Bankster Crooks At Morgan Stanley Who Helped Smash the Economy Get a Stay-Out-Jail Card for a $3.2 Billion Bribe

None of the $3.2 Billion will come out of the pocket of any of the crooked millionaire executives at Morgan Stanley.  That money will be paid by the corporation.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman: If you got rich crashing the economy and didn't have to go to prison
you would be grinning too. None of the $3.2 Billion will come out of the pocket of any of the crooked
millionaire executives at Morgan Stanley.  That money will be paid by the corporation.

_____________

Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion Over Flawed Mortgage Bonds

By NATHANIEL POPPER
Morgan Stanley will pay $3.2 billion to strike a settlement with state and federal authorities over the Wall Street firm’s creation of mortgage-backed bonds before the financial crisis.

Nearly a year ago, Morgan Stanley announced that it expected to pay $2.6 billion to federal authorities in the settlement. Since then, though, Morgan Stanley was pushed to offer more money. Much of the additional money will go to New York State.

The settlement, which was announced Thursday morning, is one of the last that is expected to come out of a working group that President Obama helped form in 2012 to deal with the flawed mortgaged-backed bonds that banks put together before the financial crisis. In the go-go years that preceded the crisis, Wall Street banks purchased subprime mortgages and packaged them into bonds that ended up suffering significant losses.

Because Morgan Stanley did not originate mortgages itself, its settlement is much smaller than those struck by large consumer banks like Bank of America, which paid $16.6 billion in its 2014 settlement.

Morgan Stanley said on Thursday that it had set aside legal reserves to cover the agreement and would not take any additional charges in its coming financial results.

“We are pleased to have finalized these settlements involving legacy residential mortgage-backed securities matters,” a spokesman for the firm, Mark Lake, said in a statement.

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Obambi Administration Keeps Giving Billion-Dollar Stay Out of Jail Cards to Bankers Who Smashed the Economy

The parasitic bankers at Wells Fargo deliberately provided home loans without credit or income checks to people they knew couldn't afford them.  It then foisted these toxic loans on the Federal Housing Administration and then collected insurance on thousands of loans that it knew would fail. Not a single Wells Fargo executive will spend a single day in jail for this ripoff which helped crash the global economy.—Ronald David Jackson

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Wells Fargo to Pay $1.2 Billion Over Bad Government-Backed Mortgages

By James Rufus Koren
Wells Fargo & Co. will pay $1.2 billion to settle claims that it duped the federal government into insuring thousands of risky mortgages in the years leading up to the housing crash, the San Francisco banking giant said Wednesday.

If approved by a federal judge, the settlement would close the books on a 2012 lawsuit that the government filed against the bank over bad loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. It's one of the biggest fines paid by Wells Fargo related to the crash.

Prosecutors alleged that the bank “engaged in a regular practice of reckless origination and underwriting” of FHA loans backed by federal insurance and intended to help first-time home buyers.

Between 2001 and 2005, prosecutors said, the bank issued thousands of FHA loans that did not meet the program's requirements, which include minimum incomes and credit scores for borrowers. They also said that from 2002 to 2010, the bank violated federal reporting requirements by keeping problem loans under wraps and collecting insurance payouts when loans went bad.

Banks are required to report loans if they find problems in their underwriting — for instance, if a loan officer approved an FHA-backed mortgage even though the borrower did not meet criteria or provided fraudulent information when applying.

Prosecutors said Wells Fargo internal reviews found more than 6,500 problem FHA loans from 2002 through 2010, but the bank reported only 238 of them. Prosecutors said the lax underwriting was partly the result of incentives that encouraged employees to approve more loans.

The loan defaults caused the FHA to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims to Wells Fargo to cover the bank's losses, even though those loans should not have been insured, according to the suit.

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The War on Cash: A Country by Country Guide

If society becomes cashless, dissenters can’t hide cash.  All of their financial holdings would be vulnerable to an attack by the government. This would be the ultimate form of control. Because – without access to money – people couldn’t resist, couldn’t hide and couldn’t escape. And remember, we can’t rein in the banks if we can’t pull our money out of them.

(Photo from Therealasset.)

By James Corbett
Just this week Norway has jumped aboard the cashless society agenda with DNB, the country’s largest bank, calling for a total end to cash. The story only sounds shocking because people haven’t heard the similar stories from Sweden or Denmark or India or Israel or any of the dozens of other countries whose banksters and (bankster-controlled) governments have openly lusted after a world of completely trackable, completely bank-controlled transactions.

But all of these stories, reported piecemeal here and there over the years, doesn’t give the full story about how this “war on cash” is being waged on every continent and in every country by the same banksters that stand to benefit from a cashless world. Let’s fix that by compiling a list of examples from around the world of how cash payments are being regulated, restricted and phased out. The list below will be updated as new stories come in.

RELATED STORY: The Privacy Dangers of a Cashless Society Were Clear Over 40 Years Ago

If you have a link to relevant news from your own country or know of such news from another country, please let us know. Corbett Report members are invited to contribute to the list by logging in and leaving links to the relevant info in the comments below.

The Cashless Society List
CANADA – In 2007 the Canadian government stopped allowing payment of taxes in cash at government service centers. In 2010 Passport Canada followed suit. In 2011 56% of Canadians polled said they were happy to live in a bankster-controlled cashless society so the country killed the penny in 2012 and the Royal Canadian Mint started pimping the “MintChip” as a new form of electronic payment that will be “better than cash.” The Mint ended the program in 2014 but the Great White North is still on track to be a cashless society in the coming years.

DENMARK – In the 1990s about 80% of Danish retail purchases were made with cash, but these days it’s more like 25%. But if the Danish government has its way, that number will be 0% by 2030. That’s the year the Danish government has set for the complete elimination of paper money in Denmark.

FRANCE – In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks last year, the French government stepped up its war on cash. In March of last year, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin declared it necessary to “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy” in order to combat “low-cost terrorism.” As of September 2015 it is illegal for French citizens to make purchases exceeding 1000 euros in cash.

INDIA – India is one of the most cash-dependent economies in the world with a cash-to-GDP ratio of 12% almost four times that of fellow BRICS nations Brazil and South Africa). But it won’t be for long if the Indian government has its way. Last June the Indian Ministry of Finance posted a draft proposal to its website for facilitating the rise of cashless payments in the country. In his 2015 budget speech the Finance Minister declared: “One way to curb the flow of black money is to discourage transactions in cash. Now that a majority of Indians has or can have, a RUPAY debit card. I therefore, proposes to introduce soon several measure that will incentivize credit or debit card transactions and disincentivize cash transaction.”

ISRAEL – In 2014 a special committee headed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Chief of Staff Harel Locker released a report examining how to reduce the use of cash in the country. The report advocates reforms (including restrictions and limits on cash transactions) as part of a strategy whose aim is “reduced use of cash, reduced use of endorsed checks, and increased use of electronic means of payment.”

NORWAY – Late last week Trond Bentestuen, a senior executive at Norway’s largest bank, complained to the VG Newspaper that the Norwegian central bank “can only account for 40 percent” of the Norwegian kroner in circulation, meaning “that 60 percent of money usage is outside of any control.” There’s only one conclusion, according to Bentestuen: “There are so many dangers and disadvantages associated with cash, we have concluded that it should be phased out.” Don’t worry, though, the nation’s Finance Ministry says it has “no plans to change the law in this area”…for now.

SWEDEN – Last year Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology released a report stating that the country is on track to completely eliminating cash transactions in the foreseeable future. Noting that there are now only 80 billion Swedish crowns in circulation in the economy (down from 106 just six years ago), the report highlights how digital person-to-person payment technology “Swish” (developed in collaboration with Danish banks) is already transforming the country’s banking sector, where there are now entire banks that do not accept cash.

Reprinted with permission from The Corbett Report.

How Hillary Tells Us She Won't Fight Wall Street

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By Steve Weissman
Hillary Clinton has a stronger, more detailed plan to regulate Wall Street than does Bernie Sanders, says the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. But, adds journalist Ezra Klein, many are skeptical that she will do what she says.

“She has spoken out of both sides of her mouth on a number of issues,” agrees public banking campaigner Ellen Brown. “So it doesn’t seem like we can trust her.”

Between savants and skeptics, policy wonks and the politically wary, how can ordinary voters decide for themselves? It isn’t easy.

“Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake,” Krugman wrote. “But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from ‘shadow banks’ like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t.”

Krugman also finds that Wall Street prefers any Republican over either of the Democrats. Yet Wall Streeters are giving Hillary significant contributions, and their financial media does not view her as a major threat to their interests.

“As long as Hillary Clinton is in charge, they know that the Clintons historically have been enormously helpful to the banking industry,” explains former federal regulator William K. Black. “And in return the banking industry – not simply the banking industry, others as well – have made the Clintons very wealthy.”

No surprise, Hillary has little to say about her husband’s dealings with Wall Street, which will arguably define his place in history. I in no way hold Hillary accountable for the Big Dog’s transgressions, and certainly not for his carnal sins, which right-wingers delight in accusing her of enabling. But what does she think of his enabling Wall Street to bring the global economy to a thudding crash? How does she respond to Bill’s role in helping Wall Street gain such power and promote such glaring inequality?

Ask her. We need to know, and so far, her silence speaks volumes.

Remember that Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 as an economic populist on a platform created largely by Robert Reich, who became his Secretary of Labor. But Bill brought in Robert Rubin, co-chair of Goldman Sachs, to serve first as his chief economic advisor and then as Secretary of the Treasury. The soft-spoken Rubin persuaded Clinton to pay off the budget deficit left to him by George H.W. Bush, a move that won Wall Street’s blessing and helped fuel the boom-and-bust prosperity of the 1990s. The alternative, as many people now understand, would have been to rebuild our already failing bridges, transportation systems, waterworks, and electrical grids.

Rubin also convinced Clinton to push Wall Street’s neo-liberal economics and its Washington Consensus worldwide, while making the North American Free Trade Agreement a top priority, without providing any safety net for American workers whose jobs went abroad.

But, most telling, Rubin and his understudy Larry Summers prevailed on Clinton to restrain financial regulators within the administration from doing their job, regulators like Bill Black and Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. (See her story at PBS Frontline.)

Clinton then went along with Texas senator Phil Gramm and the Republican-led Congress to massively deregulate financial markets, just as Rubin and his Wall Street friends wanted. Clinton fought for and signed the repeal of most of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal’s already porous wall between commercial and investment banking. Even worse, he fought for and signed the Commodities Future Modernization Act, which removed most federal regulation of credit default swaps and other over-the-counter-derivatives, the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that shadow banks like Lehman Brothers misused to bring down the global economy in 2008.

Enabling Wall Street in this way was Bill Clinton’s mortal sin, making him an accomplice to the economic crime of the century. He was a well-paid accomplice at that, “earning” some $250 million from going to work for the Wall Street mob after he left the Oval Office. Having shared royally in the pay-off, Hillary has never confronted either the economic crime or Bill’s complicity in it. Since she’s too smart – and too experienced – not to have seen them both, she’s telling us that she would be likely to do much the same.

Krugman misses this. The choice in the Democratic primaries, as he sees it, is between Bernie Sanders’ whole-loaf idealism, which Krugman calls self-indulgent, and Hillary’s half-a-loaf pragmatism, which he prefers. In reality, choosing Hillary comes down to giving the whole loaf to Wall Street while barely leaving crumbs for the rest of us. Except for the self-serving, where’s the pragmatism in that?

_____________________
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reprinted with permission from Reader Supported News

Virtually Bankrupt Chicago Cuts Jobs and Delays Paychecks — But Banks Still Get Paid Millions

Activists protesting Gov. Bruce Rauner's proposed budget blocked the entrance to the Board of Trade on Nov.
2, 2015 (Stacy Rupolo)

No State Budget, But Banks Still Get Paid Millions

By Curtis Black
While the state’s budget impasse is holding up funds for everyone from college students to domestic violence victims, Illinois continues to pay banks millions of dollars every month for complex borrowing deals that other local governments have challenged in court, according to a new report.

The state is currently paying $6 million a month for 19 interest rate swaps, according to the report from ReFund America Project. The swaps were sold as a way to save money by protecting taxpayers from rising interest rates. Illinois has paid over $600 million for the deals and could pay $1.45 billion for them before they are ended.

“There’s no money going to emergency services, nothing going to rape counseling or homeless services," said Nathan Ryan of Grassroots Collaborative, which endorsed the report. "But the checks are going out on time, in full, twice a month to these banks for these swaps.”

The report comes just as Chicago hits the pause button on buying out its remaining interest rate swaps. Many of them had termination penalties amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, triggered when the city’s credit rating dropped to junk status. According to ReFund America, the state could be on the hook for $124 million in penalties by the end of the year if (as expected) its credit rating continues to drop.

Gov. Bruce Rauner’s office has said they are exploring options for negotiating settlements on the deals. The state and city should follow the lead of other local governments and take a more aggressive legal posture, said Saqib Bhatti, co-author of the report.

Last week Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration scaled back a multi-billion-dollar borrowing proposal before the City Council, eliminating a $200-million bond sale to buy out the last interest rate swap in its portfolio, after the Progressive Caucus questioned the maneuver and requested more information.

To date Chicago has paid or authorized $296 million in termination penalties, on top of a half-billion dollars in swap payments through 2015, according to ReFund America. The $200 million bond that was proposed and postponed would have financed a swap penalty of $106 million over 30 years.

The aldermen requested a copy of the law department’s review of the swaps, which concluded the city has no legal recourse. Ald. John Arena (45th Ward) said the aldermen are looking at the review and may “ask the legal department to go further," including exploring the experiences of cities that have sued banks, alleging that the swap deals were fraudulent.

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Hillary Clinton Asked To Provide Text of Speeches She Gave at Goldman Sachs — She Just Laughed

During one of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton reportedly reassured the crowd and told them that banker-bashing was unproductive and foolish.

By Lee Fang
After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.

Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.

Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.

During one of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton reportedly reassured the crowd and told them that banker-bashing was unproductive and foolish, according to a Politico report based on accounts offered by several attendees.

On Friday, Clinton was asked by New Hampshire Public Radio how the “average person should view the hefty speaking fees?”

“I spoke to a wide array of groups who wanted to hear what I thought about the world coming off of my time as secretary of state,” Clinton said, defending her decision to make money from speaking fees. “I happen to think we need more conversation about what’s going on in the world.”

“I think groups that want to talk and ask questions and hear about that are actually trying to educate themselves because we’re living in a really complicated world.”

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Poisoning Black Cities: The Corporate Campaign to Ethnically Cleanse U.S. Cities Knows No Bounds

They emptied New Orleans. Now they have poisoned Flint, Michigan. The corporate campaign to ethnically cleanse U.S. cities knows no bounds. Michigan’s emergency financial manager law is “part of Wall Street’s tool kit to starve, bulldoze, redline, over-price, oppressively police, and even poison Black people out of the urban centers.”

By Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor

“Michigan’s emergency financial manager system is the lead-tipped point of the spear that is gutting urban Black America.” 


It has taken the poisoning of an entire city of 100,000 people – 52 percent of them Black – to draw national attention to the human effects of systematic corporatization of the public sphere under neoliberal U.S. capitalism. Republican Governor Rick Synder promises to “fix” the ruined water infrastructure of Flint, Michigan, now hopelessly corroded and saturated with lead – a repair that could cost as much as $1.5 billion. But, even if Snyder is forced to resign, as demonstrators demand, or is jailed, as filmmaker Michael Moore would prefer, it won’t fix the irreparably damaged brains of the city’s children or prevent a cascade of Flint-like catastrophes from unfolding across the country.

We are experiencing another Katrina moment, a dreadful epiphany in which the nature of the beast that is preying upon us becomes horrifically clear. Michigan’s emergency financial manager system – a weapon of corporate dictatorship imposed selectively on heavily Black and brown cities and school systems – is the lead-tipped point of the spear that is gutting urban Black America. It is not a unique instrument – and certainly not a Republican invention – but part of Wall Street’s tool kit to starve, bulldoze, redline, over-price, oppressively police, and even poison Black people out of the urban centers.

“A Katrina moment.”

Katrina should have been the wake-up call, a decade ago, but the hegemonic influence of the bankster-infested Democratic Party in Black America muted the warning, that the Lords of Capital were determined to eject Blacks from valuable real estate by any means necessary. After their success in expelling 100,000 Black people from New Orleans under cover of a hurricane, the corporate designers of the New American City stepped up the pace of gentrification, deploying every soft and hard tool available to them. The Black-removal machine was revved up to maximum, erasing Black urban majorities and pluralities with dizzying speed.

Having met little organized resistance, the corporate ethnic cleansers grew bolder. Republicans like Rick Synder get elected by trashing Black people; they hardly need an economic motivation for race-baiting. Corporate Democrats are more subtle. Rick Snyder wasn’t the first governor to disenfranchise Black urbanites in Michigan; his Democratic predecessor, Jennifer Granholm, a reputed “liberal,” appointed emergency managers to lord it over mostly Black Benton Harbor, Highland Park, Pontiac, and the Detroit Public Schools (where teachers have been on a sick-out to protest the ghastly conditions wrought by that bipartisan legacy of plantation-like governance).

“The Black-removal machine is erasing Black urban majorities and pluralities with dizzying speed.”

The Obama administration was a full partner in the deal that finalized the bankrupting of Detroit, providing federal funds to protect prime city assets necessary for future “revitalization” (to benefit anticipated new residents) but uttering not a word in protest of the disenfranchisement of the current, 83 percent Black population. The U.S. Justice Department failed to file a brief in support of the local NAACP’s appeal to the federal courts, that Michigan’s emergency financial manager law is racially selective, sparing financially troubled “municipalities with majority-white populations” from financial oversight while negating the votes of more than half of the state’s Black citizenry. "You do not throw out the right to vote on the basis of economic distress," said Detroit NAACP president Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony.

On the contrary, that’s exactly what corporations do when they set an economic or political goal that cannot be achieved at the local ballot box: they disenfranchise the uncooperative voters. In the United States, Black votes are the easiest to nullify, because huge numbers of whites don’t think Blacks are worthy of full citizenship. They take pleasure in bringing Detroit low, and in the enforced shrinking of Black New Orleans, never considering that the weakening of democratic norms will ultimately expose whites to the whims of Capital, as well. It is the oldest story in the United States.

“Corporate tentacles encroach upon the traditional powers of ‘too-Black’ cities until there is little left for the local government to tax or administer.”

White racism thus shapes the corporate model for direct rule by moneyed interests. Typically, the urban disenfranchisement process begins with the public schools, which become overwhelmingly Black and brown ahead of the general population. Locally elected inner city school boards are swept away in favor of state or direct mayoral control, while suburbanites retain the old, hands-on democratic model. (The Michigan legislature took over Detroit’s schools in 1999.) Corporate tentacles encroach upon the traditional powers of “too-Black” cities in ways not visible to ordinary citizens – through regional agencies, special industrial and development zones, targeted tax abatements, etc. – until there is little left for the local Black government to tax or administer except its largely impoverished constituents. Black governance is discredited – even though, in the last stages of urban distress, there are few resources with which to govern. The city writhes in protracted pain until “rescued” by the state for the purpose of corporate makeover (“renaissance”) and repopulation.

The corporate rulers and their minions must be held responsible for all of the pain that is inflicted on the people of intentionally distressed cities, whose residents are stripped of the means to defend themselves against the tortures, humiliations and various poisons of the state.

________________
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Bankster Crooks At Goldman Sachs Get Another Stay-Out-of-Jail Card With A $5.1 Billion Payoff

Goldman was among other big banks that sold garbage securities and smashed the global economy, costing the world trillions and sending hundreds of millions to the unemployment line.

A world-class criminal who will never spend a day in jail.
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs.
(Photo by Financial Times)

By Ben McLannahan
Goldman Sachs has has reached a $5.1bn settlement with the US government and other agencies for mis-selling mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis, in a move that will wipe out most of its profits for the fourth quarter.

On Thursday afternoon Goldman said that it would pay a $2.4bn civil monetary penalty to the Department of Justice, and make $875m in cash payments to various other agencies. The bank said it would also provide a total of $1.8bn in relief for distressed borrowers and underwater homeowners, financing for affordable housing, and support for other programmes to boost the housing sector.

Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive, said in a statement that the bank was “pleased to have reached an agreement in principle to resolve these matters.”

The Wall Street bank had been among several charged with mis-selling by the DoJ, and is the last to settle.

The first, in November 2013, was JPMorgan Chase, whose $13bn bill reflected huge liabilities assumed through the crisis-era acquisitions of Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. Citigroup then paid $7bn to resolve its case in the summer of 2014, followed by Bank of America, which paid a heavy $17bn to settle claims pumped up by the acquisitions of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. Last February Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $2.6bn to draw a line under claims against it.

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Most Americans Are One Paycheck Away From the Street — 63% Can't Deal With $500 Emergency

Photo by Franco Folini.

By Quentin Fottrell
Americans are starting 2016 with more job security, but most are still theoretically only one paycheck away from the street.

Approximately 63% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a survey released Wednesday of 1,000 adults by personal finance website Bankrate.com, up slightly from 62% last year. Faced with an emergency, they say they would raise the money by reducing spending elsewhere (23%), borrowing from family and/or friends (15%) or using credit cards to bridge the gap (15%).

This lack of emergency savings could be a problem for millions of Americans. More than four in 10 Americans either experienced a major unexpected expense over the past 12 months or had an immediate family member who had an unexpected expense, Bankrate found. (The survey didn’t specify the impact of that expense.) “Without emergency savings, you may not have money to cover needed home repairs,” says Signe-Mary McKernan, senior fellow and economist at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on social and economic policy. “Similarly, without emergency savings, people could raid their retirement account.”

The findings are strikingly similar to two other reports, one by the U.S. Federal Reserve survey of more than 4,000 adults released in 2014. “Savings are depleted for many households after the recession,” it found. Among those who had savings prior to 2008, 57% said they’d used up some or all of their savings in the Great Recession and its aftermath. And another survey of 1,000 adults released last year by personal finance website GOBankingRates.com found that most Americans (62%) have less than $1,000 in their savings account (although that doesn’t include retirement or other investment accounts).

Why aren’t people saving? Millions of Americans are struggling with student loans, medical bills and other debts, says Andrew Meadows, a San Francisco-based producer of “Broken Eggs,” a documentary about retirement.

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Who Built Up the Technology of the Soviet Union? — Yep, the Same Wall Street Creeps Who Funded Hitler (Video)

All Those Banker Suicides: Corporations Have An Incentive to Kill Their Executives — Money and Coverups

Taking Out Life Insurance On Workers Without Their Knowledge Provides Corporations With An Incentive To Kill Them

The building from which Thomas Hughes (reportedly) jumped to his death.

By James Corbett
29 year old investment banker Thomas Hughes died in the early morning hours last Thursday after apparently falling from the 24th floor of his Manhattan apartment building. The Daily Mail’s coverage of the incident is revealing, not because it sheds light on what actually happened to Hughes, but because it deftly buries the most interesting aspects of the case under a sea of speculation and hand-waving.

“Exclusive: Father of investment banker, 29, fears son turned to drink and drugs to cope with stress and jumped to his death after a ‘Wolf of Wall Street cocaine party’!” blares the typically unwieldy tabloid title, and sadly the reporting does not rise above the level of that headline. After noting that Hughes is in fact the 12th person in high finance so far this year to take their own life (if that is indeed what he did), we are promptly informed that this has prompted a “renewed focus on the demands that Wall St places on young bankers.”

And his father’s “fear” that Thomas “jumped to his death after a ‘Wolf of Wall Street Cocaine party’?” If you can cover up the sidebar on the right-hand side of the DM’s clickbait-infested site long enough to actually read the article, you’ll find out that this is not what his father was actually saying. “I wish I would have crystal clear answers. If you met him you would say this is the opposite person who would seem like the kind of person who was considering taking this type of action,” the father was quoted as saying after asserting that his son was “enjoying his work.”

So what is happening here? Why are MSM outlets like the Daily Mail rushing to wrap this up as ‘just another suicide of an over-stressed banker’ before the police have even identified the body (which was unrecognizable after impact)?


The answer might just lie in Hughes’ resume. Although he worked for Park Avenue investment bank Moelis & Company at the time of his death, his Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) profile indicates he interned at JPMorgan Chase before going on to stints at UBS and Citibank.

Although you could be forgiven for having blinked-and-missed-it in the midst of the wall-to-wall coverage of the earth-shatteringly important Caitlyn Jenner kerfuffle, those three banks were part of the sextet that were just found guilty of manipulating the $5 trillion a day foreign exchange market and collectively fined an impressive-sounding but ultimately trivial $6 billion for the crime.

While this connection in and of itself may not be the answer to the Hughes riddle, it takes on a new light when we look at some positively ghoulish information on “dead peasants insurance” in the banking industry. For those who don’t know, “dead peasants insurance” is known in the business world as “COLI” or “corporate-owned life insurance,” or on Wall Street as “BOLI,” i.e. “bank-owned life insurance.” These are life insurance policies that are taken out by corporations for their employees. In the event of the death of that employee, the corporation gets the pay out, often behind the back of the employee’s family.

Although it is traditionally painted in the media as little more than a tax deduction scheme, Ellen E. Schultz uncovered an altogether more sinister possibility. In her 2011 book Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers, Schultz published a memo from an insurance agent to Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. discussing these types of insurance policies. The agent notes how firms like Procter & Gamble and Diebold were ‘suffering’ from low employee death rates (and thus low life insurance payoffs), but one firm had a significantly higher rate:

“A company the agent called NCC had a better death rate, he noted. People were dying at 78 percent expected mortality. ‘However, this includes three suicides within the first year which is highly unusual’— NCC had not had one suicide in twenty-five years until 1990. ‘Without these suicides, NCC would be running at 33% expected mortality. This fact highly concerns me.’”

As Wall Street on Parade pointed out in an explosive report on the subject one year ago, Wall Street, too, is heavily invested in these types of insurance policies. That report detailed how Wall Street’s four largest banks hold as much as $681 billion in life insurance in force on their employees, past and present, and JPMorgan holds up to $179 billion of that total.

And now, coincidentally, JPMorgan has been experiencing an unusual number of ‘suicides’ and unusual deaths of young workers since the so-called “bankster suicide” phenomenon began in December of 2013.

This list includes the likes of Andrew Jarzyk, another former tech intern at JPMorgan who went missing and was found dead in the Hudson River in 2014 in circumstances that have still never been explained.

Or Gabriel Magee, the Vice-President of IT at JPMorgan who apparently threw himself from the 32nd floor of the bank’s London headquarters after sending his girlfriend a text that he would be home late that evening.

Or Kenneth Bellando, a former JPMorgan analyst whose JPMorgan-employed brother was mentioned in a senate investigation into Morgan’s $6.2 billion Whale derivatives disaster that slammed the bank for lying to regulators.

Although there has been a larger pattern of bankster deaths identified by others in the past year and a half, it’s the JPMorgan pattern that sticks out: young interns and analysts, many of them tech workers for the banking giant, are ending up dead in unusual circumstances.

Could this be, as the Daily Mail and its ilk are all too keen to suggest, simply a case of overworked young investment bankers choosing the easy way out? It’s a possibility. But could it be something much more sinister? A heartless scheme to help meet the company’s dead peasant mortality projections? Or an attempt to silence potential whistleblowers about the systems JPMorgan is using to game the markets? These, too, are possibilities, though ones that will never be broached by the lapdog media.

Reprinted with permission from The Corbett Report.

Hillary Clinton’s Lucrative Life of Crime

By Ted Rall
Bill and Hillary Clinton “earned” — can a mortal earn such stratospheric sums? — “at least $30 million over the last 16 months, mainly from giving paid speeches to corporations, banks and other organizations,” The New York Times reports. “They have now earned more than $125 million on the [lecture] circuit since leaving the White House in 2001.”

This is an important issue. But the big story has little to with what actually matters.

Coverage of the Clintons’ spectacularly lucrative speaking career has focused on how it affects Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign — specifically the political damage caused by the public’s growing perception that Hillary is out of touch with the common man and woman. It is a promising line of inquiry for her detractors (myself included).

Hillary is out of touch. She hasn’t been behind the wheel of an automobile for nearly 20 years, is a multi-multi-millionaire who nevertheless considered herself “dead broke” and still believes that she and her husband are not among “the truly well off.” (Maybe Bill still drives.)

Ostentatious wealth coupled with tonedeafness didn’t help Mitt “47 percent” Romney in 2012, or John “I can’t remember how many houses I own” McCain in 2008 — and they were Republicans, a party that gleefully despises the poor and jobless. For a Democrat under heavy fire from her party’s progressive base — with Elizabeth Warren, Bill di Blasio and Bernie Sanders leading the charge — this stuff could be politically fatal.

But the media ought to focus on the real issue. FDR was wealthy, yet he created the social safety net as we know it (what’s left of it, anyway). JFK and RFK came from money, yet no one doubted their commitment to help the downtrodden. Liberals distrust Hillary due to her and her husband’s long record of kowtowing to Wall Street bankers and transnational corporations, supporting jobs-killing “free trade” agreements, backing the NSA’s intrusions into our privacy and as an unrepentant militarist. Her progressivism appears to have died with her law career.

Conflict of interest: that’s why we should be concerned about all those $250,000 speeches.

The big question is: Why do corporations and banks shell out a quarter of a million dollars for a Hill Talk?

Corporations and banks don’t pay big bucks to Hillary Clinton because they’re dying to hear what she has to say. After having been front and center on the national political scene for a quarter century, she and Bill don’t have new insights to share. And even if I’m wrong — even if you’re a CEO and you’re dying to learn her ultimate (new) recipe for baking cookies — you don’t have to invite her to speak to your company to get the dish. You can ask one of your CEO pals who already had her speak at his firm — or pay to attend one of the zillions of other lectures she gives.

This is not about Hillary’s message.

Corporations and banks bribe the Clintons to buy political favors. The speaking racket is a (flimsy) cover.

Like, there’s the time Goldman Sachs paid $200,000 for a Bill Talk a few months before the financial conglomerate lobbied Hill when she was secretary of state. At least 13 companies paid Bill and Hill at least $2.5 million in similar sleazy deals.

Those are just the brazen quid pro quo deals.

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Protesters March Against Austerity Measures in Madrid, Spain

Spain saw growth of 1.4% in 2014 but after an economic crisis that lasted six years, the economy remains battered with an unemployment rate of 23.7%

Screen capture from YouTube video.

By Agence France-Presse
Thousands of people took part in a “march for dignity” in Madrid on Saturday to protest against austerity measures on the eve of a closely-watched regional election in southern Spain.

Sunday’s vote in Andalusia, one of the poorest parts of the country, is seen as a test of the national mood ahead of Spain’s most unpredictable general election in decades.

“Bread, work, a roof and dignity” read a large banner as a group of demonstrators made their way through one of the richer areas of the capital before joining up with other protesters at the Plaza de Colón square.

The demonstrators were voicing their discontent with the painful austerity policies that have led the government to make spending cuts to the tune of €150bn ($162bn) between 2012 and 2014. Education, public health, and social benefits have all been affected.

Spain saw growth of 1.4% in 2014 but after an economic crisis that lasted six years, the economy remains battered with an unemployment rate of 23.7%.

Half of all young people between the ages of 16 and 25 are without jobs.

“We have mobilised here for the young people because in Extremadura youth unemployment is almost 60%,” said 28-year-old Antonio Laso who hails from the country’s southwestern region.

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Shock Doctrine in Ukraine: IMF $17.5 Billion Loan Linked to 'Reform' and the Impoverishment of the Ukrainian Population

Ukraine made a deal with the devil (the IMF). The post-coup government's billionaire president is swimming in money and thus has no need to worry, but the average Ukrainian might face starvation when all is said and done.

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten article. Translation and notes by Eric Zuesse,

Scroll down for Eric Zuesse’s analysis of the agreement

SUMMARY:

Ukraine will receive total loans of 40 billion dollars from international tax money. For this purpose, Ukraine will carry out “reforms” especially such demands as that the social system be dismantled and privatization [selloff of government assets in order to repay the loans] be performed. The Kiev government is very pleased with the ‘help’. A native of the US, Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko wants to buy weapons with the money. European banks are relieved because Kiev, for the time being, is able to meet its debt service

DETAILS:

Angela Merkel and IMF chief Christine Lagarde rejoiced in Berlin on Wednesday, because, in their view, Ukraine is on the right track.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has fully approved its new loan package of 17.5 billion for Ukraine. This approval from the IMF Board of the four-year loan program was announced in Berlin on Wednesday by the IMF’s head Christine Lagarde. She said that the loan will help to stabilize the economic situation in Ukraine as quickly as possible. At the same time Ukraine will launch far-reaching reforms to restore robust growth and improve the living conditions of the population, she promises.

“Ukraine has fulfilled all conditions for this loan program, “Lagarde said in Berlin after a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and the heads of other global financial and economic organizations. The newly approved plan will pay Ukraine ten billion dollars in the first year.

Overall, the international community is now fully committed to provide to Ukraine around $ 40 billion in loans. Specifically, the IMF has converted its previous short-term loans (Stand-By Arrangement) into a long-term loan program (Extended Fund Facility).

Ukraine is virtually bankrupt and can, according to the statement from Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, survive only with the IMF loans. Yatsenyuk says that the amount of the first installment of the new loan program from the IMF will be five billion US dollars. ”We managed to show the IMF that we implement reforms,” he said on Wednesday night, according to local media in Kiev – and he pointedly held five fingers in the air.

The EU has recently approved 1.8 billion euros for Ukraine. Germany has bilaterally (with Ukraine) granted an additional credit line of 500 million euros for economic stabilization. In addition, Reuters reports that IMF insiders believe that the creditors of Ukraine will be asked to pay. They are expected to contribute 15.4 billion euros – which could run for example via a waiver [of part of what’s owed]. This could affect Russia as well as the investor George Soros, both of which hold Ukrainian government bonds.

Ukraine will get more funds, more time, more flexibility and better financing terms, Lagarde said. She pointed out that additional funding will be added. Furthermore, the Ukrainian government has initiated talks with lenders to reduce the national debt to a sustainable level in the medium term.

The IMF says that the impact of the reforms, particularly for the poorest part of the population, will be to cushion and enable to be strengthened the social network and enable its measures to be implemented in a more targeted way. But the opposite is actually true. The government has in particular brought in laws by which the situation of pensioners, the sick and children will significantly deteriorate.

“The program is ambitious and involves risks,” said Lagarde. This is particularly true in view of the conflict in the east. Encouragingly, the ceasefire agreed in Minsk seems to be holding, to a large extent.

In addition to the new IMF loans, the loan program to Ukraine also includes money from Western industrialized countries (G7), the EU and other institutions. Germany alone controls so far the additional credit line of 500 million euros for the reconstruction of the country. These are guarantees [insurance] to project funding.

The federal government had earlier stressed the “bailout” is linked to “reform”. ”This financial support from the IMF and the European Union can be provided only with the understanding that Ukraine will adopt and implement urgently needed reforms,” said government spokesman Steffen Seibert in Berlin.

US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland vowed on Wednesday in addressing the US Congress, that the reforms in Ukraine, will go beyond all the praise, by cutting pensions and the social system, and by privatizing Ukraine’s agriculture. International seed companies like Monsanto will benefit from the credits from taxpayers because these companies will be able to buy agricultural land from local farmers at low prices [without having to worry about the riskiness of Ukraine’s government debt]. [It should also be noted that until the U.S. took over Ukraine, there were no GMO seeds allowed anywhere in Europe.]

Only recently have oligarchs established an agency for the reconstruction of Ukraine.The agency is endorsed by ex-Commissioners and SPD politicians like Peer Steinbrück. Western politicians will likely help Ukraine’s oligarchs benefit from the tax money coming from Europe and America.

Taxpayers’ money will be controlled by the former employee of the US State Department, the investment banker [and now Ukraine’s Finance Minister] Natalie Jaresko. Jaresko has already announced that the new credit in addition to the debt service will help Ukraine to buy, especially, weapons.

The occupation of the key Ministry of Ukraine [Finance] by an American is describe by criticis critics as a provocation.

Banks in Europe are investing heavily in Ukraine, and therefore also will benefit from the newly approved loans. [Taxpayers take the risks, while those banks reap the benefits.]

Note by Eric Zeusse

The deal that seems to be shaping up is that while Obama’s secondary goal of enabling U.S. and EU corporations to plunder Ukraine will be fulfilled, Obama’s primary goal of Ukraine’s joining NATO will not. Russia has to approve these loans to Ukraine, because Russia is Ukraine’s most-senior debtholder. So, if this plan works out as described, and Russia accepts being treated instead as a junior debtholder, then Russia will have to be getting in return what it wants most, which is that the new, rabidly anti-Russian, Obama-imposed, Ukrainian regime, not be allowed into NATO, and not become a launch-site for NATO missiles. Implicit in this is also that the acceptance and permanency of the existing battle-demarcation-lines, in which Ukraine’s forces occupy Mariupol. This settlement suggests that Russia will somehow have to find a way to build a ten-mile bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting Crimea with the rest of Russia.

When Ukraine invaded Mariupol during 7-9 May 2014 and set afire the police headquarters and shot directly at the residents to terrify and subdue them, this started the bloodiest of the civil war’s battles that Ukraine ended up winning, and Mariupol is now virtually a ghost town except for Ukraine’s occupying troops. Ukraine’s very bloody conquest of Mariupol may be considered to be Ukraine’s revenge for having peacefully — because of Russian troops in Crimea — lost Crimea to Russia on 16 March 2014.

This news-story is basically a first-statement of the proposed and implicitly accepted settlement-terms of Ukraine’s civil war. Western taxpayers will be bearing much of the burden, though they had no role in approving these terms except for their having been fooled by propaganda into voting for politicians whose primarly loyalty is to the individuals who financed their campaigns and their careers — not to the public. The entire Ukrainian gambit of Obama ends up as little more than a pillaging operation. If he accepts it as being that, and if Putin accepts it as being nothing more than that, then the deal will stick, and the residents of Ukraine will become even more impoverished, and will massively migrate into Europe, as prostitutes and other desperate people competing against the existing refugees and other poor there. This will be a major victory for aristocrats, who will not need to pay as much for workers as formerly. However, everyone else will suffer. This is what the aristocracy calls ‘the free market,’ and ‘democracy.’ It’s a massive money-funnel to the super-rich.]

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.

How Corporate America Supported Nazi Germany — And Made a Mint off of Hitler and World War II In General

_____________

Who Funded Adolf Hitler?: The Answer Might Surprise You

For links to Further Info, Go HERE

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Hitler's American Business Partners - Documentary

Nazi Party's Rise In Greece Fueled by Austerity Says Greek Minister

New government's attempt to rectify economic conditions is all that's keeping fascists from the door says Yannis Varoufakis

People gather for an anti-austerity demonstration outside the Greek parliament in Athens February 5, 2015. About 4,000 people gathered for an anti-austerity demonstration in Athens' central Syntagma Square on Thursday but in sharp contrast with previous violent protests there were no barricades and barely any police. Thursday's protest was called to support the new government's tough stance with the EU, with whom it is seeking an end to the stringent budget rules. (Photo: Reuters/Yannis Behrakis)

By Jon Queally
Revealing the distance that still remains between the Greek and German governments when it comes to renegotiating terms of the bailout program, a meeting between the nation's financial ministers in Berlin on Thursday was punctuated by the acknowledgement that the two could not, in fact, even "agree to disagree" and a warning from the new Syriza government that without a loosening of austerity, fascist forces will almost surely rise.

"We didn’t come to an agreement," said Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, recently appointed to the post after Syriza swept into power during national elections last month. "We couldn’t even agree to disagree. We agreed to continue consultations as partners. Our solution will have Europe’s interest as a priority."

He continued: "We did not reach agreement because it was never on the cards that we would... We didn’t discuss the debt, but we set the framework for discussions."

For his part, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble indicated that his nation would remain steadfast in its belief that Greece must adhere to the terms agreed to by the previous government, despite the fact that Syriza was elected on clear promises to renegotiate those terms. Without apology, Syriza has said the austerity measures attached to loans offered by the so-called Troika—the IMF, European Central Bank, and the EU—are crushing its economy and the Greek people and must be reversed.

"We have a common currency but different economic policies," Schaeuble said of his meeting with Varoufakis. "There are commitments to the level of governments for their budgets and they need confirmation by the Greek Parliament, but it is important that agreed commitments and agreements must be respected."

In his remarks, Varoufakis said that if the does not Troika bend and accept new terms, there is serious risk that the spiraling impacts of the economic Depression in his country will continue to fuel the rise of fascist, rightwing forces within his country.

"No one understands better than the people of this land how a severely depressed economy, combined with a ritual national humiliation and unending hopelessness, can hatch the serpent’s egg within its society. When I return home tonight, I will find a country where the third-largest party is not a neo-nazi party, but a nazi party,” he said, referring to the Golden Dawn party which currently, despite many of its members serving prison time for violence and corruption, holds the third-most seats in Greek Parliament. "We need the people of Germany on our side."

Despite those risks and proving that members of the Troika are ready to play hardball with Syriza, the ECB on Wednesday applied market pressure on the new government by announcing it would no longer accept Greek-issued bonds. As explained by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the move by the powerful institution "was a clear and deliberate attempt to undermine" the new leadership in Athens amid ongoing negotiations.

According to Weisbrot, "They are trying to force the government to abandon its promises to the Greek electorate, and to follow the IMF program that its predecessors signed on to."

He concluded, "The ECB should be ashamed of its latest assault on Greek democracy. And they should not be able to get away with disguising it as anything less than that."

Syriza, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, is expected to reveal its economic plan in the coming days.

As both Tsipras, Varoufakis and other ministers returned to Athens on Thursday night, they were greeted by a large public demonstration condemning the Troika's austerity policy.

Thousands gathered in Syntagma Square to cheer Syriza and protest the ECB's move on Wednesday. According to the Greek daily Ekathimerini:

Responding to a call on social media, the crowd estimated by police at 5,000-strong stood in silence on Syntagma Square, the scene of violent protests at the height of the Greek economic crisis in 2012.

"It's the first demonstration in favour of a Greek government. Finally we have a government which respects its campaign promises and defends the interests of our country," Telemaque Papatheodorou, an engineer in his 30s, told AFP.

The protest was called following the decision by the European Central Bank late Wednesday to cut off a vital source of funds for Greece's banks. [...]

"The decision by the ECB demonstrates the pressure on Greece, but that's nothing compared to the problems of people who are starving or suicidal," said Dimitra Spyridopoulou, a lawyer.

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.