The economic and political fallout from JPMorgan Chase’s sudden announcement last Thursday night that it lost more than $2 billion from speculative bets on credit derivatives continued to grow on Monday. The biggest US bank announced the forced retirement of Ina Drew, who headed up the bank’s London-based Chief Investment Office, which placed huge bets on the creditworthiness of a collection of US corporations. Other top executives and traders are expected to be sacked or demoted. Read more…
Just a post to show my readers a classical (and all-too-common) example of smooth apology for capitalism, with the media, in this case, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, hardly raising any objections to the verborrhea of lies. (The time for polite is over, media people. Help the public or get the fuck out of the way.)
Observe this guy’s schtick. His name is Kevin Madden. And don’t be fooled by his “dreamy” looks (so I’m told by my girlfriend). Evil more than often appears in bland or appealing ways. This is a guy who comes fully armed with the usual spiel used by “conservatives” over and over again. A script riddled with lies, cynical lies at that. But artfully finetuned to fit the current circumstances. Of course, as we might expect, this pezzo di merda, as they say in the ole country, is a Romney advisor. So with the typical audacity of a trained disinformer (see below a bioblurb on him) he attacks Obama for supposedly hampering our poor capitalists in the pursuit of profits…is that a laugh or what? Read more…
By Nomi Prins, NomiPrins.com (Note: All comments and captions by TGP editors. not the author)
George Clooney: Cherleader for the Hollywood brigade supporting Obama. They should be doing something else, but such things never occur to rich liberals.
It was fitting that while President Obama and his Hollywood apostles broke fundraising records at a sumptuous $40,000 per plate dinner at George Clooney’s place, word of JPM Chase’s ‘mistake’ rippled through the news. Not long ago, Dimon’s name was batted about to become Treasury Secretary. But as lines are drawn and pundits take sides in the Jamie Dimon ego deflation saga – or, as I see it – why big banks should be made smaller and then, broken up into commercial vs. speculative components ala Glass Steagall – it’s important to look beyond the size of the $2 billion dollar (and counting) beached whale of a trading loss.
Yes, $2 billion in the scheme of JPM Chase’s book and quarterly earnings is tiny, a ‘trading blip’ as it’s been called by some business press. But that’s not a mitigating factor in what it represents. In this era dominated by a few consolidated and complex banks, the very fact that it’s a relatively small loss IS the red flag. Read more…
It’s bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it – with a big assist from Congress and the White House.
Obama: slickest of the slick. The backdoor stab his specialty.
by Matt Taibbi
Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.”
This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Read more…
The clash between the transatlantic plutocracy and the masses is reaching all corners of European society, and turmoil and agitation are growing. But seeking “solutions” within the rules of the capitalist system is guaranteed to produce failure, since it is such rules that caused the crisis in the first place.
The exemplary Greeks march in protest against the corporate plutocracy’s moves to impose “austerity.”
(Gaither Stewart in Rome) ||| Under a hot May sun, Italy’s neo-Communists marched through the streets of Rome last Saturday under the slogan of “Communist Pride”. Images of Che Guevara and Lenin, the hammer and sickle, symbolic relics of the now defunct, once beloved Italian Communist Party, accompanied by the Communist salute of raised left fists and the powerful voices of the 40,000 marchers singing the song of Italian Communists, Bandiera Rossa, Red Flag, and distributing copies of Communist publications named for the Leninist publications, The Spark, What Is To Be Done and Hammer and Sickle. Read more…
The most expensive Presidential election of all time? That came over a century ago, in 1896, when America’s original Populists endorsed a young Democrat off the Great Plains who had championed a federal income tax on America’s rich.
America’s rich would not be amused. They funneled unprecedented millions into the campaign of GOP candidate William McKinley. Of every $1,000 Americans spent for goods and services in 1896 — our gross domestic product — 60 cents went for Presidential campaign spending, most all of that for McKinley. In 2008, by contrast, White House candidates spent just over a dime per $1,000 of GDP.
But spending this year may end up rivaling that incredible 1896 level, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has blown away limits on how much the rich and the corporations they run can contribute politically. Just one right-wing political group alone, we learned last week, will likely spend a quarter-billion dollars in 2012.
Ironically, this sway the rich hold over our elections for public office is growing at the same time the rich seem to be losing their sway over the balloting that takes place in their own private backyards, at corporate annual shareholder meetings. What’s going on here? That puzzle we contemplate in this week’s Too Much. Read more…
◦ By Karen Greenberg ◦ Suggested by Contrib. Ed Paul Carline
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly holds pieces of a pipe bomb confiscated from alleged terrorist Jose Pimentel last month; the FBI reportedly had misgivings about the NYPD’s use of an informer in the plot. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Two weeks ago, Jose Pimentel was arrested as an alleged terrorist bomb-maker as a result of an NYPD sting. Within hours of the arrest, his attorney raised the prospect of a possible entrapment defense. Last month, when Mansour Arbabsiar was indicted for trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on behalf of Iran, he, too, was the subject of a sting, in this case by the FBI, and he claimed entrapment. These are but the latest iterations of dozens of terrorism cases that have come through the system with varying degrees of “entrapment” claims by the defense at the time of arrest. The Fort Dix case from New Jersey in 2007, and the more recent instances of the sole terrorism suspects in Portland, Washington, DC and Baltimore are among the many cases in which some sort of entrapment was alleged (at least, at the outset). Read more…
With pre-approved candidates by the nation’s plutocracy the system allows no true choices to the electorate, a fact that makes American elections something of a broad daylight farce. Yet the masses remain passive about such an imposture or get reliably passionate about the pseudo election in response to the frenzy whipped up by the media. The great stumbling to real democracy, however, remains the Democratic party illusion. Without demolishing it, nothing of positive consequence can be built. “Face it: the reigning U.S. political party and elections system is an epic plutocratic and imperial mind fuck: a corporate-managed fake democracy in which elitism masquerades as populism and state-capitalist authoritarianism wears the clothes of the common good.”—Eds
The presidential election year is here and along with it comes the quadrennial intra-leftist bloodletting on the unpleasant question of how to best respond to the narrow “choices” handed down by the nation’s corporate-managed one-and-a-half party system. I am aware of at least three different, often fiercely held left positions on this issue. Read more…
Revolutionary Violence vs Institutionalized Violence
"There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves..." —Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution.
Make creeps like Kissinger
and Palin miserable.
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