Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?
Posts tagged Goldman Sachs
DOJ Calls It A Hit Piece: Frontline – The Untouchables
03 months ago
Source: http://video.pbs.org/video/2327953844
Screen capture from video.
Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
Even a fiat currency and the casino game of fractional reserve standards are not enough to cover the never ending greed. Banks use your deposited money plus imaginary reserve policy funds to make bad bets, and lose. But who really lost? The banks get bailed out by Washington D.C. criminals, you get foreclosed on and then you are responsible for the cost of the bailout.
Part 1 of 4. To view complete please follow the link provided above. Bernie Madoff and other smaller fish got constant mainstream media coverage while the big ponzi scheme rolls along with white glove treatment, as it seems only the Wall Street thieves approved by D.C. are officially too big to fail.
Your thoughts appreciated below.
Fiscal Cliff: Middle Class Free Fall, Corporations’ Golden Parachute
0Source: http://newsjunkiepost.com
By Andrea Egizi
Posted Jan 4, 2013
Credit: Peter Patau
It seems like everyone who is paying attention to the fiscal cliff debate has an opinion one way or another about the benefits and disadvantages of the Tuesday night passage of the Senate Bill. The compromise that was agreed upon can be described as a barrel filled with pork for both Democrats and Republicans and their corporate sponsors, being that earmarks and tax breaks for corporations are included amongst the illusion of fiscal relief for the middle and lower classes.
Credit: Gilbert Mercier
For the left, the tax increases on the super-rich, who make up approximately 0.9 percent of the American population (those individuals earning more than $400,000 or $450,000 per household), was a victory but still managed to fall short of the Obama campaign promise of raising taxes on the top two percent (individuals earning more than $200,000 or $250,000 per household). For the right, the numbers must have added up, seeing as quite a few house Republicans voted in line with the Democrats. This tax increase on rich folks from 35 percent to 39.6 percent will create about $600 billion in revenue over the course of ten years, but with congress’ track record being as shoddy as it is, who knows what programs or misuse it will go to, you know: like the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program), where taxpayer money went directly to the banks and CEOs but not to the millions of underwater homeowners that it was designed to assist to avoid foreclosure. But don’t worry, this money will surely not go towards paying down our world-record national debt of $16.4 trillions that was not even addressed by the bill. Economists have predicted that all the expenditure this bill allows will raise the national debt to $20 trillion during the next ten years.
Let us take a look at what else this bill will do to the economy and the American people. For starters, the bill extends for another year Goldman Sachs and Bank of America’s tax break by moving their headquarters to the “Liberty Zone”, a post 9/11 area where the World Trade centers once stood. This tax provision was created to help revitalize Lower Manhattan’s small businesses but instead helped out these two mega-bailed-out banks and helped to subsidize the construction of luxury apartments. Goldman Sachs alone was reported to have received $1.6 billion in tax free financing of its new building.
The Extension of the Active Financing Exception of Sub-part F is a very fancily-worded trade tax loophole; it extends a bill created in 1997 that allows American companies to avoid paying taxes on income from certain transactions called “active financing.” This loophole, a credit of up to $9 billion, basically encourages American companies to move overseas and thus outsource employment from Americans. One of the biggest corporations to abuse this loophole is General Electric (GE).
Credit: Peter Patau
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Photographs one and three by Peter Patau. Photograph two by Gilbert Mercier.
The four business gangs that run the US
04 months ago
Source: http://www.blacklistednews.com
This article first appeared on: The Age
If you’ve ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you – at least in respect of the United States.
In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ”Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” he says.
Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ”corporatocracy”.
First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ”As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,” he says.
Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.
These days, almost every US Treasury secretary – Republican or Democrat – comes from Wall Street and goes back there when his term ends. The close ties between Wall Street and Washington ”paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government”.
Third is the Big Oil-transport-military complex, which has put the US on the trajectory of heavy oil-imports dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East, he says.
”Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.”
Big Oil has consistently and successfully fought the intrusion of competition from non-oil energy sources, including nuclear, wind and solar power.
It has been at the side of the Pentagon in making sure that America defends the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, in effect ensuring a $US100 billion-plus annual subsidy for a fuel that is otherwise dangerous for national security, Sachs says.
2012: The Year of Banker Infestation . . . 2013: The Year They Become Obsolete?
04 months ago
Source: http://www.activistpost.com
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert argue over whether things are looking better or worse for the American worker. While Stacy argues that the return of some manufacturing is a sign that wealth creating jobs may return to the US, Max counters that the system is so corrupt that the chances of labor getting any cut of the wealth is nil and that the Internet giants will prevent the rise of a powerful decentralized economy online.
In the second half, Max Keiser talks to Professor Jonathan Feldman about the Global Teach-In and about a boycott and short sale campaign and creating an industrial policy for America because right now the US even outsources some military production to China.
Goldman Sachs Alumni Mark Carney Is Governor of the Central Bank of England
05 months ago
Source: http://occupycorporatism.com
By Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
November 27, 2012
Chancellor George Osborne has named Mark Carney, who is the current governor of the Bank of Canada and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board of the G20, has been chosen for governor of the Bank of England and successor to Mervyn King.
In April it was revealed that Carney was being “informally approached as a potential candidate to replace King as head of the central Bank of England in June of 2013.”
Obsorne explained that Carney brings “strong leadership and external experience the Bank needs.” Carney and his leadership in Canada were recognized for having weathered the central banking schemes “better than any other Western country.”
The Bank of England, established 318 years ago, is expected to take a new direction under Carney’s leadership – a suspected necessity for the technocrats to gain stronger hold over the financial markets. There are rumors that the incessant printing of fiat will be curbed because of its inability to stimulate the global economy. This strategic move may also ensure that the City of London can repair its reputation.
Carney’s position as governor of the central Bank of England will last for 8 years; however Carney has indicated that he expects to serve for 5 years and hand over the position in 2018.
Carney appears to be a solid choice, as he has not been tainted by the planned implosion of the global financial market that was the Crash of 2008. He also has a long history with the technocrats. Carney was employed by the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc in the City of London. He also worked at Goldman Sachs locations in Tokyo, New York and Toronto. Carney has a masters and PhD degree from the globalist-funded Oxford University.
Yet Carney’s involvement in the 1998 Russian financial collapse that Goldman Sachs created seems to have escaped the mainstream media’s memory. In response, and to divert attention, Carney used precise coercion to convince the Russian government to become indebted to Goldman Sachs as a saving grace from the devastation that the crash threatened to produce.
Like any good technocratic institution, Goldman Sachs came to the “aid” of the Russian government with loans to the tune of $1.25 billion to be used for purchasing bonds. This scheme was not enough to save the nation, and just like clockwork; the Russian government defaulted and was indebted to Goldman Sachs.
Pathocracy in Action: US supreme court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants
17 months ago
Source: http://www.sott.net
Glen Greenwald
The Guardian
© GettyThe telecom giant has another big win in US cou
Yet again, the Congress, courts, executive branch and the establishment media work together to protect the nation’s most powerful actors
So pervasive and reliable is the rule of elite immunity – even in the face of the most egregious crimes – that one finds extreme examples on a weekly basis. Six weeks ago, the Obama justice department forever precluded the possibility of criminal accountability for Bush torturers by refusing to bring charges in the only two remaining torture cases, ones involving the deaths of the detainee-victims by torture.
The Obama campaign is now running a new campaign ad against Mitt Romney that rails against a litany of Wall Street “criminals” and “gluttons of greed”, but as David Dayen astutely notes, those examples were all imprisoned during the Bush era because the Obama administration has prosecuted no significant Wall Street executives for the 2008 financial collapseand thus have none of their own examples to highlight:
“So the Obama campaign could not fill a list of three Wall Street criminals that the Obama Justice Department actually sent to jail. Heck, they couldn’t fill a list of one!
“This is despite Eric Holder telling students at Columbia University in February of this year that his Justice Department’s record of success on fighting financial fraud crimes ‘has been nothing less than historic.’ But not historic enough that his boss could point to, well, one Wall Street criminal behind bars as a result of DoJ’s actions.
That’s painfully telling. Nobody from Bank of America or Wells Fargo or Citigroup or JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs or Bear Stearns or Morgan Stanley or Merrill Lynch or even Countrywide or Ameriquest was available to stand in as a ‘glutton of greed’ in this advertisement. Literally no major figure responsible for the financial crisis has gone to jail. So the campaign has to use two CEOs from a decade-old accounting scandal, and a garden-variety Ponzi schemer.”
And now, the US supreme court just consecrated one of the most corrupt acts of the US government over the past decade: its vesting of retroactive legal immunity in the nation’s telecom giants after they had been caught red-handed violating multiple US eavesdropping laws. Just as the Obama DOJ forever precluded any legal accountability for Bush-era torturers, the supreme court on Tuesday forever precluded any legal accountability for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and other telecoms for their crucial participation in the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (the Obama DOJ, needless to say, supported the position of the telecoms).
When the New York Times revealed on 16 December 2005 that the Bush administration was spying on the telephone calls and emails of American citizens without the warrants required by the criminal law, it exposed lawbreaking not only by government officials but also by the nation’s largest telecoms. Multiple laws were in place at the time imposing both criminal and civil liability on telecoms for enabling government spying on the communications of their customers without warrants or other legal authority, and that is exactly what these telecoms did. One former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, publicly described how AT&T had even built a separate room with no purpose but to permit the National Security Agency unfettered access to all of its customers’ communications.
The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations
18 months ago
Source: http://rtr.org
Posted by Karen Lehrke
Written By Barry Ritholtz
The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations
Every generation or so, a major secular shift takes place that shakes up the existing paradigm. It happens in industry, finance, literature, sports, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, travel, communication, etc.
I would like to discuss the paradigm shift that is occurring in politics.
For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.
The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power. The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.
This may not be a brilliant insight, but it is surely an overlooked one. It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing.
Consider:
• Many of the regulations that govern energy and banking sector were written by Corporations;
• The biggest influence on legislative votes is often Corporate Lobbying;
• Corporate ability to extend copyright far beyond what original protections amounts to a taking of public works for private corporate usage;
• PAC and campaign finance by Corporations has supplanted individual donations to elections;
• The individuals’ right to seek redress in court has been under attack for decades, limiting their options.
• DRM and content protection undercuts the individual’s ability to use purchased content as they see fit;
• Patent protections are continually weakened. Deep pocketed corporations can usurp inventions almost at will;
• The Supreme Court has ruled that Corporations have Free Speech rights equivalent to people; (So much for original intent!)
None of these are Democrat/Republican conflicts, but rather, are corporate vs. individual issues.
For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture. Consider this about the Bailouts: It was a right-winger who bailed out all of the big banks, Fannie Mae, and AIG in the first place; then his left winger successor continued to pour more money into the fire pit.
What difference did the Left/Right dynamic make? Almost none whatsoever.
Globalists Combine Geoengineering and Family Planning to Ensure Population Deduction
18 months ago
Source: http://occupycorporatism.com
By Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
The US Geological Survey has been analyzing rising sea levels from North Carolina to Boston and expect there to be a doubling of current levels. By 2050, the sea levels are assumed to be higher than 1.5 feet, according to Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control in Delaware. Several federal and state-sponsored scientific agencies agree. Computer models say a 3 foot rise would flood waterside communities along the Eastern seaboard.
Alarmists claim we are just a few years away from a “tipping point” where current weather patterns will become drastically different – as evidenced by comparison of the changes in the last few decades. The US Department of Energy published a report that shows CO2 emissions in the US have dropped; yet not enough to stave off the devastation of the tipping point.
Rich Collins, member of Delaware’s Sea-Level Rise Advisory Committee , explains: “I have real concerns, because there are many environmental programs that I believe are designed to drive people away from the water.”
David Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy is pushing the releasing of nanotechnology with sulfuric aerosols into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sunlight back out into space. Keith manages the million-dollar geoengineering research that is funded by Bill Gates and the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research.
(more…)
Banks Can Legally Steal Customer Funds From Private Checking Accounts
19 months ago
Source: http://occupycorporatism.com
In 2007, the Sentinel Management Group (SMG) collapsed, leaving many customer segregated funds lost after they had been used as collateral. After a plethora of lawsuits and creditor claims, a decision earlier this month in the 7th Circuit Court placed the banking cartels ahead of customer claims for funds returned. Essentially, the Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM) sued to be first in line for return on stolen customer account monies – and won the right by the US court system.
In the mainstream media (MSM), the SMG collapse and subsequent ruling in favor of BNYM was touted as a difficulty “for customers to recoup money lost”.
SMG, a Chicago-based futures broker, had stolen more than $500 million in segregated customer funds to use as collateral on a loan to BNYM for in-house proprietary trading operations. Their books were audited by the National Futures Association (NFA), however the NFA admitted that they could not understand the convoluted mess they were provided by SMG to sign off on. And yet they did; and approved the audit.
BNYM sued SMG to re-coup any monies owed to them. However, these monies were customer segregated funds that SMG stole and re-hypothecated.
In federal court, John D. Tinder, US Circuit Court Judge ruled “that Sentinel failed to keep client funds properly segregated is not, on its own, sufficient to rule as a matter of law that Sentinel acted ‘with actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud’ its customers.”
This means that once a banking customer deposits their money into an account with a bank, the funds become property of the bank. The customer, at the point of deposit, relinquishes all rights to that money regardless of any laws in place, legal assurances, claims or guarantees; and this extends from investments to private checking accounts.
The CRASH Commeth! Reuters: Fed tells its 5 Member-Banks to prep, to stave off coming collapse!
09 months ago
Source: http://www.dailypaul.com
Exclusive: U.S. banks told to make plans for preventing collapse
Photo added to original post, originally post on http://chrisinmaryville.net/mega-banks-plan-for-collapse-with-contingency-plans-and-private-police-force.html
(Reuters) – U.S. regulators directed five of the country’s biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.
By Rick Rothacker
Fri Aug 10, 2012 8:41am EDT
The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the “living wills” the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.
Officials like Lehman Brothers former Chief Executive Dick Fuld have been criticized for having been too hesitant to take bold steps to solve their banks’ problems during the financial crisis.
According to documents obtained by Reuters, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency first directed five banks – which also include Citigroup Inc,, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co – to come up with these “recovery plans” in May 2010.
Courtesy of LRC:
‘U.S. banks told to make plans for preventing collapse’
Posted by Lew Rockwell on August 10, 2012 11:41 AM
Like adopting 100% reserves? Nope. The inherently bankrupt will stay that way, until—no matter what this article claims—they need a few trillion from the Fed.
This is a work in progess, a self learning tool and fun little project. Please excuse the slow development as it seems the needed proper time is always lacking. It is my hope that the combination of content and links to other sources of information in this simple blog may help awaken a few of the sleeping masses and encourage and inspire others to initiate their own research, ultimately for each person to be a light to help awaken others. Opinions expressed belong to me, myself and I. Also, a big thank you to all that take the time to visit, it is appreciated :)
