Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail | Politics News By Matt Taibbi | At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. All the government bailouts succeeded in doing was to make the bank even more prone to catastrophic failure – and now that catastrophe might finally be at hand. Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. And why? And man, what a lot of fraud!
Flip The Debt Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash | Threat Level House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Howard McKeon, (R-California), speaks to reporters following a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, May 21, 2013. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters. That’s the upshot of a new analysis by MapLight, a Berkeley-based non-profit that performed the inquiry at WIRED’s request. Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets.
Le Trésor américain accusé d’avoir vendu le monde aux banquiers Lorsqu’il a obtenu ce mémo [PDF], l’écrivain et journaliste d’investigation américain Greg Palast « n’arrivait simplement pas à y croire ». Selon lui, ce document – qu’il affirme authentique – est digne des pires théories complotistes : « A la fin des années 1990, les hauts fonctionnaires du Trésor américain ont conspiré en secret avec une petite cabale de gros bonnets du secteur bancaire pour tailler en pièces la régulation financière dans le monde entier. » Capture d’écran du mémo Greg Palast ne précise pas comment il a authentifié le document, mais avec sa longue carrière d’enquêteur pour des cabinets d’audit anti-trust et anticorruption, et de nombreuses investigations pour la BBC, The Observer et The Guardian, il ne fait aucun doute que ses preuves sont solides. Une cabale politico-financière Ce mémorandum ne serait donc rien de moins que la genèse de la crise financière mondiale et du « sang et des larmes » qui en ont coulé. Daté du 24 novembre 1997, son auteur Timothy F.
the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable. The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. The Zurich team can. So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. 1. (Data: PLoS One)
Revolving Door This is a Call to Action for a Non-Hierarchical Occupation of Monsanto Everywhere Whether you like it or not, chances are Monsanto contaminated the food you ate today with chemicals and unlabeled GMOs. Monsanto controls much of the world's food supply at the expense of food democracy worldwide. Political heavyweight Monsanto took on an Indiana soybean farmer today in the U.S. And, once again, Justice Clarence Thomas was on the bench, hearing the case with the other justices. Some have criticized Thomas’ participation in cases involving a previous employer. Thomas knows something about the subject of today’s case: In 2001, he authored an important decision in this field, J. At issue today were Monsanto’s patents of its herbicide-resistant seed. That’s where Monsanto took issue. Monsanto typically reaches a settlement with farmers it has sued for patent infringement. Clarence Thomas aside, Monsanto has plenty of other ties to Washington. Source: The Center for Responsive Politics
"La finance dérégulée nous condamne aux krachs" Un bureau grand comme un mouchoir de poche, grignoté par des piles de dossiers et des rayonnages de livres. Et un pupitre pour tout meuble, surplombé d'une affiche au titre ironique : Manifeste des "sagesses boursières"... jamais respectées. Justement, les folies financières et les bulles de marché, André Orléan, professeur à l'Ecole d'économie de Paris, les scrute et les dissèque depuis longtemps à la façon d'un biologiste. Apparemment, pour l'auteur de L'Empire de la valeur (Seuil) et de De l'euphorie à la panique (Editions Rue d'Ulm), la série des krachs entamée depuis une douzaine d'années risque de se poursuivre. Mouvements erratiques des actions, chute de l'or, recul des marchés émergents, bulle sur quelques obligations d'Etat... Cette situation d'extrême nervosité sur tous les marchés - et non pas quelques-uns - est-elle inédite dans l'histoire? Non. Cette situation est fort risquée. Pouvez-vous nous en dire un peu plus sur ce paradoxe? Absolument. Mais alors, que proposez-vous?
The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever | Politics News Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia Why? The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. "You name it," says Frenk.
AND THE BAND PLAYED ON A confluence of events last week has me reminiscing about the days gone by and apprehensive about the future. I’ve spent a substantial portion of my adulthood rushing to baseball fields, hockey rinks, gymnasiums, and school auditoriums after a long day at work. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed every moment. Watching eight year olds trying to throw a strike for two hours can become excruciatingly mind-numbing. But, the years of baseball, hockey, basketball, and band taught my boys life lessons about teamwork, sportsmanship, winning, losing, hard work, and having fun. There were championship teams, awful teams and of course trophies for finishing in 7th place. My youngest son was one of a hundred kids in the 8th grade choir. The Millennial generation was born between 1982 and 2004. Are Millennials addicted to their iGadgets, cell phones and Facebook pages? There are no Millennials among the 535 corrupt bought off politicians slithering down the halls of Congress. Generational Bridge
140 Years Of Monetary History In 10 Minutes C’est la bulle finale J'avais consacré l'édito du 14 mai dernier du Contrarien Matin à « la bulle finale ». Voilà ce que je disais il y a presque quinze jours sur la notion de peur qui, quand elle disparaît, montre et démontre que nous sommes en pleine bulle financière : « La définition d'une bulle, c'est lorsque les « zinvestisseurs » n'ont plus peur de rien, qu'ils n'ont plus peur de perdre, qu'il y a un sentiment général où on ne « peut que gagner ». Le sentiment de peur fait partie de tout être humain. Lorsque l'on ne perçoit plus le danger, on peut dire que nos sens physiques ou psychiques sont altérés et cela aura pour conséquence directe une diminution considérable de notre espérance de vie. » Un beau gadin au Japon ! Pour rester dans l'histoire, il faut savoir que ce genre de configurations techniques signe en général un renversement durable de tendance sur fond d'un retour de la peur. La peur, le retour ! La question devient : comment en sortir ? Alors pourquoi en sortir ? Maintenant comment en sortir ?