Category: Aggregated

Wall Street bribery and U.S. House leadership stupidity combined to give another big “victory” to the big banks over the regulations of the Dodd-Frank bill on Jan. 14. The House voted 271-154 for yet another bill, HR 37, containing sticks of dynamite for bankrupt Wall Street banks to use to blow up the approaching financial crash.

The anti-Wall Street backlash group of leading Democrats which has formed in both Houses against these bills, is demanding that Obama veto this one. But he’s signed two bills in the past month with the same kind of Wall Street regulation-killers and bailout provisions in them, including repeals of derivatives regulations which Obama opposed back when Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010.

The Wall Street strategy, as described in repulsive detail in a front-page New York Times story yesterday morning, is: Pay for massive lobbying ($110 million estimated in 2014); and corrupt Congress with wall-to-wall campaign and PAC contributions, with special largesse to the financial committees of both Houses. All other economic sectors cut back their lobbying expenditures in 2014, the Times reported; Wall Street juiced theirs up.

The Glass-Steagall Act — a simple structural reform which breaks up megabanks on “bankruptcy reorganization” principles — worked for 60 years and will work again. But Dodd-Frank — a thousand little regulations supposed to take effect at various times within 5-7 years (when it was passed in 2010) — doesn’t work. What Wall Street is doing now, with Rep. John Boehner’s GOP leadership, is simply postponing those Dodd-Frank resolutions which cramp their wilder speculations, off into 2019 or later.

Their latest triumph, HR 37, lets them speculate with “CLOs” — collateralized loan obligations — until 2019 at least. One has to read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short to appreciate how destructive CLOs and their evil cousins “CDOs” — collateralized debt obligations — were to the economy in the 2007-08 financial crash. Secondly, HR 37 lets Wall Street banks that own, say, oil or gas operations trade derivatives over the counter (i.e., out of sight and regulation) rather than in central clearinghouses.

These victories by a bankrupt Wall Street, over a sticks-and-straws Dodd-Frank Act which was passed to block Glass-Steagall, brings restoring Glass-Steagall back front-and-center.

This was reported most bluntly in a USA Today column Jan. 13, “Clip Dodd-Frank at Your Own Risk.” It notes,

If the Wall Street-hating general public gets involved, the bipartisan bills in both Houses to restore Glass-Steagall, could prevail, the column concludes.

Wall Street bribery and U.S. House leadership stupidity combined to give another big “victory” to the big banks over the regulations of the Dodd-Frank bill on Jan. 14. The House voted 271-154 for yet another bill, HR 37, containing sticks of dynamite for bankrupt Wall Street banks to use to blow up the approaching financial crash.

The anti-Wall Street backlash group of leading Democrats which has formed in both Houses against these bills, is demanding that Obama veto this one. But he’s signed two bills in the past month with the same kind of Wall Street regulation-killers and bailout provisions in them, including repeals of derivatives regulations which Obama opposed back when Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010.

The Wall Street strategy, as described in repulsive detail in a front-page New York Times story yesterday morning, is: Pay for massive lobbying ($110 million estimated in 2014); and corrupt Congress with wall-to-wall campaign and PAC contributions, with special largesse to the financial committees of both Houses. All other economic sectors cut back their lobbying expenditures in 2014, the Times reported; Wall Street juiced theirs up.

The Glass-Steagall Act — a simple structural reform which breaks up megabanks on “bankruptcy reorganization” principles — worked for 60 years and will work again. But Dodd-Frank — a thousand little regulations supposed to take effect at various times within 5-7 years (when it was passed in 2010) — doesn’t work. What Wall Street is doing now, with Rep. John Boehner’s GOP leadership, is simply postponing those Dodd-Frank resolutions which cramp their wilder speculations, off into 2019 or later.

Their latest triumph, HR 37, lets them speculate with “CLOs” — collateralized loan obligations — until 2019 at least. One has to read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short to appreciate how destructive CLOs and their evil cousins “CDOs” — collateralized debt obligations — were to the economy in the 2007-08 financial crash. Secondly, HR 37 lets Wall Street banks that own, say, oil or gas operations trade derivatives over the counter (i.e., out of sight and regulation) rather than in central clearinghouses.

These victories by a bankrupt Wall Street, over a sticks-and-straws Dodd-Frank Act which was passed to block Glass-Steagall, brings restoring Glass-Steagall back front-and-center.

This was reported most bluntly in a USA Today column Jan. 13, “Clip Dodd-Frank at Your Own Risk.” It notes,

If the Wall Street-hating general public gets involved, the bipartisan bills in both Houses to restore Glass-Steagall, could prevail, the column concludes.

Wall Street bribery and U.S. House leadership stupidity combined to give another big “victory” to the big banks over the regulations of the Dodd-Frank bill on Jan. 14. The House voted 271-154 for yet another bill, HR 37, containing sticks of dynamite for bankrupt Wall Street banks to use to blow up the approaching financial crash.

The anti-Wall Street backlash group of leading Democrats which has formed in both Houses against these bills, is demanding that Obama veto this one. But he’s signed two bills in the past month with the same kind of Wall Street regulation-killers and bailout provisions in them, including repeals of derivatives regulations which Obama opposed back when Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010.

The Wall Street strategy, as described in repulsive detail in a front-page New York Times story yesterday morning, is: Pay for massive lobbying ($110 million estimated in 2014); and corrupt Congress with wall-to-wall campaign and PAC contributions, with special largesse to the financial committees of both Houses. All other economic sectors cut back their lobbying expenditures in 2014, the Times reported; Wall Street juiced theirs up.

The Glass-Steagall Act — a simple structural reform which breaks up megabanks on “bankruptcy reorganization” principles — worked for 60 years and will work again. But Dodd-Frank — a thousand little regulations supposed to take effect at various times within 5-7 years (when it was passed in 2010) — doesn’t work. What Wall Street is doing now, with Rep. John Boehner’s GOP leadership, is simply postponing those Dodd-Frank resolutions which cramp their wilder speculations, off into 2019 or later.

Their latest triumph, HR 37, lets them speculate with “CLOs” — collateralized loan obligations — until 2019 at least. One has to read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short to appreciate how destructive CLOs and their evil cousins “CDOs” — collateralized debt obligations — were to the economy in the 2007-08 financial crash. Secondly, HR 37 lets Wall Street banks that own, say, oil or gas operations trade derivatives over the counter (i.e., out of sight and regulation) rather than in central clearinghouses.

These victories by a bankrupt Wall Street, over a sticks-and-straws Dodd-Frank Act which was passed to block Glass-Steagall, brings restoring Glass-Steagall back front-and-center.

This was reported most bluntly in a USA Today column Jan. 13, “Clip Dodd-Frank at Your Own Risk.” It notes,

If the Wall Street-hating general public gets involved, the bipartisan bills in both Houses to restore Glass-Steagall, could prevail, the column concludes.

An important article in the Daily Beast by senior correspondent Eleanor Clift, her second since the press conference Jan. 7, goes after Obama for covering up the Saudi connection to global terrorism. The piece is titled, “White House: Don’t Call It Terrorism,” with the subhead: “Having flubbed Paris, the administration is convening a summit on countering violent extremism, carefully avoiding any reference to Islamic terrorism, never mind the facts.”

The thrust of Clift’s article is to go after the Obama Administration for refusing to talk about Islamic terrorism, strongly suggesting that this is because it would call the question on the Saudis.

She first quotes Farah Pandith, who was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s representative to Muslim communities, who says that we actually know a lot about Islamic extremism, and who funds it — which is the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. “It’s mind-blowing, the money to build shiny new mosques with a particular viewpoint,” Pandith says.

Clift then quotes Bill Galston of Brookings, who was a domestic policy advisor to Bill Clinton, arguing that it’s not just about nomenclature; the failure to identify the problem

Clift writes:

Lyndon LaRouche warned on Wednesday that the escalating war crisis around Ukraine, which targets Russia, is being driven by the London and Wall Street desperation over their looming total bankruptcy.  The desperation was expressed yet again that same day, when Wall Street rammed through HR 37, another deregulation of the derivatives bubble. The bill had been defeated just last week, and Wall Street’s Republican leadership in Congress immediately brought the bill back up for a new vote, this one requiring only a simple majority.

They are clearly aware that the entire trans-Atlantic financial bubble is on the edge, and they cannot wait even a decent interval before pushing through new bailout guarantees. This is criminally unconstitutional.

The same factors are at work in the continuing sabotage of any solution to the Ukraine conflict that would de-escalate the continuing provocations for general war against Russia.  LaRouche warned that the neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine are being promoted and backed by like-minded circles in parts of Western Europe, including in Germany.  The propaganda spewing out of the German media is touting the same neo-Nazi line that Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk spread during his visit to Berlin last week.

LaRouche warned:

LaRouche added that there must be recourse against these London and Wall Street criminals, and he promised that the upcoming Jan. 17 New York City Schiller Institute event would be an important unleashing of just such a recourse.

There are clearly other forces aligning against the London/Wall Street war drive, as reflected in the four-million-person march in France following the two jihadist attacks in Paris last week.  France has refused to fall into the London trap—as Merkel’s Germany has—and respond to the asymmetric warfare with a further assault against its own population.

And there is continuing serious coverage of the Saudi hand behind the global terror, following last week’s Capitol Hill press conference by Sen. Bob Graham, Rep. Walter Jones, Rep. Stephen Lynch and representatives of the 9/11 families led by Terry Strada, as well as the Jan. 9 LaRouche PAC webcast, which fully exposed the Anglo-Saudi factor. Just in the last 24 hours, excellent coverage of the press conference and the Saudi role appeared in the Daily Beast, Zerohedge, Russia Today, and China’s Global Times.

The Anglo-Saudi apparatus is at the very center of the war drive against Russia.  The willful driving down of world oil prices to way below break-even costs is aimed at Russia directly, and the Putin leadership in Moscow are fully aware of that they are targeted from London, Riyadh, and from the Obama White House.