Lehman failed to report “repo” transactions, cooked books

If this doesn’t convince you that the Timothy Geithner knew about the securities shenanigans that were going on at Lehman, than I don’t know what will.

Keep in mind, that Geithner ran Lehman through 3 “stress tests” prior to bankruptcy; all of which Lehman failed, and yet, nothing was done. Anton R. Valukas–the examiner who wrote the 2,200 page investigative-report which was released on Thursday– has provided plenty of information detailing Lehman’s “materially misleading” accounting and “actionable balance sheet manipulation.”

In other words, they cooked the books.

“Quite a few observers… have been stunned and frustrated at the refusal to investigate what was almost certain accounting fraud at Lehman. ….The unraveling isn’t merely implicating Fuld (Lehman CEO) and his recent succession of CFOs, or its accounting firm, Ernst & Young, as might be expected. It also emerges that the NY Fed, and thus Timothy Geithner, were at a minimum massively derelict in the performance of their duties, and may well be culpable in aiding and abetting Lehman in accounting fraud and Sarbox violations….

We need to demand an immediate release of the e-mails, phone records, and meeting notes from the NY Fed and key Lehman principals regarding the NY Fed’s review of Lehman’s solvency. If, as things appear now, Lehman was allowed by the Fed’s inaction to remain in business, when the Fed should have insisted on a wind-down ….. at a minimum, the NY Fed helped perpetuate a fraud on investors and counterparties.

This pattern further suggests the Fed, which by its charter is tasked to promote the safety and soundness of the banking system, instead, via its collusion with Lehman management, operated to protect particular actors to the detriment of the public at large.

And most important, it says that the NY Fed, and likely Geithner himself, undermined, perhaps even violated, laws designed to protect investors and markets. If so, he is not fit to be Treasury secretary or hold any office related to financial supervision and should resign immediately. (Naked Capitalism)

Repeat: “Accounting fraud”, “collusion”, “aiding and abetting.” These are serious charges by a usually restrained blogger.

And this is from Zero Hedge:

“Lehman has become merely the latest example of all that is broken with today’s crony capitalist system…. The evident conclusion is that the core driver of modern capitalist society is fraud at its very core, and nothing short of a massive revolutionary overhaul of the political system, which is the number one defender .. of very lucrative bribes and kickbacks originating from the same rotten Wall Street that (is) nothing but a sham filled with toxic assets” Zero Hedge

This story isn’t going away. Someone has to go to jail. It’s clear that Geithner acted as the “chief facilitator” of industrial scale securities flim-flam which led directly to the Great Crash of ‘08. He needs to be held accountable for his actions.
_______

Mike Whitney

Citigroup announces possible bank holiday

Warns customers it “reserves the right” to delay withdrawals from checking accounts for seven days.

This notice was sent to customers nationwide:

“Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change,”

Citigroup later claimed that it was a mistake and only applied to residents of Texas.  They later released the following statement:

Citibank has now released the following statement by way of explanation: “When Citibank moved to unlimited FDIC coverage in 2009, we had to reclassify many checking accounts to allow for immediate withdrawals in order to ensure all customers qualified for the additional coverage. When we moved back to standard FDIC coverage with most major banks in 2010, Citibank decided to reclassify those accounts back to make them eligible again for promotional incentives. To do so, Federal Reserve Reg D requires these accounts, called NOW accounts, to reserve the right to require a 7-day notice of withdrawal. We recently communicated this technical requirement to our customers. However, we have never exercised this right and have no plans to do so in the future.” [futureofcapitalism.com]

Detroit schools offer class in how to to work at Walmart

Corporate Personhood: First Amendment Rights

revolutionnot.com

Supreme Court OKs unlimited corporate spending on elections (LA Times)

Reporting from Washington – Overturning a century-old restriction, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations could spend as much as they wanted to sway voters in federal elections.

In a landmark 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative bloc said that corporations had the same right to free speech as individuals, and for that reason the government could not stop corporations from spending to help their favored candidates.

…..

I have so many issues with this that it felt like someone kicked me in the chest. Watching this move through the system was worrisome. This decision has only further solidified the fascist take over of our republic.

I wrote about corporate personhood last year during Sotomayor’s admission into the court. She is very much questioning not just first amendment rights but giving any constitutional rights to corporations.

Once again, the strict constructionist conservative wing of the Supreme Court threw out their ideals and voted to further corporate power and it’s take-over of our government. It’s *($%^ infectious. It’s growing and they have bastardized the US Constitution again.

This is how the strict constructionists strayed to lands beyond from their ideals. Strict Constructionists

“Strict constructionism” is also used in American political discourse as an umbrella term for conservative legal philosophies such as originalism and textualism, which emphasize judicial restraint and fidelity to the original meaning (or originally intended meaning) of constitutions and laws.

The original intent of the constitution nor the 14th Amendment never even considered corporations as actual people. If they had intended Corporations to have the same constitutional rights as individuals they would have written “People and Corporations” throughout the document. In fact, before corporations had personhood, they needed a charter for organization which needed to be continually renewed by each state. That is the original intent of the Constitution.

There are a few arguments for it:

• Investor protection
• Management protection

There are so many arguments against it:

• They have a LOT money, translating into more and more effective speech for corporations
• They enjoy more rights in the form of lower tax rates and then just on profit. This is like taxing Caucasians 20% and everyone else 25%. Secondly, imagine if actual people were only taxed on what we “save” because all living costs were tax deductible? Also, imagine states fighting for your citizenship by giving you incentives like no state taxes for 10 years? These corporate “people” have preferential laws.
• It is a form of double representation. The investors are already represented as themselves. They vote and can put their own money towards a campaign. If you invest in a company but want another canditate to win other than what is being supported by the corporation, then the corporation is not accurately representing you.
• Corporations make false claims and representations. They use their First Amendment Rights to do great harm to the people. A great example of this is the Tobacco and Cigarette Industry claiming that smoking was safe and funding skewed studies.
• Financial Ratings companies like Standard & Poor and Moody say that their financial ratings are opinion and protected by the First Amendment. So, when they rated toxic assets as AAA they had no liability to their word even though the entire financial industry depends on these ratings accuracy. Giving them accountability may actually force them to give securities proper ratings.
• The Constitution cannot be cherry-picked. A real person cannot only have some right in the constitution. A person MUST have all rights. The problem is that corporations are slaves and cannot vote, to name two important conflicts with corporations having the full rights of the constitution.
• A corporation legally must maximize shareholder value. This is the highest law to the corporation and can even be sued by shareholders if found to not be doing this. These include things that could be “to the detriment of people.” Corporations do not have the same priorities as actual people who exist in reality. Two or three times a day, we eat. Without sufficient food we die. Corporations don’t have these daily existential crises

Solutions:

• Force the court to explain why corporations don’t have full First Amendment Rights as people do. Corporations are “artificial people” after all. Justice Clarence Thomas had the clarity to at least do away with this contradiction.
• Force the court to tell us how corporations are not slaves.
• Force the court to tell us how corporations will participate in voting during an election.
• Force the court to tell us how a corporation can use a firearm without any other person helping.
• Force the court to tell us how a corporation can be conscripted into a war if we re-instate the draft.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations younger than 21 can possess alcohol.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations don’t have identification cards like passports or driver licenses.
• Force the court to tell us how to imprison a corporation in a jail.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations owned by foreign entities, including foreign governments, can have rights under our constitution.

Any answers to these questions are purely rationalizations.

I don’t believe any of this can be done because a corporation by itself cannot think, learn, or feel. It cannot be thrown in jail for the lack of physical presence. It cannot pull a lever in a voting booth nor mark any paper. A corporation does not need food or water. It doesn’t even need toilet paper. It does not need to breath and cannot ever be hospitalized. A corporation never came out of a vagina (or c-section) nor must it eventually die. It cannot use a firearm. It is not conscious and can only act through proxies.

or we could just,
Remove corporate personhood. Singapore doesn’t have corporate personhood and, while investment and growth is hampered, it still has a thriving economy where the risk of corporations is priced, truly, into its market value.

I’m not quite sure how corporate protection should look but we can cross that bridge when we get to it.

My last point is that this ruling clearly flies in the face of stare-decisis. This was an important aspect to confirming the Supreme Court Judges Alito and Roberts in the Judiciary Committee of Congress.

FCC says you can’t use that wireless mic any more

If you own a wireless mic that operates in the 700 MHz band (between 698 and 806 MHz), as of June 12, 2010, you will be prohibited from using it.  This frequency band is no longer used for analog TV after the switch to digital TV and is now being used by law enforcement and emergency services.

Naturally, the ever-growing police state will need more radio bandwidth for its minions to communicate with each other, especially when operating within the range of your wireless mic, such as in your home, business, or church.

Chris Lyons, manager of technical and educational communications for Shure Microphones, says “The 700 MHz band has been reallocated and the bottom line is that any wireless mic that operates in the 700 MHz band—and that’s a lot of them—needs to be replaced.”

So for the good of the state, and for your own safety, you must throw away that microphone.  There will be no compensation.

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/wirelessmicrophones/

Kucinich calls on Congress to take control of the Fed, end fractional reserve banking system

Dennis Kucinich speaks to the participants of the 2009 American Monetary Institute’s 5th Annual Monetary Reform Conference:

McDonalds, public school lunch beef treated with ammonia

New York Times

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

…

Carol Guzy/Washington Post

Carl S. Custer, a former U.S.D.A. microbiologist, said he and other scientists were concerned that the department had approved the treated beef for sale without obtaining independent validation of the potential safety risk. Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

One of the toughest hurdles for Beef Products was the Agricultural Marketing Service, the U.S.D.A. division that buys food for school lunches. Officials cited complaints about the odor, and wrote in a 2002 memorandum that they had “to determine if the addition of ammonia to the product is in the best interest to A.M.S. from a quality standpoint.”

“It is our contention,” the memo added, “that product should be labeled accordingly.”

Represented by Dennis R. Johnson, a top lawyer and lobbyist for the meat industry, Beef Products prevailed on the question of whether ammonia should be listed as an ingredient, arguing that the government had just decided against requiring another company to list a chemical used in treating poultry.

School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef.

U.S Soldiers Are Waking Up!