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Paul Merrell

The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare | Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...the-9-billion-witness-20141106

banksters fraud JPMorgan whistleblowers

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014
  • tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore.  "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'"  Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She's had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.
  • Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations. Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. "My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with," she says. "Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview." 
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  • This past year she watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts. 
  • Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it's not exactly news that the country's biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That's why the more important part of Fleischmann's story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her. She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. "Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way," Fleischmann says.
  • And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. "I could be sued into bankruptcy," she says. "I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history." 
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 14
     
    Matt Taibbi is back at Rolling Stone, relaunching with a major blockbuster.
Paul Merrell

Oil Wars: Pop! Goes the Weasel… | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

journal-neo.org/...pop-goes-the-weasel

war & peace economic-warfare pipelinestan-wars shale-oil collapse

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The “weasel” known as the USA fracking revolution, America’s recent shale gas and shale oil boom, which has been touted by the Obama Administration as grounds for risking their radical regime change policies across the OPEC Islamic world, is going “pop!,” as the money goes… The collapse of the five-year-old USA fracking revolution is proceeding with accelerating speed as jobs are being slashed by the tens of thousands across the United States; shale oil companies are declaring bankruptcy and Wall Street banks are freezing new credits to the industry. The shale weasel in America has just gone pop!, and soon the bloodbath will look like the aftermath of the Battle of Falkirk of Braveheart fame.First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/27/pop-goes-the-weasel/
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia is at a Dangerous Crossroads | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...a-is-at-a-dangerous-crossroads

Saudis economy pipelinestan

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Ambivalence, political twists and turns and the adoption of mutually exclusive decisions on Syria clearly show how completely lost the Saudi leaders are and their distinct lack of understanding of the fundamentals of modern foreign policy. The leaders of the wealthiest countries in the world, the leaders of the Arab and Muslim world have fully displayed their political inadequacy, inability to manoeuvre and adapt to the realities of the modern world. The once infinite riches are melting away rapidly, and soon ordinary Saudis will be faced with the issue of cost-cutting in their simple everyday problems.
  • The current policy which is so inconsistent and lacks any elementary logic was not only unsuccessful, but plunges Saudi Arabia ever deeper into an abyss of hardship and misery, setting new, complex problems before the King. Primarily, this concerns the economic and financial problems that the once wealthy Saudi society has not yet encountered. As the director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department of the IMF, Masood Ahmed, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the cumulative budget deficit of Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries in the next five years could reach $1 trillion. Moreover, the treasury of the regional leader, Saudi Arabia, is at risk of running dry, and the “kingdom of the welfare state” can expect bankruptcy. Up to now, financial holes – the budget deficit, which this year is projected to be 21.6 percent of GDP, has been covered by the earlier petrodollar savings. In particular, this summer the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency was forced to withdraw $70 billion from foreign investment funds assets. It can be assumed that this is only the beginning of the return of capital to their homeland, to tide over the emerging new outgoings. Otherwise, a sharp reduction in expenditure could lead to a social explosion in the Kingdom, whose citizens have become used to living a well-off life during the oil boom.
  • Saudi Arabia is currently exploring the possibility of higher energy prices for consumers within the country, as reported by the Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi. Responding to a question about whether the Kingdom is going to reduce energy subsidies in the near future, the Saudi official said: “Your question concerns whether we are considering such a possibility? Yes, we are considering it.” Energy prices in Saudi Arabia are among the lowest in the world. Saudi Arabia is in fact the leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Meanwhile, the Kingdom is losing out on potential revenue by selling oil on the domestic market at a much cheaper rate than on the foreign market. Currently, Saudi Arabia spends about 86 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil producers.
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  • Not surprisingly, many members of the Saudi Royal Family are concerned about the situation which has come about after the new King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud came to power. According to the Egyptian newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette, the changes that have occurred in the Kingdom’s foreign and domestic policy in less than 9 months of King Salman’s reign have cause a growing number of problems in both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and abroad. Dissatisfaction among the Saudis has risen to a new level. All of this is reflected in a letter that members of the Royal Family received from one of the younger princes. In the letter, which was widely reprinted in the world media, the anonymous monarch justifies the need for change and literally calls for a coup d’etat, which, according to the prince should by carried out by the 13 currently healthy sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia. “The King in not in a stable position and in reality the son of the King is ruling the Kingdom”, the prince wrote. He called for “the sons of Ibn Saud, from the eldest, Bandar, to the youngest, Muqrin” to urgently convene a meeting to examine the situation and see what should be done to save the Kingdom, to carry out a series of substitutions in high positions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and to verify the decisions taken by members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, irrespective of which they generation belong to.
  • It is worth noting that the author of the letter refers to a range of reasons for which the current King Salman and his son should be removed from their posts, including their inability to lead or deal with the difficult economic situation in the country caused by the fall in oil prices, the unpopular war in Yemen, the foreign policy failures in Syria and the recent tragedy in Mecca that claimed more than 800 lives. Meanwhile the writer does not explain exactly whom he would like to see in the position of King and Crown Prince. Neither the Royal house, nor the 13 princes, to whom the letter is addressed, have since reacted. In any case, the current rulers are faced with a number of questions and problems, and the immediate future of Saudi Arabia will depend on how professionally and quickly they are able to solve them.
Paul Merrell

Enron Corpus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Enron_Corpus

Enron-corpus litigation database emails

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Enron Corpus is a large database of over 600,000 emails generated by 158 employees[1] of the Enron Corporation and acquired by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its investigation after the company's collapse.[2]
  • The Enron data was originally collected at Enron Corporation headquarters in Houston during two weeks in May 2002 by Joe Bartling,[3] a litigation support and data analysis contractor working for Aspen Systems, now Lockheed Martin, whom the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had hired to preserve and collect the vast amounts of data in the wake of the Enron Bankruptcy in December 2001. In addition to the Enron employee emails, all of Enron's enterprise database systems,[4] hosted in Oracle databases on Sun Microsystems servers, were also captured and preserved including its online energy trading platform, EnronOnline. Once collected, the Enron emails were processed and hosted in litigation platform Concordance, and then iCONECT, for the investigative team from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Department of Justice investigators to review. At the conclusion of the investigation, and upon the issuance of the FERC staff report,[5] the emails and information collected were deemed to be in the public domain, to be used for historical research and academic purposes. The email archive was made publicly available and searchable via the web using iCONECT 24/7, but the sheer volume of email of over 160GB made it impractical to use. Copies of the collected emails and databases were made available on hard drives.
  • A copy of the email database was subsequently purchased for $10,000 by Andrew McCallum, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[6] He released this copy to researchers, providing a trove of data that has been used for studies on social networking and computer analysis of language.
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  • The corpus is unique in that it is one of the only publicly available mass collections of real emails easily available for study, as such collections are typically bound by numerous privacy and legal restrictions which render them prohibitively difficult to access.[6] In 2010, EDRM.net published a revised version 2 of the corpus.[7] This expanded corpus, containing over 1.7 million messages, is now available on Amazon S3 for easy access to the research community. Jitesh Shetty and Jafar Adibi from the University of Southern California processed this corpus in 2004 and released a MySQL version[8] of it and also published some link analysis results based on this.[9]
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