Wall Street Is Occupied - And The Mainstream Isn't Reporting It

diegueno:

This is the part of the protest that the protest organizers didn’t figure out: how to get it in the press.

It’s not effective to let this prove it’s own point to walk away from this saying “The Media Has Been a Tool of The Corporatocracy!” It’s like preaching to the choir. The media silence on the action should have been taken in to consideration as an obstacle and had a plan to over come it. That is a Big Fail.

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nightline:

Wall Street - Is Greed Still Good?  David Wright takes a look back at the 80’s movie and where the sequel fits today

A few weeks back, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with a joke. He said he had recently come across a headline that asked, “What If Women Ran Wall Street?” “Now that’s an excellent question, but it’s kind of a low bar,” Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter. “How, you might ask, could women not have done better?” It is rarely noted that the financial wreckage littering our world is the creation, almost exclusively, of men, not women. And no wonder: to this day, each of the large banks, from Citigroup to Goldman Sachs, employs fewer than a handful of women in senior positions, and only 3% of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO. Embarrassing tales of a testosterone-filled trading culture tumbled out of the what-went-wrong probes as the Great Recession took hold. (See the seven key elements to financial reform.) In itself, Geithner’s joke was not extraordinary for Washington, where self-deprecating fare is the norm. But what happened next drove home a deeper point: the lectern in the marbled hall at the U.S. Treasury known as the Cash Room was cleared away so that a panel of women could take their seats. Among them was Sheila Bair, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and one of the first federal regulators to publicly sound the alarm about the collapse three years ago. She sat next to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Mary Schapiro, the first woman to hold that post and the deciding vote to initiate the agency’s recent lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. Across the stage sat Elizabeth Warren, chair of the panel bird-dogging the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout and the chief advocate for new consumer-finance regulations that banks and their allies have spent millions to oppose. Suddenly, something else became clear: these women may not run Wall Street, but in this new era, they are telling Wall Street how to clean up its act. Michael Scherer of Time: men run Wall Street but the new sheriffs of the Street are women…. via realitychex continue reading… time  

A few weeks back, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with a joke. He said he had recently come across a headline that asked, “What If Women Ran Wall Street?”

“Now that’s an excellent question, but it’s kind of a low bar,” Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter. “How, you might ask, could women not have done better?”

It is rarely noted that the financial wreckage littering our world is the creation, almost exclusively, of men, not women. And no wonder: to this day, each of the large banks, from Citigroup to Goldman Sachs, employs fewer than a handful of women in senior positions, and only 3% of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO. Embarrassing tales of a testosterone-filled trading culture tumbled out of the what-went-wrong probes as the Great Recession took hold. (See the seven key elements to financial reform.)

In itself, Geithner’s joke was not extraordinary for Washington, where self-deprecating fare is the norm. But what happened next drove home a deeper point: the lectern in the marbled hall at the U.S. Treasury known as the Cash Room was cleared away so that a panel of women could take their seats. Among them was Sheila Bair, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and one of the first federal regulators to publicly sound the alarm about the collapse three years ago. She sat next to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Mary Schapiro, the first woman to hold that post and the deciding vote to initiate the agency’s recent lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. Across the stage sat Elizabeth Warren, chair of the panel bird-dogging the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout and the chief advocate for new consumer-finance regulations that banks and their allies have spent millions to oppose. Suddenly, something else became clear: these women may not run Wall Street, but in this new era, they are telling Wall Street how to clean up its act.

Michael Scherer of Time: men run Wall Street but the new sheriffs of the Street are women….

via realitychex continue reading… time

 

“

In a scene straight out of Fight Club, bankers and traders are said to be trading in their gelled-hair and Armani ties for black eyes and cut lips at gyms around the city.


“We get a lot of finance guys. It’s a good release from their job. If you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s good to come here and get it out.” - Max McGarr, a gym program director and professional fighter.

”

Wall Street Fight Clubs On The Rise

In his Wall Street speech, the president outlines reforms—but they don’t go deep enough.

…Taking credit for stabilizing the financial system after feeding it with massive amounts of federal money is like a teacher bragging about turning around the academic performance of a failing student after handing them all the answers to the big tests.

Here’s how the economy is really faring:

  • National unemployment is at 9.7 percent, higher than last year’s 5.8 percent, with double digit jobless rates in 139 metropolitan areas this July, compared to 14 last July.
  • The number of foreclosures is greater than last year: nearly 2 million new foreclosure filings occurred in the first half of 2009, up 15 percent from the same period in 2008.
  • While homes in some areas have begun to slowly sell again, they are doing so at deeply depressed prices, in many instances below their mortgage value.
  • Wall Street bonuses are back to pre-crisis levels. For some firms, such as Goldman Sachs, they are even higher.
  • Bank leverage, or excessive borrowing on the back of risky assets—a major cause of the meltdown—is rising again.
  • Geithner recently reported that his program to enable private financial firms to buy up toxic assets with government help will wind up costing less than the $1 trillion he had first envisioned. However, he did not mention that there are less toxic assets available to buy partly because the Fed has allowed banks to use some toxic assets as collateral in return for cheap loans.
  • Big banks are bigger than they were last year. Since the Fed blessed more mergers last fall, the nation’s three largest banks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo—hold the maximum percentage of legally permissable US deposits or more.
  • Mid-size and smaller banks keep closing. This year, the FDIC has closed 92 banks, and depleted its deposit insurance money in the process.
  • We still don’t have detailed information on the trillions of dollars of loans the Fed handed out to the banking sector or about the quality of the collateral banks provided in return.

continue reading Nomi Prins analysis…mother jones

“

…Instead, it is President Obama who is taking the heat. Right-wing pundits have hammered the president as an out-of-control socialist hellbent on bankrupting the country, their attacks rising to a crescendo during the past month’s healthcare wars. During the presidential campaign, Obama brushed off the “socialist” label with ease, but after a year of repetition it seems to be getting stickier.

…so at a moment when financial CEOs should be the villains, it is Obama who is being booed from all sides.

…For Americans eager to know whom to blame, we have some suggestions: Vikram Pandit, Lloyd Blankfein, Kenneth Chenault and James Dimon. Pandit is the CEO of Citigroup, where he received a compensation package worth $38 million in 2008, while slashing 75,000 workers and taking $50 billion of taxpayer bailout funds. The other three executives, CEOs of Goldman Sachs, American Express and JPMorgan Chase, respectively, all made at least $35 million in 2008 while accepting billions from taxpayers and cutting thousands of jobs.

The CEO pay scandal stands ready to repeat itself, since many of these firms handed out boatloads of new stock options early this year, at a time when their stocks were at bargain-basement rates. Now that taxpayer assistance has boosted their recovery, the top executives are poised to turn the crisis into huge windfalls. The Institute for Policy Studies obtained data on ten of the top bailout recipients and found that about two dozen executives at these firms have enjoyed a combined increase in the value of their options of about $90 million, even though all of the firms’ stock prices are still below precrash levels.

”

Remember who really killed the economy: Wall Street.

- by JOHN CAVANAGH & SARAH ANDERSON - continue reading…  the nation