Search Results for: koch

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2015 Manipulating Americans to organize or protest against their own interests is the sine qua non of big corporate front groups. These groups are alternately known as astroturf organizations because the grass in “grassroots” is fake turf. Just how fake that turf is came into crisp perspective on April 2 when Christine Stapleton, an investigative reporter at the Palm Beach Post, revealed that a protest rally called by the Tea Party of Miami and Florida Citizens Against Waste used paid actors from the Broward Acting Group as faux protesters. (Watch a video here.) The fake protest was in response to more than 100 real citizens turning out the prior month to demand that the South Florida Water Management District, a state agency, exercise its option before it expires to purchase 48,600 acres of corporate land owned by U.S. Sugar, a huge sugar … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 12, 2015 There’s an old adage that goes: “never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” It’s generally interpreted to mean don’t go to war with the press. That would surely include syndicated reporters working for the Associated Press, which says in a lawsuit filed yesterday that it has “one billion readers, listeners and viewers.” Despite the sage advice, Hillary Clinton is now in a full blown war with the press over how she became the Decider in Chief over which government emails would be preserved from her time as Secretary of State versus the tens of thousands that she elected to erase, ruling them to be about personal matters. The Associated Press has filed its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State because the Federal agency has defied the Freedom of Information Act and stonewalled AP reporters for as long as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2015 The monetary policy arm of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), is getting hammered this week. On Monday, two researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco chastised the FOMC for effectively wearing rose-colored glasses since 2007 and getting the rate of economic growth mostly dead wrong. (More on that later in this article.) Yesterday, in a speech before the Minnesota Bankers Association, Narayana Kocherlakota, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said that if one applied a corporate performance measurement to the FOMC’s dual job assignment from Congress of promoting price stability and maximum employment, then the FOMC has “underperformed in the past three years” on both measures. The reason the FOMC has underperformed according to Kocherlakota is that it did not provide adequate stimulus. The Fed President told the audience: “What concrete actions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 26, 2014 Coming off the greatest financial collapse in modern history because of unregulated derivatives backed by dodgy collateral, it is more than a little disconcerting that we are now forced to use our digital ink to explain the pitfalls of investing in a digital currency backed by air. There seems to be a mass hypnosis at work. For example, last evening, at 6:47 p.m., the wire service Reuters explained Bitcoin to its readers as follows: “Unlike traditional currencies, where a central bank decides how much money to print based on goals like controlling inflation, no central authority governs the supply of bitcoins. Like other commodities and currencies, its value depends on people’s confidence in it.” The last sentence of the Reuters statement was likely penned by someone who has never traded commodities or registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Bitcoin is decidedly not like other traded commodities. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 11, 2014 Janet Yellen, the newly installed Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, will face her first Congressional grilling as Fed Chair today before the House Financial Services Committee. That Committee is chaired by Jeb Hensarling, a staunch conservative, who has turned the web site for the Committee into a billboard for self promotion and the Koch Party platform for small government, deregulation, and partisan attacks. Below is the written testimony that Yellen will deliver this morning at 10:00 a.m. before the Committee. ————- Chair Janet L. Yellen, Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress Before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. February 11, 2014 Chairman Hensarling, Ranking Member Waters and other members of the Committee, I am pleased to present the Federal Reserve’s semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress. In my remarks today, I will discuss the current … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 28, 2014 Remember the line from the iconic movie, Dirty Dancing – “nobody puts baby in a corner”? That basically sums up the President’s game plan for 2014 that he will unveil tonight in his State of the Union address. The key elements of the plan have been leaking over the past two days. Yesterday at a White House press briefing, in answer to a question about the State of the Union speech, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “I think restoring security and economic vitality to the middle class is a very ambitious goal.  Restoring opportunity for all and expanding opportunity for all, those are very ambitious goals.  And those are the goals the President has identified…mindful of Congress’s reluctance to be cooperative at times, the President is going to exercise his authority.  He’s going to use his pen and his phone…And it would be the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: December 5, 2013 Yesterday, President Obama appealed to fellow Americans to help him focus Congress on efforts to stem the unprecedented income inequality in our Nation. Tonight, one of the denizens of the greed-is-good corporate front groups, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute, will attack that message in a speech at NYU. New York University presents an ideal forum for Brook. It’s a microcosm of the pitched battle for the soul of America. The Wall Street cartel has oozed itself into NYU’s boards, municipal bond issuance, student loans, mortgage loans, credit cards and naming rights on buildings and auditoriums. NYU now has the highest tuition in the country, crippling student debt, while it simultaneously doles out forgivable loans to elite administrators for mansions in the suburbs. As a determined group of over 400 faculty attempt to restore the University to its core educational mission and reduce … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 3, 2013 If there is one must see film this year, it is Robert Reich’s newly released “Inequality for All.” If you’ve ever yearned to sit in a Reich public policy class at UC Berkeley, or get your mind around how Wall Street crashed the economy in 2008, or rid yourself of guilt that you’ve failed your family by losing your job or living from paycheck to paycheck – this is your opportunity to take a seat and let the warm and witty former Labor Secretary take you on a journey from 1928 to today. The first stunner comes with the chart we have posted below showing that in 1928 and 2007 – the year before the two greatest financial crashes in U.S. history, income inequality peaked. In the film, Reich says about the graph: “The parallels are breathtaking if you look at them carefully.” Indeed they … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 27, 2013  George Melloan has done a deep disservice to the ever-shrinking pool of ethical investigative writers covering Wall Street, civic-minded prosecutors, and to the underpaid but dedicated career regulators overseeing the financial markets. (No, the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington hasn’t quite killed off all that is good.)  Yesterday, Melloan penned an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that was so Koch-esque, so preposterously skewed, and so utterly lacking in factual basis that it must be called out. Melloan makes the claim that the big banks aren’t doing anything more egregious than they have done in the past and the growing charges of fraud are the product of overly zealous regulators, “encouraged by the Obama administration” to blame the nation’s economic ills “on the rich, Wall Street, moneybags bankers, deal makers like Mitt Romney or almost anyone else who still wears a suit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 25, 2013  The frightening “L” word is now making the rounds on Wall Street, resurrecting fears of the early days of the 2008 financial crisis. According to Wall Street veterans, liquidity has dried up in finding buyers for what hedge funds are desperate to sell: large blocks of lower rated bonds.  Since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke held his press conference on Wednesday, June 19, of last week, hedge funds have been stampeding to unwind trades, driving down the value of not just bonds, but stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and gold as well. Even U.S. Treasury notes, the typical safe haven amidst panic selling, have lost significant value. The Treasury selloff is likely a result of the liquidity of the instrument; when hedge funds must raise cash quickly to meet margin calls and there are no bids for some of their other asset holdings, they have no … Continue reading →