A Nation With A Fraudulent, Unaccountable Elite

Top stories this morning:

New Fraud Inquiry as JPMorgan’s Loss Mounts:

JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Friday that losses on its botched credit bet could climb to more than $7 billion and that the bank’s traders may have intentionally tried to obscure the full extent of the red ink on the disastrous trades.

Mounting concerns about valuing the trades led the company to announce that its earnings for the first quarter were no longer reliable and would be restated. Federal regulators, who were already examining the trades, are now looking at whether employees of the nation’s biggest bank by assets intended to defraud investors, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The revelations left Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, scrambling for the second time within two months to contain the fallout from the trading debacle. It has already claimed one of his most trusted lieutenants, compelled Mr. Dimon to appear before Congress to account for the blunder and prompted the bank to claw back millions in compensation from three traders in London at the heart of the losses. A top bank official said that the board could also seize pay from Mr. Dimon, but did not indicate that it would do so.

And this one:

Paterno Won Sweeter Deal Even as Scandal Played Out

In January 2011, Joe Paterno learned prosecutors were investigating his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for sexually assaulting young boys. Soon, Mr. Paterno had testified before a grand jury, and the rough outlines of what would become a giant scandal had been published in a local newspaper.

That same month, Mr. Paterno, the football coach at Penn State, began negotiating with his superiors to amend his contract, with the timing something of a surprise because the contract was not set to expire until the end of 2012, according to university documents and people with knowledge of the discussions. By August, Mr. Paterno and the university’s president, both of whom were by then embroiled in the Sandusky investigation, had reached an agreement.

Mr. Paterno was to be paid $3 million at the end of the 2011 season if he agreed it would be his last. Interest-free loans totaling $350,000 that the university had made to Mr. Paterno over the years would be forgiven as part of the retirement package. He would also have the use of the university’s private plane and a luxury box at Beaver Stadium for him and his family to use over the next 25 years.

The university’s full board of trustees was kept in the dark about the arrangement until November, when Mr. Sandusky was arrested and the contract arrangements, along with so much else at Penn State, were upended. Mr. Paterno was fired, two of the university’s top officials were indicted in connection with the scandal, and the trustees, who held Mr. Paterno’s financial fate in their hands, came under verbal assault from the coach’s angry supporters.

Board members who raised questions about whether the university ought to go forward with the payments were quickly shut down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

In the end, the board of trustees — bombarded with hate mail and threatened with a defamation lawsuit by Mr. Paterno’s family — gave the family virtually everything it wanted, with a package worth roughly $5.5 million. Documents show that the board even tossed in some extras that the family demanded, like the use of specialized hydrotherapy massage equipment for Mr. Paterno’s wife at the university’s Lasch Building, where Mr. Sandusky had molested a number of his victims.

The details of Mr. Paterno and his family’s fight for money seem to deepen one of the lasting truths of the Sandusky scandal: the significant power that Mr. Paterno exerted on the state institution, its officials, its alumni and its purse strings.

And of course this:

New York Fed Knew of False Barclays Reports on Rates

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York learned in April 2008, as the financial crisis was brewing, that at least one bank was reporting false interest rates.

At the time, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed official that “we know that we’re not posting um, an honest” rate, according to documents released by the regulator on Friday. The employee indicated that other big banks made similarly bogus reports, saying that the British institution wanted to “fit in with the rest of the crowd.”

Although the New York Fed conferred with Britain and American regulators about the problems and recommended reforms, it failed to stop the illegal activity, which persisted through 2009.

British regulators have said that they did not have explicit proof then of wrongdoing by banks. But the Fed’s documents, which were released at the request of lawmakers, appear to undermine those claims.

The revelations fuel concerns that regulators are ill-equipped to police big banks and that financial institutions can game the system for their own purposes.

Even after authorities have beefed up oversight and lawmakers have enacted new rules, blowups on Wall Street continue to occur with some regularity. Amid the rate-manipulation scandal, regulators are also dealing with the fallout from the multibillion-dollar trading losses at JP Morgan Chase and the collapse of a second brokerage firm, just months after the failure of MF Global.

It's all rigged, folks.

All rigged.

And it's not fixable.

It's not.

Worldwide elites have a stranglehold on power, wealth, and weaponry.

They're not going to be taken down.

You can see the brazenness in the actions of a sociopath like Paterno.

Even as he is lying to a grand jury about Sandusky, he's rigging a new deal that will make sure he and his family are taken care financially no matter what happens.

Sure, he's dead now, so ultimately he didn't get anything out of it.

But his family did.

A perfect example of an elite rigging the system.

Why is Jamie Dimon still in charge at JP Morgan Chase?

Why isn't he in jail?

Why isn't anybody from Barclays in jail for LIBOR rigging?

Why did the government sign a non-prosecutorial agreement with Barclays?

Why isn't Geithner in jail, if not for sitting on the LIBOR rigging, than for the sweetheart deals he gave Goldman Sachs via the AIG bailout?

Why isn't Hank Paulsen in jail?

Or Dick Fuld?

Or Angelo Mozilo?

Or anybody who rigged the Big Casino that is "The Street"?

You know why, I know why, and they know why.

Because it's all rigged.

And it ain't going to get fixed.

The system is too rotten and corrupted to be fixed.

This is the Roman Empire, circa 300 AD, but we're moving a lot faster to dissolution than they ever did.

We can make believe like the "election" in November is some referendum on things, but nearly everybody but the most partisan know none of that shit matters.

Whether Romney or Obama is elected, we are continuing down the Road to Plutocracy.

But even as they try and distract us from the gravity and reality of the situation with bread and circuses and reality TV and politics and mythology and the rest, there are people looking to build a road to the future.

There is no map there, no directions.

But from the Occupy movement to the recovery movement to the restorative justice movement, there are glimpses of what the future could like - after we hit "bottom" and Global Warming puts a final nail in the coffin of capitalism and the market-based ideologies that currently are poisoning our air, our water, our communities, our families, our spirits, our minds and our souls.

I am not hopeful that this is something I will see, but I am hopeful that I can be a part of building that future so that two, three, five or ten generations down the road from now, there is some kind of human society on this planet that is sustainable and worthwhile.

Because what we are viewing right now as it crumbles around us sure isn't it.