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Recent Posts
- The Fed Just Kicked the Capital Increases for the Dangerous Megabanks and their Derivatives Down the Road for Years
- Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Jay Sekulow, Suing the IRS for Freedom Loving Tea Party, Says He Helped Write the USA Patriot Act
By Pam Martens: May 30, 2013 Jay Sekulow is all about freedom and liberty – for some. He’s not a fan of a woman’s right to the control of her own body. He’s been a major litigator on behalf of abortion protesters’ rights. He’s a big proponent of religious freedom — for some. His nonprofit filed a lawsuit to stop the ground zero mosque. In the last two weeks, he’s been on a whirlwind of television interviews railing against the oppression of the IRS stalling the rights of his clients to get their organizations registered as tax-exempt nonprofits – some of which were political organizations with clearly no right to get registered. His clients are Tea Party groups, whose mottos invariably include the words liberty and freedom. And now it turns out, this is the same man who helped John Ashcroft write the USA Patriot Act, despised by right and left alike … Continue reading
When the IRS Is Finished With the Tea Party, It Needs Some Answers from Jay Sekulow, John Ashcroft, and Pat Robertson
By Pam Martens: May 29, 2013 As we reported yesterday, Jay Sekulow has spent the last two weeks burning shoe leather racing from one network studio to the next to pump up an IRS “scandal.” Now Sekulow has a lot of explaining to do as to why rampant conflicts of interests in his dizzying web of nonprofit groups were never reined in – even after being exposed in 2011 in the pages of USA Today. New documents have surfaced in Sekulow’s operations, raising questions about his business dealings with former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and television evangelist Pat Robertson. One month after stepping down as U.S. Attorney General in 2005, John Ashcroft accepted a part-time teaching position at Regent University, a Christian institution founded by Robertson, who is currently Chancellor and Executive Chairman at the University. Ashcroft has remained at Regent University, currently serving as Distinguished Professor of Law and … Continue reading
Jay Sekulow: The Man Pumping the IRS Scandal on Network TV Sits At the Center of a Web of Nonprofits That Have Paid Him, His Family and Related Businesses $40 Million Since 1998
By Pam Martens: May 28, 2013 Jay Sekulow will never be accused of a lack of audacity. The man who has orchestrated and pumped the “scandal” that the IRS was unfairly targeting nonprofits tied to the Tea Party, is the same man who filed 27 applications with the IRS in recent years seeking tax-exempt status for Tea Party and related groups. He’s also the man who together with family and business interests have reaped at least $40 million since 1998 from a tangled web of IRS approved nonprofits with eye-popping conflicts of interest. In the early days of the IRS controversy, Jay Sekulow was a major source of information for network news. On May 13, he framed the controversy for CBS News and the PBS Newshour. Two days later he appeared on GBTV with Glenn Beck, framing the current IRS matter as “worse” than in the days of Nixon. He also appeared on the … Continue reading
Jamie Dimon Has Become the JPMorgan Brand – And That’s a Problem
By Pam Martens: May 24, 2013 For five solid years, the highs and lows of JPMorgan’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, have been splashed across the headlines of the business press. First he was the Wall Street hero who came through the 2008 financial crisis unscathed. He sprinkled the phrase “fortress balance sheet” throughout his media interviews. He lectured Washington against over-regulating big banks (despite the fact they had just collapsed the largest economy in the world). He called international plans to require more bank capital reserves “anti-American.” He was the reigning King of Wall Street and he relished the limelight. And then, in an instant, the King’s crown was tarnished. His glib tongue uttered the immortal words “tempest in a teapot” over outsized bets by his derivatives traders in London, only to have to eat back that phrase, letter by letter, billion by billion in reported losses over the … Continue reading
Koch Media’s Megaphone and the IRS “Scandal”
By Pam Martens: May 23, 2013 There are IRS scandals and then there are IRS Scandals – with a capital S. Last year, we reported on the capital S kind. For decades, billionaires Charles and David Koch had secretly owned shares giving them 50 percent ownership of the Cato Institute – a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization subsidized by the taxpayer — while pushing a deregulatory agenda for big business. Today, Cato is functioning as a megaphone to spin the current flap over the IRS to advance its agenda. Before the news broke in 2012 of the Kochs’ ownership in Cato, most of America believed that nonprofits could not be owned by individuals and were required under the law to have a freely elected Board of Directors. (Charles Koch had found a loophole in the law in Kansas where Cato was originally formed.) The Internal Revenue Service warns that charitable organizations like the … Continue reading
IRS Sleuths Were on the Right Track: Big Tobacco Created Tea Party in 1994
By Pam Martens: May 22, 2013 On February 25, 2013, James Hepburn, writing at Daily Kos, made the emphatic assertion in a headline that “Big Tobacco Had Nothing to Do With Tea Party Formation.” That is likely to be the one headline that will haunt Mr. Hepburn to his grave. I decided to follow in the treacherous footsteps of the IRS and engaged in that unforgiveable sin: I targeted the “tea party” as a key word search at the legacy tobacco document archive. Resting quietly in the archive is full blown proof that Big Tobacco directly created multiple Tea Parties in 1994 as push back against a planned increase in the Federal Excise Tax (FET) on cigarettes. In fact, Big Tobacco not only created the Tea Party, it has promoted it over decades, pumped millions into marketing it, and pulled it out of its magic hat every time it needed … Continue reading
Billionaire Kochs Get Taxpayer-Subsidized Security Protection
By Pam Martens: May 21, 2013 Yesterday, DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy released a stunning report showing how counter terrorism units and the Department of Homeland Security gathered intelligence on the Occupy Wall Street movement for the benefit of the very corporations targeted by the protesters. Titled, Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street, the year-long investigation is based on the collection of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies. One of the revelations of the report is that Koch Industries, as well as billionaire Charles Koch and his son, Chase Koch, hired off-duty Wichita, Kansas police officers that served as their own private security force at the company and their personal residences in mid February 2012. According to the report: “These dates coincide with Occupy Wichita’s ‘Occupy … Continue reading
The Criminal Case Against the Tea Party Cabal and Why the Justice Department Won’t Pursue It
By Pam Martens: May 20, 2013 The Justice Department is investigating the investigators of the Tea Party at the IRS while leaving a 29-year criminal conspiracy against the American people by the Tea Party cabal untouched. That’s not surprising, given that the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, and the former head of his criminal division, Lanny Breuer, came from the law firm Covington and Burling which played a seminal role in the conspiracy. On February 8 of this year, the peer-reviewed health professionals’ journal, Tobacco Control, published an exhaustive study of the roots of the Tea Party dating back to the 1980s. Researched and written by Amanda Fallin, Rachel Grana and Stanton A. Glantz, the study was funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and titled ‘To Quarterback Behind the Scenes, Third Party Efforts’: The Tobacco Industry and the Tea Party. The authors explain how Citizens for a Sound … Continue reading
Today’s IRS Scandal Dates Back to 1959
By Pam Martens: May 17, 2013 To rational folks, the real scandal at the IRS is that corporate front groups – who want to bust unions, pollute the water and air with impunity, and kill Social Security in order to eliminate the corporate match of the Social Security tax – are allowed to register with the IRS as social welfare organizations, receive tax-exempt status, and then funnel tens of millions of dollars into political attack ads in order to elect candidates sympathetic to their corporate deregulatory agenda. These so-called social welfare organizations are allowed to do all this while drawing a black curtain around the names of their corporate donors. On April 9, 2013, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a petition with the IRS that mapped out the real scandal taking place at the IRS – the scandal that right wing media don’t … Continue reading
It Wasn’t Conservatives That Were Being Investigated by the IRS; It Was the Koch Brothers’ Front Groups
By Pam Martens: May 16, 2013 The President Obama of 2013 who is feigning outrage over the IRS adding extra scrutiny to nonprofit applications being filed with the words Tea Party in their title is not the same man who singled out Americans for Prosperity in a speech in 2010. Americans for Prosperity was founded and funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch, who have funneled money into politics through front groups for over four decades to advance their corporate deregulatory agenda that powers their profits and personal wealth. The Kochs are majority owners of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world. (According to Forbes, the brothers’ wealth has almost doubled in just three years to $34 billion each – while 46 million Americans without lobbyists and clever tax attorneys live below the poverty level, including one in five children.) Americans for Prosperity is a front for creating Tea … Continue reading