"This Is A Sick Joke On ALL Of Us!" Obama Nominates Wall Street Protector To Head SEC

Revealing Reality: US & UK 'evolve into full blown police states'

Published on Jun 22, 2013

The US government has filed criminal charges against Edward Snowden - the man who told the world about the scope of America's global surveillance network. Washington now wants help from Hong Kong officials - because Snowden's been hiding in the Chinese territory since unleashing the revelations about the National Security Agency. Julian Assange has meanwhile published a speech in which he severely criticizes President Obama for his handling of whistle blowers. RT is joined by geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser, stopimperalism.com.

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HOW TO BANKRUPT THE WORLD !!! GOLDMAN SACHS MASTERS OF GREED

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

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To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

OBAMA & THE SHOREBANK CORRUPTION TIES - BAILOUT MONEY GOING TO HELP OBAMA FRIENDS

No more bailouts, no more greed, how many profits do you need?" That's been a signature chant of the community organizers and Big Labor thugs who have stormed bank offices and financial executives' private homes decrying corporate welfare over the past several months. But now that the federal government and a coalition of big banking interests are poised to bail out a crony Chicago bank with longtime ties to the Obama administration, Saul Alinsky's avenging angels are nowhere to be found.

ShoreBank is a Windy City investment bank with all the right (or, rather, left) ties. Its stated progressive mission isn't merely to make good lending decisions, but to engage in Barack Obama--esque social engineering to "create economic equity and a healthy environment." The ShoreBank corporate slogan: "Let's change the world."

The company website features a video of Obama in Kenya championing ShoreBank microlending projects overseas. ShoreBank has also touted itself as a "green" bank from its founding days — promoting dubious carbon-credit programs, subjecting new borrowers to eco-litmus tests ("we look at how you use water, how you recover water and clean it, how you use energy, if you produce clean energy, how you manage CO2, whether you are offsetting CO2 that your product produces, if you are using sustainably produced materials"), and encouraging customers to participate in "EcoDeposits" to "directly support the green agenda."

Social and environmental justice may make for good Volvo bumper stickers. They do not, however, make for a good bottom line. While the bank was on do-gooder missions around the world, business at home was in trouble. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Losses racked up during the recession have left the bank facing a demand to raise new capital or face likely closure by regulators."

Enter the Chicago political friends and family of ShoreBank. The ties are long and deep, as the Central Illinois 9/12 Project has been chronicling for months:

ShoreBank co-founder Jan Piercy was a Wellesley College roommate of Hillary Clinton's, who has long supported the bank along with former president Bill Clinton.

Former ShoreBank vice chairman Bob Nash worked for Mrs. Clinton's presidential bid as deputy campaign manager. Board of directors member Howard Stanback is a Hyde Park neighborhood pal of President Obama, and served with Stanback on the board of the radical Woods Fund (where Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers also sat).
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett served on the board of Chicago Metropolis 2020 with ShoreBank director Adele Simmons, former president of the liberal MacArthur Foundation, where she focused on "climate change" and "global governance" issues.

The bank and its employees donated some $12,000 to the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, and co-founder Mary Houghton reportedly gave advice to Obama's late mother about small-business lending issues

Ron Paul: "It's Going to Get Much, Much Worse"

Dr. Ron Paul has long been a leading voice for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, sound money, civil liberty, and non-interventionist foreign policies.
His last term in the U.S. House of Representatives ended earlier this year, so we caught up with the former Congressman to get his latest perspective on how successfully our national leadership is dealing with America’s economic challenges.
In Dr. Paul’s assessment, Washington is too committed to deficit spending and the debt-based economy – both operationally and philosophically – to expect it to embrace a more fiscally-responsible model without a forcing crisis (which he believes is coming):

[T]hey believe it like a religion that spending is good no matter what the spending is on. And that the deficits don't matter; deficits are not a burden. And even though we have this national debt and we have a foreign debt, they don't consider that so bad, as long as people will spend money. And if the people won't spend any money, the government has this moral obligation to do it.

I don't expect anything else because they are reflecting what I consider “prevailing attitudes.” And the prevailing attitudes for the last 50 or 60 years, especially since the 1930s, has been spending and deficits and printing money is the way to go.

But where I am encouraged is outside of Washington. You get a better perspective from people like you who talk about this and get people to look at their investments. I think this is beneficial, because a lot of people are realizing this whole system is deeply flawed, and they are looking elsewhere. And that is why I talk a lot about free markets, and property rights, and Austrian economics, and getting rid of the Fed. All these things are now up for grabs. A lot of people, especially the young people, are looking at this. So, for this reason, I am a bit encouraged by what might come out of this.

But I think we are going to go through the ringer. I think it's going to get much, much worse. It is bad enough already, but there is no way that we can step back.

The one thing I am convinced of, after having spent so much time in Washington, is that this will not be a gradual recovery from this disaster that we have. We are not going to elect enough people and have enough courage to vote the right way; there is too much demagoguing and too much misunderstanding. The people would revolt, but the collapse will come. It is going to hit the dollar, and then we are going to have our opportunity. 

So, the more people who are protected intellectually as well as financially, the better off we will be in rebuilding what we will need to do in the near future.

Dr Paul continues to be vocal about the destructive role the Federal Reserve’s loose and interventionist monetary policies are having in enabling the mal-investment in the system:

What if the Fed could not buy government debt? What a different world it would be. Everybody said this would be a disastrous to the economy but what if people accommodated with this?

What if there was a dependency on saving? What if we did have a market rate of interest? And what if that resulted in less bubbles? All of a sudden the world would be a different place.

But no...The only thing they can even do is spend more and more money. That is the only tool they have.

So, for that reason, I am not shocked at the numbers. I guess I am more surprised that the whole thing holds together so long. Because when you look at this, and you look at the foreign debt, and the national debt it is so outrageous, and there is still confidence in the dollar, the world – they do not have a good currency, so the best they can come up with is the dollar, but even the dollar is less popular than it used to be. It is being held a lot less now as reserve currency, but we can still buy oil, and we can still buy our stuff from China, and they take our currency.

But what amazes me is that it holds together. So I think monetizing debt and spending and deficit is going to get much, much worse until the world rejects the dollar. And there will be a rejection here at home, and prices will soar, and eventually interest rates will break loose and they will start rising.

He continues to view precious metals as prudent to hold in advance of this currency crisis. But in the long run, he sees civil agitation for smaller government as our best strategy:

I don't think the euro is going to replace the dollar. And that certainly looks like it is the case. You are not going to go to yen, and you are not going to go to special drawing rights…

No, when people become frightened, they look for things of real value, and I don't think they can repeal the laws of economics that says that for 6,000 years metals have been beneficial. They will go to monetary metals, gold and silver, and they will buy other things, such as buying property. But no matter what we have, whether we have our gold coins or we have our property, if we have an authoritarian government, that is our greatest threat.

So, I would like to think that there is no perfect protection, other than shrinking the size and scope and power of government, so that we can be left alone and take care of ourselves.

Ron Paul Blasts NSA Defenders On Piers Morgan: 'You're Justifying Dictatorship!'

 

"To all of you who defend this nonsense, what should the penalty be for those who destroy the constitution?" - Ron Paul

This Isn't About Snowden: It's About the Other Traitors Still In the Room

So let's review the narrative as it stands regarding Edward Snowden and see if we can find the missing elephant in the room.
Let's assume that the most vile of human beings --one that is not only a traitor, but also thief and a liar and a burglar, a kidnapper, an arsonist and a rapist --proves to you and the world that the following has happened to you and your family:
--A group of people are stalking you, collecting photos, listening to, monitoring, recording and saving your telephone conversations, surfing habits, and building a database and chart with everyone you know, interact with, whether your family, work, or acquaintances. In addition, your political and religious beliefs, where you shop, what you buy and even what you like to eat and what music you listen to and the books you read.
Now let's assume that you take the side of the people who call this hypothetical person a traitor, a thief and a liar and a burglar, and a kidnapper, and an arsonist and a rapist and that you agree with them, and further that this person should be tried and punished.
Good enough. That's one criminal down. Now what about the other one?
What other one?
Remember the other criminal that you now know is stalking you, collecting your photos, listening to calls and record your internet, social, shopping, political, and religious connections?
Yeah what about that criminal?
Because what's being overlooked quite purposefully in the media, on the Senate floor, and in the Oval Office is that there are two traitors in the room.
Always remember that one traitor has outed the other.
And that other traitor? He (or they are) is desperately trying to airbrush themselves out of the room before anyone notices.
On that note, it can be said that only the mind of someone like that of a violent rapist or of a sexual predator (a sociopath or psychopath) would characterize and compare the physical and mental violation the most intimate parts and recesses of a person mind and body as a balancing act between actual rape or molestation to a medical procedure that is intended to detect and diagnose disease in his or her victim, and where the resulting emotional and physical scarring inflicted is nothing compared to the favor they did you.
Or the favor they claim to be doing for millions of victims so raped and molested, if in the process, they do detect and discover some disease, and in so doing clothe themselves as worthy of pity, and all of us worthy of guilt and shame and perhaps punishment, for the thankless job we've forced them to perform over our bruised, bloodied and violated bodies and souls.
The ungrateful worms that we are.
We're supposed to lay back and enjoy it and thank them for it -- not ruin their special moment nor make them feel guilty.
And so it is with the rape of our most intimate and private thoughts and words. We consider it as such not because there is something to hide, but because they are priceless and must be protected from harm or misuse.
We would feel wrong to share them with anyone other than those we deeply trust and further, that we have found that they have not, nor would not take advantage, of our most vulnerable moments to gain something at our expense, which it ultimately is at our expense, in the instant that our words and thoughts are extracted against our will, without our knowledge and surely without our consent and used against us, to blackmail, coerce, ruin, or jail us, or to be used against those we love.
And as we survey the landscape dotted with the characters who have now revealed themselves to have raped the products of our hearts and minds, are we even able to retroactively absolve them of a crime because they haven't taken advantage of us in any other way?
Would they have been worthy of our consideration for our most intimate thoughts and to have and hold the things we hold dear?
Would the rapist had been our friend under other circumstances if he or she had only courted us instead and won our trust and respect?
Or is our outrage justified because in addition, they've rifled through and spent all of our money? Because they've opened trillions in credit accounts in our names and hung us with the balance? Because they've audited and harassed people for their political beliefs? Arranged laws so that anyone can be detained without charge or trial?
Hadn't they already proven themselves to be abusive spouses or crooked business partners or lying, thieving employees, before they became leering, scheming eavesdroppers and peeping toms?
Hadn't they already failed the bare minimum tests you would have imposed on anyone you would remotely think of having sex with, or making love to, or sharing to deepest secrets with?
Then what makes them think this will be forgotten or forgiven?
What makes them think that any and all attorney's reading this won't be compelled to sue for records to prove that attorney client privilege has been in fact violated?
What makes them think that any and all physicians won't be compelled to sue for records to prove that doctor patient confidentiality has been in fact violated?
What makes them think that companies will not sue for having their trade secrets and business plans (recorded) stolen from them?
What makes them think they can claim they know all of our secrets, even some "crimes", but not be aware of their own "crimes" in the process of admitting to knowledge of ours?
How can they claim to know all about everyone to the exclusion of themselves?
How? By thinking like rapists and predators and denouncing you as an ungrateful victim for the favor they did you. That's how.
By believing their crimes to be gifts while demanding you be an accomplice to them by demanding your silence .In the meantime, their claim of knowing all convicts them of all, or do they think they would be immune to same rod being put to their backs that they have fashioned for ours?
They are now accomplices to everything including the real possibility that all this spying provides an ancillary benefit a something of a gateway drug: To the harder drug of blackmail.
You see, one chief advantage of the Executive being able to spy on everyone, including Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Generals, CEO's, of any party affiliation, etc., is that it's easy to blackmail them into submission and obedience or get rid of them whenever you want.
As you think about just how much spying was and is reportedly going on, think back over the last 10 years or so and recall just how many high profile people in the Federal (and State) government suddenly lost their jobs, decided to step down, or not run for office again, and had their reputations destroyed over "leaked" personal information that was embarrassing, or made them vulnerable, or got them ostracized.
It may help explain the behavior of those who are mysteriously (or maybe not so mysteriously?) currently and to your astonishment, defending the very system that they know for sure already spies on them, and most likely know has them blackmailed as well. It's said that in organized crime circles, the point is made to extract your obedience through complicity - which is to simply make you an accomplice to the crimes they commit- so that if they go down, you go down with them.
As a gateway drug then, spying opens a door to blackmail which has the power to silence anyone, and moreover to compel those under it's influence to defend it.
So to us it doesn’t matter who Snowden works for, or whether he’s coached or not, or whether someday even more heinous things about him are said. Hang him for it.
Because what matters Naomi is who this traitor or puppet, or whatever he is, exposed--- a room full of other traitors, who by the way nearly all Americans have come to see as puppets anyway.
And we can’t help but notice how little attention is being paid to paint them with that brush at all, except perhaps with a vanishing airbrush so they match the background of outrage directed at just Snowden (instead of including them) and disappearing in plain sight.
May you speak up about this false dichotomy and narrative before the conflation, discrediting and obfuscation take firm root in the public mind to the point where they no longer see a room full of traitors outed by another.
It’s not about Snowden.
It’s about who and what Snowden exposed, and the power it has to silence anyone and extract their cooperation, regardless of their station or office.
It's about the other traitors still in the room.

First Head to Roll? New Report Claims Top IRS Official Fired, Has ‘Dropped Off the Edge of the World’

Holly Paz. (ABC)

An Internal Revenue Service official at the center of the agency’s political targeting scandal has reportedly been fired and has since “dropped off the edge of the world,” according to a new report from National Review Online.

Holly Paz, the director of the agency’s Rulings and Agreements office, was fired last Friday, according to the NRO report, and her agency-issued computer, phone, and Blackberry have shown no activity since.

“As of Thursday, the voice mail on Paz’s work phone remains active and callers are asked to leave a message for Paz, though nobody answered repeated calls placed to that number,” the report notes.

“Calls to the mobile phone number listed under Paz’s name in the IRS’s internal directory are sent straight to voice mail, and indicate her mailbox has not yet been set up,” it adds.

Paz’s alleged connection to the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups became public knowledge during a Congressional hearing in May

Here’s some NRO background on her role as director of the Rulings and Agreements office:

As the director of Rulings and Agreements, Paz served as the first line of management in Washington, D.C., that oversaw both the tax-law specialists who provided guidance to agents in Cincinnati reviewing tea-party applications and the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati charged with processing those applications. Paz has served in that position since January 2011, reporting directly to Lois Lerner, with the exception of a four-month period between October 2011 and January 2012 when she reportedly was on maternity leave. Lerner, the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division was on May 23 placed on paid leave.

Paz, as mentioned in the above, recently became a person of interest when it was revealed that she was aware of an internal investigation into the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups (one year before the release inspector general’s report) and failed to notify Congress.

“Lawmakers have also raised eyebrows at the fact that Paz was present when members of the inspector general’s team interviewed her subordinates during the course of their investigation,” the NRO report continues.

“In a May 23 Oversight Committee hearing, chairman Darrell Issa expressed his astonishment, saying he was ‘shocked’ to find that Paz ‘participated in virtually every one of the interrogations or interviews with her own subordinates,” the report adds.

Rep. Issa said: “In those, of course, one of the questions the IG had to ask was, ‘Did anyone tell you to do this?’ If that question was asked, their own superior was in the room.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) was also surprised at Paz’s actions.

“It sounded like Ms. Paz felt like she needed to be in the room because she wanted to be able to defend herself – or the agency, I don’t know – based on what may have been said or the information gathered in that interview,” Cummings told inspector general J. Russell George.

“Usually when you are conducting an investigation . . . you want to keep your witnesses separate because you’re in search of the truth and you are trying to make sure there’s no advantage of a person hearing what somebody else said,” he added.

Paz, according to Rep. Issa, told the committee that neither she nor Lois Lerner requested be present during the investigation interviews.

“I can’t remember if I made the request or Lois Lerner made the request, but we discussed that in order for the IRS to be able respond to the report, we had to understand what information [the inspector general] had and what they were being told,” Congressman Issa said, quoting Paz.

As of this writing, the IRS has neither confirmed nor denied Paz’s firing.

But if the NRO report proves accurate, Paz’s firing would be the first head to roll in the IRS scandal.

Sean Hannity Displays Hypocrisy On NSA Surveillance (VIDEO)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/12/sean-hannity-nsa_n_3431346.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

Sean Hannity sure has changed his tune.
The rambunctious Fox News host on Monday lashed into the Obama administration over the revelations of widespread Internet and phone surveillance by the National Security Agency, warning that "anarchy and tyranny will follow."
But back in 2006, when a similar NSA spying scandal was unearthed during President George W. Bush's administration, Hannity wasn't so concerned. He came out as a staunch defender of the NSA then, saying it was "staggering to me we are even debating the use of these techniques in this country even at this time."
Media Matters put together a mashup of Hannity's comments, comparing his position then and now.