By Pam Martens: October 3, 2012 According to the Arizona Secretary of State archives, Nathan Sproul’s address at 80 E. Salado Parkway, Suites 814 and 817, in Tempe, Arizona, has been home to 27 companies. Those companies clearly show Sproul as the agent, principal, or member of the company.  Two other companies incorporated in other states use Sproul’s office address, but do not link him to the firm: Strategic Allied Consulting, registered in Virginia, and Grassroots Outreach LLC, registered in California and Nevada.   Strategic Allied Consulting has been linked to allegations of voter registration fraud in Florida and Colorado. Sproul has recently come forward to admit his involvement with the firm, indicating that he was asked to keep his association secret by the Republican National Committee (RNC) due to previous allegations of voter registration fraud in prior election cycles.  As allegations have spread to multiple counties in Florida, with credible … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 2, 2012  The voter registration firm secretly set up by the controversial Republican strategist, Nathan Sproul, has hired a top white collar criminal defense attorney, Frederick Petti, of the Phoenix, Arizona law firm, Petti and Briones.  Sproul’s voter registrations firms were investigated in the past for fraud but never prosecuted.  To blunt scrutiny, Sproul says he was asked by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to set up a front company with no connection to him for this election cycle.  According to state Republican committees, the RNC then turned around and recommended the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, to Republican committees in swing voter states.  The ruse only came out because of a quick thinking blogger named Greg Flynn at BlueNC.com  who investigated the trail of Strategic Allied Consulting and found that the web site was registered to Sproul’s firm, even though the firm’s corporate filing in Virginia made no … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 2, 2012  Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge, Richard Sullivan, issued a 32-page smack down to the mass arrest practices of the New York City Police Department.  The Court ruled that the NYPD’s arrests of hundreds of peaceful protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan were unlawful.   In one specific instance, on August 31, 2004, when the police arrested more than 200 peaceful protesters near Church and Fulton Streets, the Court had this to say:  “Moreover, even if [NYPD’s] Monahan’s dispersal order had been sufficiently loud to be heard by all, the marchers had no opportunity to comply with it. Monahan abruptly stopped the march within minutes of its beginning and ordered the marchers to move to the north side of Fulton Street against the St. Paul Cemetery fence. At that point, the police began to form a line that effectively corralled the marchers on the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 1, 2012 There are growing allegations of widespread voter registration fraud from Florida to California.  Voters are being registered as Republicans when they are not and given fake or wrong addresses in the wrong voting precinct.  This could lead to widespread voter disenfranchisement on election day. The footprints lead to a long-time Republican strategist named Nathan Sproul who has run various companies out of a suite of offices at 80 East Rio Salado Parkway, Suite 814, Tempe, Arizona.  Sproul’s companies have been the target of voter registration fraud probes in prior years. The company at the center of the latest allegations is Strategic Allied Consulting. As Brad Friedman reports: “The firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, is the latest creation of Sproul, a longtime, high-level GOP operative whose companies — including Sproul & Associates and Lincoln Strategy Group — have been accused of destroying Democratic voter registration forms … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 28, 2012  U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now three for three in the book world: the quintessential poster boy for regulatory capture who ended up as Citigroup’s bitch.  In Ron Suskind’s  Confidence Men, Geithner ignores a directive from the President of the United States to wind down Citigroup.  In Neil Barofsky’s Bailout, Geithner is the evil genius using the Home Affordable  Modification Program (HAMP) to “foam the runways” for the banks, slowing down the foreclosure stream so the banks could stay afloat, with no genuine goal to help struggling families stay in their homes.  Now Sheila Bair, the ultimate insider as former head of the FDIC during the crisis, has completed the microscopic job on Geithner in Bull by the Horns. The image that emerges is a two-headed monster: a regulator functioning as a Citigroup messenger boy and an insanely mismanaged bank that was somehow able … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 27, 2012 With Mitt Romney writing off 47 percent of voters, the Presidential race now comes down to the Koch brothers’ money and Paul Ryan’s ambitions.  According to the Republican political consultant, Roger Stone, David Koch played a key role in Ryan’s selection. Says Stone, “The selection was cemented at the July 22nd fundraiser Koch held for Romney at the former’s sumptuous Hamptons estate. Koch pledged $100 million more to C-4 and Super PAC efforts for Romney for Ryan’s selection.”  According to Forbes, the Kochs have budgeted to spend approximately $400 million in this election cycle, chump change to men worth $25 billion each according to the Forbes list of billionaires.   To understand the Koch motivation to get Paul Ryan a heartbeat away from the Presidency, it requires listening to this brief tape, featured at the libertarian Cato Institute web site.  On the tape you will first hear Herman … 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 25, 2012 There is an infamous video clip in Michael Moore’s film,  “Capitalism: A Love Story,” where Treasury Secretary, Donald Regan, leans toward the ear of President Ronald Reagan while he is delivering a speech and tells him to “speed it up,” in a manner suggesting he is speaking to his paid puppet.  The President doesn’t do anything to quell that impression, amiably accepting the criticism and continuing on.  Who speaks to the President of the United States that way? Donald Regan had been the Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, the largest Wall Street brokerage firm in terms of stockbrokers throughout much of the last century.  Later, Regan would become President Reagan’s Chief of Staff and was viewed by many as being the Acting President of the United States. When Ron Suskind’s book, “Confidence Men,” was released last year, it included the deeply troubling revelation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 24, 2012 JPMorgan Chase, the Wall Street mega bank now under criminal probes for losing billions of FDIC insured deposits in risky derivative trades, for years has been one of the dinner hosts of an unseemly industry trade and lobby group established by none other than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, its own regulator.  On the evening of October 8, 2009, representatives of the largest Wall Street banks enjoyed cocktails and dinner at 270 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase.  Bill Hirschberg of Barclays was there; Jeff Feig of Citigroup; Troy Rohrbaugh of JPMorgan; Fabian Shey of UBS and numerous others.   Also  enjoying the food and conversation were seven officials from their regulator, the New York Fed.  The Fed attendees were: Steven Friedman, Marcus Lee, Susan McLaughlin, Patricia Mosser, Jamie Pfeifer, and Brian Sack.  Michael Nelson, currently Counsel and Senior Vice … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 21, 2012 If you place the words “Wall Street mafia” in the Google search engine without the quotes, it produces 11.3 million links. That’s not good for America. Throughout most of our Nation’s history, Wall Street has been synonymous with the U.S. financial markets. But at long last, the simmering subconscious view that Wall Street may have slipped past the demarcation line of mere corruption into the nether world of organized crime is gaining public notice.  That’s a positive sign.  Until we can fully comprehend what we’re dealing with, Congress will continue to tinker around the edges of financial reform while the core continues to rot. On June 22 of this year, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine and Yves Smith of the financial blog, Naked Capitalism, performed a critical public service by advancing the concept of Wall Street mafia from the nebulous unsaid to bold … Continue reading →