Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Take the Banks to Court, Already!

On Tuesday, fierce consumer advocate and needler of banks Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called out Wall Street regulators for their habit of giving tepid punishments to misbehaving banks, and asked the agencies to justify their policy of settling with the wrongdoers out of court.

Warren sent a letter to the Justice Department, as well as to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve, asking them for evidence on how a settlement that doesn't require a bank to admit guilt would be better policy than taking the bad apple to trial. If regulators at least show that they are willing to play tough, she argued, it will help deter bad behavior and allow regulators to negotiate bigger fines in the event of a later settlement.

Here are a few snippets:

There is no question that settlements, fines, consent orders, and cease and desist orders are important enforcement tools, and that trials are expensive…But I believe strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial…the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer…If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate million in profits, and if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.

Warren's letter follows a similar request she made to another banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, at a February Senate Banking Committee hearing. When agency officials couldn't answer Warren's question about the last time they took a financial institution to trial—some said it was unnecessary—she asked them to pony up any research it had on the trade-offs of settling versus going to trial. Last week, the OCC responded that it had no such research. So Warren decided to take the question to some of the other Wall Street regulators.

In recent years, major US financial institutions have been caught, among other things, cooking their books, committing fraud, financing terrorists, and laundering money, and many walked away with little more than a wrist-slap. Last year, for example, the Justice Department declined to prosecute HSBC for years of money-laundering violations, levying a fine instead. In March, Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee, conceded that the size of the banks, at least in the view of the administration, warrants some degree of impunity—that some banks are "too big to jail."

The same month, at a hearing on bank money laundering, Warren pointed out the absurdity of Holder's position. "If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, you're going to go to jail," she said. "But if you launder nearly $1 billion for international cartels and violate sanctions [as HSBC did], you pay a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."

Financial-reform advocates are happy with Warren's refusal to let the issue fade. "Warren is doing a great public service by repeatedly raising the critical question of why no one in this country will prosecute crimes on Wall Street," says Dennis Kelleher, who heads the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets. "A democracy cannot last long when there's a double standard for justice where the rich, powerful, and well connected get away with crime, and everybody else gets the book thrown at them."

Here's the link to the full letter:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05/elizabeth-warren-obama-put-bad-banks-trial


 

Obama: IRS acting commissioner has resigned

By JIM KUHNHENN Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced the resignation of the top official at the Internal Revenue Service following a controversy over the agency's targeting of conservative political groups.

Obama, who has been criticized for appearing passive in his response to the matter, declared, "I am angry about it" and said the American people had a right to be angry as well.

Before announcing the resignation of Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, Obama met at the White House with top officials from the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS. The White House scheduled the meeting a day after the release of an inspector general report that showed ineffective management at the IRS allowed agents to improperly target tea party groups for more than 18 months.

Miller became acting commissioner in November, after Commissioner Douglas Shulman completed his five-year term. Shulman had been appointed by President George W. Bush.

The president has proceeded cautiously since the IRS controversy was made public Friday. While he initially said the accusations were "outrageous," he also said he wanted to wait until the inspector general's report was released before addressing what should be done to hold accountable those responsible.

The report lays much of the blame on IRS supervisors in Washington who oversaw a group of specialists in Cincinnati who screened applications for tax exempt status. It does not indicate that Washington initiated the targeting of conservative groups, but it does say a top supervisor in Washington did not adequately supervise agents in the field even after she learned the agents were acting improperly.

The Justice Department is also investigating the IRS targeting, as are three congressional committees.

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Source http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_IRS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-05-15-18-31-03

Boehner on IRS Scandal: 'Who is going to jail?'

Posted by

CNN's Kevin Liptak and Deirdre Walsh
 

(CNN) – The admitted targeting of conservative groups applying for tax exempt status is grounds for some Internal Revenue Service employees to lose their jobs, House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday.

"The IRS has admitted to targeting conservatives, even if the White House continues to be stuck on the word 'if,'" Boehner said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "Now, my question isn't about who's going to resign. My question is who's going to jail over this scandal?"

"There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse," Boehner continued. "Someone made a conscious decision to harass and hold up these requests for tax exempt status. I think we need to know who they are, whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law."

On Tuesday a report from the inspector general responsible for the IRS stated that lax oversight at the tax agency led to the targeting of tea party and other conservative groups who were applying for federal tax exempt status.

Asked after Wednesday's press conference what specific crimes Boehner was alluding to, an aide to the House speaker cited the illegal targeting of groups and the IRS's sharing of confidential information with the news organization Pro Publica, which said this week the agency shared conservative groups' applications for tax exempt status.

Obama first spoke on the controversy Monday, saying reports the IRS targeted the groups were "outrageous" and that there was "no place for it" in his administration. But he said he would wait for the official IG report to be released before demanding any action be taken by the Treasury Department.

After the report was released Tuesday, Obama released a statement saying the findings are "intolerable and inexcusable."

"The federal government must conduct itself in a way that's worthy of the public's trust, and that's especially true for the IRS. The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity," he said. "This report shows that some of its employees failed that test."

Obama ordered Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to ensure that each of the inspector general's recommendations are implemented soon, "so that such conduct never happens again."

Brzezinski: “Populist Resistance” is Derailing the New World Order

During a recent speech in Poland, former US National   Security Advisor  Zbigniew Brzezinski warned fellow elitists that a worldwide “resistance” movement to “external control” driven by “populist activism” is threatening to derail the move towards a new world order.

Calling the notion that the 21st century is the American century a “shared delusion,” Brzezinski stated that American domination was no longer possible because of an accelerating social change driven by “instant mass communications such as radio, television and the Internet,” which have been cumulatively stimulating “a universal awakening of mass political consciousness.”

The former US National Security Advisor added that this “rise in worldwide populist activism is proving inimical to external domination of the kind that prevailed in the age of colonialism and imperialism.”

Brzezinski concluded that “persistent and highly motivated populist resistance of politically awakened and historically resentful peoples to external control has proven to be increasingly difficult to suppress.”

Although Brzezinski delivered his comments in a neutral tone, the context of the environment in which he said them allied to his previous statements would indicate that this is not a celebration of “populist resistance” but a lament at the impact it is having on the kind of “external control” Brzezinski has repeatedly advocated.

The remarks were made at an event for the European Forum For New Ideas (EFNI), an organization that advocates the transformation of the European Union into an anti-democratic federal superstate, the very type of bureaucratic “external control” Brzezinski stressed was in jeopardy in his lecture.

In this context, it must be understood that Brzezinski’s point about “populist resistance” being a major hindrance to the imposition of a new world order is more of a warning than an acclamation.

Also consider what Brzezinski wrote in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era, in which he advocated the control of populations by an elite political class via technotronic manipulation.

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities,” wrote Brzezinski.

“In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason,” he wrote in the same book.

Brzezinski’s sudden concern about the impact of a politically awakened global population isn’t born out of any notion that he identifies with their cause. Brzezinski is the ultimate elitist insider, the founder of the powerful Trilateral Commission, a Council on Foreign Relations luminary and a regular Bilderberg attendee. He was once described by President Barack Obama as “one of our most outstanding thinkers”.

This is by no means the first time Brzezinski has lamented the burgeoning populist opposition to external domination by a tiny elite.

During a 2010 Council on Foreign Relations speech in Montreal, check video below:

Brzezinski warned fellow globalists that a “global political awakening,” in combination with infighting amongst the elite, was threatening to derail the move towards a one world government.

Source:

Paul Joseph Watson

http://www.infowars.com

Succinctness of Flavor Energies is Defining Hue-manity at This Time

Succinctness of flavor energies is defining Hue-manity at this time. Tasting the sweetness of the New Gaia ensures completion of the Gaia renewal and re-birthing process.

So-called “sudden” changes may appear and are indeed to be expected during these present moments. As these are embraced and not resisted, Gaia progress occurs.

Portal expansion has enabled smoothing harmonics for the needed “sudden” changes.
Releasing fear brings New Gaia near.

http://gaiaportal.wordpress.com/

Time to Abolish Left vs. Right . . . it’s about time we start understanding this necessary fact: We’ve been divided in order to conquer us!

Time to Abolish Left vs. Right 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-gibson/time-to-abolish-left-vsright_b_3274432.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

14 May 13

eeping our nation divided is an agenda supported by both Fox News and MSNBC. The media and the politicians both profit from Americans believing they should hate their fellow Americans. And oddly enough, the one thing that unites the traditional “right” and “left” in this country is our hatred for those same media organizations and politicians that make money by regularly lying to us. The best way to beat them is to find the things that bring us together in one common purpose and unite around that.

An article in the Atlantic last week talked about how the dominant liberal narrative is broken. The argument that government is inherently good and is necessary to provide things like Social Security, Medicare and national parks has some truth to it, and worked well for both parties in the mid-twentieth century. Democrats and Republicans from FDR to Eisenhower won landslide elections using the good-government narrative. But now that our government is captive to corporations and their lobbyists like the US Chamber of Commerce, Americans of all ideological leanings are united in the belief that our current government, as it stands, is completely out of touch and needs radical change from outside the political system to do it.

In this video Mark Meckler, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, talks about how he had a surprisingly pleasant conversation with several of the co-founders of MoveOn.org about crony capitalism. It was an incredibly populist speech about how they found themselves in complete agreement that big moneyed special interests have taken government hostage and have wasted billions of tax dollars on bailing out banks (like the Federal Reserve’s $16 trillion in bailouts to both US and foreign banks that went entirely under the media’s radar). He also talked about how it’s more profitable for the crony capitalist DC bubble and the media they control to keep us divided than it is for us to play into those forced divisions.


Another Tea Party founder lamented about how the raw populist energy that originally inspired the Tea Party back in early 2008 against the Bush administration’s bailouts of the biggest banks has been overtaken by Republican ideologues like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. Karl Denninger, a financial blogger who runs MarketTicker.com, said the Tea Party’s original message was against the big banks. After Obama’s inauguration, there was anger over appointees like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who were the same bought-and-paid-for financiers who deregulated the banks during Clinton’s second term and brought about the beginning of the financial collapse. Denninger supported the Occupy Wall Street movement early on, saying it was picking up where the Tea Party left off before it was hijacked by the Republican Party.

Democrats and Republicans are using issues like gun control, Benghazi and gay marriage to continue feeding the illusion that there’s a difference between the two and to continue the flow of money to their corporate masters. Whenever a politician says “gun control,” gun sales go through the roof. When the ruckus over Chick-Fil-A’s disapproval of marriage equality became mainstream conversation, social conservatives formed lines that went around the entire block to make their political statement about marriage equality. After their much ado about nothing Benghazi hearings, GOP members of Congress are fundraising off of their witch hunt. In either instance, whenever you follow the money trail, gun manufacturers and allegedly gay-hating fast food restaurants made record sales and politicians raised more money. Money is the entire point.

When it comes to Republican and Democratic Party officials’ deference to corporate money, they’re both nearly identical. The GOP-controlled House is pressing Obama hard to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would endanger an entire region’s drinking water supply and create anegligible amount of temporary jobs. Harry Reid’s Senate voted overwhelmingly for a resolution supporting the pipeline in their budget. The Monsanto Protection Act, which was written by GOP Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Monsanto officials, quietly became law with the signature of a Democrat president after the approval of a Democrat-led Senate.

Both parties are captive to the for-profit war industry – the military-industrial complex thatEisenhower warned us about – and are united in their support for military intervention whenever and wherever possible. Our last Republican president waged wars in two countries without being attacked by either one. Our current Democratic president has extended one of those wars byanother ten years and used drones to take military action in several other countries. Even Rand Paul, who made a name for himself filibustering Obama’s drone czar to lead the CIA, has made statements supporting drones to be used on Americans. Even though traditional Republicans are united against wasteful government spending, and traditional Democrats are united against austerity policies, both parties can agree that there’s entirely too much wasteful spending in Washington when it comes to an imperial military force with a bloated budget currently occupying over 130 nations with 900 bases around the world, and the multibillion-dollar security and surveillance state used to monitor peaceful protesters instead of terrorists. We can certainly find agreement that it would be much more productive to stop spending money on the dysfunctional F-35 jet, which even John McCain has criticized, than make cuts to early childhood education programs like Head Start.

Americans should be smarter than to allow ourselves to get thrown into the counter-productive left vs. right fight hyped by the corporate-owned media and our corporate-owned politicians. If we’re going to fight a binary struggle, it should be populist vs. corporatist. That’s the only real division in this country right now. Are you on the people’s side, or on big money’s side?

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary “We’re Not Broke,” which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

http://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/time-to-abolish-left-vs-right-its-about-time-we-start-understanding-this-necessary-fact-weve-been-divided-in-order-to-conquer-us-j/

Fulford: New moves afoot to break financial deadlock

Reposted from: Benjamin Fulford.

The ongoing battle over control of the global financial system has entered a new phase with some heavy under the radar maneuvers, according to Chinese government, Illuminati, CIA and Asian secret society sources. Despite the departure of the old pope, the surrender of the Rothschilds and the neutering of the Bush family, a stalemate has continued with the Rockefellers, the new Pope, Queen Elizabeth, Obama, the Japanese Emperor and other old world order power-brokers refusing to finance a major campaign to end poverty and stop environmental destruction.

In order to break this deadlock and free human potential, a secret campaign has now been started to identify and deal with the precise obstacles to freeing humanity from financial slavery. This will mean more and more prominent people will be suddenly vanishing from public view, according to members of several different secret societies.

For example, have either George Soros or Nat Rothschild been seen in public recently? Also, Japanese right wing politician Shintaro Ishihara has dropped out of view again despite the appearance of a reported double on TV following his long “hospital stay.” We do not condone “disappearing” people and hope they all make a public appearance soon so that we can confirm they are alive and safe.

Nonetheless, some very dangerous people are justifiably angry at various mass murder campaigns carried out at the behest of the Sabbatean mafia, are very impatient with the ongoing deadlock and are not easily held back.


To try to prevent a bloodbath among the elite, action is being taken to ensure a major campaign to end poverty and stop environmental destruction begins sooner rather than later. That is why there will be a push to break the freeze on lawsuits aimed restoring the rights to the world’s historical treasure to the legal owners. This is a tricky process because it involves undoing 100 years of secret Sabbatean Mafia global financial control via privately owned central banks. For that reason, the US agencies, the Chinese government, Asian Secret Societies, the Gnostic Illuminati, the Vatican and the Swiss, among others, are being consulted about the best way to go forward.

The best research indicates that rights to 85% of the world’s historical treasure belong to Asian royal families, notably Chinese dynastic families like the Qing, Ming, Lee and Sung.

Neil Keenan, who claims to have the backing of the Pentagon and US agencies, says there is a (sic) “Xing” Empress who is fully in charge of, and managing the rights to, 85% of the world’s money. However, Chinese government and Asian Secret Society sources have not been able to confirm this. Nor does it appear to be the reality on the ground. We await further confirmation on this issue from Asian sources but since this requires non-digital communications, it will take time.

Also, our own research indicates the “Dragon family” appears to be the Merovingian, i.e. European, royal families. The head of a major royal Asian secret society claims not to have heard of a “Dragon family.”
In any case, historical rights to treasure is one thing, current geopolitical reality is another. Even if the Asians have historical rights to 85% of the world’s treasure, Western governments are not about to stand by and let them translate that into control of 85% of the world.

Nonetheless, the situation at present is that the people de facto in charge of the Federal Reserve Board and the European Central bank got control by defrauding Asian royals of their gold and need to be removed. However, this needs to be done in a way that does not lead to the dysfunction of the financial system subsequent collapse of Western civilization.

The best way to go about this is to systematically audit the books of all financial organizations and remove fraudulently created money, especially derivatives created via astronomical leverage and complex computer algorithms. Traditional futures markets should be restricted to the maximum 10 times leverage that historical experience shows is the limit needed for long term market integrity. It is time to go back to plain vanilla.
It is also necessary for Western governments to recognize that most of them have been borrowing from the rest of the world, especially Asia, at an unsustainable rate for the past 30 years or longer. They need to negotiate a restructuring of their overseas debt.

There also needs to be a major realignment of currencies. The Euro needs to shed Southern Europe and become a Northern European Mark. The Southern Europeans need their own competitive currency. That is the cultural and economic reality. It will mean cheap Greek holidays for Germans and expensive Mercedes limousines for rich Greeks until the natural balance is restored.

Also, and I cannot repeat this too often, the U.S. dollar is not and never was American and the United States government needs to start issuing its own greenbacks. The only other choice, and this is the one made by Sabbatean Mafiosi who run the US government, is to wait until 90% of Americans’ incomes to fall to Chinese levels.

The bottom line for Europeans and Americans is that no matter how hard they try to avoid it, reality has a way of catching up.

On the bright side, once an agreement is reached on new financial architecture, humanity has the potential to experience a spurt of growth and progress on par with the birth of agriculture and the start of the industrial revolution.

Finance is the process of deciding what we as a species do in the future. That has been stolen from us by a family mafia of religious cultists obsessed with turning ancient prophecies into reality. Once these people are removed from control of the creation of dollars and Euros humanity will be able to decide its own future.
Traditional political and religious organizations can play a major role in this process once the financial rot (bribed politicians etc.) is cut out. The Vatican, the British Commonwealth, the restored Republic of the United States and other such venerable power centers have the institutional ability to carry out vast projects.
We also need to build entirely new institutions from the ground up to work in harmony with existing ones. The White Dragon Society has proposed that these new institutions be run on the basic principles of equality and finding win-win solutions.

Asian financial leaders have already agreed to generously finance non-military Western ventures once the financial stand-off ends. There is plenty to do. China, for example, needs Western expertize to clean up its increasingly toxic environment. Turning the deserts green and replenishing the oceans are other big projects waiting to start.

Western technology and science also now stand at the brink of accomplishments that will outstrip our imaginations. Immortality, super-powers, exploration of other dimensions, the creation and colonization of new digital realities and much more are now within our reach. What are we waiting for?