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How the US Sold Africa to Multinationals Like Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, PepsiCo and Others

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Jill Richardson - May. 26 (Special Report) - Will Obama's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition help farmers like Charity? The New Alliance was announced in conjunction with the G8 meeting last Friday. Under the scheme, some 45 corporations, including Monsanto, Syngenta, Yara International, Cargill, DuPont, and PepsiCo, have pledged a total of $3.5 billion in investment in Africa. The full list of corporations and commitments has just been released, and one of the most notable is Yara International's promise to build a $2 billion fertilizer plant in Africa. Syngenta pledged to build a $1 billion business in Africa over the next decade. These promises are not charity; they are business.

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'Naked Short Selling'

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Matt Taibbi - May. 16 (Investigative Report) - “Fuck the compliance area – procedures, schmecedures,” chirps Peter Melz, former president of Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp. (a.k.a. Merrill Pro), when a subordinate worries about the company failing to comply with the rules governing short sales. We also find out here how Wall Street professionals manipulated public opinion by buying off and/or intimidating experts in their respective fields.

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Mitt Romney Debt Speech Ignores Key Facts

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Tom Raum - May. 16 (News Analysis) - When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney decried the "prairie fire" of U.S. debt Tuesday, he ignored some of the sparks that set...

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Crony Capitalism: After Lobbying Against New Financial Regulations, JPMorgan Loses $2B in Risky Bet

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 15 (News Analysis) - The loss has renewed calls for tougher regulation of Wall Street, with critics saying JPMorgan could have avoided it under regulations the bank opposed.

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Resurrecting Glass-Steagall

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Reich - May. 11 (News Analysis) - JP. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

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From Coal to Foreclosures, Bank of America Faces Protest at Shareholders Meeting in Charlotte

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 09 (News Report) - Occupy Wall Street protesters, environmental activists, and struggling homeowners are converging in Charlotte today for a protest outside Bank of America’s annual shareholder meeting. The protesters are calling attention to the bank’s involvement in the financial crisis, its support for the coal industry, and its long record of alleged foreclosure abuses.

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Paul Krugman: Austerity Is So Wrong!

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Paul Krugman - May. 08 (News Analysis) - a funny thing happened in 2010: Much of the world's policy elite - the bankers and financial officials who define conventional wisdom - decided to throw out the textbooks and the lessons of history, and declare that down is up.

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Turning America Into a Giant Casino

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Reich - Apr. 03 (News Analysis) - Organized gambling is a scam. And it particularly preys upon people with lower incomes - who assume they can't make it big any other way, who often find it hardest to assess the odds, and whose families can least afford to lose the money. Yet America is now opening the floodgates.' Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

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How American Corporations Transformed from Producers to Predators

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By William Lazonick - Apr. 02 (Special Report) - For the past three decades, top executives have been rewarding themselves with mega-million dollar compensation packages while American workers have suffered an unrelenting disappearance of middle-class jobs. Since the 1990s, this hollowing out of the middle-class has even affected people with lots of education and work experience. As the Occupy Wall Street movement has recognized, concentration of income and wealth of the top “1 percent” leaves the rest of us high and dry.

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Gangster Banks Keep Winning Public Business. Why?

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Matt Taibbi - Mar. 22 (News Report) - Because both banks, Chase and Bank of America, have been repeatedly inveigled in scandals involving the issuance of public debt. Bank of America paid a $137 million settlement for rigging the bids of bond issues in numerous communities (including places as far away as Guam), while Chase also paid a big settlement of $211 million last year for more or less exactly similar offenses involving localities in 25 different states. Chase also entered into a $722 million settlement with the government over its behavior in Jefferson County, Alabama, where the bank essentially bribed local officials to stake on onerous swap deals that left the county in debt until the next millenium.

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Paul Volcker: Goldman Sachs Changed For The Worse

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Bonnie Kavoussi - Mar. 14 (News Report) - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said on Wednesday that Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive director who dramatically announced his resignation in a New York Times op-ed, is right that Goldman Sachs has changed for the worse over the past decade.

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Goldman Sachs Crowns Shady Banker Who Destroyed Bear Stearns and Scammed Investors Its Global Head of Mortgage Trading

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd - Mar. 13 (News Report) - Jeffrey Verschleiser is, in the words of Matt Taibbi, "a former Bear Stearns executive who was instrumental in helping blow up that venerable firm." He is famous for being the dude who rented out all 94 rooms of an Aspen Hotel for his daughters bat mitzvah, an anecdote that embodied the gross excess that still proliferates on Wall Street, but much grosser is that he allegedly scammed as much as $55 million in three weeks by shorting his clients, screwing over Bear Stearns' bond insurers and collapsing the company. So you'd think that after the colossal economic dump he helped usher in, Wall Street would have banned this guy from ever stepping foot in a firm again, right? Yeah, Wall Street doesn't work that way: he's now at Goldman Sachs, and was just appointed its global head of mortgage trading.

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Banks Repaid Fed Bailout With Other Fed Money: Government Report

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Mark Gongloff - Mar. 09 (News Report) - Though lots of people grumble about the government bailing out banks in the financial crisis, we have at least taken some comfort in the idea that the government has turned a profit on that bailout. Only problem is, that profit comes from taxpayer money -- money that was meant to spur banks to develop communities and help small businesses. Instead they've used it to develop and help themselves.

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Scientists Urge Reform for a Broken Global System

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Inter Press Service - Feb. 21 (News) - VANCOUVER, Feb 21, 2012 (IPS) - Unless governments work actively to build a brighter future for humanity, climate change, poverty and loss of biodiversity will worsen and continue to exacerbate existing global problems, top scientists warned ministers at

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Van Jones: Bank Settlement: $25B Down, $675B to Go

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Van Jones - Feb. 12 (News Analysis) - 'We must not forget the more than 14 million homeowners (one in five) whose homes are underwater, beneath a crushing total $700 billion in negative equity. We must not forget the more than 4 million families who have lost their homes.' Van Jones, Reader Supported News

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What’s the ‘Real’ Jobless Rate?

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Robert Farley, Dave Bloom - Feb. 11 (Fact Check) - As the Obama administration basked in the news that the unemployment rate in January dipped to a three-year low of 8.3 percent, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich threw a wet blanket on the announcement. Romney said the “real unemployment rate” was actually 15 percent, and Gingrich said that when you include people who have simply given up on trying to find a job, the rate “jumps up to about 12 percent.” Is the unemployment rate not the real unemployment rate? Neither Romney nor Gingrich put things quite right. But they are referring to legitimate yardsticks of “alternative measures of labor underutilization” put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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50-State, $25B Mortgage Settlement: Relief for Struggling Homeowners or Bailout for Big Banks?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - The U.S. Justice Department has unveiled a record mortgage settlement with the nation's five largest banks to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and mortgage practices that have indebted and displaced homeowners and sunk the nation's economy. While the deal is being described as a $25 billion settlement, the banks will only have to pay out a total of $5 billion in cash between them. We speak to one of the settlement's most prominent critics, Yves Smith, a longtime financial analyst who runs the popular finance website, "Naked Capitalism." "The settlement, on the surface, does look like it's helping homeowners," Smith says. "But, in fact, the bigger part that most people don't recognize is the way it actually helps the banks with mortgages on their own books... The real problem is that this deal is just not going to give that much relief." [includes rush transcript]

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Taibbi: Mortgage Fraud Settlement is More Like a Bailout Than Justice

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Kristen Gwynne - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - Tabbi says that as more of the banks' bad behavior is exposed, it will become obvious that they must shut down to pay for their crimes, because the reparations necessary would bleed them dry. This settlement, he says, is a "kewpie doll" for victims of banker greed, and won't "stem the tide or turn the tables for these people."

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Ford may post best year since 1998

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Louisville Courier-Journal - By Bloomberg News - Jan. 26 (News Report) - Ford Motor Co., boosted by a one-time tax gain, may report its most profitable year since 1998, while weakness in Europe and Asia cut fourth-quarter earnings.

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Looking Back on a Century of the Fed’s BS

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

infowars.com - Jan. 23 (News) - Infowars.com | A timeline of the most amusingly disturbing speeches delivered by the Federal Reserve & Co.

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Nobody Understands Debt

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Paul Krugman - Jan. 02 (News Analysis) - 'In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit. This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they're talking about - and the people wh

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President Obama’s view of fraud “from 40,000 feet” (without an oxygen mask)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New Economic Perspectives - By William K. Black - Dec. 20 (Fact Check) - Hallucinations occur at high altitude when you become oxygen deprived. Let’s review the bidding on the Bush/Obama record in prosecuting the elite control frauds that drove the ongoing crisis. There are no convictions of the Wall Street elites that made, purchased, packaged, and sold millions of fraudulent liar’s loans. There are no federal prosecutions of the major banks that committed over 100,000 fraudulent foreclosures. There are a few settlements that sound like large dollar amounts, but are merely what even Obama concedes to be the (deeply inadequate) “cost of doing (fraudulent) business.” Fraud pays – it pays enormously and our elites now commit it with impunity as a means of becoming wealthy. We have just witnessed the travesty of Wachovia admitting to criminal conduct in their (grotesquely weak) settlement with the Department of Justice (which has a policy of no longer prosecuting large corporations that commit crimes) – and having the SEC refuse to require Wachovia to make similar admissions in its settlement. All this, the President implicitly or even explicitly concedes.

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Fed Report Finds Speculators Played Big Role in Housing Collapse

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

consumeraffairs.com - Dec. 17 (News) -

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The 'Squidding' of Goldman Sachs

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Matt Taibbi - Dec. 14 (News Analysis) - Earlier Monday, about 300 protesters in squid costumes surged outside the offices of Goldman Sachs investment bank shouting, "We fry calamari!" and "Everyone pays their tax - everyone but Goldman, Sachs!"

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Secretive Millionaires Funding Online Primary For 'Independent' White House Run

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Justin Elliott - Dec. 13 (Special Report) - Here’s what the group is not so upfront about: It’s fueled by millions of dollars of secret money, there is a group of wealthy, well-connected board members who have control over Americans Elect’s nominating process, and the group has myriad links to Wall Street.

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