At Least Judge Rakoff Gets It. Too Bad Citi and SEC Crooks.

Federal Judge Blocks Citi MBS Settlement, Schedules Jury Trial
By: David Dayen November 28, 2011

Judge Jed Rakoff delivered a final blow to the enforcement paradigm followed by the Securities and Exchange Commission today by rejecting their $285 million settlement with Citigroup on an illegal mortgage backed securities deal, calling it “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor in the public interest.”

In an order Monday, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff rejected the pact, saying in part that he “lacks a framework for determining” the adequacy of the deal based on the facts presented to the court.

“The SEC’s long-standing policy—hallowed by history, but not by reason—of allowing defendants to enter into consent judgments without admitting or denying the underlying allegations, deprives the court of even the most minimal assurance that the substantial injunctive relief it is being asked to impose has any basis in fact,” the judge said.

As you can see, Rakoff is not only rejecting this deal, but objecting to the entire premise of SEC settlements on these issues over the past several years, particularly the idea that the offending party need not admit to wrongdoing when they settle. There may not be a more galling aspect to the general amnesty given to the financial industry than this, that the big banks can just throw money at their problems, just pay off the regulators for their fraudulent activities, and never have to say “we were wrong.” Obviously an admission of guilt would open them up for additional charges, and that simply cannot be done.

Zero Hedge has the full filing. This triggers a trial date for Citi in July of 2012, a jury trial where the ultimate terms of the settlement can change wildly. The SEC obviously gets reprimanded by Rakoff for failing to create a settlement in the public interest. But Citi could have to pay through the nose by going to a jury on this case, where they are accused of knowingly selling MBS to investors where they took the other side of the bet.

More from Crain’s New York. Bravo for Judge Rakoff for blowing the whistle on an insidious game being played between the regulators and the banks to essentially whitewash past crimes. This is a great line, from the order:

In any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth. In much of the world, propaganda reigns, and truth is confined to secretive, fearful whispers. Even in our nation, apologists for suppressing or obscuring the truth may always be found. But the SEC, of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if fails to do so, this Court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances.

WHY OCCUPY? Watch 3 mins of WHY...

We are very close to the foreclosure crisis in America - for those who are directly facing or have friends facing foreclosure, read below.  DEMAND that the bank/servicer/court SHOW YOU PROOF of *INTEREST* - DEMAND THE NOTE!  FIGHT!

Foreclosure Fraud in a Nutshell
and How Newt Gingrich Abetted the Theft of Average Joe’s Home

by Bill Butler

The untold story in the foreclosure crisis unfolding across America is that, following a foreclosure perpetrated by one of the October 2008 Bailout Banks (e.g. Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo) Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac suddenly appear as the record owner of Average Joe’s home. These federal government sponsored entities then go into local housingcourt and get a court order authorizing them to evict Joe. If Joe resists, these supposedly charitable institutions obtain a writ ordering the local sheriff to forcibly remove Joe from his home.


Newt Gingrich recently admitted to accepting $1.8 million from Freddie Mac ($25,0000 to $30,000 a month during one span of time) for advising this proto-fascist entity. Gingrich claims that he supports Fannie and Freddie because he believes the federal government "should have programs to help low income people acquire the ability to buy homes." But Fannie and Freddie don’t do this and never have. When government "helps" someone by subsidizing the purchase of something (through easy credit or lower-than-market rates), it makes that something more expensive. Helping someone buy something that is overpriced because of your help is not help. Fannie/Freddie subsidies not only hurt the low income people they intend to help, they hurt everyone by subsidizing, and therefore distorting, the entire housing market. Fannie/Freddie’s charity has now taken a dark turn. Like their Depression-era New Deal predecessor the Regional Agricultural Credit Corp., Fannie/Freddie are now repossessing homes at an increasing and alarming rate. Mr. Gingrich either does not understand economics – government subsidies make things more expensive, not less expensive, and therefore hurt their intended beneficiaries – or he is a vain, selfish, and cynical man with no interest in actually helping his neighbor.


You decide.


THE OCTOBER 2008 BAILOUT PAID OFF THE HOLDERS OF MORTGAGE BACKED SECURITES AND DERIVATIVE INSUREDS


The facts indicate that the Federal Reserve "printed" at least 16 trillion dollars as part of the 2008 bailouts. The bigger questions, however, who got it, why and what did the Fed get in return? The Fed doesn’t just print money. It prints money to buy stuff. Most often this is U.S. Treasuries. That changed in October of 2008. In and after October 2008 the Fed printed new money to buy mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that were defaulting at a rapid rate. Want proof? Here is a link to the Federal Reserve balance sheet which shows that the Fed is holding over a trillion dollars in mortgage backed securities that it began acquiring in 2008.


Why is the Federal Reserve holding all these MBS? Because when "the market" collapsed in September of 2008, what really collapsed is the Fannie/Freddie/Wall Street mortgage "daisy chain" securitization scheme. As increasing numbers of MBS went into default, the purchasers of derivatives (naked insurance contracts betting on MBS default) began filing claims against the insurance writers (e.g. AIG) demanding payment. This started in February 2007 when HSBC Bank announced billions in MBS losses, gained momentum in June of 2007 when Bear Stearns announced $3.8 billion in MBS exposure in just one Bear Stearns fund, and further momentum with the actual collapse of Bear Stears in July and August of 2007. By September of 2008, the Bear Stearns collapse proved to be the canary in the coal mine as the claims on off-balance sheet derivatives became the cascading cross defaults that Alan Greenspan warned could collapse the entire Western financial system.


Part of what happened in October 2008 is that the Federal Reserve paid AIG's and others’ derivative obligations to the insureds (pension funds, hedge funds, major banks, foreign banks) who held the naked insurance contracts guaranteeing Average Joe's payments. To understand this, imagine that a cataclysmic event occurred in the U.S. that destroyed nearly every car in the U.S. and further that Allstate insured all of these cars. That is what happened to AIG. When the housing market collapsed and borrowers began defaulting on their securitized loans, AIG’s derivative obligations exceeded its ability (or willingness) to pay. So the Fed stepped in as the insurer of last resort and bailed out AIG (and probably others). When an insurer pays on a personal property claim, it has "subrogation" rights. This means when it pays it has the right to demand possession of the personal property it insured or seek recovery from those responsible for the loss. In Allstate’s case this is wrecked cars. In the case of AIG and the Fed, it is MBS. That is what the trillions of MBS on the Fed’s balance sheet represent: wrecked cars that Fannie and Freddie are now liquidating for scrap value.


Thank you Mr. Gingrich. Great advice.


Read full article here.

They Get The Profit, You Pay The Bill.

Wall Street Banks Earned Billions In Profits Off $7.7 Trillion In Secret Fed Loans Made During The Financial Crisis

By Travis Waldron on Nov 28, 2011 at 9:25 am

In the lead-up to the financial crisis that crippled the American economy and plunged the country into a recession, the Federal Reserve made trillions in undisclosed loans to struggling banks and financial institutions, according to official documents obtained by Bloomberg News. Six of the country’s largest banks then turned those loans into more than $13 billion in previously undisclosed profits.

The total cost of the Fed loans amounted to $7.77 trillion, and unlike the funds made available by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the loans came with virtually no strings attached for the banks:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

In one month, Morgan Stanley — one of the most vulnerable financial companies at the time — took $107 billion in secret loans, enough to pay off a tenth of the nation’s delinquent mortgages. The loans, like those made to other institutions, were never reported to Morgan Stanley’s shareholders or the taxpayers who subsidized them.

Other banks drew similar loans without disclosing them. Bank of America, for instance, held $86 billion in public debt on the day then-CEO Ken Lewis declared his company “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” Bank of America’s Fed borrowing peaked at $91.4 billion in February 2009; at the same time, it benefited from $45 billion in TARP loans.

And even while members of Congress were working to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system, the banks and the Fed kept them in the dark about the loans. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), one of the architects of the Wall Street reform act that eventually became law, and former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), the GOP’s lead negotiator on TARP, told Bloomberg they were unaware of the specifics of such loans.

Had Congress had such information, members of both parties would have changed their votes to favor Wall Street reform, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said. Former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), meanwhile, said knowledge of the loans could have led to a push to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited banks from owning investment companies and vice versa, thereby limiting their size and vulnerability to such crises.

The secret nature of the loans, however, instead helped Wall Street work to “preserve a broken status quo” that allowed its biggest banks to grow even larger than they were before the crisis. The nation’s largest banks have turned more in profit in the last 30 months than they did in nearly eight years preceding the crisis, all while spending millions to derail significant reform legislation. And since the Dodd-Frank Act became law, they have spent millions more to weaken its rules and prevent certain regulations from taking effect. Bank lobbying, in fact, is now on pace to reach a record high this year.

More News Of The Great American Theft Is Leaked By The Press

Bloomberg News: Banks Got An Undisclosed $13 Billion During Bailout

By Susie Madrak

We will continue to see the economic effects of the "extend and pretend" philosophy of pumping massive amounts of public money into failing banks for a very long time. (Thank God we taught those homeowners a moral lesson by refusing to help them, huh?) Yes, the banks lied about their stability, the regulators lied to the public, and no, they really didn't pay back TARP in full. But at least we didn't allow homeowners to get a break, and that's the most important thing (as a bunch of millionaires courageously decided).

It's a shame that the European Union isn't learning from our mistakes, either:

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

Go read the whole infuriating story. Apparently passing "too big to fail" regulation would have been "punishing success." Meanwhile, senior citizens who are living in their cars and dumpster diving for food because these bastards crashed the economy? Losers!

Just a Holiday Reminder: Black Friday Is Utterly Meaningless

You'd never know it from the media coverage, but Black Friday sales are essentially meaningless noise in the U.S. economy.
(Charles Hugh Smith 11-25-11)

You know the economy and stock market are in deep trouble when the Mainstream Media elevates one essentially meaningless metric to "The One Meaningful Statistic" and then trumpets it slavishly. One such meaningless metric is Black Friday.

The Media has glommed onto Black Friday for a number of flawed reasons, number one being the MSM's ceaseless drive to reduce all complex problems down to something that can be expressed in a sound-bite voiceover and a video clip of a crowded mall.

The MSM loves binaries: two parties, two final contestants, and if Black Friday is "good," i.e. sales exceed last year's consumerist bacchanal, then the economy is "healthy." Any weakening of the consumer's lemming-like drive to buy, buy, buy means the economy is "weak."

This is of course absolutely backward: consumers buying shiploads of poor-quality crap made overseas means the economy is is still on the slippery slope to implosion, as debt is being used to fund consumption while capital formation (savings) remains pathetic.

Since most of the crap (and it is crap--most Americans have either forgotten what actual quality is or they have never experienced it) is made overseas, the "boost" to the economy generated by rampant charge-card consumption flows to only one slice of the the U.S. economy: corporate profits.

U.S.-based global corporations skim most of the profits made when crap is made overseas; how much profit do you think the Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers of the iPad and iPhone components make? If you guessed 1%-2% of their part of the cost, you're right. So if a $300 device costs $100 to actually manufacture in China, the Chinese suppliers make a dollar or two. Apple skims about $100 and the distribution/retail channels skim the other $100.

Read full article here.

Thank You, Thank You.

Heres A Thanksgiving Gift To All Those That Tried To make Things Better For All Of Us.

For those that occupied Wall Street and all the other occupy sites around the country and the world, Thank You.

For those students on the nations campuses who met the violence of authority with non-violence, Thank You.

For those that gave material support for those that occupied, Thank You.

For those that took part in the, Move Your Money campaign, Thank You.

For those who raised their voice in support of #OWS and the 99%, Thank You.

For the few politicians who understood and supported #OWS, Thank You.

And finally to those who have kept an open mind or may be contemplating a review of their long held conservative beliefs we at LGMC wish you well and an enlightened holiday, Thank You.

Thank You, Thank You.
LGMC

Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here? (Moore)

November 22nd, 2011 1:51 PM

Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here?

1 of 1

By Michael Moore

This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.

The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. As one of the millions of people who are participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

Occupy Minneapolis Forms Human Chain to Defend Foreclosed Home, Police Retreat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1x_UPdFDLY&feature=player_detailpage

Dumb and Dumber

Fox News Host Dismisses Pepper Spray Attack By Cops: ‘It’s A Food Product, Essentially’

Last night, Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly attempted to defend a UC Davis police officer’s use of pepper spray against nonviolent protesters. “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police,” O’Reilly said, “particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.” He didn’t explain why the abuse of violent force might be more necessary or justified against liberal students. Kelly went even further in dismissing the suffering of students attacked by the pepper spray, speculating that it’s not that harmful because “it’s like a derivative of actual pepper. It’s a food product, essentially.” Watch it:

While Kelly suggests the pepper spray was somehow diluted, Lt. John Pike actually sprayed the sitting students in the face with military-grade pepper spray three times. Video of the incident provoked public outrage and prompted UC system president Mark Yudof to order a review of police procedures at all UC campuses. Two students were hospitalized, and three cops were placed on paid leave as a result of the attack.

Big Business Lies About Layoffs, Again!

Companies Lay Off Workers While Spending Billions On Share Buybacks To Enrich Executives

By Pat Garofalo posted from ThinkProgress Economy on Nov 22, 2011

Even as Republicans and CEOs of major companies complain that taxes are stifling job creation, corporations have been sitting on trillions of dollars in cash reserves, at some of the highest levels on record. The New York Times this morning notes another wrinkle in this story, pointing out that some companies have been laying off workers at the same time that they’re spending billions to buy back their own shares, thus enriching executives:

When Pfizer cut its research budget this year and laid off 1,100 employees, it was not because the company needed to save money.
In fact, the drug maker had so much cash left over, it decided to buy back an additional $5 billion worth of stock on top of the $4 billion already earmarked for repurchases in 2011 and beyond. [...]

There has been a steady drumbeat of other companies laying off workers even as they have disclosed plans to buy back more stock. On June 23, Campbell Soup said it would buy back $1 billion in stock; five days later it announced plans to eliminate 770 jobs. Hewlett-Packard announced a $10 billion stock repurchase in July, and jettisoned 500 jobs in September after it discontinued its TouchPad and smartphone product lines.

“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. By buying back shares and lowering the number that are in circulation, executives can make their own “earnings per share” number look better, thus boosting their bonuses.

Part of the problem is that companies don’t see any demand in the economy, thanks to high unemployment, lack of consumer confidence, and austerity at the state budget level. But at the same time that they’re using billions to enrich themselves, corporate executives are whining that the problems in the economy have to do with regulation and taxes, and spend their time pushing for new tax giveaways that would boost their already high levels of cash even higher. But if the way that they’re employing their current stockpiles of money is any indication, corporations’ attempts to secure more through lower taxes should be met with extreme skepticism.

Gee, Another EU Supply Side Accolyte Elected To Prove That The World Is Flat

Another Change of Party in Europe as Crisis Continues
By: David Dayen Monday November 21, 2011

At least this time, the public actually chose new leaders, instead of the European Union choosing them for the public. In Spain, the Popular Party (why didn’t we think of that? How can you lose with a name like the Popular Party?) led by Mariano Rajoy scored a victory over the Socialists, due in no small part to the crisis ravaging the country with high unemployment and a collapsing housing market.

Mr Rajoy, who is expected to tackle the country’s debts amid slow growth and high unemployment, said he was aware of the “magnitude of the task ahead”.
He told supporters there would be “no miracle” to restore Spain to financial health, and that the country must unite to win back respect in Europe.
“Forty-six million Spaniards are going to wage a battle against the crisis,” said the 56-year-old PP leader [...]
Miguel Arias, the Popular Party’s campaign co-ordinator, said Spain was “going to make all the sacrifices”.
“We have been living as a very rich country,” he told BBC News.
“People are used to a very high level of public services and it takes time to them to acknowledge the realisation that we now are a poor country, that we have lots of debts and in order to pay them back we must reduce public expenditure and then we must recover the confidence of the markets.”

A-ha, now I see why the EU didn’t step in. The party out of power favored austerity! And since things are so bad in Spain, with nearly 20% unemployment, the party out of power, just by virtue of not being the party in power, was assured of victory, the EU could just sit back and let nature take its course.

This is the fifth European country to see a change in leadership during the debt crisis, with Spain joining Italy, Greece, Portugal and Ireland. And yet we still have a crisis, not because of anything the old governments did or anything the new governments are doing, necessarily, but because the real leaders in Europe, the ones with the firepower to solve, the problem, refuse to take the necessary steps. Mario Draghi, the new head of the ECB, appears to be following in those footsteps:

Credibility implies that our monetary policy is successful in anchoring inflation expectations over the medium and longer term. This is the major contribution we can make in support of sustainable growth, employment creation and financial stability. And we are making this contribution in full independence.

If the only contribution he thinks they can make is on inflation, then as Paul Krugman writes, the ECB “will end up as the highly credible defender of the value of a currency that no longer exists.” Krugman has more in his column today, highlighting that the leaders of Europe aren’t technocrats, but deluded idealists who think that some weird form of Calvinism and self-denial will reap their own rewards.

The biggest problem for Europe right now is that creditors are fleeing from their governments’ bonds and the banks that hold them, in a kind of slow-motion bank run. If the ECB stands mute, the result will be disastrous.

Gingrich Calls Child Labor Laws ‘Stupid’, Wants To Replace Janitors With Poor Kids

 In an anti-government diatribe that would be funny if he weren’t serious, GOP presidential candidate New Gingrich told a crowd at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government yesterday that child labor laws are “tragic” and “stupid” and have “done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy.” In a proposal that he freely admitted was “extraordinarily radical,” he called for firing all school janitors and replacing them with poor students. Politico reports:

“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” Gingrich said. “Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.” [...]

“Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

We Are Starting To Force The Issues.

Sign The 99 Percent Are Winning: Even Ayn Rand Fan Paul Ryan Is Complaining About The Top 1 Percent

By Zaid Jilani posted from ThinkProgress Special Topic on Nov 17, 2011 

99 Percenters nationwide have been engaged in raucous protests for two months now, seeking to call attention to income inequality and other social injustices that have enriched the top 1 percent at the expense of the rest of us.

Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — a hard-right congressman whose political inspiration was ultra-right ideologue Ayn Rand — released a report offering an analysis of the nation’s growing income inequality.

It’s a sign that the 99 Percent are having an impact, forcing even staunch conservatives to address income inequality. Ryan’s report bemoans the country’s growing inequality and even highlights the huge growth of income among the top 1 percent, using the following chart from the Congressional Budget Office:


While the report does go on in other sections to blame the wrong culprits for income inequality and in other ways downplay income inequality altogether, the fact that a congressman who gets his political inspiration from Ayn Rand — who targeted altruism itself as evil — is now forced to openly talk about the problem of income inequality is a huge victory for the 99 Percent.

The First Lucid Writing To Come Out Of Washington DC In Years!

#OccupyDC's Declaration of the Occupation

By Tina Dupuy

Not bad, OccupyDC.

This was voted on Thursday and sent out:

The Declaration of the Occupation of Washington, D.C.
Consented to in committee November 15th, 2011

We have been captives of corrupt economic and political systems for far too long. The concentration of wealth and the purchase of political power stifle the voices of the increasingly disenfranchised 99%. Corporate dominance subverts democracy, intentionally sows division, destroys the environment, obstructs the just and equitable pursuit of happiness, and violates the rights and dignity of all life.

Occupy D.C. is an open community of diverse individuals, founded on equality for the common good. We are peaceably assembled at McPherson Square, practicing direct democracy on the doorstep of K Street, the center of destructive corporate and governmental relationships. We insist that our political and economic systems serve the people’s interests. Now is the time to advance and complete the struggles of those who came before us.

We are assembled because...

It is absurd that The 1% has taken 40% of the nation’s wealth through exploiting labor, outsourcing jobs, and manipulating the tax code to their benefit through special capital tax rates and loopholes. The system is rigged in their favor, yet they cry foul when anyone even dares to question their relentless class warfare.

Candidates in our electoral system require huge sums of money to be competitive. These contributions from multi-national corporations and wealthy individuals destroy responsive representative governance. A system of backroom deals, kickbacks, bribes, and dirty politics overrides the will of the people. The rotation of decision-makers between the public and private sectors cultivates a network of public officials, lobbyists, and executives whose aligned interests do not serve the American people.

The entrenched 2-party system overlooks public interests by pursuing narrow political goals. This climate encourages candidates to polarize voters for individual power and personal gain. Citizens’ meaningful input has been compromised by gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and unresponsive politicians. Residents of Washington DC continue to lack autonomy and legislative representation.

Those with power have divided us from working in solidarity by perpetuating historical prejudices and discrimination based on color of skin, perceived race, immigrant or indigenous status, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability, among other things.

Corporations broke the financial system by gambling with our savings, property, and economy. They needed the public to bail them out of their failures yet deny any responsibility and continue to fight oversight. They loot from those whose labor creates society’s prosperity, while the government allows them to privatize profits and socialize risk.

Corporate interests threaten life on Earth by extracting and burning fossil fuels and resisting the necessary transition to renewable energy. Their drilling, mining, clear-cutting, overfishing, and factory farming destroys the land, jeopardizes our food and water, and poisons the soil with near impunity. They privilege polluters over people by subsidizing fossil fuels, blocking investments in clean energy and efficient transportation, and hiding environmental destruction from public oversight.

Private corporations, with the government’s support, use common resources and infrastructure for short-term personal profit, while stifling efforts to invest in public goods.
The U.S. government engages in drawn-out, costly conflicts abroad. These operations are often pursued to control resources, needlessly overthrow foreign governments, and install friendly regimes. These wars destroy the lives of American soldiers and innocent civilians and are a blank check to divert money from domestic priorities.

Government authorities cultivate a culture of fear to invade our privacy, limit assembly, restrict speech, and deny due process. They have failed in their duty to protect our rights.

Exacerbated by profiteering interests, the criminal justice system has unfairly targeted underprivileged communities and outspoken groups for prosecution rather than protection.

Corporatized culture warps our perception of reality. It cheapens and mocks the beauty of human thought and experience, while promoting excessive materialism as the path to happiness. The corporate news media furthers the interests of the very wealthy, distorts and disregards the truth, and confines our imagination of what is possible for ourselves and society.

Leaders are trading our access to basic needs in exchange for handouts to the ultra-wealthy. Our rights to healthcare, education, food, water, and housing are sacrificed to profit-driven market forces. They are attacking unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, creating an uncertain future for us all.*

A better world is possible. To all people,

We, the Washington D.C. General Assembly occupying K Street in McPherson Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble and reclaim the commons. Re-conceive ways to build a democratic, just, and sustainable world.

To all who value democracy, we encourage you to collaborate, and share available resources. We stand with you in solidarity.

*These grievances are not all inclusive.

About Damn Time

Foreclosure Fraud: First Criminal Charges Filed In Nevada Over Robo-Signing

The Nevada attorney general has indicted two midlevel staffers at a mortgage document company, Lender Processing Services, on a whopping 606 counts of felony and gross misdemeanor for directing employees to forge signatures and falsely notarize documents used to illegally foreclose on Nevada homeowners.

Nevada's is the first criminal indictment since last year's discovery of the nationwide "robo-signing" scandal, in which mortgage servicing companies and banks were processing foreclosures en masse at lightning speed by signing documents they neglected to review and falsifying information.

"The grand jury found probable cause that there was a robo-signing scheme which resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents with the Clark County Recorder's Office between 2005 and 2008," said Nevada's chief deputy attorney general, John Kelleher, in a statement.

The indictment against the two employees, Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, describes them as LPS title officers and California residents. Neither has been arrested, but the court has set bail at $500,000 each.

In a Thursday release, LPS said that it's cooperating with the investigation. It also asserted that no homeowners have been harmed: "Based on the company's reviews, LPS acknowledges the signing procedures on some of these documents were flawed; however, the company also believes these documents were properly authorized and their recording did not result in a wrongful foreclosure."

Prentiss Cox, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a former assistant state attorney general, said it was admirable for Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto to pursue the robo-signing case. But, he added, "When criminal prosecutions are done for robo-signing, I would hope the target of those prosecutions would be the people who designed the system and profited from it, not just the low-level people doing what they were told."

Read More: Here

They're Back!

Occupy Wall Street Strikes Back, Takes Over Financial District With Protests

By Zaid Jilani posted from ThinkProgress Special Topic on Nov 17, 2011 at 9:25 am

Today, activists across the country plan to stage demonstrations in solidarity with Zuccotti Park’s evicted protesters. Early this morning, hundreds of demonstrators are marching on Wall Street, taking over the Financial District with mass protests.

Police have moved in and started to arrest many of the demonstrators, who are blocking Wall Street employees from getting to work and shutting down intersections. Here are some pictures of Occupy Wall Street striking back:

Seattle City Council Joins The Battle In Support Of OWS and The 1%

Seattle Joins Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo In Supporting Occupy Protests

The Seattle Times reports today:

The Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution in support of Occupy Seattle that calls on the city to examine its banking and investment practices, home-foreclosure patterns and the financing of local elections.

The resolution was a grab bag of proposals meant to provide a local response to the concentration of wealth and abuses in the financial sector that the Occupy Wall Street protest and its regional offspring have called attention to in encampments and rallies around the country this fall.

“Working together, we can fix our broken economy and fix our broken social contract,” said Council member Nick Licata, who sponsored the legislation. He said that, at the very least, the city can make sure public funds are reinvested in the community.

Other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo, have passed resolutions in support of the Occupy protests.

The Seattle resolution ….called on Congress to support job creation by investing in the country’s infrastructure, tightening banking regulations and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.

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This Is What Revolution Looks Like

Tuesday 15 November 2011

by: Chris Hedges

Occupy Wall Street protesters react and wave copies of the court order allowing them back into Zuccotti Park as police block them from re-entering, in New York, November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits.  Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

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Crash Tax: Wall Street Should Pay Reparations to the 99%

It's time for the bankers who crashed the economy to pay back those of us who bailed them out--with a financial transactions tax.

November 15, 2011  

 

 Wall Street waged war on the American economy and middle class with its reckless gambling.

It wasn’t Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that crashed the economy. It wasn’t the federal government. It wasn’t hapless homeowners who were sold mortgages they couldn’t afford. It was Wall Street financiers that aggressively sought and bought mortgages to package and sell as derivatives, which the banks could wager on.

Americans bailed out Wall Street, handing it a Marshall Plan for reconstruction after its bad bets blew up the world economy.  Now, three years later, happy days are here again for the Wall Street banksters. They’re hauling in big profits and paying outrageous bonuses. But the American middle class continues to suffer high unemployment, record foreclosures and rising poverty.

So it’s time for Wall Street to pay reparations. It’s time for a crash tax, a tiny sales tax on Wall Street transactions, the revenues from which would pay for Main Street restoration. It’s time for the 1 percent to repay the 99 percent, for Wall Street to share in the sacrifices necessitated by its rogue behavior.

The levy, sometimes called a Tobin Tax after the American economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin, who endorsed it in the 1970s, is far from shocking or novel.  A financial transaction tax is advocated by a huge range of groups and individuals, from billionaires to conservative heads of state. Thirty nations, including Great Britain and Switzerland, already tax some financial transactions. The United States imposed a similar tax from 1914 to 1966. In addition to raising revenue in a time of government deficits worldwide, the tax would suppress the very kind of risky speculation that got the global economy into this mess.

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