OBAMA and his FILTHY BANKSTERS… STILL
AT IT! THE LOOTING of a NATION
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).
IF YOU’RE NOT A FILTHY BANKSTERS, OR A CARD CARRYING MEMBER
OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA “THE RACE” YOU DON’T GET A JOB IN THE
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS DONE MORE FOR CRIMINAL BANKSTERS
THAN BARACK OBAMA.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE BANKSTER MONEY THAN BARACK
OBAMA.
DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, BANKS MADE MORE MONEY
THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
Obama nominates Jacob
Lew, budget-cutter and ex-banker, to head Treasury
By Andre Damon
11 January 2013
11 January 2013
US President Barack
Obama announced the nomination of current White House chief of staff Jacob Lew
as treasury secretary Thursday, underscoring the administration’s commitment to
slashing entitlements and its domination by Wall Street.
Lew, a longtime Washington operative and former Wall Street executive,
helped negotiate cuts to Social Security with the Reagan administration in
1983, worked to slash social spending in the Clinton administration’s Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), and served as the Obama administration’s point-man
in budget-cutting negotiations with congressional Republicans.
Prior to joining the Obama administration in 2009, he earned
millions of dollars as the chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative
Investments unit, which made bets against the housing market as it collapsed.
Nominating one of the Democrats most associated with deep cuts to
Social Security and Medicare underscores the administration’s commitment to
attacking these programs. “For all the talk out there about deficit reduction,
making sure our books are balanced—this is the guy who did it,” Obama said at
Lew’s nomination on Thursday afternoon.
Lew’s nomination also
makes clear that Obama has no reservations about naming a former Wall Street
executive to head the department most responsible for the 2008 bank bailout and
regulation of the financial industry. Lew’s predecessor, Timothy Geithner,
despite a lifetime spent facilitating the banks’ crimes as a regulator, was
never officially on their payroll.
As Obama’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, Lew pushed
for the administration’s “grand bargain” proposal in 2011, which would have cut
the deficit by $4 trillion through the slashing of Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security. As it turned out, the White House was only able to negotiate a
smaller $2.4 billion deficit package with congressional Republicans. Obama
intends to make good on the balance this year.
The “fiscal cliff” deal struck on New Year’s Eve with Republicans,
featuring the fig leaf of a small increase in taxes for the wealthy, sets the
stage for a budget deal with Republicans that will slash trillions from key
entitlement programs.
As a senior advisor to then-Democratic Speaker of the House Tip
O’Neill, Lew worked to develop a bipartisan deal in 1983 with the Reagan
administration undermining Social Security. The deal, reached after Reagan’s
campaign predicting the imminent financial collapse of the federal pension
program, raised regressive payroll taxes and increased the retirement age by
two years, to 67.
From August 1995 to July 1998, Lew served as Clinton’s Deputy
Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he helped work out
the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which included $112 billion in Medicare cuts,
including reductions in payments to doctors and hospitals that take part in the
program.
Clinton then nominated Lew to become the director of the OMB in
1998, a capacity in which he served till January 2001. With the election of the
Bush Administration, Lew moved on to work as an “executive vice president and chief
operating officer of New York University, where he was responsible for budget,
finance, and operations,” according to the White House. During this time, the
university successfully carried out a campaign to end collective bargaining for
graduate students.
In 2006, Lew moved on to a more lucrative employer, Citigroup,
where he served first as managing director and chief operating officer of Citi
Global Wealth Management and later as the chief operating officer of Citi
Alternative Investments (CAI), the hedge fund and real estate investing arm of
the bank.
The unit that Lew
oversaw made large investments in the hedge fund managed by billionaire John
Paulson, which helped banks issue toxic mortgages during the subprime boom,
then bet, using insider knowledge, that those mortgages would collapse in value. These activities
were amply documented by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,
and prompted a then-record $550 million settlement between the Securities
Exchange Commission and Paulson’s partner in crime, Goldman Sachs.
At Citigroup, Lew
received a salary of $1.1 million. Two weeks before he joined the Obama State
Department, and after Citigroup had received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout
money, Lew received an additional $900,000 bonus on top of his salary, which
the Obama administration sought to cover up during his nomination.
Lew was tapped by Obama to become deputy secretary of State for
management and resources in January 2009 under Hilary Clinton, a position in
which he served through November 2010. He then moved on to head the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) from November 2010 through January 2012, after
which he became Obama’s third chief of staff. Lew’s predecessors, Rahm Emanuel
(2009-2010) and William Daley (2011-2012), were like him multi-millionaires who
made their fortunes as top executives of major banks.
Lew’s predecessor, Timothy Geithner, played a leading role in the
bank bailout, first as president of the New York Fed, then as Obama’s treasury
secretary. During his time as the head of the New York Federal Reserve from
2003 to 2009, he did his best to cover up the practices that led to the 2008
crash, then, as treasury secretary, supervised the bank bailout while working
to disguise the banks’ ongoing criminality.
*
OBAMA and his CRIMINAL BANKSTERS –
THERE IS A REASON WHY THE BANKSTERS INVESTED SO HEAVILY IN BARACK OBAMA, ONE OF
THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY TOOK SO
MUCH DIRTY MONEY FROM BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA. DURING HIS FIRST TWO YEARS
THE BANKS LOOTED MORE PROFITS THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
“I’m not here to punish banks!”
Barack Obama – Floor of the Senate – STATE of the UNION MESSAGE.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE LOOT FROM CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA! WHILE HIS DOJ IS OUT HARASSING LEGALS ON BEHALF OF
OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS, THE BANKSTER GO UNPUNISHED!
DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS SOARED GREATER THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS AND CRIMES ARE SOARING… so are
foreclosures!
OBAMA and HIS
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Consider the Obama administration's choices for the four
most important positions in financial sector law enforcement. The attorney
general (Eric Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's criminal
division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington & Burling,
a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their
industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal
defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case.
Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of
FINRA, the investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave
her a $9 million severance for a job well
done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is Robert
Khuzami, who was general counsel for
Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero
prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
Banking Is a
Criminal Industry Because Its Crimes Go Unpunished
Posted:
07/16/2012 8:23 am
Consider
just this month's news in financial services.
First,
Barclay's has been manipulating the Libor, the main interest rate upon which
most other interest rates and financial transactions are based, since 2005.
Moreover, Barclay's traders were colluding with traders in many other banks to
assist them in manipulating the Libor too, so that they could all profit from
their bets on it.
Second,
JP Morgan Chase is having a really great month. Recent reports describe how it
is resisting Federal subpoenas related to
price-fixing in U.S. electricity markets. It is also accused (by former
employees among others) of deliberately inflating the performance of its
investment funds to obtain business. And finally, JP Morgan's failed "London
whale"
trade, which has now cost over $5 billion, is being investigated to determine
whether the loss was initially concealed from regulators and the public.
Third,
HSBC is paying a fine because it allowed
hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars of money laundering by rogue
states and sanctioned firms, including some related to terrorist activities and
Iran's nuclear efforts. But HSBC is only one of at least 12 banks now known to
have tolerated, and in some cases aggressively courted, money laundering by
rogue states, terrorist organizations, corrupt dictators, and major drug
cartels over the last decade. Others include Barclay's, Lloyds, Credit Suisse,
and Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo). Several of the banks created special
handbooks on how to evade surveillance, created special business units to
handle money laundering, and actively suppressed whistleblowers who warned of
drug cartel activities.
Fourth,
a new private lawsuit cites documents indicating that Morgan
Stanley successfully pressured rating agencies into inflating the ratings of
mortgage-backed securities it issued during the housing bubble.
Fifth,
Visa and Mastercard have just agreed
to pay $7
billion to settle a private antitrust case filed by thousands of merchants, who
alleged that Visa and Mastercard colluded to fix fees and terms of service.
Just
another month in financial services. Is it unusual? No, it's not. If we go back
just a little further, we have UBS, HSBC, Julius Baer, and other banks actively
marketing tax evasion services to wealthy U.S. and European citizens. We have
senior executives of several banks (including JP Morgan Chase and UBS) strongly
suspecting that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, but deciding to make
money from him rather than turn him in. And then, of course, we have the
financial crisis and everything that led to it. As I show in great detail in my
book Predator
Nation,
we now possess overwhelming evidence of massive securities fraud, accounting
fraud, perjury, and criminal Sarbanes-Oxley violations by mortgage lenders,
investment banks, and credit insurers (including senior executives of
Countrywide, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, AIG, and
Lehman Brothers) during the housing bubble that caused the financial crisis. If
we go back to the late 1990s, we have the massively fraudulent hyping of
Internet stocks, and several banks (including Merrill Lynch and Citigroup)
actively aiding Enron in committing its frauds.
So,
July 2012 really isn't abnormal at all. The reason for this is very simple.
Over the past two decades, the financial services industry has become a pervasively
unethical and highly criminal industry, with massive fraud tolerated or even
encouraged by senior management. But how did that happen?
Well,
deregulation helped, of course. But something else was far more important. It
is the one critical factor that unites all of the episodes cited above,
including those of this month. This critical unifying factor is the total
number of criminal prosecutions of major firms and senior executives as a
result of all of these crimes combined.
And
what is that number?
Zero.
Literally
zero. A number that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney shows the slightest
interest in changing.
Consider
the Obama administration's choices for the four most important positions in
financial sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric Holder) and the
head of the Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny Breuer) both come to
us from
Covington & Burling, a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the
major banks and their industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its
white collar criminal defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating
agency in the Enron case. Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing
bubble in charge of FINRA, the investment banking industry's
"self-regulator," which gave her a $9
million severance for a job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps
most stunningly of all, is Robert Khuzami, who was
general counsel for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the
entire bubble. So zero prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
In
contrast, what do you think would happen to you if, as a lone individual, you
were caught supporting Iran's nuclear program? Do you think that you would get
off with a "deferred prosecution agreement" and a fine equal to a few
percent of your annual salary? No?
But
that's because you don't live right. You probably haven't been to the White
House a dozen times since President Obama took office, or attended White House
state dinners, like Lloyd Blankfein has. Nor have you probably overseen
millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign donations, or hired senior
administration officials, or sent your executives into the government in senior
regulatory positions, or paid $135,000 for a speech by someone who later became
chairman of the National Economic Council. And, well, you get the law
enforcement that you pay for.
Charles
Ferguson is the author of Predator
Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
“Gretchen Morgenson, in a New York Times op-ed entitled
“Surprise, Surprise: The Banks Win,” wrote: “If you were hoping that things
might be different in 2013—you know, that bankers would be held responsible for
bad behavior or that the government might actually assist troubled
homeowners—you can forget it.”
“In concluding
the pittance of a settlement, a fraction of the billions taken in by the banks
from the sub-prime mortgage racket, the Obama administration is once again
letting the banks get away with massive crimes that have had devastating social
consequences, while giving them a green light to continue similar practices.”
Another sweetheart bank settlement on mortgage
fraud
By Andre Damon
9 January 2013
9 January 2013
Ten major financial firms agreed on Monday to pay $3.3 billion in
cash to settle allegations of mortgage fraud by the Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency (OCC) in the latest in a string of sweetheart settlements
between the major Wall Street banks and their nominal regulators. As usual,
there were no criminal charges and no bank officials were held accountable.
The settlement, which nominally totals $8.5 billion, includes $3.3
billion in direct payments to borrowers and $5.2 billion in loan modifications
and other forms of “borrower assistance” left largely at the discretion of the
banks.
The settlement with the OCC, a branch of the Treasury Department,
relates to widespread fraud committed by the banks in their rush to foreclose
on as many homes as possible in 2009 and 2010. To expedite the foreclosure
process, the banks had employees or contractors sign off on thousands of
mortgage documents every month, swearing that they had intimate knowledge of
their contents when in reality they had not even read them.
In many cases,
banks illegally imposed fees on targeted homeowners or failed to inform them of
their rights.
In concluding the
pittance of a settlement, a fraction of the billions taken in by the banks from
the sub-prime mortgage racket, the Obama administration is once again letting
the banks get away with massive crimes that have had devastating social
consequences, while giving them a green light to continue similar practices.
In all the
scandals relating to the banks’ criminality in the run-up to and aftermath of
the 2008 financial crisis, the government has deliberately avoided bringing
cases to trial. This is not only to protect the banks’ activities from further
public scrutiny, but also to cover up regulators’ complicity in facilitating
the banks’ illegal activities.
The number of households that will get a share of the $3.3 billion
in payouts, averaging $868 for each of the 3.8 million borrowers whose homes
were in foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, has not been disclosed. Under previous
guidelines issued by the federal government, homeowners who were put in
foreclosure but were not really in default would theoretically receive $15,000
and a reversal of the foreclosure, or $125,000 if a reversal was not possible.
The actual amounts that are ultimately paid out could be far lower.
The settlement puts to an end the “Independent Foreclosure Review”
imposed as a regulatory action by the OCC on fourteen banks in April 2011.
Under the program, banks paid contractors to examine each claim of improper
foreclosure. The cost to the banks had reached $1.5 billion when the government
agreed to end the investigation.
With the new settlement, the banks themselves are left to
determine where abuses took place, with only a handful of cases to be examined
by regulators.
Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry sought in a press
conference Monday to present the settlement as a means of getting money to
consumers as soon as possible. “When we began the Independent Foreclosure
Review, the OCC pledged to fix what was broken, identify who was harmed, and
compensate them for that injury,” Curry said. “While today’s announcement
represents a significant change in direction,” he continued, “it meets those
original objectives by ensuring that consumers are the ones who will benefit.”
The settlement prompted an outpouring of denunciations from
consumer advocates and even some media commentators. “The regulators have
decided to replace the fox in the henhouse with the wolf,” commented John
Taylor, head of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a community
development nonprofit. “It is just incomprehensible to me that they could not
find a third party that has the wherewithal and independence to fairly
determine what the damage is to homeowners.”
Gretchen
Morgenson, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Surprise, Surprise: The
Banks Win,” wrote: “If you were hoping that things might be different in
2013—you know, that bankers would be held responsible for bad behavior or that
the government might actually assist troubled homeowners—you can forget it.”
The settlement
includes Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, MetLife Bank,
PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, US Bank and Aurora. Four other banks that were
included in the investigation refused to take part in the settlement.
The settlement by the OCC is of a piece with the agreement
announced last February between 49 state governments and five top Wall Street
banks over similar types of mortgage fraud. In last year’s settlement, the
federal government put pressure on state attorneys general to wind down their
investigation into criminal abuses by the banks, leaving them to pay only $5
billion in payouts and a largely meaningless $17 billion in mortgage
modifications.
Under the de facto protection of the government agencies that
are supposed to police them, the banks are allowed to violate securities and
other laws knowing that they can treat any fines that may eventually be imposed
as part of the cost of doing business.
The same applies to the settlement also announced Monday between
Bank of America and the government-sponsored mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae,
in which the bank will pay $3.55 billion to Fannie and buy back 30,000
low-performing mortgages for $6.75 billion.
The settlement covers allegations that Countrywide Financial,
bought by Bank of America in 2008, knowingly sold Fannie Mae toxic mortgages
that produced billions of dollars of losses. The loans were made between 2000
and 2008 and were originally valued at $1.4 trillion. The collapse of these
assets triggered a $116 billion government bailout of Fannie and helped
precipitate the financial crisis that led to the loss of millions of jobs.
The deal follows a similar 2010 agreement in which Bank of America
repurchased $2.87 billion of bad loans from Fannie’s fellow government-backed
mortgage company, Freddie Mac.
More than four years after the financial crash of September 2008,
not a single top Wall Street executive has been criminally prosecuted.
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