The Obama Justice Department vs Big Five Banks Settlement is Actually a Payoff for Services Rendered

by Scott Creighton Keep this information in mind as you read the following article: The largest banks made a combined 13 billion dollars in profits from 7.77 trillion dollars of undisclosed emergency loans from the Federal Reserve bank over and above the 780 billion dollar banker bailouts. The loans and the bailouts were a direct [...]

Sept 17th Occupy Wall Street Protest News

by Scott Creighton This is what it takes to protect the criminal elites from the people. This is America in a nutshell…

Fed Report Finds No Wrongful Foreclosures By Banks, Consumer Advocates Slam Methodology

from Huffington Post A months-long investigation into abusive mortgage practices by the Federal Reserve found no wrongful foreclosures, members of the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Council said Thursday. During a public meeting attended by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and other regulators, consumer advocates on the panel criticized federal bank regulators for narrowly defining what constitutes a [...]

Wrong Matt Taibbi. Wrong Cenk Uygur: They Aren’t Prosecuting the Banksters Because the Banksters Were Doing What They Were Told To Do

by Scott Creighton Cenk Uygur interviews Matt Taibbi about his new article in Rolling Stone magazine which looks at how few (one) of these criminal bankers and financial CEOs have been prosecuted for their blatant criminality over the past 12 years or so. In the end, Taibbi finally suggests that the reason no one got prosecuted as they [...]

Obama Pulls a Clinton

by Robert Sheer, Truthdig Here we go again. When Bill Clinton suffered an electoral reversal after his first two years in office, he abruptly embraced the corporate money guys who had financed his congressional opposition in an effort to purchase a second term. On Tuesday in his Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece, Barack Obama veered [...]

Hey Michelle, Read My Book

by Robert Sheer, Truthdig On Tuesday, I received yet another deceptively personal e-mail addressed to “Robert” from Michelle Obama asking me once again to contribute to the “amazing journey” toward “progress” that her husband has led. “Fool me once,” I muttered, regretful of my previous contribution and even embarrassed to wear the artist-designed Obama for [...]

Obama reassures Wall Street on bank regulation bill

by Barry Grey, WSWS President Barack Obama went to lower Manhattan Thursday to deliver a message to Wall Street: Your profits and bonuses will not be disturbed by the regulatory overhaul making its way through Congress. In a deferential speech pitched to top bankers in the Cooper Union audience, Obama urged what he called the [...]

Obama vs. Obama

by Michael Brenner, Huffington Post The enigma that is Barack Obama grows day by day. Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. ‘Obscene’ Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute into well earned rewards for a good guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis means placing [...]

Exposed: Bernanke’s “Skimming Operation”

(So what the banks did in a sense was, they carefully removed restrictions on housing loans and created what the industry called “liar loans”, loans that they knew would default when they were making them. They got their co-conspirator at the credit rating agencies to slap “AAA” ratings on them.  They got their money up front [...]

What a Sad Week for Democracy

by Scott Creighton ***UPDATE*** (Five. I stand corrected. There are now 5 events from this past week that I should have mentioned. Please see the last one reported on by Glenn Greenwald at the end of this article.) What a week it was for our democratic freakshow. How many more shocks can our fragile egos [...]

Emails implicate Treasury Secretary Geithner in cover-up of AIG deal to bail out the banks

by Barry Grey, WSWS A financial scandal has erupted that implicates Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in efforts to conceal the funneling of $62 billion in taxpayer funds to 16 large banks as part of the government bailout of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG).

Wall Street Pay Cuts? White House Plan Has Loopholes

by Rich Blake, ABC News The details of the Obama administration’s efforts to curb excessive compensation on Wall Street emerged Thursday, with dual announcements from pay czar Kenneth Feinberg and the Federal Reserve Board. And while the potential loopholes do not appear large enough to drive the proverbial armored truck through, the securities industry is [...]

US bankers cash in despite phony pay restraint

by Patrick Martin, WSWS The executive pay regulations announced Thursday by the Obama administration’s “pay czar” and the Federal Reserve represent a cynical attempt to placate public outrage over Wall Street bonuses while allowing the financial speculators to continue awarding themselves multi-million-dollar compensation packages.