Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: April 11, 2013  If President Obama is trying to make it clear that he reports to the 1 percent, not the average Americans who elected him, he’s earning an A+ on his report card.  At 6:46 p.m. last evening, the White House sent out the President’s schedule for today. One item on the agenda reads as follows: “Later in the morning, the President will meet with members of the Financial Services Forum as part of the organization’s daylong Spring Meeting. This meeting in the Roosevelt Room is closed press.” There is no mention in this press announcement that the President will be meeting with the CEOs of the too-big-to-fail banks – certainly a detail worthy of the public’s attention. Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal’s link on the front page of its web site to its story on the President’s meet-up with members of the Financial Services … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 10, 2013  In what is likely an historical first for a Democratic President, groups that were his most loyal and hardworking supporters during last year’s campaign massed outside the White House yesterday to pronounce the President a traitor to his people and his party.  Just five months after spending millions from their campaign war chests and an equal amount of volunteer hours, the progressive groups who delivered a second term to Barack Obama feel betrayed. Using unusually harsh language and delivering 2.3 million signed petitions, the President’s base came to warn Congressional Democrats against falling in lockstep with the President.  The uproar comes over the President’s plan, to be unveiled today in his budget proposal, to cut Social Security payments by indexing benefits to a chained Consumer Price Index (CPI), a process viewed as a rigged system of reducing payments over time to the Nation’s most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 9, 2013  The Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, has been in office a mere 15 business days and has already logged more foreign travel on the taxpayers’ tab than most executive branch personnel see in a year.  Lew was sworn in on March 20, 2013. Five days later he was sitting in Beijing chatting it up with China’s President Xi Jinping. Yesterday and today, he’s flitting about Europe. His agenda includes meetings in Brussels with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and European Commission Vice President Olli Rehn, and European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Michel Barnier. Lew was also scheduled to meet in Frankfurt with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.  Today, Lew heads to Berlin to have a conversation with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble. Lew’s meeting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 8, 2013 President Obama is expected to release his budget proposal this week and, as confirmed by his administration over the weekend, he is planning to cut Social Security benefits for seniors, veterans and people with disabilities by indexing payments to chained CPI. Damon Silvers, Director of Policy for the AFL-CIO, sent an angry email alert to members over the weekend, saying the action was “unprecedented for a Democratic president” and that chained CPI is “a discredited way of calculating annual cost-of-living increases that does not keep up with actual costs, eating into benefits.” Damon said the president’s proposal would also “require middle-class seniors — people who make $47,000 a year and more — to pay higher Medicare premiums.” (Read the full statement from the AFL-CIO below.) The sellout by the President, who was elected to save Social Security not gut it, was confirmed by administrative sources. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 5, 2013  Last evening, the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, part of the Senate Banking Committee, announced the details of its much anticipated hearing slated for next Thursday, April 11, to peel away the multi layers of darkness surrounding the government’s hastily scrapped plan for in-depth, “independent” reviews of bank foreclosure files that were to make victims of foreclosure abuse whole.  The Senate Subcommittee, which includes Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Jeff Merkley – who have sufficiently removed their rose-colored glasses regarding continuing Wall Street corruption to function as useful investigators – will focus on the role of the outside consultants that were hired and paid directly by banks to conduct what were promised to be unbiased reviews. The hearing is titled Outsourcing Accountability? Examining the Role of Independent Consultants and is slated for 10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in the Dirksen Senate Office … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 4, 2013  In a March 25, 2013 letter to Wall Street regulators, Senator Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings warned that “Criminal activity should not be shielded by regulators as if it constitutes proprietary information or trade secrets.”  And yet that is exactly how Federal Courts and Wall Street regulators are functioning today – as sealed vaults for Wall Street’s dirtiest secrets.  Take the case of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority v. Citigroup. Abu Dhabi is a U.S. ally. It invests the surplus cash of the country through its sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, known throughout Wall Street as ADIA. In 2010, ADIA charged Citigroup with lying and defrauding it out of $4 billion in connection with a $7.5 billion investment it made in Citigroup when the company was teetering in November 2007.  ADIA could not bring its charges in an open public courtroom. It had … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 3, 2013  The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has released new documents it obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The documents show that DHS, the sprawling Federal agency ostensibly created to combat terrorism after the September 11 attacks, routinely spies on peaceful First Amendment activities and required daily briefing on the extent of media attention being given to Occupy Wall Street activities.  Media coverage both inside and outside of New York City was of concern to DHS. On October 7, 2011, a special agent sent a memo to inquire about Kansas City, asking: “Has there been any media attention given to the Occupy KC protests?”  A DHS employee expressed concern in an October 27, 2011 memo that Federal Protective Service personnel, a division of DHS, may have been caught on camera, writing:  “Was there media … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 2, 2013  In addition to collecting her $250,000 for sitting on the Board of General Electric, former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, who left the SEC post in December, will be hanging her shingle at Promontory Financial Group LLC as a managing director. The firm has not disclosed the amount of her compensation.  Promontory’s founder, Eugene Ludwig, was formerly the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) from 1993 to 1998. The OCC is the primary regulator of national banks. Before becoming head of the OCC, Ludwig was a partner at the corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, the firm where former head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, Lanny  Breuer, returned earlier this year. The Justice Department has been heavily criticized for failing to prosecute Wall Street banks or their top executives.  The U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, also hails from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 1, 2013 If you’re a citizen residing in the Southern District of New York, be aware that if you break the law you are likely to land in prison. On the other hand, if you’re a too big to jail Wall Street bank, chances are quite good that you’ll walk. In 2010, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald sentenced former New York State Assemblyman Tony Seminerio to six years in prison for shaking down hospital officials in his district in a $1 million scheme to collect consulting fees for work his office should have provided at no charge. In 2011, Seminerio died in prison at age 75. This past Friday, heading into the Easter holiday weekend when the public’s focus is elsewhere, Judge Buchwald handed down 161 pages of a tortured decision that twisted both logic and law into a pretzel in order to arrive at the bizarre … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 28, 2013 (This column, with updates, runs periodically at Wall Street on Parade. Please consider emailing it to friends and family members.) Yesterday, while at the grocery store, I noticed a large, attractive display of unused hardcover books with a big sign reading: “3 for $10.” As I drew closer, my eye fell on All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. I swooped up a copy even though I knew I already had one sitting in my bookcase at home. When I arrived home, I went to the bookcase and looked at the price I had paid when the book first case out in 2011. The price was $32.95. In my early years on Wall Street, when it actually functioned as an allocator of capital to worthy enterprises, we were trained to look for opportunity by … Continue reading →