First Iceland, then the World

Written by Michael Collins

SOURCE: DailyCensored.com

Michael Collins
The public is angry. Why should the public pay for the bankers mistakes. Iceland blogger Halldor Sigurdsson

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn’t fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks. Covering the debt would have cost Iceland’s 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

Iceland’s national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

As citizens voted, Iceland’s Prime Minister was dismissing the importance of the vote and promising to negotiate a payment scheme obligating citizen subsidies for bad debt created by Iceland’s beyond-bad bankers.

I don't, typically, hog the front page with blog posts. However, Gregg prompts me to make an exception and use the tools that will provide exposure of his posturing for the longest period of time.

Greetings:

The New Hampshire Progressive newsletter is back after a couple months of ‘break’ and dealing with computer challenges. Each week or so I will try to send the best of state and national public policy reporting and opinion.

In this issue:

Item 1: The Governor calls for large cuts in the budget he signed just 7 ½ months ago. The economy has reduced state revenue and increased the number of people in need of state assistance, so something has to give. It won’t be pretty.

Item 2: A bill to parole state prisoners sooner, and provide them with monitoring after release, in the hopes of reducing recidivism, and ultimately, saving the State money.

Item 3: An op-ed I wrote on the so-called “LLC Tax”

Item 4: Warren Rudman writes about 100 years of campaign finance reform, the recent US Supreme Court decision, and his support of public financing of candidates for federal office.

Item 5: A bill before Congress to blunt the impact of the US Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. The bill would ban contributions by corporations more than 20% foreign owned, by government contractors, or by bank bailout recipients. Has anyone in the legislature considered doing the same at the state level?

Mark Fernald

En Espanol

What follows is an explanation of how the transfer of the American people's assets into the pockets of a few is carried out--what I have taken to calling "Deprivation Under Cover of Law", for the simple reason that it's all legal.

Union Leader story on Financial Resources Ponzi Scheme

I wanted to share this with you. This is in my judgment a very critical matter, in much need of public discourse and sunlight. Something is happening here that doesn't seem right, and we have to make sure the public's right to know is guaranteed. It hits to the very heart of the process of government and trust. - Jim

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To All New Hampshire House and Senate Members, and Executive Council:

Like a number of House and Senate members, we received a letter from Al and Susan McIlvene of Kittery Point, Maine about the Financial Resources Mortgage, Inc. situation. We are sharing our response with you as part of our call for the Legislature and the Governor's Council to further investigate this matter. We would be pleased to talk with anyone about this issue, which we strongly feel needs to be publicly addressed.

SOURCE: NY Daily News

UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld deserves statue on Wall Street, not prison sentence

Juan Gonzalez - News

Wednesday, January 6th 2010, 4:00 AM

Take action

AP
UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld

Barack Obama, who entered the White House promising all this change, should be hailing Bradley Birkenfeld as a modern-day hero.

He should erect a statue on Wall Street for this former banker for Swiss giant UBS who blew the whistle on the biggest tax-evasion scheme in U.S. history.

Instead of rewarding Birkenfeld, Obama's Justice Department is sending him to prison. He begins serving a 40-month federal sentence Friday for conspiracy and bank fraud.

SOURCE: USA Today

Opposing view: TARP was a flop

Target relief to Main Street families and businesses, not big banks.

By Paul Hodes

A year ago, as our nation stood on the brink of economic collapse, Congress decided that to stabilize our financial system, we should spend $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks. I opposed this move. Some now claim that since our banking system averted collapse, the Troubled Asset Relief Program — TARP — must have been the right approach. Unfortunately, the results show the opposite.

When America spends taxpayer money, we need to make sure it is being spent right. But after sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street with little accountability or oversight, we still haven't seen an increase in lending, we still face a massive foreclosure crisis and no one can say exactly where all the money went.

SOURCE: Rollingstone.com

A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

BY MATT TAIBBI, Posted Oct 14, 2009 9:30 AM

Watch Matt Taibbi break down short-selling vs. naked short-selling on his blog, Taibblog.

n Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

As I am sending this Update, as unbelievable as this seems, it is snowing to beat the band in Nashua!!

I hope all of you are enjoying our first snowstorm of the season.

Debora

NEWS RELEASE FOR DISTRICT FIVE October 8, 2009 FROM DEBORA B. PIGNATELLI, Executive Councilor

October 7, Concord, NH - Listed below are some of the items that were approved at the Governor and Council Meeting October 7, 2009 in Whitefield, NH that might be of interest to District Five constituents.

The next Governor and Council Meeting will be held Wednesday,

October 21, 2009 in Walpole, NH.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FINANCE AUTHORITY

Authorized to award a grant to the Town of Hinsdale, NH, to conduct a study of the water and wastewater infrastructure system at Ash Brook Swamp Cooperative in the amount of $12,000. Effective upon G&C approval through December 31, 2010. 100% Federal Funds.

Authorized to amend an agreement with the City of Keene, NH, (previously amended by G&C on 7-18-07, item #2), for the purpose of making infrastructure improvements to vacant property in the Railroad Yard area of downtown Keene, by changing the end date from December 31, 2009 to December 31, 2010. 100% Federal Funds.

Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alan Grayson of Florida have joined forces to bring the workings of the Federal Reserve Bank out into the open. Specifically, Senator Sanders has introduced S.604-Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009 and Representative Grayson has started a petition to ask the Senate not to move on the appointment of Ben Bernanke to a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve until some critical information is made public.

in, of all places, Kansas.

Landmark Decision: Massive Relief for Homeowners and Trouble for the Banks

by Ellen Brown

A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS. Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound. .....

It's almost become a cliché that the thing left out is often more important than what's actually being written and talked about. Still, I was heartened by the diary the other day in which sluggahjells made the point that the CEOs of the major medical insurance corporations, for some reason, hadn't been heard from on the talk-show circuit. You'd think that with the future profitability of their organizations being topic number one, the CEOs would step up to the plate and justify their business plan.

It's really hard to believe that if, as is being reported in the media, lobbyists are being paid millions to influence a few law-makers, the head honchos wouldn't want to drop a few pearls on the general public to, at least, validate their good intent. Even harder to believe that they haven't been invited to present their side of the story by a media that's always interested in balance.

"Follow the money" is good advice when you're looking for crooks. However, finding the crooks, in this day and age, isn't nearly as important as finding the loot and making sure it gets returned to the rightful owners. In America in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rightful owners of dollars are the American people, who, in their world-renowned generosity, have been quite content to lend our well-respected dollars out. But, now we want them back.

If you need a little more convincing, consider that our separate and unequal public health care system is a remnant of the days of segregation.

Conservatives put much emphasis on the fact that people are different and can't be made equal. They do this because it's entirely beside the point. The Constitution demands equal service, not equalizing, from the agents of government. You know, like you get at MacDonald's. Every big Mac is the same size, regardless of how hungry you are.

SOURCE: NYT
March 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Has a 'Katrina Moment' Arrived?
By FRANK RICH

A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won't fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers' bonuses won't fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won't fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans' anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: "President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived."

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country's surge of populist rage could devour the president's best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn't get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public's revulsion at the moneyed insiders' culture illuminated by Daschle's post-Senate career. Yet last week's events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

MARCH 21, 2009, 12:30 PM
More on the bank plan
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

Why was I so quick to condemn the Geithner plan? Because it's not new; it's just another version of an idea that keeps coming up and keeps being refuted. It's basically a thinly disguised version of the same plan Henry Paulson announced way back in September. To understand the issue, let me offer some background.

Start with the question: how do banks fail? A bank, broadly defined, is any institution that borrows short and lends long. Like any leveraged investor, a bank can fail if it has made bad investments - if the value of its assets falls below the value of its liabilities, bye bye bank.

But banks can also fail even if they haven't been bad investors: if, for some reason, many of those they've borrowed from (e.g., but not only, depositors) demand their money back at once, the bank can be forced to sell assets at fire sale prices, so that assets that would have been worth more than liabilities in normal conditions end up not being enough to cover the bank's debts. And this opens up the possibility of a self-fulfilling panic: people may demand their money back, not because they think the bank has made bad investments, but simply because they think other people will demand their money back.

SOURCE: Salon.com

Obama's Wall Street bailout failure

Before it can clean up Wall Street or do much of anything else, the administration has to clean up the way it's been trying to clean up Wall Street.

By Robert Reich

Mar. 20, 2009

AIG is rapidly becoming a nightmarish metaphor for the Obama administration's problems administering the bailout of Wall Street. One central problem is the lack of transparency. According to some news reports, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner knew weeks ago that AIG was planning to issue the bonuses to executives in its notorious credit default swap unit, and felt it was contractually bound to do so. But even if Geithner discovered all this just last week, he faces an awkward question about why he didn't know sooner. These bonuses in fact were only the latest in a series, and were not even distributed until last Friday. But it was not until Saturday, after the story leaked to the press, that Geithner went public to express his "outrage" about them.

Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire seems to have his own cheering section in the Washington press. On MSNBC the line is:

Gregg: Budget forecast a lie

Posted: Thursday, March 12, 2009 12:55 PM by Domenico Montanaro

Filed Under: White House, Congress, Republicans

From NBC’s Ken Strickland

It was obvious to most Capitol Hill insiders why President Obama wanted Republican Judd Gregg as a member of his cabinet: He's one of the sharpest money-minds in Congress.

....

In a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee Gregg dressed down Geithner with facts, figures, and charts. While always keeping his cool, the exchange was somewhere between a mother's scolding, a drill sergeant's questioning and an attorney's cross examination.

In his opening statement, Gregg politely called the administration's budget forecast a lie.

And that assessment became the line of the day almost across the board, as any check in Google will show.