How Much is The Minimum Wage? (Video)

This funny rant by a Brit echoes what many in the US feel. 

Warning...the language is a bit rough but it only highlights this guy's passionate views.

Ron Paul: US Slipping Into a Fascist System Dominated By Big Government and Big Businesses

Kansas City: Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul says the US is "slipping into a fascist system" dominated by big government and big businesses.

The Texas congressman held a fiery rally on Saturday night across the street from a World War I Memorial, upstaging simultaneous Republican Party banquets being held on both sides of the nearby Missouri and Kansas line.

Paul said the US got off track during the era of president Woodrow Wilson, who led the nation through World War I and unsuccessfully advocated for the nation's involvement in a forerunner of the United Nations.

 Although campaign aides were aware, Paul told reporters after his speech that he did not know his rally was coinciding with long-established Republican Party events.  

ZeeNews.com

Look Who 'Has Stolen IDs and Fake Tax Returns'.. What's a Little Bank Fraud Between Friends, Anyway?

Did HSBC Bank Knowingly Launder Billions in Drug Money?

Making fraudulent loans to corporate accounts that existed in name only was a key part of an alleged money-laundering scheme by the global bank HSBC, according to a whistleblower who has provided WND with more than 1,000 pages of evidence.

The evidence includes customer account ledgers for dozens of companies through which the financial institution was laundering money each month, charges John Cruz, a former relationship manager for the bank’s southern New York region.

“A bank employee would first set up a bogus corporate account using a stolen corporate identification and the required personal identification to set up the account,” the whistleblower explained. “The loan request would go to HSBC underwriting in Buffalo and the loan would get approved, often on the basis of fraudulent tax returns and fraudulent documentation to support the loan.”

The series of articles on HSBC already has caused fallout for this reporter and for WND, which saw one of the articles temporarily blocked when HSBC filed a complaint with an Internet provider that turned out to be unwarranted. PayPal and American Express also have been implicated in the bank fraud.

HSBC reportedly is under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee, and WND has provided material to federal investigators.

Cruz said the scheme relied on corporate and personal information selected by identity theft to give the fraudulent account a sufficiently good credit history to justify the loan, even though all the supporting documentation, including tax returns, was fraudulent.

“Even when these fraudulent loans were declined, HSBC employees in on the scheme would simply call senior bank executives to have the loans approved, thereby effectively by-passing underwriting.

Exhibit 1 is a HSBC list of fraudulent bank loans made by various employees, all of whom used the same bogus USER ID here redacted as 433***36. All customer and bank employee information has been redacted from this report to respect privacy restrictions.

Each line item in Exhibit 1 represents a different loan made to a different fraudulent company.

Cruz noted that all of the Social Security numbers are legitimate numbers used by the HSBC identity thieves to establish the account.

“None of companies listed were functioning companies, and the loan files lacked critical documentation including source of repayment,” Cruz said.

The whole point was to steal hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars from HSBC itself, Cruz alleged, through the fraudulent loans drawn from bank income. As a result, the net earnings of the bank were depressed and the loan loss transferred to the shareholders once the loans defaulted.

“Once the loans were made, checking accounts were established by HSBC employees for the fraudulent corporations, and the loan proceeds were transferred into the corporate accounts,” he explained. “Once the loan funds were in the fraudulent corporate accounts, HSBC employees in on the scheme could wire the money out of the accounts to locations not recorded in the account bank statements.”

Exhibit 2 is another HSBC internal bank record documenting fraudulent loans. The user ID of the bank employee making the loans is again 433***86, a number multiple bank employees utilized when setting up bogus corporate accounts for fraudulent loans.

Exhibit 2: HSBC internal report documenting alleged fraudulent loan activity

Every time Cruz saw suspicious loan activity, he reported it – through emails, faxes and telephone calls.

When he realized his reports with senior management and bank security were being ignored, Cruz began wearing a wire so he could record conversations with bank employees in which the discussions confirmed their awareness of the fraudulent activity and their unwillingness to do anything to stop it.

He also began printing out reports documenting fraudulent loans and keeping a record of his emails that he could remove from the bank location for safekeeping.

Exhibit 3 is a memo Cruz wrote in his attorney’s office shortly before he was terminated by HSBC, to be sent to his direct management supervisor at HSBC.

In the memo, Cruz explained the methodology in which fraudulent loans were being created by HSBC employees. He also detailed his efforts to bring the information to bank security officers.

The names of the bank officers discussed in the memo have been redacted to respect privacy.

Exhibit 3: John Cruz memo to HSBC bank management

“The only result of the memo was that the bank took disciplinary action against me,” Cruz said. “I reported the fraud, and I was reprimanded for not bringing in more business. I was told that my job was not to report fraud, but to bring in more business. Since I refused to bring in new business from fraudulent accounts, I marked myself for termination.”

In February 2010, Cruz was terminated from HSBC for poor job performance; he had been at HSBC since January 2008.

After leaving the bank, Cruz attempted through his attorney to turn his information over to the Department of Homeland Security.

“DHS didn’t even respond,” he said. “We didn’t get as much as a letter from DHS, despite the repeated calls and emails my attorney made to DHS in the attempt to get their attention.”

Cruz has no idea how much money went through HSBC in fraudulent loan activity. The amount that he observed and was not able to print out ran into the billions of dollars, he estimates.

“Every day I went to work, I began to wonder how many fraudulent accounts I would find that day,” he said. “But every time I found something suspicious, the reaction I got from bank management and bank security was, ‘Shut up and do your job.’”

Article by Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., and a WND senior staff reporter. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Where's the REAL Birth Certificate?"

JP Morgan "Donates" $4.6 Million to NYPD. Money Can't Buy You Love But It CAN Buy Protection (Video)

Corrupt Wall Street Bankers Resort To Paying For Protection Now That John Q. Public Is Rising Up Against Them. Are We Going To Stand Idly By As Daddy Warbucks Buys The Favors Of Taxpayer Paid Law Enforcement?

Wake Up America!

JPMorgan Chase recently "donated" an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing "profound gratitude" for the company's donation.

"These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe," Dimon said. "We're incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work." 

 

Watch the video below to see just how "safe" NYDP goons are keeping those bankers.

Citi Is Latest To Hike Fees On Checking Accounts. Bankers Know We Are Too Weak To Fight Back

Big Bankers Are Sticking It To Us Again. Their Message: If You Impose Regulations On What We Can Charge For One Of Our Profit Centers, We Will Ram It Up Your A*s On Another. Aren’t You Sick And Tired Of This Yet? How Much More Are You Going To Take, Sheeple?

Wake Up America!

The fees keep coming. Citi is the latest big bank to slap customers with a round of fee hikes. This time, on its checking accounts.

Starting in December, customers who hold its mid-level Citibank Account will be charged $20 a month if they fail to maintain a minimum balance of $15,000 in their combined accounts. Previously, account holders had to carry a minimum balance of $6,000.

At the same time, customers who have the bank's EZ Checking account will start being charged $15 a month if they don't carry a minimum balance of $6,000. Citi says it is phasing out the EZ Checking package, which currently carries no monthly fee for balances over $1,500, and is instead offering customers either the Citibank Account or its Basic Banking account, which also carries a fee.

Last month, Citi said it is hiking the fee on its Basic Banking account from $8 to $10. Customers will be able to avoid paying the $10 fee by either maintaining a minimum balance of $1,500 or by making one direct deposit and one automatic online payment through their checking account each month, said Citi.

Currently, account holders must make five transactions per month in order to avoid paying the fee and there is no minimum balance requirement.
9 most annoying bank fees

Citi's fee hikes come just days after Bank of America announced it would charge a $5 fee for debit card purchases. Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase Sun Trust and Regions Financial have all also rolled out similar fees in select markets in recent weeks.

"The regulatory environment has changed a great deal -- particularly with the Durbin Amendment -- and we're seeing the results of that now," said Claes Bell, banking reporter with Bankrate.com. Going forward, "we're going to see more large national banks announce fees."

With the new regulation that caps how much revenue banks can get from the swipe fees they collect from merchants, banks must look for other ways to cover that lost income, explained Nessa Feddis, vice president and senior counsel of the American Bankers Association.

"We don't expect to pay nothing to ride the train, it's the same thing with a checking account," she said.
Bank accounts: Get a fair shake, not a shakedown

Citibank said it chose not to charge a debit card fee because its customers did not want it. "There's a reason why we structured it this way," said Catherine Pulley, spokeswoman for Citi. There are also no hidden fees, Pulley added, and customers will benefit from free online bill pay and free access to non-Citi ATM machines.

While the majority of checking accounts were free last year, less than half now come without a price tag, according to a recent study from bank-comparison site Bankrate, which looked at 243 interest and 238 non-interest accounts.

Like Citi's new offerings, 92% of checking accounts have fee waivers, meaning that if you can meet certain financially requirements, most checking accounts are -- or could become -- free.

Article by Jessica Dickler, CNN Money

BP Increases Pay For Claims Czar Ken Feinberg's Law Firm To $1.25 Million Per Month

Talk about the fox looking after the hen house! Kenneth Feinberg, Obama's "Claims Czar" for the BP oil spill disaster, is being paid by...you guessed it. BP! WTF??!!

The "Czar" is doing such a good job saving BP billions of bucks by stiffing claimants he is getting a raise. 

Good job Hussein... You have screwed the taxpayer once again.

Wake Up America!

 

Documents provided by the administrator of BP's claims fund for Gulf oil spill victims show the oil giant agreed to increase his law firm's monthly compensation from $850,000 to $1.25 million.

The documents furnished Friday to The Associated Press include a letter from former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to claims czar Kenneth Feinberg. Mukasey stated his belief that the extra money was warranted because Feinberg's duties had grown. Mukasey was asked by Feinberg to weigh in on how reasonable his compensation was.

The pay hike, detailed in a Tuesday letter from Mukasey to Feinberg, is retroactive to Jan. 15 and runs through the end of 2011.

Feinberg has been criticized for the pace of processing the roughly 500,000 claims that have been filed since he took over handling claims for individuals and businesses from the $20 billion fund in August. Fishermen and others have complained that the money they have received is inadequate, and that in many cases their claims have been denied with little explanation.

An AP review published in February that included interviews with legal experts, government officials and more than 300 Gulf residents found a process beset by red tape and delay. At its center is a fund administrator whose ties to BP have raised questions about his independence.

Under Feinberg's plan for making final payments to victims, claimants would receive twice their documented 2010 losses. Oyster harvesters and oyster processors would be offered four times their losses.

The White House and BP appointed Feinberg last June to oversee payments from the fund to individuals and businesses. Since Feinberg took over the payment process, some $3.6 billion has been paid out to 172,000 claimants. Besides payments to individuals and businesses, the fund also can be used to pay for environmental damages and state and local response costs. Feinberg is not in charge of those payments.

Feinberg has said he believes the Gulf of Mexico should largely recover from BP's oil spill by the end of next year, and he doesn't think the entire $20 billion will be needed to compensate victims. Only half of that should suffice, he has said.

"He has performed poorly, and I'm being polite, and yet they are giving him a raise," said Orange Beach, Ala., Mayor Anthony Kennon, whose community was hard hit by the oil spill. "The real question is, how does BP view his performance? They are giving him a raise, so they must think it's good. That speaks for itself."

Article by Huffington Post

Colgate Accused of Stealing Thousand-Year-Old Toothpaste

Another case of Big Business squeezing profits from the pockets of the disadvantaged. Thankfully the truth is out on this one and Colgate Palmolive will not be able to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

 

 A legal dispute between the U.S. and India over a herbal toothpaste was leaving a bitter aftertaste between the two countries Thursday, with Colgate Palmolive accused of filing a bogus patent.

Colgate, the world’s largest producer of toothpaste, patented a toothcleaning powder in the hope that it would take the multibillion-dollar Indian oral hygiene market by storm.

However, Indian activists claim that the patent is bogus because the ingredients -- including clove oil, camphor, black pepper and spearmint -- have been used for the same purpose for hundreds, “if not thousands,” of years on the subcontinent.

The dispute is likely to become a test case for who owns India’s folk medicines -- a repository potentially worth billions.

The American household goods giant was granted the patent in the U.S. in June for what it claimed was a groundbreaking “red herbal dentifrice.” The patent, the Indian activists allege, is the latest act of “biopiracy” - whereby Western corporations plunder techniques, plants or genes used in the emerging world for centuries, for commercial profit.

“This toothpowder is classical in origin,” said Devender Triguna, the president of the Association of Manufactures of Ayurvedic Medicines, an Indian body that promotes traditional remedies. It is demanding that the Indian government take legal action against Colgate.

“The ingredients date back to antiquity. They have been used by the common Indian man for thousands of years. So how can it possibly be patented?” Triguna asked.

Colgate did not respond to a request for comment. However, its patent filing argues that the use of red iron oxide, which is less abrasive than ingredients in traditional toothpaste, is new.

The case is the latest to anger India as it becomes increasingly vocal over the alleged pillaging of its ancient knowledge for commercial gain. It is one of 17 nations to form the Group of Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries, an alliance that has accused richer countries of tapping the emerging world’s natural resources for medicines and cosmetics without paying royalties.

India is in the process of creating 34 million webpages to document its ancient medicinal techniques to stop them from being claimed by foreign profiteers.

Article courtesy of MyFox