The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/fifty-years-since-johnsons-declaration.html
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
Hefty profits for top US banks
as millions face social disaster
Big US banks reported much stronger than expected profits in the third quarter while wide layers of the population face misery and hardship.
Buoyed by government cash poured into the financial markets, JPMorgan Chase reported third-quarter profits of $9.44 billion, or $2.92 per share, well above the forecasts of economic experts. That figure compared with $4.76 billion last quarter and $9.08 billion one year ago.
JP Morgan’s bond and stock trading operations accounted for a 20 percent year-over-year increase in revenues, offsetting declines in consumer loans and credit cards. The bank’s earnings rose despite a charge for $524 million for legal fees related to its criminal manipulation of global markets in commodities and US treasury notes.
Citigroup reported $3.2 billion for the third quarter, despite a 13 percent drop in revenue from consumer banking as its trading and investment revenue rose 5 percent.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, also reported strong third quarter profits, which rose to $1.36 billion. Fueled by US Treasury cash, its assets under management increased to $7.8 trillion, which is an increase of 12 percent from the third quarter of last year.
Other large US banks, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are expected to show healthy third quarter profits when their reports come out later this month.
The strong results for the banks come in the midst of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression and mounting hardship across the US. The situation facing the unemployed is increasingly dire as the limited and inadequate support for the unemployed contained in the CARES Act long ago expired and funds released by the Trump administration for a $300 supplement are largely exhausted.
Meanwhile, the US Treasury continues to pump cash into the financial markets, money that will have to be repaid at devastating cost to the working class in terms of social benefits, wages, working conditions and lives. The necessity of restarting production in order to repay the trillions handed over to the banks and corporations is the driving force behind the homicidal back-to-work policy of the US ruling class and governments around the world. This has led to a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths, with the number of fatalities surpassing one million internationally and 221,000 in the US.
Despite the reported decline in the official unemployment rate, September saw an unprecedented increase in the number of long-term unemployed, those out of work 27 weeks or longer. Some 2.4 million were classified as long-term unemployed last month, a rise of 781,000 since August. That represents 19.1 percent of the total unemployed.
Alongside the growth in the number of long-term unemployed is the rise in permanent layoffs, indicating that many of the jobs lost during the pandemic are never coming back. The number of permanent job losses increased in September by 345,000, bringing total permanent job losses to 3.8 million. That number is 2.5 million higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Nick Bunker, an economist at job website indeed.com, told Business Insider, “Longer and longer durations of unemployment are a sign that the shock from the coronavirus is becoming more and more enduring and that the ability for people to quickly be recalled to old jobs seems to be fading."
Tens of thousands of jobs are being wiped out at airline and aviation companies, movie theaters and entertainment firms like Disney. Chevron, the number two US oil company, announced 700 layoffs this week at its Houston headquarters as part of its plan to cut 6,000 jobs globally this year. Other layoffs are expected soon at aviation engine maker Pratt & Whitney, tech company Cisco, sports network ESPN and dozens of other companies and public sector employers.
The jobs crisis has dealt the hardest blows to low-paid sections of workers, particularly in the service sector. Employment in the travel industry as well as bars and restaurants remains depressed, as workers choose to stay home rather than risk COVID-19 infection.
New unemployment claims continue at unprecedented levels going back to March, when the pandemic exploded across the US. Another 840,000 filed for unemployment the week ending October 3, the most recent weekly report.
All told in September, some 26 million received some form of unemployment assistance, including support for “gig” workers and the self-employed. That did not include some 5 million small businesses that are getting aid.
According to a report in Axios, if so-called discouraged workers or those forced to stay home during the pandemic for childcare or who are not able to find a full-time job at a living wage are taken into account, US unemployment stands at 26.1 percent. This is more than three times the official jobless rate of 7.9 percent in September announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Many furloughed workers who are being recalled are finding their wages or hours are being cut, including at Walmart, where many workers are seeing reduced hours but increased workloads. Southwest Airlines pilots are facing demands for a 10 percent pay cut to avoid furloughs.
Under these conditions, millions of working class families face the stark choice between paying for medical care, rent, food or utilities.
Underscoring the brutality and irrationality of capitalism, some 10 million people in the US will lose their employer-sponsored health insurance in the midst of a deadly pandemic, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.
While the US Centers for Disease Control issued an eviction ban last month, many families have not been able to secure protection due to varying interpretations of the ban by judges and onerous documentation requirements. Between September 27 and October 3, more than 2,100 landlords in 17 states began eviction proceedings, according to the Princeton University Eviction Lab.
Meanwhile, the US Census Bureau reports that nearly half of 8.3 million renter households it surveyed were “very” or “somewhat” likely to leave their home in the next two months due to eviction. About one in three adults says he or she fears foreclosure or eviction in the next two months.
As millions face destitution, Congress and the Trump administration are continuing their months-long charade of negotiations on a new economic stimulus bill. Behind the political maneuvering is a deliberate policy by both parties to block any further help to the unemployed in order to push workers back into COVID-infected workplaces to crank out profits. Whatever eventually emerges from Washington will involve a further wholesale handover of cash to banks and corporations with at best a pittance for workers.
Despite the funneling of massive amounts of government cash into Wall Street, the US financial situation remains precarious. Banks and corporations are utterly dependent on the continued infusion of funds and any reduction from the Treasury spigot threatens an economic meltdown.
The situation facing small businesses is already dire. An analysis of credit card transactions by the online marketing firm Womply indicates that one out of every five small businesses operating at the start of 2020 had permanently closed by September, including 23 percent of restaurants. Forty percent of restaurants said they would be out of business in six months without help from the government.
With social tensions at the breaking point, the Trump administration is moving forward with plans for a presidential coup if he is defeated at the polls in November. Meanwhile, the Democrats are desperately trying to smother social opposition and disorient the population through the promotion of identity politics.
OBAMA’S CRIMINAL MONEY LAUNDERING PARASITE BANKSTER JAMIE DIMON IS DOING WELL. BUT THEN HE OWNS ENOUGH POLS THERE’S NO REASON FOR HIM TO CONTEMPLATE JAIL TIME.
Among bankers, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase topped the list with $31 million, while Brian Moynihan of Bank of America received $23 million. Along with Goldman Sachs, these banks played central roles in precipitating the 2008 Wall Street crash.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/fifty-years-since-johnsons-declaration.html
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan
Median CEO pay in US tops $1 million a month
The median income for 132 CEOs of major US corporations jumped to $12.4 million in 2018, more than $1 million a month, according to an analysis published Sunday by the Wall Street Journal. The CEOs, representing about one-quarter of the S&P 500 firms for which figures have thus far been released, saw pay rises of about 6.4 percent apiece compared to 2017.
The CEO gains were driven by rising stock prices for the year, despite a sharp drop in December 2018, the worst December for the financial markets since the Great Depression. Assuming the pay rises for the remaining CEOs in the S&P 500 match those of the first group, 2018 would mark the third consecutive year of record CEO pay in the United States.
Among the biggest payouts were $66 million for Robert Iger, longtime CEO of Walt Disney Co., $44.7 million for Richard Handler, CEO of Jefferies Financial Group, and $42 million for Stephen MacMillan, CEO of medical equipment maker Hologic Inc. Patrick McHale of Minneapolis-based manufacturer Graco Corp. made $34.9 million in 2018.
Some CEOs outside the S&P 500 received even bigger windfalls, topped by the $125 million for Nikesh Arora, a former Google executive who became CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity company, only in June 2018.
Corporate criminals like the CEO of Boeing and the heads of the major banks suffered no consequences from the devastation that their actions have caused for their own workers and the population as a whole.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg received $23.4 million after a year that ended with the crash of a 737 Max jetliner operated by Lion Air of Indonesia, killing 189 people. Two weeks ago, a second crash of a 737 Max, this time in Ethiopia, killed 157 people and led to the worldwide grounding of all the 737 Max 8 and Max 9 jets made by the company. Boeing stock plunged 10 percent, wiping out $25 billion in stock market value.
Among bankers, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase topped the list with $31 million, while Brian Moynihan of Bank of America received $23 million. Along with Goldman Sachs, these banks played central roles in precipitating the 2008 Wall Street crash.
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan saw a pay rise to $16.4 million, including his first-ever bonus, despite the company’s stock plunging 24 percent due to the scandal involving the creation of millions of false accounts for customers, leading to fines and regulatory penalties.
Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett received a 10 percent raise in 2018, raking in $17.75 million, while the company continues to slash jobs both in the United States and internationally. According to press reports, the Ford CEO received 276 times the median pay for all Ford employees. General Motors has yet to report the 2018 compensation for CEO Mary Barra, who made $21.9 million in 2017.
A study reported last month in the magazine Institutional Investor found that median CEO pay at major US corporations has soared over the past four decades—from $1.8 million in the 1980s to $4.1 million in the 1990s, reaching $9.2 million in the early 2000s.
Following a drop after the 2008 Wall Street crash, when CEO compensation was driven down by falling share prices, the combined compensation from pay, stock options and bonuses for corporate bosses has returned to the level that prevailed before the financial crisis. In contrast, most workers have seen no significant recovery.
CEO pay has risen nearly 72 percent since the low point in 2009 and is now just 3.3 percent below the record levels set in 2007, on the eve of the financial collapse. According to the study reported in Institutional Investor, CEO pay grew 17.6 percent between 2016 and 2017 alone, while average pay for workers rose by only 0.3 percent.
The ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the average worker has risen from 20-1 in 1965 to 30-1 in 1978, 58-1 in 1989, 112-1 in 1995 and a record 344-1 in 2000. After the dip following the 2008 crash, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio rose back to 312-1 in 2017.
One corporate CEO’s record pay package deserves particular attention: Daniel Loepp, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the largest insurer in the state, covering the majority of autoworkers and other industrial workers, as well as auto retirees. Loepp has seen his annual compensation rocket from $1 million in 2006, when he became CEO, to $9 million in 2015, $13.4 million in 2017 and $19.2 million in 2018, including a staggering bonus of $16.2 million.
Loepp’s bonus was “only” $10.4 million in 2017, and the $5.8 million raise in his bonus was due to meeting “performance targets” set by the corporate board. These targets included slashing corporate expenses by $360 million over the past three years, through cuts in jobs and employee compensation. Loepp also pushed through a cut in the health care coverage for Blue Cross retirees, who had expected, having worked for a health care company, that their benefits would be secure.
Loepp is by far the best-paid chief executive officer of a company that is still nominally not-for-profit—but posted an “operating margin” last year of $605 million—and which, because of its longstanding relationship with the auto industry, the UAW and the AFL-CIO, has eight union executives on its board of directors.
These union officials approved the bonus and other compensation for Loepp and set the “targets” that Loepp had to meet, which were achieved by cutting the jobs and benefits of Blue Cross Blue Shield workers, many of them members of the UAW, as well as benefits for workers insured by the company, which is the principal health insurer for unionized workers across the state.
The Detroit Free Press contacted the eight union officials, including those from the UAW, Michigan Education Association, Michigan Building Trades Council, and Michigan AFL-CIO, to question them about the basis for Loepp’s whopping bonus and raise. Seven did not respond, while the Teamsters Union representative on the board of directors defended the $19.2 million payout.
William Black, executive director of Michigan Teamsters Joint Council 43, said in an email to the newspaper: “We at the board are sensitive to compensation issues, and we have emphasized that pay be tied to performance... His compensation is heavily weighted against company performance, as it should be. That performance has been very strong in recent years.”
This statement underscores the scurrilous and thoroughly corrupt role of the unions in supporting the profit system and the gouging of union members to enrich the capitalists and the corporate bosses. The union executives have far more in common with Loepp than with the workers they claim to represent. In institutions like the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, the union officials preside over multibillion-dollar corporate entities with salaries and bonuses that are modeled on those of the Loepps, Hacketts and Jamie Dimons.
JAMIE DIMON - STILL ON THE LAM. PROBABLY HOLED UP WITH THE OBOMB!
Bank Shares Slide on Reports of Rampant Money Laundering
21 Sep 20208
Shares of some major banks are tumbling
before the market open Monday following a
report alleging those including JPMorgan,
HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche
Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued
to profit from illicit dealings with disreputable
people and criminal networks despite being
previously fined for similar actions.
According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, leaked government documents show that the banks continued moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.
The consortium says the documents indicate that JPMorgan moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela, and the Ukraine. The bank also processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade for Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, according to the documents, which are known as the FinCEN Files.
JPMorgan’s stock declined 4.4 percent in premarket trading.
The consortium’s investigation found the documents identify more than $2 trillion in transactions between 1999 and 2017 that were flagged by financial institutions’ internal compliance officers as possible money laundering or other criminal activity — including $514 billion at JPMorgan and $1.3 trillion at Deutsche Bank. Shares of Deutsche Bank dropped 7.7 percent.
Report: Chinese Companies Helped North Korea Launder Money Through U.S. Banks
21 Sep 202049
3:37
North Korea moved nearly $175 million through prominent U.S. banks in recent years in a money-laundering scheme that used shell companies and help from Chinese companies, according to confidential bank documents reviewed by NBC News in a report published Sunday.
For several years, the international community has imposed sanctions on North Korea to deprive the nation of financial resources that could contribute to its rogue nuclear program. Some of the sanctions specifically target money transfers to block Pyongyang’s access to the global financial system. Despite the sanctions, North Korea has managed to move funds across international borders in recent years, according to the report.
“The suspected laundering by North Korea-linked organizations amounted to more than $174.8 million over several years, with transactions cleared through U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase and the Bank of New York Mellon,” the report claimed.
According to the documents, “Wire transfers from North Korean-linked companies with opaque ownership sometimes came in bursts, only days or hours apart, and the amounts … transferred were in round figures with no clear commercial reasons for the transactions.” The suspicious details of the wire transfers are considered red flags of attempts to move illicit funds.
A suspicious activity report filed by the Bank of New York Mellon shows that Ma Xiaohong, the chief of Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Corp. in Dandong, a Chinese city on the North Korean border, allegedly funneled resources to North Korea.
“Ma and Dandong Hongxiang routed money to North Korea through China, Singapore, Cambodia, the U.S. and elsewhere, using an array of shell companies to move tens of millions of dollars through U.S. banks in New York,” according to the documents.
“One transaction in 2009 featured a Singapore shipping concern called United Green Pte. Ltd., whose directors included Leonard Lai,” a man sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2015, along with his Singaporean company, Senat Shipping Ltd., “for their links to a North Korean shipping company that was alleged to have tried to move weapons from Cuba to North Korea,” according to the report. The 2015 sanctions remain in place.
In 2015, New York Mellon reported handling “suspicious transfers of $85.6 million.” The document seen by NBC “details $20.1 million of those transactions.” In 2016 and 2019, U.S. authorities indicted Ma and other Dandong Hongxiang executives on charges of money laundering and helping North Korea evade international sanctions. So far, “no one has been extradited, and charges remain pending,” according to the report.
The leaked bank documents seen by NBC were obtained by BuzzFeed as part of a collaborative project with over 400 other journalistic agencies around the world.
“The project examined a cache of secret suspicious activity reports filed by banks with the [U.S.] Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, as well as other investigative documents,” the report claimed. The documents span a time period from 2008 to 2017, during which both the Obama and Trump administrations worked to tighten financial sanctions against North Korea in an effort to pressure the nation to denuclearize.
BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AS PRESIDENT, BARACK OBAMA HAD ALREADY SUCKED OFF MORE BANKSTER BRIBES THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT THE REST OF US DID NOT?
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
BLOG EDITOR: JP MORGAN IS BARACK OBAMA’S FAVE CRIMINAL BANKSTER. THEY HAVE BEEN VERY GENEROU$ TO OBOMB AND HIS BIDENBOY.
“The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.”
HSBC HAS LONG HAD A HISTORY AS THE CHOICE BANKSTER FOR THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. OBAMA’S BANKSTER REGIME MADE SURE THAT NO ONE WENT TO PRISON AT HSBC. DURING HIS 8 YEARS BANKSTER-OWNED ERIC HOLDER, A SOCIOPATH LAWYER, MADE SURE THAT NO BANKSTER PERIOD SAW PRISON TIME. NOT THEY’RE BACK AT IT. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
“The Obama/Biden was the most corrupt, criminal
administration any of us has ever seen, yet the
media cheered or covered up all the abuse of
power, obstruction of Justice and other crimes. “ JACK HELLNER
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Report documents criminality and corruption at heart of global banking system
22 September 2020
An explosive report published Sunday by BuzzFeed News documents the role that major US and international banks knowingly play in laundering and circulating trillions of dollars in dirty money from terrorist organizations, drug cartels and assorted international financial criminals.
The report is an unanswerable indictment not only of the banks, but also of Western governments and regulatory agencies, which are fully aware of the banks’ illegal but highly lucrative activities and tacitly sanction them.
BuzzFeed writes that its investigation demonstrates “an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverses the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.”
The report continues: “Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
The extensive report is based on more than 21,000 “suspicious activity reports” (SARs) filed by some of the world’s biggest banks with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, between 1999 and 2017. FinCEN makes its database of SARs available to more than 450 law enforcement and regulatory agencies across the United States.
What BuzzFeed calls the “FinCEN Files” were leaked to the news outlet more than a year ago. It has since been combing through them, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which coauthored the report.
BuzzFeed News notes that it also shared the SARs with more than 100 other news organizations in 88 countries. The report, titled “Dirty Money Pours into the World’s Most Powerful Banks,” includes only a small and redacted sample of the news outlet’s hoard of suspicious activity reports.
The US government maintains a policy of total secrecy in relation to the SARs, refusing to release them even in response to Freedom of Information requests. Earlier this year, the Treasury Department issued a statement declaring that the unauthorized disclosure of SARs is a crime. In an obvious attempt at intimidation and threat of prosecution, the statement added that the matter was being referred to the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General.
The initial response of the American corporate media has been to bury or entirely ignore the BuzzFeed revelations. Monday’s print edition of the New York Times carried a report on page eight of its business section. The print editions of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal made no mention of the exposé.
The report is based on more than 22,000 pages of documents concerning over 10,000 subjects and involving more than 170 countries and territories. Nearly 90 banks and other financial institutions are included in the institutions that submitted the SARs.
Deutsche Bank recorded the highest total value of transactions listed in the FinCEN Files: $1.3 trillion, based on 982 suspicious activity reports.
BLOG EDITOR: THE CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION OF WELLS FARGO HAS LONG OWNED THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN AND NOW KAMALA HARRIS. AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA, HARRIS MADE SURE NO WELLS FARGO EXECS WENT TO PRISON DESPITE THE MASSIVE ECONOMIC DEVASTATION THIS BANK CAUSED. WELLS FARGO HAS CONTINUE TO BE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE EVER SINCE. AFTER ALL, IT’S EASY AND CHEAP TO BUY A POLITICIAN.
The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.
One report, filed by JPMorgan in August, 2014, lists over $355 billion in suspicious activity relating to more than 100,000 wire transfers “sent, received or transferred” over the course of a decade by MKS, a Swiss-based company that trades in precious metals.
At least 25 of the people named as subjects in the SARs have appeared on Forbes ’ list of billionaires in 2018, 2019 or 2020.
The findings featured in the BuzzFeed report include:
● Standard Chartered moved money on behalf of Al Zarooni Exchange, a Dubai-based business that was later accused of laundering cash on behalf of the Taliban.
● HSBC’s Hong Kong branch allowed WCM777, a Ponzi scheme, to move more than $15 million even as the business was being barred from operating in three states. Authorities say the scheme stole some $80 million from investors, mainly Latino and Asian immigrants. The firm’s owner used the funds to buy two golf courses, a mansion, a 39.8-carat diamond and mining rights in Sierra Leone.
● Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express and other financial firms processed millions of dollars in transactions for Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of Kazakhstan’s most populous city, even after Interpol issued an order for his arrest. Khrapunov fled to Switzerland and was later convicted in absentia on charges including bribe-taking and defrauding the city.
A separate piece by NBC News presents evidence that JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon and other banks helped move more than $150 million for companies tied to the North Korean regime.
In other words, the biggest US and international banks have made countless millions in profits serving as money-launderers for organizations labeled "terrorist" such as the Taliban and governments of so-called “rogue states” such as North Korea—with the knowledge and tacit approval of the governments of the US and other major powers—even as these same governments were waging or threatening war against the targeted organizations and overseas regimes.
The BuzzFeed report describes the cynical rationale behind the formality of banks filing SARs, which, for the most part, are never even read by the staff of FinCEN. Over the past decade, the number of SARs filed by major banks has sharply increased, indicating a growth of money laundering and other illegal activities on behalf of criminal clients. Over the same period, the staff of FinCEN has shrunk by 10 percent.
Banks are legally required to file a SAR with FinCEN if they suspect a transaction might be linked to illegal activity. Large banks file tens of thousands of such reports every year. In 2017, 19 large banks filed a total of 640,000 suspicious activity reports, according to a study by the Bank Policy Institute, a lobbying group.
But as the BuzzFeed report explains: “So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.”
In its article on the FinCEN Files report, the New York Times noted that JPMorgan wired money to banks in Switzerland, Lebanon and Nigeria on behalf of a convicted money launderer, reported the transactions to British and American authorities, and continued doing business with the client. The Nigerian government is now suing the bank in British court.
This collusion between gangster bankers and capitalist government regulators is a continuation of longstanding policy. In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
That was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities, including those that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in what at that time was the deepest slump since the Great Depression. To this day, not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working class living standards in the US and around the world.
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back.
Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama-Biden and their bankster regime than Bush.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/12/obamanomics-at-work-depressed-wages-and.html
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Wealth concentration increases in US.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/02/staggering-concentration-of-wealth-in.html
The latest research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the population has suffered a major decline.
The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
No, Joe, There Was No Economic Boom Under Obama
The great Jackie Gleason once said, "The past remembers better than it lived." And so it is, apparently, with the Obama years.
BLOG EDITOR: THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN OF 2008 WAS CAUSED ENTIRELY BY THE VERY BANKSTERS WHO OWNED BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN FROM DAY ONE. THEY NOW ALSO OWN KAMALA HARRIS.
ULTIMATELY, THE ‘OBAMA RECOVERY’ SAW THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
There was no economic "boom" as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are misremembering. This was an economy that skidded into a financial ditch and seemingly never pulled out of it and got back on the prosperity hot lanes until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.
You can mark the real recovery -- an economic inflection point almost the day after that surprise election outcome.
Every liberal forecaster and most academic economists had guaranteed America that, if Trump were elected, the stock market would crash; workers would be flattened; and, as New York Times economist Paul Krugman famously predicted, the economy would "never" recover.
Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared by 257 points the morning after the election (that's some crash), and it rose for the next three years, as it has again over the last several months. A few days after that election, small-business optimism surged by its most considerable amount ever measured, going back many decades. Family incomes surged to record-high levels in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as deregulation and tax cuts fueled a powerful engine. In three years, ordinary people had made more income gains than in eight years under the Obama-Biden administration.
But now we are being told a fairy tale that the Obama economy was booming and Biden miraculously fixed it and Trump "blew it."
Here's the reality check. Under Barack Obama, the economy barely grew 2% -- rather pathetic for a "recovery." The people who made the preposterous bullish claims that Obama saved the economy are the ones who now say the Biden economic plan will gain millions of jobs.
In the last year of Obama's presidency, growth shrunk to 1.6%, and the concern was the possibility of another recession. That's some boom.
If the Obama recovery had been as rapid as the average recovery, we would have had at least $1 trillion more GDP by 2016. If we had experienced a Ronald Reagan-style recovery, the GDP would have been $2.5 trillion larger when Obama left office. It is almost equivalent to the size of the entire output of the state of California gone missing.
The first four years of the Obama presidency were abysmal. The Obama-Biden $800 billion stimulus plan left unemployment higher every year than their economists had predicted if we did nothing. What bailed out Obama, ironically enough, was the shale oil and gas revolution that added millions of jobs despite the Obama-Biden hatred of fossil fuels. Most of the employment growth came in Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota. Meanwhile, most of the green energy subsidies went into failed and now-bankrupt companies such as Solyndra. And now Biden promises another $2 trillion for "clean energy" corporate welfare subsidies.
Throughout nearly all of the Biden-Obama presidency, roughly 1 out of 3 people in the United States rated the economy as "good" or "excellent." Most of the rest rated the economy "fair" or "poor." That number surged to about 65% rating the economy as "good" or "excellent" within a year of Trump's presidency.
People can debate Trump's handling of the virus and the mistakes that have been made. It now looks like under any scenario, except an airtight sequestering of those over the age of 75, smokers, diabetics and severely overweight people, we would have seen the same or worse results.
Now the question is which game plan gets the economy and employment back to normal as quickly as possible. Biden promises a $4 trillion tax hike on almost all U.S. businesses and investors. That's roughly 5% of everything we produce that gets snatched away in higher taxes. If you believe that this will get America back on the fast track, you probably believe Obama caused an economic boom.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy."
Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency Hardcover – August 18, 2020
by Jack Cashill (Author)
5 ratings
Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency Hardcover – August 18, 2020
by Jack Cashill (Author)
Jack Cashill’s Unmasking Obama By Thomas Lifson
To my surprise, Jack Cashill's new book, Unmasking Obama, couldn't be more relevant to the political struggle facing us today. In 2020, as in 2008 (and throughout the two Obama presidential terms), the key to political power is what must be called "information warfare" (my term, not Jack's) between the mighty establishment media and the feisty conservative alternative media, which Jack likens to the samizdat underground commentary in the old Soviet Union. It is the process of the unmasking of the phony propaganda peddled by the all-powerful establishment by the resource- and prestige-poor "Lilliputians" (an appropriation of Jonathan Swift's work that the satirist surely would approve of) that is the heart of the book. The narrative history presented in Unmasking Obama is captivating. Jack takes readers along with him as he was both a participant in the warfare and a historian of it, digging up parts of the elusive truth about the real Barack Obama in the face of derision and obstruction that came his way. But Jack is far from the sole hero of the story of the warfare. Because of his literary detective work, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Bill Ayers wrote the autobiographical book, Dreams from My Father, that first established Obama as a serious intellect, Jack enjoyed access to many of the most formidable truth-tellers about Obama. The book's prologue, in fact, begins with a phone call Jack received in 2011 from a then little-known lawyer named Michael Cohen, acting as a lawyer for Donald Trump. Unmasking Obama takes the reader through the major aspects of the fraudulent picture of Obama that was painted by the media and political establishments and details how the truth was uncovered and often partially suppressed by the retaliatory efforts launched in response. It often resembles detective fiction in the drama of the struggle to get at the truth and the struggle to prevent that. I hesitate to call it beach reading, for it is not in any sense fluff, intended to while away time. But it is vastly entertaining and thought-provoking, and the 218 pages fly by rapidly. Today, exactly the same struggle is underway between the Lilliputians seeking to uncover who really is running the front-man candidacy of Joe Biden and the shadowy movement that is looting and destroying our cities and the coordinated might of the mass media that spends 95% of its time pushing a party line that Trump is an unprecedented threat to human civilization and Joe Biden an amiable and pragmatic centrist. Future historians, if there are any left still interested and able to dispassionately understand how America came to the current point of crisis, will find the story told in Unmasking Obama a very helpful guide. If journalism is the "first draft of history," Unmasking Obama is a well considered second draft, adding crucial perspective and assessment of the consequences of the real-time reports. You don't have to wait that long, though. It went on sale last week, and is well worth your time.
Income inequality grows four times faster under Obama than Bush …. we bankroll Mexico's welfare state in our borders as the number of Americans (Legals) sink into poverty! Illegals also get all the jobs!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/09/obamas-assault-on-american-people-on.html
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.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM
THE FED'S OLD BOY NETWORK
By Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author of "The Rise of Tyranny" and
"Global Censorship of Health Information"
December 19, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, performed an enormous service for the American public when it sued the Federal Reserve and the Clearing House Association LLC, an institution created by several of the nation’s largest banks, to force disclosure of secret loans made by the Federal Reserve principally to the six largest U.S. banks but also to certain foreign banks. The treasure trove of evidence ultimately obtained by Bloomberg reveals that while the public Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailed out leading Wall Street firms for the whopping sum of $700 billion, the Fed at the same time doled out some $7.77 trillion (an astronomical sum equal to have the gross domestic product). To make matters worse, the Fed expanded its emergency discount lending program, giving tens of billions more to the same banks at an interest rate of 1%, while the prime lending rate stood at over 3%. The banks getting these funds often turned them into profit centers, lending out proceeds from them at higher interest rates and pocketing the difference, profiting on federal largesse.
The President and his top economic advisers bought the “too big to fail” concept, the notion that regardless of how profligate, irresponsible, even criminal, heads of the leading financial institutions in America had been, it would be worse for the nation if those institutions were to collapse. Consequently, while pushing a legislative agenda of public bail-outs, the Obama Administration maintained a secret program of multi-trillion dollar loans, including billions at below market interest rates. The principal recipients of the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley.
The General Accounting Office audit of the Federal Reserve revealed that some $16 trillion was supplied in secret loans from the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The largest single recipients were Citigroup ($2.5 trillion); Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion); Merrill Lynch ($2 trillion); Bank of America ($1.3 trillion); Barclays PLC ($868 billion); Bear Stearns ($853 billion); Goldman Sachs ($814 billion); the Royal Bank of Scotland ($541 billion); JP Morgan Chase ($391 billion); and Deutsche Bank ($354 billion).
Bloomberg discovered that while top banks were touting in their press releases during the crisis that they had fiscal soundness, their balance sheets were made up primarily of federal funds, most from the Federal Reserve. Moreover, while many banks paid back the TARP funds, they most often did so in reliance on the secret receipts of tens of billions of dollars in Federal Reserve money (in other words, the pay back was in that sense a charade: federal money paid back federal loans). In short, the Administration was complicit in the orchestration of a massive fraud on the American public, making it seem that the banks largely responsible for the financial crisis were weathering the storm of their own accord when in fact they were on board the good ship U.S. Taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the bad lending and financial dealing practices that helped produce the financial crisis have been largely kept in place, underwritten by the federal government. The top banks suddenly realized that far from having to suffer ignominy and defeat for their abuses, they would be kept alive by a seemingly endless flow of federal cash. Indeed, the feds accepted as collateral for loans securities of virtually no worth and other properties that would never support private commercial lending. By propping up the major banks despite their irresponsible lending practices, the federal government has given them a privileged financial status whereby private lenders will give them terms far more favorable than their smaller competitors because they understand the federal government will not let them fail. Economist call this safety net a “moral hazard” (effective federal underwriting for heightened risk taking that permits these lenders to profit at above market rates of return in speculative investing without suffering financial liability for loss). The amounts doled out by the federal government to the banks could have paid off as much as one tenth of all of the delinquent mortgages, Bloomberg determined.
Rather than be forced to take their losses on their enormous junk portfolios and interbank lending practices, the top six banks were allowed to keep the junk portfolios, maintain their dubious lending practices, and turn to the Federal Reserve for money on demand whenever problems arose. Repeatedly when the banks should have gone under due to poor lending practices and grossly speculative profiteering, they were complimented by the Federal Reserve, rescued, and then allowed to tout the falsehood that their success came from sharp management rather than from secret loans. At the same time, these banks and others have shut down commercial lending for small businesses nationwide.
The “too big to fail” justification for the massive federal welfare dole to the top six United States banks was based on a faulty premise. Without question the demise of the leading banks would entail hardship, particularly for the employees of those institutions, but the long term prognosis was good for a restructuring of the financial market through bankruptcies and takeovers. The alternative to allowing the market to impose its own swift and harsh corrective involves imposing a massive burden on every American citizen for generations to come for the trillions spent to prop up a few dozen Wall Street moguls. Rather than have the taxpayers pay an inflated sum to keep the banks responsible for the financial crisis alive, the nation could have spared itself an assumption of massive debt and witnessed the demise of these banks and the rise of new competing financial institutions based on a solid financial model.
The Bush and Obama Administration’s role as Santa Claus for Wall Street has kept from Wall Street the needed lessons that would have otherwise come from the collapse of the major lending institutions. Painful as it may seem to some, it is far better to allow the market to experience a correction for profligate lending practices than to force the American taxpayers for generations to come to pay for the bad decisions made by a few and to let those few go without suffering a single consequence beyond temporary embarrassment.
In the two years since leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama has spent his time raising and solidifying his position in the uppermost echelons of the top one percent of Americans. Obama has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public speaking events and made deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made during the depths of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has amassed so much wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a speech in South Africa last year.
Since he left office, the former president has given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate audiences for hundreds of thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same year he left office, Obama was officially recognized as one of the top ten highest paid public speakers in the US.
Just last month, Obama was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is Colombia’s largest marketing and business event of the year and one of the largest in Latin America. Simply titled, “A conversation with President Barack Obama,” his talk purportedly addressed “influential growth strategies” in marketing and other aspects of the marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous for the corruption prevalent in its public sector and military,
which costs the country $17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP.
Colombia exports half of the world’s cocaine and its drug cartels have been known
to have a hand in the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant that
Colombia’s Inspector General likened it to “the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of the danger of “exploding inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted to him for one night in Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household in the US makes in a year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse was nearly triple the amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious speeches to Goldman Sachs that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall Street stooges. Former President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech when he toured Latin America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing
between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the stock markets soared as the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149 percent. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with Obama becoming the first president to spend every day of his two terms at war, much to the delight of the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on and the financial oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing mountain of wealth being concentrated at the top of society, real wages stagnated and an unprecedented opioid overdose crisis spun out of control. Rising numbers of “deaths of despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among the working class, resulted in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in the modern era.
In addition to monetary rewards for his service to the financial elite and military-intelligence apparatus, Obama has been lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as Richard Branson. Obama was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island where the pair were seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also benefited after the family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed a $65 million book deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their political memoirs. Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of 2018 with over 10 million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals with Netflix and Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and promoting diversity in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.
In the two years since leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama has spent his time raising and solidifying his position in the uppermost echelons of the top one percent of Americans. Obama has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public speaking events and made deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made during the depths of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has amassed so much wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a speech in South Africa last year.
Since he left office, the former president has given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate audiences for hundreds of thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same year he left office, Obama was officially recognized as one of the top ten highest paid public speakers in the US.
Just last month, Obama was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is Colombia’s largest marketing and business event of the year and one of the largest in Latin America. Simply titled, “A conversation with President Barack Obama,” his talk purportedly addressed “influential growth strategies” in marketing and other aspects of the marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous for the corruption prevalent in its public sector and military,
which costs the country $17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP.
Colombia exports half of the world’s cocaine and its drug cartels have been known
to have a hand in the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant that
Colombia’s Inspector General likened it to “the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of the danger of “exploding inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted to him for one night in Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household in the US makes in a year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse was nearly triple the amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious speeches to Goldman Sachs that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall Street stooges. Former President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech when he toured Latin America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing
between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the stock markets soared as the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149 percent. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with Obama becoming the first president to spend every day of his two terms at war, much to the delight of the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on and the financial oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing mountain of wealth being concentrated at the top of society, real wages stagnated and an unprecedented opioid overdose crisis spun out of control. Rising numbers of “deaths of despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among the working class, resulted in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in the modern era.
In addition to monetary rewards for his service to the financial elite and military-intelligence apparatus, Obama has been lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as Richard Branson. Obama was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island where the pair were seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also benefited after the family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed a $65 million book deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their political memoirs. Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of 2018 with over 10 million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals with Netflix and Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and promoting diversity in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.
They Destroyed Our Country
“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.)”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-democrat-party-party-for-illegals.html
CHICAGO HUCKSTER or simply a PSYCHOPATH?
THE RISE TO POWER OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew Research Center
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/06/pew-american-people-legals-see-obama-as.html
The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.
CRONY CAPITALISM ...the rise of Barack Obama and the fall of America!
OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1% LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/07/obamas-looting-of-america-crony.html
CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually shrank.
Meanwhile, Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
OBAMA AND BIDEN: SERVANT OF THE 1%
Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth
The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/10/how-barack-obama-and-his-crony.html
The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.
Wealth concentration increases in US.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/02/staggering-concentration-of-wealth-in.html
The latest research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the population has suffered a major decline.
The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
Joe Biden Fundraises with Wall Street During Donald Trump Rally
18 Jun 201984
Former Vice President Joe Biden attended a fundraiser with Wall Street donors during President Donald Trump’s campaign kickoff rally in Florida on Tuesday.
It was the fourth New York City fundraiser for Joe Biden in about 24 hours.
The fundraiser was hosted by Eric Mindich, the CEO of Eton Park Capital Management with about 100 donors including Stephen Scherr, the executive vice president and chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, H. Rodgin Cohen the senior chairman at Sullivan & Cromwell as well as former Clinton and Obama officials
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
“You know what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,” he said. “Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done.”
Biden warned that if Trump won re-election, he would “literally fundamentally change the nature of who we are and how we function.”
Biden boasted that Obama leaned on him to help bring members of Congress together during their administration.
“Folks, I believe one of the things I’m pretty good at is bringing people together,” he said. “Every time we had trouble in the administration, who got sent to the Hill to settle it? Me. No, not a joke. Because I demonstrate respect for them.”
Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-recovery-that-never-happened-except.html
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism"
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
Obama's Wall Street cabinet
6 April 2009
A series of articles published over the weekend, based on financial disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday concerning top White House officials, documents the extent to which the administration, in both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions, and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous character of relations between the Obama administration and the American financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and “unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from industry than from finance.
In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war.
“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).”
THE GLOBALIST LEGACY OF A SOCIOPATH
Obama warns against “cynicism” at Ohio State commencement address
7 May 2013
At a commencement address on Sunday at Ohio State University, President Barack Obama counseled students not to be “cynical” about government and politics.
There was an almost comically absurd element to Obama’s remarks, delivered with his characteristic demagogy and attempted gestures at profundity. In his first four years in office, along with the first months of his second term, Obama proceeded to systematically repudiate every campaign pledge and to deflate every illusion that, with the assistance of a highly coordinated marketing campaign, led millions of people, including a large number of young people, to vote for him in 2008.
The Obama administration handed trillions of dollars to the banks; has overseen a massive attack on public education; is leading the campaign to slash Social Security and Medicare, the core federal retirement and health care programs; expanded the war in Afghanistan, led a war against Libya, and is preparing a new war in Syria; and has asserted the right to kill anyone, anywhere, including US citizens, without due process.
After this record of service to the corporate elite, he declares: “When we turn away and get discouraged and cynical… we grant our silent consent to someone who will gladly claim it. That’s how we end up with lobbyists who set the agenda; and policies detached from what middle class families face every day; the well-connected who publicly demand that Washington stay out of their business—and then whisper in government’s ear for special treatment that you don’t get.”
The references to the “whispers” of the wealthy and well-connected is particularly rich, coming only a week after Obama nominated Penny Pritzker for commerce secretary. The selection of Pritzker—a longtime Obama confidant, billionaire heiress and owner of a private equity company—only underscores the fact that the administration is a government of, by and for the financial aristocracy. She will be the wealthiest person ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
Previous to his appointment of Pritzker, Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), one of the main financial regulators. White made millions of dollars as an attorney for banks responsible for the financial crisis, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, called White the “perfect choice” to head the SEC.
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the financial crisis.
As a whole, Obama’s speech was characterized by a complete separation from the actual conditions facing the graduates he spoke to, who confront joblessness, falling wages, and a lifetime in debt. “You have every reason to believe that your future is bright,” he told his audience. “You’re graduating into an economy and a job market that is steadily healing.”
He added later, “The trajectory of this great nation should give you hope.” Really? This is under conditions in which over 11 percent of college graduates are unemployed a year after getting out of school, and another 16.1 percent simply drop out of the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of those who do find a job are paid barely enough to get by, let alone pay off student loans. Wages for young adults are falling faster than any other part of the population, and are down by 6 percent in the past four years.
Most of the students that Obama addressed Sunday will be so burdened with debt that they will delay or have to completely put off starting a family or buying a home.
It is not surprising that Obama should neglect to dwell on this disastrous situation, because his administration bears responsibility for it. In the government-sponsored restructuring of the auto industry, the White House insisted that the wages of new-hires be slashed in half, setting the stage for vast reduction of wages throughout the economy.
Obama sought to paint opposition to the government’s violation of democratic rights as right-wing hysterics. “Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity,” Obama said. “They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
This comes from a president who has personally overseen the illegal assassination of thousands of people, including at least three American citizens, in weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. The assertions of executive power have been systematically expanded, going beyond those claimed even by the Bush administration. The specter of a police state—the response of the ruling class to growing social opposition—is in fact lurking around the corner.
The moribund state of American politics, of which the Obama administration is a principal expression, is, according to the president, the fault of the American people. “Democracy doesn’t function without your active participation,” he admonished. If politicians “don’t represent you the way you want… you’ve got to let them know that’s not okay. And if they let you down, there’s a built-in day in November where you can really let them know that’s not okay.”
Such limp efforts to encourage illusions in the viability of the “democratic process” in the United States will not go very far. The experience of the past four years has not passed in vain. Millions of people, including many of those in the audience at Ohio State, are drawing the quite justified, if “cynical,” conclusion that the entire political and economic system is rotten to the core.
Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor rigging - THE RAPE OF THE ECONOMY BY THE BANKSTERS
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/fifty-years-since-johnsons-declaration.html
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
BANKSTER SOCIALISM
Dimon’s bank received tens of billions of dollars in government bailouts and many billions more from the Obama administration’s ultra-low interest rate and “quantitative easing” money-printing policies. He told his shareholders that “socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption” and “authoritarian government,” and would be “a disaster for our country.”… UNLESS IT IS SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL STREET!
"This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling oligarchy."
BLOG: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY OF CRONY CAPITALISM IS THE PARTY OF BANKSTERS AND BOTTOMLESS BANKSTER BAILOUTS... AND NO PRISON TIME!
Former adviser to President Obama and investor Robert Wolf told Politico that the financial industry has changed over the last few decades and that Wall Street-types are vastly more aligned with the Democrat establishment than Trump’s GOP.
“I don’t think the stereotypes of the industry serve the same purpose as they used to,” Wolf said. “People who work in corporate America and financial services may have the same views that she does on 95 percent of the issues such as income inequality, student loans, climate change, and others.”
Wall Street and Warren have at least one major policy initiative in common: A full repeal of Trump’s illegal and legal immigration reforms.
This month, Warren released her immigration platform that includes increasing overall legal immigration to the U.S. to provide business with an even greater flow of foreign workers to hire over Americans, as well as a decriminalization of illegal immigration, an amnesty for all illegal aliens in the country, and an end of Trump’s reforms such as his immigration ban from terrorist-sponsored countries and reduction of the refugee resettlement program.
Like Warren, Wall Street executives have railed against Trump’s immigration agenda — demanding that his zero-tolerance policy at the U.S.-Mexico border be ended and opposing his travel ban.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has supported amnesty for illegal aliens since at least 2016 when he announced support for the infamous “Gang of Eight” amnesty, saying, “Let them stay and let them build companies.”
Last month, Dimon said amnesty for illegal aliens was necessary to grow the economy, saying, “If we do these policies right, America will be growing a lot faster.”
Some of the top multinational banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — have come out against Trump’s travel ban that effectively stopped all immigration from a handful of foreign countries that sponsor terrorism.
“This is not a policy we support, and I would note that it has already been challenged in federal court, and some of the order has been enjoined at least temporarily,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote in a letter at the time. “Let me close by quoting from our business principles: ‘For us to be successful, our men and women must reflect the diversity of the communities and cultures in which we operate … Being diverse is not optional; it is what we must be.'”
Meanwhile, Citigroup has promoted mass immigration as a necessary component to growing the American economy in terms of increasing GDP. A report released by executives last year championed migration into the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany.
For decades, the big business lobby, Wall Street, and donor class have said mass immigration is crucial to growing GDP in the U.S. though research has shown that increasing legal immigration levels to an enormous ten million admissions a year would only grow GDP by about 2.5 percent. Meanwhile, Trump’s low-migration, high-wage economy has translated to 3.2 percent annual economic growth.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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