Saturday, November 7, 2015

06/25/2015 Is our country run by money launders and psychopaths?

Money laundering is the generic term used to describe the process by which criminals disguise the original ownership and control of the proceeds of criminal conduct by making such proceeds appear to have derived from a legitimate source. Current campaign finance laws are not not enforced and allow money laundering: counter to Federal laws!

“psychopath doesn’t just mean someone who cuts you up with a chainsaw — though the majority of people who do things like that are psychopaths….

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial char, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality.”


These 10 Careers Tend To Have The Most Psychopaths
  1. CEO
  2. Lawyer
  3. Media (TV/Radio)
  4. Salesperson
  5. Surgeon
  6. Journalist
  7. Police Officer
  8. Clergyperson
  9. Chef 
  10. Civil Servant
So, if you work in the above relevant industries, you may not be wrong about your boss being psycho or your coworker actually being crazy.

My personal opinion is that President Obama is not a psychopath; even though he displays many of traits with how he has handle Trade Promotion. I am at a total loss as to rational reasons for trade promotion with our experiences of the last 20 years.


Chief Executive Officer of the United States - Barack Obama

Top Contributors:

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization's members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors - like EMILY's List and Club for Growth - make for particularly big bundlers.

University of California
$1,350,139
Microsoft Corp (Technology)
$815,645
Google Inc (Technology)
$804,249
US Government
$736,722
Harvard University
$680,918
US Dept of State
$638,237
Kaiser Permanente (Medical)
$592,761
Stanford University
$532,246
Columbia University
$478,123
Deloitte LLP (Lawyers)
$458,275
Time Warner (Technology)
$447,521
DLA Piper (Lawyers)
$415,390
US Dept of Justice
$402,280
Sidley Austin LLP (Lawyers)
$400,671
US Dept of Health & Human Services 
$391,978
IBM Corp (Technology)
$370,491
Walt Disney Co (Media)
$369,598
New York University
$357,822
University of Chicago
$354,282
University of Michigan
$351,118

Source: opensecrets.org

United States Trade Representative Michael Froman (Civil Servant)

Froman served as liaison of the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) legal assistance program in Albania. He was also a member of the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission in Brussels.

Between January 1993 and December 1995, Froman was Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs on the United States National Economic Council, a position held jointly at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. 

He was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Eurasia and the Middle East, where his work was related to economic policy towards the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as economic components of the Dayton Accords. He was a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and a Resident Fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

Froman spent much of his career within the United States Department of the Treasury where he rose to Chief of Staff under Robert Rubin in January 1997 and served until July 1999.

After the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, Froman followed Robert Rubin from the Treasury Department to Citigroup. He was President and Chief Executive Officer of CitiInsurance and head of Emerging Markets Strategy at Citigroup, managing infrastructure and sustainable development investments. He received more than $7.4 million from January 2008 to 2009 alone.

Froman and Obama were not in touch after their time at Harvard until Obama's 2004 Senate run, when Froman volunteered to advise Obama on policy; he introduced Obama to Robert Rubin. In 2008 Froman served on a 12-member advisory board of the Obama campaign’s transition team, and joined the White House for a second run in 2009. He went back to the position he held during the Clinton years, as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council until 2013.

On May 2, 2013, Froman was nominated to serve as U.S. Trade Representative. Financial documents provided to the Senate Finance Committee showed he had nearly $500,000 in an offshore fund at Ugland House on the Cayman Islands, which Obama had once described as “the biggest tax scam in the world.” the U.S. Senate confirmed Froman in a 93-4 vote on June 19, 2013. One of the four dissenting senators were Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who faulted Froman for "refusing to commit to [...] standards of transparency in trade talks set by the George W. Bush administration".

Citigroup:

November 2008, Collapse & US Government Intervention (part of the Global Financial Crisis)

By November 2008, Citigroup was insolvent, despite its receipt of $25 billion in tax-payer funded federal Troubled Asset Relief Program funds. On November 17, 2008, Citigroup announced plans for about 52,000 new job cuts, on top of 23,000 cuts already made during 2008 in a huge job cull resulting from four quarters of consecutive losses and reports that it was unlikely to be in profit again before 2010. The same day on Wall Street markets responded, with shares falling and dropping the company's market capitalization to $6 billion, down from $300 billion two years prior. Eventually staff cuts totaled over 100,000 employees. Its stock market value dropped to $20.5 billion, down from $244 billion two years earlier. Shares of Citigroup common stock traded well below $1.00 on the New York Stock Exchange.

2012–2014: Failed Federal Reserve stress tests

On March 13, 2012, the Federal Reserve reported Citigroup is one of the four financial institutions, out of 19 major banks, that have failed its stress tests. The tests make sure banks have enough capital to withstand huge losses in a financial crisis like one Citigroup faced in 2008 and early 2009 when it almost collapsed. The 2012 stress tests determine whether banks could withstand a financial crisis that has unemployment at 13 percent, stock prices to be cut in half, and home prices decreased by 21 percent from current levels.

According to Citi and the Federal Reserve stress test report, Citi failed the Fed stress tests due to Citi's high capital return plan and its international loans rated by the Fed to be at higher risk than its domestic American loans. Citi gets half their revenues from its international businesses. In comparison, Bank Of America, which passed the stress test and did not ask for a capital return to investors, gets 78% of its revenue in the United States.

 On March 26, 2014, the Federal Reserve reported that Citigroup was one of the five financial institutions that had failed its stress tests, but that Citigroup had failed it again. Unlike in the failed stress test in 2012, the Fed failed Citigroup on qualitative concerns, which were left unresolved despite regulatory warnings, versus quantitative calculations. The report specifically states as quoted that Citigroup failed "to project revenues and losses under a stressful scenario for material parts of the firm's global operations and its ability to develop scenarios for its internal stress testing that adequately reflects its full range business activities and exposures." The Fed did not state the $400 million fraud at Oceanografia, which forced Citigroup to revise to lower earnings, as a reason.

Alleged money laundering by Raul Salinas

In 1998, the General Accounting Office issued a report critical of Citibank's handling of funds received from Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of Carlos Salinas, the former president of Mexico. The report, titled "Raul Salinas, Citibank and Alleged Money Laundering," indicated that Citibank facilitated the transfer of millions of dollars through complex financial transactions that hid the funds' paper trail. The report indicated that Citibank took on Salinas as a client without making a thorough inquiry as to how he made his fortune, an omission that a Citibank official called a violation of the bank's "know your customer" policy. 

Conflicts of interest on investment research

In December 2002, Citigroup paid fines totaling $400 million, to states and the federal government as part of a settlement involving charges that ten banks, including Citigroup, deceived investors with biased research. The total settlement with the ten banks was $1.4 billion. The settlement required that the banks separate investment banking from research, and ban any allocation of IPO shares.

Citigroup proprietary government bond trading scandal of 2004

Citigroup was criticized for disrupting the European bond market by rapidly selling €11 billion worth of bonds on August 2, 2004 on the MTS Group trading platform, driving down the price, and then buying it back at cheaper prices. 

TARP funding

In a New York Times op-ed, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn described the November 2008 $306 billion guarantee as "an undisguised gift" without any real crisis motivating it. 

According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Citigroup paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to more than 1,038 of its employees after it had received its $45 billion TARP funds in late 2008. This included 738 employees each receiving $1 million in bonuses, 176 employees each receiving $2 million bonuses, 124 each receiving $3 million in bonuses, and 143 each receiving bonuses of $4 million to more than $10 million. As a result of the criticism and the U.S. Government's majority holding of Citigroup's common shares, compensation and bonuses were restricted from February 2009 until December 2010

Terra Securities scandal

In November 2007 it became public that Citigroup was heavily involved in the Terra Securities scandal, which involved investments by eight municipalities of Norway in various hedge funds in the United States bond market. The funds were sold by Terra Securities ASA to the municipalities, while the products were delivered by Citigroup. Terra Securities ASA filed for bankruptcy November 28, 2007, the day after they received a letter from the Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway announcing withdrawal of permissions to operate. The letter stated, "The Supervisory Authority contends that Citigroup's presentation, as well as the presentation from Terra Securities ASA, appears insufficient and misleading because central elements like information about potential extra payments and the size of these are omitted."

Allegations of theft from customer accounts

In August 2008, Citigroup agreed to pay nearly $18 million in refunds and fines to settle accusations by California Attorney General Jerry Brown that it wrongly took funds from the accounts of credit card customers. Citigroup would pay $14 million of restitution to roughly 53,000 customers nationwide. A three-year investigation found that Citigroup from 1992 to 2003 used an improper computerized "sweep" feature to move positive balances from card accounts into the bank's general fund, without telling cardholders. Brown said that Citigroup "knowingly stole from its customers, mostly poor people and the recently deceased, when it designed and implemented the sweeps...When a whistleblower uncovered the scam and brought it to his superiors [in 2001], they buried the information and continued the illegal practice."

Lobbying

Between 1998 and 2014, Citigroup spent nearly $100 million lobbying the federal government.]As of 2008, Citigroup was the 16th largest political campaign contributor in the US, out of all organizations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. From 1989 to 2006, members of the firm donated over $23,033,490, 49% of which went to Democrats and 51% of which went to Republicans. Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center, acknowledged these figures, but pointed out that Citigroup had been "a longtime donor to left-wing pressure groups", and referred to a Capital Research Center Foundation Watch 2006 study of Fortune 100 foundation giving, where Citigroup's foundation gave "20 times more money to groups on the left than to groups on the right" during tax year 2003.

In 2014 Citigroup’s PAC contributed $804,000 to campaigns of various members of Congress, i.e. 162 members of the House, including 72 Democrats, where donations averaged about $5,000 per candidate. Of the 57 Democrats supporting the 2015 Spending bill, 34 had received campaign cash from Citigroup’s PAC at some point since 2010. Citigroup’s 2014 donations favored Republicans only slightly. The bank’s PAC had been nearly as generous to Democrats as Republicans – $30,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the maximum) and $10,000 to the 'New Democrat Coalition', a group of moderate Democrats most of whom voted for the 2015 spending package. Citibank’s PAC made donations to both the campaigns and the leadership PACs of many top Democrats who voted for the 2015 spending bill, including Steny Hoyer (Md.) House Democratic Whip and Representatives Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida).

Public and governmental relations

In 2009, former chairman Richard Parsons hired long-time Washington, D.C. lobbyist Richard F. Hohlt to advise him and the company about relations with the U.S. government, though not to lobby for the company. While some speculated anonymously that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would have been a particular focus of Hohlt's attention, Hohlt said he'd had no contact with the government insurance corporation. Some former regulators found room to criticize Hohlt's involvement with Citigroup, because of his earlier involvement with the financial-services industry during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980's. Hohlt responded that though mistakes were made in the earlier episode he'd never been investigated by any government agency and his experience gave him reason to be back in the "operating room" as parties address the more recent crisis.

In 2010, the company named Edward Skyler, formerly in New York City government and at Bloomberg LP, to its senior public and governmental relations position. Before Skyler was named and before he began his job search, the company reportedly held discussions with three other individuals to fill the position: NY Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "political guru ... [who] spearheaded ... his short-lived flirtation with a presidential run ..., who will soon leave City Hall for a position at the mayor's company, Bloomberg L.P. .... After Mr. Bloomberg's improbable victory in the 2001 mayor's race, both Mr. Skyler and Mr. Sheekey followed him from his company to City Hall. Since then, they have been a part of an enormously influential coterie of advisers"; Howard Wolfson, the former communications director for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign and Mr. Bloomberg's re-election bid; and Gary Ginsberg, now at Time Warner and formerly at News Corporation.

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