With a story about prosecuting Wall Street featured on the most mainstream of TV news shows, CBS’s Sixty Minutes, might there finally be enough momentum for some banking executives go to jail?
In this segment, two high-ranking financial whistleblowers say they tried to warn their superiors about defective and even fraudulent mortgages. Reporter Steve Kroft questions why the companies and their executives haven’t been prosecuted.
Kelly Carr and Brian Grow recently reported in Yahoo Finance: The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming. At a single address in this…
Is it possible to channel a fictional character? Specifically, the Southern-gentrified blowhard from the Warner Bro.’s 1960’s “Foghorn Leghorn” franchise? Based upon experiments performed over the weekend, I can report a firm…
If I had to pick one issue that I think many more people should really, really be curious about, I’d say the backstory behind so-called recent “financial crisis”, (which has been documented in such films as Inside Job, Capitalism: A Love Story and Plunder: The Crime of Our Time to name a few), is at the top of my list. Therefore, I was surprised when I saw at the end of the Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg comedy, The Other Guys, to find this “message” embedded in a mainstream entertainment film. As Gary Susman wrote on Moviefone’s Blog:
The movie may be a silly farce about New York cops who stumble upon a Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme that threatens to defraud billions from city workers. But buried in the comedy is a serious point about what really constitutes grand theft these days, a point illustrated over the closing credits by a PowerPoint-like presentation full of jazzy infographics and serious statistics outlining just how much Wall Street and corporate leaders have enriched themselves at the expense of American workers and taxpayers…
It’s a fascinating sequence, both from a design perspective and from the unlikely prospect of seeing a major corporation (in this case, Sony) release a mass-entertainment movie that also wants to educate moviegoers about the legalized wealth-grab that’s benefiting major corporations…
This takes elaborate ruses to new level. Californian Yupeng Deng used uniforms, IDs, basic training exercises, and military parades in a scam tricking Chinese immigrants into believing they had joined a “special…
Via Fox News:
A coin commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks is drawing the ire of consumers and politicians who have learned that the coin may be just a worthless trinket that has no affiliation with the U.S. government and does not benefit the 9/11 Memorial.
Katie Smith and John Shughart of Carlisle, Pa., thought they were buying a priceless piece of history. Now, the coin they bought may have not even a cent of value.
“I think it’s a complete rip-off,” says Smith. “It’s a scam.”
The couple called a 1-800 number and ordered a 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Commemorative Coin after seeing a commercial on TV. The commercial claims the coin has “sculptures of the USS New York and the World Trade Center towers, inset with jeweler precision on its obverse, each entirely clad in .999 pure silver actually recovered from beneath the ashes of ground zero.”
Jenny McCarthy take note: Britain’s leading medical journal has declared that Andrew Wakefield’s discredited 1998 autism study was not merely riddled with errors, but was a case of deliberate, “elaborate fraud.” CNN…
As domestic bee colonies collapse in droves, the United States is being flooded with cheap, perhaps dangerous, Chinese honey in “the largest case of food fraud in history.” The Globe and Mail…
An interesting ‘coincidence’ in the still unfolding honey pot trap that has ensnared Julian Assange. From Kirk Murphy at Firedoglake.com: Yesterday Alexander Cockburn reminded us of the news Israel Shamir and Paul…
Via LiveScience: U.S. scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics….
Who would suspect an elderly white man? Nobody. At least, that’s what the young man from Hong Kong thought. While the facial disguise was quite impressive, he forgot to make his hands…
In the US fake IDs are printed, near the Afghan border fake voter registration cards are printed. What will this do to President Hamid Karzai’s term? From the Associated Press via NPR:…
Charles Rangel must die, politically that is. He has become an embarrassment to a House Speaker who vowed to “clean the swamp” of Congressional corruption. It took him 80 years but Harlem’s…
Is this really the time to give a “get-out-of-jail-free” card to corporate chiefs who can’t resist fraudulently dipping into the honey pot of riches that they have access to? I mean we’re…
[disinformation editor’s note: We decided to run this article because of recent wild swings in currency exchange rates resulting from turmoil in the financial markets. We recognize that the author is promoting…
What is Congress getting right now? A Philosopher’s Stone? The Holy Grail? The Ark of the Covenant? Your ideas are quite welcome. Zach Carter writes on Alternet: Late last night, the U.S….
Think that the financial crash has left investment banking hotshots humbler and wiser? Not likely. The National Review blog The Corner has a defiant email that has been circulating over the last…
In celebration of this paragon of capitalism, Goldman Sachs, on April 30th we’ll be giving away copies of Danny Schechter’s latest documentary on Wall Street fraud, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time (available now on DVD and iTunes) for those who Tweet the following:
Let’s Give Goldman Sachs Their Own “Shitty Deal” #Plunder #GoldmanSucks #FreeFriday http://bit.ly/cuUXky
(If you haven’t heard of the “shitty deal” yet read here.)
As always the more you Tweet the above phrase, the greater your chances of receiving a copy of Plunder on DVD. Here’s the trailer:
Goldman Sucks, I mean Sachs, this is priceless. Did you really have to destroy the U.S. economy to make C-SPAN this entertaining? Next time, instead of handing the potential investor a prospectus, why not just have them bend over? Via Countdown With Keith Olbermann:
Once again, The Daily Show does the job the mainstream media should be doing:
Finally! Despite the cozy relationship between the Obama administration’s financial team of Geithner, Summers, et al with their brethren on Wall Street, the SEC reveals that it has the balls to go…
The “F Word” (for fraud) is back in polite conversation on Wall Street. Fraud and financial crime are slowly becoming part of the debate over what must be done to restore confidence…
CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reports: In a wide-ranging jailhouse interview with SEC Inspector General David Kotz, convicted swindler Bernard Madoff explained how he managed to conceal his multi-billion-dollar fraud operation. “It…
