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 are about to do it again. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. Read more:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail.
How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it. Read the article.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-102004
People vs. Goldman Sachs
A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges. the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — ’a million fraud cases a year’ is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008. More.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-245191/
Secrets and Lies of the Bailout.
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy — it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come. It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul — right? Wrong. Read more.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/
Occupy Wall Street
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he’s not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That’s what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left. Read more.
The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia.
How America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy – until they were caught on tape. More.
How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform.
It’s bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it – with a big assist from Congress and the White House. Read.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-190802/
The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power.
It’s over – we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline – a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire. Read.
The Real Housewives of Wall Street.
Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.” > The Real Housewives of Wall Street. Read.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-246430/
Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle.
Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy — they’re re-creating the conditions for another crash. On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis. Read.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/wall-streets-bailout-hustle-197925/
Looting Main Street.
How the nation Looting Main Streets biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece. If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff Looting Main Streets precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid. Read.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/looting-main-street-196661/
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever.
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix. Conspiracy 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. More.
Looting Pension Funds
All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers. More.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/looting-the-pension-funds-172774/
Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal.
The federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education – saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy. More.
