Route Opened for Donations to Wikileaks

Per WL Central,

After almost two years of fighting an unlawful banking blockade by U.S financial giants VISA and MasterCard, WikiLeaks has announced it is back open for donations.

After WikiLeaks' publications revealing U.S. war crimes and statecraft in 2010, U.S. financial institutions erected a banking blockade against WikiLeaks wholly outside of any judicial or administrative process. The blockade came during a time of substantial economic growth for WikiLeaks but blocked over 95% of donations, costing the organization in excess of USD 20M.

The Wau Holland Transparency Reports for WikiLeaks' finances, released today, illustrate the financial consequences of 18 consecutive months of economic censorship. For the year 2011, the blockade resulted in WikiLeaks' income falling to just 21% of its operating costs.

WikiLeaks has been forced to run on its cash reserves at the Wau Holland Foundation, which have diminished from EUR 800K at the end of December 2010, to less than EUR 100K at the end of June 2012. As the graph shows, WikiLeaks' reserve funds will expire at the current austere rate of expenditure within a few months. In order to effectively continue its mission, WikiLeaks must raise a minimum of EUR 1M immediately.

More at the link above. You can donate here – that's direct from WL Central and should be reliable; I just donated.

Elites Hiding at Least $20 TRILLION. Seriously.

Per the Guardian,

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report . . . . He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks.

* * * * *
"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people," said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network.

Note, that's 13 to 20 trillion British pounds, which per my computer's converter = more than 20 to 31 trillion US dollars.

P.S.: Based on current US census estimates, that's nearly $64,000 for every man, woman, and child in the US. And that's just the offshored stuff; you also have to add in whatever they haven't managed to hide.

Re- the Stalled Recovery,

From Nation of Change:

While the [National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), an organization that often acts as a front for larger corporate interests] warns that minimum wage increases would create serious cost problems for small businesses, few of their members list "labor costs" as their "most important problem." Instead, what we see from the NFIB survey results is that the percentage of small businesses listing labor costs as their most important problem has hovered consistently between 3% and 5% since the beginning of the recession in December 2007. In the most recent data, the percentage fell to 2%, its lowest level since the start of the recession.

* * * * *
Instead of wages, the NFIB survey results suggest that “poor sales” have been — far and away — the biggest concern of small businesses. At the onset of the recession in December 2007 about 9% of firms said that poor sales were their most serious problem. By 2009 and 2010, the share citing poor sales was as high as 34%. In the most recent data, about 21% of all firms still list poor sales as their biggest challenge. The real problem facing firms is not that their low-wage workers earn too much, it is apparently that their customers earn too little [see chart at right.]

Lots more useful info at DU.

The LIBOR Scandal Explained

Or, yet another way in which the rich have been looting you – legible version at Dangerous Minds.

From a comment at Naked Capitalism: "Banking is the only . . . sport where the referees don’t enforce the rules and the fans get severely injured when the players cheat."

UPDATE: The NYT now reports, "Congress intensified its focus on the interest-rate rigging scandal on Thursday, as Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, vowed that authorities would forcefully pursue criminal investigations into some of the world's biggest banks" – awesome! Now, who's going to investigate Timmeh?

Another interesting story: per a report at naked capitalism, LIBOR manipulation was commonly recognized in London by 1991 – when Bob Diamond was in charge of interest rate trading at Morgan Stanley London, "which means his claim that he found out about Libor manipulation at Barclays mere weeks before his Treasury Select testimony was bollocks." One commenter makes an excellent point:

I think this may be a more significant data point than it appears at first glance to us jaded cynics. What it says is that not only are our institutions now utterly corrupt, but that they have been getting that way for a long time. This suggests that the problem is not likely to be random, accidental, or personality driven, but rather that it stems from deep structural causes. That is important because it suggests that that is also where the solutions must be found.

FURTHER UPDATE: Salon has a good article explaining how the LIBOR-rigging affected some of us: "Six Ways Big Banks Screwed Grandma – Grandma's finances will almost certainly never recover from the LIBOR scandal that's rocking the world."

Helpful Image (Restore Glass-Steagall)

(Click on the image for a more legible version.)

UPDATE: From the MetroWest Daily News, quoting but without linking to The Nation:

Why do the losses of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase matter? The Federal Reserve allowed investment banks to convert to bank holding companies, now owning commercial banks, which are FDIC insured.

William Greider writes in the Nation magazine, “JPMorgan Chase parks all of its vast derivatives holdings in its commercial bank subsidiary, which means the taxpayer is on the hook for these losses since commercial banks are FDIC insured.” Greider further states, “In the event of a collapse, the banks can use its deposit base to pay off the derivatives, while leaving the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to reimburse depositors if their money runs out. JPMorgan has contracts totaling $72 trillion and 99 percent of them are booked at its FDIC- insured bank.”

Continuing — “We are “insuring” other big boys of banking in the same way. Citigroup has nearly all of its $53 trillion in derivatives in its FDIC-insured bank; Goldman Sachs has $44 trillion parked at and FDIC-backed institution. After Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch, BoA began transferring the securities firm’s derivatives to the FDIC-insured bank, which now holds $47 trillion in contracts.” And the Ryan Republicans want to invest Social Security with these same bankers?

Updates on Assange & Manning

This is not just an infowar; it's a p.r. war. And most of the p.r. machinery is owned by t.p.t.b.

Neither Assange nor Wikileaks has been charged with any violation of any law in any country on the planet, though not for lack of strenuous effort by the authorities. The allegations against Assange fall far short of anything considered illegal in the US or most other countries, and the women who made them did not want him prosecuted.

He offered to be questioned while in Sweden before departing for the UK – he lingered there for over a month for that purpose – and he repeatedly offered to be questioned while in the UK. But although Swedish police and prosecutors recently travelled to Serbia to question a suspect in another case, they refused to interview Assange in the UK. They don't want to question him; they want him in their possession.

Gary McKinnon, wanted in the US since 2002 for allegedly committing the biggest hack of US military computers of all time, walks free in the UK. Shawn Sullivan, a convicted pedophile wanted in the US since 1994 for alleged sexual violations of three underage girls, walks free in the UK.

On May 26, 2012, the Swedish Foreign Minister announced a visit by US Sec. of State Hillary Clinton; she arrived in Sweden on June 2. This was the first visit to Sweden by a US Sec. of State since Henry Kissinger spent one day there in 1976. Clinton remained in Sweden for a week.

It should be noted that Sweden is known to have cooperated with the US's rendition program, and that at least one innocent individual in its custody, Muhammad al-Zery, though never actually charged, was sent to Eqypt for torture and held for two years in jail without ever seeing a judge.

Without Assange and Wikileaks, a great many terrible crimes committed by various governments and corporations around the world might never have been revealed. This is what has precipitated the unprecedented efforts to shut Wikileaks down and gain possession of Assange.

Assange's Position Re- Extradition & Asylum

The excerpts below are from a statement found on WL Central and made yesterday in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and they accurately summarize some of the matters that have been the subjects of misrepresentation most recently.

Yesterday Mr. Assange was served with a letter from the Metropolitan police service requesting that he surrender himself to the Belgravia police station at 11.30 this morning.

Mr Assange has been advised that he should decline to comply with the police request. This should not be considered any sign of disrespect. Under both international and domestic UK law asylum assessments take priority over extradition claims.

The issues faced by Mr. Assange are serious. His life and liberty and the life and liberty of his organization and those associated with it are at stake.

The United States Government has instigated a grand jury investigation against Julian Assange and other “founders or managers” of Wikileaks. Australian diplomats have described this investigation as being of “unprecedented scale and nature." There is irrefutable evidence in the public record of subpoenas being issued and witnesses being compelled to testify against Mr. Assange. WikiLeaks, the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups have been fighting these subpeonas and other issues arising from the investigation in multiple US courts. US officials have said in open court that the FBI file about the investigation has now reached 42,135 pages. The US department of justice admitted yesterday that its investigation into WikiLeaks proceeds. It is only a matter of time before US authorities begin extradition proceedings against Julian and other leading members of WikiLeaks on various charges including conspiracy to commit espionage. There are credible reports that a sealed indictment has already been made against Mr. Assange. Under US law a sealed indictment can only be made public once Mr. Assange is in custody. For a US official to otherwise acknowledge the existence of a sealed indictment is a criminal offense. The Independent newspaper’s diplomatic correspondent reported that informal talks between the US and Sweden have been conducted.

It should be made clear what would happen if Julian was extradited to the USA. The United Nations special rapporteur for torture, Juan Mendez has formally found that the United States has subjected Julian Assange’s alleged source in this matter, the young soldier Bradley Manning, to conditions amounting to torture. The UN found that the United States subjected Bradley Manning to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”. Mr. Manning has been charged by the US government with the capital offense of “aiding the enemy” in relation to his alleged interaction with Mr. Assange. Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for two years and was placed into solitary confinement for 9 months in his cell for 23 hours a day, stripped naked and woken every 5 minutes. His lawyer and support team say these harsh measures were to coerce him into implicating Julian Assange.

So it is clear that there is a legal process in place which will result in taking Julian to the US, which if allowed to succeed would violate his basic rights.

It is accepted by the UK Supreme Court that Julian Assange has not been charged with any criminal offence in Sweden. It is also accepted that he was by told by Swedish authorities that he was free to leave Sweden. And it is also accepted that he has continuously offered to be interviewed by the Swedish authorities here in the UK, should they wish to do so. Although it is normal procedure, Swedish authorities have refused, without reason, to make the 3 hour trip to London and to interview Julian, causing him to be trapped in the UK under virtual house arrest for 561 days and an additional 10 days in solitary confinement – all without charge. Instead they have issued an INTERPOL Red notice and extradition requests.

Julian and his legal team have previously sought assurances from both the UK government and the Swedish government that they will guarantee safe passage after the completion of legal interviews with Mr Assange and both have [refused]. The Swedish executive publicly announced on June 14 that it would detain Mr. Assange in prison without charge.

Once in Sweden under such grave restrictions it would be impossible for Mr. Assange to exercise his asylum rights.

Mr. Assange did not feel safe from US extradition in the UK. We are all too aware of the abuses of the US-UK extradition treaty. Although Mr. Assange has been trapped in the UK, under dangerous circumstances, he at least has had the freedom to apply for political asylum.

It is in this context that Julian has made the difficult decision to seek refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy to ask for asylum.

Julian will remain in the Embassy under the protection of the Ecuadorian government while evidence for his application is being assembled and processed.

See also Glenn Greenwald's summary of the situation and Justice for Assange.

Assange would be a fool to allow himself to fall into the hands of the US or any nation subject to its influence. No doubt t.p.t.b. are too smart to dispose of him in a way that might boost his appeal as a martyr; but once in Swedish or US custody, a lot of things could happen. There could be an unfortunate accident, or he could simply be held incommunicado for a very long time.

Here's a recent BBC piece on the situation:



Below are just some of the revelations made thanks to Wikileaks, as of back in Dec., 2010:

How about the needless gunning down by U.S. military forces of a Reuters cameraman and Iraqi innocents shown in the leaked "Collateral Murder" video? Or, limiting inquiry to the U.S. Embassy cables, what about the revelations that six months before the worldwide economic meltdown, the governor of the Bank of England was secretly proposing a bailout of the world's biggest banks funded by nations such as the U.S.; or that the British government secretly assured the U.S. that it had "put measures in place to protect your interest during the UK inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war"; or that the U.S. dismissed British objections about secret U.S. spy flights taking place from the UK, amid British officials' concerns that the UK would be deemed an accomplice to torture; or that, in response to U.S. pressure, the German government assured the U.S. that it would not follow through on its investigation of the CIA's abduction of a German citizen mistakenly identified as a terrorist, Khaled el-Masri; or that the U.S. threatened the Italian government in order to make sure that no international arrest warrants were issued for CIA agents accused of involvement in the abduction of cleric Abu Omar; or that the U.S. sought assurances from the Ugandan government that it would consult the U.S. before using American intelligence to commit war crimes; or that as of 2009, Shell Oil had infiltrated all the main ministries of the Nigerian government; or that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer paid investigators to unearth corruption links to Nigeria's attorney general so as to pressure him to drop legal action for harm to children from a drug trial; or that government corruption in Afghanistan is rampant (viz. an incident last year when then vice-president Ahmad Zia Massoud was stopped in Dubai while carrying $52m in cash); or that the U.S. seeks to manipulate nations opposed to its approach to global warming; or that the U.S. and China worked together to prevent European nations from reaching an agreement at last year's climate summit; or that the Vatican refused to cooperate with an official Irish inquiry into clerical child abuse; or that BP covered up a giant gas leak in Azerbaijan eighteen months before the Gulf of Mexico disaster? To mention just a few items revealed as of 2010-12-21. (UPDATE: See also Glen Mitchell's "Why Wikileaks Matters" for The Nation; the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "The Best of Cablegate: Where Public Discourse Benefited from the Leaks"; Glenn Greenwald's "What Wikileaks revealed to the world in 2010" at Salon; Wikileaks - A timeline of the top leaks at The Telegraph; and to add just one from 2011 so far, "WikiLeaks points to US meddling . . . to keep the [democratically-elected] Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti." FURTHER UPDATE: See Greg Mitchell's "32 Major Revelations (and Counting)," including the fact that Wikileaks' publications are widely believed to have helped inspire the uprising in Tunisia against a brutal dictator; OpEd News; Greg Mitchell's top Cablegate picks as of his 100th day of blogging the Wikileaks story, here; and Kevin Gosztola's 100 leaks in 100 tweets, here.

Manning Wins Access to US Damage Assessments

Meanwhile, from AFP:

A US military judge ordered prosecutors Monday to share more documents with WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning after defense lawyers accused them of hiding information that could help their client's case.

For months, Manning's defense team has demanded access to reports by government agencies, including the CIA, that assessed the effect of the leak of classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Manning is accused of passing on a massive trove of files to WikiLeaks but his lawyers believe the reports will show the alleged disclosures had no major effect on the country's national security.

Judge Denise Lind ruled that government prosecutors must provide "damage assessment" reports from the CIA, the State Department, the FBI, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (Oncix) and other documents that were relevant for the defense.

I strongly suspect that if the effects of the release were really so damaging to legitimate US interests or to innocents in general, the gov't would by now have managed to identify a few particulars it could afford to make public.

UPDATE: Patrick Cockburn has a fine essay at The Independent:

All governments indulge in a degree of hypocrisy between what they say in public and in private. When democratic openness about general actions and policies is demanded, they pretend they are facing a call for total transparency which would prevent effective government. This deliberate and self-serving inflation of popular demands is usually aimed at the concealment of failure and monopolising power.

* * * * *
Assange and WikeLeaks unmasked not diplomatic reticence in the interests of the smooth functioning of government, but duplicity to justify lost wars in which tens of thousand died. Recent history shows that this official secrecy, frequently aided by "embedding" journalists with armies, works all too well.

In Iraq, in the months before the US presidential election in 2004, foreign embassies in Baghdad all knew and reported that US soldiers were only clinging to islands of territory in a hostile land. But the Bush administration was able to persuade US voters that, on the contrary, it was fighting and winning a battle to establish democracy against the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and the adherents of Osama bin Laden.

State control of information and the ability to manipulate it makes the right to vote largely meaningless. That is why people like Julian Assange are so essential to democratic choice.

Much more at the link. Another good one by B.J. Sachs at Counterpunch.

The Results of Austerity

How states that have expanded spending have done as compared to states that have cut back. More at The Atlantic.

The Results of "Trickle Down"

"1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. . . .

"2) Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. . . .

"3) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. This is both cause and effect. One reason companies are so profitable is that they're paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: those "wages" are other companies' revenue."

More great charts and other info at Business Insider. And if you like this, you might like this video of Huey Long in 1934.

Retirement, Ha Ha!

I have a 401(k) with a major investment company whose name starts with F, which I'll call "F Co." I just got an email from them advising me of five "relatively easy steps that [their] research shows" can help make sure I have a comfy retirement. Here they are:

1. Rebalance your investments, i.e., every once in a while, you should shift some of your funds from stocks into bonds or vice versa, to keep from accumulating too much of either. This is investments 101 and I don't think most of us needed F Co.'s "research" to reveal it to us. It also kind of assumes we're actually accumulating too much of either stocks or bonds, which hasn't been a problem for most of us 99%-er's lately.

2. Contribute more to your savings. Duh!

3. Put off retiring. Here's where I guffawed.

4. Work during retirement. Seriously, they counted that as a separate "step" toward a comfy retirement. Well, maybe the job market will have picked up in another ten or fifteen years.

5. (Drumroll . . . ) Sell your home.

Since 1/4 of my retirement funds were melted in 2008, I'm really glad for F Co.'s "research."

For immediate action (re- Wikileaks/Assange):

Go here to send a message such as the following:

[To:]
President Rafael Correa
Ecuador
Embassy of Ecuador
1050 30th Street NW
Washington, DC 20007
US

I am a citizen of the United States, but above that, I am a citizen of humanity.

Wikileaks' Julian Assange is a hero who has helped expose terrible acts of injustice around the world and has spoken truth to power regardless of nationality or the consequences to himself.

It now falls to those who recognize what's really happening and have the power to help him to do so, for the sake of humanity as well as for Mr. Assange's sake.

I urge you to grant him asylum. Posterity will honor you for your recognition that the time has come to do what's right, and having had the courage to do it.

Sincerely,

Assange's Appeal Rejected by UK Supreme Court

More on the court's case at Raw Story.

As succinctly summarized at WL Central, Assange, who has already been detained for some 500 days without charge, will be extradited to Sweden "for questioning," even though there is no charge against him for violating any law in any country, the two women who alleged sexual misconduct did not want to press charges but only to have him tested for STD's, and

[before leaving for the UK, he] stayed in Sweden for nearly 5 weeks to answer the allegations. Attempts to arrange an interview were made through his lawyer Björn Hurtig, but all proposed dates were refused. When Mr. Assange left Sweden, he did so only after receiving approval from the Swedish prosecutor on the case, Marianne Ny.

Mr. Assange has offered himself to be questioned via telephone or video link from London, which are perfectly legal methods under Swedish law, despite Prosecutor Ny falsely stating otherwise. All offers by Mr. Assange have been rejected.

* * * * *
If Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden he will be immediately placed in prison, in solitary confinement, and incommunicado. There is no bail system in Sweden, nor is there a time limit to detention . . . .

If he is eventually charged, the trial will be held in secret. Sweden's legal system also features a panel of lay judges who hold no formal legal training and are appointed because of their political affiliation.

Mr. Assange then faces further extradition to the United States, where politicians have openly called for his assassination. Sweden holds a "temporary surrender" agreement with the U.S. which allows extradition without the usual lengthy procedure.

More at the links above; and see Business Insider for more background.

Why the Rich Oppose Unions

News You Can Use

Per the WSJ's Market Watch,

After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4% annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.

In per capita terms, real spending will drop by nearly 5% from $11,450 per person in 2009 to $10,900 in 2013 (measured in 2009 dollars).

By the way, real government spending rose 12.3% a year in Hoover’s four years. Now there was a guy who knew how to attack a depression by spending government money!

UPDATE: Great article in the NYT by Bruce Bartlett, who held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations:

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Much more at the link.

How JPMorgan Chase Has Proved We Need to Break Up Big Banks & Bring Back Glass-Steagall

From Robert Reich at Nation of Change:

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said [Jamie] Dimon [current CEO of JPMorgan Chase and former Dir. of the Board of the Federal Reserve], a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.” Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again. Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule — creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown. And now — only a few years after the banking crisis that forced American taxpayers to bail out the Street, caused home values to plunge by more than 30 percent and pushed millions of homeowners underwater, threatened or diminished the savings of millions more, and sent the entire American economy hurtling into the worst downturn since the Great Depression — J.P. Morgan Chase recapitulates the whole debacle with the same kind of errors, sloppiness, bad judgment, excessively risky trades poorly-executed and poorly-monitored, that caused the crisis in the first place.

In light of all this, Jamie Dimon’s promise that J.P. Morgan will “fix it and move on” is not reassuring. The losses here had been mounting for at least six weeks, according to Morgan. Where was the new transparency that’s supposed to allow regulators to catch these things before they get out of hand? . . . . Let’s hope Morgan’s losses don’t turn into another crisis of confidence and they don’t spread to the rest of the financial sector. But let’s also stop hoping Wall Street will mend itself. What just happened at J.P. Morgan – along with its leader’s cavalier dismissal followed by lame reassurance – reveals how fragile and opaque the banking system continues to be, why Glass-Steagall must be resurrected, and why the Dallas Fed’s recent recommendation that Wall Street’s giant banks be broken up should be heeded.

More at the link.

Occupy the Regulatory / Investigatory System

From the Washington Post:

Occupy Wall Street has moved. Its new address: 60 Wall Street.

There, inside a soaring public atrium, dreadlocked teens trade shoulder massages near the evening meditation circle. A young man holds up a sign: “You’re a Federal Reserve $lave.” The dinnertime crowd buzzes over free plates of rice and beans while listening to an improvised, profanity-laden operetta about the evils of agro-giant Monsanto. But amid the din, there’s a small group holding a quieter, and far wonkier, conversation.

* * * * *
After much discussion, the group agreed that the Volcker Rule’s earlier definition of clearing agencies, which banks use for exchanging futures contracts, was “clear and tough and good,” but decided that it was worth double-checking section 17(a) of questions that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission raised about it.

It may sound like technical gobbledygook to an outsider, and, indeed, a few newcomers to Occupy the SEC seem befuddled by the group’s headlong dive into the finer distinctions between proprietary trading and market-making. But the meeting is a glimpse into one of the most surprising iterations of the free-wheeling, anarchic movement: fighting the man through the tedious and Byzantine regulatory process.

More at the WaPo link above.

From truthout:

“How can we help? How can we help? How can we help?”

It’s not your average protest slogan, but it’s what the group chanted today as it marched from Zuccotti Park to 120 Broadway, which houses the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The AG chairs President Obama’s task force to investigate the routine fraud and abuse that characterized Wall Street during the Bush-era inflation of the housing bubble and precipitated the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession. According to a Schneiderman-penned Daily News Op-Ed, though, the task force has only been furnished with “[m]ore than 50 attorneys,” whereas the Enron investigation alone required over 100, and the Savings and Loan crisis took over 1,000. Wall Street occupiers today, under the banner The May Fourth Committee for Equal Justice Under the Law, offered to fill that void.

* * * * *
Alexis Goldstein, a former net developer and business analyst at three large Wall Street firms, echoed that sentiment. “In January,” she told the crown. “President Obama appointed a financial fraud task force co-chaired by five people to investigate mortgage fraud. He touted it proudly in the State of the Union. But since the task force was created, we’ve seen zero prosecutions brought against the banks who committed securities fraud, conducted robo-signing, and illegally foreclosed on homes. We’ve seen no one thrown in jail following the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

Austin Guest brought a calculator, a pocket protector and news clippings. “I’m good at investigating,” he told me. “Frankly, it doesn’t seem very difficult. People are on record committing fraud. I’m very capable of using Google and a printer.”

More at the truthout link above.

May 1st: General Strike

More info here.

And just in time: if you missed the 99% non-violent action training, you can take it online here.

Occupiers & Others Preparing for General Strike May 1; Noam Chomsky Endorses 99% Spring

Back in the 70's, experts believed that the improvements possible through technology would increase worker productivity to the point that the 40-hour work week would inevitably shrink to 35 or less, and that we'd all have more leisure while enjoying the same or a better standard of living.

Part of that prediction came true: worker productivity in the U.S has exploded since then. Yet instead of having more leisure and greater wealth, our inflation-adjusted incomes have actually dropped, even while our work week has increased to 50 hours and more, and even though, in most families now, both parents work.

What happened? If you read this blog, you already have an idea (e.g., see here or here).

May 1, a holiday in many countries, is the annual commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when Chicago police fired on workers during a General Strike for the eight-hour workday. Now, OWS, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Chicago, Occupy Oakland, other General Assemblies, Labor organizers, immigrants’ rights groups, artists, faith leaders, and others are preparing for a General Strike on May 1, calling for all of us to take the day away from school and the workplace, to show that we will not continue to accept corporate and governmental systems that exploit the many in order to enrich the few.

More info on the May 1 General Strike here and here.

"99% Spring" is a congruent but separate effort – see my previous post here; more here, here, and here – which has now been endorsed by Noam Chomsky:

NYC Art Fairs 2012, and "It's the Political Economy, Stupid"

Pulse may have decided, wisely, that the field's gotten too crowded; they've moved to May.

Within four days (Mar. 3 - 11), viewers were offered the Armory Show, Scope, VOLTA, the Moving Image Fair, the Independent Fair, the Dependent Fair, the Fountain Art Fair, the Spring Break fair, and the Brucennial; not to mention the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum Triennial and plenty of other shows, most of which could only be viewed Wed. thru Sun., i.e. mostly the same days the fairs were open, and mostly only during roughly the same hours. Given that most exhibitions include a lot more video and other time-based work than they used to, any hope of seeing and doing justice to all the work shown has become even more remote.

I saw (in no particular order): the Armory Show – just the contemporary Pier and some of the Armory Film programs; the Moving Image Fair; the Independent; the Dependent; Spring Break; the Brucennial; the It's the Political Economy, Stupid show at the Austrian Cultural Forum; the Whitney Biennial; and the New Museum Triennial.

I shot lots of photos, which I'm in the process of culling and putting online. The first up are from It's the Political Economy, Stupid, curated by Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler. The exhibition borrows its title from Slavoj Žižek's twist on Pres. Clinton's old campaign slogan. (Image above from The Bull Laid Bear (2012), video, 24 min., Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, from this show.)

As you may know, I've followed the economic situation for a while and am concerned that economic reform is essential but that few non-experts understand the problems well enough to know what should be done about them. But the problems aren't all that hard to understand; it's just that the perpetrators have done a terrific job obfuscating them. (My own grasp happens to be a little better than average, since I happened to write a paper on Glass-Steagall back when it was being repealed, and I've also had experience with commercial loans that were rolled into the kind of securitized mortgage pools blamed by some for the economic meltdown.)

The works in Political Economy were really brilliant, using various documentary and imaginative strategies to greatly further this discussion. More info at the Austrian Cultural Forum; and there's an excellent review of the show on the art:21 blog.

UPDATE: Posts on the other shows I saw will be available here.

Punk Economics

Here's a good explanation of the European debt crisis that's also applicable in the US:



A few points that might warrant further explanation:

First, there are good reasons why it's both more fair and more constructive to require lenders and derivatives speculators to eat losses arising from bad loans, rather than passing them on to innocent taxpayers. A basic concept in the law as it's evolved through the centuries is that, when a transaction or other course of conduct results in harm, if the person who was the primary cause (in this case, the borrower) lacks the financial means to make things right, the next person who should be held liable is the person who was in a position to figure out that there could be a problem but who, rather than investigating the situation and preventing the bad transaction, facilitated it and profited from it. In the present situation, this next person would be the banks that made and securitized the bad loans and especially those that created and sold pools of those loans and who also placed bets that those loans would go bad.

If the bankers are required to eat the losses on the loans and the bets they made on them, they'll be motivated not to make the same mistakes or commit the same frauds again. If, on the other hand, innocent taxpayers are required to pay for bankers' mistakes and frauds, the bankers are given every incentive to do it again. So it's both more fair and more constructive to let the bankers eat the losses they should have known would result, rather than imposing them on innocent taxpayers.

I personally also have no problem requiring borrowers who took out loans that went bad to eat their losses, although I do believe we should have a decent social safety net, so they don't end up on the streets.

Instead, we're doing the exact opposite of what would be most fair and constructive – we're bailing out the bankers and some of the borrowers, at the expense of the people who took no part in any of the foolishness or fraud.

Second, the reason excessive austerity won't help is that it's demand that drives economic recoveries. Even proponents of austerity occasionally slip up and admit this; and it's consistent with actual, historical experience in the US – the fact that the economy has tended to grow and deficits have tended to shrink during Democratic administrations, which tend to favor social safety nets and protections for workers, while the economy has tended to shrink and deficits have tended to grow during Republican administrations, whose policies have favored the 1%.

Giving money to people who already have more than they can spend does not stimulate the economy because they don't spend it. More particularly, rich people know it makes no sense to use the money to create inventory when so few others can afford to buy it, so they know it makes no sense to hire workers to create more inventory. When you give money to rich people during a recession, you encourage not job-creation but money-hoarding, which helps no one other than the rich. Thus, despite – or rather, because of – the fact that so much of the U.S. stimulus has gone to banks and big corps., employment has risen very little, while cash reserves held by those businesses have swollen dramatically. Time and again, "trickle-down" has been proven not to work, and that's why conservatives have abandoned the phrase; but they're still pushing the policy.

(It's ironic, too, that in order to believe that trickle-down could work, you have to embrace something its proponents emphatically reject: namely, you'd have to assume it makes sense for the rich to create products regardless of whether the market demands them, even at the risk that they're products no one would ever want, rather than letting the market – i.e., in this case, the rest of us – decide. I.e., you have to embrace centralized planning, only it's planning by the oligarchs rather than by an elected government.)

As a result of the way we've handled things under the undue influence of the rich, vast sums have been sucked out of the productive economy and pocketed by the oligarchs.

Basically, economics can be boiled down to one metaphor: you generally can't eat a carrot unless someone cultivates one. To the extent we allow the 1% to loot our carrots without doing anything to help grow them, we starve. The same is true vis à vis deadbeats among the 99%; but the 1% have perfected the means to loot our carrots faster and on a vaster scale. And we're not just practicing socialism for the rich; we're literally making crime pay, while impoverishing the people who have been the most economically productive . . . because the latter are the only people with any money left but who still lack (or who have as yet failed to effectively exercise) the political clout of the rich.

Finally, I agree with ar47yrr4p, who commented on the video, " . . . I think it might have been beneficial to mention Iceland and what happened there a couple years ago . . . you see they jailed their bankers and some of their MP's, threw out their government, [and] told the banks to shove it . . . and now Iceland is prospering." The same thing happened in the wake of the S&L debacle that resulted from Reagan's deregulation of those institutions: we liquidated the bad S&L's, prosecuted the fraudsters, and moved on.

Update Re- "Derivatives for Dummies" (What Every Legislator Should Know About How to Fix Our Economy, but Doesn't)

Remember my posts in May, 2009 (here and here) on "Derivatives for Dummies"?

Well, they're still relevant, because we still haven't done anything about regulating the derivatives that were the source of the biggest loss to our economy (no, it wasn't bad mortgages!) – so the problem has only gotten worse since 2008.

Charles Hugh Smith's oftwominds has an updated discussion, with a description of the current state of the looming, derivatives-driven disaster: "[a]ccording to the Bank of International Settlements, as of June, 2011 total over-the-counter derivatives contracts have an outstanding notional value of 707.57 trillion dollars, (32.4 trillion dollars in CDS’s alone). Where does this kind of money come from, and what does it refer to? We don’t really know, because over-the-counter derivatives are [still] not transparent or regulated." [Emphasis supplied.]

If you don't know what I'm talking about, read my original posts (links at the top of this post). I don't think I've seen a simpler explanation, and it's not nearly as hard to understand as they try to make it seem.

As the hippies used to say, "where the people lead, the leaders will follow."