Search Results for: koch

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2016  The world woke up this morning to find that the populist stirrings that were fanned by the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, which first galvanized the debate on the wealth and income inequality of the 99 percent, have been simmering in the hearts and minds of voters ever since. Apparently, voters were simply waiting for an authentic presidential candidate to frame their demands into a cohesive message. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont crushed Hillary Clinton in the first presidential primary in New Hampshire, taking 60 percent of the Democratic vote to Hillary’s 38.4 percent with over 90 percent of the vote counted. Donald Trump took 35.1 percent of the Republican vote, with the current Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, coming in at a distant second with 15.9 percent, based on a little over 90 percent of the vote counted. (See … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2016 Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is stumping across America urging citizens to help him create a meaningful political revolution to take back the country from the death grip of the one percent. His message is resonating. Sanders is attracting crowds of tens of thousands of disillusioned Americans. Political revolution is also in the air in the state of New York where a group called “Fed Up New Yorkers” has just launched a newspaper whose stated purpose “is to lessen Big Money’s grip on our political system and on our society.” The newspaper founders say their project is both “a publishing project and a political plan.” Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the project is Neil Fabricant, retired president of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and a former legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Fabricant is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2016 Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 22, 2015 Corporate front groups got a big fat Christmas present in the recently passed Omnibus spending bill. Congress is hoping that voters are too distracted with holiday preparations to look at the fine print in its more than 2,000 pages. We were winding our way through its copious contents when we stumbled upon its section on the IRS. Somehow this so-called “spending” bill has legislated into law a right-wing vendetta against the Internal Revenue Service. For example, the IRS is effectively stripped of its ability to writes new rules on 501(c)(4) organizations. Those organizations are increasingly being used as corporate-funded political front groups masquerading as social welfare organizations: The new Omnibus law reads as follows: “During fiscal year 2016: (1) none of the funds made available in this or any other Act may be used by the Department of the Treasury, including … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 7, 2015 Last evening, in his speech to the nation from the Oval Office, President Obama reminded Americans that “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes — and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country.”  In his concluding remarks, the President told viewers that our nation was “founded upon a belief in human dignity — that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.” (See full video of the speech below.) What the President didn’t say is that while the recent mass killing in San Bernardino, California was conducted by a married couple who were Muslim, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2015 Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors voted 5-0 to approve a new rule that was required under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to rein in the type of vast, secret, and below-market-rate lending the Fed engaged in during the 2007 to 2010 financial crisis. But rather than rein in its hubris, the Fed seems to have gone out of its way to emphasize that it has the power to make loans to “persons,” not just financial firms whose illiquidity might pose a threat to the nation’s overall financial stability. Most Americans understand that the U.S. is experiencing unprecedented wealth inequality and that there are many billionaires in the U.S. whose net worth exceeds that of many regional banks (think Koch brothers or the Walton family behind Walmart). But if individual “persons” should get in a financial bind, is it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2015 The problem with Wall Street is not just that individual participants serially disrespect the law. The bigger problem is that Wall Street as an industry has structured itself as an ingrained law-avoidance system. There’s simply no other industry in America where you could start the sentence – “Wall Street is the only industry in America where…” – and find endless ways to finish that thought. Jamil Nazarali, the head of Citadel Execution Services, the trading arm of a hedge fund and dark pool operator, gave the above sentence a trial run on October 27 at a Securities and Exchange Commission meeting on market structure. Nazarali said: “This industry is the only one that I am aware of where a for-profit public company regulates its customers and competitors. And I understand that you guys think that that’s important but what is it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 16, 2015  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the federal agency created after the 2008 crash to protect the little guy from Wall Street predators, which has done a top-flight job of it, was portrayed as a commie organization in a advertisement that ran repeatedly during the Republican Presidential debate on November 10. To enhance the communist theme of the ad (see full video below) giant banners of CFPB Director, Richard Cordray, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who pushed for the creation of the agency, hang on the wall in a nod to Soviet dictators. The advertisement is grossly misleading, overtly suggesting that the job of the CFPB is to deny car loans and mortgages to regular folks seeking credit. The agency, in fact, has absolutely nothing to do with approving credit applications. Its job is to root out and punish financial institutions that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 31, 2015  The riveting writer, Michael Hudson, has read our collective minds and the simmering anger in our hearts. Millions of American have long suspected that their inability to get financially ahead is an intentional construct of Wall Street’s central planners. Now Hudson, in an elegant but lethal indictment of the system, confirms that your ongoing struggle to make ends meet is not a reflection of your lack of talent or drive but the only possible outcome of having a blood-sucking financial leech affixed to your body, your retirement plan, and your economic future. In his new book, “Killing the Host,” Hudson hones an exquisitely gripping journey from Wall Street’s original role as capital allocator to its present-day parasitism that has replaced U.S. capitalism as an entrenched, politically-enforced economic model across America. This book is a must-read for anyone hoping to escape the most corrupt era … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2015 On October 23, 2008, with much of Wall Street lying in ruins and the U.S. economy rapidly heading toward a 1930s type of collapse, Henry Waxman, Chair of the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee, attempted to elicit answers from Alan Greenspan, the former Chair of the Federal Reserve for an unprecedented 18 years who had pushed for the deregulation of Wall Street that had left the country teetering. After enumerating a series of  recent financial collapses occurring from either deregulation or corrupted business principles, Waxman said: “Each of these case studies is different, but they share common themes. In each case, corporate excess and greed enriched company executives at enormous cost to shareholders and our economy. In each case, these abuses could have been prevented if Federal regulators had paid more attention and intervened with responsible regulations.” In those three sentences, … Continue reading →