?This story actually comes from back in November, but I just found out about
it due to a recent Planet Money episode all about the regulatory scramble to
rewrite our banking rules. The whole podcast is interesting, but there's a
bit in the middle about one of the tactics used by lobbyists to influence
the rules: they totally forged letters from individuals and small businesses
to make it seem like there was "grassroots" support for a particular
position on derivatives reform.

They just forged the letters entirely -- including from a small Burger King
franchise and a circuit court judge who was not happy about her name being
used this way

Thus, the end result is almost always going to be in the favor of big
players in the industry who can afford lobbyists (whether they do
underhanded things like forge letters or just do more aboveboard lobbying).

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...s-reform.shtml

Seems like the regulators are getting played like a violin.
At the very least the justice department should look at filing
RICO charges against those *******s. Notice the main stream
media did not report any of this story.

Best Regards
Tom.

Hey Tom,

Hah...not real nice, but if you want a real SunOffAhBeach!! story,
look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/user/fiercefreeleancer

Hopefully Uncle George McDuffee will chime in. I'd be interested to
know if it's true. Snopes had nothing about it as of yesterday.

Brian Lawson,
Bothwell, Ontario.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 04:57:29 -0800, "azotic"
wrote:

?This story actually comes from back in November, but I just found out about
it due to a recent Planet Money episode all about the regulatory scramble to
rewrite our banking rules. The whole podcast is interesting, but there's a
bit in the middle about one of the tactics used by lobbyists to influence
the rules: they totally forged letters from individuals and small businesses
to make it seem like there was "grassroots" support for a particular
position on derivatives reform.

They just forged the letters entirely -- including from a small Burger King
franchise and a circuit court judge who was not happy about her name being
used this way

Thus, the end result is almost always going to be in the favor of big
players in the industry who can afford lobbyists (whether they do
underhanded things like forge letters or just do more aboveboard lobbying).

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...s-reform.shtml

Seems like the regulators are getting played like a violin.
At the very least the justice department should look at filing
RICO charges against those *******s. Notice the main stream
media did not report any of this story.

Best Regards
Tom.

On 2/12/2011 5:48 PM, John R. Carroll wrote:

Technical term for this is regulatory capture, where the
regulated become the clients/customers and the original
intent of protection of the public/economy/country is
ignored or forgotten.

One of the worst aspects of this is when the regulators
investigate, and levy a nominal fine, generally equal in
total to 1% or less of the amount of money lost. This not
only "puts this behind us," but in many cases
limits/prevents prosecution under the double jeopardy rule.
Fines are generally paid under an Alford or nolo contendere
plea rather than a guilty plea or verdict.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolo_contendere

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021106210.html

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?...d=ar6m5YSMWHZg

http://www.katv.com/Global/story.asp?S=14017212
Estimated IndyMac losses 12.7 billion$. (currently -- may go
much higher)
Regulatory fine and restitution paid by Blair Abernathy
126,592$ + interest
126,592$/12,700,000,000$ = 0.000996787%

I don't see how that is particularly relevant to the video offered for
comment.

Do you have any idea what the shareholder's lost when the FDIC moved in?
What about the debt holders? The answer in both cases is one hundred percent
and that's a really big number. This is the way our markets work.
The people that let Abernathy run their company got creamed right along with
the people that funded the company through it's bond sales.

The FDIC isn't out a dime and won't be.
One West won't know for years if their cram downs will pay off and that
$75,000.00 note is to insure that the taxes owed by the original
borrowers gain are paid and that the house isn't resold at a riskless
profit. That's right. A borrower owes the tax on any gain realized in a cram
down exactly as if there had been a normal sale.

I can understand the genuine outrage in the air but what's in that video
isn't reason for it.

I've looked into the causes of our current state of affairs at length over
the last ten months and from nearly every perspective.
Politics, policy, regulation, culture and other considerations and most of
my homework has beem the work product of real professionals in
both the University, regulatory and business communities. There are real
studies out there for the viewing if you dig around.
I've learned a great deal, in some cases, not many but enough, that I was
just wrong.
In other instances, things that struck me as particularly interesting were
fairly mundane or trivial.

You seem to be all hopped up on G-L-B and the repeal of Glass-Steagal. I can
tell you with a very high degree of confidence
that this was a fairly trivial event. The existing law was being
circumvented very effectively.
One proof is the location of AIG FP, a business that wouldn't have been
impacted by G-S in any event.
They don't know from Glass in London, don't care and never really have.

We have had exchanges, you and I, regarding the sociopathic community
promoted to the top of the food chain in the financial
services industry. That is a bigger factor by far than the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999. The CFTMA was relatively seminal and largely
unobserved.
One corrective regulatory change to undo this is the ICE Exchange for
derivatives. Contrary to it's creators intention, this exchange has done
nothing to bring
transparency to the market beyond what existed.

Anyway. The root cause isn't directly attributable to either politics or
industry misbehavior.

You can clearly discern what's happened if you will study organized
interests and their trends and populations over the last fifty years.
Compare membership in America's fraternal organizations, as one example, not
with party swings in election cycles but with the actual policy outcomes.
Then look at the number and size of organized business groups, how they have
evolved, function and the regrouping that has gone on under very large
umbrella
organizations like the Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber of Commerce resembles a union as much as anything.
Think about that for a minute.
Fraternal organizations ( down 60 percent) and labor union membership ( down
by nearly 80 percent) has declined to historic lows. Business unions on the
ascendant, exhibiting large multiples in membership and funding growth at
the same time. It's the organization that's important and business entities
are already individually organized to bring diverse resources to bear
over extended periods of time to accomplish tasks not otherwise possible.
What could be easier or more natural than organizing the organized?

The cloud will lift but despair will almost certainly set in.........
Between policy making and policy drift we have ended up in the crapper.




Yeah, and what's funny to me is to see all the excitement going on over
the problems for the dictatorships in the Middle East. Where everyone
over there seems to think they have just had some moment in time where
the "people" took control of their country and will now be able to run
it for the benefit of themselves. Hah! Look at us. We're supposedly the
freest country there is, but as you point, out America doesn't belong to
the Americans. It belongs to the wealthy and to the organized groups
that have "captured" the government. So the people in the Middle East
can now look forward to going from a dictatorship of one person to a
dictatorship by a group of organized business organizations just like us.

So the question is now that the people have risen up in the Middle East
and sent their leader packing; is it actually possible for the American
people to do the same with the covert leadership that really runs things
here? I'd sure like to see Americans doing what the Egyptians did except
that we'd be demanding an end to transnational corporations and
financial firms running the country for their sole benefit. The sad
thing is that instead of Americans throwing out the corporate leaders
they're just as likely to be out in the street demonstrating for the
corporations. I mean, can't you just see conservatives in the streets,
like the Teaparty people, out there demonstrating for the right of
corporations to rule America instead of the people? I sure can. When you
can't even count on our own people to throw out the real bums we're in
deep ****, and that my friends is where we certainly are. So there is no
chance at all of Americans throwing out our dictators.

Hawke

On Feb 15, 12:20*am, Hawke wrote:







When you
can't even count on our own people to throw out the real bums we're in
deep ****, and that my friends is where we certainly are. So there is no
chance at all of Americans throwing out our dictators.

Hawke

I assume you are talking about the current administration.

Dan

On Feb 15, 11:40*am, F. George McDuffee gmcduf...@mcduffee-
associates.us wrote:

Now the question is what should be done about it. *Should
these large private combinations be broken up under
anti-trust? Should these (or at least their US operations)
be required to become publicly owned joint stock companies
subject to full SEC disclosure? *Should there be a cap
imposed on gross sales volume or market share? *

-- Unka George *(George McDuffee)

Why do you think something needs to be done?

Dan

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:19:28 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

On Feb 15, 11:40*am, F. George McDuffee gmcduf...@mcduffee-
associates.us wrote:

Now the question is what should be done about it. *Should
these large private combinations be broken up under
anti-trust? Should these (or at least their US operations)
be required to become publicly owned joint stock companies
subject to full SEC disclosure? *Should there be a cap
imposed on gross sales volume or market share? *

-- Unka George *(George McDuffee)

Why do you think something needs to be done?

Dan
===========
If I wanted to live like a North Korean, I would move to
North Korea. I have several bad habits to support. I like
to wear clothes, I like to live in a house with central hear
and running water and I like to eat. I also drive a car.


-- Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

On Feb 15, 4:29*pm, F. George McDuffee gmcduf...@mcduffee-
associates.us wrote:


Why do you think something needs to be done?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *Dan

===========
If I wanted to live like a North Korean, I would move to
North Korea. *I have several bad habits to support. *I like
to wear clothes, I like to live in a house with central hear
and running water and I like to eat. *I also drive a car.

-- Unka George *(George McDuffee)
..............................


You did not answer the question. Why do you think something has to be
done?

Are you not wearing clothes now? Are you living in a house with
central heat? Does it not have running water? Are you having
problems with getting food? Do you not have a car?

In other words what problems does having both private and public
companies cause you?

If it ain't broke, do not fix it.

Dan

John R. Carroll wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:

People who are paid with tax dollars should be prohibited to unionize.

Why?
Prohibiting them from collective bargaining or otherwise organizing is a
violation of the very right to assemble that our constitution guarantee's.

Oh, they have a right to organize, assemble, or whatever, but they DO NOT
have a "right" to have my income confiscated from me to line their own
pockets.

That's the problem with socialism - its very foundation is institutionalized
theft.

Thanks,
Rich

On 2/15/2011 4:55 AM, wrote:
On Feb 15, 12:20 am, wrote:







When you
can't even count on our own people to throw out the real bums we're in
deep ****, and that my friends is where we certainly are. So there is no
chance at all of Americans throwing out our dictators.

Hawke

I assume you are talking about the current administration.

Dan



I thought you understood that our dictators aren't the politicians in
Washington but the special interests of wealth and corporations who are
the real dictators in this country. It seems I was mistaken.

Hawke

On 2/16/2011 2:45 PM, Rich Grise wrote:
John R. Carroll wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:

People who are paid with tax dollars should be prohibited to unionize.

Why?
Prohibiting them from collective bargaining or otherwise organizing is a
violation of the very right to assemble that our constitution guarantee's.

Oh, they have a right to organize, assemble, or whatever, but they DO NOT
have a "right" to have my income confiscated from me to line their own
pockets.

That's the problem with socialism - its very foundation is institutionalized
theft.

Thanks,
Rich


Your problem is that you don't understand what it means to negotiate.
Try negotiating with someone holding you at gun point and asking you if
you will give them your valuables. You can't. The reason you can't is
the disparity of power between you and the person holding the gun. It's
the same with all negotiation. If you are not in a position of fairly
equal power you cannot bargain in good faith. When you are weak you have
to take whatever you are offered. By being able to bargain collectively
you put your side on the same footing as your opponent. That allows
actual negotiating to occur.

What you don't understand is that reason why republicans want to take
away the right to collectively bargain is because they know that will
allow them to dictate to workers and not have to negotiate with them.
That's what this is about. Destroying the ability of individuals to
bargain with management on an equal footing. You buy right into the
argument of those who want to negotiate in bad faith. You got suckered.

Hawke

On Feb 16, 7:49*pm, Hawke wrote:


That only means you have no idea what is going on. You are sadly
uninformed of the danger that we are in. I see you as someone in Europe
in the 1930s who sees nothing to fear from the coming of Fascism. The
threat of corporate control of our country is real. You are just
oblivious to it.

Hawke

And you see bogeymen behind every tree.

You are right I do not see any threat of corporate control of the
U.S. Somehow I managed to work for many years and only saw
corporations that were managed by humans. Managed to negotiate
without needing a union etc.

I see you as a "True Believer" that needs a cause. I am willing to
read whatever you can find on the threat of corporate control. But do
not think you will find anything. The truth is that there are
thousands of corporations competing with each other. Not colluding to
take control of the country.

Dan

On 2/16/2011 5:49 PM, wrote:
On Feb 16, 7:49 pm, wrote:


That only means you have no idea what is going on. You are sadly
uninformed of the danger that we are in. I see you as someone in Europe
in the 1930s who sees nothing to fear from the coming of Fascism. The
threat of corporate control of our country is real. You are just
oblivious to it.

Hawke

And you see bogeymen behind every tree.

You are right I do not see any threat of corporate control of the
U.S. Somehow I managed to work for many years and only saw
corporations that were managed by humans. Managed to negotiate
without needing a union etc.

I see you as a "True Believer" that needs a cause. I am willing to
read whatever you can find on the threat of corporate control. But do
not think you will find anything. The truth is that there are
thousands of corporations competing with each other. Not colluding to
take control of the country.

Dan



But there are also many corporations that collude with each other all
the time. You have members of one giant corporation serving on the
boards of many others. You see industries, which are just a group of
companies in the same business, working together. You see them set
prices. You see them agree not to compete against each other. If you
don't see this then you are simply in the dark. Businesses work as a
team in groups like the business roundtable. They work together in
collective groups like the chamber of commerce to advance their aims.
They work through lobbyists to achieve their goals.

The Koch brothers are working to eliminate laws that keep the air clean.
Tobacco companies worked to sell products that addicted and killed
people. I could give you a list a mile long of businesses doing all
kinds of heinous things and working in conjunction with each other. Most
damage done to this country has been done by corporations not individuals.

The evidence of malfeasance by corporations is huge. You could go back
to Teddy Roosevelt and hear what he said about corporations. You want to
defend corporations because of your personal feelings about them. I'm
going strictly on the evidence. The last trick of corporations was to
get the supreme court to rule that they could buy off elections as if
they were individual people. Every time something like that happens it
diminishes things for real people. History is not on the side of the
corporations. They have been doing bad things for many years. The fact
that they create jobs and make a lot of money doesn't make up for it
either. But don't think this applies to all corporations. It doesn't.
Many of them do nothing wrong, but it only takes a few giant ones to do
all the damage. Look a little closer. You'll see I'm not just whistling
Dixie.

Hawke

On Feb 17, 9:16*pm, Hawke wrote:
But don't think this applies to all corporations. It doesn't.
Many of them do nothing wrong, but it only takes a few giant ones to do
all the damage. Look a little closer. You'll see I'm not just whistling
Dixie.

Hawke

Lots of words, but no facts. Show what the damage is. How are we
worse off than say 15 years ago? I think you are scared of bogeymen.

Dan

On Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:16:49 -0800, Hawke
wrote:
snip
History is not on the side of the
corporations. They have been doing bad things for many years. The fact
that they create jobs and make a lot of money doesn't make up for it
either. But don't think this applies to all corporations. It doesn't.
Many of them do nothing wrong, but it only takes a few giant ones to do
all the damage. Look a little closer. You'll see I'm not just whistling
Dixie.
snip
===========
So what are we going to do about it?

Following is an email I sent to my congressmen on this
topic. Feel free to use any, all, or none of it

----- start of email -----

IF A FEW ROTTEN APPLES SPOIL THE BARREL, LETS GET RID OF THE
BAD APPLES *NOW*.

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?...d=ar6m5YSMWHZg
Wall Street Justice Means Nobody Gets Pinched: Jonathan Weil
Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Here's another discouraging lesson
for anyone hoping the people who caused the financial crisis
will be brought to justice someday. Just because the
Securities and Exchange Commission has accused a
too-big-to-fail company of committing an outrageous fraud,
that doesn't mean the agency will hold anyone accountable
for it.

The question is what can we do about it.

One suggestion is to impose a point system analogous to that
used in many states to revoke the drivers' licenses of
habitual careless, incompetent and/or reckless drivers.

If a corporation accumulates so many points in a time frame,
say three years, the officers and board of directors are
automatically terminated on the principle that a fish rots
from the head first. If still more points are accumulated
to total more than a preset limit with the replaced
directors within a specified time frame, say 3 more years
then the corporation is liquidated.

Points would be assessed for *EVERY* violation of
law/regulations including those resolved by Alford or Nolo
Contendere pleas, possibly scaled for the amount of fine
paid and loss to the public. Employee deaths or serious
injuries, e.g. BP's oil platform and refinery explosions,
would incur additional [high] point assignment, as would
"accidents" resulting in the citizen loss of life or
extensive property damage, e.g. San Bruno, California.
Corporate tax evasion should also incur points, with the
larger the evasion, the higher the points assigned.

Operating a business is no more of a "right" than operating
a motor vehicle on the public roads. This proposal applies
the same standards to the directors and officers of a public
corporation, and the corporation itself, with which most
vehicle operators must comply, i.e. exhibit habitual
carelessness, incompetence, or recklessness and get your
license revoked. If replacing the directors and officers of
the corporation fails to correct the problem, the inherent
culture/traditions of the organization is such that it
should be liquidated before it causes any more damage or
loss.

----- end of email -----

You can identify your congressmen and access their web mail
[and snail mail addresses] at
http://house.gov/ and
http://senate.gov/

Be sure and bookmark the web mail pages for your
Congressmen.


-- Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...-jail-20110216

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone | Feb. 16, 2011 |
25 minutes (6,189 words)

A former Senate investigator sums up: "Everything's ****ed up, and nobody goes
to jail. That's your whole story right there." Taibbi's latest investigation
dissects the relationships between the SEC and Justice Department and the
financial institutions, to find out why prosecutors have not pursued criminal
charges against executives:

"In the end, of course, it wasn't just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who
got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was
similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset,
uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was
caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been
fined or jailed — not even Fabrice 'Fabulous Fab' Tourre, Goldman's outrageous
Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the 'surreal' transactions in the
middle of a meeting with the firm's victims. In a similar case, a sales
executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider
trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert
Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC."




Also...


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...chine-20100405

The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major
market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again


By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury
secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a
suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful
of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury
secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup —
which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John
Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his
office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a
multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds
to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the
former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives
$225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing.
There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark
Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just
a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge
of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman
after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks
are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York
Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York —
which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites
in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like
trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big pictu
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain
— an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic
capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free
markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.