JPMorgan Managing Director Dies Suddenly; Has Links to Other JPM Deaths

Pam Martens
Wall St. On Parade

When you are the largest bank in the United States and you’ve been compared to the Gambino crime family in a book by two trial lawyers; when you’ve pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the United States Justice Department in the past five years; when you’ve paid over $30 billion in fines over charges of crimes against the public and investors since 2008; and when you’ve had an unprecedented string of employees leaping to their death from buildings, dropping dead at home or on the street, and two alleged murder-suicides by employees — all in just the past five years – one might think that law enforcement might show some interest – especially since this employer – JPMorgan Chase – holds tens of billions of dollars of Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) on its workers. (This death benefit, by the way, pays tax-free to the corporation, not the employee’s family.)

But when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers – no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.

Take the case of Douglas (Doug) Arthur Carucci, age 53, who died on Saturday, March 9 under what Sarah Butcher at eFinancial Careers calls “tragic” and unexpected circumstances. Carucci is believed to have been a resident of Manhattan with his wife, Cindy.

We called the New York City Police Department and were told they had no information in their database about the death of a Douglas Carucci in March 2019. We next emailed the New York City Medical Examiner’s office – which is mandated under law to investigate all deaths from accidents or sudden deaths. Aja Worthy-Davis, the Executive Director for Public Affairs of the Medical Examiner’s Office responded as follows:

“There is no OCME record of this individual (under the name shared). Please keep in mind that the OCME does not investigate (or keep records of) all deaths within the City of New York. The OCME is specifically responsible for investigating only NYC-based deaths occurring from criminal violence, by accident, by suicide, or in any unusual or suspicious manner.”

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Market Analyst: “Nothing Is Real… All Of This is Being Played To Keep People Believing The System Is Working”

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

The stock market may be hovering near all-time highs, but according to Greg Mannarino of Traders Choice that doesn’t mean the valuations are actually real:

We exist, beyond any shadow of any doubt, in an environment of absolute fakery where nothing is real… from the prices of assets to what’s occurring here with regard to the big Wall Street banks, the Federal Reserve, interest rates and everything in between.

…All of this is being played in a way to keep people believing, once again, that the system is working and will continue to work.

Full Interview with USA Watchdog:

 

President Obama has suggested that people like Greg Mannarino who are exposing the fraud for what it is are just peddling fiction. And just this week the President argued that he saved the world from a great depression and that the closing credits of the 2008 crash movie “The Big Short” were inaccurate when they claimed that nothing has been done to fundamentally curb the fraud and fix the system under his administration. But as Mannarino notes, the President and his central bank cohorts are making these statements because the system is so fragile that if the public senses even the smallest problem it could derail the entire thing:

Let’s just look at the stock market… there’s no possible way at this time that these multiples can be justified with regard to what’s occurring here with the price action of the overall market… meanwhile, the market continues to rise.
…
Nothing is real. I can’t stress this enough… and we’re going to continue to see more fakery… and manipulation and twisting of this entire system…  We now exist in an environment where the financial system as a whole has been flipped upside down just to make it function… and that’s very scary.
…
We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world… The Federal Reserve has never been in a situation like this… we are completely in uncharted territory where the world’s central banks have gone negative interest rates… it’s all an illusion to keep the stock market booming.
…
Every single asset now… I don’t care what asset… you want to look at currency, debt, housing, metals, the stock market… pick an asset… there’s no price discovery mechanism behind it whatsoever… it’s all fake… it’s all being distorted.
…
The system is built upon on one premise and that is confidence that it will work… if that confidence is rattled the whole thing will implode… our policy makers are well aware of this… there is collusion between central banks and their respective governments… and it will not stop until it implodes… and what I mean by implode is, correct to fair value.

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Wall Street Stunned As Iceland Dares To Jail Banker Involved In 2008 Crash

Zero Hedge 

The impossible is possible. Never say never. Wall Street bankers are staring agog at headlines coming from Europe where, in Iceland, the former chief executive of one of the largest banks in the country which was involved in crashing the economy in 2008 has been sentenced to jail time. As Valuewalk reports, in receiving a one year prison sentence, Sigurjon Arnason officially became the first bank executive to be convicted of manipulating the bank’s stock price and deceiving investors, creditors and the authorities between Sept. 29 and Oct. 3, 2008, as the bank’s fortunes unwound, crashing the economy with it. It appears he was as shocked by the verdict as Wall Street-ers are, "this sentence is a big surprise to me as I did nothing wrong." It was likely all for the people's own good...

 

 
Via ValueWalk,

Some thought it would never happen. But in Iceland, the former chief executive of one of the largest banks in the country which was involved in crashing the economy in 2008 has been sentenced to jail time.

Iceland banker the first to manipulate bank’s stock price

In receiving a one year prison sentence, Sigurjon Arnason officially became the first bank executive to be convicted of manipulating the bank’s stock price and deceiving investors, creditors and the authorities between Sept. 29 and Oct. 3, 2008, as the bank’s fortunes unwound, crashing the economy with it.  Landsbanki was one of three banks that had tallied nearly $75 billion in debt before the final curtain was drawn.

What, me guilty? was the bank executive’s response upon learning of his fate. “This sentence is a big surprise to me as I did not nothing wrong,” Arnason was quoted as saying in a Reuters article after he learned of his punishment.  Amason had not decided if he was going to appeal the decision to the supreme court, as the appeal process might take longer than his sentence.

Other Iceland bank executives also convicted

The Reykjavik District Court had lopped off nine months of Arnason’s sentence, saying they were suspended.  Other bank executives involved in the situation were convicted: Ivar Gudjonsson, the former director of proprietary trading at the bank, along with Julius Heidarsson, a former broker at the bank. They each received nine-month sentences and six of those nine months were immediately suspended by the court.

All pleaded innocent to the charges, as the the fallout from the 2008 crisis continues to this day in the north Atlantic island and around the world.  As a sign of thawing in the crisis, Reuters reported that earlier in the week Landsbanki, the successor to the failed Landsbankinn, agreed to extend a deadline to restructure bonds to the end of the year. If a bond restructuring agreement is reached, it could help the government lift capital controls which were imposed due to the crisis.

Scary 1929 market chart gains traction

Market Watch

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — There are eerie parallels between the stock market’s recent behavior and how it behaved right before the 1929 crash.

That at least is the conclusion reached by a frightening chart that has been making the rounds on Wall Street. The chart superimposes the market’s recent performance on top of a plot of its gyrations in 1928 and 1929.

The picture isn’t pretty. And it’s not as easy as you might think to wriggle out from underneath the bearish significance of this chart.

I should know, because I quoted a number of this chart’s skeptics in a column I wrote in early December. Yet the market over the last two months has continued to more or less closely follow the 1928-29 pattern outlined in that two-months-ago chart. If this correlation continues, the market faces a particularly rough period later this month and in early March. (See chart, courtesy of Tom McClellan of the McClellan Market Report; he in turn gives credit to Tom DeMark, a noted technical analyst who is the founder and CEO of DeMark Analytics.)

One of the biggest objections I heard two months ago was that the chart is a shameless exercise in after-the-fact retrofitting of the recent data to some past price pattern. But that objection has lost much of its force. The chart was first publicized in late November of last year, and the correlation since then certainly appears to be just as close as it was before.

To be sure, as McClellan acknowledged: “Every pattern analog I have ever studied breaks correlation eventually, and often at the point when I am most counting on it to continue working. So there is no guarantee that the market has to continue following through with every step of the 1929 pattern. But between now and May 2014, there is plenty of reason for caution.”

Tom Demark added in interview that he first drew parallels with the 1928-1929 period well before last November. “Originally, I drew it for entertainment purposes only,” he said—but no longer: “Now it’s evolved into something more serious.”

Another objection I heard two months ago was that there are entirely different scales on the left and right axes of the chart. The scale on the right, corresponding to the Dow’s DJIA +1.22%  movement in 1928 and 1929, extends from below 200 to more than 400—an increase of more than 100%. The left axis, in contrast, represents a percentage increase of less than 50%.

But there’s less to this objection than you might think. You can still have a high correlation coefficient between two data series even when their gyrations are of different magnitudes.

However, what is important, McClellan said, is that the time scales of the two data series need to be the same. And, he stresses, there has been no stretching of the time dimension to make them fit.

One of the market gurus responsible for widely publicizing this chart is hedge-fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners and CNBC fame. In an email earlier this week, Kass wrote of the parallels with 1928-29: “While investment history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme.” And, based on a number of indicators rather than just this chart drawing the 1928-29 parallel, he believes that “the correction might have just started.”

DeMark is even more outspokenly bearish. If the S&P 500 SPX +1.11%  decisively breaks the 1762 level, he told me, then a major bear market will have only just begun.

You may still be inclined to dismiss this. But there were many more were laughing last November when this scary chart began circulating. Not as many are laughing now.

Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial Digest in Chapel Hill, N.C. He has been tracking the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters since 1980. Follow him on Twitter @MktwHulbert.

Another batch of Wall Street villains freed on technicality

Rolling Stone

I love covering trials, which is one reason I've been a little sad since switching over to the Wall Street beat: Few of the bad guys in this world ever even get interviewed by the authorities, much less indicted, so trials are comically rare.

But we did have one last year, a big one, and though it was boring and jargon-laden enough on the surface that at least one juror fought sleep in its opening days, I thought it was fascinating. In a story about the Justice Department's Spring 2012 prosecution of a wide-raging municipal bond bid-rigging case, I called it the "first trial of the modern American mafia":

"Of course, you won't hear about the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that . . . But this just completed trial in downtown New York . . . allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street."

Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm were mid-level players who worked for GE Capital. They were involved in a wide-ranging scheme (one that also involved most of America's biggest banks, from Chase to BOA to Wachovia) to skim billions of dollars from America's cities and towns by rigging the auctions banks set up to help towns earn the highest returns on the management of municipal bond issues.

The case was over 10 years in the making and involved offenses that took place long before the 2008 crash. All three defendants were convicted in May 2012, with Goldberg ultimately getting four years and the other two getting three.

Now, they're all free. A New York federal judge last week ordered their convictions overturned in a quiet Thanksgiving-week transaction.

The GE Muni-riggers will now join such luminaries as the Gen Re defendants (executives from an insurance company who were convicted in 2008 of helping AIG conduct a fraudulent accounting transaction) and the KPMG defendants (executives of the U.S. arm of the Dutch accounting giant who were convicted in the 2000s of selling illegal tax shelters) in the ranks of Wall Street line-crossers who improbably made it all the way to guilty verdicts in criminal cases, only to be freed on technicalities later on.

As one antitrust lawyer I know put it: "Apparently, the government can't seem to get criminal trials involving financial executives (as opposed to, well, drug dealers) right. Go figure."

In this case, the defendants were shielded by the sheer complexity of the case. It would appear that the state took so long sorting through the mountains of recorded conversations and interviews to find the massive but well-camouflaged crime - these men, along with others like them in other banks, were using code words to rig the auction process so that banks and finance companies could collude and bid lower for city and town money management business - that the statute of limitations ran out on their own individual actions. When that happened, the Feds then switched up and charged them with different crimes related to what they claimed was an ongoing conspiracy, using continuing interest payments to establish the "ongoing" part of the indictment.

According to the lawyers for the three men, this allowed the government to unfairly bypass the statute of limitations. The lawyers for two of the men gave statements that recalled the heartwarming courthouse-steps speeches given by attorneys for genuine innocents, freed from prison after years of suffering by DNA results.

"We feel gratified by the Second Circuit's order, which allowed Steve Goldberg to be freed in time for Thanksgiving with his family," said David Frederick, Goldberg's attorney.

There are two important reasons why Wall Street defendants tend to slink out of convictions more easily than, say, drug dealers or burglars. Both reasons showed loudly in this case.

One is obvious. The Wall Street types have better lawyers. They don't miss anything and they all have gigantic balls (or are paid to have them, anyway). In this case, who knows, the court might even have been technically right in its decision. But it needed to be led there by lawyers with the skill to pull it off.

The argument in this case was relatively straightforward, as the government itself admitted it missed the deadline to charge the defendants based upon their own actions. But in the KPMG case, for instance, the court had to be convinced that an official Department of Justice policy for securing cooperation from corporate targets - one originally dreamed up by Eric Holder in the Clinton years, incidentally - was inherently violative of defendants' rights to counsel. That was a long bomb of a legal argument and in that case the KPMG lawyers hit the court right in the hands.

So unlike street-crime cases - where prosecutors screw up all the time but overworked defense counsel rarely have the time or the resources to call them on their mistakes - in these finance-sector cases, no error ever goes unnoticed.

It's one of the reasons prosecutors don't like to bring these cases at all. You make one misstep, and the whole case goes away - in this case, 10 years of work by God knows how many lawyers and investigators goes down the drain, with the snap of a finger. Imagine the last time you lost a paper thanks to a computer error, multiply that feeling by about 10 billion, and you might get close to grasping the horror of the DOJ prosecutors in this case this week.

The other reason these cases get overturned so much is equally obvious. These scandals are crazily complex. It's not just juries that have a hard time sorting them out. In many cases the crimes are so subtle, and the standard of proof to even call the crimes crimes is so high, that it takes years and years for investigators to build cases.

You can send a guy away for life on a murder charge based on a speck of blood and an old lady who saw a piece of a license number on a car screeching away from the scene. But you need to build a massive rhetorical case from scratch just to indict someone for being part of a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy.

The crimes take place in a world unknown to ordinary people, so it is not unlike trying to explain a crime committed by aliens on another planet. In fact, the crime, in many cases, is not one that has even been seen in American courtroom before.

Judges need to be convinced they're not wasting their time. Juries need to be walked by the hand down a very deep rabbit-hole of inscrutable paper transactions and then literally trained on the fly to recognize evidence - these trials are often more like seminars than court cases.

So bringing these cases takes forever. This one took forever. And in the end, for these three anyway, it was all for nothing.

The Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm case was important on a number of levels. Many years from now, we will look back on this story that began as far back as the late Nineties and recognize in it an early, smaller-scale preview of the major global manipulation/collusion scandals that have already rocked the planet and will likely continue to do so in the years to come.

After all, the most dangerous possible consequence of the extreme concentration of financial power that has taken place in the last few decades has always been the possibility that these giants might figure out ways to work together, to game the costs of things for the rest of us. That's what took place in this case, as these defendants (and many big banks which have already settled with the state for similar actions) were caught colluding to skim from the investment returns owed to all of us local taxpayers.

Something similar also took place in the Libor case, and in the global currency exchange scandal now blowing up, and in numerous other manipulation cases (involving everything from metals to chocolate) already coming down the pipeline.

All of these cases will share the same features. The defendants, if there will be any, will have the best lawyers money can buy. And if they're charged at all, it will be for the most complex crimes imaginable, offenses so convoluted that it will take years to make cases.

This carries serious risks for anyone trying for justice, and we've just seen what those risks are. It's hard to put these guys away. It's even harder to keep them there. 

The Streets of 2012

 
Project Syndicate / Naomi Wolf

NEW YORK – What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent?

The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are likely to see much greater centralization of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. But we are also likely to see significant grassroots reaction.

What we are witnessing in the drama of increasingly globalized protest and repression is the subplot that many cheerleaders for neoliberal globalization never addressed: the power of globalized capital to wreak havoc with the authority of democratically elected governments. From the perspective of global corporate interests, closed societies like China are more business-friendly than troublesome democracies, where trade unions, high standards of human-rights protection, and a vigorous press increase costs.

All over the world, the pushback against protest looks similar, suggesting that state and corporate actors are learning “best practices” for repressing dissent while maintaining democratic facades. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron routinely impugns human-rights laws; the Metropolitan Police have sought authority to use baton rounds – foot-long projectiles that have caused roughly a dozen deaths, including that of children, in Northern Ireland – on peaceful protesters; and a police report on the threat of terrorism, distributed to “trusted partners” among London businesses, included updates about Occupy protests and referred to “suspected activists.”

The UK has stringent internal-security legislation, but it never had a law like the United States Patriot Act. After anti-austerity protests in early 2011, followed by riots in major cities in August, the Metropolitan Police claimed powers to monitor private social-media accounts and smartphones. And, under the guise of protecting this summer’s Olympics against terrorism, the British military is establishing a massive base in London from which SAS (special forces) teams will operate – a radical departure from Britain’s traditional civil policing.

In Israel, Ha’aretz reports that Occupy-type protests have been met with police violence, including a beating of a 15-year-old girl, and threats of random arrest. Israel, like Britain, has seen a push, seemingly out of nowhere, to enact new laws crippling newsgathering and criminalizing dissent: a new law makes it potentially a crime to donate to left-wing organizations, human-rights laws have been weakened, and even investigative reporting has become more dangerous, owing to stricter libel penalties. Ha’aretz calls the push “the new feudalism.”

Finally, in America, the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress in December, allows the president to suspend due process for US citizens, detain them indefinitely, and render them for torture. One should not be surprised to see similar legislation adopted in democracies worldwide.

Not only are laws criminalizing previously legal dissent, organizing, and reporting being replicated in advanced democracies; so are violent tactics against protesters, backed by the increasing push in countries with long traditions of civil policing to militarize law enforcement.

Indeed, increasingly sophisticated weapons systems and protective equipment are being disseminated to civilian police officers. In the US, the federal government has spent an estimated $34 billion since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to arm state and local police forces with battlefield-grade hardware. Investigative reporting has also revealed cross-pollination of anti-protest training: local police from cities like Austin, Texas, have been sent to Israel for training in crowd control and other tactics.

The globalization of mercenaries to crack down on dissent is also proceeding apace. Mercenaries are important in a time of global grassroots protest, because it is easier to turn a foreigner’s guns or batons against strangers than it is to turn the military or police against fellow citizens. Erik Prince, the head of the most infamous outfit, Academi (formerly Xe Services, formerly Blackwater), has relocated to the UAE, while Pakistani mercenaries have been recruited in large numbers to Bahrain, where protesters have been met with increasingly violent repression.

But this apparently coordinated pushback against global protest movements is not yet triumphant – not even in China, as the people of Wukan have shown. While the outcome of the villagers’ protest against the local government’s confiscation of their land remains uncertain, the standoff reveals new power at the grassroots level: social media allows sharper, coordinated gatherings and the rapid dissemination of news unfiltered by official media. The Internet is also disseminating templates of what real democracy looks like – instantly and worldwide.

Not surprisingly, people use this technology in ways that indicate that they have little interest in being cordoned off into conflicting and competing ethnicities, nationalities, or religious identities. Overwhelmingly, they want simple democracy and economic self-determination.

That agenda is in direct conflict with the interests of global capital and governments that have grown accustomed to operating without citizen oversight. It is a conflict that can be expected to heighten dramatically in 2012, as protesters’ agendas – from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Moscow – gain further coherence.

Much is at stake. Depending on the outcome, the world will come to look either more like China – open for business, but closed for dissent – or more like Denmark. 

Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org

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Code, scan, trade and profit. A new wave of computer enabled insider trading.

Max Keiser

A new Wall St. scam

Rumors are circulating about a new Wall St. research service scam that goes like this… 

Research reports are written with both recommendations and coded phraseology that enables pre-market manipulation. 

The way it works – a report that gives recommendations also contains coded phraseology that programs trading bots on the exchange that ‘read’ the report and make various trades. Certain word, symbol and number combinations in the report are picked up by the bots who put on the trades based on the coded info. 

In the following research report – the report spells out a recommendation – that will make the trades put on as the result of the previous report profitable. 

Let’s say in January, the research says “We love tech. and big pharma” but hidden in the report is coded info that was picked up by trading bots who went long Co. X. 

The following report recommends Co. X, making those pre-trades profitable (while containing new coded messages for the trading bots in anticipation of the next report). 

This ‘research’ service is sold to traders for a hefty fee. It’s inside info that is virtually impossible to detect available to a firm’s best clients on a regular basis. 

Simply buy the service and enable your computer software that ‘reads’ the research to pick up the code that will trigger what trades will be profitable when the next report is published. 

Bankers are the Dictators of the West

One of Fisk's best articles yet. 

----------------------------

Independent
Robert Fisk

Suggested Topics Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense. 

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. 

Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940? 

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

Perpetual National Elections Make the Top 1% Richer

Photo Credit: C-SPAN

Alternet

Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes words outlive their usefulness.  Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us.  “Election,” “presidential election campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for name-change.

I thought about this recently as President Obama hustled around my hometown, snarling New York traffic in the name of Campaign 2012.  He was, it turned out, “hosting” three back-to-back fundraising events: one at the tony Gotham Bar and Grill for 45 supporters at $35,800 a head (the menu: roasted beet salad, steak and onion rings, with apple strudel, chocolate pecan pie, and cinnamon ice cream -- a meal meant to “shine a little light” on American farms); one for 30 Jewish supporters at the home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, for at least $10,000 a pop; and one at the Sheraton Hotel, evidently for the plebes of the contribution world, that cost a mere $1,000 a head. (Maybe the menu there was rubber chicken.)

In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, we're one nation.  We're one people. And that's what's at stake in this election."

Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1% president.”  The end result from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1% of what they will need for the next year.

These were the 67th, 68th, and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd, and 73rd.  (It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6% of the events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.

Think about that.  You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy.  Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that involve him -- 63 so far in 2011 -- perhaps 12% of his time is taken up with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen.

New York being the home of... gulp... Wall Street (1%! 1%!), Obama doesn’t exactly have it to himself.  Mitt Romney was heading into town on December 14th for his own rousing round of four fundraisers. One at the Waldorf Astoria will be hosted by -- you can’t be balder than this -- four JPMorgan Chase executives, including James B. “Jimmy” Lee, Jr., the vice chairman of the company and the “banker who battled the Obama administration over the restructuring of Chrysler LLC.”  And oh yes, Romney leads Obama in funding support from billionaires, 42 to 30 (with Rick Perry taking third place at 20).

In the 2008 election, JPMorgan employees gave $4.6 million to the candidates of their choice, coming in behind only Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on The Street.  Now that, I would say, is actual electoral power.  Perhaps it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that the voting that matters most takes place at those fundraisers, not in the booths where, billions of dollars in attack ads later, the usual hoi polloi pull the handles on electoral slot machines.

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6 Shocking Revelations About Wall Street's "Secret Government"

Alternet

We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. (See here and here.)

These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-'09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what we now know: 

• The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008. 

• Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.

• The secret funding, provided at below-market rates, gave Wall Street banks an additional $13 billion in profits. (That’s enough money to hire more than 325,000 entry level teachers.)

• The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts. 

• While Henry Paulson (Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury) was informing Congress and the public that only minor reforms were needed to protect Fannie and Freddie from collapse, he met secretly with leading Wall Street hedge fund managers -- among them his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs -- to alert them that he was about to nationalize the giant mortgage companies – a move that would eradicate nearly all the stock value of the companies. This information was enormously valuable because it allowed these hedge funds to short Fannie and Freddie and thereby make a fortune.

• While Timothy Geithner was head of the NY Federal Reserve, he argued against legislative efforts by Senator Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, to limit the size of banks because the issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions,” Kaufman recalls. Meanwhile, Geithner was fully aware of the enormous secret loans while Senator Kaufman was kept in the dark. Barney Frank, who was authoring key bank reform legislation was also not informed of the secret loans. No one in Congress was told.

So what does this all mean? 

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Lobbying firm's memo spells out plan to undermine Occupy Wall Street

Open Channel.MSNBC

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by [MSNBC]. The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association. CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. Two of the memo’s authors, partners Sam Geduldig and Jay Cranford, previously worked for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. 

The memo outlines a 60-day plan to conduct surveys and research on OWS and its supporters so that Wall Street companies will be prepared to conduct a media campaign in response to OWS. Wall Street companies “likely will not be the best spokespeople for their own cause,” according to the memo. “A big challenge is to demonstrate that these companies still have political strength and that making them a political target will carry a severe political cost.”

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Occupy Wall Street eviction - Protester talking about throwing Molotov Cocktails at Macy's

It's these kinds of  deluded idiots that will play right into the hands of the Police State. They want violence and they have all the means to wipe the floor with any number of protesters if they so wish. "Non-lethal" weapons and an array of crowd control technology will be wheeled in and that will be that. 

NON VIOLENCE is the only way. Play their game and they will win.

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Occupy Wall Street is not a Protest but a Prototype

Douglas Rushkoff

 

The more familiar something looks, the less threatening it seems. This is why images of funny-looking college students marching up Broadway or shirtless boys banging on drums comprise the bulk of the imagery we see of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Stock brokers look on, police man the barricades, and what appears to be a traditional protest movement carries on another day, week, or month. 

But “Occupy” is anything but a protest movement. That’s why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the “demands” of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. Just like pretty much everyone else on the planet, occupiers may want many things to happen and other things to stop, but the occupation is not about making demands. They don’t want anything from you, and there is nothing you can do to make them stop. That’s what makes Occupy so very scary and so very promising. It is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living. 

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Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Provocateurs

Regulators Investigating MF Global

New York Times

Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the company's operations as it filed for bankruptcy on Monday, according to several people briefed on the matter.

The revelation of the missing money scuttled an 11th hour deal for MF Global to sell a major part of itself to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global, the powerhouse commodities brokerage run by Jon S. Corzine, had staked its survival on completing the deal.

Now, the investigation threatens to tarnish the reputation of Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey Governor and Goldman Sachs chief who oversaw MF Global's demise, making it the first American victim of Europe's debt crisis.

What began as nearly $1 billion missing had dropped to less than $700 million by late Monday. It is unclear where the money went, and some funds are expected to trickle in over the coming days as the firm sorts through the bankruptcy process, the people said.

But regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer funds to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse. If that was the case, it could violate a fundamental tenet of Wall Street regulation: Customers' funds must be kept separate from company money.

Such a finding would move the discussion from sloppy internal controls at MF Global to something more troubling. While the investigation is in its early days, it raises the specter that regulators ultimately could sanction the firm or the employees responsible.

MF Global and Mr. Corzine have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Occupy Wall Street Outing The Media Shills

Daily Bail

This is brilliant.

http://twitter.com/jsmooth995

A few thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, I've been watching it and going down there for a while now but hadn't had a chance to speak on it.

By the way when I say some news media people are "ringers," I don't necessarily mean that they deliberately obfuscate, or get orders from some shadowy figure to do so. I think they'll often just have a personal investment in the system and status quo that's being critiqued/threatened, so they'll naturally--without any need to conspire--have their perception skewed by an instinct to protect the status quo they're invested in. So though it's quite possibly not their intention to play the ringer, it's the function they wind up serving nonetheless.

The Robin Hood Tax: Occupy Movement now Marching Straight Off the Globalist Cliff

Global Research

It was inevitable that a movement which has struggled to agree on a manifesto, would in the end, do the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they are demonstrating against to begin with.

Instead of achieving freedom from Central Bank debt enslavement, naive Occupiers appear to have taken the bait, pulling the mob towards endorsing a global taxation system, and one to be administered…by a brand new global government body.

As the Occupy Movement sets its sights on the upcoming G20 Summit in France on November 3-4, its globalist handlers behind the scenes have succeeded in carefully directing its crowds towards the Holy Grail of all socialist super-states - the celebrity supported, trendy “Robin Hood Tax”, also known as a Tobin Tax, a financial transaction tax levied on all transactions involving shares, bonds and derivatives. Or so the plan goes…

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AE911Truth Supporters Inform Occupy Movement | Outreach with WTC Evidence Yields Warm Reception with Positive Results

 
David Long and this Ottawa AE911Truth Action Group occupy the Canadian Parliament Grounds

The 10^th anniversary of 9/11 was an excellent occasion to educate the public with the explosive evidence exposed by AE911Truth. Now, the “Occupy Wall Street” protests nationwide have provided a new opportunity to educate the public about the WTC skyscraper demolitions, and AE911Truth supporters and volunteers have already made an impact.

9/11 Truth activists have courteously reached out to demonstrators at local “Occupy” events in a variety of ways, including displaying the AE911Truth banner, wearing 9/11 truth T-shirts, and handing out our street brochures.

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Michel Chossudovsky On OWS Movement & Libyan War

PotentNewsUpdates

"If you want to change the tide you have to organise in a very solid way. You can't just have a programme...Please Mr. Obama... could you be more gentle, have less wars, could you tax the rich? You don't demand [the leaders of this] system which is in crisis and which should be replaced and reformed to act on your behalf...Those leaders have to be unseated because they are the problem they are not the solution. [...] What troubles me in this movement is that there is a covert element with organisations such as 'Anonymous' and 'Adbusters' as well as the main websites...Who is behind it? Who is financing it? I recall that immediately when the mlovement got going that several prominent personalities came to the support of Occupy Wall St. and these were people like Warren Buffet, Howard Buffet, Ben Bernanke, Al Gore. Now these people from my standpoint do not constitute the solution to the crisis they are the cause, they are the actors behind this crisis."

See also: Occupy Wall Street and "The American Autumn": Is It a "Colored Revolution"?

David Icke - Essential Knowledge For A Wall Street Protestor

Even though he likes to take credit for ideas that have been around way before he thought of them, David still shines when he talks about 3D societal controls. Take note.

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