A "shadow bank lobby" has played a prominent role in shaping the financial reform process, pushing amendments that will weaken consumer protections, water down regulation of the Wall Street casino, and increase the likelihood of continuing fraud and future bailouts.

The financial reform process is providing definitive proof as to what the true priorities are for each Senator. 10 Senators have emerged as American heroes, 37 Senators have revealed themselves as puppets of the Financial Oligarchy.

AmpedStatus has joined a new coalition to fight for economic justice. We are sick of reporting upon the crimes of Wall Street and watching our future go up in flames without any accountability or measures being taken to defend against blatant criminality. The Wall Street Elite have controlled our political process for too long! The following is our first announcement and call to action.

Democracy is devolving into fascism before our eyes, the "iron law of oligarchy" is once again asserting itself. You cannot have a concentration of vast wealth and Democracy at the same time, and we currently have the greatest concentration of wealth in history...

By David DeGraw & Max Keiser
The stock market plunge on May 6th was an act of domestic financial terrorism in America. A day that will live in infamy.

Keiser and DeGraw discuss the unreported underlying elements of the SEC's case against Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson's background and role in causing the economic crisis, the Federal Reserve's illegal activities, the epidemic of accounting fraud on Wall Street, and expose clear examples of trillions of dollars stolen through market manipulation.

Not only did Goldman Sachs profit on betting against CDOs they designed to fail; more importantly, they insured them through AIG which led to a $182 billion taxpayer bailout.

David DeGraw recently gave a speech to World War II veterans summing up his recent reporting: "The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age have now been displaced as America's most despotic and depraved ruling class."

Mike Papantonio talks with David DeGraw about the REAL America, the one that those of us who aren't CEOs of major corporations live in. David also appeared on RT TV and called for "a mass movement to restore the rule of law."

The evidence is now overwhelming. The United States government has facilitated the theft of trillions of dollars of national wealth and 99% of the US population no longer has political representation.

With the country focused on job growth and with unemployment continuing to hover above 9 percent, comparatively little attention has been paid to the quality of the jobs being created and what that might say about the opportunities available to workers when the recession finally settles. There are reasons for concern, however, even in the early stages of a tentative recovery that now appears to be barely wheezing along. For years, long before the recession began, job growth had become increasingly polarized in this country. High-paid occupations that require significant amounts of education and training grew rapidly alongside low-wage, service-type jobs that do not, according to David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. " Tags: Economic Death Squad Economic Inequality Unemployment

The Continued Stealth Takeover of the Courts. Corporate CEOs are making concerted efforts to direct political contributions in a manner designed to elect judges that will champion CEOs’ interests. Note that I stress that the person that controls the corporation, typically the CEO, is the key actor and that the CEO commonly maximizes what he believes will be his interests at the expense of the corporation and its shareholders, creditors, and employees. This harms the nation. Yves’ blog prompted responses that eventually morphed into a debate about the role of law and economics in judicial decision making and discussion of what students are being taught in law and economics. I have taught five multidisciplinary courses at the University of Missouri – Kansas City that integrate law, economics, criminology, finance, regulation, political science, and accounting. One of those courses is law and economics. My spouse, June Carbone (a professor at UMKC Law), and her co-author Naomi Cahn discuss the role of elected v. appointed judges in their recent book Red Families v Blue Families. You can see why we are interested in these debate topics." Tags: Economic Justice campaign finance Economic Death Squad

Currency trading volume around the world has hit $4 trillion a day,…the $4 trillion mark represents a 20% gain from $3.3 trillion in 2007, the last time the global foreign-exchange markets were surveyed, according to the Bank for International Settlements. ….the continued rise in trading reflects the increased globalization of investing. With the big developed economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan struggling, investors are turning toward other markets for returns and generating more foreign-exchange trading in the process. Now small investors are increasing their foreign-currency exposure. They are piling into mutual funds which make bets on currencies as a core part of their strategy. More broadly, U.S. stock mutual funds that invest overseas have taken in $42 billion over the past year, according to Morningstar Inc." Tags: Economic Death Squad Stock Market

Based on Federal data from the US Department of Education, the number of students identified as homeless by public school districts rose by more than 40 percent between the 2006-2007 school year and 2008-2009, to 956,914. The figure has almost assuredly passed one million in the current school year. That well over one million public school students are homeless is a damning indictment of the entire social order. The staggering growth in student homelessness took place simultaneously with the transfer of trillions of dollars in public funds to Wall Street, overseen by the administrations of former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama. Tags: Economic Death Squad Economic Inequality

"Pay no attention. The stock market has as much to do with the real economy as the weather has to do with geology. Day by day there’s no relationship at all. Over time, weather and geology interact but the results aren’t evident for many years. The biggest impact of the weather is on peoples’ moods, as are the daily ups and downs of the market. The real economy is jobs and paychecks, what people buy and what they sell. And the real economy — even viewed from a worldwide perspective — is as precarious as ever, perhaps more so. Today’s rally was triggered by news that one of China’s official measures of its growth – its Purchasing Managers Index – rose. The index had been in decline for three straight months." Tags: Stock Market Economic Predictions

"If you poke them enough, it appears they do eventually wake up. After many months of rants by Zero Hedge on both subjects of quote stuffing and sub-pennying, it appears the SEC is finally getting involved. Of course, this being the SEC, which a year after saying it will ban Flash trading, still allows HFT frontrunning as a perfectly acceptable and encouraged practice on such exchanges as DirectEdge (and Nasdaq, although the latter has recently voluntarily recanted from abusing the public's, tee hee, trust in regards to frontrunning), we don't have very high hopes. Nonetheless, the fact that the HFT marauders are finally in the regulator's bullseye, will promptly make such occurrences as daily flash crashes hopefully a thing of the past. In other news, we are happy that the SEC is finally starting to catch up with this thing called "teknoulogee."" Tags: Market Manipulation SEC Economic Justice

The Obama administration's "summer of recovery" has morphed into a summer of economic discontent amid anxiety over the weakening economy. The greater than 4% growth and less than 8% unemployment envisioned by the president's economic team are nowhere to be seen. Almost everything that is supposed to be up—the economic growth rate, the stock market, bond yields—is down. And almost everything that is supposed to be down—unemployment-insurance claims, new mortgage delinquencies—is up. " Tags: Economic Death Squad Obama Illusion Economic Predictions

The 8.5m who lost their jobs in the recession; the 1.2m who have given up looking for work and, finally, the Republicans who can smell a Democratic President in trouble. Like the recession, America's recovery is departing from the normal script. Since World War II, the deeper the downturn the economy has endured, the steeper the recovery it has enjoyed on the way up. But a summer that brought record temperatures to many parts of the country has seen the momentum that the economy began to lose in the spring evaporate further." Tags: Economic Predictions Obama Illusion

The U.S. economy is so bad that the chance of avoiding a double dip back into recession may actually be pretty good. The sectors of the economy that traditionally drive it into recession are already so depressed it’s difficult to see them getting a lot worse, said Ethan Harris, head of developed markets economics research at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York. Inventories are near record lows in proportion to sales, residential construction is less than half the level of the housing boom and vehicle sales are more than 40 percent below five years ago. " Tags: Economic Predictions

The howls of surprised economists were everywhere last week as the government reported on Tuesday that July had the sharpest single-month plunge in existing home sales on record. The next day the Commerce Department reported that new home sales hit a post-war low in July. All the economists who had told us that the housing market had stabilized and that prices would soon rebound looked really foolish yet again. To understand how lost these professional error-makers really are it is only necessary to know that the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) puts out data on mortgage applications every week. The MBA index plummeted beginning in May, immediately after the last day (April 30) for signing a house sale contract that qualified for the homebuyers tax credit. It typically takes 6-8 weeks between when a contract is signed and a house sale closes. The plunge in applications in May meant that homebuyers were not signing contracts to buy homes. This meant that sales would plummet in July. Economists with a clue were not surprised by the July plunge in home sales. " Tags: Economic Death Squad Economic Predictions

"In the summer of 1961, a twenty-two-year-old college graduate from rural Nevada packed up his young family and moved to Washington, D.C. He took a job working nights as a U.S. Capitol policeman while by day he studied for a law degree in Foggy Bottom, at a local commuter school by the name of George Washington University. Foggy Bottom in those days was an unfashionable neighborhood of State Department office buildings, apartment blocks, decrepit townhouses, bodegas, and parking lots. GW’s campus was an unlovely spread of mostly concrete structures frequented by students who sat for classes and then returned to their lives and apartments off-campus. They came because the school offered an education that was convenient, affordable, and thoroughly adequate to the needs of, say, a Department of Agriculture employee looking to secure a pay raise with a new degree, or a Maryland housewife going back to college once her kids were out of the house." Tags: Education Economic Death Squad

Wall Street is preparing for a hurricane starting with the letter E, but it's not Earl, it's Elizabeth, as in Warren. Bankers appear to be resigning themselves to a fate worse than tougher financial regulation: The hard-charging Harvard professor, who oversees TARP funding, seems a near-cinch to be named the nation's consumer watchdog. "At this point, it seems pretty clear that she's going to get the nomination," said one high-ranking bank official, noting that President Obama, who has been sliding in the polls, could use a Warren nomination as a rallying point. For now, sources are speculating that President Obama may grant a so-called "recess appointment" for Warren over the coming weeks or months. Congress is currently in recess until after Labor Day; the next such break is after Oct. 8. " Tags: Economic Justice

Bea Garwood has been bracing for foreclosure since May, but she says she's been told three times to expect a sheriff's sale in the next month and it still hasn't happened. "We really at this point do not know where we are in the process," said Garwood, who lives in Pinckney, Mich. with her husband. "We have no clue. We haven't even heard from Chase bank in three weeks." The Garwoods may have had a lucky spin in the game that industry analyst Sean O'Toole calls "Foreclosure Roulette." Banks don't want to recognize losses by having to put homes on the market at foreclosure-sale prices, but they don't want to encourage borrowers to quit making payments either, so, O'Toole believes, they randomly foreclose on some people to prevent widespread "moral hazard." The rest are left hanging with the help of the government's "extend and pretend" approach to the collapse of the housing bubble. " Tags: foreclosures Economic Death Squad

Democrats in Congress are poised to play a leading role this month in thwarting their party's effort to raise income tax rates on the wealthy. Tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 expire at the end of this year. President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders have been eager to extend the breaks for individuals who earn less than $200,000 annually and joint filers who make less than $250,000. Those who earn more would pay higher, pre-2001 rates starting next year. However, a small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich. Many face electorates that recoil at the mention of any tax increase. Some represent areas that are loaded with wealthier taxpayers. Further, some incumbent senators who don't face voters this fall are reluctant to increase taxes on anyone while the economy remains sluggish. " Tags: Economic Death Squad Obama Illusion congress

Introducing her story, NBR correspondent Erika Miller announced: “Consumers are not the only ones holding on tightly to their cash these days. Corporations are too … Non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have a record $837 billion in cash in their coffers.” “That’s enough to pay 2.8 million workers -- basically, the entire population of Chicago -- $100,000 a year for three years.” “But,” added Miller, “one of the few places companies are spending money is on is on mergers and acquisitions. With one day left, August already has the highest value of global M&A deals this year.” Notably, only days before the NBR story was aired, Thomson Reuters had released a study revealing that a whopping $200 billion worth of corporate deal-making took place in the month of August alone – that’s $200 billion in mergers and acquisitions (known as M&A’s in corporate circles). The study was followed by an August 27th Reuters report sporting the following headline: “August's $200-billion in takeover announcements is unlikely to provide enough of a spark to energize equity markets fretting about another dip in global growth.”" Tags: Economic Justice Unemployment Economic Death Squad

As Labor Day approaches, many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief for the extra day off. Plenty of people are feeling like their hard work isn’t exactly paying off the way it used to. Even as productivity has continued to climb, wages have been either stagnant or declining. Household income for the average working family has continued to fall, but men, latinos and those without a college education have experienced an especially sharp deceleration of wage growth since the recession, according to a new briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank says that from 2002 to 2007, productivity rose 11 percent but the hourly wage for high school and college educated workers fell. In fact, the average median household income (adjusted for inflation) actually earned $2,000 less during that period, going from $60,804 to $58,718. For the first time, family income levels sunk below what they had been at the beginning of the economic cycle." Tags: Economic Justice Economic Death Squad Economic Inequality

What’s important to understand is that this reversion to 2009 rates permanently would cost the country $292 billion dollars, according to the Tax Policy Center. If we made it retroactive to capture the tax on estates in this holiday year of 2010, maybe it’s closer to $250 billion. But it’s still a large hole in the budget relative to current law, in a time when every deficit hawk is screaming about long-term debt. Therefore, it’s the height of faux-populist kabuki to assail the absence of the estate tax in 2010, and then promote a policy that would reduce estate tax receipts by hundreds of billions of dollars. And that’s where we find Robert Rubin today in the Wall Street Journal. Tags: Economic Death Squad Deficit

Wall Street is reportedly one step ahead of the Obama administration's plan to scrap some of the Bush tax cuts on the nation's top earners. Banks are considering paying annual bonuses early this year to lessen the impact of the increased tax rates expected in January, when bonuses are traditionally paid out, reports the Wall Street Journal. Rumors of the hurry-up bonuses on Wall Street come on the heels of Credit Suisse's reported plan to pay 400 managing directors in its London office a cash reward next month in lieu of a chunk of their 2009 bonuses. The bank's aim, according to a Bloomberg report, was to spread the cost of a one-time 50 percent tax levied on bank bonuses in the U.K. " Tags: Economic Death Squad bonuses

Sorkin has a rather curious piece that purports to explain why the banking industry is up in arms about Obama. For anyone at the TBTF firms, it’s patent rubbish. The firms got overt and back door bailouts so they could shore up their equity capital, and what do they do? Pay a big chunk of government-provided largesse out to themselves in record 2009 bonuses. It’s one of the most blatant acts of looting on record, and the industry deserves every bit of scorn the authorities can muster dumped on its head. Tags: Obama Illusion Media Bias Economic Death Squad

Bank profits jumped 21 percent last quarter to nearly $22 billion, the highest level in three years, as banks put away less money to cover future losses. Lending also dropped by about $96 billion, or 1.3 percent, as borrowers continue to remain skittish about the "slow recovery," Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Sheila Bair told reporters Tuesday in Washington. "Consumers and businesses need to have confidence in the recovery before they will start making decisions on credit," Bair said, according to a transcript of her remarks. Tags: Economic Death Squad