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Massive Punishment: Two Big Banks Are Cut From $600 Million Project. Here’s Why.

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The Louisiana State Bond Commission on Thursday voted to block two giant banks — Citigroup and Bank of America — from taking part in a $600 million highway project plan, The Washington Times reported. The decision was made in light of the banks’ anti-gun policies that were adopted after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

The Commission voted 7-6 to keep the banks from participating in the project. The move is said the state’s way of saying they won’t do business with anti-gunners.

“I personally believe the policies of these banks are an infringement on the rights of Louisiana citizens,” Bond Commission Chairman and State Treasurer John M. Schroder said in a statement. “As a veteran and former member of law enforcement, I take the Second Amendment very seriously.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (R) applauded the Commission’s vote. In fact, earlier this year, Kennedy had previously urged state officials to reevaluate all contracts with Citigroup and Bank of America over their stances on the Second Amendment.

“Citibank and Bank of America are trying to impose their political agenda on the American people. In the process, they’re trampling on people’s Second Amendment rights. That is a slap in the face to every single taxpayer who bailed those banks out during the Great Recession,” Kennedy said in a statement. “The State Bond Commission made the right decision. If you have zero respect for the U.S. Constitution, then you don’t need to do business with the state of Louisiana.” (Read more from “Massive Punishment: Two Big Banks Are Cut From $600 Million Project. Here’s Why.” HERE)

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Man Faces 13 Years in Jail for Criticizing Big Banks with Sidewalk Chalk Messages

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Photo Credit: Scripps Media

Photo Credit: Scripps Media

By Marie Coronel. The case against a North Park man who wrote anti-big bank messages on city sidewalks with chalk will go to trial, a judge decided Tuesday.

Jeff Olson is charged with 13 counts of vandalism and is facing 13 years in jail, as well as $13,000 in restitution fees.

Olson calls the charges heavy-handed and describes what he did as free speech.

“I was encouraging folks to close their accounts at big Wall Street banks to transfer their money local nonprofit, community credit unions,” said Olson.

Surveillance pictures showed him writing on the sidewalks of banks using children’s chalk to promote anti-big bank websites. Olson told 10News he did this more than a dozen times at three different locations in Hillcrest and North Park. Read more from this story HERE.

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big banksJudge Won’t Allow Bank-Protester to Claim First Amendment Protections for Chalk Messages

By Dorian Hargrove. The First Amendment has no place in Superior Court Judge Howard M. Shore’s courtroom, not when it comes to vandalism with water soluble chalk.

Today the trial began in the case of a San Diego man who is being charged with 13 counts of vandalism for writing anti-big-bank slogans with washable children’s chalk on a sidewalk outside of three Bank of America branches in Mid-City.

On one side sat Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old political activist who protested against the bailout of the big banks early last year. On the other side was Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard and law student and city attorney employee William Tanoury. Also accompanying Hazard were two other representatives from the City Attorney’s side.

For Olson, and any free-speech advocates and political activists, the day couldn’t have gone much worse.

Judge Shore granted Hazard’s motion to prohibit Olson’s attorney Tom Tosdal from mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial. Read more from this story HERE.

Over a Trillion Dollars of Student Loans on the Brink; Fall-Out Could Be Enormous

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Cable news channels regularly stoke their viewers’ fears about China holding $1.1 trillion of U.S. debt. But they’re focused on the wrong $1.1 trillion of loans.

The borrowers of this other $1.1-trillion debt are far more likely to default on their obligations: students, particularly those who went to for-profit colleges. The global consequences could be — and likely will be — staggering…

These loans leave many students entrenched in a permanent underclass. When they default — and they are defaulting in record numbers — the ripple effects spread from shore to shore, and beyond. They have no money to see movies, buy health insurance or, sometimes, even put dinner on the table. And when this many Americans are facing debt they can’t afford, businesses suffer from lower demand, tax revenues decline, and lenders face enormous losses.

This should sound eerily familiar. The situation is not unlike America’s recent housing crisis. In both cases, loans were doled out without regard to credit risks, and borrowers took on substantial debt they could not afford. Years of irresponsible, predatory lending finally caught up with mortgage issuers when homeowners lost their jobs and could not afford to repay their mortgages with interest rates that averaged 6.5%.

Now imagine the economic calamity if those mortgage interest rates had doubled to 13%. That’s the dire situation faced by unemployed and underemployed former students, who have neither steady jobs nor savings to cover tens of thousands of dollars in loans that seem to grow exponentially. We all know what happened to the housing market. Student loans are not far behind.

Read more from this story HERE.

Former Counsel to World Bank Claims that US Government has been Co-opted by Corrupt Global Corporations

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Photo Credit: intellihub

A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve.

The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview with The New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.

Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”

According to the peer-reviewed paper, which presented the first global investigation of ownership architecture in the international economy, transnational corporations form a “giant bow-tie structure.” A large portion of control, meanwhile, “flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions.” The researchers described the core as an “economic ‘super-entity’” that raises important issues for policymakers and researchers. Of course, the implications are enormous for citizens as well.

Hudes, an attorney who spent some two decades working in the World Bank’s legal department, has observed the machinations of the network up close. “I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt,” she told The New American in a phone interview. “The pillars of the U.S. government — some of them — are dysfunctional because of state capture; this is a big story, this is a big cover up.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Penny Pritzker: Obama’s Worst Insult to His Left-Wing Base

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Photo Credit: breitbart In a crowded field, Chicago billionaire, bundler, sub-prime banker and union buster Penny Pritzker is clearly the worst nominee that President Barack Obama has chosen for his second term cabinet.

Though the position for which she has been nominated, Secretary of Commerce, often goes to a presidential crony or political insider, Pritzker would exceed all her predecessors and peers with her shocking record of cronyism and failure.

Pritzker ran Superior Bank into the ground by dealing in sub-prime mortgages. As Breitbart News noted recently, the bank’s depositors lost $6000, on average, and the taxpayers got fleeced–but the investors got paid out first. Pritzker recently served on the board of the Chicago Public Schools during a period of abject educational failure, and earned a bad reputation with labor unions both there and at her family’s Hyatt hotel chain.

Read more from this story HERE.

In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in Massive, Internationally Coordinated A.T.M. Scheme

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Photo Credit: NY TimesIt was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault.

In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours.

In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million.

The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating financial information with the stroke of a few keys, as well as common street criminals, who used that information to loot the automated teller machines.

The first to be caught was a street crew operating in New York, their pictures captured as, prosecutors said, they traveled the city withdrawing money and stuffing backpacks with cash.

Read more from this story HERE.

Everything is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

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Photo Credit: Victor JuhaszConspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

Read more from this story HERE.

Financial Crisis Caused by Banksters on Cocaine, Says Former UK Drug Czar

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

The former Government drugs tsar, Professor David Nutt, has said the financial crisis was caused by too many bankers taking cocaine.

The controversial academic, who was sacked for claiming that ecstasy was as safe as horse riding, told the Sunday Times that abuse of cocaine caused the financial meltdown.

“Bankers use cocaine and got us into this terrible mess,” he told the paper adding that the drug made them “overconfident” and led to them taking more risks.

Nutt, who is professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, claimed that cocaine was perfect for a banking “culture of excitement and drive and more and more and more. It is a ‘more’ drug”.

He goes on to claim in the interview that abuse of cocaine led to the financial meltdown, “and the Barings crash”.

Read more from this story HERE.

Confirmed: Bank Deposits To Be Seized In Cyprus, Many Cypriots Have No Cash (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Cyprus has agreed to shrink its bloated financial industry and tap big depositors at its two leading banks for billions of euros, clearing the way for a €10 billion European Union bailout the island nation needs to avoid collapse.

The deal with the EU was struck early Monday after days of frantic negotiations that followed the rejection by Cypriot lawmakers of Plan A. That proposal, unveiled little over a week ago, would have imposed a tax on all account holders to raise funds to recapitalize the failing banks.

Now the new bailout plan will protect all deposits of less than €100,000 euros but is likely to mean much bigger losses for account holders with more than €100,000 at the two biggest banks — the Bank of Cyprus and Popular Bank of Cyprus.

Popular Bank will be broken up immediately. Its viable assets will be integrated into the Bank of Cyprus, and its non-performing loans will be moved into a “bad bank” to be wound down.

The “haircut” for Popular Bank depositors will raise about €4.2 billion, while shareholders and bondholders are likely to be wiped out. The scale of depositors’ contribution to the restructuring of Bank of Cyprus has yet to be fixed.

Watch video here:

Read more from this story HERE.

Bernanke: ‘Too Big To Fail’ Remains A Problem

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Photo Credit: Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday that he still views “too big to fail” banks as a “major issue” that must be addressed.

Bernanke told reporters that the lingering concern about whether the nation’s biggest financial institutions are perceived as enjoying a government lifeline is still a challenge for regulators. He added that while new tools created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law are aimed at addressing the issue, further action may be needed to put the matter fully to bed.

“I don’t think ‘too big to fail’ is solved now. We’re doing a number of things which I think will help,” he said. “If we don’t achieve the goal, I think we’ll have to do additional steps … it’s not just something we can forget about.”

Bernanke and other regulators have been pressed by lawmakers in both parties about whether big banks still enjoy the implicit backing of the U.S. government since the financial crisis. And while regulators and Dodd-Frank backers insist the law provides the tools to prevent future bailouts, Bernanke acknowledged that the perception has persisted to some degree.

“Too big to fail was a major source of the crisis, and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that issue successfully,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.