Is Senator Elizabeth Warren Preparing to Take on the Banksters Where Others Are Too Scared?

Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to the corrupt Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. She “demanded to know why the government keeps accepting financial settlements from criminal bankers when they could instead be taken to trial, convicted and locked up.”

The letter was also sent to corrupt US Attorney General Eric Holder, the person most capable and completely unwilling to deal with the crimes of Wall Street. SEC Chair Mary Jo White also received a copy.

Senator Warren put the matter bluntly, “..…I believe very strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial — either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources — the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer.

The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations. If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.”

In other words, Wall Street banks rip off main street citizens, make big profits in the process, and then get assessed tiny penalties that are paid for with the money they stole from us. Doesn’t sound like much of a deal for the 99 percent to me. It’s a scam aided and abetted by the federal government.

We all know the answers to the problems outlined by Warren. The US government has been completely corrupted by big money, through both chambers of congress, both political parties, the white house, and all the way to both liberal and conservative wings of the US Supreme Court. That’s why and how the whole economic game has been legislatively rigged against the 99 percent. Elizabeth Warren is our champion.

The letter is below. It should also have been addressed to Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, as well as Wall Street President Barack Obama.

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Video: US Senator Elizabeth Warren Introduces the the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act

US Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act on May 10, 2013. She made several good points about student loans, the most depressing one being that interest rates for new subsidized student loans will increase from 3.4 to 6.8 percent on July 1, unless congress does something about it.

She noted that banks get to borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0.75 percent, the same banks that destroyed the economy. The Federal Reserve has also lent and or given out tens of trillions of dollars to the banks on behalf of rich investors, so yes we can afford to push interest rates down on student loans.

However, the banks have investors who want more and more profits, while students only invest in themselves. Student loans are purchased by Wall Street investment banks, who then slice and dice them, and sell bonds backed by the loans to rich investors. Much of the monthly loan payments made by students go directly into the pockets of investors.

Consequently, the current purpose of student loans are to redistribute income from the borrowers to rich investors. As they examine the bill, everybody in congress and on Wall Street will look at it and wonder, why would any investor buy bonds backed by such low interest rates?

So don’t expect congress to vote yes on the bill without sizable pressure from voters calling them to support it. And, of course, the corporate press will be sure to never mention that the bill exists, except perhaps in the least obvious way, like in small print on page 57, or with a five second clip on the 2am news. That way they won’t alarm the general population to act on federal legislation to their benefit and people won’t call Wall Street’s congressional representatives, such as Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Earl Blumenauer. That way Wall Street hacks won’t complain to the editors.

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wall street fraudsters ripped you off again and Guess what Obama’s Justice department is going to do about it for you

How would you feel if a bunch thugs stole your money in broad daylight, were caught red-handed, and they were immune from the law, could not be convicted, and they got to keep your money?

Guess who recently did that to you? The banksters! People are calling it the LIBOR scandal. Sixteen banks, like Citibank and Bank of America, decided not to compete with each other, which is normal business for them. But this time they got caught setting their interest rates at higher levels than if they’d been competing, which coincidentally, is illegal.

This was a massive income redistribution scam from the 99 to the 1 percent. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that was stolen by collusion from the 99 percent. Did you know that the 1 percent have gained $5.6 Trillion in this supposed economic recovery, while the rest of us have lost $669 billion?
That’s because most of their gains have been stolen from us.

The US Justice Department has decided the banks are too big to go after, even though they were caught months ago. This really means the banks have been handing out a ton of money to politicians to not go after them; they’ve been handing out the money they stole from us so that the political hacks such as Barack Obama and Eric Holder stand up for the right of the banks (which are tools of the 1 percent) to rip off every one else.

It’s time to end the madness of corruption. Let’s begin to form a broad alliance that can take back our government from thieves and liars, like Wall Street’s Senator Ron Wyden and his buddy, Wall Street Congressman Paul Ryan.

That’s what the Democratic and Republican parties stand for. Click on the link below for the full story.

your-retirement-bottle-champagne-how-wall-street-fraudsters-ripped-you-again

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What Would Happen if Non-Corporate Democrats Were Stacked on the Senate Finance Committee Rather Than Wall Street Toadies Like Ron Wyden?

What Would Happen if Non-Corporate Democrats Were Stacked on the Senate Finance Committee Rather Than Wall Street Toadies Like Ron Wyden?

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The Rigged Game: Wall Street Banks and the Big Government Handout

Wall Street Banks and the Big Government Handout: These banks give out high dividends from the taxpayers to their rich welfare-shareholders and CEOs. The game is rigged against the 99 percent because the 1 percent own the goverment, lock, stock and barrel. Just ask Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden.

Do you want to see how much Wall Street has gotten from the Federal Reserve? Check out this link; http://johnhively.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/breakdown-of-the-26-trillion-the-federal-reserve-handed-out-to-save-rich-incompetent-investors-but-who-purchase-political-power/

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Job Prospects Dim For the Class of 2013

In The Class of 2013 young graduates still face dim job prospects. For the fifth consecutive year, new graduates will enter a profoundly weak labor market and will face high unemployment and underemployment rates and depressed wages. In this report from the Economic Policy Institute, the authors show how the Great Recession and its aftermath have harmed young workers’ current job and earnings prospects. They also detail the long-term consequences, including reduced earnings, greater earnings instability, and more spells of unemployment for at least the next decade. But here’s what the authors won’t tell you.

Currently, the 1 percent steal via their plutocrats in public office about 32 percent of all the income produced in the USA, up from 8 percent thirty-three years ago, and that is growing. That leaves less money for the rest of to buy things that produce jobs, like cars and food. Meanwhile, the 1 percent invest in redistributing more income from the 99 to the 1 percent, like purchasing the favors of politicians such as Wall Street Senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch. Why are jobs in such short supply? Look no further than Wyden and Hatch. They’re the tip of the legislative ice berg when it comes to redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent. It’s called corruption.

Click the link below for the full story.

Job Prospects Dim–Economic Policy Institute

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The Battle for the Soul of the United States

Despite such terminology as “fiscal cliff” and “debt ceiling,” the great debate taking place in Washington now has relatively little to do with financial issues. It’s all about economic winners and losers in American society, about Wall Street and Big Money, and how they’ve gotten control of both political parties. Senator Bernie Sanders says “It is all about the soul of America.”

In the following article by Senator Sanders, he doesn’t mention corruption, he simply implies it. Big Oil, Big Money, these are the phrases he uses. But Big Oil and Big Money have to have bought something with their money. They’ve purchased politicians, with political contributions, with personal favors, such as lobbying jobs after they’re finished raping and pillaging the middle class on behalf of Wall Street. You know who I’m talking about: Ron Wyden, Orrin Hatch, John Boehner, Barack Obama, and so many others. Corruption is rampant in the US government.

The Senator writes, “In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth, and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent.

Despite the reality that the rich are becoming much richer while the middle class collapses and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high, the Republicans and their billionaire backers want more, more, and more. The class warfare continues.

My Republican colleagues say that the deficits are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. What these deficit-hawk hypocrites won’t talk about is their spending. They won’t discuss what they did to dig the country into this $1 trillion deep deficit hole. They waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. They gave away huge tax breaks for the rich. They squandered taxpayer dollars on the pharmaceutical industry by making it illegal for Medicare to bargain for lower drug prices. They also rescinded financial regulations that enabled Wall Street to operate like a gambling casino, leading to a severe recession that eroded tax revenue and left more than 14 percent of American workers unemployed or underemployed.

Now, despite the deficits their policies helped to create and despite the enormous suffering which exists in our society, the Republicans want to cut Social Security, veterans’ programs, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition programs, and virtually every program which benefits low- and moderate-income Americans. They choose to turn their backs on the economic reality facing a significant part of our population: high unemployment, reduced wages, 50 million without health insurance, college graduates saddled with enormous student debt and elderly people living in desperation. And they have tried to slam the door on any further discussion about how to raise revenue by ending tax loopholes and unfair tax breaks.

Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who say the revenue debate is over don’t want you to consider these facts:

• Federal revenue today, at 15.8 percent of GDP, is lower today than it was 60 years ago. During the last year of the Clinton administration, when we had a significant federal surplus, federal revenue was 20.6 percent of GDP.

• Today corporate profits are at an all-time high, while corporate income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is near a record low.

• In 2011, corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP was just 1.2 percent — lower than any other major country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Poland, and Iceland.

• In 2011, corporations paid just 12 percent of their profits in taxes, the lowest since 1972.

• In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all while they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period.

We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats? Will President Obama fulfill his campaign pledge to “protect the middle class” or will he surrender to right-wing blackmail? Will Democrats in the House and Senate stand with the vast majority of our citizens and such organizations as AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the AFL-CIO, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and every other veterans’ organization in the fight against cuts to Social Security and veterans’ programs, or will they agree to a disastrous corporate-backed “chained CPI” concept which makes major benefit cuts to those programs and raises taxes on low-income workers?

The simple truth is there are relatively easy ways to deal with the deficit crisis — without attacking the elderly, the children the sick or the poor.

For example, we have got to eliminate loopholes in the tax code that allow large corporations and the wealthy to avoid more than $100 billion in taxes every year by setting up offshore tax shelters in places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas. This situation has become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the “home” to more than 18,000 corporations.

Further, we must also end tax breaks for companies shipping American jobs overseas. Today, the United State government continues to reward companies that move American manufacturing jobs abroad, despite the fact that millions of American jobs have been outsourced to China, Mexico, and other low wage countries over the past decade. The Joint Committee on Taxation (the official revenue scorekeeper in Congress) has estimated that we could raise more than $582 billion in revenue over the next decade by eliminating these offshore tax loopholes.

We must also recognize that Wall Street recklessness caused the economic crisis, and it has a responsibility to reduce the deficit. Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.

We are entering a pivotal moment in the modern history of our country. Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans — working families, children, the elderly, the poor — or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.”

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Book Review: The End of the Free Market by Ian Bremmer

This is an incredibly dumb book and it’s very boring. It lacks clarity and decent research to back up it’s point, whatever it is. For example, the author implies that the Smoot-Hawley Act was responsible for the depth of the Great Depression, yet all academic studies show that the act had little impact on the severity of the Great depression. On top of that, Bremmer argues that modern nations don’t attack each other much, but “In 2010, the US troops are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they’re struggling to overcome militants and insurgents, not foreign military powers.”

How brain dead can one get? The United States was not invited by the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan to help them against militants and insurgents. Apparently, Ian Bremmer doesn’t know the United States invaded and occupied those nations. That’s how profoundly stupid this book is.

The central argument of the book is that Wall Street is good, although he doesn’t say for what, and that free trade is good, although he doesn’t say for what. All Wall Street needs is more regulation. As if Wall Street would want that.

An accompanying argument is that foreign governments own corporations that compete with private US corporations. And they do this for political purposes. Duh! But the author’s ignorance is so enormous that he cannot comprehend that US corporations own the US government, lock, stock and barrel. For example, agents of the Monsanto corporation wrote the recently passed Monsanto Protection Act that congress passed and President Obama signed. Wall Street investment banks don’t want more regulation, and so the government of which they are the primary shareholders via their investments in politicians, such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, isn’t going to regulate them.

Bremmer is woefully ignorant on too many levels to be taken seriously. He doesn’t comprehend how free trade treaties, for example, redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent and wreck the economy in the process. According the Federal Reserve, over 27 million US jobs have been off shored since Nafta. The difference between the old higher wages and the new lower wages gets redistributed into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate earnings, rising share prices and more dividends.

This book doesn’t even deserve one star because it reads like a apology and justification for Wall Street and the many crimes committed by its CEO’s, lawyers, traders and others. It’s pure pointless propaganda with a weak central argument.

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US Corporate President Barack Obama Signs the Monsanto Protection Act Into Law

While Hungarians were burning corn fields planted illegally with seeds from Monsanto, US Corporate President of the 1 Percent Barack Obama signed into law….well, the captions of the photos say it all.

GMO foods have been linked to the rise of cancer and the worldwide allergy epidemic. In addition, some people have noted the strange coincidence of the rise of the obesity epidemic in the US and the spread of genetically modified foods over the last twenty years. Soy beans are in many US food products, such as ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, etc…. Ninety percent of all Soy Beans harvested in the US are genetically modified. And we’re not allowed to know this crap is in our food.

Obama has done something simple. He has redistributed our right to know and our health to the bottom lines of the manufacturers of GMO food products. It’s all about making the rich more affluent at the expense of the rest of us.

Get over it liberals. Obama is not a populist, nor even a Democrat. He’s an old fashioned right of center corporate drone, like Wall Street senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch.

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Does Obama’a Secret Negotiations Aim to Destroy the Constitution and Redistribute Income and Wealth From the 99 to the 1 Percent

Obama’s plan

Labor, trade, health and environmental Advocates are urging open negotiations, protections for American workers as the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Deal is being negotiated. The Guardian newspaper calls the trade pact the largest in history, “Nafta on Steroids” and “an end run around the US Constitution.”

On the eve of his fifth State of The Union Address, President Barack Obama was urged by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and a broad coalition of progressive organizations to ensure that strong, enforceable labor, health and environmental protections are included as part of the largest “free” trade agreement ever negotiated by the U.S. The president most likely doesn’t care about these issues since the current negotiations will likely send 200,000 low paying textile jobs in El Salvador to lower paying Vietnam. This will cause tens of thousands of US textile workers to lose their jobs since many US textile workers manufacture thread, fabric and yarn and export them to El Salvador. About 2 percent of all US manufacturing exports are textiles. Vietnamese textile firms, on the other hand, get their thread, fabric and yarn from Chinese businesses. So Chinese workers will likely get American jobs, while Vietnamese workers get the jobs of 200,000 people in El Salvador. Good job President Obama! The difference between the old wages in El Salvador and the new lower wages in Vietnam will go into the pockets of rich shareholders. The same holds true of the US jobs that will be lost to China. In other words, the TPP is another income redistribution scam, just like all the rest.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership currently is being negotiated in secret among the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Roughly 600 corporate lobbyists have access to the negotiations and nobody else does, not even Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Trade, and one of Wall Street’s fiercest warriors in their financial plundering and rape of the middle class.

“Unless President Obama insists on strict standards of openness and iron-clad protections for American workers, the TPP will likely become the biggest and most destructive free trade agreement we’ve ever seen,” said CWA Chief of Staff Ron Collins. “This agreement will provide even more incentives for corporations to off-shore U.S. manufacturing and service jobs to countries like Vietnam which pay extremely low wages and suppress workers’ rights. Also, it could lead to lower wages and benefits in the U.S. as the remaining U.S. employers are forced to compete with these low wage countries. These same incentives will further erode labor rights, health and environmental protections among all participants. It would be part of a global race to the bottom that only benefits multi-national corporations.”

Collins noted that CWA and the other organizations support fair trade, but not the giveaway of jobs that has been the outcome of previous agreements, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the entry of China into the World Trade Organization. The current TPP process has given corporate lobbyists access to all negotiating documents, while the public is shut out of any discussion.

“We will only support trade agreements that secure fundamental labor rights for workers and fundamental protections for our health and environment in America and abroad,” Collins said.

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