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USA: Crime Report Number One: State By State
23 July 2013
(LPAC)—With this report, LaRouche PAC is initiating a Weekly Crime Report documenting, state by state, the criminal action of Wall Street, with the consent of the state or the Federal government, which is destroying the lives of American citizens, and leading to deliberate outright genocide. The Wall Street moguls and top layers in the Federal and state governments know the consequences of what they are doing, Lyndon LaRouche has stressed. And they must be stopped. As the global financial system careens toward a new global crash, this looting is set to escalate, by means of full bankers’ dictatorship. Before that happens, it must be stopped. Many of the methods being currently used to carry out this genocide process are invisible to the ordinary citizen—such as the Libor interest-rate rigging operation being carried out by Wall Street and the City of London banks, and the ongoing process of trillions of dollars of bailout being provided to the Wall Street banks, while starving the physical economy. The Libor ripoff, for example, is estimated to have affected, and swindled, the 75% of all municipalities in the U.S. who resorted to interest-rate swaps to manage their debt, and one in six non-profit hospitals in the United States. Top bankers should be marched off to prison for the crimes they have committed, and are committing. And in fact, many lawsuits against the banks involved in Libor rate-fixing are ongoing. As for the Obama Administration, it has prosecuted no one, including complicit officials such as former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. But the first measure to be taken is more immediate: This genocide can only be stopped by the instant restoration of the Glass-Steagall law, followed by the implementation of a Hamiltonian credit system and massive job-creation programs like the North American Water and Power Alliance. Every state in the Union has an interest in forcing through this action now, which will literally put the Wall Street sharks out of business and cripple their political frontmen, including President Barack Obama. - Alabama - MONTGOMERY COUNTY/BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA was forced into bankruptcy in 2011, as a result of a JPMorgan Chase swindle on interest rate swaps for their sewer system. The county is just now seeking to re-emerge from bankruptcy, after having suffered major water rate increases, layoffs, and other attacks on the population’s living standards. - California - As the most populous state in the Union, California has been looted in myriad ways by the predator banks and the austerity and environmental policies of the Obama Administration. We highlight merely three examples here: OAKLAND, a city of 390,000, has been bled dry by Goldman Sachs interest-rate swaps, which were part of the LIBOR rigging. The police force has been drastically cut, leading to an increase in crime, and hundreds of jobs cut, in order for the city to pay exorbitant, fraudulent fees to Goldman. CENTRAL VALLEY—This rich agricultural area has been devastated by the Obama Administration’s environmental-genocide policies, which have supported the cutback of necessary water for irrigation in the drought-stricken area, and refused to provide for the water-projects which would be necessary to solve the problem in the longer-term. CRUCIAL STATE INSTITUTIONS, such as the state pension fund (CALPERS) and state universities, have been swindled massively by the LIBOR-rigging scandal. - Connecticut - THE CITY OF NEW BRITAIN’s Firefighters’ and Police Benefit Fund, was among the first to sue the banks which sold them interest rate swaps, claiming the LIBOR manipulation cost them millions, in the days following the revelation of the rate-fixing in 2012. - Florida - SARASOTA MEMORIAL HOSPITAL lost $5 million in derivative swaps, due to the LIBOR rigging, which led the hospital to cancel expansion, and leave 50,000 people without the services of a needed new hospital. - Illinois - THE CITY OF CHICAGO is being forced into new draconian budget cuts, both within its school system and other public services, as a result of the deliberate starving of the physical economy by the Wall Strett banks. In June, 50 schools were closed, with associated layoffs of 850 personnel. On July 18, 2,100 more teacher layoffs were announced, as the budget deficit reached $1 billion. Former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who has signed on to the deschooling/privatization program of the Obama administration, is presiding over the devastation. - Kentucky - OWENSBORO MEDICAL HEALTH SYSTEM was swindled out of $14 million through an interest rate swap negotiated through Merrill Lynch, in the spring of 2010. - Maryland - BALTIMORE, MARYLAND has been cheated of millions of dollars through rigged interest-rate swaps, which losses led, by testimony of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, to devastating cuts in fire safety, among other services. Baltimore was the lead plaintiff in a suit against the 16 banks involved in selling interest-rate swaps—a suit in which Federal Judge Naomi Buchwald of the U.S. District court for the Southern District of New York ruled largely in favor of the banks on April 1, 2013. - Massachusetts - THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY TRANSIT AUTHORITY was faced with a $160 million deficit in fiscal 2013, and forced to raise fares, in some cases dramatically (23% to 150%), due to a crushing debt burden arising from interest-rate swap deals, which were subject to criminal manipulations by the banks. The MTA serves 175 cities and towns that include about 70% of the state’s population. - Michigan - DETROIT, the largest city in the U.S. ever to declare bankruptcy, is a major victim of the LIBOR interest-rate derivatives scandal, in addition to the criminal shutdown of the auto industry, which was presided over by the Bush and Obama Administrations. As a result of this accumulation of crimes, Detroit itself is being murdered, along with its hundreds of thousands of citizens, who have an official unemployment rate of 18.5% and a real one that is much higher. - New Jersey - THE CITIES OF CAMDEN, PATERSON, NEWARK, AND JERSEY CITY, all brutally deindustrialized by the looting of the physical economy by the Wall Street money machine, have all come under various forms of receivership, especially their school systems— as local and Federal authorities (such as Barack Obama) continue to push for privatization of education. - New York - NASSAU COUNTY, Long Island, which was forced into state receivership in 2011, for the second time in a decade, was defrauded of an estimated $13 million by LIBOR interest-rate rigging. - North Carolina - On July 1, 70,000 unemployed North Carolinians lost their unemployment benefits, as a result of changes in state law, which not only lowered the number of weeks that unemployment benefits were available (from 26 to 20 weeks), but reduced the maximum benefit from $535 to $350, thus making the state ineligible for federal unemployment funds. The unemployment rate is officially 8.9%. - Oregon - THE ROGUE VALLEY MEDICAL CENTER, in Medford, Oregon, a city of 75,000 with an unemployment rate of 9.6% (April 2013) was looted viciously when the Wall Street crisis hit in 2008, collapsing the auction-rate securities market. The interest rates on its swaps went from 5% to 18%, and it had to pay a $30 million termination fee to end the swaps—which it did at the expense of hospital staff and other cutbacks hurting the population. - Pennsylvania - Like California, Pennsylvania has been broadly and visibly affected by interest rate swap swindles, as even documented by State Auditor General Jack Wagner in a January 2012 report entitled "Too Big to Trust?—Banks, Schools, and the Ongoing Problem of Interest Rate Swaps." Wagner found that of the 500 school districts in Pennsylvania, 107 of them had entered into interest-rate swaps between 2003 and 2009, as had another 86 local government units in Pennsylvania. Altogether they had contracted 626 swaps, relating to $14.9 billion in debt during that period. PHILADELPHIA and its school district, which Wagner had said had $1 billion in swap contracts already in testimony in 2010, had already lost $331 million in net interest payments and cancellation fees relating to swaps negotiated with bailed-out institutions such as Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and others, and stood to lose another $240 million in net interest rates alone. Many other cities, such as Reading and Bethlehem, were similarly ripped off. HARRISBURG, the state capital, came under state receivership as a result of its own interest rate derivative, taken out on behalf of building a sewage system. The result was the evisceration of the city budget. - Rhode Island - CENTRAL FALLS, a city of 19,000 people, was forced into bankruptcy, and massive cuts in pensions and public employment, plus huge tax increases, in 2011. - Texas - THE STATE OF TEXAS, home of the Bushes, has undergone a massive cut in the education budget during the 2012-2103 budget season, losing 10,000 teaching positions, even as enrollment rises by 83,000 students per year. Schools have been closed across the state, with the additional hidden cost of poor children losing access to free lunches. |