October 30, 2012 Joseph Lhota, Chairman of the MTA, released the following statement on the current condition of the New York City subway system: “The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night. Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system, in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots. As of last night, seven subway tunnels under the East River flooded. Metro-North Railroad lost power from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon on the Hudson Line and to New Haven on the New Haven Line. The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards and suffered flooding in one East River tunnel. The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel is flooded from end to end and the Queens Midtown Tunnel also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 29, 2012  The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine has a one-on-one interview with President Obama.  Reading the interview, it became quickly clear how incredibly lax the New York Times was in failing to respond to repeated requests to correct a mountain of false facts that appeared in an Andrew Ross Sorkin article of May 21, 2012.  President Obama is now repeating the same utterly bogus information for even wider distribution.  This is no small matter.  Honing in on what genuinely caused the financial crash of 2008 is critical to understanding its roots and thus enabling the nation to write proper reform legislation.  This is what Andrew Ross Sorkin falsely claimed in his column in May: “Let’s look at the facts of the financial crisis in the context of Glass-Steagall. “The first domino to nearly topple over in the financial crisis was Bear Stearns, an investment bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 26, 2012 The peaceful stirrings of Occupy Wall Street began with a poster of a lithe ballerina poised gracefully on a bull with the reminder – “Bring tent.”  After a year of arrests, evictions, police brutality, and no prosecutions of Wall Street titans, the mood is less sunny.   An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street called Occupy Goldman Sachs has now set up a camp outside the ultra luxurious home of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan.  The group is calling for a big protest there on November 10 at 12 noon with the reminder to bring pitch forks and torches (fake ones, of course.)  By this time next year, the reminder that the armaments should be fake may be shelved.  Explaining the protest on its web site, www.OccupyWallSt.org, the group says “this is a reminder that, as we close in to the 2012 elections, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2012  Nathan Sproul, the former Executive Director of the Arizona Republican Party, whose multi-headed political operations have left a widening eight-year trail of voter registration fraud allegations, is tied to yet another newly discovered operation called California Grassroots Mobilization.  California Grassroots Mobilization is the third firm linked to Nathan Sproul which was registered with a Secretary of State by a subsidiary of the foreign corporation, Wolters Kluwer – a sprawling conglomerate based in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, with operations in 35 foreign countries.  Why Wolters Kluwer is fronting for Sproul and why a foreign corporation has been involved in the 2006 mid-terms, and the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections should rouse the FBI and Justice Department from their perpetual slumber on anything that doesn’t involve a man in a turban. California Grassroots Mobilization shows Meghan Cox, Nathan Sproul’s partner in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 24, 2012 There are three words that provide context as to why Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup, was abruptly dispatched from the bank eight days ago: Sheila Bair and Libor.  Bair’s book, Bull By the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street From Wall Street and Wall Street From Itself, threw down the gauntlet to Citigroup’s board to justify why it was keeping Pandit on board.  More than any other bank or CEO mentioned in Bair’s outstanding recounting of the financial crisis, Citigroup and Pandit are cast in a harsh light – as they should be.  Bair was the Chair of the FDIC and revealed in her book that Citibank, the insured deposit bank within Citigroup, had actually been downgraded to a rating of Camels 4, which would have landed the company on the troubled bank list.  It was only pressure from Citigroup’s other regulators that got the bank upgraded to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 23, 2012  Yesterday, a reporter at a mainstream media outlet ran the following sentence in her coverage of Greg Smith, the Goldman Sachs Vice President who resigned in March via an oped in the New York Times charging the firm with a corrupt environment: “Smith is the first former employee to write a critical account of his career at New York-based Goldman Sachs …”  I wrote to the reporter and the editor of the piece requesting a correction, alerting them that a highly respected former managing director of Goldman Sachs, Nomi Prins, had specifically attributed leaving a 15-year career on Wall Street to one firm’s hubris — Goldman Sachs.  I included this passage from Prins’ 2004 book, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America: “When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave of scandals uncovering scores of massively destructive deceptions, my choice … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 22, 2012  On April 5, 2010, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi famously depicted Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”  But if last week’s performance by its human relations department is any guide, the great vampire squid is flailing around in quicksand. No one in the legal or HR department at Goldman Sachs has apparently ever heard the phrase, if you’re in a hole, stop digging.  With Goldman whistleblower Greg Smith’s book, Why I Left Goldman Sachs, set to launch today and his highly anticipated appearance last night on CBS News’ 60-Minutes (typically watched by 13 million viewers), one would have expected Goldman to hire a sophisticated crisis management firm imbued with some tiny inkling of just how repugnant it and its colleagues on Wall Street are to the average … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 19, 2012 As we reported earlier today, Colin Small, a man linked to the Republican National Committee, was arrested yesterday in Virginia for tossing completed voter registration forms into a dumpster.  The arrest comes on the heels of growing claims of voter registration fraud carried out by firms tied to Nathan Sproul.  Small was previously employed by Sproul’s firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, until it was terminated by the RNC at the end of last month, according to news reports. This afternoon, three ranking Democrats in Congress issued the following letter to Reince Priebus, Chair of the RNC, demanding answers regarding the RNC’s relationship with Sproul. Separately, Elections Subcommittee Ranking Member Charles A. Gonzalez wrote to the Virginia State Board of Elections to ask how it would handle further cases of potential voter disfranchisement as the scandal there continues to unfold. ~ ~ ~  October 18, 2012  Reince Priebus, Chairman Republican National Committee 310 First Street, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 19, 2012  A Sacramento law firm that touts its sophistication in campaign finance matters has been linked to companies secretly operated by Nathan Sproul to register voters.  Sproul’s operation is under investigation in Florida and by members of Congress for voter registration fraud, including registering dead people, forging signatures, falsifying addresses, and changing party affiliations.  Yesterday, a former employee was arrested in Virginia for tossing completed voter registrations into a dumpster, as reported by Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times.  Charles H. Bell, Jr. and Thomas W. Hiltachk, founded the law firm now known as Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk in 1991.  It bills itself as a leader in campaign finance and regularly brings election law matters before the Federal Election Commission and Appellate Courts.  Bell is currently General Counsel to the California Republican Party, serving in that position since 1999.  He also held that position from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 18, 2012 The landmark 2010 Citizens United decision at the U.S. Supreme Court, effectively ending democracy as we know it, made it legal for advocacy groups to accept unlimited funds from secret donors while openly campaigning for a candidate.  Super PACs can now also accept unlimited sums from a single donor and spend every dime on attack ads against an opponent, providing they keep their activities separate from the candidate’s campaign. What has evolved from the Citizens United decision is an incestuous world where campaign rules matter little to the masters of the universe. The pro-Romney super Pac, Restore Our Future, has raked in $96,667,002 in this campaign cycle according to a recent filing at the Federal Election Commission. Almost half of that has sluiced out the back door to the ad buying firm of Mentzer Media.  Mentzer Media is the firm that placed over $18 million in ads attacking … Continue reading →