Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Finally, Wall Street gets put on trial: We can still hold the 0.1 percent responsible for tanking the economy
Salon | Thomas Frank | 09/07/14

The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the disaster, you will recall, was to blame the crisis on the people at the bottom, on minorities and proletarians lost in an orgy of financial misbehavior. Sure enough, when taking on ordinary people who got loans during the real-estate bubble, the president's Department of Justice has shown admirable devotion to duty, filing hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases against small-timers. ...

...This is a difficult thing to understand--indeed, not understanding it is the stated reason Obama Administration officials have made no effort to send financiers to jail--so let us take this slowly. Executives at the mortgage origination companies got huge bonuses in those days for writing lots of loans. OK? They wanted to write more of them, and the only way to really crank out mortgages on a vast scale was by giving one to anyone who wanted one, regardless of their ability to pay, a feat that is only possible by means of the "liar's loan." So: Liar's loans = rich bankers. ... Read more

CQ Roll Call Unveils the 50 Richest Members of Congress
mediabistro.com | Nick Massella | 09/08/14

At the top of the list this year and last is Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) with a net worth of more than $350 million. Rounding out the Top 10 is Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Rep. John Delaney (D-MD), Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA).

At the bottom of the Top 50 is Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) with a net worth of $7.47 million. Roll Call's Top 50 includes 30 Republicans and 20 Democrats, 35 House and 15 Senate members, and 41 men and 9 women. ... Read more

50 Richest Members of Congress

Lindsey Graham Worries Islamic State Will Destroy Americans, Wipe Out Mankind
HP | Jennifer Bendery | 09/14/14

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday slammed President Barack Obama's strategy for combating Islamic State militants and said the president needs to significantly step up military action against the terrorist group before it comes to the United States and "we all get killed."

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Graham said the Obama administration is "delusional" for thinking it can counter the Islamic State, a terrorist group in Syria sometimes called ISIS or ISIL, primarily through expanded air strikes and by training Syrians for ground combat.

"There's no way in hell you can form an army on the ground to go into Syria to destroy ISIL without a substantial American component," said Graham, a prominent war hawk on Capitol Hill. "This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home." ... Read more

Why Scotland Has All The Leverage, In One Chart
ZeroHedge | author | 09/15/14

As Scotland prepares to vote for or against Independence from the Union on Thursday, it appears everyone has an opinion on what may, what should and what will happen. At the basis of every such opinion is some basis in fact, misguided as it may be in most cases, about who has all the leverage, with the dominant one being that Scotland would make a horrendous mistake if it says goodbye to the UK and puts a border around what is currently a third of UK's landmass.

Some, such as Deutsche Bank, the bank that has the single greatest derivative exposure in the world and is therefore most leveraged to maintaining the status quo, saw its "Chief Economist & Member, Group Executive Committee, Deutsche Bank AG" David Folkerts-Landau personally put pen to paper on Friday and in rambling, demagogic terms, explain why it would be a "Wrong Turn" for Scotland to seek self-determination.

He says that, "A "Yes" vote for Scottish independence on Thursday would go down in history as a political and economic mistake as large as Winston Churchill's decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failure of the Federal Reserve to provide sufficient liquidity to the US banking system, which we now know brought on the Great Depression in the US. These decisions -- well-intentioned as they were -- contributed to years of depression and suffering and could have been avoided had alternative decisions been taken." ... Read more