HSBC, led by ordained Anglican priest Stephen Green, has profited more than any other institution from companies that manufacture cluster bombs. The British bank, based at Canary Wharf, has earned a total of £657.3m in fees arranging bonds and share offerings for Textron, which makes cluster munitions described by the US company as ‘leaving a clean battlefield’.
In Wall Street’s latest affront to the public trust, the nine mega-banks graced with $125 billion in taxpayer bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) were reported last week to be paying out billions of dollars in bonuses to their executives. At least 4,793 bankers and traders received more than $1 million each in bonus payments, although it was one of Wall Street’s worst years on record. After months of investigating banker compensation, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on July 30, “The repeated explanation from bank executives that bonuses are tied to performance in a manner designed to promote (national economic) growth does not appear to be accurate.”
It’s financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls “pump and dump,” defined as “artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price,” then profit more on the downside by short-selling. “This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common,” and in today’s volatile markets likely ongoing daily.
For over a century, powerful international bankers wanted a private central bank giving them ‘the exclusive right to ‘monetize’ the government’s debt (that is, print their own money and exchange it for government securities or IOUs.)’ The entire Act was written in obscure Fedspeak so no one but its creators knew its purpose.
Filed in Creative-i on Capitalism, Creative-i on the USA, Creative-i’s Featured Writer
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Also tagged Andrew Carnegie, Federal Reserve Act, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Jacob Coxey, John D. Rockefeller, Robber Barons, Rockefeller, Stephen Lendman
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it is imperative to make people aware of the fact that the only chance of success is by opposing capitalism. Neoliberalism has already started its retreat and criticism should not point to just one capitalist policy or phase — the neoliberal one — but to the fundamental structure of bourgeois society, whatever the political or economic form it transitorily assumes.
How many citizens of this sceptred isle even know of Friends of Israel, let alone which member is an acolyte when he or she is speaking on Palestine.
The October 2008 financial meltdown is not the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon. It is the deliberate result of US government policy instrumented through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.
Filed in Creative-i on Capitalism, Creative-i on the USA
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Also tagged bailout, banking crisis, Barack Obama, Bear Stearns, Bernanke, Bill Clinton, capitalism, corruption, economic crisis, Federal Reserve Bank, financial manipulation, Glass-Steagall, Glass-Steagall Act, globalization, Goldman Sachs, hedge funds, Henry Paulson, imf, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman, Lehmann Bros, multinational corporations, Rockefeller, united states, US Treasury, Volcker, wall street, world bank
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Is it over? This is the question on most people’s minds today. But what does this question mean? The way this question is posed, especially on the left, usually conflates three distinct questions. First, is the Paulson program going to end the crisis? Second, does this crisis, and both the state and the popular reaction to it, spell the end of neoliberalism? Third, are we witnessing the end of US hegemony
Filed in Creative-i on Capitalism
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Also tagged AIG, bailout, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke, bretton woods, capitalism, china, credit, deregulation, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Glass-Steagall, gold, Goldman Sachs, imf, meltdown, Neoliberalism, new deal, Rockefeller, Savings and Loan, sub-prime mortgages, US Treasury, Volcker, world bank
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