Matt Taibbi writes: "If the financial crisis proved anything, it's that Wall Street companies in particular have been serial offenders in the area of dishonest accounting and book-cooking. Sarbanes-Oxley is obviously no panacea, but removing it in exchange for a temporary, election-year job boost is exactly the kind of myopic, absurdly irresponsible shit that got us into this mess in the first place."
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifying before Congress. (photo: AP)
OWS: Washington Still Doesn't Get It
25 October 11
'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.
The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:
1) Bank of America is shifting a huge collection of Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts onto its own federally-insured balance sheet. This move of risky instruments off the uninsured Merrill balance sheet onto the commercial bank's balance sheet was done to prevent Bank of America's creditors from attacking the firm with collateral calls and other sorties. Essentially, an irresponsible debtor, B of A, is keeping a loan shark from breaking his legs by getting his rich parents to co-sign his loan. The parents in this metaphor would be the FDIC.
The FDIC naturally is not pleased with this development, but the Fed, the supreme banking regulator, is apparently encouraging this move. Here's how Bloomberg characterized this move:
In short, the Fed's priorities seem to lie with protecting the bank-holding company from losses at Merrill, even if that means greater risks for the FDIC's insurance fund.
Again and again, the Fed proves it has no appetite for allowing Wall Street to eat its own pain, and continually encourages banks to stick the government with its losses and bad assets. This move will allow Bank of America to keep a Band-Aid over its disastrous financial situation far longer than it would be able to in a genuinely free market. People should be outraged at this development.
2) Barack Obama is apparently expressing willingness to junk big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley in exchange for support for his jobs program. Business leaders are balking at creating new jobs unless Obama makes compliance with S-O voluntary for all firms valued at under $1 billion.
Here's how to translate this move: companies are saying they can't attract investment unless they can hide their financials from investors. So the CEOs and gazillionaires on Obama's Jobs Council want the politically-vulnerable president to give them license to cook the books in exchange for support for his jobs program. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
"All you're going to do is have more fraud. The ultimate losers are going to be investors," said Jeff Klink, a former federal prosecutor whose Gateway Center firm helps clients prevent and detect fraud.
If the financial crisis proved anything, it's that Wall Street companies in particular have been serial offenders in the area of dishonest accounting and book-cooking. Sarbanes-Oxley is obviously no panacea, but removing it in exchange for a temporary, election-year job boost is exactly the kind of myopic, absurdly irresponsible shit that got us into this mess in the first place. For Obama to pull this in the middle of these protests is crazy.
If anyone thought OWS has already done its job, and Washington has gotten the message already, think again. They're not going to change until the protesters force them to change, it seems.
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Our Corporate America and the Big Banks that REALLY run the government and eat the populace alive are the greatest Ponzi scheme EVER!
I wrote about this on OpEdNews.com a couple of years ago.
To the streets and the barricades, folks. We have no choice now, and really, we never had another choice but to start the REVOLUTION.
And so the real death of America begins in earnest...and the world will follow.
N.
And all those regulations to figure out how to circumvent when they are written as part of the Dodd-Frank Law. These people are going to be up nights figuring out a whole set of new ways to cheat consumers and break the law. Creativity is hard work.
And then there are those pay offs to elected members of Congress driving up the cost of doing business to think about.
Baron Thurlow in England is supposed to have said, "They have no soul to save, and they have no body to incarcerate."
And things have only gotten worse since...
Now that IS funny.
Actually totally predictable.
You will know them by the compan(ies)y they keep - Look no further then Obama's staff and remove the blinders that make him the anointed one in your eyes.
Then the POLITICIANS who BAIL OUT undeserving BANKS.
Capitalism does not have government bail outs - Fascism/Sociali sm does.
Blaming those who receive and ignoring those who give is a half truth that is a lie to hide those truly responsible - the thieving politicians who are habitually being liberal with other peoples money.
Dylan Ratigan, Matt Taibbi, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann--reve red pundits on the left who underscore OWS and continue to shine a light on the mortally traumatized financial system and its drone-army of ivy-league suits--do so in a political atmosphere comparable to some conscientious beach attendant trying to sweep all the sand into the surf with a stick broom. A useless, pointless, hopeless undertaking.
Just listen to Rick Perry or Hermain Cain for 5 minutes, or less, and you'll see my point.
Left wing pundits shine the light on the process like the image of sweeping on a sandy beach, it looks futile until their is a mass of awareness and then it flips and everyone accepts it as the norm. And I for one believe this next tipping point will be cataclysmic.
We're still protesting, and the protests are still growing, aren't they? Anybody else closing out their BofA or other MegaBank accounts and moving that money to a local credit union on Nov 5th "Bank Transfer Day"? I certainly am, one way to express my displeasure with these actions is to vote with my money.
The only thing these protests have accomplished so far is shift the conversation from "deficits" as the GOP wants it to where it belongs, with jobs and income/wealth disparity and the disparity in political power that wealth differential promotes. We got a long-road ahead, and there are still 25% of America totally asleep who haven't even heard of these protests (lol, too entranced with the bread-and-circu ses of Snookie of Jersey Shore I guess).
Well, goodness is never improved by compromising it with evil. One doesn't have to be an intellectual giant to understand this. If the Republicans want to try to block his every move, they will only bring shame upon themselves. However, of course, I am presupposing a truly independent media here, which is obviously not the present case.
I mean, Hell, some ostentatious honesty might wake people up if OWS hasn't reached 'em yet.
But the fact is a large part of S-O is simply redundant paper pushing for the sake of making it look like the government is enforcing tough regulations. Any pieces of S-O that exist solely for the purpose of a business entity to prove that they are not breaking any laws is foolishness. If gutting regulations that are based on the assumption of guilt, whether by a business or a person is the price for getting jobs, then I am all for it.
Gutting large pieces of S-O by itself will not actually create many jobs, it may even decrease it a bit.
From where I stand much of S-O was put into place as a CYA charade for regulators that were not doing their jobs. If fraud is illegal, just bust a comapny for committing fraud. not for not submitting paperwork to prove they are not committing fraud.
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