According to the 2,200-page court examiner’s report this practice, known as “Repo 105″ (“Repo”? Really, why not call it “Steal 105″?), was like “a drug” propelling the bank to conceal the true nature of its financial health.

The collapse of “venerable” Wall Street investment house Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Here’s Dylan Ratigan and Eliot Spitzer making sense of what is clearly a crime against the economic health of the United States:

“It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world,” Jacque Fresco said to a sold out crowd of over 800 in New York City’s Upper West Side.

Though he may not need to convince these people, many his ardent followers, it will indeed take a restructuring of the mind for those unfamiliar with Fresco’s work to realistically accept the ideas he proposes of a new global society that has given up money and property in favor of a shared, sustainable, technology-driven community.

The caustic skepticism can already be heard, critics crying out with pointed fingers, decreeing communism, socialism, insanity! But as Fresco himself will tell you, communism is still just another system with banks and social stratification. The kind of world he imagines for the future is much different. To ease the transition, The Zeitgeist Movement provides a wealth of dizzying information detailing why a new global system is not only preferred, but necessary, and just how we can get there.

March 14th, 2010 was the second annual celebration of ZDay. Coordinated by The Zeitgeist Movement, ZDay is an educational event geared toward raising awareness of the movement. While 337 sympathetic events occurred in over 70 countries worldwide, NYC was home to the main event, a 6-hour live web cast presentation with lectures from the movement’s key figures, and 30 different countries represented in the audience.

So what exactly is The Zeitgeist Movement? Not even two years old, the movement declares itself as the activist arm of The Venus Project, an organization started in the 1970s by Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. The Venus Project distributes resources promoting Fresco’s vision of an improved society, with the main component being a resource-based economy, rather than a monetary-based one. In Fresco’s resource-based economy, the world’s resources would be considered as the equal inheritance of all the world’s peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development. It is toward this idea that The Zeitgeist Movement works to educate and inform people.

The movement’s founder, Peter Joseph, came to notoriety with his 2007 internet film sensation, Zeitgeist, and it’s 2008 successor, Zeitgeist: Addendum. While many people may find it hard to digest the idea of a world without currency, Joseph’s argument that our economic system is the source of our greatest social problems was supported with valuable evidence…

[continues at Huffington Post]

On Sunday, he laughed with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes when the two bantered on about how about stupid it all was and why so many smart people drank the Kool Aid. The story he tells has no hard edges really…it’s about “delusion,” Wall Street deluding us all and then each other.

The idea of delusions feeds a psychological and cultural analysis of bankers cut off from the world, focused on their own pocket books and believing their own hype. It is in this sense Shakespearian—the stuff of drama, not calculation. What a web we weave when first we practice to deceive, to quote Sir Walter Scott.

At one point in the 60 Minutes two part interview purporting to explain the collapse, Lewis drifts off message and calls it all, an “elegant theft.”

Theft is a word we associate with crime, not personal greed or human failings. But that point was left unexplored by 60 Minutes, of course, because if the story is about crime, than we have to move into the arena of facts, not just opinions, insights, hyperbole and personalities.

Ironically, many of the facts that Lewis himself cites comes from an undergraduate college thesis according to the Deal Journal of the Wall Street Journal which calls his book a “yam.” They note that his book credited ““A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just written a thesis about the market for sub prime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.”

Perhaps even more interesting than his book?‘

Earlier, Lewis told the Atlantic what his main sources of information is: “Actually, if you were to draw a pie chart of where I get news from, I bet I get a third from whatever people in Berkeley—specifically the parents’ at my kids’ school—are outraged about. I’m surrounded by people who are alive to what’s going on in the world and who are quick to be outraged by it.”

So there he goes again, with emotion and attitude apparently meaning more to him than fact finding.

Lewis has criticized those who criticize Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg, writing earlier, “bashing Goldman Sachs is Simply a Game for Fools.”

Which side is he on I would guess, his side? On 60 Minutes, TV’s top news magazine, he was described as a former trader. Not according to Janet Takakoli who runs her own financial firm:

“Imagine my surprise to see him billed as a trader on 60 Minutes, since he was actually a junior salesman, she writes on Huffington Post, “Well-heeled male peacocks strutted the trading floor, and junior salesmen were girlie-men, mere eunuchs serving their pashas.”

She also notes that he was among the “experts” who downplayed the warnings about the very financial crisis that he has suddenly, thanks to validation from CBS and MSNBC, become THE expert on, charging, “he ridiculed their concern of a pending crisis due to the surge in derivatives demand and called it “this year’s case in point.” Then Michael showed how dangerous it is to be a brilliant writer with a poor command of facts and their true meaning”

Financial analysis is not what the media is well equipped to communicate. As a media dissector and editor of Mediachannel, I have followed the reporting of this story closely with many detailed articles and in two books since, even before it became a story back to 2005 when I made my film In Debt We Trust only to be dismissed by some as a doom and gloomer for exposing the subprime mortgage fraud.

I was hoping that Rachel Maddow would challenge his mass delusion theory but she bought right into it also, in her interview. At one point Lewis opined that there was DECEPTION (i.e., lying by the investment world) but that too was not examined as Lewis himself counterpoised two explanations for the disaster, asking, “was it mass delusion or crime?

And then he “answered” his own question or appeared to, by asserting that when you ask the people involved, they say it was delusion.

Duh, Michael? What do you think they would say? Do think they would cop to their own criminality? For them, it was all one big miscalculation, never mind who got hurt, which neither 60 Minutes nor Maddow explored.

Sorry to say, Jon Stewart did no better with his part of Lewis’ all star media mystery tour. He did introduce him as one of the people making big money on the crisis but then jokingly let him ramble on, praising the sometimes weird people who made small fortunes betting against Wall Street. They were his heroes. Again no concern was expressed for the people they cheated—only the idiots who lost money in the” kingdom where the blind man was king.”

Lewis like many non-fiction novelists prefers character-based story telling or “yarns” to more objective analytical investigation. It makes for better narratives, and bigger best sellers. It also gets e interviewers laughing instead of crying. Why? Because there are only smart men doing things that turn out to be stupid, it makes us all feel superior to them even if they had the last laugh on the way to the bank.

Sorry, The Big Short seems short—short of a serious consideration of what really drove the financial crisis and the reason that 82% of the American people recently said they want a crack down on Wall Street, not a chance to feel sorry for the “delusions” of its masters of the universe. They want a jail out—not a bailout.

On the very day of Rachel’s fawning, but well intentioned interview, United States Senator Ed Kaufman of Delaware, the state that provides a sanctuary for most US corporations and credit card companies, made a speech which got at the heart of the matter.

Senator Kaufman did not get lost in the vague clouds of “delusion.” He was more down to earth arguing.

“Fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis”

Let me repeat and capitalize this brave Senatorial assertion: “FRAUD AND POTENTIAL CRIMINAL CONDUCT WERE AT THE HEART OF THE FINANICAL CRISIS/”

The Senator goes on: “Americans could draw at least three lessons from the (Lehman) report: that we must “undo the damage caused by decades of deregulation;” that the United States must “concentrate law enforcement and regulatory resources on restoring the rule of law to Wall Street;” and that Congress must help regulators and other gatekeepers “by providing clear, enforceable ‘rules of the road’ wherever possible.”

Unfortunately, says Kaufman, “I’m concerned that the revelations about Lehman Brothers are just the tip of the iceberg. We have no reason to believe that the conduct detailed last week is somehow isolated or unique. Indeed, this sort of behavior is hardly novel.”

Now, it so happens that I have been making a similar argument in my own book The Crime Of Our Time, and film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time. But I am not a former Wall Streeter or best selling author or a US Senator. So my work and the work of many other “outsiders” are still unknown.

The media prefers to seek the truth from the very people who either caused the crisis or who were in media perches that ignored it.

The point is that many people, many very qualified who have arguing the crime thesis—some in my film—have not so far had the benefit of the prime time exposure even though the American people believe it even was the media downplays it.

Will that change? Only if the people don’t believe the hype and demand the truth!

News Dissector Danny Schechter’s film and book will be released in April by Disinformation. For more information, Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

From Alternet:

Our nation is already deeply in debt. How can we possibly afford to invest in our infrastructure, renewable energy, health care, our schools — and create the millions of jobs that our unemployed desperately need?

We are told that we’re already living well beyond our means — that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security will bankrupt us. Forget the solar panels, the smaller classes and the new jobs — we’ve got to cut back on government programs at all levels.

Meanwhile, the super-rich are still having a ball. In his annual shareholder letter, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote, “We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.” And Forbes Magazine adds, “Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year’s wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year.”

Which brings us back to the federal budget. There are two sides to every ledger: the expenses…and the income. We need to start looking at the income side. With a fairer tax system, we could retrieve some of that money downpour that the elite has been siphoning away from us for decades.

[Read more at Alternet]

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.

At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.

[Read more at the Huff Post]

Turns out they’re not on the breadlines or working in industries other than finance; examining data from LinkedIn shows that the brains at the failed Wall Street companies were quickly scooped up by the biggest existing competitors. Here’s where they went:

Bring back the Robber Barons. That is the title of yesterday’s “Wonderland” column by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal.

Henninger distinguishes between market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. Market entrepreneurs innovate and create new products. Political entrepreneurs make money by gaming the political system. “We need vision, vitality and commercial moxie. The government is draining it away.”

Bravo!

The real cost of TARP and stimulus is the diversion of resources and talent from creating value into transferring money from one pocket to another.

The stimulus bill was a cover for a massive income transfer from the productive to the unproductive classes in society.

TARP transferred money from profitable firms and hardworking Americans to profligate bankers…

Western producers like BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell are enjoying their best access to Iraq’s southern oil fields since 1972, but a weaker government could be on the way.

BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since addam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one.Parliamentary elections may produce a weak or unstable government incapable of tendering new oil contracts, said Samuel Ciszuk, a London-based analyst at IHS Global Insight. He said he does expect the 10 technical-services contracts won by Exxon, BP and 20 other companies to be honored.

“One thing that’s fairly certain is there won’t be a strong coalition, so it may take time for the next government to get its act together,” Ciszuk said in a telephone interview.

“Bottlenecks could hold up production increases” if no government forms by June.

[Read more at Business Week]

When Henry Kaiser arrived 55 years ago, this place was no place — “a rural problem area,” the government called it, so poor and isolated that the population had dropped 15% since 1940.That all changed after Kaiser, the industrialist who’d turned out ships and planes at a record pace in World War II, built the nation’s largest consolidated aluminum works here on the banks of the Ohio River.

The plant paid Tim Shumaker his first living wage, and he won the right to keep it two decades ago after his union was locked out for 19 months.

Today, that victory seems hollow. Shumaker, 49, has been laid off. Part of the vast aluminum complex is closed, and the rest is for sale — its orders down, its workforce reduced, its future uncertain. Shumaker stands at the locked plant gate and, after a year without work, worries what’s next for him and his community. “The way things are going,” he says, “there’s not going to be anything here.”

[Read more at USA Today]

from death+taxes

It’s undeniable that the recession has unleashed anger across the nation. And that anger’s rapidly devolving into madness. From Joe Stack’s flight into an IRS building to Terry Hoskins, the man who bulldozed his house ahead of foreclosure, seemingly average Americans are lashing out in crazy ways. While Stack’s attack qualifies as the most dramatic outburst, the Hoskins incident, hardly isolated, provides a far more telling glimpse into the ways the economic crisis has soured, and scorched, the American dream.

Owning a home once ranked as the primary goal in the American experience. It was the pinnacle of national striving and homes were icons. Now, as millions face foreclosure, that dream has turned into a nightmare. At his wit’s end about a potential foreclosure, and undoubtedly angry with the bank, Ohio man Terry Hoskins decided to take matters into his own hands and destroy his home. “When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it — no, I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I took it down,” explained Hoskins. It’s a compelling tale, one that gives a face to universal public frustration. It’s also turned Hoskins into something of a hero.

Scores of people are praising Hoskins’ middle finger to big business. That’s not surprising. It was, after all, a somewhat charming way to get back at the bank. Rush Limbaugh called his and Stack’s actions “defiance.” Neighbors and sympathizers have started a website to collect donations for Hoskins, who still owes the bank and IRS hundreds of thousands, and may lose his business. Local businesses are showing their support by selling t-shirts and hats that depict a bulldozer and read “Take ‘Er Down.” It’s unclear if “‘er” means the banks, the government, or just foreclosed homes. A sympathetic singer, meanwhile, has written a ballad about Hoskins.

It doesn’t matter to many that Hoskins insists he didn’t do it to “stick it to the man.” He unwittingly embodies public anger, and the public likes to see a mirror image. Though Hoskins gained widespread exposure for his antics, he’s hardly the only American taking drastic steps to avoid foreclosure. He’s just the most flamboyant and, therefore, spellbinding.

Various political demagogues and Wall Street interests have mounted a campaign to convince Americans that despite persistent massive unemployment for the foreseeable future, more than 15 million people underwater on their home mortgages, and two unnecessary wars, what we really should be worried about is America’s national debt.

It doesn’t help that most of the media pretends not to understand the basic economics, accounting, or arithmetic of the issue. Let’s start with the economics: the Obama administration forecasts unemployment of 10.0, 9.2, and 8.2 percent, respectively, for 2010-2012. The rate does not fall to the 5.2 percent rate it considers full employment until 2018.

The difference between 10 percent unemployment and 5.2 percent is more than 7 million people without jobs. And that doesn’t count the increase in millions of people involuntarily working part time, or millions who leave the labor force because they can’t find work.

[Read more at Truthout]

In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature’s bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas. Reflecting its lack of civilization, they named this island “Basicland.”

The Europeans rapidly repopulated Basicland, creating a new nation. They installed a system of government like that of the early United States. There was much encouragement of trade, and no internal tariff or other impediment to such trade. Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple. It adapted to a national ethos that sought to provide a sound currency, efficient trade, and ample loans for credit-worthy businesses while strongly discouraging loans to the incompetent or for ordinary daily purchases.

Moreover, almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investments, including real estate and tangible personal property. The one exception was the widespread presence of secured, high-down-payment, fully amortizing, fixed-rate loans on sound houses, other real estate, vehicles, and appliances, to be used by industrious persons who lived within their means. Speculation in Basicland’s security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small. There was no trading in options on securities or in derivatives other than “plain vanilla” commodity contracts cleared through responsible exchanges under laws that greatly limited use of financial leverage.

In its first 150 years, the government of Basicland spent no more than 7 percent of its gross domestic product in providing its citizens with essential services such as fire protection, water, sewage and garbage removal, some education, defense forces, courts, and immigration control. A strong family-oriented culture emphasizing duty to relatives, plus considerable private charity, provided the only social safety net.

The tax system was also simple. In the early years, governmental revenues came almost entirely from import duties, and taxes received matched government expenditures. There was never much debt outstanding in the form of government bonds.

As Adam Smith would have expected, GDP per person grew steadily…

[Be sure to read the rest in Slate]

Understanding the Nature of the Global Economic Crisis

The people have been lulled into a false sense of safety under the ruse of a perceived “economic recovery.” Unfortunately, what the majority of people think does not make it so, especially when the people making the key decisions think and act to the contrary. The sovereign debt crises that have been unfolding in the past couple years and more recently in Greece, are canaries in the coal mine for the rest of Western “civilization.” The crisis threatens to spread to Spain, Portugal and Ireland; like dominoes, one country after another will collapse into a debt and currency crisis, all the way to America.

In October 2008, the mainstream media and politicians of the Western world were warning of an impending depression if actions were not taken to quickly prevent this. The problem was that this crisis had been a long-time coming, and what’s worse, is that the actions governments took did not address any of the core, systemic issues and problems with the global economy; they merely set out to save the banking industry from collapse. To do this, governments around the world implemented massive “stimulus” and “bailout” packages, plunging their countries deeper into debt to save the banks from themselves, while charging it to people of the world.

Then an uproar of stock market speculation followed, as money was pumped into the stocks, but not the real economy. This recovery has been nothing but a complete and utter illusion, and within the next two years, the illusion will likely come to a complete collapse.

The governments gave the banks a blank check, charged it to the public, and now it’s time to pay; through drastic tax increases, social spending cuts, privatization of state industries and services, dismantling of any protective tariffs and trade regulations, and raising interest rates. The effect that this will have is to rapidly accelerate, both in the speed and volume, the unemployment rate, globally. The stock market would crash to record lows, where governments would be forced to freeze them altogether.

When the crisis is over, the middle classes of the western world will have been liquidated of their economic, political and social status. The global economy will have gone through the greatest consolidation of industry and banking in world history leading to a system in which only a few corporations and banks control the global economy and its resources; governments will have lost that right. The people of the western world will be treated by the financial oligarchs as they have treated the ‘global South’ and in particular, Africa; they will remove our social structures and foundations so that we become entirely subservient to their dominance over the economic and political structures of our society.

This is where we stand today, and is the road on which we travel…

[continues at the Centre for Research on Globalization]

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.

— Noam Chomsky

As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970-2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEOs, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, “From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%.” Robert Freeman added, “Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three quarters of all the economy’s growth was captured by the top 1%.”

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all-time record.

[Read more at Dissident Voice]

Services such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz can alert criminals when users are not home, according to Confused.com, the price comparison service. Foursquare, for example, shows that people are in a specific spot and, more importantly, that the user is definitely not at home, Confused.com added.It predicted that the new wave in social media could eventually lead to big rises in home insurance premiums.

Darren Black, the head of home insurance at Confused.com, said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if, as social media grow in popularity and more location-based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual’s risk. We could see rises of up to 10pc for people who use these sites.

“Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering, even using Google Earth and Streetview to plan their burglaries with military precision. Insurance providers are starting to take this into account when they are assessing claims and we may in future see insurers declining claims if they believe the customer was negligent.”

Read More: Telegraph

When Tiger’s speech causes a more dramatic volume impact than the FOMC you know this market is all sorts of perfectly efficient. Bloomberg’s chart of the day below shows the total NYSE volume change in-between when Tiger started his convoluted and meandering mea culpa, and when he ended.

FOMC stands for Federal Open Market Committee, a.k.a. “The Fed” that many disinfo.com visitors have plenty to say about. So Tiger had more impact than a Fed Discount Rate hike announcement that day, good to know for the next time I talk to some finance guy who cold calls me about getting into the market…

Seems like just more proof that, as the Onion recently put it (brilliantly), money is a “symbolic, mutually shared illusion.”

Read the Full Story at Zerohedge.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

Calling it “basically no more than five rectangular strips of paper,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke illustrates how much “$200″ is actually worth.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.

“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we … if we …” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this — this so-called ‘money’ — really matters at all.”

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

Read More in the Onion

Cleveland photo by Lisa Chamberlain (CC)

Cleveland leads a slew of Midwestern towns on Forbes’ annual list, but thanks to high taxes New York and Chicago make it too:

The city of Cleveland has had a colorful history. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through the city, famously caught fire in 1969 thanks to rampant pollution, and it wasn’t the first time. In 1978 it became the first U.S. city to default on its debts since the Great Depression. Cleveland sports fans have had to endure more anguish than those in any other city. The city has been dubbed with a less than endearing nickname: the Mistake by the Lake.

This year Cleveland takes the top spot in our third annual ranking of America’s Most Miserable Cities. Cleveland secured the position thanks to its high unemployment, high taxes, lousy weather, corruption by public officials and crummy sports teams (Cavaliers of the NBA excepted).

Misery was on the rise around the country last year. Sure the stock market was up big, but so were unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcy filings. Meanwhile housing prices, the U.S. dollar and approval ratings for Congress continued their downward spiral.

The widely tracked Misery Index initiated by economist Arthur Okun, which combines unemployment and inflation rates started 2009 at 7.3 and rose to 12.7 by the end of the year thanks to soaring joblessness. That is the highest level since 1983…

[visit Forbes for the full story and list]