N.Y. state attorney general accuses Barclays of fraud in lawsuit

from washingtonpost.com

June 25 at 8:41 PM

SECURITIES

State’s suit accuses Barclays of fraud

British banking and financial services firm Barclays misled large institutional investors and other clients by falsely telling them it was taking measures to protect them from predatory high-frequency traders, New York’s attorney general said Wednesday.

The allegations against Barclays were contained in a securities fraud lawsuit that Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced at a Manhattan news conference.

The complaint, filed in the state Supreme Court, portrays “a flagrant pattern of fraud, deception and dishonesty with Barclays clients and the investing public,” Schneiderman said.

In a statement, Barclays spokesman Mark Lane said the bank was cooperating with the attorney general. “We take these allegations very seriously. . . . The integrity of the market is a top priority at Barclays,” Lane said.

The lawsuit alleges Barclays, which has headquarters in London, deceived investors about its dark pool, an electronic trading operation intended to shield them from the high-frequency traders who use sophisticated computer programs to get early access to pending orders and other market-moving information. The bank promoted a service it claimed was a “surveillance” system that would identify and hold accountable “toxic,” “predatory” and “aggressive” traders, the lawsuit says.

Instead, the service “was essentially a sham,” Schneiderman said. “Barclays has never prohibited any trader from participating in its dark pool, regardless of how predatory or aggressive its behavior was determined to be.”

The lawsuit asks the court to order Barclays to halt the behavior and pay unspecified damages.

— Associated Press

A Plan Only Banksters Will Love: WikiLeaks Reveals Trade Deal Pushing Global Financial Deregulation

from democracynow.org

The pro-transparency group WikiLeaks has released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement, TISA, a trade agreement covering 50 countries and more than 68 percent of world trade in service. Until now, the draft has been classified to keep it clandestine, not only during the negotiations, but also for five years post-enactment. According to the leaked text, TISAaims to cement the extreme deregulatory model of the 1990s by forbidding countries from improving financial regulation. The draft Financial Services Annex would also establish rules favorable to the expansion of financial multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory obstacles. The draft text comes from the April 2014 negotiation round. We discuss the leaked text with Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and author of "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority."

Photo Credit: WikiLeaks

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Thursday, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for a trade deal called the Trade in Services Agreement. The deal covers 50 countries and over 68 percent of world trade in services. Until now, the draft has been classified to keep it secret, not only during the negotiations, but also for five years post-enactment. According to the leaked text, the trade deal aims to cement the deregulatory model of the 1990s by forbidding countries from improving financial regulation.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Denver, Colorado, where we’re joined by Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and the author of The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority.

Lori Wallach, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of this WikiLeaks leak around this trade agreement.

LORI WALLACH: Well, we’ve known these negotiations have been ongoing, but no one knew exactly what they were up to until this leaked. And effectively, the text, if it were enacted, would roll back a lot of the re-regulation that followed the global financial crisis and basically handcuff us into the 1990s extreme deregulation model that we all recognize was the cause of the crisis. And the perverse nature of it is, of course, because of the extreme secrecy, you have the Obama administration in public working to "re-regulate" the Dodd-Frank bill and its regulations, but then, behind closed doors in these negotiations in Geneva, sort of on the sidelines of the World Trade Organization, the U.S. and the European Union—the leaked text shows, because there are brackets that say who has what proposal—are pushing amongst the most retrograde anti-regulation provisions.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Lori, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, quote, "the payoff from TISA[could] be huge" for domestic service industry firms and presents, quote, "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tear down barriers to international trade." The Chamber has also recommended thatTISA "eliminate regulatory inconsistencies" and ensure that private companies are not put at a disadvantage when they compete with "state-owned enterprises." Your response?

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Healthcare: Let's Have People over Profits Once And For All

From OpEdNews.com

There are some things in this world that shouldn't be turned into profit-making machines, and healthcare is definitely one of them. Believe it or not, There are some things in this world that shouldn't be turned into profit-making machines, and healthcare is definitely one of them. 

Believe it or not, there was a time in America when in almost every state health insurance companies and hospitals were required to be non-profits. Back then, Americans could actually get the healthcare and treatment they needed at affordable prices. But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and you guessed it, everything changed. Suddenly, there was money to be made off of healthcare in America, and a lot of it. Banksters realized that these once-nonprofit hospitals, health insurers, and nursing homes had the potential to become absolute gold mines. Former Senator Bill Frist's family, for example, made billions in the 1980s and 1990s privatizing formerly county and city hospitals, slashing salaries, busting unions, and raising prices.

Slowly but surely, corporations and the wealthy elite took over our healthcare system, and have left us with a healthcare nightmare. That's why according to a new study by a prominent think-tank, the United States ranks dead last in a review of healthcare in the industrialized world. For the fifth time in a row, the U.S. has been ranked last in the Commonwealth Fund's annual review of healthcare in developed nations.

The review looked at healthcare access, efficiency and equity in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Of the nations included in the review, the United States had the highest percentage of citizens who didn't get medical care because they couldn't afford it.

A staggering 37% of Americans said they didn't get a prescription, see a doctor, or seek out other medical care, because they were worried about the costs. On the flip side, just four percent of people in the United Kingdom said they skipped out on healthcare because of cost concerns. So why such a large disparity?

The United Kingdom has universal health care. In fact, every country the Commonwealth Fund looked at has universal healthcare, except the U.S. The U.S. is the ONLY free-market country in the world without a universal healthcare system, and -- not coincidentally -- the only one with such a large involvement of for-profit companies in the healthcare marketplace.

Countries with universal nonprofit healthcare don't have millions of people struggling to afford healthcare. And they don't have millions of people skipping out on prescriptions because they cost too much money. From Switzerland to Italy, and Norway to France, healthcare is considered a basic human right. No one questions the notion that everyone, no matter who they are, is entitled to lifesaving and affordable healthcare.

But the differences in healthcare outcomes in the U.S. and in Europe go beyond just universal healthcare. You see, healthcare isn't a profit-making machine in Europe the way it is in the U.S.

In fact, in Switzerland, not only is there universal healthcare, but health insurers are FORBIDDEN from making a profit on basic health insurance coverage, because the Swiss realize, and accept, that healthcare and ballooning profits don't go together. They realize that profit incentives have to be removed if a healthcare system is going to work for everyone.

Since it went into effect, Obamacare has done tremendous things for healthcare in America. It's allowed millions of Americans to get the healthcare and treatment they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. An April Gallup study found that as many as 9.9 million Americans have gotten new health insurance under Obamacare, and more than 4 percent of Americans have gotten health insurance for the first time in their lives.

But Obamacare is just one piece of the puzzle. If we truly want to have a healthcare system that works for all, than we need to go back to the days before Reagan, when healthcare wasn't a cash cow for Wall Street bankers. Unless we take Wall Street's skin out of the game, healthcare in America will never work for everyone. It's time to put people over profits once and for all, and require hospitals and health insurance companies to once again become non-profits.

Suddenly, there was money to be made off of healthcare in America, and a lot of it. Banksters realized that these once-nonprofit hospitals, health insurers, and nursing homes had the potential to become absolute gold mines. Former Senator Bill Frist's family, for example, made billions in the 1980s and 1990s privatizing formerly county and city hospitals, slashing salaries, busting unions, and raising prices.

Slowly but surely, corporations and the wealthy elite took over our healthcare system, and have left us with a healthcare nightmare. That's why according to a new study by a prominent think-tank, the United States ranks dead last in a review of healthcare in the industrialized world. For the fifth time in a row, the U.S. has been ranked last in the Commonwealth Fund's annual review of healthcare in developed nations.

The review looked at healthcare access, efficiency and equity in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Of the nations included in the review, the United States had the highest percentage of citizens who didn't get medical care because they couldn't afford it.

A staggering 37% of Americans said they didn't get a prescription, see a doctor, or seek out other medical care, because they were worried about the costs. On the flip side, just four percent of people in the United Kingdom said they skipped out on healthcare because of cost concerns. So why such a large disparity?

The United Kingdom has universal health care. In fact, every country the Commonwealth Fund looked at has universal healthcare, except the U.S. The U.S. is the ONLY free-market country in the world without a universal healthcare system, and - not coincidentally - the only one with such a large involvement of for-profit companies in the healthcare marketplace.

Countries with universal nonprofit healthcare don't have millions of people struggling to afford healthcare. And they don't have millions of people skipping out on prescriptions because they cost too much money. From Switzerland to Italy, and Norway to France, healthcare is considered a basic human right. No one questions the notion that everyone, no matter who they are, is entitled to lifesaving and affordable healthcare.

But the differences in healthcare outcomes in the U.S. and in Europe go beyond just universal healthcare. You see, healthcare isn't a profit-making machine in Europe the way it is in the U.S.

In fact, in Switzerland, not only is there universal healthcare, but health insurers are FORBIDDEN from making a profit on basic health insurance coverage, because the Swiss realize, and accept, that healthcare and ballooning profits don't go together. They realize that profit incentives have to be removed if a healthcare system is going to work for everyone.

Since it went into effect, Obamacare has done tremendous things for healthcare in America. It's allowed millions of Americans to get the healthcare and treatment they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. An April Gallup study found that as many as 9.9 million Americans have gotten new health insurance under Obamacare, and more than 4 percent of Americans have gotten health insurance for the first time in their lives.

But Obamacare is just one piece of the puzzle. If we truly want to have a healthcare system that works for all, than we need to go back to the days before Reagan, when healthcare wasn't a cash cow for Wall Street bankers. Unless we take Wall Street's skin out of the game, healthcare in America will never work for everyone. It's time to put people over profits once and for all, and require hospitals and health insurance companies to once again become non-profits.

http://www.thomhartmann.com

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War(more...)

Hillary Clinton: Warmonger for the Bankster Elite

from globalreasearch.ca

Next president owned by the same banks and corporations as Obama and Bush

Unfortunately, it takes the media mouthpiece of the Russian government to tell the truth about Hillary Clinton and the War Party.

You’ll never get the truth from the U.S. government’s media mouthpiece who self-righteously and disingenuously claim they are independent and “fair and balanced” (cue laugh track).

Clinton, of course, is no different than your garden variety Republican, including the any number of neocons. All of them are propped up by the military-industrial-intelligence complex and the banksters who run the show and who laughingly pretend we all live in a pluralistic democracy. Of course, anybody who has more than two brain cells to rub together and is not in serious denial knows we live in an authoritarian plutocracy run for the sake of a small clique of mega-rich and powerful global internationalists.

Clinton will be the Democrat contender for the position of teleprompter reader. Jeb Bush will probably be the Republican choice to play the political equivalent of musical chairs. The ruling elite has decided it wants to stick with the Bush-Clinton dynasty for the foreseeable future.

Hillary is preferable because the elite are keen on making sure all criticism and political activism is either marginalized or written off as hatred and thus not only dismissible, but worthy of a violent response by government. Criticism of Hillary will be deemed sexist the same way serious criticism of Obama is now considered racist.

In addition, Hillary’s confrontational and ugly personality will be described as an admirable attribute indicative of a strong leader the same way the psychopathic personalities of her male counterparts are described as the attribute of masters of statecraft (the word is synonymous with bombing small helpless nations and bailing out transnational banks).

It really is too bad RT had to run this piece. The Russian government, of course, is as authoritarian and violent, and in some instance more so, than the government ruling the United States. Anti-Russian propaganda disseminated by alphabet networks owned and operated by an interlocking directorship dominated banks and transnational corporations point out Russia’s flaws on a daily basis.

Everything we see on television, an increasingly on the internet, “often surpasses expectations of media subservience to government propaganda,” as Edward S. Herman noted nearly two decades ago. Only the alternative media, which naturally suffers from its own flaws, is free to tell the truth.

As an arm of the state, RT has its own propaganda agenda. Part of that agenda is pointing out the indisputable fact the U.S. government is owned and operated by banks and large corporations. For pointing out what the corporate media in this country is forbidden to mention, we can be thankful. On the other hand, we should be wary and mistrustful of RT and any other propaganda organ of the state.

Fund giants BlackRock, Pimco mull suit against Ocwen

from therealdeal.com

Fund giants BlackRock, Pimco mull suit against Ocwen

Handling of former ResCap mortgages at issue

February 12, 2014 01:24PM

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From left: Ocwen’s Ronald Faris, BlackRock’s Laurence Fink and Pimco’s Mohamed El-Erian

In an abrupt change, BlackRock and Pimco are contemplating filing suit against Ocwen Financial for improperly handling residential mortgages.

The duo supported the sale of ResCap’s $300 billion mortgage servicing portfolio to Ocwen back in 2012, after that firm went bankrupt. At the time, ResCap trustees slammed the deal with Ocwen, citing the company’s lackluster customer service record.

Now the attorney who represented the 17-member institutional investor group — including mutual fund heavyweights BlackRock and Pimco — is preparing a suit against Ocwen. The allegations?  Ocwen allegedly fudged its handling of the mortgages and has not done enough to keep borrowers out of foreclosure, an unnamed source told the New York Post.

News of the suit comes on the heels of the New York State Department of Financial Services move last week to halt the transfer of $39 billion in mortgage servicing rights from Wells Fargo to Ocwen. The Atlanta-based mortgage servicer picked up the rights in January.[NYP] – Julie Strickland

Tags: blackrock, ocwen, pimco

Oops -- a spy name gets out

from  nashuatelegraph


Monday, June 2, 2014 

Telegraph Editorial

In the history of our republic prior to 2009, the federal government brought criminal charges against three journalists for cases involving leaks, according to a New York Times story published last Wednesday.

The Obama administration, by contrast, has brought eight charges against reporters, according to the Times. It has sought the phone records and email files of government employees suspected of talking to reporters, and is regarded as the most paranoid administration since the Nixon regime when it comes to investigating leaks, according to a study published last fall.

One administration target has been a New York Times reporter who is under subpoena to testify about a case involving a former CIA official. That issue is on appeal to the Supreme Court, which is being asked to decide whether the reporter must be compelled to testify, or if he is protected by the First Amendment.

Attorney General Eric Holder sat with a group of journalists last week to discuss the administration’s track record with regard to press freedoms and to speak generally about the administration’s approach to leak investigations.

“As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail. As long as I’m attorney general, someone who is doing their job is not going to get prosecuted,” the Times quoted Holder as saying.

Not to venture too far afield, but it seems that Holder’s Justice Department has taken much the same approach when it comes to the government’s view toward the investment banksters on Wall Street who brought the country to the brink of economic ruin in 2008. We’re against the death penalty, but it didn’t escape our notice that a man believed to be Iran’s wealthiest citizen was put to death recently for his role in a $2.6 billion bank fraud. In this country, such creative thinkers not only don’t get prosecuted by the government, they get year-end bonuses.

Perhaps the Obama administration, rather than going after journalists or the occasional Wall Street miscreant upon which they happen to stumble, should spend more time examining their own practices.

For instance, a week ago Sunday the White House inadvertently disclosed the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan on the occasion of the president’s Memorial Day weekend visit to that country. “Station chief” is spyspeak for “top spy,” and the name and job description of the operative was included on a list circulated to about 6,000 reporters. It was removed from a later replacement list that the White House press office sent out, but by then the damage was done.

The administration has, predictably, ordered a review of how the error happened.

The good news is, there’s nothing to suggest that the disclosure was as insidious as when officials in the George W. Bush administration purposely outed Valerie Plame as a CIA spy in 2003. That was an act of political retaliation to punish her ambassador husband for his criticism of Bush administration policies in Iraq.

The bad news is, it might have been an act of incompetence the likes of which the public has come to expect from the Obama administration.

Maybe they should have just leaked the name to The New York Times. At least those people know how to keep secrets.

Bilderberg 2014: In the Court of Good King Henry

from axisoflogic.com

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By Tony Gosling, RT

RT.com

Saturday, May 31, 2014

ARCHIVE PHOTO: Activists protest on June 9, 2011 in front of the Suvretta House five-star hotel in the chic Swiss ski station of St Moritz, where the Bilderberg Group is holding its annual meeting. (AFP Photo / Fabrice Coffrini) In medieval times the most crooked arch-dukes and barons could gather in an imposing castle of their choice and plot the demise of their kindly neighbors, without anyone knowing what they were up to. But have we come a long way in six hundred years? Propelled by more money than anyone could ever spend and the strange compulsion to make even more, Bilderberg's 21st Century Western elite have gathered again, preparing to devastate more once prosperous lands, for asset stripping and reconstruction contracts. When they tell us they are just trying to put the world to rights, I say 'phooey!' Just look at what a wreck they are making of the 21st Century. Just look at the medieval courtiers of finance capitalism. The bankers, intelligence chiefs and private military strategists are the dukes, energy and arms firms the barons. The lowly politicians and media cannot resist sticking their noses in, hoping for a share of the spoils of war. Whether its money laundering for the Mexican drug cartel, hacking, torturing in secret prisons or just assassinating their political rivals with drones, one thing all the feudal Bilderberg elite have in common is crime. We like to think that everyone is equal under the law in our modern judicial systems but Bilderberg is living proof that the money men and their favored ones are above the law. The betrayal by Bilderberg politicians and media In the post-9/11 Western world, legal impunity from bribery, murder and fraud has become the norm amongst the big arms firms, military men and banksters that make up Bilderberg's core. As they step over the Bilderberg threshold swearing to Chatham House rules of secrecy our media and elected politicians don't just betray their voters, viewers, readers and listeners, just by being there they are endorsing the Bilderbergers' crimes, betraying everything we voted them into office, or listen to their news or buy their papers for. The politicians may also be breaking the criminal law. When the mayor of Atlanta Georgia Kasim Reed gets home he should face arrest and questioning under the 1799 Logan Act, which expressly forbids politicians from entering into private discussions with foreign governments. In the UK it's prohibited by Parliament’s Ministerial Code but the man in charge of overseeing it, David Cameron, broke the code himself going to Bilderberg last year. Contempt for parliamentary standards straight from the top. What with the bankers to finance it and the increasing presence of secret services and arms firms to prosecute it, Bilderberg has become the engine room of the warfare state. Bilderberg chummy too these days are the present and future internet media giants: Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, YouTube and LinkedIn are all on first name terms with the war machine too. ‘Don’t be evil unless you can get away with it.’ ARCHIVE PHOTO: People protest against the Bilderberg meeting in central Barcelona June 5, 2010. (Reuters / Gustau Nacarino) Back in the 1930s, when Bilderberg’s founding chairman, Prince Bernhard, was strutting around in his black SS uniform the fascists stood out a mile. In Spain, Italy, Germany and London there they were, making loud noises about atheistic Communism and 'Johnny foreigner'. Then they started building tanks, guns, dive bombers and sticking them in anyone’s face that didn’t see things their way. Nowadays, in the countries ravaged by interventions of NATO and Israel the propaganda is more sophisticated, but the end result is the same: secret prisons, genocide, drone assassinations and apartheid. Bilderberg’s men in suits will say: 'What do you care about them,' because it’s all 'just a means to an end.’ Except where a racist element is convenient, as in Ukraine, the new fascism embraces sociopaths of all races and cultures. The new fatherland is set to become a transatlantic NATO bloc, outside which plentiful supplies of bogey men lurk. Here just as Hitler's tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland and Belgium, armies of Bilderberg and Goldman Sachs friendly banks and corporations are launching hostile takeovers. These are 'buy 'em up' rather than 'shoot 'em up' campaigns and all paid for with 'funny money', QE conjured out of nowhere. As you’d expect, for a transcontinental empire which spans twenty-two countries nationalism plays little part in the new fascism. As if the EU was not big enough, the proposed but hardly discussed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would legally bind the EU and US together, being one legal jurisdiction for corporate power. The global solutions that refuse to go away Back in 2000, when I attended my first Bilderberg, an unofficial ‘counter conference’ was to be had in the bar of the hotel where American Free Press' Big Jim Tucker stayed. Since then this gypsy-like counter-conference has evolved into a series of more formal seminars given by campaigners and thinkers concerned for discussing the future of humanity outside the Bilderberg straitjacket, forging a genuine social justice narrative, toward a united front and inspiring vision for a future. Little Iceland has locked up its banker criminals, dealt with the debt crisis, increased state support for the disadvantaged and pointed the way for the rest of Europe. As such, the plucky Icelanders are not invited this year. Bilderberg would like to deal with Iceland at a later date. But we are not going to let them. The worse pay and unemployment get in Europe, the easier it is to see that the various so-called solutions we are offered are just tinkering. Only developing world style campaigns for land and monetary reform will put humanity back on track. A new monetary system too must serve everyone that uses it, not just those who run it. The chimes of freedom flashing Exactly a year ago, during Bilderberg 2013 in Watford, Enland, Edward Snowden shuffled onto the world stage with a memory stick in his pocket. He showed us the capability our Signals Intelligence services now have to identify, target and take down anyone, yes, including creative writers, artists or other public figures who threaten corporate power. The Snowden revelations showed us our laws have been broken and our courts bypassed, that we are all 'enemy' targets but we now know too how complicit the big internet companies have been in this government hacking deep into our personal lives. By failing dismally to fight back for our privacy Google, Facebook and the rest have become little more than fronts for the intelligence services. Handing them our lives on a plate. But Snowden's biggest message of all is that our governments will lock up the whistleblowers we so desperately need to understand what governments are doing in our name and with our taxes. In the case of top British government scientist David Kelly, who many believe was ‘suicided’ for blowing the whistle on Blair's 'dodgy dossier', worse. Western criminal justice too has fallen under the securocrats' black magic spell. Chelsea Manning Just look at how Chelsea Manning the whistleblower and Julian Assange the publisher have been scapegoated. The message is clear, if you want to tell the public about crimes by NATO governments you better be prepared to get out of Britain, America or your home country before you do so. The power elite really can, it seems, still just shout 'lock him in the tower' and no one will lift a finger to see that justice is done. King of the Anarcho-Capitalists, Henry Kissinger may not have destroyed the fabric of domestic society in the NATO countries as comprehensively as his medieval namesake Henry VIII. Yet! But he’s been one of the driving forces behind the disappearance and butchery in Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and scores of other countries and will continue to do so until he's stopped. The debt that Bilderberg's IMF, Goldman Sachs, Federal Reserve and European Central Bank hold the levers to, replaced the old, obvious, colonialism. Lines of credit that were used to strangle third world nations are now strangling the peoples of the West's right to fresh water, food and shelter too. Rather than the post-war dream of helping the developing world to share in the social justice our forefathers fought for, these Bilderbergers are now driving the people of the developed world down too, through the anaconda of unpayable debt, toward barbarism. Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.