Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

BP CEO: Gulf Oil Spill Settlement Benefits Lawyers More Than Victims
HP | author | 07/30/13

BP CEO Bob Dudley says the "biggest beneficiaries" of an agreement related to the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill disaster aren't the victims, but their lawyers.

In an interview with CNBC Tuesday, Dudley said the U.S. class-action system has become an "industry" ripe with financial incentives that make plaintiffs' lawyers eager to bring claims. "This is not right, it's not good for American business," Dudley said. "It happens all the time in the US with this class action plaintiff system, which is an industry and a business model." ... Read more

*Who Will Stand Up to Wall Street?
Bill Moyers | Leo Gerard | 07/24/13

Wall Street held itself a big fat profit party last week. The nation's six largest banks reported $23 billion in profits. That's for one quarter -- three months. Pop the champagne. Buy another Lamborghini.

Well, if you're a Wall Street banker, that is. Not if you're a college student looking for a loan. Because bankers and Congress don't intend to give you a break today. ... Read more

*Bombshell: Plutocrats Brazenly Collude to Hurt State Economies and Screw Working People
AlterNet | Lynn Stuart Parramore | 07/29/13

These days, many Americans walk around feeling like no matter how hard they work, how much they manage to save or how carefully they plan for the future, the game is rigged against them. They suspect that behind closed doors, CEOs and Wall Street honchos are eagerly scheming to rip them off.

Their worst fears of corruption and collusion just came true in Illinois, where corporate titans were caught red-handed in the act of Rigging the Game.   Let's step inside a recent gathering of the corporate-backed Union League Club of Chicago, where former Illinois Attorney General Ty Fahner, who now leads a band of plutocrats known as the "Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago," recently launched into an hour-long diatribe on the evils of state pensions.

Fahner, a top GOP fundraiser, can't abide the notion that teachers, firefighters, nurses and other public workers in the state of Illinois can still expect a decent retirement. Not a luxurious retirement, mind you -- the average pension is $32,000 a year, and most state employees will not receive Social Security. But even a modest retirement for hard-working people is too much for today's fatcats. ... Read more

How the Execs Who Brought Down Bear Stearns Bounced Back
MotherJones | Alison Fitzgerald | 07/31/13

Five years after their firm crashed and kicked off the financial crisis, these subprime mortgage managers hold top jobs at the most powerful banks on Wall Street.

Bear Stearns, once the nation's fifth-largest investment bank, had been a fixture on Wall Street since 1923 and had survived the crash of 1929 without laying off any employees.

But in 2008, its customers and creditors didn't much care about its storied history. They were worried that the billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities on its books weren't worth what the company claimed. En masse, they stopped doing business with Bear.

Within a few days, on Monday, March 17, Bear was gone -- subsumed into JPMorgan Chase & Co. with the help of the Federal Reserve for a price that was approximately the value of its shiny new Madison Avenue office tower alone. ... Read more

The Mystery of Bee Colony Collapse
Mother Jones | Tom Philpott | 07/31/13

What's tipping honeybee populations into huge annual die-offs? For years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to a group of insecticides called neonicotinoids, widely used on corn, soy, and other US crops, as a possible cause of what has become known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). ...

... But according to a new peer-reviewed paper, neonicotinoids aren't the only pesticides that might be undermining bee health. The study, published in PLOS One and co-authored by a team including US Department of Agriculture bee scientist Jeff Pettis and University of Maryland entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp, found that a pair of widely used fungicides are showing up prominently in bee pollen--and appear to be making bees significantly more likely to succumb to a fungal pathogen, called Nosema ceranae, that has been closely linked to CCD. The finding is notable, the authors state, because fungicides have so far been "typically seen as fairly safe for honey bees." ... Read more