Finance and the Economy

Jury Awards $5 Million For Home Foreclosure, Gov’t Let Banks Off Easy

January 7, 2016 David Dayen, www.theintercept.com Educate! Banks, Finance and the Economy, Foreclosure, Housing

By David Dayen for The Intercept - A Texas jury’s recent decision to award over $5 million in damages and fees for the fraudulent foreclosure of a single home suggests that the big banks could have been on the hook for as much as $32 trillion — before the Justice Department and state attorneys general settled for $25 billion, or less than one-tenth of a penny on the dollar. In the trial in Harris County district court, the jury awarded Houston foreclosure victim. Mary Ellen and David Wolf $5.38 million on November 6, on the grounds that Wells Fargo Bank and Carrington Mortgage Services knowingly submitted false documents to kick them out of their home.

A Message Of Hope For The New Year

January 6, 2016 Jack Balkwill, www.dissidentvoice.org Strategize! #BlackLiveMatter, Antarctica, Banks, Bolivia, BXE, Capitalism, China, Climate Change, Cooperatives, Democracy, Ecuador, Elections, Empire, Energy, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Greece, Kurds, Marijuana, Media, militarism, Occupy, Portugal, Russia, sHellNo!, Spain, TPP, Ukraine, Venezuela, Wall Street, Zapatistas

By Jack Balkwill for Dissident Voice. There have been many victories and we need to celebrate them. Among the victories was stopping the northern portion of the KXL pipeline, various new laws in 24 states to prevent police violence and an increase inprosecutions of police who commit violence, and the increase in wages across the country and winning the critically important battle for net neutrality. These were people-powered victories that showed when we act together we have the power to defeat corporate interests. Another ongoing series of victories is seeing local people, who have not been involved in activism, working along with experienced, often young, energy activists, taking on big energy companies in an aggressive way. This is a victory.

Wall Street Taking Over Nonprofit Sector

January 5, 2016 Dan Wright, www.shadowproof.com Educate! Finance and the Economy, Nonprofits, Wall Street

By Dan Wright for Shadow Proof - While there has traditionally been a close relationship between Wall Street donors and nonprofit organizations like charities and universities, a new study from the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) reveals a growing Wall Street takeover of nonprofit boards of directors. Using data from what are referred to in the study as major private research universities, elite small liberal arts colleges, and prominent New York City cultural and health institutions, SSIR calculates that “[T]he percentage of people from finance on the boards virtually doubled at all three types of nonprofits between 1989 and 2014.”

IMF’s Rogues Gallery. Crooks, Rapists And Swindlers

January 5, 2016 Staff, www.petras.lahaine.org Educate! Bankers, Banking, Finance and the Economy, IMF

By Staff of James Petras Website - The IMF is the leading international monetary agency whose public purpose is to maintain the stability of the global financial system through loans linked to proposals designed to enhance economic recovery and growth. In fact, the IMF has been under the control of the US and Western European states and its policies have been designed to further the expansion, domination and profits of their leading multi-national corporations and financial institutions.

The Brilliant Simplicity Of A Guaranteed Minimum Income

January 5, 2016 Hamilton Nolan, www.gawker.com Create! Finance and the Economy, Guaranteed basic income, Poverty

By Hamilton Nolan for Gawker - The working poor need more money. “But retail stores can’t raise wages very much—their profit margins are too small,” say conservatives. Aha—but there is a solution! All types of people across the political spectrum agree that people who work hard should not have to live in poverty. Movements like The Fight for 15 have focused on raising the incomes of the lowest-paid workers by forcing low-paying industries like fast food to raise their hourly wages. Which is fine. They need a higher income. But the most common response from corporations that employ lots of low wage workers is simply: we can’t afford it. Our profit margins are too thin.

To Change Everything, It’s Going To Take Everything We’ve Got

January 3, 2016 John Foran, www.thischangeseverything.org Resist! Climate Change, Environment, Finance and the Economy, System Change, Wars and Militarism

By John Foran for This Changes Everything. OK, here’s the idea. We’re in a crisis so deep, so knotted, so unprecedented, and so urgent that, well, we have to change everything, pretty much. Or else. And there’s no one to do it for us. There’s just us. Just-us. Justice. And who are we? We are everyone, everywhere, who wants to do this. Everyone, everywhere, who cares what happens to everything—each other, humanity, Mother Earth, nature, the planet, the future creatures for whom what we do this day—this year—will make a difference. Possibly all the difference. And what do we have to do? To repeat: we have to change most of the systems in which we live, whether we are in comfort or not, whether we have other preoccupations or not, whether we are happy or not, whether we have enough time, money, resources, or not. And we have to be radical.

Banks Don’t Always Win Anymore, Are On The Defensive

January 3, 2016 Zach Carter, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Banks, Finance and the Economy, Government, Wall Street

By Zach Carter for Huffington Post. Washington, DC - Banks started the year with a long Washington wish list. They wanted to tie up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with reams of red tape. They wanted to charge high hidden fees on auto loans -- a practice that disproportionately hits the pocketbooks of people of color. They wanted to poke a big hole in the Volcker Rule, which bans banks from placing speculative securities bets with taxpayer-backed money. They wanted to let banks with assets measured in 12 figures operate with thinner capital cushions and larger amounts of risky borrowed money. They wanted to kill a new rule that would require financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients (amazingly, this is not already the law). The banks lost every one of these fights.

During The Next Crisis, Central Banking Itself Will Fail

December 25, 2015 Graham Summers, Phoenix Capital Research, www.zerohedge.com Educate! Economic collapse, Finance and the Economy

By Graham Summers, Phoenix Capital Research for Zero Hedge. For six years, the world has operated under a complete delusion that Central Banks somehow fixed the 2008 Crisis. All of the arguments claiming this defied common sense. A 5th grader would tell you that you cannot solve a debt problem by issuing more debt. If the below chart was a problem BEFORE 2008… there is no way that things are better now. After all, we’ve just added another $10 trillion in debt to the US system. Similarly, anyone with a functioning brain could tell you that a bunch of academics with no real-world experience, none of whom have ever started a business or created a single job can’t “save” the economy. We are heading for a crisis that will be exponentially worse than 2008. The global Central Banks have literally bet the financial system that their theories will work. They haven’t. All they’ve done is set the stage for an even worse crisis in which entire countries will go bankrupt. The situation is clear: the 2008 Crisis was the warm up. The next Crisis will be THE REAL Crisis. The Crisis in which Central Banking itself will fail.

HSBC Whistleblower Sentenced To 5 Years In Prison

November 29, 2015 Andrew Emett, www.nationofchange.org Resist! Banking, Finance and the Economy, Whistleblowers

By Andrew Emett for Nation of Change. A former HSBC employee was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for aggravated industrial espionage. Although HSBC claims the whistleblower initially stole the information for his own personal financial gain, his revelations exposed international fraud, tax evasion, and money-laundering scams involving thousands of corrupt businessmen and arms dealers. While developing a client management database for HSBC’s Swiss private bank in 2004, Hervé Falciani was handed access to extremely sensitive and incriminating data. According to the private bank accounts, HSBC was allowing criminal organizations to launder their blood money while turning a blind eye to affluent clients committing tax evasion. Instead of ignoring the data, Falciani brought his laptop into work and downloaded the details of approximately 130,000 HSBC accounts. On December 11, 2014, the Swiss government indicted Falciani for violating the country’s bank secrecy laws and committing industrial espionage. Instead of extraditing Falciani or filing charges against him, the French government opened a criminal investigation into HSBC. Refusing to appear in Swiss court, Falciani dismissed the legal proceedings against him as a “parody of justice.” Convicted in absentia, Falciani was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for committing the largest leak in banking history.

Solidarity Economy – From Quebec To Chicago To Mexico

November 14, 2015 Derek Royden, www.occupy.com Create! Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy

By Derek Royden for Occupy - Defining the term “solidarity economy” can be difficult: it has become a kind of catch-all to describe everything from worker-owned cooperatives to open source software to complementary currencies. Surprisingly, the ideas promoted in the solidarity economy aren't very well known in the English-speaking world, though they’ve been gaining a foothold in academia and civil society groups since the turn of the century. Quebec, Canada’s French language-majority province, is where the concept began to get traction in the late 1980s, mostly influenced by European experience (the word "solidarity" is, after all, French).

Whistleblow Wall Street: Platform To Expose Corruption

October 11, 2015 Staff, www.whistleblowwallstreet.com Resist! Corruption, Finance and the Economy, Wall Street, Whistleblowers

By Staff of Whistleblow Wallstreet - Whistleblow Wall Street provides a platform for banking and financial sector employees to blow the whistle on unfair practices and corruption. From call center workers that aren’t allowed to go to the bathroom, to bank tellers forced to sell predatory products because of unreasonable sales goals, to high level executives that are pressured and rewarded for engaging in illegal practices, Whistleblow Wall Street aims to help financial sector employees root out the worst practices in the financial industry. As we all now know, Wall Street banks wrecked the economy and brought the world to the brink of financial collapse. Meanwhile federal regulators were nowhere to be found, media organizations had already dismantled their investigative units, corporate compliance departments did not dare to question the profit centers, and the creators of highly leveraged securities stole billions of dollars. At WhistleblowWallStreet we are saying, “Never again!”

Stop The TPP: ‘Not A Done Deal’

October 7, 2015 Staff, www.flushthetpp.org Resist! Corporatism, Finance and the Economy, TPP, Trade

By Staff for Flush the TPP. After five years of secret talks, the twelve countries involved in the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations announced they have reached an agreement. The deal was written by corrupt trade ministers and hundreds of corporate lobbyists without public (or even US Congressional) input. It is much more than a trade deal– only 5 of the 29 chapters even deal with trade. The rest of the deal is about privatizing government programs and services for corporate profits, removing government regulations, and setting protections for multinational corporations and investors rather than the health of the planet or necessities of people. The TPP has supposedly been agreed upon (the trade ministers' announcement was vagur), but it has not been signed yet and there are still many steps before it becomes law. It is now up to us to stop.

Hedge Funds Attack American Neighborhoods Again

October 1, 2015 Staff, www.hedgeclippers.org Organize! Finance and the Economy, Housing bubble

Staff for Hedge Clippers - A new report by our colleagues at the Center for Popular Democracy and the ACCE Institute uncovers how hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed mortgage notes to 200,000 homes in communities around the USA — and they’re getting special treatment from the government to aid their conquests. Hedge funds and private equity firms are getting big discounts when they buy the rights to collect homeowners mortgage payments – discounts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) – the two government agencies that have refused to give similar discounts to homeowners that aren’t billionaires.

Will TTIP Get Terminated? Negotiations Falter

September 29, 2015 Deidre Fulton, www.commondreams.org Educate! Europe, Finance and the Economy, Free Trade, TTIP

By Deidre Fulton in Common Dreams - While public opposition to the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—the massive proposed "trade" deal between the European Union and the United States—has grown steadily since negotiations started two years ago, new signs suggest that official government backing is also faltering across Europe. In an interview with French regional newspaper Sud Ouest published Monday, Junior Trade Minister Matthias Fekl said TTIP negotiations were favoring American interests and "either weren't advancing or were progressing in the wrong direction." "If nothing changes, it will show that there isn't the will to achieve mutually beneficial negotiations," he said, before adding: "France is considering all options including an outright termination of negotiations."

In Virtually Every State, Poverty Rate Higher Than Before Recession

September 26, 2015 David Cooper, www.epi.org Resist! Finance and the Economy, Poverty

By David Cooper in Economic Policy Institute - Between 2013 and 2014, the poverty rate in most states was largely unchanged, according to yesterday’s release of state poverty statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS). While the poverty rate fell slightly for the country as a whole, most of the changes at the state level were too small to signify a meaningful difference. As of 2014, only two states—North Dakota and Colorado—have poverty rates at or below their 2007 values, before the Great Recession. From 2013 to 2014, the national poverty rate, as measured by the ACS, fell from 15.8 percent to 15.5 percent. Poverty rates declined in 34 states plus the District of Columbia, but only five of these changes were large enough to signify a measurable difference: Mississippi (-2.5 percentage points), Colorado (-1.0 percentage points), Washington, (-0.9 percentage points), Michigan (-0.8 percentage points), and North Carolina (-0.7 percentage points).

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