Joe Stringer of ACCE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment talks about why he is going to Washington, DC to risk arrest at the Department of Justice.

Stringer,in Los Angeles talks about how the foreclosure crisis has decimated his neighborhood in Watts.

It's time for bankers to go to jail!

This may be President Obama's last chance to get justice for the millions of homeowners, taxpayers, and retirees whose homes, savings, pensions and livelihoods were stolen by Wall Street bankers.

Tell President Obama:

1. Prosecute Wall Street bankers for stealing our homes, savings and livelihoods.

2. Keep people in their homes by resetting their mortgages.

3. Make Wall Street pay us back.

Sign the petition here.

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Greg Smith, the ex-vice president of Goldman Sachs who resigned last spring after publishing a scathing op-ed about his former employers in the New York Times, has a new book out (“Why I Left Goldman Sachs”) and appeared on “60 Minutes” last night to talk to Anderson Cooper about it.

Smith said Goldman, like other firms, started several years ago to use client information to bet with its own money, sometimes against its own clients. Getting an unsophisticated client, he said, became the “golden prize” because the “quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.”

Greg Smith: So what Wall Street will do is, they will approach one of these philanthropies, or endowments, or teachers' retirement pensions funds, in Alabama, or Virginia, or Oregon, and they'll say to them, "We have this great product that is gonna serve your needs." And it looks very alluring to these investors. But what they don't realize is that up front, they're immediately paying the bank two million dollars or three million dollars because of their lack of sophistication.

Anderson Cooper: So they don't say to the client: the price you're paying for us to execute this trade is a million dollars?"

Greg Smith: That's a huge part of the problem. Not at all.

Anderson Cooper: How can it be that the client doesn't understand what the bank is making?

Greg Smith: These are very complicated derivative securities which takes a Ph.D. in physics or in engineering to understand. And there are pension funds and mutual funds that represent people's 401(k)s and retirement savings that are trading the most complex instruments out there without fully understanding them.

Anderson Cooper: So, did the people you work with want unsophisticated clients?

Greg Smith: Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.

Goldman rejects Smith's accusations that the company puts its own interests ahead of its clients and conducted an internal investigation aiming to disprove the charges. Smith really abandoned Goldman because his superiors refused to promote him to managing director and more than double his salary to more than $1 million, the company says. Blankfein this month that he's "not really concerned about the book's revelations."

Smith said he "absolutely" would have left Goldman Sachs told CBNCs even if they had agreed to his promotion and salary increase. With his book completed, Smith doesn't yet know what his next move will be. "I was not doing this in order to get hired at another Wall Street bank."

A full transcript of the "60 Minutes interview" is available here.

Dissatisfied with the country’s worsening economic troubles and displeased with proposed austerity measures, thousands of demonstrators clashed with police in Madrid Tuesday. The protesters formed a human chain around the parliament building while police fired bullets at and beat the most violent in the crowd with truncheons. At least 22 people were arrested while 32 were injured, including four policeman. The protest was timed to the new 2013 budget, which will be announced by the government Thursday and includes cuts in inflation-linked pensions, taxes on stock transactions, the implantation of green taxes, and the elimination of several tax breaks. The region of Catalonia, which is responsible for 20 percent of the national output, called for an early election on Nov. 25 that could lead to a referendum on secession.

Yves at Naked Capitalism has a good run down on the situation in Spain. And this Daily Kos diary does a pretty good job of showing the consequences of the banker control going on in Europe.

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest adds this:

The job of bankers is to assess risk. They are supposed to look at all the factors, and price a loan accordingly. If you have a credit card with very high risk, you might pay in the 20% range! This way the banks can lend out the money, and even if a large percentage of the borrowers default, they still do OK. They are expecting a certain default rate, they price accordingly, they do OK on the loan portfolio.

Same for when they lend to countries. They price loans according to the default risk, and over the lifetime of the loans they are supposed to get their money back plus some return, even with the expected defaults. If the banks screwed up and didn't price their loans correctly, this doesn't make the people of Greece lazy, etc. it makes the bankers incompetent.

OR the bankers did price correctly, and over the lifetimes of all of their loans they are getting their money back and a return, AND they are also taking advantage of the situation to get more, make a killing, force privatization, force wages down, get rid of that pesky democracy that has been in the way, etc.

So here we are again, with the elites in the position of being either stupid (incompetent) or evil. And with the people in misery as a result, while the elites do just fine for themselves. With the added bonus for the elites that the experiment of wresting control from the elites and to the people -- democracy -- ending.

During an interview on "Moyers & Company" recently, Bill talked with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes the modern dysfunction of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Lofgren’s view, Republicans have become overly obsessed with obstructing President Obama, and the Democrats suffer from political complacency. Lofgren’s new book is "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."

Here's a snippet from the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: The Republican Party now has the super rich and its corporate wing funding it and the religious right provides the ground troops. Why are so many everyday folks out there in the pews defending the prerogatives of the rich?

MIKE LOFGREN: That's something of a mystery. The Federal Reserve, in one of their recent reports, found that net household income fell about 40 percent since 2007. That's a tremendous drop. Yet, here we have as the nominee for one of the two major parties, we only have a binary choice in this country, is by all accounts the richest man ever to run for president and was a leverage buyout artist.

The party is really oriented towards the concerns of the rich. It's about cutting their taxes, reducing regulation on business, making things wide open for Wall Street. Now you're not going to get anybody to the polls and consciously pull the lever for the Republicans if they say, "Our agenda is to further entrench the rich and, oh by the way, your pension may take a hit."

So they use the culture wars quite cynically, as essentially rube bait to get people to the polls. And that explains why, for instance, the Koch brothers were early funders of Michele Bachmann, who is a darling of the religious right. They don't care particularly, I would assume, about her religious foibles. What they care about is the bottom line. And these religious right candidates, many of them believing in the health and wealth, name it and claim it prosperity gospel, believe that the rich are sanctified and the poor punished

BILL MOYERS: Many of those people on the right would tell you that the fall in the income of middleclass people and others has been because of Obama's economic policies.

MIKE LOFGREN: I think they're suffering from selective amnesia. They also don't understand that George Bush doubled the national debt, that the original meltdown on Wall Street occurred during George Bush's watch, and by the time Obama became president in 2009, we were already well into the recession. Now I don't defend him in every way. I don't say that everything he's done is right by any means. I have all kinds of issues with him on the health care legislation. For instance, his willingness to play ball with pharma made the bill cost a lot more than it need.

BILL MOYERS: The pharmaceutical industry?

MIKE LOFGREN: Yes. That said, he was legitimately elected. We were in a very, very serious situation in this country. If the economy had fallen any further, it would be comparable to the Great Depression. So what is Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Senate, what is his first priority for the country? Is it getting jobs for people? Is it restoring the solvency of the financial system? Is it foreign policy? Is it any of those things? No, it's making sure Obama is a one-term president.

BILL MOYERS: It seems that some of these people are willing to see the government go down in order to win.

MIKE LOFGREN: That would be the case. I grew up in a party that believed in the traditions of Eisenhower, and for that matter, even Reagan. He raised taxes several times when the deficit threatened to get out of control. He pleaded with Congress to send him a clean debt limit extension bill without any extraneous riders on it. He knew what the stakes were.

But now it's basically obstruct. They're no longer a parliamentary loyal opposition. They want to seize up the wheels of government. And to most people that means you don't have federal inspectors of airliners. You don't have federal inspection of food safety. Your national parks will be closed. Federal law enforcement will go home. That's what that means.

BILL MOYERS: Why did you leave the party? You'd been a Republican, what, all your life?

MIKE LOFGREN: I left the party because it was becoming an apocalyptic cult. Because you cannot govern a country of 310 million people that is the greatest economic power on earth and the greatest military power on earth as if it's a banana republic. You can't govern it with people who think that Obama was born overseas or who believe in all manner of nonsense about climate change. They don't even know, apparently, where babies come from, if we're to believe Todd Akin.

Really a great interview, the full transcript is available here.

RT's Anastasia Churkina talks to Occupy activist and war veteran Scott Olsen on the state of affairs in the U.S. today, and the changes that have taken place since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"Most likely people are either going to vote for Democrats or Republicans and I think both those are wrong choices. They are both working for the same system, they are both taking money from the same people, from the same banks and you can see in their policy that they are rewarding their donors. Voting for the continuing of this policy is not going to change anything at all," explains Olsen.

On alternatives in the coming election, Olsen said "You can vote for the third party that may not win. You may count voting for the third party as a waste of vote, but I think voting for a Democrat or a Republican is a waste of vote. You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are voting for either of those."

A great conversation with Scott Olsen. He talks about war, being a veteran, homeless veterans and the tragedy of 18 military veterans daily committing suicide in the U.S.

You'll also hear Scott's thoughts on the Occupy movement, and what's ahead for Occupy Wall Street now that it's approaching its first anniversary.

A full transcript follows below the fold...

Continue reading »

CNN:

In the canon of political cliches, "it all comes down to turnout" is among the most tired.

But in the case of the polarizing and closely watched Wisconsin recall election, the maxim happens to ring true.

Public polling, internal polling and campaign strategists all tell the same story: Republican Gov. Scott Walker is clinging to a tiny lead over his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, heading into Tuesday's vote.

And the number of undecided voters has dwindled to almost zero, strategists in both parties say, meaning that the only mission left for both sides is to get their rabid supporters to the polls.

If just the one million people who signed the Walker recall petition get themselves to the polls today, Wisconsin will be free of Scott Walker once and for all.

Via ChicagoSpring.org:

On May 19, Mayor 1% Emanuel will bring to Chicago military and civilian representatives of the 28-nation US-commanded and largely US-financed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and heads of state and finance ministers of the G-8 world economic powers.

They meet on behalf of the 1% of the world, the rich and the powerful, the bankers and generals. Their agenda is to continue to impose austerity, or poverty, by cutting social spending for workers and the poor to maintain profitability for the rich and to launch more wars to stop the rise of the poor nations of the Third World.

The people of this fine city do not want these summits. The mayor has his own agenda. In anticipation of widespread opposition to the war & poverty agenda of the NATOG8, Mayor Emanuel passed a set of first-amendment crushing ordinances, known as "Sit Down Shut Up", to stifle the exercise of free speech and assembly during the summits. The mayor single-handedly gave himself the abililty to issue no-bid security contracts and deputize out-of-town law enforcement while imposing harsh restrictions on parades, marches and demonstrations.

But we will not be silenced. We will stand up to this corrupt system and say enough! Join Occupy Chicago, Coalition Against NATO/G8 (CANG8), the Midwest Antiwar Mobilization and many more as we gather in Chicago in May!

Continue reading »

On 12 May people around the world will rise up again responding to the global call for action. In London, protesters will visit those who gambled with their futures and deliver their very own personal messages to them.

Via:

"Our city has lost its pride. It’s been stolen. Our politicians, regulators and those who were meant to be looking after things sold us out. Who is benefiting?"

So begins Occupy London's call to action, issued for May 12, when "people around the world will rise up again responding to the global call for action that marks the birth of the indignados movement."

The video they've created is an invitation to occupy London, home to plenty of 1 percenters, the banksters "who gambled with our pensions and savings, created financial nonsense to make money out of thin air, paid hundreds of thousands to wine and dine with our ‘elected’ representatives, were bailed out, evaded billions in taxes and secured 40% of the world’s wealth for themselves.

"On 12 May, we’ll deliver our very own personal messages to them. Be creative: come dressed as your least favorite banker, tax evader, corporate tycoon, politician, vampire squid, and company CEO. Bring stickers, monopoly money, caution tape, placards, faux awards, pots, pans, bullhorns, conches, tents, stereos, war horns or any other “random acts of kindness” you like."

This post-May Day action is still in the planning stages, so if you have any ideas for guerilla theatre or other creative direct action, go here.

Via:

In Hungary, IT workers retire at 32 and get pensions equal to 150 per cent of their salaries. That’s according to Anonymous’ version of the Hungarian Constitution, which they posted after hacking the website of the Constitutional Court.

­“Ideals and rulers of tyranny, or dictators represent but short periods of history. The people have the right to eliminate tyranny or rebel against it,” said the “new constitution” written by the Anonymous hacker group.

The hackers have made their own adjustments to basic Hungarian law. Thus, according to the group’s version of the constitution, IT workers not only get to retire early on a luxurious pension, but are also exempted from paying tax.

The text of Anonymous’ “ideal” constitution was swiftly removed from the court’s website.

Either a lot of hacktivists live in Hungary, and make their living as IT workers...or Anonymous just really, really loves Hungary.

Watch and share this video presented by the National Nurses United promoting a financial transaction tax on Wall Street trading to help restore the economy. The video portrays a banker whose greed contributes to the economic meltdown of a nation, resulting in lost pensions and jobs, as well as home foreclosures, and financial ruin for many Americans. The entertaining video short is inspired by The Twilight Zone, an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling.

[Photo via Flickr]