Bernie nailed it: Wall Street is FRAUD.

[Octafish]

From the New Hampshire debate:

And, I want to say something, and it may sound harsh, not to you, but to the American people. In a sense, in my view, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. It's fraud. I believe that corruption is rampant, and the fact that major bank after major bank has reached multi billion dollar settlements with the United States government when we have a weak regulator system tells me that not only did we have to bail them out once, if we don't start breaking them up, we're going to have to bail them out again, and I do not want to see that happen...

-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/04/sanders-clinton-debate-transcript-annotating-what-they-say/

These are the richest times in human history. So, why do We the People get a government that delivers austerity?

[Ferd Berfel]

1. ...a government that delivers austerity?

Greed. Sociopathy, Pathology. Un-diagnosed and untreated Psychological problems.

[Octafish]

2. DU, is the Sequester over?

It's crazy, we don't invest in people, but give tax breaks to those who don't need breaks -- let alone, letting off the hook those individuals who threw millions of families out on the street illegally. And no one goes to jail for lying America into illegal, immoral, unnecessary and disastrous wars -- for profit.

SANDERS: Let me just say this. Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.

Goldman Sachs was one of those companies whose illegal activity helped destroy our economy and ruin the lives of millions of Americans. But this is what a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system and a broken criminal justice is about. These guys are so powerful that not one of the executives on Wall Street has been charged with anything after paying, in this case of Goldman Sachs, a $5 billion fine.

Kid gets caught with marijuana, that kid has a police record. A Wall Street executive destroys the economy, $5 billion settlement with the government, no criminal record. That is what power is about. That is what corruption is about. And that is what has to change in the United States of America.
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/04/sanders-clinton-debate-transcript-annotating-what-they-say/

Vietnam was for profit, too. Dulles Brothers sided with the French colonialist masters, even offered to nuke them to keep a lid on the tin, etc.

[Fuddnik]

7. Fucking Alan Dulles sided with the Nazis.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Devils-Chessboard-Americas-Government/dp/0062276166

[mountain grammy]

16. Excellent book.. Truth!

[mountain grammy]

17. Yes, so true, and Ho Chi Minh was never our enemy..

nor the Vietnamese people. Ho tried to express that:

In a series of eight letters and telegrams to President Harry S. Truman, and three to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in 1945-46, Ho denounced French colonialism and clearly stated “our goal is full independence and full cooperation with the United States” and expressed the Vietnamese people’s admiration for “the American people whose fine stand for the noble ideals of international Justice and Humanity, and whose modern technical achievements have so strongly appealed to them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/vietnams-overdue-alliance-with-america.html?_r=0

Will we never get off the warpath?

[speaktruthtopower]

29. Special interests..

have always ruled America. But there used to be a balance between manufacturing, finance, energy, etc. Finance has outgrown the others and has near absolute power now.

[amborin]

3. $6.8 billion in tax savings for just one hedge fund

Some of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans.

Mr. Yass’s firm is litigating what the agency deemed to be tens of millions of dollars in underpaid taxes. Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund Mr. Simons founded and which Mr. Mercer helps run, is currently under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade, according to a Senate investigation. Some of these same families have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative groups that have attacked virtually any effort to raises taxes on the wealthy.

snip

So expansive was the resulting loophole that Mr. Soros’s $24.5 billion hedge fund took advantage of it, converting to a family office after returning capital to its remaining outside investors. The hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, a former business partner of Mr. Soros, took the same step.

The Soros family, which generally supports Democrats, has committed at least $1 million to the 2016 presidential campaign;

A person with knowledge of the group’s fund-raising said the organization had also secured large donations or commitments from a number of wealthy individuals, including James Simons, a New York hedge fund founder, and Danny Abraham, a Florida entrepreneur

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/29/super-pac-backing-hillary-clinton-says-it-is-raising-more-than-it-did-for-obama/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html


the various maneuvers discussed in these articles are not fraud but the result of how billionaires, hedge funds, banksters can pressure politicians and influence policy

[Octafish]

4. What would Goldman think of that?

Thank you for the heads-up, amborin. The money involved is staggering. The cost to Democracy is incalculable. And it's how the Establishment stays that way -- keep the peons worried about where their next meal is coming from, not why the rich keep getting rich.

Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked

By Greg Palast
Reader Supported News, September 16, 2013

Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?"

Huh?

Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think?

A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.

Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-goldman-sacked/

What's Brooskley Born doing these days?

[Lucky Luciano]

13. I'm a huge Jim Simons fan. One of the most brilliant humans of all time.

Nearly impossible to get into his fund. Wall Street experience counts against you. They only take the top mathematicians and scientists in their respective field. Ithas a very academic culture.

[Octafish]

32. Is he a friend of William K. Black, too? He'd make a great AG as he knows what Fraud is.

Hillary, the Banksters Committed 'Fraud,' Not 'Shenanigans'

William K. Black
Huffington Post, 02/04/2016

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her debate with Senator Sanders minutes ago, said that she went to Wall Street and told them to stop their "shenanigans." The context was that she was being asked to respond to the complaint that she was too close to on Wall Street billionaires. She had every incentive, therefore, to demonstrate how tough she would be on Wall Street.

In that context, the best she could muster was the pusillanimous "shenanigans." Here is a typical definition of that word with examples.

1. : a devious trick used especially for an underhand purpose
2. 2a : tricky or questionable practices or conduct --usually used in pluralb : high-spirited or mischievous activity --usually used in plural

Examples of SHENANIGAN
1. students engaging in youthful shenanigans on the last day of school
2. an act of vandalism that went way beyond the usual shenanigans at summer camp

Hillary cannot bring herself to use the "f" word in the context of Wall Street CEOs leading the largest and most destructive fraud epidemics in history - frauds that made them spectacularly wealthy. A few minutes later, Bernie said that "fraud" was Wall Street's business model.

SNIP...

Here is the reaction of another prominent official to the plight of the homeowners:

"Along with innovation came complexity, and complexity is the enemy of transparency. I had high school friends and grade school friends that got put into mortgages by unscrupulous brokers. Some lost their houses, and I spent time with them and looked at what they had been conned into accepting--they didn't understand what they were signing on for. It was despicable."

"Despicable." The person I am quoting is Hank Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs, and Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush. Paulson is not by nature someone with great sympathy for the poor. Hillary urges us to believe that because she started as a lawyer for an NGO she has established that she is a person of exceptional empathy. But her 2007 speech to Wall Street was a direct test of character that she failed. Hank Paulson, the leader of the "Vampire Squid," won the test of reality and human sympathy and Hillary lost -- and it wasn't close.

Hillary could easily have gotten the issue correct by talking with Miller and Madigan to get the facts. Both AGs are leading endorsers of Hillary's campaign. Hillary did not investigate, she did not even take the step that Hank Paulson did and check with friends with real experience with foreclosures.

Hillary simply believed the banksters' myths about the crisis. She pronounced sentence on the people losing their homes who were the victims of the banksters' frauds. She implicitly cast the banksters as the victims of the homeowners. The best she could muster was to note that the banksters should have vetted the loans more carefully. What courage.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/hillary-the-banksters-com_b_9164930.html

[MrMickeysMom]

5. What the savings in taxation to ONE Hedge Fund could buy the American People...

According to Triple A, the annual tab for pothole damage is likely to set motorists in the USA back nearly $6.4 billion, a leading traffic engineer.

So, in every day language of what that one hedge fund's tax abatement could cover for the U.S., it's more than what is needed to tend to our crumbling infrastructure.

[mindwalker_i]

6. Hillary will tell them to cut out their shenanigans

And she's like totally going to do that even though they've given her millions of dollars.

[Octafish]

21. Just like Obama did in '08! No socialism for the 99.99 percent!

Goldman Sachs Socialism

by William Greider
Published on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 by The Nation

Wall Street put a gun to the head of the politicians and said, Give us the money--right now--or take the blame for whatever follows. The audacity of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bailout proposal is reflected in what it refuses to say: no explanations of how the bailout will work, no demands on the bankers in exchange for the public's money. The Treasury's opaque, three-page summary of plan includes this chilling statement:

"Section 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." In other words, no lawsuits allowed by aggrieved investors or American taxpayers. No complaints later from ignorant pols who didn't know what they voted for. Take it or leave it, suckers.

Both political parties may submit to this extortion because they don't have a clue what else to do and bending over for Wall Street instruction, their usual posture, seems less risky than taking responsibility. Paulson and Bernanke evoked intimidating pressure for two reasons. The previous efforts to restore investor confidence had all failed as their slapdash interventions worsened the global panic. Besides, the Federal Reserve was running out of money. Nearly three-fifths of the Fed's $800 billion portfolio is now loaded down with junk--the mortgage securities and other rotten assets it took off Wall Street balance sheets. The imperious central bank is fast approaching its own historic disgrace--potentially as discredited as it was after the 1929 crash.

Despite its size, the gargantuan bailout is still designed for the narrow purpose of relieving the major banks and investment houses of their grief, then hoping this restores regular order to economic life. There are lots of reasons to think it may fail. The big boys are acting, as usual, in self-interested ways since the government allows them to do so. Washington's money might pull firms back from the brink--at least the leaders of the Wall Street Club--but that does not guarantee the banks will resume normal lending, much less capital investing. The financial guys may well hunker down, scavenge the wreckage for cheap profits and wait for the real economy to get well. Likewise, global investors--China, Japan and other major creditors--have been burned and may step back from pumping more capital in the wobbly house of US finance.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/09/24/goldman-sachs-socialism

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. Been saying that for some time now, he has. n/t

[antigop]

9. Yes, he did. nt

[Ned_Devine]

10. When he said that at the debate...

...my brother looked at me and said "Can you believe this guy is saying this on a national stage like that? He's a hero."

[Marty McGraw]

20. That and the dreaded media

Taboo word (especially coming from Comcast's MSNBC) TPP came up as well - A debate like the other night has not been seen in decades. I Hope it sets precedence once more!

[Uncle Joe]

11. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[brewens]

12. The way I understand things, people on Wall Street are doing things that are flat out illegal.

Laws just aren't being enforced. The high frequency trading is really high tech front running. Something like a naked short sell would have involved actually counterfeiting paper shares if you tried the same move in the 70's. No body does a freakin' thing about it.

You're supposed to get pissed at poor people getting free stuff they didn't earn. These bastards raking off the top without doing anything beneficial to earn it hurt us a lot more.

[Duppers]

14. K & R for the whole thread.

You're always most informative, Octafish!

[ymetca]

15. Matt Taibi's article today

has some great quotables:

You will never catch Bernie Sanders standing in a room as a paid guest of a bank under investigation for ripping billions off pensioners and investors, addressing the audience in the first-person plural. He doesn't spend enough time with that kind of crowd to be so colloquial.

The Clintons meanwhile have by now taken so much money that when they stand in a room full of millionaires and billionaires, they can use the word "we" and not have it sound odd. The money has irrevocably moved them to that side of the ropeline. On that side of the line, public anger isn't legitimate, but something to be managed and waited out, just as Lloyd suggests.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35032-the-vampire-squid-tells-us-how-to-vote

[Duppers]

24. Wow! Matt succinctly nailed it!

Thx, ymetca!

[Jefferson23]

18. Clinton via CNN now saying, why would WS be running $6 million ads against me if they didn't

know the same thing? Answer: they always hedge their bets, spread the money to
both parties..whoever will take it that is.

Funny if it were not so pathetic.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor. Voltaire

[ErikJ]

23. Hence their "pro-life" movement?

Could be. More consumers to keep buying from them and more cheap labor.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

25. A valid observation.

[ErikJ]

22. Bernie was found guilty of fraud and went to jail.

Bernie Madoff that is. LOL

[Spitfire of ATJ]

26. Chuckie tried to dismiss it as silly by claiming it CAN'T be because pensions are in there....

Must be nice to have so much faith is the powerful.

I can't do it.

I've walked into far too many multi-million dollar dollar homes in the 90s and seen the VCR flashing 12:00.

[Romulox]

27. It's gambling with OUR money. Heads they win, tails WE lose. nt

[valerief]

28. Some people get richest betting on the abject failing of the masses' investments.

They're kind of like the Pentagon. They take all our money and give us nothing but heartache.

[Jenny_92808]

30. K&R

We need Bernie!

[jonestonesusa]

31. Go Bernie!

A direct and truthful assessment of these issues.