Free Republic

The United States Military Academy at West Point hosted the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s top propaganda effort that seeks to “influence foreign governments and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies” as a speaker, The National Pulse can reveal.The United States Military Academy (USMA) has also partnered with state-run Chinese universities – including institutions accused of doubling as espionage and cyberattack training grounds and Xi Jinping’s alma mater – on exchange programs.What’s more, West Point leadership has visited the China-based schools to call for increased collaboration, including a former superintendent “inviting national...

The private-equity tycoon Stephen A. Schwarzman, backed by an array of mostly western blue-chip companies with interests in China, is creating a $300 million scholarship for study in China that he hopes will rival the Rhodes scholarship in prestige and influence. The programme, whose endowment represents one of the largest single gifts to education in the world and one of the largest philanthropic gifts ever in China, was announced by Mr. Schwarzman in Beijing on Sunday. The Schwarzman Scholars programme will pay all expenses for 200 students each year from around the world for a one-year master’s programme at Tsinghua...

....In my far less titillating research on the Hamilton Project (see work listed below), I have come across some interesting ties between MIT economist Jonathan Gruber and the Hamilton Project. Gruber–it turns out–carries bags for the Obama administration and the Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin-funded Hamilton Project. Gruber is a RentEconomist ready and seemingly willing to take any economic position (pardon the RentBoy inspired pun) you might want, for money that is, lots of it as Emptwheel has shown....... ....But while I have been doing research recently on the links between the Obama government and Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs and...

This week financial news organization CNBC gave some mainstream attention to the largest money laundering and racketeering lawsuit in United States History, in which “Banksters” and their U.S. racketeering partners are being accused of laundering of 43 trillion dollars worth of ill gotten gains. The lawsuit is said to involve officials located in the highest offices of government and the financial sector. Since this information was surprisingly revealed by the mainstream news organization there has been a very suspicious and deadly fallout at the CNBC headquarters. Within hours the original page for the article was taken down, and CNBC senior...

If you’re an amoral person with political connections, it’s possible to make a lot of money. Warren Buffett lined his pockets by making a government-subsidized investment in Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis.The rest of us suffered and he got richer, but the left seems to be okay with that perverse form of redistribution because he supports class-warfare tax hikes. Sort of like buying an indulgence in the Middle Ages.Hey, nice work if you can get it.But Buffett may be an amateur compared to the crony capitalists at Citigroup.The just-confirmed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was given a huge bonus for...

NBC News special correspondent Tom Brokaw was taken by ambulance to a Charlotte hospital this morning after an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Brokaw, 72, who stepped down as anchor of “Nightly News” after the 2004 election, has been working a break-neck pace the last two weeks first at the RNC and this week at the DNC. Brokaw has been up early, appearing on “Morning Joe,” then reporting throughout the day and into the night. Last night, he appeared on Sean Hannity‘s Fox News show. An MSNBC spokesperson tells TVNewser, “On the set of ‘Morning Joe’ this morning, Tom Brokaw...

America is headed for a fiscal cliff if members of Congress fail to act before the end of the year. Many economists agree that if no action is taken, 2013 will begin with a $600 billion drag on the economy, or a 4 to 5 percent hit to GDP, due to a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts set to take effect. To put that in perspective, the knock to economic growth could be twice as much as current GDP growth forecasts for all of 2012 and more than any annual GDP growth in the last decade. Former Treasury...

Bicycles instead of cars? Dense apartment clusters instead of single homes? Community rituals instead of churches? "Human rights" instead of religious freedom? The UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) which met June 3-14 [1996]in Istanbul, painted an alarming picture of the 21st century community. The American ways-free speech, individualism, travel, and Christianity-are out. A new set of economic, environmental, and social guidelines are in. Citizenship, democracy, and education have been redefined. Handpicked civil leaders will implement UN "laws", bypassing state and national representatives to work directly with the UN. And politically correct "tolerance"-meaning "the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism"...

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

If prudent investors can only make .5% on short term assets, how does Goldman Sachs prosper? Robert Rubin was a very powerful man. After 26 years and rising to the level of Co-Senior Partner, he left Goldman Sachs in 1994 to become Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration. His first major undertaking was during the Mexican bailout of 1995. ...Rubin drew criticism in Congress for using a Treasury Department account under his personal control to distribute $20 billion to bail out Mexican bonds, of which Goldman was a key holder. For 1998, the first year which we have public financial...

Round two of the economic crime of the century has begun. On January 12, Lawrence Summers, President Obama's designee to become director of his National Economic Council, sent a letter to congressional majority and minority leaders seeking the second half of the $750 billion approved by Congress last October.   Citing Obama's economic speech of January 8, Summers wrote: "As the President-elect recently stated, 'we start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any other we have seen in our lifetime.'" As you no doubt recall, last September Congress, fearing the wrath of constituents, rejected a bailout scheme put together...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Robert Rubin, a senior adviser to Citigroup Inc. at the time of its deep losses from subprime mortgages, said Wednesday that he learned belatedly that Citi had $43 billion in high-risk securities on its books. "I do not recall knowing before September 2007" that the bank had held onto the investments composed of repackaged mortgage bonds, Rubin said. In November 2007, Citigroup publicly estimated it would lose $8 billion to $11 billion in the fourth quarter that year from those securities.

There is a whiff of Fascism emanating from the Obama White House. Reports say that the head of GM is quitting under duress from the Obama administration:

A new Citigroup scandal is engulfing Robert Rubin and his former disciple Chuck Prince for their roles in an alleged Ponzi-style scheme that's now choking world banking. Director Rubin and ousted CEO Prince - and their lieutenants over the past five years - are named in a federal lawsuit for an alleged complex cover-up of toxic securities that spread across the globe, wiping out trillions of dollars in their destructive paths. Investor-plaintiffs in the suit accuse Citi management of overseeing the repackaging of unmarketable collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that no one wanted - and then reselling them to Citi and...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, resigned from Citigroup Inc on Friday, following months of criticism of his performance at the giant U.S. bank. Rubin, 70, is stepping down immediately as senior counselor at New York-based Citigroup. He will remain a director until the bank's annual meeting later this year. Rubin joined Citigroup in 1999. In a letter to Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, Rubin praised management for making the "tough decisions" to restore Citigroup to health, following $20.3 billion of losses in the year ended Sept 30. But he admitted to not having foreseen the credit...

Another Sunday night, another ad hoc bank rescue rooted in no discernible principle. U.S. taxpayers, who invested $25 billion in Citigroup last month, will now pour in another $20 billion in exchange for preferred shares paying an 8% dividend. Taxpayers will also help insure $306 billion of Citi's mortgage-backed securities. Citi will cover the first $29 billion in losses on these toxic assets, and then taxpayers will cover 90% of the rest, in exchange for another $7 billion in preferred. Dilution for Citigroup investors? Yesterday's 58% pop in the bank's share price suggests the bailout is a good deal for...

Businesses that politicians deem vital to the national interest aren't being allowed to fail in America today, and the bigger they are, the more help they get from the government. So it's not much of a surprise that the fine points of yet another bailout package are being worked out behind closed doors, this time for Citigroup. Again, not surprisingly, the latest recipient of government largess is a big donor to political candidates and parties. It's the 15th largest corporate giver, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, donating $25.1 million since 1989 in roughly even portions to the two...

The bank’s downfall was years in the making and involved many in its hierarchy, particularly Mr. Prince and Robert E. Rubin, an influential director and senior adviser. Citigroup insiders and analysts say that Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin played pivotal roles in the bank’s current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits. Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin both declined to comment for this article. When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup...

We both agree that individual income tax rates and other taxes for those at the very top could be moved back to the rates of the Clinton era. ... In addition to restoring a sound fiscal regime, we could improve our personal savings rate and expand retirement security by establishing some kind of individualized account separate from Social Security, financed by an appropriate revenue measure. ... A true market economy should have true labor markets in which labor and business negotiate as peers. Many years ago, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that collective bargaining was necessary so workers had...

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has reached out recently to heavyweights in the Clinton camp, keeping his group of Washington outsiders in the background. Since locking in the Democratic Party presidential nomination in early June, Obama has expanded his team of campaign advisers without doing away with the core team that has advised him since the start of his bid in 2007. Obama's choice however to associate with Washington outsiders has sometimes resulted in mistakes by association. One was when unpaid foreign policy adviser Samantha Powers described Hillary Clinton to a reporter as a "monster," and quickly resigned. Another was...