Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: June 13, 2013  Cleta Mitchell is one of the attorneys suing the IRS on behalf of tax-exempt “conservative” groups – the word “conservative” having become a euphemism for corporate money masquerading as free speech. Her baggage is endemic to the real problem.  The billionaire Koch brothers, majority owners of the big oil, chemicals and paper company, Koch Industries, fund the “conservative” tax- exempt group, Americans for Prosperity, which then morphs into an octopus of other “conservative” tax-exempt groups.  The Cato Institute, a so-called conservative tax-exempt organization spewing out public policy research with a pro big business agenda, was secretly owned by Charles Koch for 35 years and by David Koch for 20 years, along with a few other men. The secret of billionaires owning a conservative tax-exempt organization, subsidized by you and me, while it pushes a corporate agenda, became public in the spring of last year. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 12, 2013  The American Civil Liberties Union has acted swiftly against the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot Act to allow it to collect metadata on every phone call made and received in the United States. Calling it akin to “snatching every American’s address book,” the ACLU together with the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) filed a federal lawsuit yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, challenging the lawfulness of the program and asking for the phone records to be purged from the government’s databases.  The lawsuit was fueled by Edward Snowden, a 29-year old former contractor for the NSA, who turned over Top Secret documents showing the Obama administration is using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to broadly spy on Americans, rather than abiding by the limited scope the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 11, 2013 “Ick” is a word that comes to mind far too often when writing about New York University under the tutelage of its President, John Sexton. In February, we wrote about how U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, got sweetheart deals while serving as NYU’s Chief Operating Officer, including a $1.4 million mortgage that was completely or partially forgiven, depending on which way you calculate his departing gift of $685,000.  During his tenure, students saw their tuition skyrocket by 40 percent. In 2011, Amanda Fairbanks, an investigative reporter at the Huffington Post, revealed that in order to meet the burgeoning costs for room and board and tuition, 498 young women at NYU were moonlighting as prostitutes to wealthy sugar daddies through an online match-making service. Yesterday, we reported on NYU’s financing of multi-million dollar brownstones for law professors – tossing out these outlandish perks like penny … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 10, 2013 According to documents unearthed in a month-long search of public records, NYU Law School has created an array of nonprofits to funnel money into lavish perks for its professors. The money has been used by professors to buy multi-million dollar brownstones and condos in Manhattan and Brooklyn with portions of some loans forgiven over time. In some cases, even the interest charged on the loans has been reimbursed. The decision to use nonprofit funds to enhance the lifestyles of a select handful of professors and administrators rather than assisting students is under investigation by Senator Chuck Grassley at the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. A referral has also been made by the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors to the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau which oversees nonprofit organizations. From the hundreds of records examined, NYU, under the leadership of President … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 7, 2013 Following yesterday’s report by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian newspaper that the U.S. government was engaged in data mining tens of millions of telephone calls, today both The Guardian and the Washington Post carry reports of a Top Secret federal government program called PRISM which allows snooping into the contents of emails, live chats and Skype communications of both Americans and foreigners. According to the Washington Post, a career intelligence officer was so deeply disturbed by first hand experience with the program that he turned over 41 PowerPoint slides and other documents about PRISM to the newspaper. The Post reports the officer stating: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” The slides are marked Top Secret, ORCON for Originator Controlled, and NOFORN meaning no foreign access. The government is already striking out at the release of the classified information. Late yesterday, James … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 6, 2013  Last evening, The Guardian newspaper published a document classified by the U.S. government as Top Secret, revealing that the Obama administration is engaged in a domestic surveillance program involving the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.  The Guardian article is written by Glenn Greenwald, formerly a columnist for Salon and author of the 2011 book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. The publisher describes the book as a no-holds-barred indictment of a two-tiered system of justice that “ensures that the country’s political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world…[Greenwald] shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 5, 2013  It’s not that Congress actually believes that it has passed legislation to rein in the Wall Street frauds and abuses that crashed the largest economy in the world. It’s that Congress desperately wants Americans to think it has Wall Street under control – not the other way around. That’s why there is going to be a lot of screaming and phone slamming on Capitol Hill today. Katy Burne has busted one more Wall Street illusion today with her piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that offers up this headline: “One of Wall Street’s Riskiest Bets Returns.”  According to Burne, two of the largest Wall Street firms are assembling Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). Adding to the Congressional angst will be the name of one of the firms involved and the location of the bankers putting the deals together: JPMorgan and London.  That … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 4, 2013 The Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) manufacturing index contracted in May to a reading of 49, the lowest level since it registered a reading of 45.8 percent in June 2009. A reading below 50 means the manufacturing sector is contracting. The data, called the PMI or Purchasing Managers’ Index, is based on a survey of more than 300 purchasing and supply executives from around the country who respond anonymously to a monthly questionnaire. With the exception of a four-year interruption during World War II, ISM has published the data monthly since 1931. Both the index and a number of its individual components showed broad-based weakness in May. ISM’s new order index registered 48.8 percent in May, a decrease of 3.5 percentage points when compared to the April reading of 52.3 percent. The Backlog of Orders Index registered 48 percent, a 5 percent drop from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 3, 2013 The New York Stock Exchange has released data showing that the amount of borrowing against assets held in brokerage accounts as of April 30, 2013 has reached an all time record. Called margin loans, investors have borrowed $384 billion against their accounts, topping the prior record of $381.4 billion in margin debt set in July 2007 – just before the onset of the financial crisis. The ramp up in margin debt has been occurring at a steady pace. It stood at $284.6 billion in June 2012; $330 billion at the end of December 2012; and has risen each month since then to reach $384 billion at the end of April 2013, according to the most recent data listed at the New York Stock Exchange. But just who is it that is taking out of all these risky loans? If it’s the small, retail investor, that should set … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 31, 2013 Ignore this past week’s trading in the junk bond market at your own peril. On May 7 and May 8 of this year, junk bonds fell to record low yields of 4.97 and 4.96 percent, respectively, according to the Barclays U.S. Corporate High Yield Index. (Wall Street prefers the misleading title of “High Yield” to peddle its junk bond wares.) Back in 2008, junk bond yields were trading as high as 19 percent. (Junk bonds are those rated below Baa3 by Moody’s and below BBB- by Standard & Poor’s.) In the last two weeks, junk bond prices have been selling off as everyone from small investors, pension funds, insurance companies and mutual fund portfolio managers reassess the amount of bond support that will be coming from the Federal Reserve in the future. While prices of Treasury bonds and investment grade corporate bonds have also … Continue reading →