~there are some implications here I’m not to thrilled about however our chances of reparation seem slim to none at this time…But… I’m never quite sure of France’s intentions, however it looks like Germany favors it also and I do admire Merkel….would this end up only taxing the middle class yet again??? The TPB is very good of robbing us ( ~jude…
With U.S. media obsessing on the fight here at home among conservatives vying to become president, most of them
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missed some big news about France, which already has a conservative president. This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take the lead — even go it alone within Europe, if need be — in introducing and pushing a Financial Transaction Tax in his country.
That’s right — theconservative president of France wants to tax the financial traders and speculators.
Referring to the tax as a “moral issue” and blaming deregulation and speculation for the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy has said that traders must “repay for the damage they have caused.”
What does it tell us about U.S. politics that the conservative president of France – on this issue and others — is way to the left of President Obama? The U.S. president has not publicly promoted a Wall Street transaction tax (even though U.S. financial institutions, not the French, were largely responsible for the global crisis).
Sometimes called a “Robin Hood tax,” a Financial Transaction Tax is endorsed worldwide by everyone from conservative European leaders to the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury to Bill Gates and Ralph Nader. The tax is tiny per transaction and would barely be felt by middle-class investors or their pensions or 401(k)’s, but it could raise big bucks from high-volume investors and impose a brake on the kind of speculation that tanked the world’s economy.
French President Sarkozy keeps explaining to the people of France and Europe that a small transaction tax raises billions for countries facing deficits.
Wouldn’t it be something if President Obama went to the American people with such a deficit proposal, instead of putting Medicare on the chopping block?
President Sarkozy invokes the “moral issue“ of financial institutions repairing the damage they caused. What a shock it would be to see President Obama aiming the “moral issue” at Wall Street profiteers and demanding repair of damage, instead of rewarding them with top White House jobs.
After failing to get resistant allies among European countries to join him, Sarkozy is going forward on his own – declaring yesterday: “If France waits for others to tax finance, then finance will never be taxed.”
Can you imagine Obama standing up to a resistant Congress on a Wall Street transaction tax? He can’t even stand up to his own advisers on the issue, according to Ron Suskind’s insider book on the Obama White House, “Confidence Men.” Suskind reports that Obama briefly embraced the tax and declared at one meeting: “We are going to do this!” But after Obama’s top economic adviser (and Wall Streeter) Larry Summers criticized the tax, the idea was buried at the White House.
That was back in 2009. But the idea is still alive on Capitol Hill. A couple months ago, Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter DeFazio introduced a Financial Transaction Tax bill in Congress that would easily raise $350 billion over 10 years. Rep. John Conyers introduced a similar bill last year — it would tax Wall Street to fund federal jobs programs.
A Wall Street transaction tax is backed by National Nurses United and other unions. It’s popular with the U.S. public, and would be even more popular if Obama were to campaign for it in 2012.
RootsAction.org has gained 50,000 signatures in support of the tax.
You can add your name here to those pushing Obama to (re)embrace the Wall Street tax.
And don’t get me wrong about President Sarkozy of France. He’s no great humanitarian. But he is facing an uphill reelection battle this year and the conservative president understands how popular a financial tax is with voters.
Facing reelection this year, maybe it’s time President Obama came to that same understanding.
Taibbi: Obama And Geithner Are Acting Like Lehman Executives Before The Crash
Strongly recommend this piece at theHuffington Post by Jeff Connaughton, a former aide to Senator Ted Kaufman. Jeff is one of the smartest guys on the Hill and is particularly strong on issues surrounding Wall Street and the regulatory system. In this piece, he takes apart the oft-stated mantra that what Wall Street firms did during and after the crisis was maybe unethical, but not illegal.
He takes particular aim at Barack Obama, who recently tossed that line out on 60 Minutes in what I thought was one of the real low moments of his presidency. Here’s Jeff’s take:
Speaking in Kansas on December 6, [Obama] said, “Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for being a repeat offender.” Just five days later on 60 Minutes, he said, “Some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street wasn’t illegal.” Which is it? Have there been no prosecutions because Wall Street acted legally (albeit unethically)? Or did Wall Street repeatedly violate major anti-fraud laws (and should thus find itself in the dock)?
The President is confusing “legal” with “difficult to prosecute successfully.”
The notion that what Wall Street firms did was merely unethical and not illegal is not just mistaken but preposterous: most everyone who works in the financial services industry understands that fraud right now is not just pervasive but epidemic, with many of the biggest banks committing entire departments to the routine commission of fraud and perjury – every single one of the major banks, for instance, devotes significant manpower to robosigning affidavits for foreclosures and credit card judgments, acts which are openly and inarguably criminal.
Banks and hedge funds routinely withhold derogatory information about the instruments they sell, they routinely trade on insider information or ahead of their own clients’ orders, and corrupt accounting is so rampant now that industry analysts have begun to figure in estimated levels of fraud in their examinations of the public disclosures of major financial companies.
Beyond that, as Jeff points out, Obama is simply not telling the truth about the supposedly insufficient penalties available to regulators. Employing the famous“mistakes were made” use of the passive tense, Obama copped out in his December 6 speech by saying that “penalties are too weak.” As Jeff points out, what Obama should have said is that “the penalties my own regulators chose to dish out were too weak”:
Moreover, the President is misleading us when he says that Wall Street firms violate anti-fraud law because the penalties are too weak. Repeat financial fraudsters don’t pay relatively paltry — and therefore painless — penalties because of statutory caps on such penalties. Rather, regulatory officials, appointed by Obama, negotiated these comparatively trifling fines. This week, the F.D.I.C. settled a suit against Washington Mutual officials for just $64 million, an amount that will be covered mostly by insurance policies WaMu took out on behalf of executives, who themselves will pay just $400,000. And recently a federal judge rejected the S.E.C.’s latest settlement with Citigroup, an action even the Wall Street Journal called “a rebuke of the cozy relationship between regulators and the regulated that too often leaves justice as an orphan.”
What makes Obama’s statements so dangerous is that they suggest an ongoing strategy of covering up the Wall Street crimewave. There is ample evidence out there that the Obama administration has eased up on prosecutions of Wall Street as part of a conscious strategy to prevent a collapse of confidence in our financial system, with the expected 50-state foreclosure settlement being the landmark effort in the cover-up, intended mainly to bury a generation of fraud. Here’s how Jeff puts it:
In Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men, he quotes Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as saying, “The confidence in the system is so fragile still… a disclosure of a fraud… could result in a run, just like Lehman.” The Obama Administration is pushinghard for a 50-state settlement with the major banks for their fraudulent foreclosure practices, even though several state attorneys general have rejected this approach because, in their view, it would shield too much wrongdoing. Regrettably, Obama’s top officials and lawyers seem more eager to restore the financial sector to health than establish criminal accountability among the executives who were in charge.
In other words, Geithner and Obama are behaving like Lehman executives before the crash of Lehman, not disclosing the full extent of the internal problem in order to keep investors from fleeing and creditors from calling in their chits. It’s worth noting that this kind of behavior – knowingly hiding the derogatory truth from the outside world in order to prevent a run on the bank – is, itself, fraud!
This is exactly the mindset that led Lehman to the abuses of the ”Repo 105″ accounting trick, in which loans were disguised as revenues in order to prevent the outside world from knowing the dire state of the bank’s balance sheet.
Now Obama and Geithner are engaged in the same sort of activity, only they’re trying to prevent a run not on an individual bank, but the entire American financial services sector. Geithner seems really to believe that if fraud were aggressively policed, and the world made aware of the incredible extent of the illegality in our markets, that international confidence in the American financial sector would plummet and our economy would suffer – and suffer, incidentally, on Barack Obama’s watch.
Better, apparently, the Band-Aid the problem now, and let the real mess happen later on, on someone else’s watch, or at least in a second term, when there’s no need to worry about re-election.
Of course, this is exactly the wrong way to go about things. If Geithner and Obama really wanted to convince the world that America’s markets weren’t broken, they would effectively police fraud, and by extension prove to everybody that at the very least, our regulatory system is not broken.
But by taking a dive on fraud, and orchestrating mass cover-ups like the coming foreclosure settlement fiasco, what they’re doing instead is signaling to the world that not only are our financial markets corrupt, but our government is broken as well.
The problem with companies like Lehman and Enron is that their executives always think they can paper over illegalities by committing more crimes, when in fact all they’re usually doing is snowballing the problem so completely out of control that there’s no longer any chance of fixing things, thereby killing the only chance for survival they ever had.
This is exactly what Obama and Geithner are doing now. By continually lying about the extent of the country’s corruption problems, they’re adding fraud to fraud and raising such a great bonfire of lies that they probably won’t ever be able to fix the underlying mess.
If they looked at the world like public servants, and not like corporate executives, they’d understand that the only way out is to come clean. That they don’t look at things that way should tell people quite a lot.
If pictures speak louder than words, what do these four images tell you?
Daily Mail: Half of the U.S. population is worried they won’t be able to buy the holiday presents on their list because of their financial situation:
Tim Duy’s Fed Watch: History suggests the U.S. economy will be unable to resist the pull of a European downturn (contrary to what Wall Street might say):
Think B.I.G.: Based on home price data through September, only two of the twenty cities tracked by Case Shiller showed year-over-year gains — Detroit and Washington DC.
If you said economic horror story, you got it in one!
Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
We are beginning to understand, and Occupy Wall Street looks like the beginning of the revolution.
We are beginning to understand that our money is created, not by the government, but by banks. Many authorities have confirmed this, including the Federal Reserve itself.
The only money the government creates today are coins, which compose less than one ten-thousandth of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes, or dollar bills, are issued by Federal Reserve Banks, all twelve of which are owned by the private banks in their district. Most of our money comes into circulation as bank loans, and it comes with an interest charge attached.
According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this issue extensively, interest now composes40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don’t see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and materials, before they have a product to sell.
For government projects, Kennedy found that theaverage cost of interest is 50%. If the government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects at half price. That means governments—state and federal—could double the number of projects they could afford, without costing the taxpayers a single penny more than we are paying now.
This opens up exciting possibilities. Federal and state governments could fund all sorts of things we think we can’t afford now, simply by owning their own banks. They could fund something Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King dreamt of—an Economic Bill of Rights.
The ability of the COMEX commercial crooks to go short in unlimited quantities and the ability of these crooks to game the leveraged longs are the precise mechanisms behind the silver manipulation.
Wall Street and the large banks control congress and the precious metals pricing. The ability to borrow endless amounts of dollars (via deficit spending and Treasury sales) is what gives our politicians power. Both Wall Street and government need to perpetuate the dollar and need to discredit gold and silver. There is no government oversight in the gold and silver markets. The big banks (JPM and HSBC) and the CME are allowed to do as they please. Margins are increased in order to favor those of their buddies who are short, and to rape those funds and investors who are long. Butler and Chapman have called attention to these policies for years and nothing is done to stop the abuses.
What does gold want to do – go up or go down? Gold has essentially gone nowhere in the last three days. So you sit there, confused and waiting for a signal and do nothing. That is exactly what they want you to do – nothing. In the meantime you stay in dollars.
Fortunately, we do not have to rely on congress or the CFTC to set things straight. The Chinese and Indians are doing it for them. Every time the Cartel forces prices lower on the Comex, the Chinese and Indians move in with large orders for PHYSICAL gold and silver and the prices revert back to where they were and continue to climb. The free market is working. As Butler points out, it would be better if Comex totally got out of the gold and silver paper markets. All that they accomplish is to put a cap on the price of gold and silver. But as you have witnessed for the last decade, their raids have done nothing to stop the ongoing bull market in the metals and the erosion of paper currencies.
I know that it gets confusing for you. It gets confusing for me too, sometimes, until I step back and realize that all of the back-and-forth movement in the Dow, gold and silver is just “noise.” Nothing much is changing. Up one day, down the next, back up the next. The markets are rather “spinning their wheels” and that makes investors unsure of what to do and what to believe. That is why I am constantly asking you to focus on the Big Picture and to ignore the day-to-day noise of the markets. Just look at the following gold chart and try and make sense out of what is happening.
What does gold want to do – go up or go down? Gold has essentially gone nowhere in the last three days. So you sit there, confused and waiting for a signal and do nothing. That is exactly what they want you to do – nothing. In the meantime you stay in dollars.
A few days ago I wrote that gold has to close above $1,690 for a day or two and then you can feel safer that the recent takedown is behind us. At the close today, gold is only $15.50 away. Silver has to close above $32 and silver is $32.58 right now. Let’s hope that the worst is behind us here too. However, Richard Russell isn’t so sure. (Read his comments below)
The following is a letter released today by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of banking giant Goldman Sachs:
Dear Investor:
Up until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. That does not mean, however, that it has not been very much on our minds. As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests. And we have asked ourselves this question:
How can we make money off them?
The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund, whose investment objective is to monetize the Occupy Wall Street protests as they spread around the world. At Goldman, we recognize that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain – but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.
The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages. Furthermore, as clashes between police and protesters turn ever more violent, we are making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.
It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say “Let them eat cake.” But at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake futures. We project that through our aggressive market manipulation, the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.
Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy this.” We haven’t felt so good about something we’ve sold since our souls.
Gerald Celente - The Regular Guys – 24 Oct 2011 : there is no saving the system not as long as they continue the policies that they do …the whole system is corrupt from top to bottom , Gaddafi was hot o Condoleza Rice , what it all boils down to regarding the protests is just a lot of angry people as the system is rigged , the big guys can get away with everything that’s what makes people angry explains Gerald Celente , these banks are ripping off everybody not one head rolls.
Kerry Lutz Exclusive Interview with Darryl R. Schoon 10-5-11
Kerry Lutz Exclusive Interview with Darryl R. Clean 10/05/11
~It’s been there since 1987~we’re just a tad bit late…lolll~jude
Protesters in Seoul, Hong Kong and Manila join global demonstrations supporting Occupy Wall Street movement.
Occupy Movement protests spread in Asia on Saturday with anti-capitalism demonstrations held in Seoul, Hong Kong and Manila.
The message of the months-old Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. is resonating in Asian cities, where protesters are saying the rich-poor gap is widening due to economic policies that favour big corporations.
In South Korea s capital Seoul, dozens of protesters gathered in front of the country s Financial Advisory Service to express their solidarity with the Occupy movement. The protesters held up placards, chanting “We re 99%,” echoing the Occupy Wall Street slogan.
The South Korean protesters urged the government to enact policies that support victims of what they called “greedy” financial institutions.
Some angry protesters struggled with police as they attempted to post stickers reading “business will be suspended” on doors of the Financial Advisory Service to express their rage against the government.
They said the country s top financial watchdog had close ties with the wealthy, while neglecting to protect people from what they said was “exploitation” by big banks and corporations.
In Hong Kong around 200 protesters gathered outside the stock exchange in the heart of the financial district.
They brought up a range of issues ranging from capitalism to nuclear power.
One activist said the staggering rich-poor gap in Hong Kong is one example of the flawed global financial system.
The activists also proposed a more equitable tax system. Some protesters said they planned to remain there until the stock markets open on Monday.
In Manila, dozens of left-leaning activists marched to the U.S. Embassy on Saturday in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The protesters were prevented by local authorities from approaching the embassy gates.
They held placards and streamers, expressing support for the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, and echoed the U.S. protesters disdain for the global financial system.
The Filipino activists said only 1 percent of the population benefited from big businesses, while the rest are falling deeper into poverty.
Protesters urged a change in the financial system, and in Philippine laws which they say should give workers more protection to help them weather economic crises.
Occupy Wall Street, a movement which was started last July by a Vancouver-based group called Adbusters, has spread across the US, with meet-ups being posted in social networking sites to condemn economic inequalities and widespread poverty blamed on flawed financial institutions.
Violence broke out in Rome, where protesters smashed shop windows and torched cars.
A fesh report said the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters have attacked and damaged Italian defence ministry building.
Tens of thousands nicknamed “the indignant” marched Saturday in European cities as protests against capitalism and austerity measures went global.
The “Occupy Wall Street” protests that began in Canada and spread to cities across the U.S. moved Saturday to Asia and Europe, linking up with anti-austerity demonstrations that have raged across the debt-ridden continent for months.
Black smoke billowed into the air in downtown Rome as a small group of violent protesters broke away from the main demonstration. They smashed car windows, set vehicles on fire and assaulted two news crews of Sky Italia, the TV reported. Others burned Italian and EU flags.
Police were out in force in Rome, which expected up to 100,000 protesters a day after Premier Silvio Berlusconi barely survived a confidence vote. Italy, with a national debt ratio second only to Greece in the 17-nation eurozone, is rapidly becoming a focus of concern in Europe s debt crisis.
“People of Europe: Rise Up!” read one banner in Rome. Some peaceful demonstrators turned against the violent group and tried to stop them, hurling bottles at them, Sky and the ANSA news agency reported. Others fled, scared by the violence.
Around 4,000 people marched through the streets of Berlin, with banners that urged the end of capitalism. Some marchers scuffled with police as they tried to get near the country s parliamentary buildings. In Frankfurt, continental Europe s financial capital, some 5,000 people protested in front of the European Central Bank.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke to 500 demonstrators outside St. Paul s cathedral in London.
“The banking system in London is the recipient of corrupt money,” he said, adding that Wikileaks would launch a campaign against financial institutions in the coming months.
Assange is on bail as he fights extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over claims of rape and sexual molestation made by two women.
In the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, hundreds walked through the streets carrying pictures of Che Guevara and old communist flags that read “Death to capitalism, freedom to the people.”
Another 500 people gathered to hear speakers denounce capitalism at a peaceful rally in downtown Stockholm, holding up red flags and banners that read “We are the 99 percent” and “We refuse to pay for capitalism s crisis.”
The reference was to the world s richest 1 percent, who control billions in assets, while billions around the world live in poverty or are struggling economically.
“There are those who say the system is broke. It s not,” trade union activist Bilbo Goransson shouted into a megaphone. “That s how it was built. It is there to make rich people richer.”
In Spain, groups that became known as the Indignant Movement established the first around-the-clock “occupation” protest camps in cities and towns across the country beginning in May and lasting for weeks. Six marches are set to converge Saturday on Madrid s Puerta del Sol plaza just before dusk.
Portuguese angry at their government s handling of the economic crisis are protesting in downtown Lisbon later. Portugal is one of three European nations the others being Greece and Ireland that have already needed an international bailout.
A group of 100 prominent authors, including Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists Jennifer Egan and Michael Cunningham, signed an online petition declaring their support for “Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.”
Turnout was light in Asia, where the global economy is booming. In Sydney, around 300 people gathered Saturday, cheering a speaker who shouted, “We re sick of corporate greed! Big banks, big corporate power standing over us and taking away our rights!”
Only 200 people protested in Tokyo, marching outside the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the tsunami-hit Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, chanting anti-nuclear slogans.
“No to nuclear power!” marchers chanted as they held up banners.
In the Philippines, about 100 people marched on the U.S. Embassy in Manila to express support for the U.S. Occupy Wall Street protests and to denounce what they called “U.S. imperialism.”
In Canada, protests were planned in Montreal and Vancouver as well as at the country’s main stock exchange in Toronto.
Breaking News Alert The New York Times Thursday, October 13, 2011 — 11:25 AM EDT
The fallen hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam received on Thursday the longest-ever prison sentence for insider trading, a watershed moment in the government’s aggressive two-year campaign to root out the illegal exchange of confidential information on Wall Street.
Judge Richard J. Holwell sentenced Mr. Rajaratnam, the former head of the Galleon Group hedge fund, to 11 years in prison. A jury convicted him of securities fraud and conspiracy in May after a two-month trial.
Calling him “the modern face of illegal insider trading,” prosecutors accused Mr. Rajaratnam of using a corrupt network of well-placed tipsters – including former executives of Intel, I.B.M. and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company – to illicitly gain about $64 million.
