COLORADO SPRINGS- This morning’s OWS Oct15 march visited the downtown banking giants, along Tejon, Colorado, Cascade & Boulder.
(Click on each image to see expanded views.)
The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America is suggesting you take your mortgage company protest to the streets, their streets. Specifically the neghborhood where your predatory lender CEO lives. Let his kids meet your kids. Let them ask their daddy why your children are being put out on the street. NACA has listed online all the pertinent names and addresses to facilitate what they call the “Predators Tour,” a sort of involuntary Parade of Homes.
To fight eviction, NACA cautions victims to remain in their homes, and solicit legal help. But when it comes to changing mortgage lending policy, NACA promotes CONFRONTATION and ADVOCACY. They’re calling these posh neighborhood rallies: nonviolent bank terrorism.
NATIONAL CITY MORTGAGE
Peter Raskind, CEO
(216) 222-2000
peter.raskind@nationalcity.com
Net worth: $5 Million
Home value: $1 Million
19212 Shelburne Road, Cleveland, OH 44118
HSBC
Brendan Mcdonagh, CEO
(224) 544-6676
Net worth: $20 Million
Home value: $2.5 Million
1065 Fisher Ln, Winnetka, IL 60093
CERBERUS CAPITAL MANAGEMENT (GMAC)
Stephen Feinberg, CEO
(212) 891-2100
Net worth: $1 Billion
City Address: $19.75 Million
36 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065
Weekend address: $1.1 Million
35 Craig Court, Stamford, CT 06903
GREENWICH FINANCIAL SERVICES
William Frey, CEO
(203) 862-3600
Bill@greenwichfin.com
Home value: $2.2 Million
10 Glenville Road, Greenwich, CT 06831
GOLDMAN SACHS
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO
(212) 902-1000
Lloyd.Blankfein@gs.com
Net worth: $350 Million
Vacation Home: $6.05 Million
121 Parsonage Lane, Sagaponack, NY 11962
City address: $26 Million
15 Central Park West 1617A, New York, NY 10023
MORGAN STANLEY
John Mack, CEO
(212) 761-4000
Net worth: $400 Million
Home value: $2.75 Million
6 Club Road, Rye, NY 10580
Vacation address 1: $7.8 Million
53 S. Beach Road, Wilmington, NC 28411
Vacation Address 2: $4.34 Million
54 S. Beach Road, Wilmington, NC 28411
BARCLAYS
Robert Diamond, CEO
(212) 412-4000
Net worth: $200 Million
Vacation address: $6.5 Million
3 Lincoln Way, Nantucket, MA 02554
CREDIT SUISSE
Robert Shafir, CEO Americas
(212) 325-2000
Net worth: $20 Million
Vacation home: $3.25 Million
354 Bluff Road, Amagansett, NY 11930
FORTRESS INVESTMENT GROUP, LLC,
Wesley Edens, CEO
(212) 798-6100,
Net Worth: $1.6 Billion
Country address: $1.88 Million
8 Oyster Pond Road, Edgartown, MA 02539
City Address: $7.23 Million
271 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024
MEET -AFTER WORK- TUESDAY at the corner of SMITH BARNEY and MORGAN STANLEY, where DAIN RAUSCHER meets BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON at the Plaza of the Rockies Building. That’s where Colorado Springs needs to voice its objections to a bailout for the Wall Street extortionists. Don’t hand over America’s wealth to the money traders! Scribble your sentiments on the back of whatever poster-board is lying around your office and meet at TEJON & COLORADO from 4:30-5:30PM. Bring determination to tell them NO! (You can RSVP with TrueMajority.)
Some poster suggestions from ML:
Eat the Rich
Eat the Oligarchs
Eat the Plutocracy
No Corporate Welfare
Socialism for the Rich
Bailout is a Sellout
Fight them on Wall Street so we don’t have to fight them on Main Street
Scrape the GOP off the Treasury
No welfare surge for the rich
Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?
Let the Banks Burn
Jail (arrest) Paulson
FEDup USA
Give bankers bail-not Bailout
Rescue Main Street not Wall Street
Back-STABilization
Private Debt=Private Liability
$1 Trillion Bailout = 20% Inflation
No cash for crooks!
Don’t blame me- I voted for Kucinich
Leverage This
Bailout: The Audacity of DOPES
No Cash for Trash
You Broke it- You Bought It
The Kleptocrats are pulling the biggest heist in world history. They created money out of nothing, and are now dumping all that worthless paper on the taxpayers. The Robber Barrons took the money and ran, and are now planning their next, even bigger, heist.
Even arch conservative Bill Kristol is balking at the trillion dollar heist being pulled on the taxpayer. And he isn’t the only one.
Know them by their fruits. McCain’s campaign manager made $2 million blocking regulations for the mortgage “industry.”
McCain: “I’m glad I deregulated Wall Street.”
Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary told Senate on Friday that complete meltdown of our entire financial system is just days away. Or, as John McCain would say, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Just not in our favor. And their “rescue plan” is likely to finish off our economy all together. All because, 8 years ago, half the voters thought it would be cute to vote for the guy they’d like to have a beer with. Maybe America deserves to fail.
Bare market. Fed moves to rescue Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
USA is collapsing just like USSR. It’s now unavoidable, the only question is, what comes after?
John McCain (KKK Party) scapegoats blacks for financial crisis. Oh, and BTW, Obama is black, so he must be in cahoots!
Non-elitist John McCain owns THIRTEEN cars.
One swindle after another. McCain thinks a market-based reform of the health care crisis is called for, since that worked so well with Wall St.
Saturday Night Live skit reveals the truth about the McCain campaign better than all the news networks combined.
Judge orders Cheney to preserve records. As if he’s ever obeyed the law before.
NASA to hold press conference Tuesday about death of our solar system.
Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s Sept 22 notes, thomasmc.com.
To put things in perspective, it helps to know that Lehman Brothers holdings were 10 times the value of Enron’s, a company that also fell into bankruptcy amidst scandal. But the collapse of the American economy is not over yet, as other companies, such as Washington Mutual and AIG also appear to be on their way to going under. Here is what wikipedia has to say about AIG, the 18th largest company in the world, and one that in 2006 was fined over 1.5 billion dollars for fraud.
‘On June 15, 2008, under intense pressure due to financial losses and a falling stock price, Martin Sullivan resigned from the CEO position. He was replaced by Robert B. Willumstad who has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Company since 2006.
In 2008, AIG’s share prices fell over 95% to less than $3 in September and the company reported over $13.2 billion in losses in the first six months of that year. As Lehman Brothers suffered a major decline in value and share price, potential investors began to compare the types of securities held by AIG to those held by Lehman, and found that AIG had valued their Alt-A and sub-prime mortgage-backed securities at rates 1.7 to 2.0 times those Lehman had used for what Lehman officials called similar securities. On September 14, 2008, AIG announced it was considering selling its aircraft leasing division, International Lease Finance Corporation, in an effort to raise necessary capital for the company. The Federal Reserve has hired Morgan Stanley to determine if there are systemic risks to a failing AIG, and has asked private entities to supply short-term “bridge” loans to the company. In the meantime, New York regulators have approved AIG for $20 billion in borrowing from its subsidiaries.
On September 16, AIG’s stock dropped 60 percent at the market’s opening. The Federal Reserve continued to meet that day with major Wall Street investment firms to broker a deal to create a $75 billion line of credit to the company. Rating agencies Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, meanwhile, downgraded their ratings on AIG’s credit on concerns over continuing losses to mortgage-backed securities. The New York Times later reported that talks on Wall Street had broken down and AIG may file for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, September 17.’
Will this company in fact file for bankruptcy tomorrow as the NYT reports? And what about Washington Mutual and the others? It’s beginning to look like the 30’s once again, and all doubt about ‘recessions’ or not is now over. The word is DEPRESSION. Hang onto your job, house, and pension if you can, for it looks grim.
COLORADO SPRINGS- An early Pikes Peak Region African American settler is commemorated with a statue in downtown Colorado Springs. A plaque explains that William Seymour was one of many freed slaves who moved west after the Civil War. The statue is meant to honor all those “invisible” pioneers, ignored in the official histories of the city. What’s remarkable is that the statue of this black man is erected next to the Plaza of the Rockies, a bastion of conservative financiers.
The plaque explains a further improbability: the statue was funded by the Plaza. Otherwise known as the Booz Allen Hamilton building, the Colorado Springs home of Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney and RBC Dain Rauscher.
What caught my eye was Seymour’s fedora laying on the adjacent bench. It’s an artistic touch that blurs bronze with reality, but the metal hat also reduces the bench’s utility by half. That’s the first beef I had with it. Only one person can sit at a time to wait for the bus.
Then I pondered why Seymour’s hat was off. The gesture makes him look like a gentleman, fitting to have been the first African American to serve on an El Paso County jury. Seymour was also a founding member of a local Baptist church. Is the park bench meant to be a church pew? He’d have left his coat at the door as well.
Integrated as it is with the park bench, we have to conclude William Seymour is standing outside. We’ve encountered him, as the plaque suggests, on his way home. He’s taken his hat off out of deference to us. We honor he and his fellow “invisible” black pioneers, but we depict him in the lee of Plaza of the Rockies, knowing his place.
Other historical luminaries honored around the downtown have statues who’ve kept their hats on.
These bastards are brazen thieves and agents of disinformation. Has the entire fricking country gone stupid? We are witnessing the transfer of vast sums of our money… not theirs, ours… to them!! And a Fed who wants to get the SEC out of the way so they can do it! Paulson, Bernake, Greenspan, Volker, Rubin… all wall street thieves and crooks, liars and scum. This is the fascist business model in full head long dive to the bottom with the Fed cleaning up the mess and divvying up the bailout money to their wall street buddies. For the next 6 months.
This had to be planned. No concerned economic professional in their right mind would have let this happen. The Fed is responsible for the housing bubble, the subprime crime, the weak dollar and now for looting the U.S. citizen treasury!! JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank America… they’re all going down. They’ve all got the CDO-SIV-Hedge Fund cancer bad. Why is the Fed taking on all this worthless paper and risk? All for show. They create and destroy money all the time.
Regardless, they will bail them all out… on our tab. Bear Stearns was sacrificed to keep JP Morgan on life support. But you can bet the Bear Stearns management got out before the crash of stock price. I think the SEC would investigate that right? And how is it that the Fed can act alone on these things, and the Congress (many of whom voted to repeal the Glass-Steagal act with Clinton) [there’s a question for Hillary] in the aftermath asks their sniveling little questions of how the deal was structured? Because the Fed runs the show. It is a private banking system… not a government agency! We are witnessing the power of the central banking system that was set up in Europe by the Bauers (Rothchilds), the Greens, the Schifts, the Warburgs…all German banking Zionists. Then brought to the U.S. (The Money Masters -dvd). Talmudist Jews by the way. Sold out Germany with the British to bring U.S. into WWI. Even though Germany was offering England a return to peace with no reparations or conditions.
Now, what happened to that 2.4 trillion that went missing from the Pentagon… just before 9-11? Hmmmm Dov Zakhiem might know. Another Zionist and dual Israeli/U.S. citizen who was in charge of the Pentagons budget as comptroller. Funny how that “plane” hit the accounting area of the Pentagon, destroying all evidence and records of misplaced funds. Darn the luck. Who’d have thought?
Lock up your daughters, it’s the Christian Peacemaker Team delegation!
By now the story is out about our visit to Senator Allard’s office today, particularly the effort we encountered to thwart our visit.
I’ll recap. After holding our daily noon vigil for the four CPT hostages being held in Iraq, a delegation of vigil keepers went downtown to visit the offices of three local congress members as part of the national SHINE THE LIGHT campaign. We walked with three yard signs and another sign of similar size held aloft. One among us wore a black hood over his head, to remind onlookers of the Abu Ghraib captives.
After a pleasant walk down Tejon Street, we first visited Congressman Hefley’s office where we received a warm reception. They’d seen the TV news report the night before. They also confirmed having received our emailed press releases.
When we tried to find Senator Allard’s office, our reception was quite a different matter. We nearly didn’t make it to his office.
Senator Allard’s office is located in the Plaza of the Rockies, a mid-sized office building with a large atrium. The building is home to many financial service companies such as Morgan Stanley, RBC Dain Rauscher, Booz Allan and Hamilton, Stewart Title, and Vectra Bank among others.
Finding ourself on the second floor of the atrium, unable to get to the floor above, our group fanned out to find a stairwell or alternative elevator. We were no longer parading with our poster boards, carrying them instead under our arms. But our identity as war malcontents was probably apparent enough and we could tell that a couple of the occupants of those glass offices appeared to grab their phones on seeing us walk by.
After my own fruitless search for Suite 300, I returned to find our group being confronted by two men in suits. We were being asked to leave the building. This was private property they explained and we were not permitted to protest on their property.
We answered that we were not protesting, but were merely trying to reach Senator Allard’s office. Could they tell us which way to Suite 300? They would not, “he’s not there.” They insisted instead that we leave. Private property and all that.
We countered that Senator Allard’s office was a public space, and certainly the conveyance to his office must be considered public. They did not agree. When we asked with whom we were speaking, the first identified himself as “Larry,” the chief security officer, the other was the property manager.
Finally we offered to relinquish the offending signs and take them outside the building. I ran the signs down to Pat and Esther who were waiting outside the front door.
I got back in time to hear the property manager arguing “if you knew your bible, you’d know why we have to be in the Middle East!” I learned afterward that I had missed him accusing the leader of our delegation, CPT member Bill Durland, of being “Taliban.”
Eventually the two building representatives agreed to conduct us to the Senator’s office, but only on the condition that Peter remove his hood. Though again we made our case that the Abu Ghraib hood represented an important message we were trying to communicate, in the end Peter agreed to take it off. He would be able to put it back on in the Senator’s office.
In the Senator’s office we were greeted by his assistant who offered to talk with us. But she insisted that the security official remain in the room, and she insisted that Peter remove his hood.
There followed a polite exchange whereupon members of our group spoke from their hearts about the illegality of the war in Iraq, the immorality of torture and other crimes related to the taking of captives without just cause, etc. Senator Allard’s assistant pulled out an old chestnut that Allard is still using at fund raising speeches. Apparently 9-11 caused more casualties that our fighting in Iraq, and that if we hadn’t fought the war in Iraq, the war would have come to us here.
Throughout this discussion, police officers were arriving. The first two arrived at the heels of another Allard staffer. They walked in the door without saying a thing, walked through the reception area where we were having our exchange, and went to stand in the office just inside the reception area.
The odd thing was that no one was addressing these officers, they were merely shown the inside office where they could hear our discussion and interrupt presumably if they were needed. A third officer arrived shortly, and then a fourth. We could see them waiting unsupervisez in the other room. One of the police officers wore the typical tight black gloves and left them on.
When asked who had called for the police officers, Allard’s assistant repeatedly declared that she did not. Although she also did not question any of the officers as to what was the purpose of their visit, and why there came another and another. Instead she proffered that the police were merely a routine measure of building security.
In the end, our visit felt more fruitless than constructive. I don’t know what we would have expected to communicate to one of the few senators who voted against the anti-torture bill. Allard’s assistant defended her boss by telling us that his opposition to the anti-torture bill was because he wanted a stranger one. We interjected that simultaneously Allard had expressed his approval of President Bush’s signing exemption.
In the end we saw the soft underbelly of the beast. and should have taken greater advantage of it. The Neocons may be formidable adversaries, but their supporters, the underbelly, are about as soft as they come.
Senator Allard’s office help kept insisting that they welcomed our visit, yet they seemed quite in step with the actions taken on the part of building security, actions which were not welcoming in the least.
Had our confidence not been boosted by the knowledge that our lead negotiator was an ACLU lawyer, we might not have been persistent enough to reach Allard’s office.
The routine scrambling of police officers certainly surprised us. Afterward I longed to have questioned one of the police officers in the next room. What was the nature of the disturbance described to them? What trouble were they fearing might errupt from a christian(!) peacemaker(!) team visiting their senator’s office?