Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

A Plea for Caution From Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria
NYTimes | Vladimir V. Putin | 09/11/13

RECENT events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization -- the United Nations -- was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again. ... Read more
Letter from Vladimir V. Putin - Click to zoom
Letter from Vladimir V. Putin (09/12/13)

Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo
Greg Palast | author | 08/22/13

When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears. ... Read more or at Vice: Read more
End Game Memo            Another Memo

The Fed, Lawrence Summers, and Money
NYTimes | Louise Story | 08/10/13 older

Jeremy I. Bulow, an economics professor at Stanford University, wife always said about Larry: "With Larry, it's hard to be happy if you want to have the most money because you'll never have the most money,"... Read more

Secret Agenda in Syria? Larry Summers and Cronies Opening the World to Criminal Banksters
AlterNet | Ellen Brown | 09/04/13

Iraq and Libya have been taken out, and Iran has been heavily boycotted. Syria is now in the cross-hairs. Why? Here is one overlooked scenario.

In an August 2013 article titled " Larry Summers and the Secret 'End-game' Memo," Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.

The "end-game" would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and "usury" -- charging rent for the "use" of money -- is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks don't need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations. ... Read more

Wes Clark - America's Foreign Policy (10/03/07) [7:36]

In D.C., small tax debts lead to misery, loss of homes
Washington Post | author | 09/10/13

The District's century-old tax lien program has turned into an often predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town investors who have turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts - then foreclosed on homes when families couldn't pay, a Post investigation has found.

As the housing market soared, the investors scooped up thousands of liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, a gamechanger that has made it more difficult for families to save their homes. Tax lien purchasers have foreclosed on nearly 200 houses since 2005 and are now pressing to take 1,200 more, many owned free and clear by families for generations. ... Read more