Contributors to the major candidates for President according to how much spent…

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These table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families.Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization’s members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors – like EMILY’s List and Club for Growth – make for particularly big bundlers.

MITT ROMNEY (R)

~jude conclusion…Banks….Investment Corps…

RON PAUL (R)

~jude conclusion…Military…he advocates less/to no wars and major Corps….

NEWT GINGRICH (R)

~jude conclusion…Insurance & Banks….

RICK SANTORUM (R)

~jude conclusions…Healthcare, Insurance, Energy…

RickPerry (R)

~jude conclusions…energy, TX, Healthcare, Banks…

Michele Bachman (R)

~jude conclusions…media & SEO, Industry, Pharma, college loans?, Transport…

Barack Obama(D)

Please take into account of *HOW MUCH $$$* was contributed by each Corp…or legalize corps employees/shareholders…

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00009638

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Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale…

If there was ever a news story that crystalized the moral dementia of modern Wall Street in one little vignette, this is it.

Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado,  will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon.

Why? Because some local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a “nice family,” but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs.

At first,  I couldn’t remember where I knew that name from. But then I looked it up and saw an explosive Atlantic magazine story, published last year, called, “E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out Of Millions.” And then I remembered that piece, and it hit me: Jeffrey Verschleiser is one of the biggest assholes in the entire world!

The story begins at Bear Stearns, where Verschleiser used to work, up until the company exploded, in large part because of him personally.

Back in the day, you see, Verschleiser headed Bear’s mortgage-backed securities operations. Toward the end of his tenure, his particular specialty began with what at the time was the usual industry-wide practice, putting together gigantic packages of crappy subprime mortgages and dumping them on unsuspecting clients.

But Verschleiser reportedly went beyond that. According to a lawsuit later filed by a bond insurer called Ambac, Verschleiser also masterminded a kind of double-dipping scheme. What he would do is sell a bunch of toxic mortgages into a trust, which like all mortgage trusts had provisions written into their pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs) that required the original lenders to buy the loans back if they went into default.

So Verschleiser would sell bad mortgages back to the banks at a discount, but instead of passing the money back to the trust, he and other Bear execs allegedly pocketed the funds.

From the Atlantic story:

The traders were essentially double-dipping — getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn’t have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans — that claim belonged to bond investors — but they did so anyway and kept the money. Thus, Bear was cheating the investors they promised to have sold a safe product out of their cash. According to former Bear Stearns and EMC traders and analysts who spoke with The Atlantic, Nierenberg and Verschleiser were the decision-makers for the double dipping scheme.

Imagine giving someone a hundred bucks to buy a bushel of apples, but making a deal with him that he has to buy back any apples that turn out to have worms in them. That’s what happened here: Bear sold the wormy apples back to the farmer, but instead of taking the money from those sales and passing it on to you, they simply kept the money, according to the suit.

How wormy were those apples? In one infamous email cited in the suit, a Bear exec colorfully described the content of the bonds they were selling:

Bear deal manager Nicolas Smith wrote an e-mail on August 11th, 2006 to Keith Lind, a Managing Director on the trading desk, referring to a particular bond, SACO 2006-8, as “SACK OF SHIT [2006-]8″ and said, “I hope your [sic] making a lot of money off this trade.”

So did Verschleiser himself know the mortgages were bad? Not only did he know it, he went so far as to tell his colleagues in writing that it was a waste of money to even bother performing due diligence on the bad bonds:

Jeffrey Verschleiser even said in an e-mail that he knew this was an issue. He wrote to his peer Mike Nierenberg in March 2006, “[we] are wasting way too much money on Bad Due Diligence.” Yet a year later nothing had changed. In March 2007, Verschleiser wrote to Nierenberg again about the same due diligence firm, “[w]e are just burning money hiring them.”

One of the ways that banks like Bear managed to convince investors to buy these bonds was by wrapping them in bond insurance through companies like Ambac, commonly known as “monoline” insurers. Investors who knew the bonds were insured were less worried about default.

Verschleiser, seeing that Bear had gotten firms like Ambac to insure its “sack of shit” bonds, saw here a new opportunity to make money. He first induced the monolines to insure the worthless bonds, then bet against the insurers! (Is it any wonder this guy ended up hired by Goldman, Sachs?) From the Atlantic story again:

Then in November 2007, Verschleiser wrote to his risk committee that he knew insurers for mortgage securities were going to have big financial problems. He suggested they multiply by ten times the short bet he’d just made against stocks like Ambac. These e-mails show Verschleiser’s trading desk bragging to firm leadership that he made $55 million off shorting insurers’ stock in just three weeks.

So in essence, Verschleiser was triple-dipping. First he was selling worthless “sacks of shit” to investors, representing them as good investments. Then, he kept the money from the return sales of the wormy apples. And then, on top of that, he made money by betting against the insurers he was sticking with these toxic assets.

We all know what happened from there. Bear, Stearns went under, thanks in large part to insane schemes like Verschleiser’s, and all of us were forced to pick up at least part of the tab as the Fed spent billions subsidizing Bear’s emergency takeover by JP Morgan Chase. In subsequent litigation, Chase has steadfastly refused to buy back the bad mortgages dumped on investors by the likes of Verschleiser, and has even fought tooth and nail to prevent the information in the Ambac suit from being made public.

Ambac went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010 for a variety of reasons, some of which had nothing to do with its losses in deals like these. But certainly Ambac and other monoline insurers like MBIA suffered for having insured worthless mortgage bonds sold onto the market by the Verschleisers of the world. Ambac in its suit asserted that it paid out over $641 million in claims related to the bonds from the Bear deals.

With all of this, though, Verschleiser landed happily on his feet. He reportedly heads Goldman’s mortgage division now. And after cutting a mile-wide swath of losses through the American economy, helping destroy two venerable firms in Bear and Ambac, bilking the taxpayer for untold millions more (he is also named in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency for allegedly speeding bad loans onto securitization before they defaulted), Verschleiser is now living the contented life of a proud family man, renting out a 94-room hotel for three days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

It’s certainly heartening that Verschleiser is spending this money on his daughter instead of, say, hiring a busload of Jamaican hookers to spend the weekend lounging with him in a hot tub full of Beluga caviar. People ought to give their children the best, I guess. But there’s this, too: at a time when one in four Americans has zero or negative net worth, renting a 94-room hotel for three days for a tweenager party might already be pushing the edge of the good taste/tact envelope. Even for the most honest millionaire in Aspen, it would seem a little gauche.

But for this burglarizing dickhead to do it? It’s breathtaking, isn’t it? I hope he at least invited his bankrupted investors to the pool party.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wall-street-in-one-brief-tale-20120113

The Fed Cartel: Part11: The Freemasons Bus & the House of Rothschilds…

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The Intel Hub
Dean Henderson
December 8, 2011

(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf…)

In 1789 Alexander Hamilton became the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.  Hamilton was one of many Founding Fathers who were Freemasons. He had close relations with the Rothschild family which owns the Bank of England and leads the European Freemason movement.  George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Ethan Allen, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Brown and Roger Sherman were all Masons.

Roger Livingston helped Sherman and Franklin write the Declaration of Independence. He gave George Washington his oaths of office while he was Grand Master of the New York Grand Lodge of Freemasons.  Washington himself was Grand Master of the Virginia Lodge.  Of the General Officers in the Revolutionary Army, thirty-three were Masons.  This was highly symbolic since 33rd Degree Masons become Illuminated. [1]

Populist founding fathers led by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine- none of whom were Masons- wanted to completely severe ties with the British Crown, but were overruled by the Masonic faction led by Washington, Hamilton and Grand Master of the St. Andrews Lodge in Boston General Joseph Warren, who wanted to “defy Parliament but remain loyal to the Crown”. St. Andrews Lodge was the hub of New World Masonry and began issuing Knights Templar Degrees in 1769. [2]

All US Masonic lodges are to this day warranted by the British Crown, whom they serve as a global intelligence and counterrevolutionary subversion network. Their most recent initiative is the Masonic Child Identification Program (CHIP). According to Wikipedia, the CHIP programs allow parents the opportunity to create a kit of identifying materials for their child, free of charge. The kit contains a fingerprint card, a physical description, a video, computer disk, or DVD of the child, a dental imprint, and a DNA sample.

The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1774 under the Presidency of Peyton Randolph, who succeeded Washington as Grand Master of the Virginia Lodge.  The Second Continental Congress convened in 1775 under the Presidency of Freemason John Hancock.  Peyton’s brother William succeeded him as Virginia Lodge Grand Master and became the leading proponent of centralization and federalism at the First Constitutional Convention in 1787.  The federalism at the heart of the US Constitution is identical to the federalism laid out in the Freemason’s Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723. William Randolph became the nation’s first Attorney General and Secretary of State under George Washington. His family returned to England loyal to the Crown.  John Marshall, the nation’s first Supreme Court Justice, was also a Mason. [3]

When Benjamin Franklin journeyed to France to seek financial help for American revolutionaries, his meetings took place at Rothschild banks.  He brokered arms sales via German Mason Baron von Steuben.  His Committees of Correspondence operated through Freemason channels and paralleled a British spy network.  In 1776 Franklin became de facto Ambassador to France.  In 1779 he became Grand Master of the French Neuf Soeurs (Nine Sisters) Lodge, to which John Paul Jones and Voltaire belonged.  Franklin was also a member of the more secretive Royal Lodge of Commanders of the Temple West of Carcasonne, whose members included Frederick Prince of Whales. While Franklin preached temperance in the US, he cavorted wildly with his Lodge brothers in Europe.  Franklin served as Postmaster General from the 1750’s to 1775 – a role traditionally relegated to British spies. [4]

With Rothschild financing Alexander Hamilton founded two New York banks, including Bank of New York. [5]  He died in a gun battle with Aaron Burr, who founded Bank of Manhattan with Kuhn Loeb financing.  Hamilton exemplified the contempt which the Eight Families hold towards common people, once stating, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are the rich and the well born, the others the mass of the people…The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge and determine right.  Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share of government.  They will check the unsteadiness of the second.”[6]

THE CHINA DECEPTION…

(Infowars) – The current trend in the world of finance and politics is toward consolidation of power into the hands of a few large financial intuitions like Goldman Sachs.  Over 40 US states have turned over control of unemployment payments to the largest private banks such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citibank.  Recipients of benefits are often forced to have a bank account and a debit card at these banks in order to receive their benefits.

Special report: Goldman’s new money machine: warehouses…(repost)

LONDON/DETROIT (Reuters) – In a rundown patch of Detroit, enclosed by a cyclone fence and barbed wire, stands an unremarkable warehouse that investment bank Goldman Sachs has transformed into a money-making machine.

The derelict neighborhood off Michigan Avenue is a sharp contrast to Goldman’s bustling skyscraper headquarters near Wall Street, but the two operations share one important element: management by the bank’s savvy financial professionals.

A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories.

Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year.

There’s just one problem: only a trickle of the aluminum is leaving the depots, creating a supply pinch for manufacturers of everything from soft drink cans to aircraft.

The resulting spike in prices has sparked a clash between companies forced to pay more for their aluminum and wait months for it to be delivered, Goldman, which is keen to keep its cash machines humming and the London Metal Exchange (LME), the world’s benchmark industrial metals market, which critics accuse of lax oversight.

Analysts question why London’s metals market allows big financial players like Goldman to own the warehouses which store huge quantities of metal even as they trade the commodity.

Robin Bhar, a veteran metals analyst at Credit Agricole in London says the conflict of interest is so acute he wants U.S. and European anti-trust regulators to weigh in.

“I think it makes a mockery of the market. It’s a shame,” Bhar said. “This is an anti-competitive situation. It puts (some) companies at an advantage, and clearly the rest of the market at a disadvantage. It’s a real, genuine concern. And I think the regulators have to look at it.”

Goldman said its warehouse subsidiary Metro International Trade Services has done nothing illegal, and abides by the LME’s warehousing rules. “Producers have chosen to store metal in Detroit with Metro,” a Goldman spokeswoman said. “We follow the LME requirements in terms of storing and releasing metals from our warehouses.”

The London Metal Exchange defends its rules. “There is a perception that consumers have not been able to get to their metal when the reality is that it is big banks, financing companies and warehouses that are not able to get to their huge tonnages of metal fast enough,” said LME business development manager Chris Evans.

BUSINESS MODEL

Goldman’s warehouse business relies on a lucrative opportunity enabled by the LME regulations. Those rules allow warehouses to release only a tiny fraction of their inventories per day, much less than the metal that is regularly taken in for storage.

The metal that sits in the warehouse generates lucrative rental income.

Little wonder that so many want in. Metro was acquired by Goldman in February 2010, while commodities trading firm Trafigura nabbed UK-based NEMS in March 2010, and Swiss-based group Glencore International acquired the metals warehousing unit of Italy’s Pacorini last September.

Matt Taibbi “Justice Department Has No Appetite To Take ANY Cases Against Wall Street Executives”…

The Real Housewives of Wall Street…

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don’t know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

How Did Gaddafi Bypass US Anti-Money Laundering Rules To Bank With Goldman And JPMorgan?…

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Submitted by Tyler Durden

One of the most critical questions that has to be asked in light of yesterday’s revelation that among the banks providing banking and asset amangement services for Libya were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Citigroup, is just how did Libya get an exemption for anti-money laundering provisions both in Europe and the US. Oddly enough, this future mainstream debate arises not in the US, where any form of critical thinking appears to be immediately curbed by SEC Rule 201 (for all those calling for a hike in the SEC’s budget, we suggest the following contrarian thought experiment: let’s cut its budget to zero and see how long before anyone notices) , but out of the UK, where a reader writes in to the FT (oddly enough, partially owned by the Libyan Investment Authority) with the following very simple question: “It seems to me entirely implausible that Col Gaddafi could have earned billions of dollars through legal means. And yet if the AML procedures, to which we are all subjected, have not been applied rigorously to the likes of Col Gaddafi and his family, one is forced to ask what purpose they really serve.” Or what purpose any regulation serves in general when fraud results in surging stock prices, and companies that adhere to the rules are promptly wiped out in this bizarro capitalist world.

From the FT:

Sir, I read with interest the news that the UK government is freezing billions of dollars in assets belonging to Muammer Gaddafi and his family. I would also be intrigued to know whether the banks and other financial institutions handling these assets have applied the same anti-money laundering (AML) procedures to these assets as are applied to every other “normal” banking client in the UK.

I am less interested in whether Col Gaddafi and his family were able to supply passport copies and utility bills but more interested in what evidence they were able to present as to the source of the funds.

It seems to me entirely implausible that Col Gaddafi could have earned billions of dollars through legal means. And yet if the AML procedures, to which we are all subjected, have not been applied rigorously to the likes of Col Gaddafi and his family, one is forced to ask what purpose they really serve.

Charles L.M. Horner,

Bangkok, Thailand

h/t Dylan Grice and Lizzie

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-did-gaddafi-bypass-us-anti-money-laundering-rules-bank-goldman-and-jpmorgan

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• Money trail (bbc.co.uk)

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?…

Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them~

By Matt Taibbi

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

The Illuminati’s Secret 20 Trillion Dollar Bank…

by Zen Gardner

Of all the scams, the worldwide banking system is one of the most mind-boggling. Never mind the entire false premise of fiat money and the debt system, that vast amounts of this illusory “currency” get shifted every micro-second just begs deceit and piracy.

Trouble is, if you “buy into it” you’re already ensnared, and it’s either eat, or be eaten. That’s their design.

Ownership by Whom?

The estimated value of the Rothschild family’s total holdings is at 500 Trillion dollars. So what. The entire planet is supposedly “owned” by a very small percentage of people. So?

Can anyone “own” anything? Ownership is a temporary power trip for the unenlightened–everything always gets passed on. Like the temporary unit we all live in called our body, it’s an illusion that anyone can “live forever” physically never mind truly “possess” anything if we look at things truthfully.

However…

That would be fine if it was just a matter of perception. Trouble is, these ultra-possessive creeps called the global elite or Illuminati impose their system of temporal power beliefs on the rest of us. Either we play the game their way, or we’re locked out of the playground and cut off from supplies by their hired thugs.

It’s a beautiful planet with lots of beautiful people, but the world “system” is very ugly and run by non-empathetic psychopaths.

But again, it’s all temporal.