Search Results for: koch

By Pam Martens: October 9, 2012  Obviously, back in 2008, when Wall Street was dumping millions into the campaign of Barack Obama, it didn’t ask for a prenup.  The honeymoon went smoothly for a while, with Wall Street quite content to have slap-on-the-wrist Mary Schapiro sitting atop the SEC and Tim Geithner, the former sugar-daddy of bailouts from the New York Fed, holding down the fort at the U.S. Treasury.   But then came Dodd-Frank, the Volcker Rule, regulation of derivatives, quips about fat-cats from the President and a big-money divorce.  Today, reports the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street and financial services firms have given a tepid $12 million to President Obama’s campaign versus the $43 million they gave in 2008.  Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has received over $24 million from the slimmed down fat-cats in this election cycle.  During the first presidential debate, Romney had this to say about the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 26, 2012  Forty-one days before a Presidential election that billionaire Charles Koch promised would be the “mother of all wars,” the battle is focusing on the ideas spun out of the decades old Koch corporate front groups.  Namely – Ayn Rand’s brand of capitalism.  The uproar has yet to fade on Mitt Romney’s video tell-all, marking 47 percent of Americans as government moochers — “my job is not to worry about those people” — a view that would have warmed the heart of author Ayn Rand, an icon of the far right who was regularly repulsed by government parasites, unless she was doing the mooching.  (In later life, Rand received both Social Security and Medicare benefits.)  Now, multiple media outlets are calling attention to an audio tape of a speech Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan delivered to the Atlas Society in 2005, praising the influence of Ayn … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 14, 2012 The incendiary anti-Islam film, Innocence of Muslims, is being widely blamed for sparking anti-U.S. demonstrations in the Middle East, leading to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Libya.  This morning, according to NBC News, a Federal law enforcement official has confirmed that the shadowy Sam Bacile, the producer of the film, is really Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an ex-con on probation for financial crimes.  Nakoula produced an amateurish documentary that was screened in one tiny theatre, with a trailer released on the internet.  That limited circulation stands in sharp contrast to another Islamophobic film that was broadly circulated in 2008 by mainstream newspapers with financial backing from a nonprofit group with ties to the Koch brothers. In the Fall of 2008, in the leadup to the Presidential election, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 13, 2012 The U.S. Census Bureau reported yesterday that annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year to an inflation-adjusted $50,054.  That figure is 8 percent lower than in 2007 and 1.5 percent lower year over year.  The $50,054 figure represents the Nation as a whole.  The West and the Midwest showed even sharper declines year over year, losing 4.1 and 2.1 percent, respectively.  The U.S. poverty rate, which is defined as an annual income of $23,021 for a family of four, was 15.0 percent in 2011 versus 15.1 percent  in 2010.  That figure translates into 46.2 million of our fellow Americans living in poverty – a national disgrace by any interpretation.  On September 22, 2010,  Forbes magazine released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans.  Their combined net worth climbed 8% that year, to $1.37 trillion.  More recently, from 2010 to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 11, 2012  There is growing evidence that Wall Street and other corporate money is finding its way into the pockets of business reporters today, just as evidence surfaced in 1932 of bribes to reporters at the New York Daily News, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Post and others.  Yesterday, Yasha Levine and Mark Ames of ExiledOnLine.com published a stunning investigative report of a deeply compromised Adam Davidson, host of NPR’s Planet Money.  On September 12, 2011, we reported that CNBC’s Larry Kudlow had pocketed $332,500 from the Koch funded Mercatus Center without disclosing it to viewers of his program.   On July 2 of this year, we reported that Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the New York Times and CNBC, attempted to downplay the need for restoring the Glass-Steagall Act by reporting that Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG had … Continue reading →

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine have been breaking story after story at ExiledOnLine.com showing that the U.S. is looking more and more like the Russian oligarchy. Listen to what happened when they broke the story at Playboy of the Koch funded front groups.

By Pam Martens: July 1, 2012 Spencer Bachus is the Chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee. On June 19, 2012, Bachus issued a press release that carried his opening remarks for the hearing on JPMorgan’s $2 billion (and growing) losses.  The final sentence of that prepared text read as follows:  “Before closing, once again I want to re-emphasize the point that JPMorgan and its shareholders – not the bank’s clients, and more importantly, not the taxpayers – are the ones paying for the bank’s mistakes. This is how the system is supposed to work.”  This is how the system is supposed to work? Maybe for the Russian Mafia or in some dystopian universe where only descendants of the Koch brothers are permitted to live.  But here in America, those who have not yet had a Fox News lobotomy, believe this is exactly how the system is not meant to … Continue reading →

Mark Ames, at Exiled Online, has a must read piece,  The Left’s Big Sellout: How The ACLU & Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights. Here’s a snippet: “Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the ‘We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!’ sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent ‘labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault’ snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.”