British Crown Declares War — On LaRouche Specifically and on Humanity Generally

From LaRouche PAC …

In reviewing the international situation in conjunction with attacks on organizations associated with him in the United States and Europe over the past 48 hours, Lyndon LaRouche stated Tuesday evening, that the Queen and the British Empire have signaled that they are now going to attack LaRouche directly, and that the next stage of world war is now beginning.

LaRouche has continuously emphasized over the past two months that Anglo-American provocations of Russia over Ukraine and the military encirclement of both Russia and China by the thuggish and amateurish Obama Administration were mere preludes to a British-directed thermonuclear war option driven, in timing, by the inevitable collapse of the British/Wall Street monetary system.

Actions by Lyndon and Helga Zepp LaRouche have fed emerging and strengthening opposition in Germany to the Anglo-American war drive, and generated popular opposition in the United States, where LaRouche and candidates Kesha Rogers and Michael Steger are leading a drive for President Obama’s impeachment by fellow Democrats. Their drive is to reclaim the Democratic Party by bankrupting Wall Street, and restoring economic and scientific greatness to the United States.

Rogers stunned the Texas Democratic Party by winning enough votes to cause a runoff for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate with Dallas dentist and former conservative Republican moneybags David Alameel who spent over four million dollars to finance his primary campaign against Rogers and others. The recent activities of the LaRouches have also concretely contributed to emerging war avoidance and economic development policies in both Russia and China.

The popular troubles of the British crown in mounting the war they view as necessary for their survival have been compounded recently by widespread circulation of the film, “Unlawful Killing,” documenting the role of the royals in the murder of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed and its coverup by the British government. The film focuses on the role of Prince Phillip in ordering Diana’s murder and prominently features background material first developed by the LaRouche movement including the quote of Prince Phillip that he wants to be reincarnated as a deadly virus so he can contribute to population reduction and Phillip’s Nazi connections. On August 5, 1999, the British magazine “Take a Break” responded to LaRouche’s exposes of the Royals and the murder of Diana with a nasty article/threat from the British establishment entitled, “Shut This Man’s Mouth.”

That strategic context set, websites associated with the Kesha Rogers for U.S. Senate campaign and the Michael Steger for Congress campaign were down for several hours on May 19-20 as a result of a massive denial of service attack on their host company, Nationbuilder. The Rogers campaign outage was particularly noteworthy as early voting has started in Texas. The Nationbuilder platform also serves many other campaigns throughout the United States where elections were being held on Tuesday, May 20th. Nationbuilder’s public statement about the attack released May 20th reads as follows: “We are reasonably certain the attack is directed at one of our customers for their political beliefs and is meant to disrupt upcoming elections.” Nationbuilder will not further comment on the customer involved but twitter postings during the time of the attack point to an attack in Britain on the United Kingdom Independence Party website by an anonymous hacker who attacked UKIP’s political views as “disgusting.” UKIP’s website is also hosted by Nationbuilder. UKIP, a populist anti-immigrant euroskeptic party is widely expected to post major gains in the European Parliamentary elections now taking place in Britain and Europe.

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Colonel Wilkerson: Oligarchy Controls U.S. War-Making

Via Global Research …

Who Is Really Responsible for America’s Wars?

The Astounding Conspiracy Theories of Wall Street Genius Mark Gorton

Via American Kabuki …

American Kabuki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You may copy, quote, and redistribute this material so long as you do not alter it in any way, and you include this link: http://americankabuki.blogspot.com

http://gawker.com/the-astounding-conspiracy-theories-of-wall-street-geniu-1561427624

Mark Gorton is a prominent financier and a respected entrepreneur. He founded the music sharing site Limewire, and he runs Tower Research, a famed high-frequency trading firm. Gorton also believes that the “ruthless” secret cabal that assassinated JFK and planned 9/11 could be coming to kill his family.

Mark Gorton does not have a reputation as a crackpot. Quite the opposite. He’s been favorably profiled in the New York Times for his business acumen and charitable deeds. His experience as the head of Limewire—which disrupted the music industry and then lost a $100 million lawsuit as a result—was closely followed by the press. And when Michael Lewis’s blockbuster new book about high frequency trading was published recently, prominent media outlets turned to Gorton to learn what HFT firms are really like. The Huffington Post even dubbed him “the new face of Wall Street.” He is a very respected and very wealthy man.

This week, we were forwarded documents that Gorton was sending out to employees at Tower Research. These documents—embedded at the bottom of this post—are essays by Mark Gorton, laying out his theories on the secret high-level murderous criminal “Cabal” that is responsible for, among other things, the JFK and RFK assassinations, the presidential careers of the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 plot, and the murder of countless witnesses, politicians, and journalists who sought to expose them, including Sen. Paul Wellstone and even Hunter S. Thompson. Everything, according to Gorton, has been an inside job.

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The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet

From Rolling Stone Magazine …

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever

By Matt Taibbi

February 12, 2014 11:00 AM ET

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It’s 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire’s biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we’ve seen in more than a century.

Matt Taibbi on the Great American Bubble Machine

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America’s banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world’s banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or “modifying,” as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

All of this was big enough news in itself. But it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is “complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally.”

Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?

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Matt Taibbi ~ Chase Isn’t the Only Bank in Trouble

From Rolling Stone Magazine …

By Matt Taibbi

Allegations of multiple Wall Street scandals could have major implications

Getty Images

I’ve been away for weeks now on a non-financial assignment (we have something unusual coming out in Rolling Stone in a few weeks) so I’ve fallen behind on some crazy developments on Wall Street. There are multiple scandals blowing up right now, including a whole set of ominous legal cases that could result in punishments so extreme that they might significantly alter the long-term future of the financial services sector.

As one friend of mine put it, “Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they’d better double it.”

Firstly, there’s a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency markets. This scandal is already drawing comparisons to the last biggest-financial-scandal-in-history (the Financial Times wondered about a “repeat Libor scandal”), the manipulation of interest rates via the gaming of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The foreign exchange or FX market is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume of nearly $5 trillion.

Regulators on multiple continents are investigating the possibility that at least four (and probably many more) banks may have been involved in widespread, Libor-style manipulation of currencies for years on end. One of the allegations is that traders have been gambling heavily before and after the release of the WM/Reuters rates, which like Libor are benchmark rates calculated privately by a small subset of financial companies that are perfectly positioned to take advantage of their own foreknowledge of pricing information.

A month ago, Bloomberg reported that it had observed a pattern of spikes in trading in certain pairs of currencies at the same time, at 4 p.m. London time on the last trading day of the month, when WM/Reuters rates are released. From the article:

In the space of 20 minutes on the last Friday in June, the value of the U.S. dollar jumped 0.57 percent against its Canadian counterpart, the biggest move in a month. Within an hour, two-thirds of that gain had melted away.

The same pattern – a sudden surge minutes before 4 p.m. in London on the last trading day of the month, followed by a quick reversal – occurred 31 percent of the time across 14 currency pairs over two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For the most frequently traded pairs, such as euro-dollar, it happened about half the time, the data show.

The recurring spikes take place at the same time financial benchmarks known as the WM/Reuters (TRI) rates are set based on those trades…

The Forex story broke at a time when the industry was already coping with price-fixing messes involving oil (the European commission is investigating manipulation of yet another Libor-like price-setting process here) and manipulation cases involving benchmark rates for precious metals and interest rate swaps. As Quartz put it after the FX story broke:

For those keeping score: That means the world’s key price benchmarks for interest rates, energy and currencies may now all be compromised.

Perhaps most importantly, however, there’s a major drama brewing over legal case in London tied to the Libor scandal.

Guardian Care Homes, a British “residential home care operator,” is suing the British bank Barclays for over $100 million for allegedly selling the company interest rate swaps based on Libor, which numerous companies have now admitted to manipulating, in a series of high-profile settlements. The theory of the case is that if Libor was not a real number, and was being manipulated for years as numerous companies have admitted, then the Libor-based swaps banks sold to companies like Guardian Care are inherently unenforceable.

A ruling against the banks in this case, which goes to trial in April of next year in England, could have serious international ramifications. Suddenly, cities like Philadelphia and Houston, or financial companies like Charles Schwab, or a gazillion other buyers of Libor-based financial products might be able to walk away from their Libor-based contracts. Basically, every customer who’s ever been sold a rotten swap product by a major financial company might now be able to get up from the table, extend two middle fingers squarely in the direction of Wall Street, and simply walk away from the deals.

Nobody is mincing words about what that might mean globally. From a Reuters article on the Guardian Care case:

“To unwind all Libor-linked derivative contracts would be financial Armageddon,” said Abhishek Sachdev, managing director of Vedanta Hedging, which advises companies on interest rate hedging products.

Concern over all of this grew even hotter last week with the latest Libor settlement, in which yet another major bank, the Dutch powerhouse Rabobank, got caught monkeying with the London rate.

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Matt Taibbi ~ Looting the Pension Funds

From Rolling Stone Magazine …

All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

By Matt Taibbi

September 26, 2013 7:00 AM ET

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

Detroit’s Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go

Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn’t even know how to react. “She’s Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street,” says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. “Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.”

Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island’s 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo’s ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.

What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo’s “tool kit” wasn’t just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation’s Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.

Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.

The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of “proprietary” information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. “When I asked, I was basically hammered,” says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island’s nine-member State Investment Commission. “I couldn’t get any information about the actual costs.”

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Matt Taibbi ~ How Wall Street Hedge Funds Are Looting The Pension Funds Of Public Workers [Video]

Via Shift Frequency …

From Democracy Now

In his latest article for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports that Wall Street firms are now making millions in profits off of public pension funds nationwide. “Essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops and firemen to billionaire hedge funders,” Taibbi says. “Pension funds are one of the last great, unguarded piles of money in this country and there are going to be all sort of operators that are trying to get their hands on that money.” ~http://www.democracynow.org

 

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The Great Fed Robbery (Smoking Gun Evidence That a Wall St Bank Front Ran The Fed’s No-Taper on Insider Info?)

From Silver Doctor’s …

 

One of Einsteins great contributions to mankind was the theory of relativity, which is based on the fact that there is a real limit on the speed of light. Information doesn’t travel instantly, it is limited by the speed of light, which in a perfect setting is 186 miles (300km) per millisecond. This has been proven in countless scientific experiments over nearly a century of time. Light, or anything else, has never been found to go faster than 186 miles per millisecond. It is simply impossible to transmit information faster.
Too bad that the bad guys on Wall Street who pulled off The Great Fed Robbery didn’t pay attention in science class. Because hard evidence, along with the speed of light, proves that someone got the Fed announcement news before everyone else.  The evidence is overwhelming.
There is simply no way for Wall Street to squirm its way out of this one.

Via Nanex:

Before 2pm, the Fed news was given to a group of reporters under embargo – which means in a secured lock-up room. This is done so reporters have time to write their stories and publish when the Fed releases its statement at 2pm. The lock-up room is in Washington DC. Stocks are traded in New York (New Jersey really), and many financial futures are traded in Chicago. The distances between these 3 cities and the speed of light is key to proving the theft of public information (early, tradeable access to Fed news).

We’ve learned that the speed of light (information), takes 1 millisecond to travel 186 miles (300km). Therefore, the amount of time it takes to transmit information between two points is limited by distance and how fast computers can encode and decode the information on both sides. Our experience analyzing the impact of hundreds of news events at the millisecond level tells us that it takes at least 5 milliseconds for information to travel between Chicago and New York. Even though Chicago is closer to Washington DC than New York, the path between the two cities is not straight or optimized: so it takes information a bit longer, about 7 milliseconds, to travel between Chicago and Washington. It takes little under 2 milliseconds between Washington and New York.

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10 Million Americans Have Had Their Homes Taken Away by the Banks — Often at the Point of a Gun

From Alter Net …

Against all odds, and continued predatory Wall Street behavior, community activists are working to reclaim devastated neighborhoods.

Photo Credit: Frontpage/Shutterstock.com

 

 

 

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We cautiously ascend the staircase, the pitch black of the boarded-up house pierced only by my companion’s tiny circle of light. At the top of the landing, the flashlight beam dances in a corner as Quafin, who offered only her first name, points out the furnace. She is giddy; this house — unlike most of the other bank-owned buildings on the block — isn’t completely uninhabitable.

 

It had been vacated, sealed, and winterized in June 2010, according to a notice on the wall posted by BAC Field Services Corporation, a division of Bank of America. It warned: “entry by unauthorized persons is strictly prohibited.” But Bank of America has clearly forgotten about the house and its requirement to provide the “ maintenance and security” that would ensure the property could soon be reoccupied. The basement door is ajar, the plumbing has been torn out of the walls, and the carpet is stained with water. The last family to live here bought the home for $175,000 in 2002; eight years later, the bank claimed an improbable $286,100 in past-due balances and repossessed it.

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Deal Book ~ JPMorgan Executive May Escape Penalty

From Deal Book New York Times …

Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressBlythe Masters of JPMorgan. Regulators initially said she lied to them under oath about the bank’s energy trading tactics.

 

Even as the nation’s top energy regulator is poised to extract a record settlement from JPMorgan Chase over accusations that it manipulated power markets, the agency is expected to spare a top bank lieutenant who federal investigators initially contended made “false and misleading statements under oath,” according to people briefed on the matter.

 

Blythe Masters, a seminal Wall Street figure who is known for developing exotic financial instruments, emerged this spring at the center of an investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission into accusations of illegal trading in the California and Michigan electricity markets.

 

The regulator found that JPMorgan designed trading “schemes” that converted “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers,” a commission document said.

 

While the commission and JPMorgan are negotiating a settlement for about $500 million, the people briefed on the matter said, Ms. Masters is not expected to face a separate action. The move signals a pivot for the agency, which has been increasingly flexing its enforcement muscle, according to the people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition they not be named.

 

Months earlier, investigators planned to recommend that the regulator find Ms. Masters, who holds a powerful position within JPMorgan as the head of its commodities business, “individually liable.” But as the investigation progressed, these people said, top energy regulatory officials have been leaning toward not pursuing any civil charges against Ms. Masters.

 

The decision — which could change, according to the people briefed on the matter — would mean that Ms. Masters would escape the agency’s sweeping crackdown against big banks. After gaining enforcement authority because of a change in 2005 that allowed it to impose fines of $1 million a day for each violation, the energy regulator has taken a tougher stance with Wall Street.

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