Ever wonder how the 9/11 attacks were actually carried out? If so, check out my work, including my eye witnessing two practice runs against the Pentagon...

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Ever wonder how the 9/11 attacks were actually carried out?  If so, go here: http://www.drivehq.com/folder/p11616925/098713455.aspx and download:
(1) My "Towards a Comprehensive 9/11 Conspiracy Theory: The “All Hijacked Passengers Survived” Hypothesis (PDF)
(2) The figures to go with the above, "Slides for New 9/11..."  (PowerPoint, example below):

 (3) "Pentagon Attack..." (self contained Power Point, example below)

ECONOMIST AND WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINOLOGIST BILL BLACK: THE NEW YORK FED UNDER TIM GEITHNER "WAS INFORMED BY BARKLEYS TRADERS THAT THE RATE WAS BEING MANIPULATED DOWN ... BUT THEY DON'T APPEAR TO HAVE MADE CRIMINAL REFERALS." "SO IF THE NEW YORK FED SCREWED UP OUR ABILITY TO PROSECUTE BY NOT TAKING ACTION AGAINST BARKLEYS, THAT'S NOT A CRIME BY GEITHNER BUT IT'S CERTAINLY SOMETHING WHERE HE SHOULD RESIGN IMMEDIATELY ... HE WAS AN ABJECT FAILURE AS A REGULATOR."

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

Baltimore, Big Banks and a Criminal Conspiracy 

Bill Black: The LIBOR fraud stole millions upon millions from American cities and people around the world

Original with full transcript here.

Bio 

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri - Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" - frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?

Submitted by Michael Collins on Thu, 05/19/2011 - 00:34

Michael Collins 

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times just published one of the few feel good stories in months following the 2008 financial crisis. She describes a possible day of reckoning for the perpetrators of the 2008 crisis and much of the pain that has followed.

The newly elected New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman (D), wants information from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Among other things, the information concerns mortgage pooling and bundling. This may well include information on collateralized debt obligations (CDO's) and mortgage backed securities (MBS). New York state officials told Morgenson:

"The New York attorney general has requested information and documents in recent weeks from three major Wall Street banks about their mortgage securities operations during the credit boom, indicating the existence of a new investigation into practices that contributed to billions in mortgage losses." New York Investigates Banks’ Role in Financial Crisis New York Times, May 16

Morgenson indicated where the attorney general might be heading - securitization fraud:

"Some litigants have contended, for example, that the banks dumped loans they knew to be troubled into securities and then misled investors about the quality of those underlying mortgages when selling the investments."

"The possibility has also been raised that the banks did not disclose to mortgage insurers the risks in the instruments they were agreeing to insure against default." New York Times, May 16

In addition to the leaked investigation, Morgenson makes a critical point about ongoing federal and state attorneys general efforts for settlement order on mortgage fraud, fictional mortgage agreements, and matters related to ForeclosureGate.

"By opening a new inquiry into bank practices, Mr. Schneiderman has indicated his unwillingness to accept one of the settlement’s terms proposed by financial institutions …" New York Times, May 16

Matt Tiabbi explained what this means:

"If the AGs were to sign off on a friendly global settlement for mortgage abuses prematurely, it would be like a DA offering a millionaire murderer a 2-year plea bargain before the cops even had a chance to interview all the eyewitnesses. It would be a blatantly political arrangement." Matt Tiabbi, May 17

The settlements (consent orders that avoid a trial) by the Obama Department of Justice and the state attorneys general would cost the big banks and Wall Street a few billion dollars in legal fees but free them from civil suits that could stretch into the trillions and jail time for criminal fraud.

The New York AG's actions stop any settlement in its tracks since, according to Tiabbi; it takes all 50 states to generate a consent order. Should it become official, Schneiderman's investigation would also set a high bar for any other settlements. It could also simulate demands for serious prosecutions around the country.

Serious charges by Schneiderman would also make a federal settlement like the one leaked to American Banker look simply awful to the public.

Nexus between Cuomo 2009 Charges against Bank of America, Schneiderman's Investigation, and the Senate Report on "Wall Street and the Financial Crisis"

On February 4, 2009, then New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a complaint against the Bank of America, Kenneth D. Lewis, and Joseph L. Price.

"The bank and the two named executives are charged with failing to inform the bank's board of directors and shareholders of the major red ink on Merrill Lynch's books prior to the merger. CEO Lewis, CFO Price, and other BofA officers and professionals chose to hide $16 billion of Merrill Lynch known pre tax losses prior to board approval. That's fraud, plain and simple." Michael Collins, Economic Populist, February 8, 2009

The complaint also, "charges that the same parties with strong arming the federal government for $20 billion to cover Merrill's debt by threatening to back out of the merger if the money wasn't forthcoming." Economic Populist

We don't know the exact direction that Schneiderman's investigation and charges will take (if they are any). However, Morgenson notes that Schneiderman may be looking at current civil charges claiming, "that the banks dumped loans they knew to be troubled into securities and then misled investors about the quality of those underlying mortgages when selling the investments." New York Times, May 16

There is a tight fit between the illegal acts and the subject matter of those acts in both Cuomo's case and the attorney general's direction, according to the Morgenson article.

Selling troubled securities without disclosure is precisely the type of fraud that Cuomo charged against Bank of America - defrauding investors on a deal by withholding vital information.

The information withheld in the Bank of America case concerned the huge losses Merrill had incurred in the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) and mortgage backed securities (MBS) market.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations April hearings and report dealt with a broad range of appalling Wall Street behavior leading to the financial crisis. In a memo from Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Tom Coburn (R-OK), the behavior that Schneiderman is reportedly investigating is described in clear terms:

Steering Borrowers to High Risk Loans. WaMu and Long Beach [as examples] too often steered borrowers into home loans they could not afford…

Polluting the Financial system. WaMu and Long Beach securitized $77 billion in subprime loans…, used Wall Street firms to sell … worldwide, and polluted the financial system with mortgage backed securities. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, April 13, 2010

Schneiderman's focus benefits from the groundwork laid by Cuomo's 2009 action. That's a considerable benefit given the depth of interviews and analysis in Cuomo's New York complaint.

The attorney general can also call on the contributions of former Special Inspector General for TARP, Niel Barofsky. The former SIGTARP collaborated wiht Cuomo in the Bank of America complaint. Schneiderman also has the benefit of exhaustive evidence developed by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Should he file a complaint, the attorney general of New Your will have a solid foundation preceding his efforts. Using these resources provides the opportunity for broad based civil and criminal actions .

The Martin Act

Cuomo's charge against Bank of America, Lewis and Price were brought using the Martin Act, a 1921 New York law designed to promote investigations of fraudulent stock market schemes. The law has some unique provisions:

"The purpose of the Martin Act is to arm the New York attorney general to combat financial fraud. It empowers him to subpoena any document he wants from anyone doing business in the state; to keep an investigation totally secret or to make it totally public; and to choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants. People called in for questioning during Martin Act investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination. Combined, the act's powers exceed those given any regulator in any other state." Nicholas Thompson, Legal Affairs, May/June 2004

The infrequently used law was the centerpiece of Elliot Spitzer's investigations into Wall Street fraud as New York AG, prior to his election as governor. Had Spitzer survived, it would have produced an array of fraud cases prior to the financial crisis.

If wishes were horses …

If wishes were horses, we'd all take a ride. Spitzer's investigations blew up after a personal scandal. Cuomo's gubernatorial campaign interrupted his Bank of America case of 2009.

We now have the new attorney general, Schneiderman, and the leaked investigation. Robert Scheer praised the effort but expressed this jaded (and probably accurate) caution:

"Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn't last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount [by the state and federal consent order proposals]." Robert Sheer, Truth Dig, May 17

Sheer has been around long enough to know the odds against the good guys winning, at least for long enough to make a difference. But you never know. Success is often a matter of timing. This attorney general is certainly attacking Wall Street and the big banks at the right time.

The support for serious legal action would be overwhelming. There isn't be a venue in the country that would miss the opportunity to sock it to these and other institutions and put a some of their officials behind bars. Of note, the Martin Act can be used for civil and criminal prosecutions. But let's not get carried away. Trillions lost, a nation in economic distress, 150,000 foreclosures a month…and how many prosecutions have we seen? The only time these guys will do is in a Timex commercial.

END

This article may be reproduced entirely with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

Michael Collins's blog

This Is What Resistance Looks Like

Posted on Apr 3, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.



Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.

Chris Hedges’ column appears every Monday at Truthdig. Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of “Death of the Liberal Class.”

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF DEMOCRACY NOW! Today's Quiz: HOW MUCH OF THIS DID YOU HEAR FROM THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA?

Bloggers's note: This is fund raising season. You will will have to wait out 1 min 46 sec of appeal before getting to the subject material. Should you wish to donate, go here.

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Juan Gonzalez: NYC CityTime Fraud Scheme "Biggest Scandal of Entire Bloomberg Era"

Four consultants hired to eliminate waste and fraud in New York City’s municipal payroll were arrested last week on charges of stealing $80 million from city coffers. Democracy Now! co-host and New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, who covered the story for the past year, calls it "the biggest scandal of the Bloomberg era."

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As Senate Passes 9/11 Health Bill, Juan Gonzalez Notes Relative Absence of Key Figures Like Bush and Giuliani

On the final day of the 111th Congress, the Senate passed a $4.3 billion package to help the 9/11 rescue workers who were sickened by the toxins at Ground Zero. Democracy Now! co-host and New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, who first exposed what was happening to the Ground Zero workers, notes the "relative absence of some of the key figures who were involved at the time when the attacks happened," like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former New York governor George Pataki and former President George W. Bush.

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WikiLeaks Cables Reveal U.S. Sought to Retaliate Against Europe over Monsanto GM Crops

U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal the Bush administration drew up ways to retaliate against Europe for refusing to use genetically modified seeds. In 2007, then-U.S. ambassador to France Craig Stapleton was concerned about France’s decision to ban cultivation of genetically modified corn produced by biotech giant Monsanto. He also warned that a new French environmental review standard could spread anti-biotech policy across Europe. We speak with Jeffrey Smith of the Institute for Responsible Technology.

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FBI Expands Probe into Antiwar Activists

The FBI’s probe into antiwar activists is growing. In September, FBI agents raided the homes and offices of activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. Subpoenas that were withdrawn have been reactivated, and a new subpoena was served to a Palestinian solidarity activist in Chicago. We speak with two of the people targeted and two former FBI agents.

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After GOP Blocks DREAM Act, Where is Immigration Activism Headed?

After Senate Republicans blocked passage of the DREAM Act, a provision that would grant undocumented young people a chance at citizenship, many immigrant rights advocates are openly questioning the Obama administration’s immigration strategy. Over the past two years, the Obama administration has deported a record number of undocumented immigrants but failed to gain support from Republicans on any immigration reform legislation. We speak with writer Roberto Lovato.