In yet another disgusting episode of "Too Big to Fail," this time from the NYT:

"Government investigators have found that JPMorgan Chase 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."

Yes, we're all shocked...again.

"The findings appear in a confidential government document, reviewed by The New York Times, that was sent to the bank in March, warning of a potential crackdown by the regulator of the nation’s energy markets."

What's with the secrecy? As if we don't know that we're being screwed by the banks.

"The possible action comes amid showdowns with other agencies. One of the bank’s chief regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is weighing new enforcement actions against JPMorgan over the way the bank collected credit card debt and its possible failure to alert authorities to suspicions about Bernard L. Madoff, according to people who were not authorized to discuss the cases publicly."

Suuuure they are.

"In a meeting last month at the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters, the comptroller’s office delivered an unusually stark message to Jamie Dimon, the chief executive and chairman: the nation’s biggest bank was quickly losing credibility in Washington. The bank’s top lawyers, including Stephen M. Cutler, the general counsel, have also cautioned executives about the bank’s regulatory problems, employees say."

Good Lord. A banker losing credibility in Washington! I'm shocked that Jamie Dimon has any credibility left to lose.

So, what exactly is the Big Bank in trouble for this time?

Continue reading »

Chris Hedges speaks at the People's Recovery Summit organized by Occupy Sandy. The Church of St. Luke & St. Matthew, Brooklyn, NY, February 2, 2013:

The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act—and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration’s appeal of the Southern District Court of New York’s ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional—to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens—especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor—from joining our revolt.

Workers who are unable to meet their debts, who are victimized by constantly rising interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent on credit cards, are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant. Debt peonage is and always has been a form of political control. Native Americans, forced by the U.S. government onto tribal agencies, were required to buy their goods, usually on credit, at agency stores. Coal miners in southern West Virginia and Kentucky were paid in scrip by the coal companies and kept in perpetual debt servitude by the company store. African-Americans in the cotton fields in the South were forced to borrow during the agricultural season from their white landlords for their seed and farm equipment, creating a life of perpetual debt. It soon becomes impossible to escape the mounting interest rates that necessitate new borrowing.

Debt peonage is a familiar form of political control. And today it is used by banks and corporate financiers to enslave not only individuals but also cities, municipalities, states and the federal government. As the economist Michael Hudson points out, the steady rise in interest rates, coupled with declining public revenues, has become a way to extract the last bits of capital from citizens as well as government. Once individuals, or states or federal agencies, cannot pay their bills—and for many Americans this often means medical bills—assets are sold to corporations or seized. Public land, property and infrastructure, along with pension plans, are privatized. Individuals are pushed out of their homes and into financial and personal distress.

Debt peonage is a fundamental tool for control. This debt peonage must be broken if we are going to build a mass movement to paralyze systems of corporate power. And the most effective weapon we have to liberate ourselves as well as the 30 million Americans who make up the working poor is a sustained movement to raise the minimum wage nationally to at least $11 an hour. Most of these 30 million low-wage workers are women and people of color. They and their families struggle at a subsistence level and play one lender off another to survive. By raising their wages we raise not only the quality of their lives but we increase their capacity for personal and political power. We break one of the most important shackles used by the corporate state to prevent organized resistance.

You can read the rest of Chris Hedges' speech at Truthout.

Willard Mitt Romney may have been shell shocked when his second attempt to rule the empire failed, but he stayed true to himself right up until the very end.

Via:

"From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself. Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked."

"Fiscally conservative," one Romney campaign staffer told NBC.

At least he didn't ship them all off to China.

Forbes' Helaine Olen notes:

In case you are wondering, this did not have to happen. The Mitt Romney for President entity does not end with Romney’s Tuesday night loss. There are papers to be filed with various federal commissions and bills to be paid ….

The Mitt Romney for President financial entity survives for as long as two more years as these tasks are completed.

The staff would also still have to face the bitter billionaire donors.

On Wednesday, Romney had a post-defeat breakfast with some of his wealthiest and most loyal donors. At the private gathering, the donors allegedly unloaded on Romney staff for its failed "junior varsity operation."

And then, a little Karma perhaps?

Via:

At some point, early Wednesday morning, when Gov. Mitt Romney and family were tucked into bed, a quiet call went out on the radio channel used by his Secret Service agents: "Javelin, Jockey details, all posts, discontinue."

Of all the indignities involved in losing a presidential race, none is more stark than the sudden emptiness of your entourage. The Secret Service detail guarding Governor Romney since Feb 1. stood down quickly. He had ridden in a 15-car motorcade to the Intercontinental Hotel in Boston for his concession speech. He rode in a single-car motorcade back across the Charles River to Belmont. His son, Tagg, did the driving.

In this morning's weekly address, President Obama highlighted indications of an improving U.S. economy, Five million jobs added, a falling unemployment rate, and his Wall Street reform legislation and gave a glimpse of what is a slowly, but very steadily, brightening financial future for middle-class Americans.

He also lauded the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which beginning next month will offer a new service to ensure that Americans will have a fair shake and can access, and correct their credit scores that are vital in many areas of personal finance.

The companies that put your credit score together can make mistakes. They may think you had a loan or a credit card that was never yours. They may think you were late making payments when you were on time. And when they mess up, you’re the one who suffers.

Until this week, if you had a complaint, you took it to the company. Sometimes they listened. Sometimes they didn’t. But that was pretty much it. They were your only real hope.

Not anymore. If you have a complaint about your credit score that hasn’t been properly addressed, you can go to consumerfinance.gov/complaint and let the consumer watchdog know.

Not only will they bring your complaint directly to the company in question, they’ll give you a tracking number, so you can check back and see exactly what’s being done on your behalf.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he explained, has also scored major victories recently, forcing credit card companies to settle with Americans for $400 million.

But, as always, reforms that benefit everyday citizens over banks, share a common enemy, the Republican party.

That’s what Wall Street reform is all about – looking out for working families and making sure that everyone is playing by the same rules.

Sadly, that hasn’t been enough to stop Republicans in Congress from fighting these reforms. Backed by an army of financial industry lobbyists, they’ve been waging an all-out battle to delay, defund and dismantle these new rules.

I refuse to let that happen.

President Obama vowed to fight a return to the "era of top-down, on-your-own economics." We've come too far for that, he said, and sacrificed too much.

A full transcript of the President's weekly address is available here.

The 'Economic Suicides':

“I have no solution in front of me." -- Antonis Perris of Greece, unemployed for two years before he took the hand of his 90-year-old mother and climbed to the roof of their apartment building and leapt to their death.

In his last note on an online music discussion site, Perris wrote that his mother had Alzheimer’s disease and that he had recently learned he was ill. He had not expected a recession, so he had not saved money. His credit cards were maxed out. He had started selling his family’s possessions but saw no permanent solution to his problems. He blamed the “powerful of this Earth” for his situation.

Giuseppe Campaniello of Italy set himself on fire outside a government tax office in Bologna on March 28 after his company collapsed.

“I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.” — Retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, 77, who shot himself in Athens’s central square on April 4.

“Violence is to work 40 years for peanuts and to wonder if you’ll ever get to retire. . . . Violence is unemployment.” — Savvas Metoikidis, 44, who hanged himself in his father’s warehouse in Thessaloniki on April 21.

“I hope my grandchildren will never be born in Greece.” — A 61-year-old electrician who hanged himself from a tree in Athens on May 30.

To date there have been 7,387 Occupy protesters arrested in the United States alone. Bankers? Zero.

More articles on economic suicide:

Death by Foreclosure

Wells Fargo Drives Homeowner to Suicide

'Dying for Work' Billboard's Dangling Dummy Disturbs Drivers

Time to Rebel! Five Ways We Can Break the Big Banks' Death Grip on the Economy

Wall Street’s incredible greed and arrogance may have finally handed us the tools and leverage we need.
Read it at Truthout.

Court orders Occupy Hong Kong to leave HSBC

Occupy Central in Hong Kong, one of the last outposts of the global protests sparked by the Occupy Wall Street movement, has been ordered to clear its encampment outside one of the world's largest banks.

Credit Card Debt Collection Flawed

Up to 90 percent of cases filed by credit-card companies to collect bad debts may be flawed, according to one New York judge who says he has heard as many as 100 in one day. The problem, say many of the judges who oversee the slew of suits filed by American Express, Citigroup, and other credit-card companies, is that they all follow the same he-said-she-said pattern—companies eager to collect debts try to make their cases with partial records and improper documents, leaving substantial holes in their arguments. The companies disagree, with one American Express spokesman telling The New York Times that the company has “a strong process in place to ensure accuracy of testimony and affidavits provided to courts.”

Occupier Charged With Terroristic Felony

David C. Gorczynski, 22, was charged on Tuesday with attempted bank robbery and terroristic threatening, both felonies, as well as one misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Police detained him after he walked into an Easton, PA Wells Fargo branch with a sign that read “You’re being robbed” and another that said “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.”

Police Take Down Occupy Memphis

Officers with the Memphis Police Department on Friday morning began dismantling the Occupy Memphis camp on Civic Center Plaza in Downtown Memphis, WMC-TV reports.

The effort began around 4 a.m. Friday. City of Memphis CAO George Little told the news station the site has evolved into a homeless encampment.

Continue reading »

Anonymous hackers targeting online porn found something a little unexpected this week at their third target, 82 government employees were subscribed to the DigitalPlayground.com server.

Via:

According to Th3 Consortium, the discovery of government email addresses on the hacked server was a happy coincidence.

"We did not set out to expose gov't hypocrisy, but the hack itself exposed it." they wrote in a Twitter post responding to the IBTimes.

When asked why they choose to target video pornography sites, they tweeted in response, "We are pirates, what did you expect."

Th3 Consortium, a relatively new hacktivist arm of Anonymous has made its debut with these. First Brazzers was hit Mid-February and 350,000 usernames and passwords were stolen. Then YouPorn was targeted and the hackers came away with a million usernames and passwords.The hack also revealed that the most common passwords used on the porn site were '123456' (332 times) and 'password' (216 times).

The full message by Anonymous follows:

"We are The Consortium, and we have something special for our first release,"

You see for a while now we have had access to digitalplayground.com, one of the five biggest porn sites in the world. But it doesn't need an introduction from us.

This company has security that if we didn't know it was a real business, we would have thought to be a joke - a joke that we found much more amusing than they will.

"This site has so many freaking holes that if I didn't know it was a porn site, I would have mistaken it for a honeypot" - [Redacted]

We did not set out to destroy them but they made it too enticing to resist. So now our humble crew leave lulz and mayhem in our path. We not only have the 72k users of this site but also over 40k plaintext credit cards including ccvs, names and expiry dates. If you want to hear more about those plaintext credit cards scroll through the MySql info further down. And of course as this is a porn site there was no shortage of .mil and .gov emails in their user list.

We also went on and rooted four of their servers, as well as gaining access to their mail boxes. Using credentials from emails we tapped into their conference call. "Is anyone besides David on the line ?" - We were. Did we win? Sure looks that way.

Digital Playground game over.

So now lets bust out the fun stuff.