Publictakeover's Weblog

Regulators Split Over BoFA Moving Merrill Derivatives

It’s too bad that the regulators are “split,” because from the sound of it, this could be a very, very damaging move to US Taxpayers in favor of Bank of America.

Unless you’re an expert, it could be difficult to sort out the details, but the Fed and the Banks are up to their old tricks of deals few understand and even fewer know exist.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), established by the National Currency Act of 1863 to protect the currency and to ensure the safety and soundness of the banking system, issued a seemingly simplistic and equally incomprehensible report for 2011 Q2.

Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.

It’s that $75 T-T-T-Trillion of derivatives, the same class of toxic assets that blew up the world economy in 2008, being moved into the BoFA commercial banking division, that seems to threaten the stability of the banking system and the ability of taxpayers to insure assets/deposits through the FDIC.

Paging Bernie Sanders! Senator Sanders, please report to Senate Banking and Finance Committee hearing. It’s an emergency! Paging Senator Bernie Sanders…

via Bloomberg.

Occupiers Have to Convince the Other 99 Percent

Chris Hedges is at it again:

the Faustian deal worked out between the Democratic Party and its corporate sponsors

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Corporate Media & “Unemployment”

A picture is worth 7,000 words:

The Spirit of Change

Citigroup to pay $285M

The problem is that it’s a settlement, not a fine.

Citibank gets a paper from the SEC saying they have not pleaded guilty or been convicted of any wrongdoing, and there are no outstanding charges against them, all claims being resolved.

In other words, they get off.

They just have to give a little of the money back to silence their clients.

Citigroup to pay $285M to resolve SEC claims | Crain’s New York Business.

Protesters dine in style – NYPOST.com

It’s hysterical. The Post’s headline this morning was:

WHINE AND DINE

Protesters dine in style – NYPOST.com.

Bernice King at the Dedication

ThinkProgress.

Top Republicans now ‘understand’ 99%!

Here is a fantastic “then and now” contrast of statements by GOP presidential candidates on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If you like watching politicians squirm like fish out of water, you’ll love this journal.

It’s disgusting, but that’s what passes for funny nowadays.

sabrina 1’s Journal – People Power! Top Republicans decide they now ‘understand’ the 99% protests!.

The Street of Torments

Looking back on American history, it is surprising that it has taken the Occupy Wall Street movement so long to materialize as a backlash to the neoliberal globalization of our economy and the US military empire.

American history is paved with the struggles of working people seeking to build a just society in the wake or maw of the Great White Shark in lower Manhattan.

Attacks on the Stock Exchange, the “money trust” or the corporate elite have not always been as broad based in consensus or nonviolent as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.

via Tomgram: Steve Fraser, The Street of Torments | TomDispatch.

Becoming conscious of the World

Human consciousness is the creation of Nature and must be appreciated as such.  We belong to the World Awareness.  So do our Words.  They don’t belong to us.  We exist because of Consciousness and Language.  The Mind and the Words live in the Community.  Every individual is part of the whole.  But no one is complete without the whole.

Without the Community there would be no designation of the Individual.

I smell cat litter.