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Breaking News

US | Call to Action: Showdown on Wall Street!
Our Future - Current
A Must. Nationwide Rallies and Marches Against Wall Street
- LINK ^

4/29/10
National People’s Action issues a Call to Action for everyday people--small business owners and union members, homeowners and tenants, faith leaders, the employed and the unemployed--to join together in recognition of our shared fate and our commitment to democracy.

On April 29th at 3:30 pm, thousands will converge on Wall Street to reclaim America with one simple message: Americans deserve an economy that works for all of us, not just Wall Street! Wall Street and big banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo crashed our economy leaving millions without housing, work, and critical services.

Join us as we take the fight for financial reform into the belly of the beast!

WHEN: 3:30pm: Assemble • 4pm: March and rally
WHERE: City Hall, New York City (Enter at Broadway and Chambers St.)
Click link above for schedules in other cities.

US | Looters in Loafers
The New York Times - By Paul krugman - April 18, 2010
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Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb “sacks,” as in looting and pillaging. The student replies, “Goldman Sachs.”

Sure enough, last week the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Gucci-loafer guys at Goldman of engaging in what amounts to white-collar looting. I’m using the term looting in the sense defined by the economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer in a 1993 paper titled “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” That paper, written in the aftermath of the savings-and-loan crisis of the Reagan years, argued that many of the losses in that crisis were the result of deliberate fraud.

Was the same true of the current financial crisis?

Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. Clearly, some borrowers were lured into taking out complex, expensive loans they didn’t understand — a process facilitated by Bush-era federal regulators, who both failed to curb abusive lending and prevented states from taking action on their own. And for the most part, subprime lenders didn’t hold on to the loans they made. Instead, they sold off the loans to investors, in some cases surely knowing that the potential for future losses was greater than the people buying those loans (or securities backed by the loans) realized.

What we’re now seeing are accusations of a third form of fraud.

Click link above for detaills.

TV Video | The Daily Show - Jon Stewart Explains Goldman Sachs Fiasco: “These F*cking Guys!”
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Monday’s Daily Show was a triple smackdown: First, Stewart took on “Mad Money” soothsayer Jim Cramer (wrong about Goldman Sachs and dressed like a Village Person). Then it was the mainstream media, who seem dead-set against adequately explaining the financial meltdown. Finally, Stewart slammed Republicans for their blind opposition to financial regulation.

All in a day’s work. Watch it on link above.

US | The Real Lehman Lesson: Break Up The Banks
Campaign for America's Future - By Zach Carter - April 20, 2010
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Tuesday's hearing on Lehman Brothers' now infamous Repo 105 scam was only tangentially related to the megabank's accounting deceptions and subsequent collapse. That story is simple: Lehman almost certainly committed fraud, regulators failed to stop it, and many of the people who screwed up under President George W. Bush inexplicably remain in power under President Barack Obama.

Liveblogging The Lehman Brothers Hearing
Campaign for America's Future - By Zach Carter - April 20, 2010
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Black just said Repo 105 was not just fruad, but a felony. It was a deliberate misrepresentation of the company's financial condition that was "material" to investors. This kind of deception happened all over Wall Street at firms that did not file for bankruptcy. In the savings and loan crisis nearly 1,100 people went to jail. That was a much smaller crisis than what we've been living through since 2007. There is no justification for not making arrests.

Goldman Sachs to award £3.5bn in bonuses... as it faces fraud probe
The Daily Mail / UK - April 19, 2010
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Britain's financial regulator is considering whether there are grounds for a full-blown investigation of Goldman Sachs after U.S. authorities filed civil fraud charges. The revelation came as the Wall Street giant was to announce £3.5billion in bonuses tomorrow - just days after being charged with fraud. And the defiant bank was so far standing by the London-based financier at the centre of allegations it defrauded investors of $1billion (£650million), it has emerged.

Fabrice Tourre, who dubbed himself 'Fabulous Fab' in emails, is not expected to be suspended or put on leave - despite apparently unleashing a wave of lawsuits expected to engulf Wall Street for years to come.

A Short Citizen’s Guide to Reforming Wall Street
Robert Reich Blog - April 20, 2010
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The real scandal isn’t the Street’s unlawful acts (i.e., Securities and Exchange Commission vs. Goldman Sachs) but legal acts that have reaped the Street a bonanza and nearly sunk the rest of us.

It’s good we finally have an SEC on which three out of five commissioners are willing to enforce laws already on the books. Hopefully other enforcement agencies (CFTC, FDIC, and the Fed) will follow suit. But we also need to make illegal the recklessness that’s now legal.

The Dodd bill now being considered in the Senate is a step in the right direction. Yet despite the hype, it’s a very modest step. It leaves out three of the most important things necessary to prevent a repeat of the Wall Street meltdown. >

Obama Wall Street Speech Set, President Will 'Go Big' On Reform
The Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - April 19, 2010
A must Read
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With health care reform now passed, the administration finds itself once again embroiled in major legislative gridlock with Republicans. This time the issue being debated is financial regulatory reform. Once again, Obama is going big.

The White House announced on Monday that the President will deliver remarks on the need to create new rules for Wall Street from the proverbial belly of the beast. Obama will travel to New York City on Thursday to give a major speech at Cooper Union, during which he will call for "swift Senate action" on financial regulation, according to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Iceland | Eyjafjallajökull Awakes - How an Icelandic Volcano Shut Down Europe's Airspace
A stark account of what happened and, worse, what could still happen
Der Spiegel - April 17, 2010
A must Read
- LINK ^

The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has brought European aviation to a near-standstill in the worst disruptions since 9/11. Airlines are hemorrhaging money and tens of thousands of passengers are stranded. But if the weather had only been a little different, the whole crisis might never have happened.

Editor - It's not over, baby, It's not ove until it's over.

Opinion | Commentary | Editorial | Op-Ed

US | Roosevelt or Hoover? The Most Important Speech the President Has Ever Given
Campaign for America's Future - By Richard (RJ) Eskow - April 21, 2010
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People often forget that Hoover was a fine man -- intelligent, altruistic, and deeply bipartisan in his temperament. The structural problems that led to the Great Depression didn't occur on his watch. But by failing to act boldly and decisively he endangered the economic foundation of the country. He was an eminently reasonable person, but there is enormous danger in having the right temperament at the wrong time. We're living in unreasonable times.

How unreasonable? George Soros, who has made billions of dollars predicting economic disasters, thinks we're headed for another disaster. ""Unless we learn the lessons, that markets are inherently unstable and that stability needs to the objective of public policy," he said, "we are facing a yet larger bubble." And a blue-ribbon group of regulators, economists, and Democratic policy leaders had this to say in a joint letter signed this week: "Neither the bill passed earlier this year by the House, nor the one currently under consideration in the Senate would have prevented the crisis. Without serious restructuring, they will not prevent a future crisis."

US | Urge Your Reps to Support a Timetable for Withdrawal from Afghanistan
Just Foreign Policy - Current
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This month, we have a rare opportunity to fundamentally change the course of U.S. policy towards Afghanistan: Senator Russ Feingold, Representative Jim McGovern, and Representative Walter Jones have introduced legislation -- H.R. 5015 in the House and S. 3197 in the Senate -- that would require President Obama to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces. If this legislation attracts enough support, it could reach the House floor as an amendment, allowing Congress a fundamental -- and widely reported -- vote on the direction of U.S. policy.

The key idea of the Feingold-McGovern-Jones bill is straightforward. By January 1 - or within 3 months of the enactment of the bill, if that is earlier - the President is required to submit to Congress a plan for the redeployment of the U.S. military from Afghanistan, with a timetable for doing so. After submitting the plan, the President has to update Congress every 90 days on how the implementation of the plan is going.

Would you help build support for this important legislation by asking your Representative and Senators to co-sponsor the Feingold-McGovern-Jones bill?

Javascript must be enabled to use this action.

Plan B - A Plan to Save Civilization
ENN / Earth Policy Institute - April 20, 2010
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"There is much that we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual, including our continuing failure to reverse the environmental trends undermining the world food economy, will not last for much longer," says Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, in a recent release, "Plan B - A Plan to Save Civilization." "Massive change is inevitable."

"The death of our civilization is no longer a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we're on," says Peter Goldmark, current director of the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund. Can we find another road before time runs out? I think so. I call this road Plan B.

Columbus Day and the "Myth of America"
Truthout - By: Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola- October 12, 2009
- LINK ^

To mark Columbus Day In 2004, the Medieval and Renaissance Center in UCLA published the final volume of a compendium of Columbus-era documents. Its general editor, Geoffrey Symcox, leaves little room for ambivalence when he says, "This is not your grandfather's Columbus.... While giving the brilliant mariner his due, the collection portrays Columbus as an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing - not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting biblical scripture - to advance his ambitions.... Many of the unflattering documents have been known for the last century or more, but nobody paid much attention to them until recently. The fact that Columbus brought slavery, enormous exploitation or devastating diseases to the Americas used to be seen as a minor detail - if it was recognized at all - in light of his role as the great bringer of white man's civilization to the benighted idolatrous American continent. But to historians today this information is very important. It changes our whole view of the enterprise."

But does it?

"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells," Christopher Columbus wrote in his logbook in 1495. "They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas, in the multi-volume "History of the Indies" published in 1875, wrote,

"... Slaves were the primary source of income for the Admiral (Columbus) with that income he intended to repay the money the Kings were spending in support of Spaniards on the Island. They provide profit and income to the Kings. (The Spaniards were driven by) insatiable greed ... killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples ... with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty."

This systematic violence was aimed at preventing "Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings. (The Spaniards) thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write."

Youth Beyond the Politics of Hope
Truthout - By Henry A. Giroux - October 13, 2009
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As the counterrevolution that has gripped the United States since the late 1980s appears to be somewhat modified in the emerging presidency of Barack Obama, the dark times that befell us under the second Bush administration have far from disappeared. The assault that the second Bush administration waged on practically every vestige of the public good - from the Constitution to the environment to public education - appears to have lessened its grip as the Obama regime inches towards its first year in power. Yet, the range, degree and severity of the problems the Obama team have inherited from the Bush administration seem almost too daunting to address successfully: a war raging in two countries, a legacy of torture and secret prisons, a dismantling of the regulatory apparatus, a poisonous inequality that allocates resources to the rich and misery to the poor, an imperial presidency that shredded the balance of power, a looming ecological apocalypse, a ruined reputation abroad and a financial crisis that is almost unprecedented in American history - policies and conditions that have brought great suffering to millions of Americans and many millions more throughout the world.

But the crisis that is most often forgotten or repressed in the daily headlines of gloom is the war that is being waged at home, primarily against young people, who have historically been linked to the promise of a better life, one that they would both inherit and reproduce for future generations. In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: They are the risk; young people are no longer troubled; they are trouble.

Future of the GOP - The Republicans' faulty foundation
Once again, the GOP opts for deceit as a short-term political tactic while praying that a cracked base doesn't crumble. Opts for Deceit on Financial Reform.
The Week- By Robert Shrum - April 15, 2010
- LINK ^

US | Op-Ed - Crocodile Tears on Wall Street
Truthout - By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship - April 19, 2010
- LINK ^

With all due respect, we can only wish those Tea Party activists who gathered in Washington and other cities this week weren't so single-minded about just who's responsible for all their troubles, real and imagined. They're up in arms, so to speak, against Big Government, especially the Obama administration.

If they thought this through, they'd be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who in the coming weeks will be demonstrating in Washington and other cities against High Finance, taking on Wall Street and the country's biggest banks.

The original Tea Party, remember, wasn't directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea. It may seem a bit of a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same: when enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt - badly. That's what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse.

Fraud at Last
The Huffington Post - By Robert Kuttner - April 18, 2010
- LINK ^

The SEC's fraud case against Goldman Sachs could represent a turning point in the public understanding of the great financial collapse, its politics and its remedies. Or not.

Far-seeing critics such as Bill Black, Jamie Galbraith, and Tom Ferguson, have long maintained that at the root of this crisis was not just regulatory failure or mistaken financial strategies but deliberate fraud. The SEC's suit is a civil one, not a criminal charge, but it's a start. Before this is over, senior financial executives need to be brought before the bar of justice and the existing system and its biggest players need to be broken up.

US | Goldman Sachs: Too Big to Obey the Law
The Huffington Post - By Simon Johnson - April 19, 2010
- LINK ^

On a short-term tactical basis, Goldman Sachs clearly has little to fear. It has relatively deep pockets and will fight the securities "Fab" allegations tooth and nail; resolving that case, through all the appeals stages, will take many years. Friday's announcement had a significant negative impact on the market perception of Goldman's franchise value - partly because what they are accused of doing to unsuspecting customers is so disgusting. But, as a Bank of America analyst (Guy Mozkowski) points out this morning, the dollar amount of this specific allegation is small relative to Goldman's overall business and - frankly - Goldman's market position is so strong that most customers feel a lack of plausible alternatives.

The main action, obviously, is in the potential widening of the investigation (good articles in the WSJ today, but behind their paywall). This is likely to include more Goldman deals as well as other major banks, most of which are generally presumed to have engaged in at least roughly parallel activities – although the precise degree of nondisclosure for adverse material information presumably varied. Two congressmen have reasonably already drawn the link to the AIG bailout (how much of that was made necessary by fundamentally fraudulent transactions?), Gordon Brown is piling on (a regulatory sheep trying to squeeze into wolf's clothing for election day on May 6), and the German government would dearly love to blame the governance problems in its own banks (e.g., IKB) on someone else.

But as the White House surveys the battlefield this morning and considers how best to press home the advantage, one major fact dominates. Any pursuit of Goldman and others through our legal system increases uncertainty and could even cause a political run on the bank - through politicians and class action lawsuits piling on.

US | Goldman's Blueprint for Dumping Toxic Assets: How These CDOs Were Designed to Fail
The Huffington Post - By David Fiderer - April 18, 2010
- LINK ^

"Although Goldman Sachs held various positions in residential mortgage-related products in 2007, our short positions were not a 'bet against our clients.'"

That claim, from Goldman's letter to its shareholders, is easily refuted. The S.E.C. has brought fraud charges on one of Goldman deals known as synthetic subprime mezzanine collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. While most of these deals remain shrouded in secrecy, one of them, Anderson Mezzanine Funding 2007, Ltd. lays out its blueprint in sufficient detail so that we can pinpoint how and why this transaction's failure was never in doubt.

Quotes

Video | The Tea Party's Tax Day
The Nation - By VideoNation - April 19, 2010
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Nation reporter Greg Kaufmann and filmmaker David Burkman head to the tea party's tax day demonstration in Washington, DC, to find out what drives their politics. From Fox News talking points, such as healthcare being "jammed down our throats," to much smaller gripes, like disappearing ink on receipts, the answer may not be so easy to come by. Taxes, socialism and immigration were a few oft-repeated issues that Kaufmann heard. But slowly losing freedom and liberty seemed to be the overarching worry of the tea partiers.

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