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NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street protesters scrubbed, mopped and picked up garbage at the corporate-owned park they have been occupying in an attempt to stave off a scheduled cleanup Friday that demonstrators suspect is a pretext to evict them. While moving out mattresses and camping supplies, organizers were mixed on how they would respond when police arrive at the request of Zuccotti Park owners to help remove the occupiers from the public plaza so it can be cleaned.

New York City labor unions are preparing to back the unwieldy grassroots band occupying a park in Lower Manhattan, in a move that could mark a significant shift in the tenor of the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street protests and send thousands more people into the streets.

Wall Street protesters: over-educated, under-employed and angry Inspired by Tahrir Square, those who gathered in lower Manhattan are keen to mount a more permanent protest at corporate influence in US politics In the heart of New York's financial district, the marble and concrete floor of lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park was strewn with untidy clumps of people, gathered in small groups amid a jumble of sleeping bags, mattresses and home-made banners, protesting against the banks and institutions that towered over them. Some sat in circles, talking earnestly, others hugged, while at one side of the park, a small gaggle of "facilitators"...

So last summer we stood peering off the brink, with the markets all set to roll keel over mast before bubbling to the bottom. Then the Fed implemented QE2. I personally think QE 2 was useful in that it propped up risky assets. This pushed us back from the brink a bit, and gave the government time to smell the coffee and begin to make rational economic choices. They have since squandered that opportunity. So here we are again. Same people, same brink, same choices. A few months ago I got in a big argument with one of my more...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Technology stocks sold off after a brokerage downgrade on Monday, leading the market lower, while uncertainty over higher oil prices looked set to drive volatility in the days ahead. Wells Fargo downgraded the semiconductor sector, noting it has more than doubled in two years. The PHLX semiconductor index (^SOX - News), up 45 percent since the start of September, fell 2.7 percent. The broad S&P 500 is up about 25 percent in that period.

Wall Street increasingly favors Republicans: study Tue Aug 10, 7:00 pm ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wall Street and its financial allies did an about-face in political spending in June, giving Republicans over two-thirds of their campaign contributions as Democrats pushed financial reform forward in Congress, a report said on Tuesday. The preliminary findings by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics suggest that a financial industry trend favoring Republican candidates, which began in late 2009, may have accelerated as reform legislation progressed in the run-up to November's congressional mid-term elections. The Washington research group found that individuals and political action committees...

WASHINGTON – Congress sent legislation to President Barack Obama Thursday that imposes sweeping new regulations on Wall Street and creates new protections for millions of consumers. The Senate's 60-39 vote came nearly two years after a financial crisis knocked the economy to its knees.

July 10, 2010 Wall St. Hiring in Anticipation of an Economic Recovery By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ While much of the country remains fixated on the bleak employment picture, hiring is beginning to pick up in the place that led the economy into recession — Wall Street. The shift underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever. Since employment bottomed out in February, New York...

Wall Street Is Beating a Dead Bull Adam Lass, Senior Editor, WaveStrength Options Weekly Thursday, June 03, 2010 tWall Street is drinking its own Kool-Aid when it tells you that the financial markets will jump 27%. The disconnect would be truly wonderful – if it weren't so truly awful. We have come to expect the "Axis of Error" – the propaganda colossus that is Washington and Wall Street – to do its level best to obscure the risks an investor undertakes should they choose to buy into this financial market. From an absolutist's point of view, it's foul, underhanded and...

By Andrew Sheng 05.17.2010 10:40 Bankers Confirm Wall Street's Barbarianism Investment bankers bilked clients and grossly violated fiduciary trust in ways that deserve even deeper investigation A 1987 Hollywood movie called Wall Street featured Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko, a rich, powerful and ruthless broker who teaches a young disciple that "greed is good." Coming out this summer will be a new film, Wall Street 2, also starring Michael Douglas. And we've been watching the real show recently from Washington. That's where Wall Street bankers defended themselves before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee. The...

The Senate has scheduled a showdown early next week on Wall Street reform, and lawmakers familiar with negotiations say a deal is unlikely by then. Democrats have set a 5 p.m. vote for Monday to begin consideration of the bill, giving negotiators only four more days to reach a deal on a document exceeding 1,400 pages.

A Senate committee on Wednesday passed a proposal aimed at helping protect the economy from future meltdowns and taxpayers from more Wall Street bailouts. The Senate Agricultural Committee voted 13-8 in favor of the bill, which would impose regulations on the complex system of Wall Street trades known as derivatives. Senate leaders now will look at merging the measure with a financial regulations reform bill already passed by the Senate Banking Committee that is headed for debate by the full chamber.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is the "father of the subprime crisis" and his aggressive attacks on Wall Street could make him dangerous to the banking sector if he becomes the next governor of New York, well-known banking analyst Dick Bove told CNBC. "One of the key reasons why (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are] bankrupt today, and why the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in supporting them, is because of the edicts pushed through by Mr. Cuomo," said Bove, of Rochdale Securities, in a live interview. "It's also thought by many that the hundreds of...

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry’s campaign to thwart Mr. Obama’s proposals for tighter financial regulations.

Unbelievable we all know who Wall St. paid off even the NYT just put out an article showing how heavily they donated to Zero and the dems. I will put Open Secrets donations to them in comments.

I lifted this from the reply section of Market Watch's article on Scott Brown's win. He makes some good points. Then he gets sidetracked into deep ends. Overall, .... LOL PEOPLE OF AMERICA HAVE HAD IT WITH OUR SO CALLED LEADERS We have repudiated Democrats and Republicans! We are fed up with the lot of you. You Promised change on Wall Street and Washington who Control OUR Country! But Wall Street continues Buying OUR POLITICIANS and passing Laws favoring the Financial Aristocracy! Taking care of Corporations but NOT us despite worst Crisis in generations! America is in BIG trouble as...

THE seminal question for this year - coming into the mid-term elections - is exactly that. Have you had it? Are you tired of being bent over the table with 29.9% credit card interest rates while these big banks borrow at zero from The Fed and use that money to speculate in the markets? Are you tired of "too big to fail" - better stated as heads we (the banksters) win, tails you (the taxpayer) lose? Are you enraged beyond words with the fact that this economic mess was not an accident - it was an intentional act of willful...

So much has changed over the past year. Or has it? On the heels of the most harrowing period for financial markets since the Great Depression, politicians, regulators, investors and Wall Street executives shared a vow: never again. They would reform the system and change behavior to prevent another financial calamity. But more than a year after Lehman Brothers, American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Washington Mutual collapsed or were saved by the government and financial markets swooned, it is striking how little on Wall Street has changed. Indeed, the surge in markets around the globe last...

Barack Obama was never the progressive ideologue many of his supporters hoped he'd be. He ran as a fairly centrist, cautious candidate, and that's how he's governed. Though to his credit, he's been office for less than a year, and he's already decided to blow most of his political capital on a party-line vote to reform healthcare, something his predecessor George W. Bush never dared to try with, say, Social Security. But because healthcare doesn't include a public option, thus leaving the for-profit insurers to make a fortune on the great insuring of America, and because Wall Street reform seems...

“Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.” That’s the starting point of my brother Tim Carney's new book released today, titled Obamanomics, How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses. Whether he likes it or not, President Barack Obama’s policies on finance, the economy, technology, the environment, and even health care are turning out to be boons to the most entrenched special interests. Meanwhile, smaller businesses, taxpayers, and some disfavored industries are bearing the burden. Our President believes in a “mixed economy” in which private enterprise and the profit motive...