Woe to you who are rich

Woe to you who are rich

Read Full Post »

Wall Street: The Real Recipients of Government Welfare

From 2009 to 2012, the US government handed out $1.1 trillion in welfare to Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. These corporations earned $180.3 billion during the same years. They also handed out $477.6 billion in pay and bonuses. In other words, the US government directly redistributed almost $300 billion in taxpayer money so that these five horribly managed companies could increase pay and bonuses to the people who managed to wreck them. How’s that make you feel?

Buy enough politicians, be totally incompetent in managing a company, and the public servants that are owned by incompetent CEO’s like Jamie Dimond of JP Morgan will make certain that you’ll get a nice reward for your troubles.

The US government is almost completely corrupt. The same is true of the Supreme Court. It’s credibility has been destroyed by the billionaire Koch Brothers. Big money has destroyed all three branches of our democracy so that they’re only purpose is to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent while engaging in political theater.

Read Full Post »

President Obama’s Views on the Banksters Who Destroyed the Economy

“Go free, very free,” is the Obama motto for his campaign contributors at Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan, Bank of America and other banks and bankers that tanked the economy. So not one Wall Street criminal has gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, the bankers, the banks, and their investors got bailed out to the tune of $26 trillion dollars given to them by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the 99 percent got the shaft.

See related article below.

Breakdown of the $26 trillion the Federal Reserve Doled Out to Save Rich Incompetent Investors

Read Full Post »

Banks agree $25 billion deal for U.S. homeowners

The banks got trillions in loans from the Federal Reserve that they claim they paid back, although it is statistically impossible for them to have done so; but now the banks are willing to pay billions to homeowners, which isn’t all that much when divvied up among all the homeowners the deal is supposed to help. $25 billion is a drop in the bucket, but it is an election year, so Obama fans the illusion that he cares about working people. No doubt about it, he does care, but only during an election year. Otherwise, President “Wall Street” Obama would have done something to help homeowners a long time ago.

click here for the full story

Read Full Post »

Old Women Protest and Land Knockout Blow to Bank of America branch in Calif.

A group of senior citizen activists calling themselves “Wild Old Women” staged a protest at a San Francisco Bank of America branch this week and succeeded in causing the business to close its doors, albeit temporarily.

The Bank of America in Bernal Heights, a San Francisco suburb, was confronted by the activists on Thursday afternoon, according to KCBS radio reporter Doug Sovern, who was on the scene.

The women were ages 69 to 82, and they stood on a sidewalk holding signs that demanded lower fees, higher taxes for the wealthy and a freeze on foreclosures. The bank locked its doors as soon as they arrived, Sovern noted.

Click here for the rest of the story

Read Full Post »

Breakdown of the $26 Trillion the Federal Reserve Handed Out to Save Incompetent, but Rich Investors

Below is letter from former Congressman Alan Grayson. It’s a breakdown of the money the Federal Reserve gave out to save rich investors from their own incompetence. Everybody assumes the Federal Reserve was out to save the banks. That’s not true. The Fed was out to save wealthy investors. If they hadn’t, a lot of rich people would be applying for jobs at Seven-Eleven. A ton of political campaign money would have dried up. A lot of money that corrupts the political system would be gone. A ton of corruption would have died. Goldman Sachs would’ve disappeared into bankruptcy. So while saving rich investors from their own stupidity, the Fed was also ensuring the continued corruption of the corporate wing of the supreme court, congress and the presidency.

There is one other matter I disagree with Congressman Grayson about in regard to the Fed’s actions. The Fed says most of the money it lent out has been paid back. That may not be true. If fact, it’s probably not true. The Fed may, or most likely, have simply cooked its own books to make it appear so. Maybe that’s why corporate profits are at record highs during this period of suppressed demand. How could they have record profits? How could they have paid back $26 trillion in loans in such a short time? That’s almost twice the domestic product of the entire United States. There’s only one answer. It’s not possible. They didn’t pay the money back, at least not most of it. The loans that were not paid back are being used to increase corporate earnings. The higher profits are going toward higher dividends and enhanced share prices for the wealthy. That makes the loans another conduit of unearned income for wealthy investors, as well as another pipeline for government corruption. Corruption is rampant, so don’t think the Fed is immune from it, since it saved the corrupters of Democracy, and likely made them richer in the process.

There’s something significantly more to this scandal and it goes something like this. But first, we need a definition.

A credit default swap is an insurance policy, usually provided on bonds backed by home mortgages. According to some sources, there were $60+ trillion worth of these insurance policies at the beginning of the housing collapse in the summer of 2006.

You didn’t need to own any of these bonds to insure them. It’s the same as being able to insure your neighbor’s house, without their knowledge, even if you don’t know the owner. Needless to say, you’d have a fair degree of incentive to burn your neighbor’s house down.

Institutions such as Goldman Sachs and a ton of unregulated investment firms called hedge funds took out insurance policies on mortgage backed bonds. These people were betting the market would collapse. They were right, even though some of them were selling the bonds up to the housing collapse and even a little after it began, even while telling hapless and really stupid (but wealthy) investors what wonderful investments the bonds were.

This leads me to believe that trillions of those dollars of unrepaid Federal Reserve loans went toward reimbursing the holders of the credit default swaps, which may be why all of those Goldman Sachs and Citicorp executives and hedge fund managers have been getting wonderful bonuses during the economic collapse they helped to craft.

Think about it. The government bailed out the insurance company AIG because of the billions of dollars of mortgage backed bonds it had insured, and that subsequently become worthless when the housing market melted down.

Let’s be clear about one thing. The government didn’t bail out AIG, although they technically did. The government actually bailed out the rich investors by bailing out AIG. These were the foolish folks that had bet that the mortgage-backed-bond market would collapse, and they’d get rich when their insurance policies (credit default swaps) bore fruit. And then came the fat surprise!

The entire insurance industry of planet Earth couldn’t possibly pay out $60+ trillion to those who’d bet on the housing market collapse. That means a bunch of rich fat cats made a bet on a market (credit default swaps) that could not sustain itself. They lost their shirts because they were dumber than a cat’s fart. Unless, of course, they expected the Fed to save their worthless hides.

The Fed’s rescue was most likely negotiated by Fed officials and Wall Street executives in one or more secret meetings. It’s possible executives simply begged Bernanke for financial salvation and he relented, but that’s unlikely.

Either way, the Fed stepped in to save their extraordinarily wealthy friends, like Goldman Sachs, their investors and numerous hedge funds.

In other words, if you were rich and dumb and placed your money in a market that was doomed to collapse, like the credit default swap market, you should have lost all of the premiums that you paid out. Coincidentally, although sizable (probably exceeding a trillion dollars), the money paid out in premiums represented only a fraction of the $60 trillion sized market.

The Federal Reserve doesn’t serve the common people or the nation. The officials at the Fed have only one thing in mind; to serve the wealthy people that control them.

So let me restate this succinctly: The Fed has paid out trillions of dollars in alleged loans and claimed they were paid back when it was impossible to have done so. The recipients of the money, the richest of people and investment companies that control the world’s most powerful government, also had to have cooked their books in order to make it appear they paid the money back.

That means they couldn’t have paid any taxes on trillions of dollars of free income provided by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Ben Bernanke is part of this crime wave. We’re also talking about hedge fund managers, investors of all stripes and sizes, basically, a ton of rich people. Obama may have even known of this crime. Why else would the Department of Justice be totally blind to this issue? Where is the investigation? Even if we had one, the crimes would be white washed in an ocean of corruption.

But then there’s the fear factor. If common people even knew there was an investigation, the demands for justice would be massive since most people now know or suspect how corrupt the financial sector and the government are, and how much and how tightly they are entwined.

I’m no attorney, but I can kind of guess what crimes have been committed, at least some of them. How about tax evasion? How about Accessory to Tax Evasion? How about obstruction of justice? Racketeering? Money laundering? And probably lots more. If you’re rich, you own enough politicians and Supreme Court and other justices that no charges will ever be brought against you.

The folks at http://criminal.laws.com/rico define racketeering this way, “Racketeering is classified as a crime that takes place through or while undertaking an illegal business or commercial venture. The activity of Racketeering is neither specific to solely illegal nor legal business operations. A wide array of the types of Racketeering exists.”

Goldman Sachs and other banks are businesses. So are hedge funds. So racketeering applies.

Criminal.laws.com also defines money laundering as “a financially-based criminal act that is employed in order to purposely conceal, misrepresent, and disguise all applicable nature or details with regard to financial income in the form of monies. Money Laundering can be instituted in order to attempt to hide the source of generation of a particular flow of income or to mask the process of the spending of monies. Furthermore, Money Laundering can be utilized in order to mislead investigations involved in the determination of the particular spending pattern or trend with regard to an individual or entity. While Money Laundering is not specific to commercial activity, it most commonly takes place within the scope of business activity.”

Money laundering clearly applies and it should be obvious to anybody with a second grade education.

Ben Bernanke is up to his neck in these crimes. Perhaps more realistically, he buried himself completely in it.

Crimes have been committed on a massive scale, but our government is totally corrupted by big money, and that’s especially true of the corporate wing of the Supreme Court. So don’t expect anything to happen soon. Join the Occupy Movement. Get Busy. Get Politically active if you want to see justice served, if you want to see our government washed clean of corruption.

Anyway, the link below takes a look at what President Obama may or may not have known about the $26 trillion and how his knowledge impacted one of the policies he proposed. The link below that is important information about the Federal Reserve. Enhancing corporate profits was not the only thing done with the unrepaid money; the third link below goes into that issue. Much of the money went to pay off rich people holding credit default swaps.

Congressman Grayson’s letter is below the third link.

The enormous implications of the bailout to the 99 percent. Click here for an analysis of what Obama may have known about the $26 trillion

Who Holds the Federal Reserve Responsible for Its Actions?

Why Isn't Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in Prison for Life?

Dear John,

I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage.

Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history.

Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number.

Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank.

Pages 133 & 137 – Some of these “broad-based emergency program” loans were long-term, and some were short-term. But the “term-adjusted borrowing” was equivalent to a total of $1,139,000,000,000 more than one year. That’s more than $1 trillion out the door. Lending for these programs in fact peaked at more than $1 trillion.

Pages 135 & 196 – Sixty percent of the $738 billion “Commercial Paper Funding Facility” went to the subsidiaries of foreign banks. 36% of the $71 billion Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility also went to subsidiaries of foreign banks.

Page 205 – Separate and apart from these “broad-based emergency program” loans were another $10,057,000,000,000 in “currency swaps.” In the “currency swaps,” the Fed handed dollars to foreign central banks, no strings attached, to fund bailouts in other countries. The Fed’s only “collateral” was a corresponding amount of foreign currency, which never left the Fed’s books (even to be deposited to earn interest), plus a promise to repay. But the Fed agreed to give back the foreign currency at the original exchange rate, even if the foreign currency appreciated in value during the period of the swap. These currency swaps and the “broad-based emergency program” loans, together, totaled more than $26 trillion. That’s almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That’s an amount equal to more than seven years of federal spending — on the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and everything else. And around twice American’s total GNP.

Page 201 – Here again, these “swaps” were of varying length, but on Dec. 4, 2008, there were $588,000,000,000 outstanding. That’s almost $2,000 for every American. All sent to foreign countries. That’s more than twenty times as much as our foreign aid budget.

Page 129 – In October 2008, the Fed gave $60,000,000,000 to the Swiss National Bank with the specific understanding that the money would be used to bail out UBS, a Swiss bank. Not an American bank. A Swiss bank.

Pages 3 & 4 – In addition to the “broad-based programs,” and in addition to the “currency swaps,” there have been hundreds of billions of dollars in Fed loans called “assistance to individual institutions.” This has included Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and “some primary dealers.” The Fed decided unilaterally who received this “assistance,” and who didn’t.

Pages 101 & 173 – You may have heard somewhere that these were riskless transactions, where the Fed always had enough collateral to avoid losses. Not true. The “Maiden Lane I” bailout fund was in the hole for almost two years.

Page 4 – You also may have heard somewhere that all this money was paid back. Not true. The GAO lists five Fed bailout programs that still have amounts outstanding, including $909,000,000,000 (just under a trillion dollars) for the Fed’s Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program alone. That’s almost $3,000 for every American.

Page 126 – In contemporaneous documents, the Fed apparently did not even take a stab at explaining why it helped some banks (like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) and not others. After the fact, the Fed referred vaguely to “strains in the financial markets,” “transitional credit,” and the Fed’s all-time favorite rationale for everything it does, “increasing liquidity.”

81 different places in the GAO report – The Fed applied nothing even resembling a consistent policy toward valuing the assets that it acquired. Sometimes it asked its counterparty to take a “haircut” (discount), sometimes it didn’t. Having read the whole report, I see no rhyme or reason to those decisions, with billions upon billions of dollars at stake.

Page 2 – As massive as these enumerated Fed bailouts were, there were yet more. The GAO did not even endeavor to analyze the Fed’s discount window lending, or its single-tranche term repurchase agreements.

Pages 13 & 14 – And the Fed wasn’t the only one bailing out Wall Street, of course. On top of what the Fed did, there was the $700,000,000,000 TARP program authorized by Congress (which I voted against). The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) also provided a federal guarantee for $600,000,000,000 in bonds issued by Wall Street.

There is one thing that I’d like to add to this, which isn’t in the GAO’s report. All this is something new, very new. For the first 96 years of the Fed’s existence, the Fed’s primary market activities were to buy or sell U.S. Treasury bonds (to change the money supply), and to lend at the “discount window.” Neither of these activities permitted the Fed to play favorites. But the programs that the GAO audited are fundamentally different. They allowed the Fed to choose winners and losers.

So what does all this mean? Here are some short observations:

(1) In the case of TARP, at least The People’s representatives got a vote. In the case of the Fed’s bailouts, which were roughly 20 times as substantial, there was never any vote. Unelected functionaries, with all sorts of ties to Wall Street, handed out trillions of dollars to Wall Street. That’s not how a democracy should function, or even can function.

(2) The notion that this was all without risk, just because the Fed can keep printing money, is both laughable and cryable (if that were a word). Leaving aside the example of Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, we have the more recent examples of Iceland (75% of GNP gone when the central bank took over three failed banks) and Ireland (100% of GNP gone when the central bank tried to rescue property firms).

(3) In the same way that American troops cannot act as police officers for the world, our central bank cannot act as piggy bank for the world. If the European Central Bank wants to bail out UBS, fine. But there is no reason why our money should be involved in that.

(4) For the Fed to pick and choose among aid recipients, and then pick and choose who takes a “haircut” and who doesn’t, is both corporate welfare and socialism. The Fed is a central bank, not a barber shop.

(5) The main, if not the sole, qualification for getting help from the Fed was to have lost huge amounts of money. The Fed bailouts rewarded failure, and penalized success. (If you don’t believe me, ask Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan.) The Fed helped the losers to squander and destroy even more capital.

(6) During all the time that the Fed was stuffing money into the pockets of failed banks, many Americans couldn’t borrow a dime for a home, a car, or anything else. If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there be 24 million Americans today who can’t find a full-time job?

Read Full Post »

Retired Philedelphia Police Captain Says His Proudest Moment Was Being Arrested With the Occupiers

Read Full Post »

Bank of America Cancels its $5 a Month Debit Card Fee

NEW YORK—Bank of America Corp. is scrapping its plan to charge a $5 monthly fee for making debit card purchases after an uproar and threatened exodus by customers.

The about-face comes as customers petitioned the bank, and mobilized to close their accounts and take their business elsewhere. The outcry had already prompted other major banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo amp; Co. , to cancel tests of similar debit card fees last week. SunTrust Banks and Regions Financial Corp. followed suit on Monday.

Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, declined to say whether the company experienced a spike in account closures since announcing plans for the debit card fee in September.

But in a statement Tuesday, Bank of America’s co-Chief Operating Officer David Darnell said the decision was based on customer feedback. “Our customers’ voices are most important to us. As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so,” he said..

Pace added that a “changing competitive marketplace” also played a role.

The retreat by the banking industry on debit fees comes amid growing public anger over higher bank fees. “When I heard about the fee, it was the last straw for me,” said Molly Katchpole, a 22-year-old nanny who started the online petition urging Bank of America to drop the debit fee. “I’m living paycheck to paycheck and one more fee was just too much.”

Katchpole said it was exciting that customers were able to sway a big corporation to rethink its decision. But she already closed her account a few weeks ago and said the bank’s decision won’t win her back. She plans to stay with her new community bank in Washington, D.C.

Other customers may be more forgiving.

Diane Abela, a 38-year-old Manhattan resident, said she had been waiting to see if Bank of America would back down on its plan before closing her account.

“I had a feeling if there was big outcry, they wouldn’t go through with it,” said Abela, who is unemployed. She said she would’ve canceled her account if the bank had followed through.

“I’m unemployed and $5 makes a big difference,” she said. “When you’re working on a budget every week, it’s the last thing you need.”

Unlike Chase and Wells Fargo, Bank of America’s announcement that it would start charging customers a monthly debit card fee had come without any testing in the marketplace.

Instead, the decision to roll out the fee early next year was based on internal surveys with customers. Pace declined to detail the nature of those surveys but said that in the past couple of weeks, “customer sentiment changed.”

The banking industry’s retreat from a debit card fee doesn’t mean customers aren’t seeing higher fees elsewhere, however.

This past spring, for example, Bank of America raised the monthly fee on its basic checking account to $12, from $8.95.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank is also testing a new menu of checking accounts with monthly fees ranging from $6 to $25 in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts. Pace said the pilot program is seeing “good results” and that the bank plans to move ahead with its rollout sometime next year. Other, smaller fees may be nicking away at customer accounts as well. In September, the bank instituted a $5 fee to replace debit cards, with overnight rush delivery costing $20. Both services had previously been free. The unwelcome changes for consumers aren’t limited to Bank of America.

Chase this year also doubled the fee on its basic checking account to $12 a month. But the bank says it will end a test in Georgia of a basic checking account that charged a $15 monthly fee.

And like many other banks, Wells Fargo ended its debit rewards program earlier this year after doing away with its free checking accounts with no strings attached late last year.

The wave of fee hikes comes as the industry adjusts to new regulations.

In particular, banks in the past year have blamed their fee hikes on a new federal regulation championed by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. The law, which went into effect last month, caps the amount banks can charge merchants whenever customers swipe their debit cards.

JPMorgan has said it would lose $300 million each quarter as a result of the regulation; Wells Fargo said it would lose $250 million a quarter.

Read Full Post »

Bank of America to Give Customers Ways to Avoid $5 Monthly Debit Card Fee

(Reuters) – Bank of America Corp, after receiving heavy public criticism for a planned $5-per-month debit card fee, is likely to give customers more ways to avoid the fee, a person familiar with the bank’s plans said Friday.

The second-biggest U.S. bank is reworking its plans as rivals Wells Fargo & Co and JPMorgan Chase & Co have decided not to charge monthly fees, ending test programs in certain states.

Bank of America is likely to allow many customers to sidestep the fee by taking measures such as maintaining minimum balances, having paychecks direct deposited, or using Bank of America credit cards, the person said.

Under earlier plans, customers might have needed balances totaling $20,000 across all their Bank of America accounts to skip the fee.

Bank of America set off a firestorm of criticism from customers, consumer advocates and politicians last month when it disclosed plans to charge customers $5 per month for using their debit cards, starting sometime next year.

The goal was to make up revenue lost to a law that slashes the fees banks charge retailers when consumers swipe their cards.

While some banks have disclosed plans to apply similar fees, many banks and credit unions decided not to institute the charge and have encouraged customers to switch banks.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America is not abandoning the fee now and will likely include it in new account types the bank is testing in three states. The bank plans to roll out these packages nationwide next year.

The $5-per-month fee may still remain an option for customers, the person said.

The bank has said the purpose of the new account types is to provide customers with upfront pricing, instead of hitting them with penalties after the fact. Customers can pay monthly fees of between $9 and $20, or avoid the charges by keeping minimum balances, using their credit cards or having a minimum amount deposited to their account.

Among other banks, Wells Fargo & Co said late Friday that in response to customer feedback it has canceled a five-state pilot program that would have charged customers $3 per month to use their cards

After testing a $3 per month fee in two states since February, JPMorgan Chase & Co has decided not to charge customers, a person familiar with the situation said on Friday. The test will end next month and will not be extended or expanded, the person added.

Citigroup Inc announced an account overhaul in mid-September that did not include a monthly debit card usage fee. Stephen Troutner, head of banking products for Citi’s U.S. consumer bank, said at the time that the New York-based bank found customers were strongly opposed to such monthly maintenance fees.

Richard Davis, CEO of US Bancorp , said during an October 19 conference call with analysts the Minneapolis-based regional bank is monitoring the results of other banks imposing debit card fees. Davis did not rule out instituting a fee in the future, but said the bank has no immediate plans to do so.

“We will find out if customers complain and move, or just complain,” he said. “We will take all that in time and we will make our decision.”

SunTrust Banks Inc is charging a $5 per-month fee on everyday checking account customers who make purchases. A spokesman declined to comment on the bank’s strategy.

Norma Garcia, manager of Consumers Union’s financial services program, applauded JPMorgan’s decision, but said that, without more details, it was unclear if Bank of America’s changes would be better for customers.

“Clearly, there is overwhelming public support to drop the fee,” she added.

(Reporting by Rick Rothacker and Joe Rauch in Charlotte, North Carolina; editing by Andre Grenon, Gary Hill)

Read Full Post »