Category: #OccupyWallStreet

Too big to punish

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Guillotine Lock - Kings Norton Junction

I’m beginning to think that they really do want a revolution, or they wouldn’t keep doing shit like this, right?

The U.S. Department of Labor is proposing to waive sanctions against Credit Suisse Group AG (NYSE:AG) that would prevent it from managing pension money in the wake of the bank pleading guilty to criminal charges. The little-noticed waiver was outlined in an announcement published in the Federal Register. The government will accept public comment on the proposal until mid-October, and then make a final decision.

The proposed waiver from federal sanctions comes amid criticism that the Obama administration has gone too easy on major financial institutions that break the law. The proposed waiver for Credit Suisse, whose employees weremajor financial backers of Obama’s election campaigns, also comes a few months after a study showed a linkage between campaign contributions and lighter enforcement actions by federal agencies.

In its announcement outlining the waiver, the Department of Labor notes that Credit Suisse “operated an illegal cross-border banking business that knowingly and willfully aided and assisted thousands of U.S. clients in opening and maintaining undeclared accounts” and in “using sham entities” to hide money. The bank pled guilty to felony charges in May.

Under existing Department of Labor rules, the conviction would prevent Credit Suisse from being designated a “Qualified Professional Asset Manager” (QPAM). That designation exempts firms from other federal laws, giving them the special status required to do business with many pension funds. The Obama administration’s proposed waiver would exempt Credit Suisse from existing anti-criminal sanctions, and allow Credit Suisse to get the QPAM designation.

Credit Suisse declined International Business Times request for comment.

H/t Attorney Steve Duckett.

What about the real bankers?

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan and James Gorman, Chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley

It’s always the lower-level traders and not the systemic fraud that crashed the economy. This is peanuts compared to what the big Wall Street banks pulled in on mortgage fraud and the related derivatives. So why aren’t the Jamie Dimons of the world on trial? I think we all know why:

NEW YORK (AP) — An Ivy League-educated ex-portfolio manager convicted of enabling his firm to earn more than a quarter-billion dollars through insider trading on a promising Alzheimer’s drug trial was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison by a judge who said the “staggering” fraud deserved lengthy incarceration.

Mathew Martoma, his face drawn, left Manhattan federal court holding his wife’s hand after Judge Paul Gardephe ordered him to report to prison in November following his February conviction for conspiracy and securities fraud.

A jury found Martoma, of Boca Raton, Florida, had flattered and enriched two medical doctors to elicit the secret results of an Alzheimer’s drug trial so he could trade ahead of public announcements, enabling his Stamford, Connecticut-based employer, SAC Capital Advisors, to earn more than $275 million illegally. His firm, headed by billionaire Steven A. Cohen, then rewarded him with more than $9 million in bonuses.

The judge ordered Martoma, 40, to forfeit $9.3 million, including his home and banks accounts holding millions of dollars.

Peanuts. Nothing. Now, here’s an interesting approach I like much better:

The case started as a routine mortgage-fraud prosecution, brought by none other than the aforementioned U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner. A group of eastern European immigrants had bought houses in California in 2006, in a real-estate market that was in the early stages of collapse. According to the indictment, filed in 2012, these people’s mortgage applications contained blank spots and wrong information; they were accused of getting the mortgages in order to sell the houses to one another at pumped-up prices in what is called a “straw buyer” scheme. Also, they defaulted on the loans.

However, members of the immigrants’ legal defense team—several of them appointed by the state—had read the newspapers over the years and were aware of the kinds of things that had gone on in real estate during the bubble. They knew, for example, that in the go-go days of the last decade, the mortgage origination industry routinely cranked out “stated income” loans—also known as “liar’s loans”—to people who were obviously unable to make the payments. The bankers back then almost never checked on whether the borrower was telling the truth about their income; they just wanted to make the loan. So the defense team in Sacramento came up with a novel strategy: How can the borrower have committed fraud on a mortgage application if the lender didn’t care whether their answers were truthful?

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After the deluge

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Climate scientists say we’re past the point of prevention, and should be working on mitigating the worst effects of climate change. Which makes me wonder: Doesn’t that same thinking apply to our political system as well? Everything is so thoroughly corrupt, it seems like revolution is inevitable.

So really, shouldn’t we be talking about how to rebuild a government after things settle down? What should change? The important thing is, the group that’s prepared to govern usually gets control.

What ideas do you have?

I would nationalize the pharmaceutical industry. How about you?

Declining wages? Yep

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

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Is this a secret? This so-called “recovery” is fake, just like extend-and-pretend policies Obama approved for the banks. If the banks had been held accountable and cleaned up, we’d have a real recovery by now:

Think your money’s not going very far this year? It’s not your imagination. According to new research by the Economic Policy Institute, real hourly wages declined for almost everybody in the U.S. workforce in the first half of 2014. Thanks, so-called recovery.

Economist Elise Gould pored over data from the government’s Current Population Survey and determined that workers at the 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th, 80th, 90th, and 95th percentiles all saw declines in their real wages in the first half of 2014 compared with the same period last year. This was true whether you had no high school degree, a high school diploma, some college, a college degree, or an advanced degree. In fact, people with advanced degrees saw the biggest drop (2.7 percent).

EPI reveals this isn’t just a blip. Real wages dropped 4.9 percent for workers with a high school degree and 2.5 percent for workers with a college degree from the first half of 2007 to the first half of this year.

Gould explains in the report that “the last year has been a poor one for American workers’ wages.” She states that “on the whole, the broad wage trends by education level over the last decade and a half make clear that wage inequality cannot be readily explained by stories about educational credentials and technology; wage inequality has increased steadily, yet even those with a college diploma or advanced degree have experienced lackluster wage growth.”

That’s nice

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Can we please fix some infrastructure now?

You’re looking at the biggest story involving the federal budget and a crucial one for the future of the American economy. Every year for the last six years in a row, the Congressional Budget Office has reduced its estimate for how much the federal government will need to spend on Medicare in coming years. The latest reduction came in a report from the budget office on Wednesday morning.

The changes are big. The difference between the current estimate for Medicare’s 2019 budget and the estimate for the 2019 budget four years ago is about $95 billion. That sum is greater than the government is expected to spend that year on unemployment insurance, welfare and Amtrak — combined. It’s equal to about one-fifth of the expected Pentagon budget in 2019. Widely discussed policy changes, like raising the estate tax, would generate just a tiny fraction of the budget savings relative to the recent changes in Medicare’s spending estimates.

In more concrete terms, the reduced estimates mean that the federal government’s long-term budget deficit is considerably less severe than commonly thought just a few years ago. The country still faces a projected deficit in future decades, thanks mostly to the retirement of the baby boomers and the high cost of medical care, but it is not likely to require the level of fiscal pain that many assumed several years ago.

The reduced estimates are also an indication of what’s happening in the overall health care system. Even as more people are getting access to health insurance, the costs of caring for individual patients is growing at a super-slow rate. That means that health care, which has eaten into salary gains for years and driven up debt and bankruptcies, may be starting to stabilize as a share of national spending.

Comcast: Data caps aren’t really data caps

~ susie

courtesy-notice

Not to beat a dead horse, but you really need to let your electeds know you oppose the proposed Comcast/Time Warner merger. It will only spread the misery and exploitation to an even larger segment of America:

Setting limits on data and charging extra when customers exceed them is precisely the type of scheme that nearly everyone besides Comcast considers to be a “data cap.” It’s the phrase normal people use to describe wireless data plans with exactly the same type of structure.

Comcast has gone so far as to ask for a correction to an article that called the limits “data caps” instead of “data thresholds” or “flexible data consumption plans.” Now it’s trying to convince the government that its data limits aren’t actually data caps.

“Comcast does not have ‘data caps’ today,” the company wrote this week in a filing with the New York Public Service Commission on its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. “Comcast announced almost two years ago that it was suspending enforcement of its prior 250GB excessive usage cap and that it would instead be trialing different pricing and packaging options to evaluate options for subscribers—options that reflect evolving Internet usage and that are based on the desire to provide flexible consumption plans, including a plan that enables customers who want to use more data the option to pay more to do so as well as a plan for those who use less data the option to save some money… Some of these trials include a data usage plan that allows customers who use very little Internet each month to receive a discount on their service fee, and variations on a plan that provide customers with the ability to buy additional increments of usage if they exceed a base amount (starting at 300GB) that is included with their service.”

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Nothing ‘civil’ about it

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

This is the kind of sleazy crap that happens when you have cities scraping for money — they decide to take advantage of the vulnerable:

Philadelphia law enforcement has transformed a once obscure legal process into a racket that treats Americans as little more than ATMs. Every year, the city collectsalmost $6 million in revenue from forfeiture. According to data collected by the Institute for Justice, between 2002 and 2012, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office seized and forfeited over 3,000 vehicles, nearly 1,200 homes and other real estate properties and $44 million in cash. Altogether, Philadelphia has generated a staggering $64 million in forfeiture proceeds, which equals one-fifth of the DA Office’s entire budget. Forty percent of those funds—$25 million—pay law enforcement salaries, including the salaries for the prosecutors who have used civil forfeiture against families like the Sourovelises.

Civil forfeiture is a nationwide problem. But the scale and scope of Philadelphia’s forfeiture machine is practically unrivaled on the municipal level. Kings County, New York, which includes Brooklyn, generated $1.2 million from forfeiture in 2010, even though its population is 1.5 times larger. Los Angeles County also kept $1.2 million in seized assets that same year, despite having more than six times as many people as Philadelphia.

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