U.S. banks engaged in biggest price-fixing conspiracy in modern history.

[think]

Robert Reich: The new Gilded Age is even more terrifying than the original

By ROBERT REICH - WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2015 04:15 AM EDT

Last week’s settlement between the Justice Department and five giant banks reveals the appalling weakness of modern antitrust.

The banks had engaged in the biggest price-fixing conspiracy in modern history. Their self-described “cartel” used an exclusive electronic chat room and coded language to manipulate the $5.3 trillion-a-day currency exchange market. It was a “brazen display of collusion” that went on for years, said Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

But there will be no trial, no executive will go to jail, the banks can continue to gamble in the same currency markets, and the fines – although large – are a fraction of the banks’ potential gains and will be treated by the banks as costs of doing business.

~Snip~

Wall Street’s five largest banks now account for 44 percent of America’s banking assets – up from about 25 percent before the crash of 2008 and 10 percent in 1990. That means higher fees and interest rates on loans, as well as a greater risk of another “too-big-to-fail” bailout.

But politicians don’t dare bust them up because Wall Street pays part of their campaign expenses...

Read more:
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/27/robert_reich_the_new_gilded_age_is_even_more_terrifying_than_the_original_partner/

[corkhead]

1. If corporations were really people, their heads would fit in a guillotine

[erronis]

2. I think it would only take one or two strokes of this blade

To make the remainder of the CEOs, CFOs, Board of Directors of these pirate institutions to decide to retire "to spend more time with my family."

Just having finished Michael Lewis's "The Big Short", there is a great list of heads that should roll.

[hifiguy]

33. That method still works nicely on the people

who sign off on this kind of criminal shit.

And its use thereon is long, LONG overdue.

Fuck the bank$ter$ with red-hot pokers, then off in the tumbrel.

[Moostache]

3. Until I see a banking executive in chains, this in not a republic any longer.

Those bastards should be facing the harshest penalties of law and instead they are partaking of the finest varieties of all!

Justice is mocked by their continued businesses and the fact of their freedom.
They should be laid low.
Stripped of all illicit gains and forced into insolvency by reparations to the people of the world, whom they have harmed in the most egregious manner imaginable.

I won't hold my breath.

[bvar22]

25. I want to see the Perp Walk.

You can throw garbage at them during a Perp Walk. You would probably get taken down and jailed for littering,
.
.
.
but it would be worth it.

[hifiguy]

34. Bring back the stocks and the pillory.

There would be a small fortune to be made in the rotten fruits/vegetables concession. Pelt them with garbage before they're hauled off to the Big House or the National Razor.

[bvar22]

36. I could get behind that!

I would make it my job to grow especially nasty veggies,
and then let them"mature" in the sun.
.
.
.
.
.
.
And, you know, it might all have been worth it
if I get a good hit with a rotten Pumpkin.

[SoapBox]

4. I'd like to start with that crook Dimon.

Every time I see his face, my blood boils.

[RR2]

5. There new mantra, We're "too- big- to- jail"

As they laugh all the way to the bank.

[Snarkoleptic]

6. The "boring job" of pushing money around is actually a high stakes game

where the 0.01% screw the populace under the not-so-watchful eye of their hand picked "regulators". There must be prosecutions as these are not victimless crimes as, for every winner, there is a loser on the other side of the transaction (read: bet).

The Libor scandal was a series of fraudulent actions connected to the Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) and also the resulting investigation and reaction. The Libor is an average interest rate calculated through submissions of interest rates by major banks in London. The scandal arose when it was discovered that banks were falsely inflating or deflating their rates so as to profit from trades, or to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they were.[3] Libor underpins approximately $350 trillion in derivatives. It is currently administered by NYSE Euronext, which took over running the Libor in January 2014.[4]

The banks are supposed to submit the actual interest rates they are paying, or would expect to pay, for borrowing from other banks. The Libor is supposed to be the total assessment of the health of the financial system because if the banks being polled feel confident about the state of things, they report a low number and if the member banks feel a low degree of confidence in the financial system, they report a higher interest rate number. In June 2012, multiple criminal settlements by Barclays Bank revealed significant fraud and collusion by member banks connected to the rate submissions, leading to the scandal

[WillyT]

7. K & R !!!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. Imagine Robert Reich as Secretary of Treasury.

[Diclotican]

10. Spitfire of ATJ

Spitfire of ATJ


If Robert Reich was given the job as Secretary of Treasury - I think Waal Street - and also many in GOP would have reason to fear him. Mostly becouse he say what others are afraid of telling - and that is that Waal Street have been plundring and stealing for 4 decades now - on a scale I doubt we have seen since right before the Great Depression in 1929...

And also the same have happened in London, and other places where the finance institutions have doing great harms to the world - in the name of earning more money for the few ones...

If they do not take actions - revolution wil be the result of it - and that would not be pretty - if the revolution hit the ones who did mutch damage as it should...

Diclotican

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. That's why I came up with this...

[Diclotican]

26. Spitfire of ATJ

Spitfire of ATJ


I love it - I should be shown far and wide....

Diclotican

[hifiguy]

37. Love it!

LoOOVVVVE IT!

[Ikonoklast]

11. Reich sat on his hands when inside the Clintonista bubble.

He knew NAFTA was a clusterfuck for working people, but said nothing.

It wasn't until he was away from the power center that he had a "Come to Jesus" moment.

No, thanks. That tells me all I need to know about Reich. He had his chance to speak up, but didn't want to lose his job at Labor.

He crapped all over the unions by telling them they were "dead wrong" on NAFTA when they called out the Clinton administration for supporting it.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

12. He did speak up at the time but was ignored.

[Ikonoklast]

14. Yes, he spoke up all right.

He told Union members they were idiots.

Fuck that guy, his selective memory doesn't impress me one bit.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

17. Got a link?

[Ikonoklast]

18. How many do you need?

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-07-14/business/9307140084_1_jobs-automobile-labor-unions
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/09/22/18743640.php
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/interviews/reich.html



....much more.


From the Frontline interview:

Later in the summer, NAFTA takes the fore. You are passionate about this. AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland is in your ear all the time. Elsewhere in the administration, there is enormous pressure in support of NAFTA. How did the president deal with that? He had you and labor in one ear, and Rubin and Panetta in the other.

Well, personally, I was and still am a free trader. I think that free trade is inevitable and overall it helps everyone. But labor was very against NAFTA. And I remember appearing on so many stages in front of various labor groups and being booed off the stage because I was representing the president, and the president was committed to NAFTA. He was committed to NAFTA in the campaign. He said, during the 1992 campaign, "I am going to sign the North American Free Trade Act."

What was your advice to him during the debate though?

My advice to him during the campaign was to sign it.

And then later, once, Kirkland was telling you guys that it was going to be a "f-ing disaster," and you were going to come to regret it. You passed that on to the president. What was his reaction?

He shrugged. He was willing to take on organized labor over the North American Free Trade Act. I think the real issue there was what kind of priority NAFTA should get. Should it be one of the highest priorities of the administration in those first years? Should he spend a lot of political capital on it? Should he delay health care in order to get NAFTA done first? And the first lady wanted health care first. She didn't want him to expend political capital on NAFTA. She was concerned, and in retrospect she was absolutely right, that if health care came after NAFTA, then health care might never get done. Already the momentum was building for some sort of universal health care. He had the political capital to get that done, but the business community was telling him NAFTA was more important. And Lloyd Bentsen, the most senior member of the cabinet, and a man of great insight and wisdom and experience to whom the president deferred quite a bit, Lloyd Bentsen was adamant. NAFTA must come first. In fact, I remember Lloyd banging his finger on the table, "We must get this done right away." And so the president decided that that was going to get the priority. My job was to deliver the news to organized labor. And that was not pleasant, but they knew it was coming. Later in the summer, NAFTA takes the fore. You are passionate about this. AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland is in your ear all the time. Elsewhere in the administration, there is enormous pressure in support of NAFTA. How did the president deal with that? He had you and labor in one ear, and Rubin and Panetta in the other.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

19. It says it was Lloyd Benson who pushed it....

Robert Reich got the blame because Clinton made him the face of NAFTA to the labor unions.

Lloyd Benson was the one who said to Quayle the famous, "I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. You're no Jack Kennedy" line.

You have to remember how split the Democratic Party was not too long ago.

George Wallace was a Democrat.

Al Gore was a Blue Dog who voted like a Conservative.

Times change and the party has made a dramatic shift since Dubya.

[Ikonoklast]

20. Reich is a Free Trader.

As with all Free Traders, Labor takes a back seat to Capital.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

21. He knows there has to be worker protections....

Have you seen his movie?

[Octafish]

31. Lloyd Bentsen made a fortune on the S&L scams, too.

Pete Brewton covered the story in his book “The Mafia, CIA & George Bush,” a must-own for those interested in the workings of the Bush Organized Crime Family and this modern world of global corruption. Written by a former Houston Post reporter, the book documents, literally, the way the Mafia, the CIA and those connected and related to George Poppy Bush -- and to the late Lloyd Bentsen -- looted more than 1,000 of the nation’s Savings and Loans institutions — and pretty much got away with it, scot-free.

More on the amazing Brewton and his work by a reporter who got stiffed by his bosses in Sacramento:

https://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/censored-bush-i-the-cia-the-mob-and-the-sls/

[Spitfire of ATJ]

35. Poppy Bush was a scary guy....

You could picture him ordering someone whacked before a putt.

[Octafish]

39. A Family Thing.

Samuel P. Bush ca. World War I



Know your BFEE: Merchants of Death

Gosh. It's been 10 years already...to the day.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

45. That's quite a job you did back then....

I was doing my bit at the Malloy board at that time.

[dreamnightwind]

47. Thanks once again

Brewton's work was amazing. I read his articles and heard him interviewed many times through the S & L scandal, he was all over the Bushes, and being in Houston, was in the right place, they looted an S & L down there (might have been Silverado, don't trust my memory though).

I was unaware of Brewton's book, I'll definitely read that.

The Gary Webb articles were also amazing, I was local to his scene then, so got his articles in the local paper (the Bee, also I think the alt press had them, Sacramento News & Review IIRC).

Those that can't understand why some of us refuse to accept business as usual would do well to learn some of this history. There were enablers from both major parties, though the Bush family was always at the center of it.

[closeupready]

15. Actually, he helped Bill sell NAFTA to a reluctant Congress.

Without Reich's support for NAFTA, it quite possibly would have failed to pass.

[turbinetree]

9. Can I commit outright fraud

and collusion and get away with this-----------I mean really.
President Sanders
Vice- President Warren
Treasury Stiglitz
Speaker of the House Ellison
Speaker of the Senate Brown
Sec Trade Reich
Attorney General Papantonio


That is a ticket

[closeupready]

16. The tone is set at the top - if people at the top contemptuously disregard federal laws,

then people who follow their lead will ALSO break laws for which THEY have no respect. Though the difference between the two groups is people at the top will not be punished; people at the bottom will be severely punished.

[think]

23. That's the ticket!

[hifiguy]

38. I just about got dizzy reading that.

I don't usually have daydreams that good without a little herbal assistance.

[Hotler]

22. Loretta Lynch seems pretty useless. Nothing to see here....

move along please.

[bvar22]

27. An Eric Holder clone.

Don't expect this AG to cause any waves,
or turn over any rocks... just like Holder.

[Dont call me Shirley]

24. K & R

[MannyGoldstein]

28. What the hell is wrong with you people?

They were *fixing* things. Fixing things is good, it means they were broken before. These bankers deserve our gratitude and bigger bonuses, not poo being thrown at them.

Regards,

TWM

[think]

41. Does this mean we're not getting the ponies & ice cream?

[dreamnightwind]

48. The fix is in - eom

[leveymg]

29. If we were serious about trying to change this, we'd peacefully assemble on Wall St - oops

Last edited Thu May 28, 2015, 07:15 AM - Edit history (1)

Tried that.

Okay, we'd peacefully assemble in DC and petition our representatives. Oops again. Tried that, too.

Or, we'd all get out and vote for the "Hope and Change" candidate . . .

What is the sound of one hand clapping for empty promises that nobody believes in a Republic lost?

[Octafish]

32. Well, it's like democratic ''Double Bookkeeping'' where what we want is tallied on one side...

...and what we get is on the other side.

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

by Jordan Michael Smith
The Boston Globe, OCTOBER 19, 2014

THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

CONTINUED...

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html

So, smile! Whaddyawant a pony or something? Your name Glennon, leveymg?

[hifiguy]

43. Just put the Glennon book on my request list at the library.

You have turned me on to so many interesting books!

[libdem4life]

30. Please don't disturb Loretta Lynch...she's too busy making headlines with the soccer scandal.

[Babel_17]

40. Ah, the sting of fines, paid by other people, and then written off

I'm sure they learned several valuable lessons.

[hifiguy]

42. You can bet your ass that the banks have money set aside

to cover those draconian fines. Probably comes to one or two percent of what they made on the scheme. Then they deduct the fines from their taxes. It really is to the point to where the banksters need to get the Ceaucescu treatment.

[Marr]

44. I honestly think these people should get the death penalty.

I'm not generally a supporter of the death penalty, but in crimes like this, I think it actually could act as a deterrent.

The scale of this fraud is just unbelievable. Imagine, this small crew rigging the global economy on a day to day basis, to benefit their speculations and current investments. Mind boggling arrogance and greed.

[Doctor_J]

46. you'd think holder could have found someone to put in jail in something this big

Where there is no will, there is no way

[olddots]

49. wait till you see the Boom Bust Boom movie

about the dumbth of economic advisors .

[raouldukelives]

50. Some resist, some assist. nt