Wall Street prospers, Main Street suffers

Will banksters get away with it?

Danny Schechter
Aljazeera
February 27, 2011

Hats off to Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

“Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”

True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to reign in financial crime. Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview.

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Europe Stocks End Lower As Libya Worries Escalate

Simon Kennedy
Dow Jones
February 22, 2011

European stock markets ended lower Tuesday, extending the previous session’s heavy losses as turmoil in Libya escalated and crude-oil prices extended their rise.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index shed 0.6% to close at 285.38.

The pullback also came on the heels of sharp losses for Asian markets, where a major earthquake in New Zealand and a move by Moody’s Investors Service to lower the outlook on Japan’s Aa2 rating to negative from stable also weighed on markets.

U.S. stocks were under pressure after U.S. markets were closed on Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.

In Libya, clashes between security forces and protesters continued.

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Lindsey Williams to Break Bombshell Info on Alex Jones Show

Infowars.com
February 22, 2011



On the Alex Jones Show today, pastor Lindsey Williams will reveal new bombshell information detailing the plans of the globalists revealed to him by his inside sources. The new information will dwarf anything Williams has revealed in the past. The new revelations deal with the death of the dollar, exploding energy prices, and the engineered onset of order out of chaos revolution worldwide.

Pastor Williams’ revelations have turned out to be uncannily accurate in the past. In December, he told Alex Jones he was told by two of this longtime friends, both retired top executives of major oil producers, that the price of crude oil was slated to move to $150-200 per barrel in the short term.

The turmoil in Libya sent the price of premium crude oil in London soaring above $105 a barrel recently, the highest level in two and a half years.

Economists are predicting gas prices will takeoff because of instability in the Middle East. Some say drivers could be paying $5 a gallon for gas by late summer.

Mr. Williams states the global elite plan to kill the dollar and bring the once great United States to its knees and reduce it to third world status.

Oil Goes Berserk In Electronic Trading As WTI Passes $98

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Feb 22, 2011

As Zero Hedge advised in early January when the severity of the Maghreb revolution was made all too clear to anyone not willing to stick their head in the CNBC sand, oil could well be the buy of a lifetime ahead of a downward spiral of unprecedented geopolitical proportions. Sure enough, today alone, WTI (April) has surged from $90 yesterday to over $98 in electronic trading (see below). Either this is some computer gone haywire in the closed session, or when America wakes up tomorrow we may be on the verge of another flash crash. As for Brent, it passed $108.50. As a reminder, and people forget this all too readily, each dollar jump in crude wipes out $100 billion in US GDP.

That means that at face value, today’s move in the commodity complex, may have taken out as much as 5% of annualized GDP when fully processed through the economy!

 WTI (per netdania):



Brent:



And some crude observations from an otherwise calm Reuters:

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Oil Jumps to Two-Year High, Gold Reaches $1,400 on Mideast; Stocks Decline

Stephen Kirkland
Bloomberg
Feb 21, 2011

Oil rose to a two-year high and gold rallied for a sixth day surpassing $1,400 an ounce, as tension in the Middle East escalated. Stocks fell for the most in a month as Eni SpA led companies with operations in Libya lower.

Brent crude gained as much as 2.5 percent, trading up 2.4 percent at 10:40 a.m. in New York. Gold climbed 1.1 percent and silver added 3.4 percent. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index declined 1.3 percent, with Eni sinking the most since July 2009 on a closing basis.

Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures lost 0.8 percent. Bahrain’s 2020 bond yield increased for a 10th day after S&P cut its debt rating. The New Zealand dollar strengthened against its major peers. U.S. markets were closed for the Presidents’ Day holiday.

Libyan security forces attacked anti-government protesters as demonstrations spread across the Middle East and North Africa, a region that accounts for 36 percent of global crude output. Chinese authorities blocked foreign news reports on protests across the country to stamp out any movement toward pro-democracy revolts.

Full article here

Wall Street Capitalism: A Love Affair

Sartre
BATR
February 21, 2011

What once was a mercantile world has become a global playpen for moving hot money to squeeze out the highest return on investment. Replacing nation states with international capital is now sport. Undermining the sovereignty of countries by an elite club of financial manipulators is the purpose for the grand game. Illustrating this fact, David Callaway writes in Market Watch. “The sale of the New York Stock Exchange to Deutsche Boerse this week underscores the lack of historical antipathy for Germany, the world wars not withstanding, but also something more significant. The deal officially slammed the door on the surge of protectionist overreaction that sprang from the global financial crisis”.

The conquest of the NYSE by German economic dominance is ironic, since so much of the financial funding of the Third Reich came out of Wall and Broad Street.


Money is the ultimate leveler. The dilemma is that capital is not democratic. If you have money, you have options. If you do not, you are at the mercy of the transnational system of financial bondage. All too often people equate capitalism with free enterprise. Nothing could be further from the truth. Crony Capitalism destroys genuine free market competition. Wealth creation is the nature of authentic commerce. Command and control is the objective of cabal moguls. Entrepreneurship is the business plan for prosperity, while systemic usury is the formula used by banksters to enrich favored cohorts in crime.
The current article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi asks a key question, Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

“Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people”.

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Making Fortune on Poverty: JP Morgan's Big Food Stamp Business

Obama’s 2012 Budget: Tool Of Class War

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
Friday, February 18, 2011

Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class. Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets. The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit.

When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.

Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.

The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.

China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.

The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.

With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.

The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”

But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.

The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.” Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–“domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.

The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.

So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.

For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.

Their answer is: make the people pay.

And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.

With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work. The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.

All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America.

With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.

American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.

The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.

These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).

There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.

Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs. They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.

These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.

A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.

What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?

The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.

Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees. America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.

The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to China and India.

Of all the countries in the world, none need arevolution as bad as the United States, country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

Video: Why Isn’t Wall St. in Jail?

MSNBC
February 18, 2011

Map Of U.S. States By Home Foreclosures

Map Of U.S. States By Home Foreclosures 

Ongoing Dollar Devastation Sends Silver Above $31, Only $18.45 From Hunt Brother High

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Thursday, February 17, 2011

It is good to see that things are back to normal. The now irrelevant, and very soon to be former reserve currency is getting pummeled as stocks go up on 410,000 initial jobless claims nearly 2 years after the end of the recession (and $3 trillion pumped into this hollow scam of an economy), and a guaranteed plunge in margins, but more importantly the Precious Metal complex is back to being a high beta alternative to stocks. Silver just passed $31.10 and is set to close at its post Hunt-Brother highs. In the meantime, the highest intraday price since the early 80′s is $31.2375 from January 3: we are less than two dimes away.



But fear not: the January 1980 high was $49.45. We have only $18.45 to go in nominal terms before this is taken out. At the current rate of dollar devastation we give it a few months.

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

Rolling Stone
February 17, 2011

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

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Madoff To NY Newspaper: Banks 'Complicit' In Fraud

Bernard Madoff Says He Gave Documents To Help Get Money Back

NEW YORK -- Disgraced Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff said in an interview published online Tuesday that banks and hedge funds were "complicit" in his scheme to fleece victims out of billions of dollars.

Madoff did not name any institutions in his series of interviews with The New York Times but said banks and hedge funds "were complicit in one form or another." He said they failed to scrutinize the discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information.

"They had to know," he said in his first interviews for publication since his 2008 arrest. "But the attitude was sort of, 'If you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know.'"

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