tv [untitled] October 18, 2011 3:31am-4:01am EDT
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these are under investigation over claims of excessive force during the anti wall street protests some officers seen resorting to punching and pepper spray at peaceful rally. of the action r t max and stacey on the case when it comes to finance including a look at whether the wall street protests will have the same impact in the west as the arab spring east kaiser report coming up. hi i'm max kaiser this is the kaiser report. banking terrorists suicide bankers it's a plague what we do about them things never yes max apparently some capitalists have bought the rope to hang themselves with it's come true j.p. morgan's bet against j.p. morgan and apparently j.p. morgan hedges the spread on its own debt when investors bid up the yield an
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indicator that they think the bank won't pay j.p. morgan makes money because they've taken a bet against themselves the bank reported one point nine billion in revenue and bets against itself right that's right the bank is manipulating markets that's true there are trading in insider information that's true they're using credit default swaps invented by their very own blith masters to gorge themselves on the list of games that's true they are bankrupting the country that they operate in america that's true jamie diamond's apartment is now being surrounded by an angry mob looking to lynch him that's true and justifiable. so j.p. morgan is an unqualified financial terrorist and this proves it they this is just one more example of bankers using markets to blow themselves up their suicide bankers now we condemn suicide bombers in the middle east for example or in other
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places around the world or timothy mcveigh. but why no condemnation for jamie diamond he's a suicide banker why but during tough economic times you see over and over during the housing crash what would happen people have insurance on their homes and if they could either sell it at fifty percent mark down or they could burn it and collect one hundred percent so if the us economy is dead and it's not coming back and the only hope that j.p. morgan could have is like a few fees on food stamp cards well maybe it's better for them to just burn the whole thing down and collect the insurance. doesn't it doesn't point well taken so the analogy to the housing market to be the arson scam of collecting the insurance and burning down your house so jamie diamond as a side to what you're saying here is that the j.p. morgan bank is worth more to him dead than alive and well apparently and so they
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had a lot of revenue from their killing their own bank and they don't care if they kill their employees or kill the country they don't care i remind me of a few months ago we covered a story i think it was paul ryan or eric cantor was double short us treasuries that's right that's right one of the politicians i think it was eric cantor who actually made a huge bet against u.s. treasuries and then actively was trying to pass laws that would hurt the american economy while he passed laws what he was voting against raising the debt ceiling so that would cause his portfolio of a double short against america in the u.s. treasury market to rise that's the problem everyone in congress is effectively a day trader they've made positions against their own country they're highly leveraged and insider trading for congressman by the way is legal people don't understand that but for a congressman you can trade on inside information there's no law against it so again you know what occupy wall street is out there it doesn't matter the banks
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continue to commit fraud against everybody and here's the next headline max wall street sees no exit from financial woes as. anchor's fret yes the poor bankers are fretting betting against themselves isn't just enough they're manic depressive people one hedge fund manager is quoted here i don't think it's time to make money this is a time to rig for survival another finance guy says they're not going to make the kind of money they wanted i'm not sure people really have come to terms with the fact that what we had was a financial bubble well the use of the word grigg is interesting i mean a lot of these hedge fund managers are sailors out there in greenwich connecticut as well is he saying he's rigging his sails to deal with this economic catastrophe that they created or are you saying. in our day to day operations of market rigging we need to rig these markets for survival as sort of rigging these markets for growth i believe it's those second option here and this is
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a good proof that the hedge fund community which is the tail wagging the economic dog sort of lives entirely on market ringing look at john paulson he was part of the market rigging two years ago he made billions on the collapse of the mortgage market this year he's lost billions because his market rigging didn't work out the way he thought it was going to work this way because they cracked down on it this was he had a direct relationship with lloyd blankfein and goldman sachs so he was shorting goldman sachs's c.d.o. packages on u.s. subprime he shorted goldman sachs's callet credit default swaps against greece so he was able to have that inside information what was going to blow up before it happened this year they're now cracking down on goldman sachs when they had to go in front of the congress and admit that they were selling crappy products to people around the world and they were intentionally blowing them up so here's john paulson he's got a trillion dollar credit line he makes massive speculative bets two years ago on
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the collapse of america's economy this year he makes bad bets. the capital never actually want to work in the economy to support growth or jobs or legitimate g.d.p. growth all that resulted was a huge around trip for that capital minus john paulson's billion dollar fee and that's all that happened and the point is i think these protesters want to know is is that treasonous and of course the answer is is indisputable the fact is it doesn't matter because it's continuing on as this article continues neil barofsky the former special inspector general for the troubled asset relief program said quote i wouldn't shed too many tears for wall street this. demick advantage that the too big to fail banks enjoyed in the lead up to the financial crisis may be diminished in the near term but the structure is still essentially the same and will certainly help catapult them to record profits and bonuses once the good times
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return that's true the system as we've described it just spinning money through the laundromat that is the new york stock exchange creates enormous fees for the money launderers look at again walkover year when volved in a near four hundred billion dollar mexican drug money laundering operation they pay very little five hundred sixty million dollars fine that was it so is that is there anything in place to stop that from happening you know well ok max you mentioned walkover was involved a longer three hundred seventy eight billion dollars for the mexican drug cartels we know that that's a fact it's only stated but never any investigation no criminal investigation no time for one single person involved in this it was all accidental three hundred seventy eight billion they paid one hundred sixty million dollars fine this week we've also seen a hedge fund manager sentenced to eleven years for making seventy five million dollars worth of ill gotten gains on insider trading which every single day in the
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market one hundred million is taken from pension funds from small job agad donuts investors through high frequency trading which is the is essentially insider trading they step in front of all trades all pension fund trades they see what you're about to do to your pension fund on your behalf they rig it to take from that and so how is that any different from insider trading i don't understand or the bank of new york scandal which is now coming to the fore they apparently have stolen something on the order of four hundred billion dollars as well from pension accounts buying gazing and look back trades which i've explained on the show several times and they won't even allow the case to go to court even though. the prosecutors are anxious to go to court and they have been caught red handed stealing billions of dollars bank of new york again is that a crime against humanity of course it is well the markets decide max and the
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markets are not pricing in any real long term effect at all on bank of new york mellon so that is not going to happen and you can count on everything continuing as such taxpayer nursing huge losses on r.b.s. and lloyds three years on from the bailouts and instead of the profits expected market meltdown and bank regulation means the taxpayer sitting on thirty two billion pound paper loss yes it's the regulation and the market meltdown caused by regulation that is making the taxpayer who own us the banks royal bank of scotland eloise you guys are sitting on a thirty two billion pound loss on a sixty billion pound investment in these banks oh and let's roll erin burnett and that clip which is down on wall street on the occupy wall street and she talks to a protester there she says a bald faced lie she says that the taxpayers made money on the bellows play clip said you know that taxpayers actually made money on the wall street bailout. they
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say maybe not on g.m. but they did on the on the wall street rebel out there does that make you feel any differently in wal-mart of course. if i were right in my that was a lie that's not true and as you just pointed out these are bread a catastrophe you know banking apologists always say that the bailouts made money because they selectively look at one or two that did all look at a.i.g. however look at fannie mae and freddie mac. we have lost money time after time after time look at the fed's balance sheet there's trillions and trillions of dollars of bad debts on those books that we're not allowed to look at too much detail so what the heck is on there and how much is yet to be revealed for use generally accepted accounting principles when looking at any of these banks and you'll find out that not a single one has paid back any amount of money to bail out. people only if you accept as the hedge fund we've talked about market raiding is the way to go if you fraud then you can put on the blinkers and make a fraudulent statement as erin burnett clearly has committed made
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a fraudulent statement so let's look at the real economy or we're talking all about the bubble economy the fake commie the banking economy we know that's rigged we know that's a fake game we know it's not real now let's look at what they're in america they're trying to do to recover the economy florida lawmaker wants to repeal dorf tossing ban to create jobs bill workman a republican state legislator in florida said on a quest to seek and destroy unnecessary burdens on the freedom and liberties of people all that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs that would be happy to get in this economy or any economy why would we want to prevent people from getting gainful employment. right it's come to this but the way to stimulate the american economy is to legalize dwarf tossing speaking of door smacks let's move on to the next headline how's geithner fly commercial to help cut the deficit so this is barney frank and he's looking at ways to cut the deficit and one of the ways he's saying is prohibiting treasury officials from using military air
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transport a practice begun under former treasury secretary hank paulson and continued by geitner it could contribute to reining in the deficit each flight of this kind cost at least one hundred fifty thousand dollars so you could apply this is like a shovel ready project max you take timothy geitner at the wharf and you throw him across the country for a flight you save some money it employs a lot of people if this is untrue this is a thing this is like a combination of the. islamic practice where they have money going around the world so this is a combination of whole wall and the world causing involving tim geithner so tim geithner wants to go from a state to new york to l.a. then he tossed from person to person to person in a train her york to l.a. or forgive all those grounds tim geithner would not be spending the taxpayer money and if it works out we can toss them around the world and i want to have an exam just for the economy by advice on your appearance. introduce your. well stacy ever since letting us know is thank you thank you max well we'll be back in
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visiting scholar at the center for capitalism and society at columbia university and a lecturer in economics at the lebanese american university safe welcome back to the kaiser report thank you for having me max your latest piece is called barracks odious debts what is the definition of an odious debt and how much did little barack leave behind the definition of odious death is death that is incurred by a regime of the does not represent that of all of the population it borrows on whose behalf it borrows on so if a if a dictator or for the terror of authoritarian government borrows a lot of money in the name of its people and then uses the money to repress those people if their interest itself under international law is used to be that such debt would not be repaid by the success of governments. for some reason this is not because of the people talk about a lot anymore these days and when governments are replaced it's considered that the
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successor governments need to honor the obligations of their pre discussers and now is probably a good time to start bringing up the stop and making governments responsible themselves for the debts that they incur and not burden the populations with repaying the debt especially of the debt was used to repress those populations rather than to help them advance or to better their own economic situation right now during the rebel revolution in cairo of course one of the major. talking points if you will was to. not comply with any i am maff debt imposition now several months after the revolution and the i.m.f. and world bank loan packages are being rumored to being now accepted in egypt your thoughts there was a very positive sign after the revolution which is that the new government the
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interim government particular the military rulers decided that they didn't want to take the i.m.f. and the world bank loans so it's a positive sign that the egyptian government turned down these loans it looks like however they're being moved to be returning to the i.m.f. and to the world bank asking for those wells nothing has been confirmed yet there's been various sorts of reports about it in all sorts of different media outlets but it has not been confirmed yet but a lot of people are the thinking this would be a good thing to do right now because borrowing from the i.m.f. and the world bank comes at a lower interest rate than borrowing from the domestic markets and considering that the budget of the egyptian government is being strained a lot by how much payments it has to make and by the crease in tax revenues this is beginning to look like more of a more of an attractive option for the people in charge of egypt today but you know it's still not clear what's going to happen because of all the political uncertainty on the economic uncertainty in the country it's not really clear what
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this will lead to well the n.f.l. interest rate from the i.m.f. of course is the teaser rate and once they've got their hooks in. then a lot of bad things tend to happen let's talk about the role of a corporatism and political and economic on rast whether in the arab world or in the rest of the world for that matter so this the role of corporatism or nail liberalism or the washington consensus do you see much of a future for that or is this global uprising going to reverse that trend you think well i mean if you if you will my opinion about the own climate. underlying economic causes of the revolution in egypt and in tunisia i would think it is the system of corporatism it's it's usually people usually talk about the you know the problem with egypt and tunisia was free market capitalism going rampant and going crazy the problem was that they introduced all those free market reforms with the world bank of the i.m.f. and that is what led to all these economic crisis i think that's
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a quite an accurate way of putting it because what egypt and tunisia had. before the revolutions was by no means a free market system or capitalist system it was a actually a textbook case of corporate a system and by a corporate a system i mean the sort of classic example of that is into war italy italy under was the leading between the first and second world wars under that sort of economic system you have a government that is very very very heavily involved in the workings of the private economy so it's not like socialism where the capital and the productive enterprises of society are owned by the government you do have private ownership however the government plays a very important role in directing production within that economy no wonder corporate the systems what ends up happening is that few powerful interests and the capturing of important positions in the big corporations and in the government and that was clearly the case in both egypt and tunisia leading up to the revolution the real problem with this is not just that they enrich themselves in august that's
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bad enough that the people who like mubarak and ben ali and their associates became very rich the real problem from this sort of system is that it closes the opportunities in the face of all sorts of normal people in the country to be able to advance economically to be able to fulfill their potential to be able to have productive going to years and to have good jobs this is the real problem of corporatism and i think the problem of egypt and tunisia was an economic system that was repressive of the needs of the people in the country it was an economic system the didn't allow people to reach the potential that they saw for themselves and i think that's why people revolted now the second part of your question about where this is going i think it's it's still. really up in the air right now i'm not entirely sure how things are going to go but i think there's a positive sign which is that. the clout that the ruling regimes had over a comic activity is being softened the they have less control over over a canonic activity than they did before those revolutions a lot of the most important figures in the corporate streams of tunis and egypt
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have other fled the country or they're in prison so a lot of the ways in which those regimes were able to suppress their people canonically are now breaking apart in one way or the other it's not completely over obviously the tunisian example is going to be better than the egypt. case but i'm slightly optimistic that things will continue to improve and that out there it is them will be weakened more and more in egypt say if you're headquartered in beirut you just finished up your ph d. at columbia university in new york so yeah have a good understanding of what's happening in new york i would imagine with the occupy wall street protests which have modeled selves on occupy square the cairo uprising are these two similar were are they not some omar and how would you compare and contrast these two protests there are some similarities but there are also some differences i think similarities what i was talking about in terms of the
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corporatism of the egyptian indonesian economists i think a very large extent applies to western economies as well if you look at the way they've done it states government has been acting over the last few years there's clear evidence that the data konami policies have been to the benefit of well connected firms and banks and to the detriment of the average american and i think it's also true in the case of the europe so in that sense you know it's good that you're witnessing that people are just not lying down and taking this other that they're standing up and they're rising but you know there are there are many many differences and i think. there are some warning trends about the way that things are going on occupy wall street. and in some of the other european countries where people you feel are missing the point sometimes when they talk about the importance of redistribution ois they talk about raising taxes as the solution to this because if you think that you know everything is ok with the system but you know what needs to be done is just raising the tax rate on the rich people then i i think you have
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a very big misunderstanding of what the problems really are it's the question is not about taxing the rich the question is about taking apart the system that makes some people the have the ability to become rich at the expense of others there's nothing wrong with being rich or something wrong with being rich through illicit means or through means where. where government support or government bailouts were involved in enriching. in reaching those people so. to focus on you know raising taxes on rich people i think is completely missing the point and the real worrying thing i think in occupy wall street what you've beginning to see of the last few days is that it is probably going to be co-opted by the mainstream political establishment so you've already seen people like nancy pelosi and barack obama talk about how they are on the same side with the protesters and you know if they're right and you know if a lot of the protesters continue to be. sympathetic towards the sort of nancy pelosi and but obama take on things then you can see this degenerating into
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something like the tea party movement or something like the antiwar movement let's remember you know back in two thousand and two and three and four there was a strong anti-war movement in the us believe it or not and that anti-war movement is what gave us but arc obama he rode the crest of that antiwar movement but by the time he came into office he was indistinguishable from george bush when it came to a wars similarly you know the tea party movement is now probably going to give us another presidential candidate who's very similar to obama and bush rick perry. so if you know if the occupy wall street movement ends up being co-opted by people like. obama or pillow. so you then obviously it's going to have been a big waste of time but you know hopefully hopefully something better will come out of it to summarize to keep points they are making hair you're making a distinction between corporatism and capitalism something that a lot of people wish folks like michael moore what i understand
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a little bit better in there they're also saying that it's not a good idea to focus on the distribution or redistribution of wealth per se but understand to focus on the underlying systemic risk and the and the institutionalized looting that's going on in the system now let me ask you one last question safe. occupy wall street. what if you could go down there and write on all their placards just one phrase or one concept to unify them or if you had a chance to manage them down down there what would be your message. you know i read to them no i think. i'm not american myself so i wouldn't want to be presumptuous enough to put myself in the sort of position to be preaching to americans about how they need to be you know fixing their economy yeah it's a safe let me. say if you where be aware of being co-opted safe let me cut in here
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for a second because it's not just an american issue this is a global issue because the banks are operating in a globalized contacts and we've seen what happens in countries like tyro and egypt when they become a client state for american banks and now american banks have run out of poor egyptians so they're attacking americans so it's a global problem so your suggestion is don't be co-opted is that is that correct definitive of the most important thing is not to be co-opted into a part of the political system. to learn from the experience of the antiwar movement. one zero. saying i was a gold i think the best thing that could happen to egypt tunisia. europe and the us at this point would be a complete separation of state and corporations the states should just completely stop dealing with the big corporations because it is under the pretext of regulating them and under the pretext of. ensuring the safety of their transactions
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with consumers the governments intervene on behalf of those companies on behalf of those big companies and then end up. using these interventions in a way in ways that are counterproductive and not helpful to the population so it's always it's always done under the pretext of you know looking out for the little guy but in reality it always ends up. causing more problems than it solves and that's that's i think that the problem of corporatism summarized ok so separation of corporation and state and i would imagine one of the first things to do along those lines would you take corporate money out of politics that's all the time we have thanks so much safer being on the kaiser report thanks for having us all right and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser stacy herbert and i thank my guests save us if you want to send me an e-mail please do so and kaiser report r t t v dot are you. saying file.
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israeli soldier gilad schalit freed after five years being held captive by hamas in exchange for one thousand palestinian prisoners but other captured soldiers families ask why israel's doing nothing to bring them home. new york police investigate over claims of excessive force during an anti wall street protest has footage of seemingly shows resorting to punches and pepper spray at peaceful rallies plus. as regards my return nothing is decided until the people have moved to ordinary citizens always have a choice to make. leaving the last word to the people here putin says it's premature to assume he'll win the presidential election in his first in.
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