IRS' Real Scandal So Clear No One Complains (Except Taxpayers), Vets' Treatment Backlogged Over 4 Months, Italian Union Leads Jobs March

The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.

The system guarantees the survival of the (bad guys) because it needs them to survive.


Now that everyone understands the reach of the Republican criminals in all facets of American life, and that the emails quoted as having been seen by Jonathan Karl of ABC News have been revealed not to have existed except in some notes written by his Republithug source, we remember anew what the real scandal about the IRS regarding taxpayers is.

The IRS and the Real Scandal

By Robert Reich

Robert Reich's Blog

18 May 13

"his systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two," said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. "This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive."

David Camp has it wrong. There has been a "systematic" abuse of power, but it's not what Camp has in mind. The real scandal is that:

The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called "social welfare organizations," like Karl Rove's "Crossroads," the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and "Priorites USA."

This campaign money has been used to bribe Congress to keep in place tax loopholes like the "carried interest" rule that allows the managers of hedge funds and private equity funds to treat their income as capital gains, subject only to low capital gains taxes rather than ordinary income taxes, and other loopholes that allow CEOs to get special tax treatment on giant compensation packages that now average $10 million a year.

Despite a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires using every tax dodge imaginable - laundering their money through phantom corporations and tax havens - the IRS's budget has been cut by 17 percent since 2002, adjusted for inflation. To manage the $594.5 million in additional cuts required by the sequester, the agency will furlough each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year.

Finally, all of this, coming at a time when the Supreme Court has deemed corporations "people" under the First Amendment and when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they've been in over a hundred years, has enabled America's financial elite to further entrench their wealth and power and thereby take over much of American democracy.

This is the real scandal and the real abuse, Congressman Camp. Your indignation over the IRS's alleged "targeting" of conservative groups is a distraction from the main event.

(Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.)

Chris Floyd reminds us of the collusion course the machinations of the double-headed beast have victimized us all by.

Who would have thought that oil barons - of all people! - would be involved in dirty back-room dealings to gorge their gobs with even more swill from the trough? From the Guardian:

The London offices of BP and Shell have been raided by European regulators investigating allegations they have "colluded" to rig oil prices for more than a decade. The European commission said its officers carried out "unannounced inspections" at several oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway to investigate claims they may have "colluded in reporting distorted prices to a price reporting agency [PRA] to manipulate the published prices for a number of oil and biofuel products" . . . It warned: "Even small distortions of assessed prices may have a huge impact on the prices of crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels purchases and sales, potentially harming final consumers."

. . . So while continuing a fierce vigilance against the relentless encroachments of an unhinged, unrestrained and openly murderous government, let us also recognize that the "free market" - often posited as some kind of purer alternative to the state, a mystic realm where the free play of individual desires and activities combine ineffably to produce the best of all possible worlds - is, and always has been, a rigged game where vicious predators seek tyrannical control, by hook, crook and vast corruption, shackling the 'free play of individual desires and activities' in every way possible to squeeze out more unjust advantage for themselves.

Of course, the 'state' and the 'free market' are simply two halves of the same rough beast. The modern 'free market' is the result of massive, continual and pervasive state intervention on its behalf - that is, on behalf of the vicious predators exercising tyrannical control of economic activity - while the state is in practice little more than a vehicle for elite aggrandizement.

You might think that having so many troops injured as a result of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that veterans' cases might finally be treated with great care and alacrity by the department now under the knowledgeable guidance of the Obama administration. You might. I'm sure this is all a mistake. Perhaps more Cheney/Bush appointees still in charge? I can't help wondering how these voters don't immediately move against these guys, but they always just move against the government, don't they?

Nearly 600,000 Wounded Vets Claims for Disability Suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan Wars "backlogged" for Months

By Dave Lefcourt

There's a big controversy concerning the Dep't of Veterans Affairs where nearly 600,000 wounded vets of the Iraq & Afghanistan wars are having their claims for disability compensation "backlogged" for over 125 days. These wounded vets don't want to hear about the antiquated system now overwhelmed by their claims. They expect their claims be acted on swiftly and without red tape. They are right.

And one more march occurs abroad calling for job creation:  this one union led! As fragmented as the Italian government is now, it's quite a shot in the arm to see thousands in the street for this issue affecting so many people worldwide. Imagine thousands in the street in the USA. But no. We'd never hear about it probably as it wouldn't fit the correct story on the mainstream news, now would it?

Union Leads March in Rome Calling for Job Creation

May 18, 12:46 PM (ET)

ROME (AP) - A union of Italian metal workers has led thousands of people in a march through the heart of Rome to press the new government for measures to spur job creation.
 
FIOM union leader Maurizio Landini said Saturday's protest was held because Italy is "going nowhere" in terms of signs of economic growth amid a stubborn recession. The union is aligned with a left-wing labor confederation.
 
After weeks of political paralysis following inconclusive elections in February, Italy now has a "grand coalition" government, including bitter rivals from the center-left and center-right blocs in Parliament.
 
Unemployment for young people is at about 39 percent, while the overall jobless rate is 11.5 percent.

The previous government used spending cuts and higher taxes to battle Italy's debt. Italians are demanding job creation measures soon.

The Best Congress FIRE Sector Money Can Buy (And You Thought They Just Didn't Care - Or Were Inept) and Teflon Diamond Don/Liars Run Amuck But Not Ever Jailed In Smartest People Anywhere Crowd (Just Ask Them)

You know how much I distrust the Wall Street Journal and most so-called reporting vehicles that originate on or from the regions (even metaphysical) around Wall Street, but I've gotta admit that the situation has now gotten so dire that it seems even the really bad guys are telling on each other (or the worse(r) guys) and it's getting tougher and tougher to tell what the really bad behavior is nowadays.

Think it's been too long a while since I amused you with the upper-class doings of the Jamie Di(a)mon(d)s, the  CitiCorpsers, the JPMorganiters, and those go-go-golden guys at Goldman Sex (much better than sex - money!)? It's really that I've been awaiting the blows from the final trumpets (otherwise, it's soooo boring to just hear another big-time financial thief story). You know, before the end-of-the-world financial Armageddon announcements. From the heart of Antifascist Calling we learn the still appalling (and unchanging) facts.

As investigative journalist Pam Martens reported in Wall Street On Parade at the time, "The Financial Services Forum is a lobby group composed of 19 CEOs of the too-big-to-fail banks, both U.S. and foreign. . . . The Forum is not bashful about its lobbying agenda. According to the lobby disclosure document it filed with the Senate last year, it doesn't believe big banks should be broken up: 'The Forum opposes legislation to preemptively dismantle or limit the activities of well-capitalized and well-managed financial institutions, haircuts on secured creditors to financial institutions in the course of a resolution, and punitive taxes or levies on financial institutions'."

One result of that April White House meeting may be watered-down rules adopted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last week over domination by too-big-to-fail-and-jail banks of the $700 trillion (£461.4tn) global derivatives markets.

As Reuters reported, the new rules are a "compromise" that will leave regulators "fewer tools in hand to rein in the opaque derivatives trading between two parties that was among the causes of the 2007-2009 credit meltdown."

Allegedly "designed to make trading less opaque as part of the Dodd-Frank law overhauling Wall Street practices," the rules are "an important nod to an industry dominated by big banks, such as Citigroup Inc, Bank of America Corp and JPMorgan Chase & Co, the CFTC lowered the number of quotes clients need to collect from banks."

Indeed, the deeply-flawed, Wall Street-friendly Dodd-Frank legislation had a provision that would have made bidding on derivatives contracts public but it was left to CFTC to iron out the details. Well, we see where that went. CFTC's Chairman Gary Gensler, caving to pressure by lobbyists had already compromised on moves to make those trades public; hence his proposal to require at least five banks to issue price quotes on financialized garbage.

"But even that plan," The New York Times reported, "prompted a full-court press from Wall Street lobbyists. Banks and other groups that opposed the plan held more than 80 meetings with agency officials over the last three years, an analysis of meeting records shows. Goldman Sachs attended 19 meetings; the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Wall Street's main lobbying group, was there for 11."

"The outcome was a 'massive convenience' for the largest banks," Will Rhodes, "an analyst at Tabb Group, a market structure research and consultancy firm," told Reuters.

"I don't think it's going to have the same impact in terms of . . . the decentralization of risk that would have occurred had there been a requirement (for five quotes) in place."

But even these weak-kneed rules were too much for the best Congress that FIRE sector money can buy. One particularly filthy piece of legislative detritus which passed out on the House Agriculture and Financial Services Committees in March, HR 992, would allow banks to hold any kind of derivative in the same account as depositor funds, i.e., checking and savings accounts which enjoy FDIC insurance protection against bank losses.

And should one of these corrupt banks go belly up, since derivatives are senior in terms of bankruptcy pay-outs, hedge fund pirates sitting on the other side of trades with the bank would get paid back first with depositors potentially left holding the bag!

In other words, as banking analyst Ellen Brown pointed out last month in the wake of Cyprus' confiscation of depositor funds, when captured governments "are no longer willing to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that have gambled away their capital, the banks are now being instructed to 'recapitalize' themselves by confiscating the funds of their creditors, turning debt into equity, or stock; and the 'creditors' include the depositors who put their money in the bank thinking it was a secure place to store their savings."

"Too big to fail" now trumps all," Brown wrote. "Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks."

And standing at the front of the line with his hand out is none other than Wall Street "maestro," Jamie Dimon.

JPM Energy Price Manipulation: History Repeats as Tragedy and Farce

The latest scandal to rock JPM concern fraudulent schemes to manipulate energy markets.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that multiple government investigations uncovered evidence that America's largest bank, with some $2.5 trillion (£1.61tn) in assets, "devised 'manipulative schemes' that transformed 'money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers,' and that one of its most senior executives gave 'false and misleading statements' under oath."

That senior executive, Blythe Masters, one of JPM's "smartest gals in the room" who helped develop "credit default swaps, a derivative that played a role in the financial crisis," that is, blow up the global capitalist economy, was accused by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in a 70-page document cited by the Times, for her "'knowledge and approval of schemes' carried out by a group of energy traders in Houston" to manipulate energy prices in the "California and Michigan electric markets."

"The agency's investigators claimed," the Times disclosed, "that Ms. Masters had 'falsely' denied under oath her awareness of the problems and said that JPMorgan had made 'scores of false and misleading statements and material omissions' to authorities, the document shows."

In other words, Masters may have committed perjury, a jailable offense.

The FERC investigation was triggered by charges last year by the California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit run by California's state government, which estimated that "JPMorgan may have gamed the state's power market," resulting in tens of millions of dollars in "improper payments" in 2010 and 2011. "But that could be just the tip of the iceberg," the Los Angeles Times reported last summer.

According to the LA Times, "The bank continued its activities past that time frame, according to the ISO. It also says JPMorgan's alleged manipulation could have helped throw the entire energy market out of whack, imposing what could be incalculable costs on ratepayers."

Though suspended from energy trading in California," Bloomberg reported that JPM "may be evading the ban through swap agreements with EDF Group and Cargill Inc. subsidiaries, the state's grid operator said."

According to Bloomberg, Cal ISO said in a recent filing with FERC that JPM may be using "using swap contracts to secure a portion of the profit stream from a unit, while masking the identity of a party that has some level of control over the bidding."

Through its contracts with EDF and Cargill, "JPMorgan could be bringing in profits during its suspension 'beyond those contemplated' by FERC in its order, Cal ISO said. The operator recommended broad changes that would capture any situation in which 'a market participant structured transactions to evade its suspension of market-based rate authority'."

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. "What's worse," the Los Angeles Times reported, "it shows that we haven't learned anything from Enron's bogus energy trading, the disclosure of which helped destroy that firm in 2001 and land several of its executives in jail."

According to reporter Michael Hiltzik, "To the extent it was designed to exploit loopholes in energy trading rules, experts say, the scheme allegedly perpetrated by JPMorgan Ventures Energy Corp. is cut from the same cloth as Enron's infamous 'fat boy' swindle, which cost the state's ratepayers an estimated $1.4 billion in 2000."

Indeed, during the Securities and Exchange Commission's 2003 investigation into JPM's collusion with Enron, federal regulators charged Chase with "aiding and abetting Enron Corp.'s securities fraud."

At the time, the SEC said that "J.P. Morgan Chase aided and abetted Enron's manipulation of its reported financial results through a series of complex structured finance transactions, called 'prepays,' over a period of several years preceding Enron's bankruptcy."

Those fraudulent transactions were exploited by Enron officers led by "Bush Ranger," Chairman Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay, CEO Jeffrey Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow, "to report loans from J.P. Morgan Chase as cash from operating activities. The structural complexity of these transactions had no business purpose aside from masking the fact that, in substance, they were loans from J.P. Morgan Chase to Enron. Between December 1997 and September 2001, J.P. Morgan Chase effectively loaned Enron a total of approximately $2.6 billion in the form of seven such transactions." (emphasis added)

But as a Florida airline executive once told investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker during his probe into the 9/11 attacks: "Sometimes when things don't make business sense, its because they do make sense . . . just in some other way."

According to the SEC complaint, "the critical difference in the J.P. Morgan Chase/Enron prepays--and the reason that these transactions were in substance loans--was that they employed a structure that passed the counter-party commodity price risk back to Enron, thus eliminating all commodity risk from the transaction."

In other words, this was a classic example of what criminologist William K. Black describes as an "accounting control fraud." Under such schemes, a firm's chief operating officers are the recipients of massive corporate bonuses as they loot their own companies. As became evident during Enron's collapse, as well as during the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, Enron executives manipulated company books as fraudulently reported income drove share prices higher, which enriched those at the top through inflated asset values, while simultaneously disappearing liabilities, which were hidden from shareholders and Enron employees.

In the wake of Enron's collapse, shareholders lost $74 billion (£48.78bn), $45 billion (£29.66bn) of which was attributed to fraud, and the firm's 20,000 employees lost more than $2 billion (£1.32bn) from looted pension funds.

SEC investigators found that the JPM-Enron fraud was "accomplished through a series of simultaneous trades whereby Enron passed the counter-party commodity price risk to a J.P. Morgan Chase-sponsored special purpose vehicle called Mahonia, which passed the risk to J.P. Morgan Chase, which, in turn, passed the risk back to Enron."

The complaint charged that JPM's "Mahonia was included in the structure solely to effectuate Enron's accounting and financial reporting objectives. Enron told J.P. Morgan Chase that Enron needed Mahonia in the transactions for Enron's accounting. Mahonia was controlled by Chase and was directed by Chase to participate in the transactions ostensibly as a separate, independent, commodities-trading entity. As the complaint further alleges, in order to facilitate Enron's accounting objectives, J.P. Morgan Chase took various steps to make it appear that Mahonia was an independent third party."

Any future obligation assumed by Enron "were reduced to the repayment of cash it received from J.P. Morgan Chase with negotiated interest. The interest was calculated with reference to," wait for it, "LIBOR." (!)

"Since all price risk and, in certain transactions, even the obligation to transport a commodity were eliminated, the only risk in the transactions was Chase's risk that Enron would not make its payments when due, i.e., credit risk. In short, the complaint alleges, these seven prepays were in substance loans."

What penalties were extracted from JPM by the SEC for helping design Enron's massive fraud? A measly $120 million; in other words, chump change.

"Adopting eight different 'schemes' between September 2010 and June 2011," The New York Times reported, "the traders offered the energy at prices 'calculated to falsely appear attractive' to state energy authorities. The effort prompted authorities in California and Michigan to dole out about $83 million in 'excessive' payments to JPMorgan, the investigators said. The behavior had 'harmful effects' on the markets, according to the document."

As a result of fraudulent "schemes," designed solely to "generate large profits" at the expense of consumers in California and Michigan, FERC "enforcement officials plan to recommend that the commission hold the traders and Ms. Masters 'individually liable.' While Ms. Masters was 'less involved in the day-to-day decisions,' investigators nonetheless noted that she received PowerPoint presentations and e-mails outlining the energy trading strategies."

Plausible deniability aside, it appears that Masters was up to her eyeballs in the grift and "'planned and executed a systematic cover-up' of documents that exposed the strategy, including profit and loss statements," the Times averred.

Citing regulators' complaints that their investigation was "obstructed" by Masters and her cohorts, when "state authorities began to object to the strategy, Ms. Masters 'personally participated in JPMorgan's efforts to block' the state authorities 'from understanding the reasons behind JPMorgan’s bidding schemes,' the document said."

Referencing an April 2011 email, "Masters ordered a 'rewrite' of an internal document that raised questions about whether the bank had run afoul of the law. The new wording stated that 'JPMorgan does not believe that it violated FERC's policies'."
Will history repeat? You bet it will! Even if FERC were to levy a maximum penalty of $1 million per day for violating the rules, "the $180-million bill would be a pittance compared with the $14 billion in revenue collected annually by JPMorgan's investment banking arm, which houses the energy trading," the Los Angeles Times reported.

Talk about a sweet deal!

A Criminal Enterprise

Coming on the heels of a scathing 307-page Senate report released by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in March, which provided details of the scandalous actions by senior officers as they covered-up bank overexposure in the synthetic credit derivatives market along with a mammoth $6.2 billion (£3.98bn) loss for investors, and a toothless Consent Order by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency over allegations of JPM drug money laundering, the question is: Why hasn't Jamie Dimon already landed in the dock?

Leaving aside the criminal behavior of US Attorney General Eric Holder, adept at prosecuting national security whistleblowers and seizing the phone records of Associated Press reporters through the mechanism of an administrative subpoena, i.e., solely on the say-so of the Justice Department and the FBI, when it comes to prosecuting corporate criminals, including those who collude with transnational drug cartels, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has surpassed the deceitful practices of the Bush regime.

No where is this more apparent than with the non-prosecution of criminogenic banks.

A withering 45-page report authored by GrahamFisher analyst Joshua Rosner, JPMorgan Chase: Out of Control, paints the organization as a criminal enterprise. According to Rosner: "Even without the inclusion" of some $16 billion [£10.41bn] in "litigation expenses" arising from JPM's foreclosure scandals, "since 2009, the Company has paid more than $8.5 billion [£5.53bn] in settlements for the various regulatory and legal problems discussed in this report. These settlement costs, which include a small number of recent settlements of older issues, represent almost 12% of the net income generated between 2009-2012."

Amongst the patently illegal schemes hatched by JPM detailed in Rosner's report we find the following:

● Bank Secrecy Act violations
● Money laundering for drug cartels
● Sanctions busting
● Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act
● The execution of fictitious trades where the customer, with JPM's full knowledge, is on both sides of the deal
● SEC enforcement actions relating to CDO and RMBS misrepresentations
● Foreclosure fraud and abuse
● Failure to properly segregate customer funds and then failing to report it
● Consumer abuses related to check overdraft penalties
● Violations of NY State's ERISA Act, the result of JPM investments in failing structured investment vehicles (SIVs)
● Credit card collection practices, "eerily similar" to JPM's foreclosure abuses
● Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act; i.e., illegally foreclosing on the homes of soldiers, including those stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq
● Illegal flood insurance commissions
● Municipal bond market manipulation, including $8 million in bribes paid to "close friends" of Jefferson County, Alabama commissioners for sewer system bonds that eventually bankrupted the county
● Violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act related to bid rigging and payments associated with "seeing competitors' bids in 93 municipal bond deals"
● Repeated obstruction and refusal to hand over documents to the OCC related to their investigation of JPM's role in the Madoff fraud

Will any of this change? It's doubtful.

Rosner writes: "JPM appears to have taken a page out of the Fannie Mae playbook in which the company perfected the art of cozying up to elected officials, dominating trade associations, employing political heavyweights and their former staffers and creating the image of American Flag-waving, apple-pie-eating, good corporate-citizen, all of which supported an 'implied government guarantee' and seemingly lowered their cost of funding. Additionally, rather than being driven by the strength of its operations and management, many of the JPM's returns appear to be supported by an implied guarantee it receives as a too-big-to-fail institution."

In other words, as with other well-connected "Families" that come to mind, "too-big-to-fail-and-jail" is bankster code for "we can do whatever the fuck we want."

Posted by Antifascist at 10:30 AM

So, is Kenny Lay still dead?

Wonder where the unexpected sudden deaths will suddenly start occurring?

Everything Is Rigged, Everything Corrupted (Thank You, Matt!)

Since we know how little the U.S. agencies do now to protect the U.S. consumer interest (being administered by those who benefit from the opposite), I thought it might be enlightening to research what other countries are doing.

And it is.

I read Matt Taibbi.

Religiously.

Thank Matt every day.

By the way, the comments to Taibbi's essay are worth the admission price alone!

Everything Is Rigged, Continued: Oil Companies Raided

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

17 May 13

e're going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.

According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data:

The commission said the alleged price collusion, which may have been going on since 2002, could have had a "huge impact" on the price of petrol at the pumps "potentially harming final consumers".

Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the alleged rigging of oil prices was "as serious as rigging Libor" - which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.

The inquiry also involves Platts, the world's largest oil price reporting agency. The concept here is very similar to both the LIBOR scandal, which involved banks manipulating the benchmark rates for interest rates, and to the possible rigging of interest rate swap prices through the manipulation of ISDAfix, the benchmark rate for those instruments, which is also the subject of a regulatory probe.

We wrote about both of those scandals in last month's Rolling Stone article, "Everything is Rigged." In that piece, finance professionals talked about the potential for manipulation in other markets that involve voluntary price reporting:

What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust.

"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.

That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities - jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it.

One analyst I spoke to for that piece talked specifically about Platts (and another, similar price assessment company), noting that they "do benchmarks for the entire oil market, the entire refined products market" and "you name it" - any of these benchmarks that rely on voluntary reporting could be manipulated.

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Financial Scandal Yet

It's not clear yet exactly what is alleged to have occurred, but Europeans have long complained that retail gas prices have not seemed to match wholesale prices. In fact, complaints that wholesale prices at gas stations were noticeably slow to fall when wholesale prices fell prompted the U.K.-based Office of Fair Trading last year to conduct a cursory inquiry into possible anti-competitive behavior in the fuel markets. Early this year, they announced that they hadn't found enough evidence to warrant a full-blown investigation. But complaints persisted.

The story is obviously hugely significant in its own right, just as the LIBOR story was. But both are even more unpleasant in conjunction with each other, and the other price-fixing scandals that have cropped up in the financial markets in the last year or two. We've had other price-fixing scandals involving gas in the U.K. and here in the U.S., just a few weeks ago, it came out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) concluded that JPMorgan Chase used "manipulative schemes" to tinker with energy prices in Michigan and California.

FERC last year also recommended a massive $470 million fine against Barclays for similar activity. (Barclays has vowed to fight the penalty.) Deutsche Bank, meanwhile, settled with FERC for $1.7 million after the commission alleged that the German bank was involved with manipulation in the California energy markets for several months during 2010.

More on all this later . . .

Comments:

Charley James•6 hours ago 

I've always suspected that oil pricing was rigged, going back to the days - roughly 100 lifetimes ago now - when I worked in the Chicago bureau of Business Week when McGraw Hill owned it and Platt's Oilgram.
The Platt's correspondent in the bureau, Herb Hugo and whose office was around the corner from mine, would spend his day phoning oil companies to get their prices for various grades of crude oil and processed petroleum. I personally sat in Herb's office on more than one occasion and often heard him say to whoever was on the phone (in essence), "Oh, OK, so you're 10-cents below what ABC is pricing at and a nickel less than XYZ. Oh, you're going to match XYZ? Thanks!"
If that wasn't price fixing, I don't know what dictionary is being used.
When I suggested to New York editors a story on this, I not only was turned down flat but told to mind my own business.

Randall James•a day ago

Matt, the follow up is even more painful to take in, than the original. It's great writing, and ballsy, considering the climate, right now. I'm hoping they press charges, and start the trial next week. There should be hundreds of brokers tossed in jail for hundreds of years, and if somebody's God is watching, trillions of bucks in fines.Little chance of that, I know, but a guy's gotta' dream.

Philip Branton • a day ago

Matt........do you not understand that WAR is rigged too. It does not take a rocket scientist to walk out side and understand and see the ENERGY all around you that is being squandered so that boys can go off to DIE for OIL. Most people are led to believe that their house is their home.....but in reality their house is a energy plant. This market manipulation is only coming to light via the pressure from the fallout of Wikileaks. Drug Barons are no different than Oil barons and Banking barons, just look at how the Taliban clipped the poppy price fixing world wide that resulted in what..??

Zack B • a day ago

Let's see, Oil price rigging: Platts; Mortgage backed securities: S&P; Libor rigging: S&P; No Child Left Behind testing: CTB. All divisions of The McGraw_Hill Companies.

pete smith • a day ago

Finally somebody is waking up the public. Do you understand how rigged the silver and gold markets happen to be? The COMEX allows naked shorts on gold and silver (mostly silver) that allows for 100 more times available metal to be traded! I other words they sell short 1000 tons while only having 10 tons available to trade. JP Morgan is almost always invovled and it rigs the price down as at will. If the people only knew, they would flip. Keep reporting the fraud Matt, keep reporting it and make sure you have a body guard because these guys are powerful.

Edward Cate•a day ago

Imagine that: "Fined millions of pounds" while they make billions. Small part of overhead. Thanks for all your fine work, Matt.

rapier • 2 days ago

The term is manage. Most all auction markets are managed for the most part. The goal and result of managed markets is stability, usually. Of course managed markets are not really markets so over longer terms mispricing occurs along with complacency about risk. The other thing is that the managers gain ever more power and wealth. Oddly each crisis that comes from mispricing (think MBS) only gives them more power.
Nobody knows when or where the next crisis will come but the managers are absolutely certain they will be richer and more powerful after it comes.

Calculus Entropy ayn_rand_welfare_queen • a day ago

Ha! Yes, the Invisible Hand shows itself once again, and it's choking the consumer.

number6• 2 days ago

The one thing that I can't get my brain around is that European Commission Regulators raided companies which have hundreds of billions of dollars at their fingertips. You don't do that unless you have serious back-up. I mean super serious back up. Otherwise you are stark raving mad.

It must be one small group of the super rich trying to do in another group. Did the artificial price hikes of the energy block do so much damage to some small super rich group who might primarily own manufacturing and retail on a trans national scale--were the price spikes such a threat that the oil monopoly needs to be taken down? BP is the biggest on the planet, isn't it? It must be the most powerful. Did the energy spikes cause so much hunger and destabilize so many small countries that it's becoming apparent to everyone outside oil cartel that they are destabilizing the "system" as a whole and have to be taken out? Relieved of their power.

Or is there one group of the super rich that is taking out everyone else and absorbing them. I keep thinking about (wasn't it?) Matt's article about the banks where he was saying that super big banks are starting to feed on each other, to grow. Who are the "European Commission Regulators?" Who hired them? Who is their boss. Whoever they are they have some serious backup. Can you imagine going after the livelihood of someone worth hundreds of billions of dollars? God, I wouldn't want to be that person.

Can you imagine the numbers of phones that have been ringing since yesterday? It must be in the tens of thousands. The amount of money at stake here--in an oil monopoly --are staggering. Just imagine you could raise the price of oil on the planet by three dollars above what it should be and pocket the difference. Can you imagine how rich some of these dudes are? Can you imagine the hysterical and angry calls that are being made? The threats? The ugly, ugly, threats?

bookmanjb number6•2 days ago

Or it could be that the companies' monumental greed finally went just a little too far to a point where it simply couldn't be ignored. One advantage of the insanely huge bureaucracy of the EU is that it pays attention to insanely huge masses of money (cf.: Microsoft & Google). If you flout too many of its regs, the bureaucracy moves tectonically toward you and forces some sort of accommodation.

Bill L John Walls • 2 days ago

Just like Big Pharma, markets a newer drugs after only basic testing and then use the public as lab rats. A few million dollar wrongful death suits are chump-change compared to the massive profits, they're built right into the cost of doing business

JackWardenIII John Walls • 2 days ago

IRS
Benghazi
AP bugging
move along , nothing to see here ?!?!?!?

Bill L JackWardenIII • 2 days ago

Don't look now, Jack, but those things you mention are a done deal on the official level -- offered up a scapegoat or two, blamed it on mysterious unknown others, and that's all she wrote. All that hollering and squawking and dancing around will maybe get a few more 'redacted' reports and then fade off into NoNo Land, as usual.

John Muller • 2 days ago

I think the EU felt the financial crisis much more than the US

number6 John Muller • 2 days ago

Hell yes. There are sooooo many countries that have had rioting in the streets.

JackWardenIII John Muller• 2 days ago

Socialism has failed in the EU
The chickens have finally come to roost 

• number6 JackWardenIII • 2 days ago

  Socialism was doing fine. And then the financeers and super rich hijacked the democracies and sucked all the money out of the system. Post World War II Europe was literally a Utopia for a few decades after World War Two. A whole generation got a free education, free health care, got good jobs, and had a great retirement. And now there's no money for anyone. The super rich have it all.
  
  

  number6 number6 • 2 days ago

  One other thing the super rich did in Europe when they formed the Euro was to quietly bump up the immigration rates to all the member countries by stunning amounts. A lot of the cities in Europe can't absorb the numbers of people flooding in. You can't create jobs fast enough. That's the biggest reason why there were all those riots outside of Paris a few years back. Nobody has jobs.
  Overpopulation. But the rich and the financial institutions thrive off of what they are calling, "violent growth."

  
  

  Jed Clampett • 2 days ago

  This is the Conservative way, steal all you can and blame (insert any liberal here).

  
  

  JackWardenIII Jed Clampett • 2 days ago

  IRS
  Benghazi
  AP bugging move along , nothing to see here ?!?!?!?

  
  

  ayn_rand_welfare_queen JackWardenIII • a day ago

  IRS: Congress shifts the problem of campaign financing onto the IRS. Yeah, that was never going to work.
  Benghazi: Look, I know you guys want to go to war with Iran, but, this won't do it.
  AP controversy: This is the first administration to pursue its critics?? Oh wait, every recent administration has. And that fourth amendment was gutted under the Cheney administration anyway.
  More manufactured crisis. You can stand around wailing or wonder what end is served in each instance?

  
  Bill Rice • 2 days ago

  Matt might have a monopoly on the biggest story (ies) of our lifetimes - almost all markets are rigged. I'm increasingly becoming convinced this is case with silver and gold, where record demand for precious metals is somehow resulting in prices that are plummeting. The "watch dog regulating agencies" a might very well be complicit or just cowardly. good to see there's at least one journalist who is doing the profession's most important job. Look forward to future reporting and commentary.

  
  

  reallybearish Bill Rice•a day ago

  These market riggings can be used to bribe politicians and market regulators. No reason to have a bag man pass unmarked 100 dollar bills in brown paper bags in the middle of the night. Just signal when the markets are ready to be manipulated, and when to buy commodities futures (in your own secret accounts). Poof! Make tens of thousands in a few seconds, sell the contracts and take a vacation on the Riviera. Do this over and over for years to come and go for a beach house in the Hamptons.

  
  

  sgtdoom Bill Rice • 2 days ago

  But of course. With futures contracts, and naked swaps, and the DTCC's Stock Borrow Program, and opaque hedge funds with trillions of dollars at their beck and call (both semi-real and structured finance, i.e., credit derivatives) everything can be and is rigged.

  
  

  number6 • 2 days ago

  What's amazing here is that the offices have actually been raided and someone's actually doing something bout the price fixing. I'm not shocked that the prices are fixed, but that some government is actually doing something. On Max Keiser not too long ago they discussed the results of a U.S. govt. study that said that the oil spike we had a few years back--where the price of oil went over 100 dollars a barrel for the first time, and we were all spending close to 5 bucks a gallon in America, and the economy went down the toilet--that that was all completely fixed. It was all a fraud. A handful of people got ridiculously wealthy from that. Tens of thousands of gardeners and other small businesses across America went under--because they couldn't make a profit with the high fuel prices. It was all a sham. And of course, no one has ever been prosecuted and no one will go to jail. Thanks for posting this Matt. Christ, this should be on the front page of the L.A. Times. Instead, we get Angelina Jolie. The world is so F'd up.

  
  

  sgtdoom number6 • 2 days ago

  Regarding the oil price speculation: mostly performed on ICE, or InterContinental Exchange by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. And who owns ICE? Why, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the oil companies (BP, Royal Dutch/Shell, etc., plus a smaller stake by Deutsche Bank). And who is ICE buying recently?
  The NYSE. And what does the NYSE own? Along with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Credit Suisse, the DTCC, of course!
  It's ALL rigged . . . .
  Furthermore, Tens of thousands of gardeners and other small businesses across America went under... --- it goes even waaaay beyond that.
  Thousands of small American businesses, which were publicly traded, were naked short sold out of business by the concentrated short selling of the hedge funds, utilizing the DTCC's Stock Borrow Program, to do a number on stocks which technically and legally couldn't even be in play (that is, the stocks were owned by the companies, and/or individual shareholders who never traded them!).

And much more craziness coming.

Depend on it.

What the Heck's Going On With the Obamaites? The Law Behind the A.P. Phone-Record Scandal Is Ours, So, Holder Like Arctic Ice Is Gone? STFU Grads & Be Glad Your Masters Have Jobs

The difference in the two parties today (if you listen to their true concerns about environmental and economic devastation in light of the rapidly oncoming (as we breathe) sacred fracking/shale oil climate-destroying missions) seems to be "in how enthusiastically the lemmings should march towards the cliff."

Is "intelligence a lethal mutation?" (Watch the video below for the unsurprising answer.)

Ever wonder what Adam Smith really said about the greedy?

You may be surprised. And what he said about the owners of his world (and ours).

Professor Chomsky of MIT knows a bit about history and, oh, linguistics. You'll also be interested in what he has to report about the "Arab Spring" collapsing due to horrendous pressure (that means troops and money injected) from the U.S.A. and S.A. (Saudi Arabia). And, oh yeah, the end of summer ice in the Arctic? Date moved from 2050 to 2020. So, we're in luck! We'll get to experience it!



It was important. It must have been. Otherwise, they broke their own rules. But has it been a charade from the first? So many sell-outs. So much time.

And so many, many sell-outs.

I empathize with Charles Pierce, but he almost looks like an insider who's only really upset when it's his personal ox being gored. Not that he hasn't reported on plenty of administration misdoings previously and thought that Holder was not addressing the issues a real progressive Attorney General should have at the forefront. He has, but I haven't heard a call for Holder's dismissal before. Have you?

May 14, 2013

The Law Behind the A.P. Phone-Record Scandal

Posted by Lynn Oberlander



The cowardly move by the Justice Department to subpoena two months of the A.P.’s phone records, both of its office lines and of the home phones of individual reporters, is potentially a breach of the Justice Department’s own guidelines. Even more important, it prevented the A.P. from seeking a judicial review of the action.

Some months ago, apparently, the government sent a subpoena (or subpoenas) for the records to the phone companies that serve those offices and individuals, and the companies provided the records without any notice to the A.P.

If subpoenas had been served directly on the A.P. or its individual reporters, they would have had an opportunity to go to court to file a motion to quash the subpoenas. What would have happened in court is anybody’s guess — there is no federal shield law that would protect reporters from having to testify before a criminal grand jury — but the Justice Department avoided the issue altogether by not notifying the A.P. that it even wanted this information. Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.

It is not, again, as if the government didn’t have options. The D.C. Circuit (in a 2005 opinion upholding a finding of contempt against the Times’s Judith Miller and Time’s Matt Cooper for refusing to testify about who had disclosed Valerie Plame’s identity as a C.I.A. operative) has held that there isn’t a First Amendment privilege for journalists to refuse to testify before a criminal grand jury, as has the Second Circuit (in a 2006 case in which the government was trying to find out who told the Times about a planned raid on two foundations suspected of providing aid to terrorists). In the wake of the decisions, there was a renewed effort to pass a federal shield law — though the proposed law would not have provided absolute protection in cases of national security — but, with the rise of WikiLeaks, that discussion died.

The Times’s case provides the facts most similar to the A.P.’s. The prosecutor had asked the Times to provide phone records; when the Times refused, he threatened to get the records directly from the phone companies. The Times then went to court and sought a declaratory judgment that its records were protected by reporter’s privilege. The Second Circuit ruled that phone records — even those held by a third party, such as a phone company — were subject to the same common-law privilege that would apply to the journalists’ own records.

However, the court noted that there wasn’t a constitutional privilege to refuse to disclose such records to a criminal grand jury, and that any common-law privilege would be not absolute but “qualified” — meaning that it could be overcome by a compelling government interest. The Circuit, however, declined to define the privilege, other than to say that it wouldn’t stand up in the case before it.

Crucially, though the Times lost that case, 2–1, all of the judges agreed that government could not act unilaterally, without judicial review. As Judge Sack said in dissent:

For the question . . . is not so much whether there is protection for the identity of reporters’ sources, or even what that protection is, but which branch of government decides whether, when, and how any such protection is overcome.

He added, “Judge Winter’s opinion makes clear that the government’s demonstration of ‘necessity’ and ‘exhaustion’ must, indeed, be made to the courts, not just the Attorney General.”

In the A.P.’s case, though, the latter is exactly what did happen. (Though since Eric Holder, the Attorney General, said Tuesday that he recused himself, that demonstration wasn’t even made to him, but to someone else in the Department of Justice.) The Department of Justice chose to avoid the court system — and its independent check on the Department’s power — by serving its subpoenas directly on the phone companies without telling the A.P. In so doing, it apparently relied on an exception to its own policy of notifying a media company in advance of a subpoena if doing so “would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.”

If, as has been reported, the grand jury is investigating the leak of information concerning the C.I.A. foiling in Yemen of an Al-Qaeda plot to bomb an airliner heading to the United States, it is hard to understand how a later request for phone records would pose a threat to the integrity of the investigation. This request for two months of records was ostensibly made after the calls were made.

If the government had a suspicion that one of its employees was the leak, it could go to a court itself and seek a wiretap of that employee. (Of course, they would have to make a showing of probable cause, which they were able to skip by going directly to the A.P.’s phone companies.) There would seem to be no reason not to let the media organization know that it wanted phone records of calls already made—after all, what was the rush? Let the courts decide whether the Justice Department really needs those records or not.

Lynn Oberlander is the general counsel of The New Yorker. Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP.

Eric Holder Must Go

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

14 May 13

hat in the several hundred names of god do these people think they're doing?

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies. "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.

These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.

Yes, the Bush people wiretapped without warrants. Yes, they trod upon the rule of law. Yes, they set all manner of horrible precedents for future presidents to follow. Yes, the phone companies rolled over, the way they all rolled over, and doesn't the president's reversal on telecom immunity back during the 2008 campaign look even more interesting now? And, no, none of that matters.

The government would not say why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States. In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP's source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an "unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information."

This isn't hard. This is what made Egil (Bud) Krogh famous. This is what got people sent to jail in the mid-1970s. This is the Plumbers, all over again, except slightly more formal this time, and laundered, disgracefully, even more directly through the Department Of Justice. And of course, this is not nearly good enough. And even if you point out, as you should, that the AP is hyping this story a little - The government "secretly" obtained the records? Doesn't that imply that nobody knew the records had been seized? Wasn't there a subpoena? The phone companies knew. - the ignoble clumsiness of this more than obviates those particular quibbles.

The White House on Monday said that other than press reports it had no knowledge of Justice Department attempts to seek AP phone records. "We are not involved in decisions made in connection with criminal investigations, as those matters are handled independently by the Justice Department," spokesman Jay Carney said.

That is all my arse. At the least, this was a counter-terrorism operation. (Why else would Brennan have been questioned already?). Which puts the whole business inside the White House. And you'd have to be a toddler or a fool to believe that Eric Holder could go off on his own and take as politically volatile a step as this. But, let us take the White House at its word. Eric Holder did this by himself. He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic.

Nobody likes the press. I will grant you that, but the administration is soft if it thinks the public distrusts the press that much. And to have this genuinely chilling revelation emerge simultaneously with the Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! mummery and the IRS dumbassery is pretty much a full broadside below the water line of this administration's credibility. Good god, this is going to be one long-ass summer.

(Charlie has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently "Idiot America." He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.)

The comments on this essay at Esquire seem very similar to those found on many anarchist sites (and this is Esquire, folks!) . . . leading a fair observer to wonder if they will become a permanent fixture in comments everywhere (if they print them) as neither party is volunteering for change duty.

Comments:

• Sharon Dymond · Top Commenter · LSU

  And that fool couldn't find anything wrong with the behavior of Goldman Sachs, AIG et al? Th'fk?

  Reply · 2 · Yesterday at 6:02am
• Paul Loop · Top Commenter

  This joins chained CPI, Medicare ``reform'' and Gitmo as broken deals. And it goes to the top of the list. Fuck this shit.

  Reply · 2 · Monday at 10:13pm

  • John L Bush · Top Commenter · Works at Virginia Tech

    yeah, agreed, and then what are we gonna say when he approves the keystone XL pipeline??

    Reply · Yesterday at 6:55am
• Kent Anderson · Top Commenter

  
  Holder is the Vernon Jordan of this Administration. And like Jordan did with both Carter and Clinton, he has done nothing but tarnish it from day one. He needs to resign three days ago yesterday. And while I don't think this reaches anywhere near what the plumbers did for Nixon, I am reminded of what old George Carlin said, "You think you have rights, you don't. You have the illusion of rights. You have privileges and they can be taken away. At any time."
  
  A long time ago, at a different part of my life, I had access to some of these kinds of people. A friend at the time worked for Michigan Bell and showed me the place where all the recordings go. He even played a few for me. Fascinating stuff. But what he told me, in 1987, was this...Your conversations aren't private. They are kept and stored for years. We have copies of conversations going back to the 1920's. He even dug up a conversation from the 1930's as proof. It was a mundane conversation, but still.
  
  And now, they have smartphones and microchips in your passport and driver's license and ID cards. 200 years from now, they'll be listening to our phone calls and knowing where we went and for how long. Hell, they already do.
  

  Reply · 1 · Yesterday at 6:37am
• Cup O' Joe

  Frankly I'm to the point where we should just hand the keys over to the GOP and let us drive the country right off the cliff, because frankly we deserve it.They're fierce and dedicated and unreasonable, we hem and haw about things and let them set the pace. And I don't mean Obama, I mean us. I mean the constituents of the GOP who vote in people like Sanford and Rubio because they're either too stupid for words or because their hatred of anything other than them and the sheer joy they get pissing people off overshadows every other motivation they have.
  
  I get told all the time by people who think we can bring back Tinkerbell by clapping louder that a few dedicated people can change the world. And they're right. But the few dedicated people are on the other side, and they've pretty much already won.

  Reply · 1 · Yesterday at 11:06am

  • 
    Mary Hartman · Top Commenter · Rochester, Minnesota

    We get so distracted by political jousting and forget that Bush is Clinton is Bush is Obama...... We so desperately WANT to believe that the party we're affiliated with is on higher moral ground and made up of a better class of more caring people and deny the reality when it's staring us in the face.
    
    Both parties are corrupt to the core. While the American people have been arguing over Right and Left the Left and Right have together undermined our safety, our security, our freedom, and our ability to seek and find redress for grievances. In 2004 the US government authorized the CIA to begin HUMINT operations on US soil against US citizens using local, state and federal law enforcement and intelligence sources. Major General Michael Ennis moved from DIA HUMINT to CIA HUMINT and brought a whole cadre of narcissistic "holier than thou" jerks into positions of power and there was not a peep out of anyone.
    
    This insidious "infrastructure" permeates government on every level and knows no political boundaries. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We the people have turned over Absolute Power and look to the power structure we relinquished control over to protect us from itself. This is a symptom of the bigger problem, which cannot be defined by insults flung from the left or right because the fact of the matter is that the stench comes from both.

    Reply · Yesterday at 9:05pm
• June Butler · Top Commenter · LSU

  You know, the drone killings alone are enough to put me off Obama. Do I think Eric Holder implemented the AP invasion of privacy expedition on his own? Not a chance. What surprises me is that anyone still believes their phone conversations or any of their online activities are private. It's been a good many years since I was naive enough to be confident about privacy. For all I know there may be tiny TV cameras hidden in every room of my house. If I found that to be the case, I would not be surprised. I'm one of the little people, so it's probably not worth any spy agency's effort or expense.
  
  One thing I do know is that I'm done with defending Obama. Maybe the change that's needed in this not-so-fair land is for Republicans to have their way with little or no restraint, and then the backlash will come - or not.

  
  Reply · 1 · Yesterday at 8:27am

And, of course, it's bless the new grads time! And what fun it's become. This millennium anyway. Graduating in a world of no jobs worth a damn (if they find any at all).

Hell, last Sunday we had that blockhead (and who could believe he was really just a clever salesman?) Steve Case lecturing the grads at UNC about his great success (I guess) in talking Time Warner's bumfuzzled idiots into lying down and being run over by his incredibly overvalued AOL franchise in an acquisition, which, yes, made a lot of connected people a healthy dollop of profits in the short term before the company's value dropped by more than $100 billion, and they finally had the sense to break apart eight years later when the combined market cap of Time Warner and Time Warner Cable had gotten to less than $40 billion, down from $350 billion at the time the merger was announced. But, hey, that's in the past. We're the move-on country!

And no one booed. No one. Oh, for the old college days.

Education. It ain't what's for dinner anymore.

14 May 2013

‘STFU’ Is AIG CEO’s Advice To College Grads

By Bess Levin



Robert Benmosche is still putting the finishing touches on his commencement address of hope.

Robert Benmosche, the chief executive officer of insurer American International Group Inc, has some tough love for college students graduating in the aftermath of the financial crisis. “You have to accept the hand that’s been dealt you in life,” Benmosche said in an interview today with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television. “Don’t cry about it. Deal with it.” The CEO is scheduled to give a commencement address May 18 at New York State’s Alfred University, where he earned a degree in math and played football. College graduates have struggled to find jobs after the financial crisis sent the U.S. unemployment rate as high as 10 percent in 2009.

Joblessness for recent college graduates, ages 20 to 29, was 12.6 percent in October 2011, a Bureau of Labor Statistics review last month showed. “They want me to talk to the students and give them a sense of encouragement, especially with the high unemployment,” said Benmosche, 68. “My advice will be, whatever opportunity comes your way, take it. Take it and treat it as if it’s the only one that’s coming your way, because that actually may be the truth.”

AIG CEO Tells Grads Don’t Cry About Economy, Deal With It [Bloomberg]

Well, he didn't mince words.

Did he?

Jeez. Sometimes I feel like I'm caught in a time warp watching/living through Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels over and over.

"In realtime" as I used to joke when I was a programmer.