Hold Fast

Metaphor fail: This time it is the Wall Street bankers and not the Occupiers who are getting hit with pepper spray. The spray comes straight from the laser printer in the chambers of a federal judge, Jed Rakoff, in New York. The victory that Rakoff gave to the Occupy Wall Street movement Monday came from [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field Jon Ward at Huffington Post has a fantastic piece on the shifting political narrative that has happened while Newt Gingrich has overtaken Mitt Romney for the lead in the Republican presidential primary. At issue is while Romney has been running on a platform of inevitability, large swaths [...]

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Matt Stoller at New Deal 2.0 writes about how mortgage servicing companies are programming fraud into their software to ensure they extract the maximum amount of money from homeowners and force them into foreclosure. Long quote: And what happens when this kind of fraud goes unprosecuted? It continues, even today. The same banks that ran [...]

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The New York Times is reporting that federal judge Jed Rakoff has thrown out a proposed settlement between Citigroup and the SEC. The SEC had agreed to $285 million in exchange for no admission of wrongdoing in a complaint about Citigroup defrauding investors in a 2007 residential mortgage backed security. Citigroup had told the investors [...]

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This summer, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism opted an interview of social anthropologist David Graeber on the history and evolution of debt in human society. In light of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the expanding debt crisis in Europe, the post is worth revisiting. First, I highly recommend the entire interview, as it is [...]

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I like this version of Reich better than the one who thought NAFTA was a great idea.

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I hope that Democrats learn from what just happened in Spain. Spain’s ruling Socialist Party – which I presume didn’t rule for eight years because of their conservative policies – was just voted out of power after presiding over cruel austerity measures enacted to appease bond vigilantes and ensure that bankers who lost bets not [...]

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This is from early this past week, but is brutal. Keith Olbermann just utterly destroys Michael Bloomberg for his violent crackdown on Occupy Wall Street.

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This speech by Nigel Farage is truly incredible. Update: I forgot to mention, but Nigel Farage is an ultra-right wing pol. Today is clearly a weird day, as I’ve basically agreed with him and Sarah Palin.

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Earlier this week Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto indicted two mid-level employees of Lender Processing Services (LPS) for 606 counts of robosigning, specifically “directing fraudulent notarization and filing of foreclosure documents.” LPS is a major company hired by banks to process foreclosure documents and has been at the center of the robosigning scandal. LPS [...]

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