By Pam Martens: August 15, 2012 According to Simon Chesterman, who has written extensively on surveillance, over the past four decades  the number of Americans killed by international terrorists was about the same as the number killed by lightning strikes or allergic reactions to peanuts.  But that has not deterred the U.S. government from marshalling the resources of 16 agencies and an annual budget of $75 billion to “protect” us. In 2009, as reported in the Washington Post, Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, blurted out the scale of the program during a morning conference call with reporters.  According to Blair: “This morning, we’re talking about the very important business of a blueprint to run this 200,000-person, $75 billion national enterprise in intelligence.” No where is this surveillance juggernaut more noticeable than in the streets of Manhattan where thousands of both public and private CCTV cameras capture the comings and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 14, 2012 We learned a little more about the policies of Mayor Michael (“just call me ‘Mike’ ”) Bloomberg last week. Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly held yet another press conference at the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center on Broadway in the Wall Street area.  As we first reported on October 18, 2011, this Center was built with at least $150 million of taxpayers’ money but its “partners” in spying on the people of New York City, with their very own staffed computer workstations in the Center, are some of the most notorious Wall Street firms: for example, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, as well as the regulator that’s got their back, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  Exactly what is the logic of going into partnership to battle crime with the very firms which the U.S. Department of Justice and regulators worldwide … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 13, 2012 To see what Sandy Weill was really up to on July 25 of this year when he went on CNBC to recommend that we separate insured deposit banks from investment banking, I went to CNBC.com and reviewed the video.  As it turns out, Weill was asked to be a guest host for two hours on Squawk Box, a program co-hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and Rebecca (Becky) Quick.  Sorkin is the author who has written, in an article that the New York Times refuses to correct, that Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have prevented the 2008 crash because Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG had nothing to do with insured deposit banking – except for the fact that Sorkin missed that they actually owned insured deposit banks only because of the repeal of Glass-Steagall.  Quick is best summed up as Warren Buffet’s personal interviewer.  Being … 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: August 10, 2012  According to an SEC filing made by JPMorgan Chase yesterday, the firm is being sued by its retirees, its customers, its shareholders, the City of Baltimore, Jefferson County Alabama, the City of Milan, the trustee for Madoff’s assets, MF Global’s customers and securities holders,  the creditors of Lehman Brothers, an Enron investor and counterparty, traders in Libor and Euribor financial instruments, and on and on.  JPMorgan’s own employees attempted to sue the firm over losses in their 401(k) plan related to Enron but according to the filing it has been dismissed: “A purported class action filed on behalf of JPMorgan Chase employees who participated in the Firm’s 401(k) plan asserting claims under ERISA for alleged breaches of fiduciary duties by JPMorgan Chase, its directors and named officers was dismissed, and the dismissal was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 9, 2012 To those still clinging to the absurdity that Wall Street banks aren’t too complicated to manage, this flow chart that JPMorgan Chase filed today with the SEC as part of its quarterly financial report (10Q) should resolve the question. This is the organization chart for the entity, the Chief Investment Office, that oversaw the loss of $5.8 billion in the first six months of the year at JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank by assets.  Imagine what the losses would have been if there were a few more departments on this chart. If one compiled a chart of the siloed regulators overseeing JPMorgan’s sprawling global operations, it would look alot like this chart.  Same for the mega law firms representing the more than 200 lawsuits against the firm.  Same for the criminal and civil investigators digging into the firm’s conduct.  More on that tomorrow.

By Pam Martens: August 9, 2012  On July 25, 2012, Sandy Weill went on CNBC to call for breaking up the big banks.  During that interview, he also stated the rationale that “simpler is better.”  Could someone please bump into Sandy Weill in the street and define the word “simpler” for him.  Last year, Weill sold his 6700 square foot condo in Manhattan for $88 million.  But he owned another multi-million dollar condo in the same building to move into.  He owns a 362 acre estate in Sonoma County, California; a 120+ acre waterfront estate on Saranac Lake, New York; an 8500 square foot mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut and a 200’ yacht interestingly named “April Fool,” that includes a brick pizza oven. Weill acquired all of those properties through obscene awards of Citigroup stock. He built Citigroup into a nightmarish conglomerate of incomprehensible accounting that collapsed into the hands of the taxpayer … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 8, 2012 It’s becoming a tragic fact of life in America – the more the 99 percent sacrifice and bail out Wall Street’s misdeeds, the more the taxpayer is sucker punched.  The New York Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department’s anti-taxpayer maneuvers that benefited billionaires Sandy Weill and a Saudi Prince in the bailout of Citigroup  are prime examples.  Weill is the man credited with the repeal of the depression-era investor protection legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Act.  He effectively put a gun to the head of legislators to repeal the law by preemptively merging Travelers Group insurance, the Salomon Brothers investment bank, Smith Barney brokerage firm, with the commercial banking operations of Citicorp.  Under the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, FDIC insured banks could not merge with insurance companies or securities firms, in order to prevent the type of systemic … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 7, 2012  (Part One.  Part Two will run tomorrow.)  When the U.S. taxpayer bailed out Citigroup and its two billionaire shareholders (Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Sandy Weill, the company’s former Chairman and CEO), the public was unaware of just how financially corrupted the firm had become.  We have those perpetually  invisible hands of lawyers at the SEC and Citigroup to thank for that.  In this December 14, 2007 letter, Gary Crittenden, CFO of Citigroup at the time, responds to questions of serious financial irregularities posed by Kevin Vaughn, Branch Chief at the time of the SEC.  Pages 22 through 32 of this correspondence have been completely redacted.  They are still redacted after the U.S. taxpayer pumped $45 billion into the firm, over $300 billion in loan guarantees, and over $2 trillion in absurdly low cost loans from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, … Continue reading →