Matt Stoller - Over 99% of Federal Reserve Bank Enforcement Actions Are Resolved Without Admission of Guilt

In a hearing last week titled “Examining the Settlement Practices of U.S. Financial Regulators”, various regulators tried to justify their practice of settling with financial firms and not requiring them to admit wrongdoing. In that hearing, Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez, stated that only seven of the roughly one thousand enforcement actions taken in the last decade were resolved without consent.

The vast majority of the Federa Reserve’s formal enforcement actions are resolved upon consent, which is fully consistent with the goal of resolving supervisory concerns with bank management quickly and firmly. In crafting enforcement actions that are entered by consent, the Federal Reserve typically sets out summary recitations of the relevant facts in “Whereas” clause provisions; however, like our fellow banking regulators, it has not been our practice to require formal admissions to the misconduct addressed in our enforcement orders given the remedial nature of our enforcement program. Requiring admission of fact and legal conclusions as a condition of entering into a consent action is likely to have a deleterious effect on our supervisory efforts by causing more institutions and individuals to challenge the requested relief in contested administrative proceedings, which typically takes years to reach final resolution, and which could delay implemenattion of necessary corrective action.

In other words, the Federal Reserve will only punish banks who break the rules if those banks consent to punishment.  This attitude is pervasive among all regulators.  Here’s the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates among other banks JP Morgan Chase.

Read More:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/over-99-of-enforcement-actions-by-federal-reserve-are-resolved-without-admission-of-guilt.html

Obama's Five Trillion Dollar Lie

Why isn't the U.S. economy in a depression right now?  The number one reason is because the federal government has stolen more than five trillion dollars from future generations since Barack Obama was elected and has used that money to pump up our grossly inflated standard of living.  Whether the federal government spends money wisely or foolishly, the truth is that the vast majority of it still ends up in the pockets of the American people who then use it to buy the things they need for their daily lives.  If the U.S. government had not borrowed and spent an extra five trillion dollars that we did not have over the past several years, we would be in the middle of a rip-roaring economic depression right now.  So any talk that Barack Obama is "improving the economy" is a total farce.  It is a five trillion dollar lie.  The reality is that Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress have been stealing trillions of dollars from future generations in order to make things tolerable in the present.  If the federal government adopted a balanced budget next year, the debt-fueled prosperity that we are currently enjoying would start disappearing very rapidly and all hell would break loose in America.

At this point, the U.S. national debt is over 15.7 trillion dollars.

When Ronald Reagan took office it was less than a trillion dollars.

If you were to divide the national debt up equally, it would come to more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

So the share of the national debt for an average family of four would be about $200,000.

Read More:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/obamas-five-trillion-dollar-lie

Michael Brenner - Seven Sins of the Democrats

The Democrats are in a shambles. Progressives, ne liberals, are in particularly dire straits. They have been marginalized and their influence on public policy wanes even as events reconfirm their values, their philosophy and their historic cause. They face an election that pits extreme rightists against an incumbent president who fits comfortably into the national establishment’s moderate wing. They have no standard bearer. Their core constituencies are being ignored or patronized. The terms of debate on the great issues of the times have been set without reference to them or their ideas.

They have themselves to blame since they have committed the Seven Sins of politics.

SLOTH 

Democrats are slow on the uptake. Their reaction time – whether to events, shifts in public mood, or Republican actions – is lethargic compared to the quick response of the latter. This goes along with a tendency to drift lethargically with the tides rather to make their own waves and to ride them resolutely. Exhibit number one is the swelling anger in the country after the financial breakdown of 2008.  This was a natural for the Democrats. The discrediting of Republican dogma and their business underwriters, the abuse of financial power, exposure of the fatal flaws in the snake oil of market fundamentalism, a spotlighting of the huge gap between the fortunes generated by casino capitalism while mean earnings for salaried people stagnated. Yet it was the crackpot right through the subsidized Tea Party movement that channeled all that passion to the reactionary end of the political spectrum? Democrats, liberal Democrats anyway, still can’t figure it out. Nor can they accept the glaring truth that they were sold out by the Obama administration in the name of the White House’s own self-serving commitment not to rock the boat by doing anything that challenged seriously the status quo. The same scenario developed with the 2010 volte-face in the direction of ‘austerity’ and subverting Social Security and Medicare in the name of budgetary discipline.

Read More:

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/05/22/SEVEN-SINS-OF-THE-DEMOCRATS/

Vandana Shiva - Eco Warriors, Arise!

In June 2012, world leaders along with thousands of participants from governments, NGOs and environmental groups as well as the private sector will come together in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil for Rio+20, 20 years after the Earth Summit was organised by the UN in 1992, to address urgent ecological challenges such as extinction of species, erosion of biodiversity and climate change. The Earth Summit gave us two significant international environmental laws — the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It also gave us the Rio principles, including the precautionary principle, and the “polluter pays” principle.

The world has changed radically since 1992 and, sadly, not for the better. Ecological sustainability has been systematically sacrificed for a particular model of economy, which itself is in crisis.

The year 1995 saw a tectonic shift in values guiding our decisions together with a shift with regard to those who make those decisions. It was the year the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established. Whereas the Rio principles — shaped by ecological movements, ecological science and by sovereign governments — were informed by values of ecological sustainability, social justice and economic equity across and within the countries, the WTO introduced the paradigm of global corporate rule, changing the values and structures of governance and decision-making through free trade agreements between nations.

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva230512.htm

Stress shrank brain area of Japan tsunami survivors: study

Emotional stress caused by last year's tsunami caused a part of some survivors' brains to shrink, according to scientists in Japan who grasped a unique chance to study the neurological effects of trauma.

On a quest to better understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the researchers compared brain scans they had taken of 42 healthy adolescents in other studies in the two years before the killer wave, with new images taken three to four months thereafter.

Among those with PTSD symptoms, they found a shrinking in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision-making and the regulation of emotion, said a study published Tuesday in the Nature journal Molecular Psychiatry.

"The changed volumes in the orbitofrontal cortex are correlated to the severity of PTSD symptoms," author Atsushi Sekiguchi told AFP.

Previous studies had already suggested that PTSD patients undergo changes to the brain, but this is the first to pinpoint which part of the organ is altered by trauma.

The full implications of these findings are so far unclear, but there could be an early benefit for doctors and patients. Telltale changes in brain volume may help easier diagnoses of PTSD and timely treatment with psychotherapy.

Read More:

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Stress_shrank_brain_area_of_Japan_tsunami_survivors_study_999.html

Renee Parsons - The Export of Weapons: Past, Present and Future

As long overdue negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) begin in early July under UN auspices, central to that discussion, by virtue of its international supremacy, will be the US export of arms that has facilitated the extensive sale of weapons around the planet. With only 19 out of 195 sovereign nations of the world with no military budget, the ATT conference will attempt to establish international standards for the $55 billion a year industry for the import, export and transfer of all conventional (small arms) weapons.

Even a widespread global recession and callous austerity budgets have done little to dampen an insatiable demand for weapons by industrialized nations, undemocratic nations and still developing or unstable nations with an estimated $1.7 trillion devoted to annual military expenditures in 2011, a 50 per cent increase in global military budgets since 2001 -- at the expense of providing a safe, secure world for all its citizens.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/the-export-of-weapons-pas_b_1540165.html

Prof. Thomas J. Nagy - How the US Deliberately Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply

In September 2001 Professor Thomas Nagy of George Washington University, D.C., revealed the existence of Defense Intelligence Agency documents “proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country’s water supply after the Gulf War. 

"The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.” On May 12, 1996 some of the horrible consequences of this policy were revealed when the CBS news program 60 Minutes reported that roughly half million Iraqi children had died as a consequence of U.S. imposed sanctions. 

This led to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s infamous answer to the question, “is the price worth it?” Her reply was yes “we think the price is worth it.” Albright later apologized, not for the murderous policy for which she was partially responsible, but rather for the fact that her answer to the above question had “aggravated our public relations problems” in the Middle East. 

As to domestic reaction, her comment “went unremarked in the U.S.” Subsequently, in 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq using the strategy of “rapid dominance” (more popularly known as “shock and awe”). The object of this strategy was to “paralyze” the enemy’s “will to carry on” through the disruption of “means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure.” One of the targets of the bombing campaign that led off the invasion was Iraq’s electrical grid. That directly impacted the country’s ability to process clean water." 

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31011

Eurobonds: The Issue That Could Shatter Europe

Would you pool your debt with a bunch of debt addicts that have no intention of reducing their wild spending habits?  Of course you wouldn't.  But that is exactly what Germany is being asked to do.  Increasingly, "eurobonds" are being touted as the best long-term solution to the financial crisis in Europe.  These eurobonds would represent jointly issued debt by all 17 members of the eurozone.  This debt would also be guaranteed by all 17 members of the eurozone.  This would allow all countries in the eurozone to enjoy the same credit rating that Germany does, and borrowing costs for nations such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain would plummet.  But borrowing costs for Germany would rise substantially.  In fact, it is being estimated that Germany could be facing an extra 50 billion euros a year in interest expenses.  So over ten years that would come to about 500 billion euros.  Needless to say, Germany is not thrilled about this idea.  But new French President Francois Hollande is pushing eurobonds very hard, and he has the support of the OECD, the IMF and many top Italian politicians.  In the end, this could be the key to the future of the eurozone.  If the Germans give in and decide that they are willing to deeply subsidize their profligate neighbors indefinitely, then the euro could potentially be saved.  If not, then this issue could end up shattering Europe.

It is easy to try to portray the Germans as the "bad guys" in all this, but try to step into their shoes for a minute.

If you had some relatives that were spending wildly and that had already run up $100,000 in credit card debt, would you be a co-signer on their next credit card application?

Of course not.

Read More:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/eurobonds-the-issue-that-could-shatter-europe

Stefan Steinberg - Sharp Divisions On Eve Of EU Summit

European leaders meet on Wednesday to discuss the deepening European crisis. On the eve of the summit, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued a report that confirms the intensification of recessionary trends.

The OECD Economic Report released Tuesday warns that the “fragile, extremely uneven” international recovery “could be derailed by the crisis in the euro area.”

The OECD has downgraded its prognosis for growth in its 34 member states from an annual rate of 1.8 percent in 2011 to 1.6 percent in 2012. The report makes clear that the chief culprit in dragging down world growth is Europe. “The crisis in the euro zone remains the single biggest downside risk facing the global outlook,” said OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan on Tuesday.

In what amounts to an indictment of the austerity policies imposed by the “troika”—the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—the report highlights the risk of a renewed banking crisis across the continent. It states: “Adjustments in the euro area are now taking place in an environment of slow or negative growth and deleveraging, prompting risks of a vicious circle involving high and rising sovereign indebtedness, weak banking systems, excessive fiscal consolidation and lower growth.”

Read More:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/euro-m23.shtml

Carl Gibson - This Is What Tyranny Looks Like

Remember when police beat Tea Party activists with batons, raided homes without warrants, unjustly arrested and strip-searched Tea Party protesters, or attacked and intimidated journalists covering Tea Party rallies?

Me neither. But then again, the Tea Party took to the streets in favor of higher profits and less regulations for the richest 1 percent, whose ranks they hope to but will never join. The media is more than happy to inflate their crowd estimates, and police are more than happy to let pro-status quo protests take to the streets undisturbed. The Tea Party has since phased out street protests to take over a major political party and make it bend to their every radical whim.

While it hasn't yet taken over a major party, the Occupy movement has successfully exposed the oppressive fascist police state that has reared its ugly head in the past year. If you want to see what tyranny looks like, consider what happened to the estimated 75,000 protesters who took on the military-industrial complex at last weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago, after the mayor revoked protesters' attempts to lawfully assemble.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/23-4