OBAMAnomics - THE SCAM HE PERPETRATES on the AMERICAN PEOPLE

A FEW BASIC FACTS ABOUT OBAMA:

“Behind the thin rhetoric about reigniting a “thriving middle class,” Obama made clear that the administration’s policies in its second term will be subordinated entirely to the interests of big business, beginning with plans to slash hundreds of billions more from health care programs.”

“CHANGE” ONLY MEANT OBAMA WOULD BE BUSH’S THIRD AND FOURTH TERMS.

LIKE BUSH, OBAMA IS THE PRESIDENT FOR THE 1% AND CRIMINAL WALL STREET BANKS. DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM ALONE BANKSTERS MADE MORE MONEY THAN UNDER ALL 8 OF BUSH’S YEARS. THE CRIMES HAVE ALSO SOARED AS HAS FORECLOSURES. OBAMA KEPT HIS PROMISE THAT NOT ONE BANKSTER WOULD BE TRIED OR FACE PRISON. THERE IS A REASON WHY THE BANKSTER PUMPED SO MUCH MONEY, MORE THAN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT, INTO BARACK OBAMA.

OBAMA HAS NEVER, NOR WILL HE EVER DO ANYTHING WHATSOEVER FOR BLACK AMERICANS. OBAMA IS MEXICO’S FIRST LA RAZA PRESIDENT. TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR HIS WALL STREET CRONIES, HE HAS LIED ENDLESSLY ABOUT OUR HOMELAND SECURITY WHILE HANDING OUT ENDLESS INDUCEMENTS, i.e., GRINGO-PAID DREAM ACTS TO LA RAZA.

OBAMA HAS SUED 4 AMERICAN STATES ON BEHALF OF HIS PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS, AND IN A PERIOD OF UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS, OBAMA HAS SABOTAGED E-VERIFY AND LET WORKPLACE ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS PLUMMET 70% HIS FIRST TERM, AND WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE NON-EXISTENT HIS SECOND.

OBAMA HAS SQUANDERED BILLIONS ADVANCING BUSH’S WARS TO PROTECT MUSLIM DICTATOR’S BORDERS WHILE LEAVING AMERICAN BORDERS OPEN UNDEFENDED AGAINST NARCOMEX. THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS NOW OPERATE IN 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES. ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GEN. KAMALA HARRIS, HERSELF A LA RAZA DEM, NEARLY HALF OF ALL MURDERS IN CA ARE BY MEXICAN GANGS. NO COMMENT FROM OBAMA’S BIG MOUTH ABOUT MEXICAN GANGS MURDERING BLACK AMERICANS IN LOS ANGELES AND COMPTON TO “CLEANSE” THEIR OCCUPIED HOODS.

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT THAT HANDS OVER TAX DOLLARS TO FUND THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA, WHICH OPERATES OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE UNDER CECILIA MUNOZ, AND MEETS LA RAZA WHERE HE STATES “WE MUST DESTROY OUR ENEMIES (LEGALS)”??????

*
NEWEST AMNESTY SCAM: JOBS FOR ILLEGALS (ONLY)

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/02/obamas-amnesty-thrust-illegal-in-every.html

The plan also would provide for more security funding and require business owners to check the immigration status of new hires within four years.

The draft also expands the E-Verify program that checks the immigration status of people seeking new jobs. Businesses with more than 1,000 employees must begin using the system within two years, businesses with more than 250 employees within three years and all businesses within four years.

*

YES, OBAMA PUNKED A NATION, AND WILL DO SO AGAIN TODAY, AND TOMORROW UNTIL WE GET RID OF THIS ACTOR.ublished by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)

Inequality and American democracy

16 February 2013

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama began by declaring that economic recovery was well underway. “Together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis,” he said, “and can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is strong.”

The latest data on social inequality in the United States, released late last month, provide greater clarity as to what precisely this statement signifies. For Obama and the political establishment as a whole, the main indices of “crisis” are the stock markets, and with them the wealth of the corporate and financial elite.

According to data brought together by University of California’s Emmanuel Saez, between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the “recovery”—average real income per family grew by 1.7 percent. However, Saez notes, “Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery.”

That is to say, the top one percent actually swallowed all of the total income growth during these two years, plus an additional 20 percent. What these figures demonstrate is a massive transfer of wealth, an infusion of funds into the financial markets at the expense of the majority of the population, the working class.

Saez adds, “In 2012, top 1 percent income will likely surge, due to booming stock-prices, as well as re-timing of income to avoid the higher 2013 top tax rates. Bottom 99 percent will likely grow much more modestly than top 1 percent incomes from 2011 to 2012. This suggests that the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.”

These trends in income share are not merely the product of abstract economic forces. They result from a definite and ruthless class policy pursued first by Bush and escalated under Obama. In response to the collapse of 2008, which was the outcome of financial speculation on an historically unprecedented scale, unlimited funds were made available to the banks by the government and Federal Reserve.

To finance the stock market boom, the Fed has purchased some $2 trillion worth of assets since 2008, essentially printing an equal amount of money to transfer into the financial system. Governments internationally have pursued a parallel policy. The results have been predictable: asset bubbles have been reflated, while the bad debts of the financial aristocracy have been transferred to central banks and government budgets.

The corollary to these measures has been a systematic and ongoing attack on the living standards of the vast majority of the population. In his State of the Union address, Obama trumpeted the supposed resurgence of manufacturing jobs—in fact, a tiny minority of those wiped out have been restored. He did not mention that whatever jobs have been created are on the basis of poverty level wages, spearheaded by the administration’s 2009 restructuring of the auto industry.

As a consequence, the number of “working poor” in the United States—those living in near poverty despite being employed—has increased sharply. In 2011, 47.5 million people lived in families earning less than 200 percent of the official poverty rate. This is nearly one third (33 percent) of all working families, up from 31 percent in 2010 and 28 percent in 2007.

These figures do not include the unemployed. Despite the official decline in the unemployment rate, due largely to millions of people leaving the labor force, the overall employment-population ratio remains near its post-crisis low.

Behind the thin rhetoric about reigniting a “thriving middle class,” Obama made clear that the administration’s policies in its second term will be subordinated entirely to the interests of big business, beginning with plans to slash hundreds of billions more from health care programs.

The inequality figures say much about the character of American society—a society dominated by a tiny aristocracy. The program of the political establishment as a whole is above all dedicated to ensuring the wealth of this social layer. It is the conflict between this aristocracy and the working class that forms the fundamental social division, not the various forms of identity politics that have become integral components of state ideology.

These social relations are central to understanding the crisis of American democracy. Without any significant opposition from the media or within the political establishment, the Obama administration has asserted the right to assassinate US citizens without any judicial review or due process.

Core democratic principles going back centuries are simply discarded. After initial media coverage of the administration white paper on the extra-judicial killing of US citizens, the issue has largely been dropped. Obama’s pick to head the CIA, John Brennan, the architect of the “kill lists,” is expected to be confirmed by the Senate later this month.

Under the banner of the “war on terror,” the past decade has seen a relentless expansion of executive power, from indefinite detention and military commissions, to domestic spying and the development of vast databases of communications.

Democratic forms of rule are not compatible with the enormous levels of inequality that pervade American society.

The defense of democracy and opposition to inequality are inextricably connected, and both depend on the development of an independent political movement of the working class in opposition to capitalism, the economic foundation upon which the modern aristocracy rests.

Joseph Kishore

*

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/01/president-barack-obama-and-his-criminal.html

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.

“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

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.

*

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!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/07/obama-promises-his-criminal-bankster.html

US treasury secretary covered up banks’ rigging of global rates

 

OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES! 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/06/obama-and-his-criminal-banksters-their.html 

THIS IS THE ALTER OBAMA' WORSHIPS AT:

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

07/16/2012

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.

*

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

“The response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.”

An insider’s view of Wall Street criminality

15 March 2012

Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation Wednesday in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, denouncing the bank's “toxic” culture of avarice and fraud.

Smith headed the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In his column, entitled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” he describes a corporate environment that encourages and rewards big short-term returns gained through the bilking of clients and the general public. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” he writes.

Speaking of one’s clients as “muppets” and describing deal-making as “ripping eyeballs out” are commonplace at Goldman, according to Smith. The way to advance at the Wall Street giant, he writes, is to persuade your clients “to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of,” get your clients “to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman,” and trade “any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”

The column describes an operation in which laws and regulations requiring financial institutions to deal honestly with their clients and protect their interests are routinely violated. The insider’s indictment of Goldman Sachs highlights a broader process—the criminalization of American capitalism as a whole.

It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.

Education, health care, pensions are being gutted, wages are being slashed and more austerity is on the agenda because there is supposedly “no money.” Corporate profits and CEO pay, meanwhile, are setting new records.

This is an indictment not simply of Goldman Sachs, or even Wall Street alone, but rather the entire economic and political system. Every official institution—the White House, Congress, the courts, the media, the Democratic and Republican parties—is complicit.

Smith’s column was widely reported in the media. NBC Nightly News led its report Wednesday night with the story, interviewing a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who was brought on to deplore the type of practices described by the former Goldman executive. The ruling class is well aware that popular anger against Wall Street is rising and capitalism itself is becoming increasingly discredited in the eyes of millions of Americans—a process that found an initial expression in the Occupy Wall Street protests. It is concerned that Smith’s piece will further fuel this sentiment.

The practices to which Smith points—and worse—are well known to the Obama administration and the financial regulatory agencies. In April of last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a 640-page report outlining in detail the fraudulent and illegal practices of major banks that contributed to the September 2008 crash. Fully 260 pages of that report were devoted to Goldman Sachs. They explained chapter and verse, giving dates and naming names, how the bank defrauded its clients by selling them mortgage securities while betting against the same investments, without telling them it was doing so.

The committee also documented the complicity of the credit rating firms and federal regulators in the colossal mortgage Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2007-2008, setting off a new world depression. It cited securities laws that had been violated by Goldman and two other banks it examined, Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, and referred this information to the Obama administration’s Justice Department.

The response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.

One Wall Street firm after another—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial—has been allowed to settle charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission out of court, paying token fines while admitting no wrongdoing. That this continues is seen in the filing Monday in federal court of the sweetheart settlement between five major banks and the state and federal governments of charges arising from the banks’ illegal processing of foreclosures. The banks have merely to pay a combined fine of $5 billion for illegally throwing thousands of families out of their homes, with no admission of wrongdoing. In return, they get the quashing of state investigations that threatened to result in tens of billions in damages and fines.

Not only does the Obama administration protect the Wall Street criminals, it includes their representatives among its top personnel. To cite some examples:

* Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

* Dianna Farrell, former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, is deputy director of the National Economic Council.

* Jacob Lew, Obama’s chief of staff, was a top executive at Citigroup. He follows two other bankers chosen by Obama to head his White House operations—former JPMorgan executive William Daley and former Chicago investment banker Rahm Emanuel.

The criminalization of the American corporate-financial elite cannot be separated from the capitalist system itself. It is the product of a decades-long process of crisis and decay, in which the ruling elite has increasingly separated its wealth-making from the production of real value.

Manufacturing and the productive infrastructure have been decimated, while financial manipulation and speculation have come to dominate economic life. The working class has suffered a catastrophic decline in its social position at the same time that a parasitic financial aristocracy has come to exercise a de facto dictatorship over the political system.

Like all aristocracies, the American financial elite will not accept any infringement of its wealth and power. The working class must break its grip by mobilizing its strength in opposition to both parties of Wall Street and fighting for the establishment of a workers’ government and socialist policies, beginning with the nationalization of the banks and corporations and their transformation into public enterprises under the democratic control of the working people.

Andre Damon and Barry Grey

The authors also recommend:

The foreclosure fraud settlement: An amnesty for Wall Street criminals
[13 February 2012]

Senate report on Wall Street crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class
[18 April 2011]

THE BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO real REGULATION, NO PRISON TIME, AND UNLIMITED PILLAGING OF THE NATION’S ECONOMY!

DESPITE THE DEVASTATION THESE BANKSTERS HAVE CAUSED AMERICANS, THEIR PROFITS SOARED GREATER DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS, THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH. SO HAVE FORECLOSURES!

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).

*

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/02/stock-market-bubble-obama-and-his.html 

WALL STREET HEADS FOR ANOTHER LOOTING OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE… THE CONTRIVED BUBBLE IS ABOUT TO BURST AGAIN… AMERICANS LEFT WITH THE PIECES AND BAILOUTS OF OBAMA’S CRONIES.

OBAMA PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO PRISON TIME AND NO REAL REGULATION. DID HE DELIVER? 

The JPMorgan scandal also throws into relief the government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown. Despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and criminality uncovered by two federal investigations last year, those responsible have been shielded from prosecution.

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).
 

HeHeHe....OBAMA PUNKED US AGAIN FOR HIS BANKSTERS!

The settlement, reported to be worth $25 billion, was announced February 9 and hailed by President Obama as a serious rebuke to the banks and boon to distressed homeowners. (See: “Obama administration brokers pro-bank mortgage fraud settlement”).*

The social and historical catastrophe confronting mankind is not simply the product of an economic crisis in the abstract. This crisis is mediated by class interests, and these class interests find expression in definite actions. Behind the central banks and governments stand the interests of a financial elite whose relationship to the rest of society is fundamentally parasitic.

*

THIS IS OBAMANOMICS!

FROM HIS FIRST DAY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, OBAMA INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, STARTING WITH BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR NO-STRINGS BANKSTER BAILOUTS, TIM GEITHNER.

OBAMA HAS PROMISED HIS BANKSTERS HE WAS NOT THERE TO PUNISH THEM FOR THEIR CRIMES. IN FACT, HE IS FUNDED BY THE CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAT INVESTED SO HEAVILY IN HIM. NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE MONEY FROM BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA.

DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS  ALONE, BANKSTER PROFITS SOARED MORE THAN ALL 8 UNDER BUSH. SOARING BANKSTER PROFITS AND SOARING FORECLOSURES.

 next Is the Stock Market Clueless or Disconnected?

By Matt Nesto

It's nothing new that Wall Street's reaction to certain events is sometimes baffling, but there's a sentiment right now that there's a certain disconnect between the stock market and general economic conditions.

A recent example is the rally that came after the January jobs data, which saw the unemployment number rise and might have been dubbed an outright disaster had it not been for a series of sweeping revisions that made the trailing data look a little better. And yet, stocks rallied on the news and investors pushed the Dow about 14,000.

There are other examples, but the fact remains that Wall Street is aiming at the clouds and not bothering with the mud beneath its feet.

"There's a simple reason stocks are going up higher: it's because the Fed says so," spouts Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes, in the attached video. While consumer inflation remains low, he says asset inflation is soaring. "If you look at stocks, bond yields, gold has doubled since QE1 started. Silver has almost tripled." This all coming at a time when unemployment, housing and real GDP growth have been missing.

Political risk has all but disappeared lately, with stocks posting their best January advance in over a decade. Even earnings, while (predictably) coming in ahead of much-lowered analyst expectations, are facing a disconnect as profit growth slumps and various valuation measures tilt towards the expensive column.

There are other examples of this disconnect, as well as some positive reasons why stocks are performing as well as they are, but the overriding rift is undebatable, especially when markets are back to pre-recession levels and economic progress is still in low gear.

*

OBAMANOMICS:

The systematic reduction of wages, the precedent for which was set by the Obama administration in the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry, has fueled an enormous boom in corporate profits, which have set records for three years in a row, and are likely to do so again in 2012. Yet these profits are not reinvested. American corporations are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash, much of which is simply funneled into the markets.

The stock market bubble

1 February 2013

In the fifth year of the economic depression, and amid signs of the worst global slowdown since 2008, world stock markets are booming.

In the US, the three major stock indices have either reached or are within a few percentage points of their 2007 highs, despite the fact that the economy has stalled, contracting for the first quarter since 2009, according to figures released Wednesday.

Europe is in a state of disintegration, with Greece and Spain facing conditions not seen since the Great Depression, while Germany is experiencing a sharp slowdown. In Britain, the economy is now 3.3 percent smaller than at the start of the downturn, but the benchmark FTSE 250 index has doubled. China, Brazil and India have posted sharply lower figures for economic growth, amidst a slowdown in exports. Yet global share prices have risen ten to twenty percent in the past year alone.

These apparently contradictory phenomena—surging financial markets and economic stagnation—are in fact intimately linked. The continued rise in the markets is not a sign of health, but a particular expression of the diseased state of the world capitalist system.

The world’s ruling classes, confronting a historic crisis of productivity and investment, have responded through the reflation of asset values—and their own incomes—through historically unprecedented measures of wealth redistribution.

Above all, there has been a massive infusion of cash into the financial system by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks. The US Fed is currently purchasing some $85 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities and treasury bills every month, essentially printing money to buy up government debt and bad assets held by the banks. The total assets owned by the Federal Reserve have climbed to $3.01 trillion, more than triple what it was in 2008.

All major world central banks have taken similar actions. In July, the European Central Bank moved to lower its benchmark interest rate to the lowest level in the history of the euro. The size of the holdings of the six largest world central banks has likewise nearly tripled, to €14 trillion in 2012.

The actions of the central banks are invariably described in the mass media as necessary measures to address unemployment and other social ills. In fact, their central purpose is to make virtually unlimited sums of money available for financial speculation.

This policy is directly tied to the frontal assault on the working class internationally. Awash in cash, the corporate and financial elite insists that there is no money for health care, pensions, decent wages. Every basic right must be eliminated in order to ensure the continued flow of funds into the banks. Millions of people have been thrown into poverty, unemployment and destitution as a consequence.

The decimation of wages and living standards has the additional affect of counteracting the inherently inflationary impact of the central banks’ policy. Under any other circumstances, the mass printing of money would cause runaway price inflation, but falling wages and plummeting investment are directing the flow of cash not into goods, but into asset values.

The systematic reduction of wages, the precedent for which was set by the Obama administration in the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry, has fueled an enormous boom in corporate profits, which have set records for three years in a row, and are likely to do so again in 2012. Yet these profits are not reinvested. American corporations are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash, much of which is simply funneled into the markets.

The entire process is completely unstable. The ruling class stumbles from crisis to crisis, and its response to one crisis sets the stage for the next. The economy stagnates, and new speculative bubbles threaten to burst, unleashing a financial collapse that could far eclipse the crisis of 2008. While engorged in excess, the ruling class appears at the same time bewildered, the measures it adopts increasingly improvisational.

At the same time, the infusion of cash into the world economy is undermining the global exchange system and fueling currency wars and competitive devaluation. This month, Japan became the latest economy to announce an expansion of its money supply in what was widely seen as an attempt to bolster exports by devaluing the yen. The breakdown of the international monetary system, and consequent turn to trade war measures that characterized the response of governments to the Great Depression, are once again being repeated.

The social and historical catastrophe confronting mankind is not simply the product of an economic crisis in the abstract. This crisis is mediated by class interests, and these class interests find expression in definite actions. Behind the central banks and governments stand the interests of a financial elite whose relationship to the rest of society is fundamentally parasitic.

A solution to the crisis must take a political form. To the interests of the ruling classes, the international working class must counterpoise its own program, its own solution. At the center of this program must be the understanding that a way forward is possible only through the transformation of society as a whole, placing it on new foundations.

The only force capable of breaking the political stranglehold of these social parasites is the international working class. It must be armed with a socialist program, fighting to place the major corporations and banks under democratic control, and reorganize the economy on a rational and egalitarian basis.

Andre Damon

*
DURING OBAMA’S FIRST YEAR, 2/3s OF ALL JOBS WENT TO IMMIGRANTS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGALS. THIS IS HOW THE DEMS KEEP CORPORATE PROFIT MARGINS HIGH AND WAGES DEPRESSED!

DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM WORKPLACE ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS WAS DOWN 70%. OBAMA HAS PROMISED LA RAZA THE OTHER 30% WILL BE GONE AS SOON AS AMNESTY IS PASSED. 

MEANWHILE, FOR THAT AMNESTY, THE MEXICAN HORDES ARE CLIMBING OUR BORDERS THIS VERY DAY!

“Almost four million workers have been out of work for more than a year…we haven’t had anything like that since the ‘30s” [and]… there’s lots of unused capacity…a lot of savings that have nowhere to go.”

U.S. Still Suffering Depression Conditions: Paul Krugman


By Bernice Napach | Daily Ticker – Tue, Jan 29, 2013 6:54 AM EST 

When Federal Reserve officials sit down today for their first policy-making meeting of the year they should consider continuing easy monetary policy well into 2015, says Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

“If the Fed can convince people that it‘s going to keep the pedal to the metal…that still has some leverage on the economy,” Krugman tells The Daily Ticker.

The Fed had been saying it would maintain near-zero low rates until mid-2015, and then until unemployment falls to 6.5% or below, but recently some Fed officials have suggested that the Fed may consider slowing or ending its asset purchases (quantitative easing) sooner than later.

Related: Don't Be on Fed 'Exit' in 2013...or Even 2014: Alan Blinder

The economy now needs all the help it can get, says Krugman, author of End This Depression Now!  whose paperback edition has just been released with a new preface.

“The U.S. economy is recovering but slowly,” and still experiencing “depression conditions,” says Krugman. “Almost four million workers have been out of work for more than a year…we haven’t had anything like that since the ‘30s” [and]… there’s lots of unused capacity…a lot of savings that have nowhere to go.”

Krugman’s solution: More government spending, not less, in order to grow the economy. “A growing economy is the best solution to all our problems,” says Krugman, also an economics professor at Princeton University.

Krugman is not concerned that more government spending will lead to bigger deficits. “There is no good reason dealing with debt should be a priority today,” says Krugman, and “the 10-year outlook for debt [in the U.S.] is not too bad.”

Even a little more inflation in the U.S.--say 3 or 4%-- could be helpful, Krugman says,

For starters, he suggests that the federal government reverse state and local budget cuts in infrastructure and education. “Just undoing that would lead a long way back to full employment. It is in fact that easy,” says Krugman.

Related: U.S. Economy Stuck in Second Gear: David Levy

Critics disagree and argue that this is not the time to add to a budget deficit, when the debt-to-GDP ratio currently tops 100% of GDP.

Krugman’s response: Japan is much more in debt than the U.S. (its debt-to-GDP ratio near 200%) but has now instituted an expansion of fiscal and monetary policy.

“Markets are not punishing [Japan],” says Krugman. "Markets are rewarding them."

Tell Us What You Think!

Do you agree with Paul Krugman that the U.S. government should spend more now to revive the economy?

*

US Treasury rubber-stamps bonus requests from bailed-out firms

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/01/president-barack-obama-and-his-criminal.html

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!

“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

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.

*

 

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!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/07/obama-promises-his-criminal-bankster.html

US treasury secretary covered up banks’ rigging of global rates

 

OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/06/obama-and-his-criminal-banksters-their.html

 

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.

*

*

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

“The response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.”

 

An insider’s view of Wall Street criminality

15 March 2012

Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation Wednesday in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, denouncing the bank's “toxic” culture of avarice and fraud.

Smith headed the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In his column, entitled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” he describes a corporate environment that encourages and rewards big short-term returns gained through the bilking of clients and the general public. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” he writes.

Speaking of one’s clients as “muppets” and describing deal-making as “ripping eyeballs out” are commonplace at Goldman, according to Smith. The way to advance at the Wall Street giant, he writes, is to persuade your clients “to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of,” get your clients “to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman,” and trade “any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”

The column describes an operation in which laws and regulations requiring financial institutions to deal honestly with their clients and protect their interests are routinely violated. The insider’s indictment of Goldman Sachs highlights a broader process—the criminalization of American capitalism as a whole.

It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.

Education, health care, pensions are being gutted, wages are being slashed and more austerity is on the agenda because there is supposedly “no money.” Corporate profits and CEO pay, meanwhile, are setting new records.

This is an indictment not simply of Goldman Sachs, or even Wall Street alone, but rather the entire economic and political system. Every official institution—the White House, Congress, the courts, the media, the Democratic and Republican parties—is complicit.

Smith’s column was widely reported in the media. NBC Nightly News led its report Wednesday night with the story, interviewing a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who was brought on to deplore the type of practices described by the former Goldman executive. The ruling class is well aware that popular anger against Wall Street is rising and capitalism itself is becoming increasingly discredited in the eyes of millions of Americans—a process that found an initial expression in the Occupy Wall Street protests. It is concerned that Smith’s piece will further fuel this sentiment.

The practices to which Smith points—and worse—are well known to the Obama administration and the financial regulatory agencies. In April of last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a 640-page report outlining in detail the fraudulent and illegal practices of major banks that contributed to the September 2008 crash. Fully 260 pages of that report were devoted to Goldman Sachs. They explained chapter and verse, giving dates and naming names, how the bank defrauded its clients by selling them mortgage securities while betting against the same investments, without telling them it was doing so.

The committee also documented the complicity of the credit rating firms and federal regulators in the colossal mortgage Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2007-2008, setting off a new world depression. It cited securities laws that had been violated by Goldman and two other banks it examined, Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, and referred this information to the Obama administration’s Justice Department.

The response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.

One Wall Street firm after another—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial—has been allowed to settle charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission out of court, paying token fines while admitting no wrongdoing. That this continues is seen in the filing Monday in federal court of the sweetheart settlement between five major banks and the state and federal governments of charges arising from the banks’ illegal processing of foreclosures. The banks have merely to pay a combined fine of $5 billion for illegally throwing thousands of families out of their homes, with no admission of wrongdoing. In return, they get the quashing of state investigations that threatened to result in tens of billions in damages and fines.

Not only does the Obama administration protect the Wall Street criminals, it includes their representatives among its top personnel. To cite some examples:

* Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

* Dianna Farrell, former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, is deputy director of the National Economic Council.

* Jacob Lew, Obama’s chief of staff, was a top executive at Citigroup. He follows two other bankers chosen by Obama to head his White House operations—former JPMorgan executive William Daley and former Chicago investment banker Rahm Emanuel.

The criminalization of the American corporate-financial elite cannot be separated from the capitalist system itself. It is the product of a decades-long process of crisis and decay, in which the ruling elite has increasingly separated its wealth-making from the production of real value.

Manufacturing and the productive infrastructure have been decimated, while financial manipulation and speculation have come to dominate economic life. The working class has suffered a catastrophic decline in its social position at the same time that a parasitic financial aristocracy has come to exercise a de facto dictatorship over the political system.

Like all aristocracies, the American financial elite will not accept any infringement of its wealth and power. The working class must break its grip by mobilizing its strength in opposition to both parties of Wall Street and fighting for the establishment of a workers’ government and socialist policies, beginning with the nationalization of the banks and corporations and their transformation into public enterprises under the democratic control of the working people.

Andre Damon and Barry Grey

The authors also recommend:

The foreclosure fraud settlement: An amnesty for Wall Street criminals
[13 February 2012]

Senate report on Wall Street crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class
[18 April 2011]

THE BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO real REGULATION, NO PRISON TIME, AND UNLIMITED PILLAGING OF THE NATION’S ECONOMY!

DESPITE THE DEVASTATION THESE BANKSTERS HAVE CAUSED AMERICANS, THEIR PROFITS SOARED GREATER DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS, THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH. SO HAVE FORECLOSURES!

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).

 

*

“Barack Obama's favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more -- all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.”

 

Is JPMorgan's Loss a Canary in a Coal Mine?

Posted: 05/16/2012 4:49 pm

That sound of shattered glass you've been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie Dimon splintering as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase. As the Good Book says, "Pride goeth before a fall," and the sleek, silver-haired, too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America's largest bank has been turning every television show within reach into a confessional booth. Barack Obama's favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more -- all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.

Once again, doing God's work -- that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down -- has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon's crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker's ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as "infantile."

To find out more about what this all means, I turned to Simon Johnson, once chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He and his colleague James Kwak founded the now-indispensable website baselinescenario.com. They co-authored the bestselling book 13 Bankers and a most recent book, White House Burning, an account every citizen should read to understand how the national deficit affects our future.

Bill Moyers: If Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, would the government be forced to step in again?

Simon Johnson: Absolutely, Bill. JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail. Hopefully in the future we can move away from this system, but right now it is too big. It's about a $2.5 trillion dollar bank in terms of total assets. That's roughly 20 percent of the U.S. economy, comparing their assets to our GDP. That's huge. If that bank were to collapse -- I'm not saying it will -- but if it were to collapse, it would be a shock to the economy bigger than that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and as a result, they would be protected by the Federal Reserve. They are exactly what's known as too big to fail.

Moyers: I was just looking at an interview I did with you in February of 2009, soon after the collapse of 2008 and you said, and I'm quoting, "The signs that I see... the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way these bankers are treated by certain congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried. I have a feeling in my stomach that is what I had in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situations. When there's a small group of people who got you into a disaster and who are still powerful, you know you need to come in and break that power and you can't. You're stuck." How do you feel about that insight now?

Johnson: I'm still nervous, and I think that the losses that JPMorgan reported -- that CEO Jamie Dimon reported -- and the way in which they're presented, the fact that they're surprised by it and the fact that they didn't know they were taking these kinds of risks, the fact that they lost so much money in a relatively benign moment compared to what we've seen in the past and what we're likely to see in the future -- all of this suggests that we are absolutely on the path towards another financial crisis of the same order of magnitude as the last one.

Moyers: Should Jamie Dimon resign? I ask that because as you know and as we've discussed, Chase and other huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to, in effect, buy off our politicians and regulators. Chase just had to pay up almost three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama. It's also paid out billions of dollars to settle other cases of perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges were for actions that took place while Mr. Dimon was the CEO. Should he resign?

Johnson: I think, Bill, there should be an independent investigation into how JPMorgan operates both with regard to these losses and with regard to all of the problems that you just identified. This investigation should be conducted separate from the board of directors. Remember that the shareholders and the board of directors absolutely have an incentive to keep JPMorgan Chase as a too-big-to-fail bank. But because it is that kind of bank, its downside risk is taken by the Federal Reserve, by the taxpayer, by the broader economy and all citizens. We need to have an independent, detailed, specific investigation to establish who knew what when and what kind of wrongdoing management was engaged in. On the basis of that, we'll see what we'll see and who should have to resign.

Moyers: Dimon is also on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, as everyone knows is supposed to regulate JPMorgan. What in the world are bankers doing on the Fed board, regulating themselves?

Johnson: This is a terrible situation, Bill. It goes back to the origins, the political compromise at the very beginning of the Federal Reserve system about a hundred years ago. The bankers were very powerful back then, also, and they got a Federal Reserve system in which they had a lot of representation. Some of that has eroded over time because of previous abuses, but you're absolutely right, the prominent bankers, including most notably, Jamie Dimon, are members of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, a key element in the Federal Reserve system. And he should, under these circumstances, absolutely step down from that role. It's completely inappropriate to have such a big bank represented in this fashion. The New York Fed claims there's no impropriety, there's no wrong doing and he doesn't involve himself in supervision and so on and so forth. Perhaps, but why does Mr. Dimon, a very busy man, take time out of his day to be on the board of the New York fed? He is getting something from this. It's a trade, just like everything else on Wall Street.

Moyers: He dismissed criticism of his dual role yesterday by downplaying the role of the Fed board. He said it's more like an "advisory group than anything else." I had to check my hearing aid to see if I'd heard that correctly.

Johnson: Well, I think he is advising them on lots of things. He also, of course, meets with some regularity with top Treasury officials, and some reports say that he meets with President Obama with some regularity. The political access and connections of Mr. Dimon are second to none. One of his senior executives was until recently chief of staff in the White House, if you can believe that. I really think this has gone far enough. Under these kinds of circumstances with this amount of loss of control over risk management, what we need to have is Mr. Dimon step down from the New York Federal Reserve Board.

Moyers: He told shareholders at their annual meeting Tuesday -- they were meeting in Tampa, Florida -- that these were "self-inflicted mistakes" that "should never have happened." Does that seem reasonable to you?

Johnson: Well, it's all very odd, Bill, and I've talked to as many experts as I can find who are at all informed about what JPMorgan was doing and how they were doing it and nobody really understands the true picture. That's why we need an independent investigation to establish -- was this an isolated incident or, more likely, the breakdown of a system of controlling and managing risks. Keep in mind that JPMorgan is widely regarded to be the best in the business at risk management, as it is called on Wall Street. And if they can't do this in a relatively benign moment when things are not so very bad around the world, what is going to happen to them and to other banks when something really dramatic happens, for example, in Europe in the eurozone?

Moyers: Some of his supporters are claiming that only the bank has lost on this and that there's absolutely no chance that the loss could have threatened the stability of the banking system as happened in 2008. What do you say again to that?

Johnson: I say this is the canary in the coal mine. This tells you that something is fundamentally wrong with the way banks measure, manage and control their risks. They don't have enough equity funding in their business. They like to have a little bit of equity and a lot of debt. They get paid based on return on equity, unadjusted for risk. If things go well, they get the upside. If things go badly, the downside is someone else's problem. And that someone else is you and me, Bill. It goes to the Federal Reserve, but not only, it goes to the Treasury, it goes to the debt.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the increase in debt relative to GDP due to the last crisis will end up being 50 percent of GDP, call that $7 trillion dollars, $7.5 trillion dollars in today's money. That's extraordinary. It's an enormous shock to our fiscal accounts and to our ability to pay pensions and keep the healthcare system running in the future. For what? What did we get from that? Absolutely nothing. The bankers got some billions in extra pay, we get trillions in extra debt. It's unfair, it's inefficient, it's unconscionable, and it needs to stop.

Moyers: Wasn't part of the risk that Dimon took with taxpayer guaranteed deposits? I mean, if I had money at JPMorgan Chase, wouldn't some of my money have been used to take this risk?

Johnson: Again, we don't know the exact details, but news reports do suggest that yes, they were gambling with federally insured deposits, which just really puts the icing on the cake here.

Moyers: Do we know yet what is Dimon's culpability? Is it conceivable to you that a risk this big would have been incurred without his approval?

Johnson: It seems very strange and quite a stretch. And he did tell investors, when he reported on first quarter earnings in April, that he was aware of the situation, aware of the trade -- he called it a "tempest in a teacup," and, therefore, not something to worry about.

Moyers: He's been Wall Street's point man in their campaign against tighter regulation of derivatives and proprietary trading. Were derivatives at the heart of this gamble?

Johnson: Yes, according to reliable reports, this was a so-called "hedging" strategy that turned out to be no more than a gamble, but the people involved perhaps didn't understand that or maybe they understood it and covered it up. It was absolutely about a bet on extremely complex derivatives and the interesting question is who failed to understand exactly what they were getting into. And how did Jamie Dimon, who has a reputation that he burnishes more than anybody else for being the number one expert risk manager in the world -- how did he miss this one?

Moyers:I've been reading a lot of stories today about members of the House, Republicans in particular, saying this doesn't change their opinion at all that we've got to still diminish regulation. What do you think about that?

Johnson: I think that it is a recipe for disaster. Look, deregulating or not regulating during the boom is exactly how you get into bailouts in the bust. The goal should be to make all the banks small enough and simple enough to fail. End the government subsidies here. And when I talk to people on the intellectual right, Bill, they get this, as do people on the intellectual left. The problem is, the political right largely doesn't want to go there because of the donations. I'm afraid some people, not all, but some people on the political left don't want to go there either.

Moyers: The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into JPMorgan's trading loss. Have you spotted -- and I know this is sensitive -- but have you spotted anything in the story so far that suggests the possibility of criminality? Dodd-Frank is not in existence yet, so where would any possibility of criminality come from?

Johnson: Well Dodd-Frank is in existence but the rules have not been written and therefore not implemented. So yes, it is hard to violate those rules in their current state. And many of those rules, by the way, violation would be a civil penalty, not a criminal penalty. If you violate a securities law -- if you've mislead investors, if there was material adverse information that was not disclosed in an appropriate and timely manner -- that's a very serious offence traditionally.

I have to say that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have not been very good at enforcing securities law in recent years, including and specifically since the financial crisis. I am skeptical that this will change. But if they have an investigation that reveals all of the details of what happened and how it happened, that would be extremely informative and show us, I believe, that the risk management approach and attitudes on Wall Street are deeply flawed and leading us towards a big crisis.

Moyers: So what are people to do, Simon? What can people do now in response to this?

Johnson: Well, I think you have to look for politicians who are proposing solutions, and look on the right and on the left. I see Elizabeth Warren, running for the Senate in Massachusetts, who is saying we should bring back Glass-Steagall to separate commercial banking from investment banking. I see Tom Hoenig, who is not a politician, he's a regulator, he's the former president of the Kansas City Fed, and he's now one of the top two people at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC. He is saying that big banks should no longer have trading desks. That's the same sort of idea that Elizabeth Warren is expressing. We need a lot more people to focus on this and to make this an issue for the elections.

And I would say in this context, Bill, it's very important not to be distracted. I understand for example, Speaker Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, is proposing to have another conflict over the debt ceiling in the near future. This is the politics of distraction. This is refusing to recognize that a huge part of our fiscal problems today and in the future are due to these risks within the financial system that are allowed because the people running the biggest banks hand out massive campaign contributions across the political spectrum.

Moyers: Are you saying that this financial crisis, so-called, is at heart a political crisis?

Johnson: Yes, exactly. I think that a few people, particularly in and around the financial system, have become too powerful. They were allowed to take a lot of risk, and they did massive damage to the economy -- more than eight million jobs lost. We're still struggling to get back anywhere close to employment levels where we were before 2008. And they've done massive damage to the budget. This damage to the budget is long lasting; it undermines the budget when we need it to be stronger because the society is aging. We need to support Social Security and support Medicare on a fair basis. We need to restore and rebuild revenue, revenue that was absolutely devastated by the financial crisis. People need to understand the link between what the banks did and the budget. And too many people fail to do that. "Oh, it's too complicated. I don't want to understand the details, I don't want to spend time with it." That's a mistake, a very big mistake. You're playing into the hands of a few powerful people in the society who want private benefit and social loss.

Watch Moyers & Company weekly on public television. See more web-only features like this at BillMoyers.com

*

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/05/case-of-incest-barack-obama-and.html

 

Why hasn’t Obama been impeached? His violations of our borders laws, inducing illegals to vote, sabotage of jobs for Americans, connections to criminal banksters…. WHAT DOES IT TAKE?

 

NO WORKS IN THE CORRUPT OBAMA WHITE HOUSE THAT IS NOT CONNECTED TO THE BANKSTERS THAT OWN OBAMA, OR THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA!

THE REASON OBAMA BROUGHT IN DALEY WAS BECAUSE WAS FROM JPMORGAN, AND AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS.

For much of Obama’s tenure, Jamie Dimon was known as the White House’s “favorite banker.” According to White House logs, Dimon visited the White House at least 18 times, often to talk to his former subordinate at JPMorgan, William Daley, who had been named White House chief of staff by Obama after the Democratic rout in the 2010 elections.

OBAMA PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO PRISON TIME AND NO REAL REGULATION. DID HE DELIVER?
 

The JPMorgan scandal also throws into relief the government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown. Despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and criminality uncovered by two federal investigations last year, those responsible have been shielded from prosecution.


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 settlement, reported to be worth $25 billion, was announced February 9 and hailed by President Obama as a serious rebuke to the banks and boon to distressed homeowners. (See: “Obama administration brokers pro-bank mortgage fraud settlement”).

 
 *

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/01/barack-obama-and-rise-of-la-raza.html 

LA RAZA ‘THE RACE” IS THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of AMERICA. IT NOW OPERATES OUT OF THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE UNDER LA RAZA V.P. CECILIA MUNOZ.

OBAMA AND LA RAZA DEM HARRY REID, HAVE HANDED OVER MILLIONS OF AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS TO THIS MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY TO BUY THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES!

THE AGENDA IS MEXICAN SUPREMACY! 

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is not only one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful militant organizations in the country, it is also notoriously racist and subversive. The group's name, "La Raza," means "The Race," by which they are referring to ethnic Mexicans, or more broadly to "hispanics" or "latinos." And it is quite clear from their decades of vitriolic rhetoric — both spoken and written — that the La Raza activists are trying to engender not only race consciousness amongst hispanic U.S. citizens and Mexican migrants, but also racial militancy and animosity toward "Gringo America."

*

“Although the nation’s largest Latino advocacy organization is a nonprofit that must remain nonpartisan because it gets millions of U.S. federal grant dollars, the group’s president helped lead a Barack Obama pep rally over the weekend during an annual conference in a California city close to the Mexican border.”

"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot."  ---Excelsior, the national newspaper of Mexico… in reality LA RAZA SUPREMACY has now spread from MEXIFORNIA to all 49 other states. Across the nation the American people are forced to pay for Mexico’s looting and crime tidal wave.

 “PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”… does that mean assault the legals of Arizona that must fend off the Mexican invasion, occupation, growing criminal and welfare state, as well as Mex Drug cartels???

OBAMA TELLS ILLEGALS “PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”

Friends of ALIPAC,

Each day new reports come in from across the nation that our movement is surging and more incumbents, mostly Democrats, are about to fall on Election Day. Obama's approval ratings are falling to new lows as he makes highly inappropriate statements to Spanish language audiences asking illegal alien supporters to help him "punish our enemies."

FROM JUDICIAL WATCH – GET ON THEIR E-NEWS!

“Nonpartisan” La Raza Council Endorses Obama

Although the nation’s largest Latino advocacy organization is a nonprofit that must remain nonpartisan because it gets millions of U.S. federal grant dollars, the group’s president helped lead a Barack Obama pep rally over the weekend during an annual conference in a California city close to the Mexican border.

The extremist Mexican group National Council of La Raza clearly endorses Barack Obama, which is why La Raza President Janet Murguia stood by as Los Angeles’ renowned Chicano mayor (Antonio Villaraigosa) praised the Illinois senator during the group’s annual convention in San Diego. A former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, Villaraigosa assured the crowd of thousands that Obama is Latinos’ best hope for reforming the nation’s federal immigration policies.

Villaraigosa took the opportunity to further pump up Obama, telling the crowd at the so-called nonpartisan convention that 12 million illegal immigrants can be brought "out of the shadows and into the light and onto the tax rolls by electing Barack Obama." (EXCEPT THERE ARE 12 MILLION LA RAZA ILLEGALS IN SOUTHERN CA ALONE. TRUE ESTIMATES OF THE NUMBER OF MEXICAN LOOTERS IN OUR BORDERS IS CLOSER TO 40 MILLION AND BREEDING LIKE BUNNIES).

If that’s not an endorsement, then what is? The Obama pep rally is sure to continue through the end of the La Raza convention sometime today. Such political endorsements are prohibited by nonprofits in the United States, especially the ones that benefit from millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars like this group.

As it is, Americans should be outraged that their tax dollars are going to an extremist Mexican group that advocates open borders and organized many of the country’s disruptive pro illegal immigration marches last year. The National Council of La Raza caters to the radical Chicano movement that says California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Texas belong to Aztlan.

The takeover plan is referred to as the "reconquista" of the Western U.S. and it features ethnic cleansing of Americans, Europeans, Africans and Asians once the area is taken back and converted to Aztlan. While this may all sound a bit crazy, this organization is quite powerful and its leaders regularly attend congressional hearings regarding immigration.

A few months ago the group got a $15 million federal earmark to counsel Hispanics about housing in addition to $1.3 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to conduct “comprehensive” housing counseling for Hispanics, whether they are in the country legally or not. La Raza also uses U.S. tax dollars to fund projects like a Southern California elementary school with a curriculum that specializes in bashing America and promoting the Chicano movement.

OBAMA IS BUSH’S THIRD AND FOURTH TERM. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IS THAT HE WAS REELECTED BY ILLEGALS!

The committee’s support for Lew’s appointment underscores the bipartisan commitment to cut corporate taxes, raise taxes on workers and slash social programs.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/02/obamas-newest-wave-of-bankster-lootings.html

 

Newsmax

Obama's 'Hispanicazation' of America

 

January 10, 2011

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/08/obamas-hispanicazation-of-america-most.html