Tuesday, September 17, 2013

THE BARACK OBAMA, SENS. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, BARBARA "BRIBES" BOXER and RICHARD C. BLUM PACT TO LOOT AMERICA


FEINSTEIN IS A MAJOR DONOR TO BARACK OBAMA and SEN. BARBARA "BRIBES" BOXER. IN FACT, FEINSTEIN AND HER PIMP HUSBAND, RICHARD C. BLUM HAVE DOLED OUT BRIBES TO VIRTUALLY ALL DEMOCRATS IN THE SENATE SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT THE STAGGERING CORRUPTION AND CONFLICTS OF INTERESTS FEINSTEIN PERPETRATES ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE YEARLY!
 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.

BARACK OBAMA, LA RAZA FASCISM and the CULTURE of DEM CORRUPTION

They Destroyed Our Country ... OBAMA AND HIS HAREMS OF CORRUPTION

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

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


EXCLUSIVE: Senator’s husband’s firm cashes in on crisis ON FORECLOSURE CRISIS CAUSED BY FEINSTEIN'S BANKSTER DONORS WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA


The Washington Times

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband's real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein's intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn't a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments - not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) - the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman - had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

 
DURING THE BANKSTER-OWNED
PRESIDENT’S FIRST TERM ALONE,
BANKSTER PROFITS SOARED AS DID
BANK CRIMES and FORECLOSURES.


 “That McLaughlin’s plan can be presented as “left” only underscores the fact that the Obama administration has done absolutely nothing to assist homebuyers. Its mortgage programs have been based on the banks voluntarily agreeing to restructure loans for small sections of the population, with no reduction in principal. The administration has worked closely with the banks to minimize their liability for their fraudulent and criminal practices that have already led millions to lose their homes.”


THE WRECKING OF AMERICA: BARACK OBAMA and his LOOTING WALL STREET DONORS PILLAGE A NATION BUSH STYLE!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-wrecking-of-america-barack-obama.html

 

WARS FOR MUSLIMS, OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX AND UNLEASHED RAPE BY WALL STREET DONORS!


the figures are in on Obama’s looting of America for Wall Street!


STAGGERING POVERTY IN AMERICA CAUSED BY OBAMA, HIS CRONIES AND WALL STREET DONORS…AND THEN ILLEGALS GET THE JOBS!

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

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

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

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

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


On fifth anniversary of Wall Street crash, Obama tries the Big Lie technique
17 September 2013
On Monday, US President Barack Obama marked the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street crash of September 15, 2008 with a White House speech that only underscored the unbridgeable chasm that separates the entire political establishment from the broad mass of working people.
Even as he spoke, the stock market was soaring to new highs on the news that Obama’s expected choice to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Lawrence Summers, had removed himself from consideration because of opposition from Wall Street.

Forbes magazine reported that the wealth of the 400 richest Americans had climbed to $2 trillion, a jump from $1.7 trillion in 2012.

With corporate profits at record highs, CEO pay once again hitting the tens and hundreds of millions, and the concentration of wealth the greatest since 1928, Obama boasted of the great success of his economic policies in restoring “security and opportunity for the middle class.”

With breathtaking cynicism—and contempt for the intelligence of the American people—Obama presented himself as single-mindedly focused on “my number one priority since the day I took office”: fighting for the so-called “middle class.” (There is, according to the mythology of the American ruling class, no working class in the United States, even though America is the most economically unequal of all industrialized countries).

Employing the technique of the Big Lie, Obama described his response to the financial crisis as follows: “We put people back to work repairing roads and bridges, to keep teachers in our classrooms, our first responders on the streets. We helped responsible homeowners modify their mortgages so that more of them could keep their homes. We helped jumpstart the flow of credit to help more small businesses keep their doors open. We saved the American auto industry… we took on a broken health care system … We put in place tough new rules on big banks … And what all this means is we’ve cleared away the rubble from the financial crisis and we’ve begun to lay a new foundation for economic growth and prosperity.”

No. The Obama administration categorically rejected any program of public works to hire the unemployed and refused to aid bankrupt state and local governments, resulting in the layoff of hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters and other public employees. As a result, mass unemployment is a permanent fixture, and the labor force participation rate is the lowest in 35 years. Moreover, the vast majority of new jobs created under Obama—still 2 million below the total before the crisis—are low-wage and part-time.

The administration refused to halt home foreclosures or force banks to reduce loan principals, allowing the banks to throw millions of families out onto the street.
While continuing and vastly expanding the bank bailout begun under Bush, Obama refused to impose any conditions on the money stolen from taxpayers, allowing the bankers to use government funds to speculate rather than provide loans to small businesses. The result was a wave of small business failures that continues to the present.

Obama forced General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy in order to impose plant closures, tens of thousands of layoffs, cuts in workers’ benefits, and a 50 percent pay cut for new-hires. The wage-cutting in the auto industry was the signal for an assault on wages and benefits in every sector of the economy, public as well as private.

Obama passed a health care overhaul devoted to cutting costs for corporations and the government by rationing health services, drugs, medical tests and procedures on a class basis. Millions of workers will see their coverage slashed while the health care giants and insurance companies enjoy windfall profits.

The Dodd-Frank financial “reform” bill passed in 2010 is a joke. A compendium of half measures meant to provide a fig leaf of reform while leaving the existing financial system intact, it largely remains a dead letter. Provisions such as the “Volcker Rule,” which would restrict—but not end—the legal ability of banks to speculate on their own accounts with depositors’ money, have not been enacted because of opposition from Wall Street.

Not a single leading bank executive has been criminally prosecuted, let alone jailed, for rampant fraud and criminality both before and after the 2008 crash. Over the past five years, bank scandals have proliferated—Libor-rigging, foreclosure fraud, concealing speculative losses, drug money laundering—with no serious consequences for the criminals. Not only have the biggest banks not been broken up, they have been allowed to grow even bigger and strengthen their grip on all aspects of economic and political life.

As for the “new foundation for growth and prosperity,” the offloading of the bad debts of the banks to the government and the massive money printing by the Federal Reserve to subsidize Wall Street have created the conditions for a financial crash of even greater proportions than the debacle of 2008.
The bankrupting of governments has, meanwhile, been used, in the US and around the world, to justify the launching of an historic assault on social programs and the jobs and living standards of the working class. Obama has spearheaded a social counterrevolution, utilizing the economic crisis to turn the wheel of history back to levels of exploitation and poverty last seen 100 years ago.

The centerpiece of this assault in the US is the bankruptcy of Detroit, backed by the White House, which is being used to destroy the pensions and health benefits of city workers, privatize and slash city services, and sell off public assets, from the water department to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit will set a precedent for cities across the country and internationally.

In his speech, Obama made passing reference to the further growth of social inequality during his tenure, noting that “the top one percent of Americans took home twenty percent of the nation’s income last year, while the average worker isn’t seeing a raise at all.” Typically, however, he spoke as though he was an innocent bystander and the further enrichment of the financial aristocracy had nothing to do with himself or his own policies.

In reality, the single-minded focus of Obama’s domestic agenda from day one has been to enable the ruling class to recover its losses from the crash and exploit the crisis to amass even greater wealth. Even as he sought in his speech to blame congressional Republicans for obstructing his supposed campaign in behalf of the middle class, Obama signaled that he intended to intensify his attack on social programs for workers and grant new windfalls to big business.

Boasting that deficits were falling at the fastest rate since the end of World War II, he said, “there’s not a government agency or program out there that still can’t be streamlined … So I do believe we should cut out programs that we don’t need.”

He reiterated his support for “reforms” to Medicare and Social Security, including raising the retirement age for Medicare, introducing a form of means testing, and cutting cost-of-living raises for Social Security beneficiaries. At the same time, he repeated his support for a massive cut in corporate taxes.

Obama’s speech will not fool the vast majority of workers, whose anger is increasingly focusing on the White House and the former candidate of “hope” and “change.” This opposition must be mobilized on the basis of a clear, independent, socialist political program, which starts from the need to build a political movement in opposition to the entire political establishment and the capitalist system it defends.

Barry Grey

On fifth anniversary of Wall Street crash, Obama tries the Big Lie technique

17 September 2013  

On Monday, US President Barack Obama marked the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street crash of September 15, 2008 with a White House speech that only underscored the unbridgeable chasm that separates the entire political establishment from the broad mass of working people.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/09/crony-capitalism-obama-celebrates-5.html
 
Forbes magazine reported that the wealth of the 400 richest Americans had climbed to $2 trillion, a jump from $1.7 trillion in 2012.

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