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Gary Edwards

Who owns the Bank of England? |Dark Politricks - 0 views

www.darkpolitricks.com/...who-owns-the-bank-of-england

banksters Banksters-of-America Rothschild-Bank-of-England

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13
     
    "Who owns the Bank of England? A brief history of World Banksters By Dark Politricks First a few historical comments by people who helped create two of the worlds most famous central banks, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence The Bank of England was created in 1694 by a Scotsman William Paterson who famously said: The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. - William Paterson The history of the Bank of England and how it was taken over by one powerful family hundreds of years ago. Up until 1946 when it was nationalised the Bank of England was a private run bank that lent money it created out of nothing to the English government and was paid back with interest. A very famous story relates to the Bank of England and the infamous Rothschilds, that all powerful banking family. This story was re-told recently in a BBC documentary about the creation of money and the Bank of England. It revolves around the Battle of Waterloo in which Nathan Rothschild used his inside knowledge of the outcome and his faster horses and couriers to play the market by getting the result of the battle before anyone else knew the outcome. He quickly sold his English bonds and gave all the traders who looked to him for guidance the impression that the French had won at Waterloo. The other traders all rus
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

BofA Said to Split Regulators Over Moving Merrill Derivatives to Bank Unit - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-derivatives-to-bank-unit.html

banksters toxic-derivatives BoA JPMorgan FDIC Dodd-Frank too-big-to-fail

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.
  • Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC- insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms. “The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”
  • Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Bank of America’s long-term credit ratings Sept. 21, cutting both the holding company and the retail bank two notches apiece. The holding company fell to Baa1, the third-lowest investment-grade rank, from A2, while the retail bank declined to A2 from Aa3.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Moody’s downgrade spurred some of Merrill’s partners to ask that contracts be moved to the retail unit, which has a higher credit rating, according to people familiar with the transactions. Transferring derivatives also can help the parent company minimize the collateral it must post on contracts and the potential costs to terminate trades after Moody’s decision, said a person familiar with the matter. Bank of America estimated in an August regulatory filing that a two-level downgrade by all ratings companies would have required that it post $3.3 billion in additional collateral and termination payments, based on over-the-counter derivatives and other trading agreements as of June 30. The figure doesn’t include possible collateral payments due to “variable interest entities,” which the firm is evaluating, it said in the filing.
  • Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates. Dodd-Frank Rules Keeping such deals separate from FDIC-insured savings has been a cornerstone of U.S. regulation for decades, including last year’s Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulation. The legislation gave the FDIC, which liquidates failing banks, expanded powers to dismantle large financial institutions in danger of failing. The agency can borrow from the Treasury Department to finance the biggest lenders’ operations to stem bank runs. It’s required to recoup taxpayer money used during the resolution process through fees on the largest firms.
  • Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
  • Moving derivatives contracts between units of a bank holding company is limited under Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which is designed to prevent a lender’s affiliates from benefiting from its federal subsidy and to protect the bank from excessive risk originating at the non-bank affiliate, said Saule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. “Congress doesn’t want a bank’s FDIC insurance and access to the Fed discount window to somehow benefit an affiliate, so they created a firewall,” Omarova said. The discount window has been open to banks as the lender of last resort since 1914. As a general rule, as long as transactions involve high- quality assets and don’t exceed certain quantitative limitations, they should be allowed under the Federal Reserve Act, Omarova said.
  • In 2009, the Fed granted Section 23A exemptions to the banking arms of Ally Financial Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Fifth Third Bancorp, ING Groep NV, General Electric Co., Northern Trust Corp., CIT Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., among others, according to letters posted on the Fed’s website. The central bank terminated exemptions last year for retail-banking units of JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Deutsche Bank AG. The Fed also ended an exemption for Bank of America in March 2010 and in September of that year approved a new one. Section 23A “is among the most important tools that U.S. bank regulators have to protect the safety and soundness of U.S. banks,” Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, told Congress in March 2008.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 13
     
    So according to Bloomberg, JPMorgan's commercial bank was the recipient of 99 percent of JPMorgan's $79 trillion (face value of derivatives) in bad bets. So adding JPMorgan's $78 trillion or so to the $75 trillion in bad bets Bank of America unloaded on its FDIC insured subsidiary, we arrive at $153 trillion in bad bets moved by two investment banks alone under the FDIC umbrella. Meanwhile, FDIC has authority under Dodd-Frank to liquidate these insolvent banks but doesn't, despite several successful lawsuits to recover the value of toxic derivatives that they sold to smaller banks that failed (which implies that FDIC could tell JPMorgan and BoA's investment banksters that they've got to pay off the toxic assets they transferred to their commercial banks, rather than diluting the insurance for normal depositors. Problem: the two big investment banks don't have sufficient assets to absorb those losses, so the too-politically-connected-to-fail factor kicks in. Note that I have not done any legal research in regard to these issues and am basing these observations on what has been stated about legal requirements in various media articles.
Gary Edwards

The Federal Reserve is a privately owned Corporation « orwelliania - 0 views

orwelliania.wordpress.com/...-a-privately-owned-corporation

End-the-Fed Banksters Globalist Rothschild-Banksters Central-Banks

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jun 12
     
    Incredible.  Watch your breathing rate as you read this.  Otherwise you might pass out. excerpt: Who actually owns the Federal Reserve Central Banks? The ownership of the 12 Central banks, a very well kept secret, has been revealed: Rothschild Bank of London Warburg Bank of Hamburg Rothschild Bank of Berlin Lehman Brothers of New York Lazard Brothers of Paris Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy Goldman, Sachs of New York Warburg Bank of Amsterdam Chase Manhattan Bank of New York (Reference 14, P. 13, Reference 12, P. 152) These bankers are connected to London Banking Houses which ultimately control the FED. When England lost the Revolutionary War with America (our forefathers were fighting their own government), they planned to control us by controlling our banking system, the printing of our money, and our debt (Reference 4, 22). The individuals listed below owned banks which in turn owned shares in the FED. The banks listed below have significant control over the New York FED District, which controls the other 11 FED Districts. These banks also are partly foreign owned and control the New York FED District Bank. (Reference 22) First National Bank of New York James Stillman National City Bank, New York Mary W. Harnman National Bank of Commerce, New York A.D. Jiullard Hanover National Bank, New York Jacob Schiff Chase National Bank, New York Thomas F. Ryan Paul Warburg William Rockefeller Levi P. Morton M.T. Pyne George F. Baker Percy Pyne Mrs. G.F. St. George J.W. Sterling Katherine St. George H.P. Davidson J.P. Morgan (Equitable Life/Mutual Life) Edith Brevour T. Baker (Reference 4 for above, Reference 22 has details, P. 92, 93, 96, 179) How did it happen? After previous attempts to push the Federal Reserve Act through Congress, a group of bankers funded and staffed Woodrow Wilson's campaign for President. He had committed to sign this act. In 1913, a Senator, Nelson Aldrich, maternal grandfather to the Rockefell
Paul Merrell

It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors | WEB OF D... - 0 views

webofdebt.wordpress.com/...anned-for-us-and-uk-depositors

financial-collapse Cyprus banksters U.S. confiscation

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.  
  • Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.”  The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.
  • No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks.  The directive is called a “resolution process,” defined elsewhere as a plan that “would be triggered in the event of the failure of an insurer . . . .”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.”  It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state: An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.
  • If our IOUs are converted to bank stock, they will no longer be subject to insurance protection but will be “at risk” and vulnerable to being wiped out, just as the Lehman Brothers shareholders were in 2008.  That this dire scenario could actually materialize was underscored by Yves Smith in a March 19th post titled When You Weren’t Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives.  She writes: In the US, depositors have actually been put in a worse position than Cyprus deposit-holders, at least if they are at the big banks that play in the derivatives casino. The regulators have turned a blind eye as banks use their depositaries to fund derivatives exposures. And as bad as that is, the depositors, unlike their Cypriot confreres, aren’t even senior creditors. Remember Lehman? When the investment bank failed, unsecured creditors (and remember, depositors are unsecured creditors) got eight cents on the dollar. One big reason was that derivatives counterparties require collateral for any exposures, meaning they are secured creditors. The 2005 bankruptcy reforms made derivatives counterparties senior to unsecured lenders.
  • Smith writes: Lehman had only two itty bitty banking subsidiaries, and to my knowledge, was not gathering retail deposits. But as readers may recall, Bank of America moved most of its derivatives from its Merrill Lynch operation [to] its depositary in late 2011. Its “depositary” is the arm of the bank that takes deposits; and at B of A, that means lots and lots of deposits. The deposits are now subject to being wiped out by a major derivatives loss. How bad could that be? Smith quotes Bloomberg: . . . Bank of America’s holding company . . . held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June . . . . That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
  • $75 trillion and $79 trillion in derivatives! These two mega-banks alone hold more in notional derivatives each than the entire global GDP (at $70 trillion).
  • Smith goes on: . . . Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. . . . Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral. But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough in deposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. Perhaps, but Congress has already been burned and is liable to balk a second time. Section 716 of the Dodd-Frank Act specifically prohibits public support for speculative derivatives activities.
  • An FDIC confiscation of deposits to recapitalize the banks is far different from a simple tax on taxpayers to pay government expenses. The government’s debt is at least arguably the people’s debt, since the government is there to provide services for the people. But when the banks get into trouble with their derivative schemes, they are not serving depositors, who are not getting a cut of the profits. Taking depositor funds is simply theft. What should be done is to raise FDIC insurance premiums and make the banks pay to keep their depositors whole, but premiums are already high; and the FDIC, like other government regulatory agencies, is subject to regulatory capture.  Deposit insurance has failed, and so has the private banking system that has depended on it for the trust that makes banking work.
  • The Cyprus haircut on depositors was called a “wealth tax” and was written off by commentators as “deserved,” because much of the money in Cypriot accounts belongs to foreign oligarchs, tax dodgers and money launderers. But if that template is applied in the US, it will be a tax on the poor and middle class. Wealthy Americans don’t keep most of their money in bank accounts.  They keep it in the stock market, in real estate, in over-the-counter derivatives, in gold and silver, and so forth. Are you safe, then, if your money is in gold and silver? Apparently not – if it’s stored in a safety deposit box in the bank.  Homeland Security has reportedly told banks that it has authority to seize the contents of safety deposit boxes without a warrant when it’s a matter of “national security,” which a major bank crisis no doubt will be.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Apr 13
     
    Time to get your money out of the bank and into gold or silver, kept somewhere other than in a bank safety deposit box. 
Gary Edwards

The Biggest Financial Scam In World History           : Information Clearing ... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31768.htm

banksters LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12
     
    Marbux sent me this link to series of videos explaining the LiBOR bankster crisis.  The awesome Bill Black is featured in two of the video interviews.  Others include Matt Taibi of the Rolling Stone Magazine.  Matt's work on bankster criminals is legendary.  This is incredible stuff.  Very heated.  Clearly we are at the heart of the largest criminal fraud ever perpetrated, and it involves the worlds largest banksters.  Including the Queen of England (Bank of England).  $800 Trillion in fraud.  Incredible. Yes, the Libor Scandal Affects You By Jack Hough July 06, 2012 "Smart Money" - -A liger is a cross between a lion and a tiger. Libor, on the other hand, is a daily approximation of what banks charge each other for loans. It turns out only one of these things is real. Awkwardly, it's not the one used to set prices on an estimated $800 trillion in global financial instruments, or $116,000 worth for each person on earth, ranging from complex derivatives to student loans. That's a problem for holders of bank stocks - which includes just about anyone who owns a mutual fund or 401(k). Barclays (BCS) agreed last week to pay $453 million to settle allegations that it manipulated Libor, which stands for London interbank offered rate. As The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, it's likely only the first: More than a dozen banks on three continents are under investigation. Libor is compiled by asking 18 banks what they think they would pay if they needed money. Some banks may have submitted artificially low responses during the global financial crisis to give the appearance of high creditworthiness. Others may have tinkered with the reading to profit from trades, or avoid losses. The Barclays settlement is affordable, at less than 7% of the company's projected profits this year, but the size of legal claims it and other banks face is difficult to imagine. Trial lawyers will do their best to work out the sums, of course. Libor may have been subject
Paul Merrell

It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34442.htm

banksters confiscation financial-collapse FDIC

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.  
  • Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.”  The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.
  • The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.”  It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state: An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks.
  • If our IOUs are converted to bank stock, they will no longer be subject to insurance protection but will be “at risk” and vulnerable to being wiped out, just as the Lehman Brothers shareholders were in 2008.  That this dire scenario could actually materialize was underscored by Yves Smith in a March 19th post titled When You Weren’t Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives.  She writes: In the US, depositors have actually been put in a worse position than Cyprus deposit-holders, at least if they are at the big banks that play in the derivatives casino. The regulators have turned a blind eye as banks use their depositaries to fund derivatives exposures. And as bad as that is, the depositors, unlike their Cypriot confreres, aren’t even senior creditors. Remember Lehman? When the investment bank failed, unsecured creditors (and remember, depositors are unsecured creditors) got eight cents on the dollar. One big reason was that derivatives counterparties require collateral for any exposures, meaning they are secured creditors. The 2005 bankruptcy reforms made derivatives counterparties senior to unsecured lenders.
  • One might wonder why the posting of collateral by a derivative counterparty, at some percentage of full exposure, makes the creditor “secured,” while the depositor who puts up 100 cents on the dollar is “unsecured.” But moving on – Smith writes: Lehman had only two itty bitty banking subsidiaries, and to my knowledge, was not gathering retail deposits. But as readers may recall, Bank of America moved most of its derivatives from its Merrill Lynch operation [to] its depositary in late 2011. Its “depositary” is the arm of the bank that takes deposits; and at B of A, that means lots and lots of deposits. The deposits are now subject to being wiped out by a major derivatives loss. How bad could that be? Smith quotes Bloomberg:
  • . . . Bank of America’s holding company . . . held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June . . . . That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show. $75 trillion and $79 trillion in derivatives! These two mega-banks alone hold more in notional derivatives each than the entire global GDP (at $70 trillion).
  • Are you safe, then, if your money is in gold and silver? Apparently not – if it’s stored in a safety deposit box in the bank.  Homeland Security has reportedly told banks that it has authority to seize the contents of safety deposit boxes without a warrant when it’s a matter of “national security,” which a major bank crisis no doubt will be.
  • Another alternative was considered but rejected by President Obama in 2009: nationalize mega-banks that fail. In a February 2009 article titled “Are Uninsured Bank Depositors in Danger?“, Felix Salmon discussed a newsletter by Asia-based investment strategist Christopher Wood, in which Wood wrote: It is . . . amazing that Obama does not understand the political appeal of the nationalization option. . . . [D]espite this latest setback nationalization of the banks is coming sooner or later because the realities of the situation will demand it. The result will be shareholders wiped out and bondholders forced to take debt-for-equity swaps, if not hopefully depositors.
  • President Obama acknowledged that bank nationalization had worked in Sweden, and that the course pursued by the US Fed had not worked in Japan, which wound up instead in a “lost decade.”  But Obama opted for the Japanese approach because, according to Ed Harrison, “Americans will not tolerate nationalization.” But that was four years ago. When Americans realize that the alternative is to have their ready cash transformed into “bank stock” of questionable marketability, moving failed mega-banks into the public sector may start to have more appeal.
Paul Merrell

Killing Off Community Banks - Intended Consequence of Dodd-Frank? | WEB OF DEBT BLOG - 0 views

ellenbrown.com/...nded-consequence-of-dodd-frank

banksters consolidation Dodd-Frank community-banks too-big-to-fail too-big-to-jail too-big-to-regulate

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Dodd-Frank regulations are so lethal to community banks that some say the intent was to force them to sell out to the megabanks. Community banks are rapidly disappearing — except in North Dakota, where they are thriving.  At over 2,300 pages, the Dodd Frank Act is the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature. It was supposed to end “too big to fail” and “bailouts,” and to “promote financial stability.” But Dodd-Frank’s “orderly liquidation authority” has replaced bailouts with bail-ins, meaning that in the event of insolvency, big banks are to recapitalize themselves with the savings of their creditors and depositors. The banks deemed too big are more than 30% bigger than before the Act was passed in 2010, and 80% bigger than before the banking crisis of 2008. The six largest US financial institutions now have assets of some $10 trillion, amounting to almost 60% of GDP; and they control nearly 50% of all bank deposits.
  • Meanwhile, their smaller competitors are struggling to survive. Community banks and credit unions are disappearing at the rate of one a day. Access to local banking services is disappearing along with them. Small and medium-size businesses – the ones that hire two-thirds of new employees – are having trouble getting loans; students are struggling with sky-high interest rates; homeowners have been replaced by hedge funds acting as absentee landlords; and bank fees are up, increasing the rolls of the unbanked and underbanked, and driving them into the predatory arms of payday lenders. Even some well-heeled clients are being rejected. In an October 19, 2015 article titled  “Big Banks to America’s Firms: We Don’t Want Your Cash,” the Wall Street Journal reported that some Wall Street banks are now telling big depositors to take their money elsewhere or be charged a deposit fee. Municipal governments are also being rejected as customers. Bank of America just announced that it no longer wants the business of some smaller cities, which have been given 90 days to find somewhere else to put their money. Hundreds of local BofA branches are also disappearing.
  • Hardest hit, however, are the community banks. Today there are 1,524 fewer banks with assets under $1 billion than there were in June 2010, before the Dodd-Frank regulations were signed into law. Collateral Damage or Intended Result?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Obviously, making the big banks bigger also serves the interests of the megabanks, whose lobbyists are well known to have their fingerprints all over the legislation. How they have been able to manipulate the rules was seen last December, when legislation drafted by Citigroup and slipped into the Omnibus Spending Bill loosened the Dodd-Frank regulations on derivatives. As noted in a Mother Jones article before the legislation was passed: The Citi-drafted legislation will benefit five of the largest banks in the country—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. These financial institutions control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. If this measure becomes law, these banks will be able to use FDIC-insured money to bet on nearly anything they want. And if there’s another economic downturn, they can count on a taxpayer bailout of their derivatives trading business.
  • Regulation is clearly inadequate to keep these banks honest and ensure that they serve the public interest. The world’s largest private banks have been caught in criminal acts that former bank fraud investigator Prof. William K. Black calls the greatest frauds in history. The litany of frauds involves more than a dozen felonies, including bid-rigging on municipal bond debt; colluding to rig interest rates on hundreds of trillions of dollars in mortgages, derivatives and other contracts; exposing investors to excessive risk; and engaging in multiple forms of mortgage fraud. According to US Attorney General Eric Holder, the guilty have gone unpunished because they are “too big to prosecute.” If they are too big to prosecute, they are too big to regulate.
Gary Edwards

The Sad Story Of The Privately Owned Federal Reserve Bank - 1 views

www.apfn.net/doc-100_bankruptcy27.htm

Federal-Reserve Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Dec 12
     
    "The privately owned Federal Reserve is not a government agency.  The privately owned Federal Reserve Bank (The Fed) is privately owned by a group of primarily foreign bankers.  In 1913, Congress sank America into eternal debt by giving the power to issue currency and control the American economic system to the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank.  Who are the owners or chief shareholders of the privately owned Federal Reserve?     Originally, there were reportedly 203,053 shares of privately owned Federal Reserve stock, of which approximately 65% were owned by foreigners and approximately 35%(72,000 shares) were:  1. Rockefellers' National City Bank = 30,000 shares  2. Chase National = 6,000 shares (currently Chase Manhattan and owned by David Rockefeller)  3. The National Bank of Commerce = 21,000 shares (now known as Morgan Guaranty Trust)  4. Morgans' First national Bank = 15,000 shares  Interestingly, the total shares owned by Rockefellers interests equal 36,000 shares and the total of Morgans' equals 36,000 shares.  Although the privately owned Federal Reserve Act of 1913 provided the names of the owner banks be kept a secret, R.E. McMaster, publisher of the newsletter" The Reaper" discovered, through confidential Swiss banking connections, that the following banks have controlling interest in the privately owned Federal Reserve   1. Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin  2. Lazard Brothers Bank of Paris  3. Israel Moses Sieff Banks of Italy  4. Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Germany and Amsterdam  5. Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York  6. Lehman Brothers Bank of New York  7. Goldman Sachs Bank of New York  8. Chase Manhattan Bank of New York (Controlled By Rockefellers) "
Paul Merrell

The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5376904

banksters CIA 9-11 arms-deals opium congtinuity-of-government

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6
  • In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20
  • since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague, The word “cartel” has here assumed the stigma of a bogeyman which the politicians are constantly attacking. The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic and because the political organization of the world has under such influence been so backward, business people who have had to cope realistically with international problems have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.21
  • In the 1960s and especially the 1970s America began to import more and more oil from the Middle East. But the negative effect on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increasing arms and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Contracts with companies like Northrop and especially Lockheed (the builder of the CIA’s U-2) included kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, who were also important CIA agents. Lockheed alone later admitted to the Church Committee that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times what it had paid to the next most important connection, Kodama.31 These funds were then used by Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-Western influence. But Khashoggi, advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss, distributed cash, and sometimes provided women, not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world – including cash to congressmen and President Nixon in the United States.32 Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting, and nothing else to prevent their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.33
  • The most dramatic use of off-the-books drug profits to finance foreign armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led campaign in Laos. There the CIA supplied airstrips and planes to support a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong army. At one point Laotian CIA station chief Theodore Shackley even called in CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf of the larger Royal Laotian Army.30
  • At the time of the Marshall Plan slush fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps which resulted in drug money to support anti-communist armies in the Far East. In my book American War Machine I tell how the CIA, using former OSS operative Paul Helliwell, created two proprietary firms as infrastructure for a KMT army in Burma, an army which quickly became involved in managing and developing the opium traffic there. The two firms were SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane with KMT bankers in Taiwan – this allowed the CIA to deny responsibility for the flights when CAT planes, having delivered arms from Sea Supply to the opium-growing army, then returned to Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even after the CIA officially severed its connection to the KMT Army in 1953, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc. supplied arms for a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU, that also was financed, at least in part, by the drug traffic.28 Profits from Thailand filtered back, in part through the same Paul Helliwell, as donations to members from both parties in Congress. Thai dictator Phao Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then alleged to be the richest man in the world, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to [former OSS chief William] Donovan [who in 1953-55 was US Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.29
  • The power exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to his access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward Moss owned the elite Safari Club in Kenya.34 The exclusive club became the first venue for another and more important Safari Club: an alliance between Saudi and other intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.35
  • As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni, In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.36 Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington (decisions not only of Congress but also of President Carter).
  • Specifically Khashoggi’s activities involving corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up quickly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and a principal Safari Club member, was a part-owner.37 In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied shipping empire owned by the Pakistani Gokal brothers, supplied financing and infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the decade, support for the Afghan mujahedin. To quote from a British book excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report: “BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank’s role began to surface in the mid-1980′s when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia’s cabinet as saying ‘It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.’ The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%.”38
  • In 1981 Vice-president Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, working together, won congressional approval for massive new arms sales of AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion package, only ten percent covered the cost of the planes. Most of the rest was an initial installment on what was ultimately a $200 billion program for military infrastructure through Saudi Arabia.41 It also supplied a slush fund for secret ops, one administered for over a decade in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he became the Saudi Ambassador (and a close friend of the Bush family, nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund was “the ultimate government-off-the-books.” Not long after the AWACS sale was approved, Prince Bandar thanked the Reagan administration for the vote by honoring a request by William Casey that he deposit $10 million in a Vatican bank to be used in a campaign against the Italian Communist Party. Implicit in the AWACS deal was a pledge by the Saudis to fund anticommunist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere that were supported by the Reagan Administration.42 The Vatican contribution, “for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party,” of course continued a CIA tradition dating back to 1948.
  • The activities of the Safari Club were exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the records of the US Embassy in Tehran. But BCCI support for covert CIA operations, including Iran-Contra, continued until BCCI’s criminality was exposed at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington resumed off-budget funding for CIA covert operations under cover of arms contracts to Saudi Arabia. But this was no longer achieved through kickbacks to CIA assets like Khashoggi, after Congress in 1977 made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreign officials. Instead arrangements were made for payments to be returned, through either informal agreements or secret codicils in the contracts, by the Saudi Arabian government itself. Two successive arms deals, the AWACS deal of 1981 and the al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably escalated the amount of available slush funds.
  • It is reported in two books that the BCCI money flow through the Bank of Oman was handled in part by the international financier Bruce Rappaport, who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a former CIA officer on his staff.39 Rappaport’s partner in his Inter Maritime Bank, which interlocked with BCCI, was E.P. Barry, who earlier had been a partner in the Florida money-laundering banks of Paul Helliwell.40
  • After a second proposed major U.S. arms sale met enhanced opposition in Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. Once again overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”43 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade.44 The money went through a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs Bank, Washington; according to Trento, the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in his words, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States.”45 More accurately, the financing was not for the United States, but for the American deep state.
  • This leads me to the most original and important thing I have to say. I believe that these secret funds from BCCI and Saudi arms deals – first Khashoggi’s from Lockheed and then Prince Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-Yamamah deals – are the common denominator in all of the major structural deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted America since the supranational Safari Club was created in l976. I am referring specifically to 1) the covert US intervention in Afghanistan (which started about 1978 as a Safari Club intervention, more than a year before the Russian invasion), 2) the 1980 October Surprise, which together with an increase in Saudi oil prices helped assure Reagan’s election and thus give us the Reagan Revolution, 3) Iran-Contra in 1984-86, 4) and – last but by no means least – 9/11. That is why I believe it is important to analyze these events at the level of the supranational deep state. Let me just cite a few details.
  • 1) the 1980 October Surprise. According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches, the principal founder of the Safari Club, arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments, in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran until Reagan was in power. Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.46 In addition, John Cooley considers de Marenches to be “the Safari Club player who probably did most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure.”47 2) the Iran-Contra scandal (including the funding of the Contras, the illegal Iran arms sales, and support for the Afghan mujahideen There were two stages to Iran-Contra. For twelve months in 1984-85, after meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal, supported the Nicaraguan Contras via Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank account in Miami. But in April 1985, after the second proposed arms sale fell through, McFarlane, fearing AIPAC opposition, terminated this direct Saudi role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme in which Iranian arms sales involving Israel would fund the contras. The first stage of Iran-Contra was handled by Prince Bandar through a BCCI account in Miami; the second channel was handled by Khashoggi through a different BCCI account in Montecarlo. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on BCCI also transmitted allegations from a Palestinian-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from BCCI for arms sales to Iran came ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”48
  • 3) 9/11 When the two previously noted alleged hijackers or designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed them and opened bank accounts for them. Soon afterwards Bayoumi’s wife began receiving monthly payments from a Riggs bank account held by Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal.49 In addition, Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. In all, “between 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa … – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi.”50 Although these sums in themselves are not large, they may have been part of a more general pattern. Author Paul Sperry claims there was possible Saudi government contact with at least four other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia and Florida. For example, “9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited s home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.”51
  • But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s payments were said to have included “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.52 In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Riggs Bank, which was by then under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.”53 Meanwhile President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C.”54 For this a Riggs account executive, Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang enjoyed State Department approval for a contract with the private U.S. military firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending offshore oil platforms owned by ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess.55 Behind the CIA relationship with the Riggs Bank was the role played by the bank’s overseas clients in protecting U.S. investments, and particularly (in the case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil companies.
  • The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.56 A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.57 It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.58
  • This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.59 The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.60 The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it. It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.
  • But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.61 In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state. Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.
Gary Edwards

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe - 0 views

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...re-almost-too-crazy-to-believe

economic-collapse Obammunism Obamanomics

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jan 13
     
    Thanks to Marbux we have this extraordinary collection of facts and figures describing the economic catastrophe that has hit the USA.  excerpt: "What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.  Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.  So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.  They are a good summary of the problems that the U
Paul Merrell

Are The Middle East Wars Really About Forcing the World Into Dollars and Private Centra... - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...d-private-central-banking.html

banksters dollar reserve currrencies Libya Iran Africa Gadafhi

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Why is the U.S. targeting Iran’s central bank? Well, multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price told King World News: What happened to Mr. Gaddafi, many speculate the real reason he was ousted was that he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to him that happened to Saddam because the US doesn’t want any solid competing currency out there vs the dollar. You know Gaddafi was talking about a gold dinar. And as I noted in August: Ellen Brown argues in the Asia Times that there were even deeper reasons for the war than gold, oil or middle eastern regime change. Brown argues that Libya – like Iraq under Hussein – challenged the supremacy of the dollar and the Western banks: Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.
  • The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that “[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.” According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Libya – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar”, Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. *** And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:
  • One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned … Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict. In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.” The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.
  • Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing. Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission. While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity.
  • Posted on January 13, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog The Reason for the Wars in the Middle East and North Africa:  Dollars The Middle Eastern and North African wars – planned 20 years ago – don’t necessarily have much to do with fighting terrorism. See this,  this and this. They are, in reality, about oil. And protecting Israel (and read the section entitled “Securing the Realm” here). But as AFP reports today, there is another major motivation for the expanding wars: The latest round of American sanctions are aimed at shutting down Iran’s central bank, a senior US official said Thursday, spelling out that intention directly for the first time. “We do need to close down the Central Bank of Iran (CBI),” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity, while adding that the United States is moving quickly to implement the sanctions, signed into law last month. *** Foreign central banks that deal with the Iranian central bank on oil transactions could also face similar restrictions under the new law, which has sparked fears of damage to US ties with nations like Russia and China. “If a correspondent bank of a US bank wants to do business with us and they’re doing business with CBI or other designated Iranian banks… then they’re going to get in trouble with us,” the US official said.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14
     
    I only highlighted snippets. Lots more and lots of links. 
Gary Edwards

The Project To Restore America - 0 views

www.theprojecttorestoreamerica.com/...x-the-Banking-System-for-Good-

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel LPB Limited-Purpose-Banking

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Nov 12
     
    Yes, it's a confusing proposal - but not when compared to what we have now; a financial industry run by "To-Big-To-Fail Banks" able to loot the public treasury at will.  Never to Big to Bail, and taxpayers voted for four more years of looting.  Limited Purpose Banking is based on equity.  Which is quite different from the fractional-reserve-lending model used by the To-Big-Fail Banksters. "The history of banking is a long and sorry record of promises that can't be kept - promises that were either overly optimistic or outright fraudulent. Since banks are leveraged, failing to deliver on their promises leads them to collapse. But unlike standard bankruptcies, bank failures produce enormous economic fallout.   There's a reason. Banks not only market financial products. They also make financial markets. Markets, be they for apples or loans, constitute critical public goods whose provision should not be jeopardized.     Making a market -- getting buyers and sellers to meet at the same time and place always represents a feat of coordination. The main purpose of banks is to effect financial coordination - to bring together borrowers and lenders and investors and savers.     When banks fail, particularly large ones, this coordination breaks down. Moreover, bank failures can be contagious. Any given bank's failure raises the prospect that fraud or very poor judgment was at fault and that other banks are engaged in the same practice. This leads to runs on, actually away from, banks in general. In addition, since banks borrow and lend to one another, the failure of bank A can bring bank B down if A owes money to B.     Worst of all, financial collapse, even by a few major financial players can coordinate non-financial companies as well as households on the belief that times are bad. And when millions of separate firms and tens of millions of households start expecting bad times, they take actions to make bad times happen. Thus, the state of confidence, what Key
Paul Merrell

12 Banks Reveal 'Living Wills' That Hint Toward a Future Bail-in | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...t-hint-toward-a-future-bail-in

banksters major-U.S.-banks bail-ins living-wills too-big-to-fail

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Twelve major banks have made their living wills open to the public in response to US regulators pushing for more “convincing plans” for self-dismantling should their operations fail.
  • The purpose of living wills is a way “to give bankers and regulators a clearer understanding of a bank’s operations and its assets and liabilities [and] map out the steps the banks would take to distribute large losses among stakeholders.” The Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) are overseeing the bank’s contingency plans, ensuring that no bank is “too big to fail”. This includes financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets; as well as non-financial firms that are considered systemically important as understood by the US Department of Treasury (USDT) Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). The banks participating in this exercise include:
  • • JPMorgan Chase & Co • Morgan Stanley • Bank of America • Credit Suisse Group AG • Goldman Sachs Group • Wells Fargo & Co • State Street Corp • Bank of New York Mellon Corp • UBS Group AG • Deutsche Bank AG • Barclays Plc Should another financial crisis rear its head again, these revelations provide investors and traders a better sense of the standing of banks.
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  • Collectively, the banks divulged that they have “stockpiled long-term debt” within holding companies (or the parent company that owns the bank) to make their portfolios appear to be “less complex”. In other words, banks have placed their derivatives (or stockpiled long-term debt) within the main corporation that owns their subsidiaries. The only problem is that if the parent fails, so do its “children”. The bank’s assets could be placed into receivership with the intention of being split up and auctioned off; however some corporations abuse receivership and bankruptcy to make investors and creditors think they are dead in the water only to pull out at the last minute and enjoy large primary debt write-offs. This is a sort of corporate version of playing possum.
  • This classic con tactic would provide the unique advantage of not having to go to the Senate and demand a taxpayer bailout. The banks could simply file for bankruptcy and exert social pressure via public outcry, protests and demands of the people that Congress consider another bailout. In this scenario, the parent company gets saved and not the subsidiaries. This tactic is a reserve version of what happened after the crash in 2008. Regarding the bank’s contingency plans, JPMorgan’s “hypothetical death”would see the bank downsize by a 3rd and provide a resolve for the bank “without systemic disruption or taxpayer support”. Citigroup has proposed shrinking by selling off $300 billion in corporate assets and “cut US retail banking to about $200 billion”; as well as get rid of broker-dealers.
  • Mark Costigilo, spokesperson for Citigroup, explained that should Citigroup go into bankruptcy, their living will “demonstrates that we can do so without the use of taxpayer funds and without adverse systemic impact.” And Bank of America (BoA) stated that their rise out of bankruptcy would involve the unloading of $1.2 trillion in assets; as well as “shedding most of … non-bank operations”. Last year, the major banks were told to revise previously submitted living wills because their plans did not provide a “credible or clear path through bankruptcy that doesn’t require unrealistic assumptions and direct or indirect public support.” All of this adds up to a bail-in, as predicted by economic analyst Jim Sinclair who said: “Bail-ins are coming to North America without any doubt, and will be remembered as the ‘Great Leveling,’ of the ‘great Flushing’ (of Lehman Brothers). Not only can it happen here, but it will happen here. It stands on legal grounds by legal precedent both in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.”
  • Sinclair pointed out: “Bail-ins do not require a crisis to occur and can surface one bank at a time, spread out over years. The major situation is deposits above insurance levels in banks too big to fail. Those deposits are directly in harm’s way.”
Paul Merrell

Bank Of America's $17 Billion Mortgage Crisis Settlement Could Be A Total Bust | ThinkP... - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...bank-of-america-deal-shrinkage

economic-collapse litigation BoA settlement criminal-fraud

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Bank of America has agreed to a legal settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to avoid prosecution for the hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage loans that it and its subsidiaries sold to unwitting investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to multiple new reports. The total on-paper cost of the deal is reportedly at least $16 billion and perhaps as high as $17 billion, which makes it the largest corporate legal settlement with the government in U.S. history. But that record price tag is deceptive. The deal is unlikely to cost Bank of America anywhere close to that amount.
  • the government’s decision to pursue civil settlements rather than criminal cases against banks that inflated the toxic mortgage bubble means that shareholders pay the price while executives who oversaw the misconduct earn large bonuses.
  • “If you let a thief buy his way out of jail, you should really make sure the check doesn’t bounce,” HDL national campaign director Kevin Whelan said in an email. “Even a record $17 billion settlement is a small fraction of the damage done by B of A and Countrywide. But it could do real good for a lot of families,” Whelan said. “The fact that the JP Morgan Chase settlement has not delivered any noticeable relief to families makes us skeptical.”
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  • Even at face value, the reported settlement is minuscule compared to the harm caused by Bank of America companies. The on-paper cost of the deal is less than 7 percent of the value of the mortgage deals Bank of America and its subsidiaries Countrywide and Merrill Lynch made before the crisis that have since gone bad. (Bank of America bought Countrywide and Merrill Lynch at the height of the crisis.) Those three companies issued just shy of a trillion dollars in mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial collapse, and $245 billion of those products have gone bad, according to Bloomberg. Bank of America had pushed for a much smaller settlement for months, arguing that it should not have to pay for the sins of the firms it bought at bargain-bin prices when the economy was reeling. But a court ruling last month regarding Countrywide’s most notorious mortgage swindle caused the bank to change its tune, according to the New York Times. Judge Jed Rakoff ordered the bank to pay about $1.3 billion for one tranch of defective mortgages sold under a program that Countrywide nicknamed “Hustle” because of its fraudulent nature. Having lost one court case over Countrywide’s notorious misdeeds, the Times says, Bank of America decided to stop resisting federal officials’ settlement demands.
  • After tax deductions, the settlement could easily shrink below the roughly $15 billion in profits the company has reported since 2011. And because the financial crisis sucked something like $14 trillion out of the economy and destroyed tens of trillions of dollars in wealth for homeowners, the DOJ can hardly claim to have delivered a proportional response. The department’s claims about the Bank of America settlement are likely to draw political scrutiny. A bipartisan bill from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) would require government officials to state the full tax deductibility and true cost of corporate legal settlements in all public statements about them. That bill, inspired by the revelations that JP Morgan’s sweetheart deal with the DOJ didn’t come close to the portrait that Attorney General Eric Holder painted of it, was passed out of committee late last month.
Gary Edwards

States negotiating immunity for banks over foreclosures - 0 views

newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/...ty_for_banks_over_foreclosures

MERS financial-collapse Banksters Mortgage-fraud Liar-Loans Undocumented-mortgages

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jul 11
     
    Thanks to Marbux.  Seems like nothing will stop the Banksters from seizing it all.  I think i've previously posted that when i was with Virtual Realty (VRi), we were forever trying to crack into the MERS electronic database.  Wow did the Banksters screw this one up.  Now only their corrupt sycophants in Congress and the Coursts can save them.  Not even the lap dog media will touch this. excerpt: A coalition of all 50 states' attorneys general has been negotiating settlements with five of the biggest U.S. banks that would include payment of up to $25 billion in penalties and commitments to follow new rules. In exchange, the banks would get immunity from civil lawsuits by the states, as well as similar guarantees by the Justice Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development, which have participated in the talks. State and federal officials declined to say if any form of immunity from criminal prosecution also is under discussion. The banks involved in the talks are Bank of America, Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial. REUTERS REPORT PROMPTS LETTER Reuters reported Monday that major banks and other loan servicers have continued to file questionable documents in foreclosure cases. These include false mortgage assignments, and promissory notes with suspect or missing "endorsements," which prove ownership. The Reuters report also showed continued "robo-signing," in which lenders' employees or outside contractors churn out reams of documents without fully understanding their content. The report turned up several cases involving individuals who were publicly identified as robo-signers months ago. Reuters found that such activity has continued even after 14 major mortgage lenders signed settlements with federal bank regulators promising to halt such practices and give remediation to some homeowners who were harmed. In response to these disclosures, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Housing, Trans
Gary Edwards

1913: The Blow That Killed America 100 Years Ago - 0 views

www.freemansperspective.com/1913-america

1913 Woodrow-Wilson Nelson-Aldrich Rockefeller Bilderbergs ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Aug 13
     
    "There is a lot of ruin in a nation," wrote Adam Smith. His point was that it takes a long time for nations to fall, even when they're dead on their feet. And he was certainly right. America took its fatal blow in 1913, one hundred years ago; it just hasn't hit the ground yet. This is a slow process, but it's actually fast compared to the Romans. It took them several centuries to collapse . The confusing thing about our current situation is that America - and by that I mean the noble America that so many of us grew up believing was real - has long been poisoned. Its liver, kidneys, and spleen have all stopped functioning. Its heart beats slowly and irregularly. But it still stands on its feet and presents itself as alive to all those who would let their eyes fool them. And I'm not without sympathy for those who want to believe. They find themselves in a world where politics is almighty, and where their comfort, prosperity, and perhaps their survival all hang in a delicate balance. They don't want to upset anything, and questioning the bosses is a good way to get yelled at. But just because someone wants to believe doesn't make it so. We are not children and we are not powerless. We Producers should never be intimidated by those who live at our expense. So let's start looking at the facts. 1913: The Horrible Year For all the problems America had prior to 1913 (including the unnecessary and horrifying Civil War), nothing spelled the death of the nation like the horrors of 1913. Here are the key dates: February 3rd : The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose income taxes on individuals. An amendment to a tariff act in 1894 had attempted to do this, but since it was clearly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court struck it down. As a result - and mostly under the banner of bleeding the rich - the 16th amendment was promoted and passed. As a result, the Revenue Act of 1
Paul Merrell

5 Big Banks Expected to Plead Guilty to Felony Charges, but Punishments May Be Tempered... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nishments-may-be-tempered.html

banksters litigation UBS Barclays JPMorgan Chase Citigroup Royal-Bank-of-Scotland guilty-pleas SEC-waivers

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 May 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said — a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.
  • The Justice Department is also preparing to resolve accusations of foreign currency misconduct at UBS. As part of that deal, prosecutors are taking the rare step of tearing up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with the bank over the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, the people said, citing the bank’s foreign currency misconduct as a violation of the earlier agreement. UBS A.G., the banking unit that signed the 2012 nonprosecution agreement, is expected to plead guilty to the earlier charges and pay a fine that could be as high as $500 million rather than go to trial, the people said.
  • Holding companies, while appearing to be the most important entities at the banks, are in less jeopardy of suffering the consequences of guilty pleas. Some banks worried that a guilty plea by their biggest banking units, which hold licenses that enable them to operate branches and make loans, would be riskier, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The fear, they said, centered on whether state or federal regulators might revoke those licenses in response to the pleas. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department — that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas, the people said. While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions — or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing — the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.
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  • The foreign exchange investigation, which centers on accusations that traders colluded to fix the price of major currencies, will test the Justice Department’s strategy for securing guilty pleas on Wall Street.
  • In the case of UBS, the bank will lose its nonprosecution agreement over interest rate manipulation, the people briefed on the matter said, a consequence of its misconduct in the foreign exchange case. It is unclear why that penalty will fall on UBS, but not on other banks suspected of manipulating both interest rates and currency prices.
  • the bank is expected to avoid pleading guilty in the foreign exchange case, the people said, though it will probably pay a fine. While UBS was unlikely to plead guilty to antitrust violations because it was the first to cooperate in the foreign exchange investigation, the bank was facing the possibility of pleading guilty to fraud charges related to the currency manipulation. The exact punishment is not yet final, the people added.The Justice Department negotiations coincide with the banks’ separate efforts to persuade the S.E.C. to issue waivers from automatic bans that occur when a company pleads guilty. If the waivers are not granted, a decision that the Justice Department does not control, the banks could face significant consequences.For example, some banks may be seeking waivers to a ban on overseeing mutual funds, one of the people said. They are also requesting waivers to ensure they do not lose their special status as “well-known seasoned issuers,” which allows them to fast-track securities offerings. For some of the banks, there is also a concern that they will lose their “safe harbor” status for making forward-looking statements in securities documents.
  • In turn, the S.E.C. asked the Justice Department to hold off on announcing the currency cases until the banks’ requests had been reviewed, one of the people said. As of Wednesday, it seemed probable that a majority of the S.E.C.’s commissioners would approve most of the waivers, which can be granted for a cause like the public good. Still, the agency’s two Democratic commissioners — Kara M. Stein and Luis A. Aguilar, who have denounced the S.E.C.’s use of waivers — might be more likely to balk.
  • Corporate prosecutions are a delicate matter, peppered with political and legal land mines. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and other liberal politicians have criticized prosecutors for treating Wall Street with kid gloves. Banks and their lawyers, however, complain about huge penalties and guilty pleas. Continue reading the main story Recent Comments AvangionQ 14 hours ago These are the sorts of crimes that take down nations, jail sentences should be mandatory. Lance Haley 14 hours ago I find this whole legal exercise not only irrational, but insulting. I am a criminal defense attorney. Punishing the shareholders and the... loomypop 14 hours ago There is much more than Irony in the reality of how America treats criminal action and punishment when the entire determination and outcome... See All Comments And lingering in the background is the case of Arthur Andersen, an accounting giant that imploded after being convicted in 2002 of criminal charges related to its work for Enron. After the firm’s collapse, and the later reversal of its conviction, prosecutors began to shift from indictments and guilty pleas to deferred-prosecution agreements. And in 2008, the Justice Department updated guidelines for prosecuting corporations, which have long included a requirement that prosecutors weigh collateral consequences like harm to shareholders and innocent employees.
  • “The collateral consequences consideration is designed to address the risk that a particular criminal charge might inflict disproportionate harm to shareholders, pension holders and employees who are not even alleged to be culpable or to have profited potentially from wrongdoing,” said Mark Filip, the Justice Department official who wrote the 2008 memo. “Arthur Andersen was ultimately never convicted of anything, but the mere act of indicting it destroyed one of the cornerstones of the Midwest’s economy.”
  • Paul Merrell on 16 May 15
     
    In related news, the Dept. of Justice announced that it would begin using its "collateral consequences" analysis to decisions whether to charge human beings with crimes, taking into account the hardships imposed on innocent family members and other dependents if a person were sentenced to prison.  No? Sounds like corporations have more rights than human beings, yes?
Paul Merrell

The Daily Dot - How a major bank and the U.S. government joined forces to spy on Anonymous - 0 views

www.dailydot.com/...ca-monitoring-activists-online

surveillance state banksters corporate-state-consolidation

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • New details have surfaced regarding the surveillance protocols used by Bank of America to keep tabs on social activists. Last year, Anonymous hacktivists published 14 gigabytes of private emails and spreadsheets which revealed that Bank of America was monitoring social media and other online services used by activists for basic communication. This time however, information about the bank’s recent surveillance activities were obtained legally through a public records request by a single petitioner. The newly published documents reveal a coordinated effort by Bank of America, the Washington State Patrol (WSP), and federal counterterrorism agencies, to monitor activists as they prepared for a public demonstration in Olympia, Wash. Over 230 people originally signed up to attend the “Million Mask March” event, which was organized by the Anonymous movement and took place on November 5, 2013. Although an official report by the WSP described the event as a “peaceful protest” being organized by activists who had made “no threats of violence,” those involved were still monitored by the department before the event took place. Information gathered about the potential protesters was then shared with Bank of America. Furthermore, Bank of America solicited information about activists from various federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
  • According to Andrew Charles Hendricks, an activist who originally acquired the documents, the emails included the home address of a demonstration organizer. Hendricks claims he redacted the address before publishing the documents online. The relationship between Bank of America and the WSP, as well as their long-term investment in surveillance, is highlighted by an email sent on September 23, 2013. Kim Triplett-Kolerich, an intelligence analyst for Bank of America requested that WSP share any intelligence gathered on activists taking part in the Million Mask March with the bank. She began the email by identifying herself as a former officer and provided her former rank. “From time to time I will see items that I believe will be of use to my friends at WSP—especially during session,” she told the officer. “May Day I will pick your brain for intel and I will give you a lot also,” she wrote.
  • Triplett-Kolerich concluded her email by boasting that the surveillance tactics used by Bank of America to monitor activists online was superior to that of the WSP. “I will most likely find it first as social media trolling is not what WSP does best. Bank of America has a team of 20 people and that’s all they do all day and then pass it to us around the country!!!” On October 24, an email was sent by a sergeant at the WSP’s Special Operations Division to an executive aide at the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. The sergeant notified the office that a large number of arrests may take place during the Million Mask March, which could impact the jail. Attached to the letter was a message written by an Anonymous activist, and a link to its Facebook event page where the names of those planning to attend the march could be seen.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The next week, Triplett-Kolerich emailed the same WSP sergeant again about the march. “Sorry for not getting back to you sooner—hectic weeks lately with foreclosures and this MMM,” Triplett-Kolerich wrote. She then notified the sergeant that Bank of America has been in contact with “the Fusion Center and JTTF” regarding the Anonymous march. JTTF refers to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is a group comprised of local law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (with whom it shares a website) and the Homeland Security department. The Fusion Center is a state-level counterterrorism agency, which coordinates “national intelligence” between various local law enforcement and public safety departments. In addition, the Fusion Center provides for “the effective communication of locally generated threat-related information to the federal government.”
  • Unbeknownst to the crowd, the supervisor of a local transit company had dropped off an Olympia city bus nearby at the request of the WSP. According to recently published emails, it was parked on the west side of an administration building close to the demonstration, just in case they needed to move in and haul a large group of disorderly protesters off to jail—but they didn’t. The Daily Dot reached out to Triplett-Kolerich and three Bank of America media relations contacts requesting a comment for this article, but received no response. 
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    More evidence of the cozy relationship between the banksters and the "anti-terrorism" folk in the U.S. Of particular interest BofA has a 20-person unit that spends their days trolling social media for intelligence.
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - The Economist Hoists Its Battle Balloon? - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...mist-Hoists-Its-Battle-Balloon

economist-magazine Banksters World-Wars New-World-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 13
     
    "The first world war... Look back with angst ... Thanks to its military, economic and soft power, America is still indispensable, particularly in dealing with threats like climate change and terror, which cross borders. But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries. The chances are that none of the world's present dangers will lead to anything that compares to the horrors of 1914. Madness, whether motivated by race, religion or tribe, usually gives ground to rational self-interest. But when it triumphs, it leads to carnage, so to assume that reason will prevail is to be culpably complacent. That is the lesson of a century ago. - Economist Magazine Dominant Social Theme: Beware the coming wars ... Free-Market Analysis: You can't make this stuff up. The top men in the globalist community have been hard at work building wars and potential wars, and now it's time to let 'er rip. This is one dominant social theme we saw coming miles away. We've been writing about its imminence for years, and predicting war and more war as internationalists try to blunt the effect of the Internet Reformation. After the Gutenberg press blew up the Middle Ages and the Roman Catholic Church besides, the globalists of the era used economic chaos, war and the invention of copyright to fight back. We predicted they would use the same tools this time around and have no reason to revise our predictions thus far. The only thing we've consistently pointed out that has not yet been addressed is the inability of the top men to launch a full-out world war because that would involve nuclear weapons. And lacking a full-out war, we have questioned how successful the strategy can be. Obviously, the top elites see something we don't. Or perhaps they are willing to risk an all-out war anyway - as they retreat into reported fully-stocked, underground "cities." Here's more fro
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