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Saturday, August 10, 2013

Elite Influence: All-Encompassing


Morgan Stanley, one of the largest banks in the United States, reported a 66% increase in earnings in July over the same period last year. Morgan Stanley had taken more than $107 billion of U.S. taxpayer money through the bailout programs in the wake of the financial crisis that it helped to create, making it the largest U.S. recipient of bailout funds. Like the other big banks, Morgan Stanley had been busy paying settlements for the massive criminal fraud conspiracies it engaged in, particularly related to the housing crisis.

In 2011, the banks came to a $40 million settlement with the state of Nevada over mortgage fraud.In 2012, Morgan Stanley paid a settlement of $4.8 million regarding electricity price-fixing charges leveled against the bank in New York State, costing consumers roughly $300 million, after generating $22 million in revenue for the bank. In a settlement over foreclosure fraud in 2013, the bank along with Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $557 million to more than 200,000 home owners who had been foreclosed on.

A former real estate executive for Morgan Stanley pleaded guilty in 2012 to violating anti-corruption laws, and was “charged with secretly acquiring millions of dollars’ worth of property investments for himself and a Chinese government official." In 2012, one Morgan Stanley executive was charged with a hate crime for using racial slurs and stabbing a cab driver of Egyptian descent, after having refused to pay the cab fare.

And yet it’s not simply enough for this financial behemoth to defraud the American public and profit from the economic crisis it helped create. It has also managed to profit from increasing hunger and land grabs across the so-called Third World. As big banks speculate on food prices, they drive the costs of food up, sparking food riots and increasing hunger across much of the world while making banks a nice profit in the process. The three financial institutions most active in food speculation are Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Thus, as millions more people get pushed into hunger, rest assured: Morgan Stanley will be there to swoop up the profits, as untold numbers of people get displaced and foreign investors purchase their lands at giveaway prices. In just one example, Morgan Stanley bought 40,000 hectares of land in Ukraine.

Thus, based on mortgage fraud, the housing crisis, bailouts, the food crisis and the great global land grabs, it's fair to say that Morgan Stanley is a bank seeking profits at the expense of people, the environment and the world at large. The Global Power Project investigated 24 individuals on both the executive committee and board of directors of Morgan Stanley. The most highly represented institution shared by elites at Morgan Stanley is the Council on Foreign Relations, with six individual affiliations between the two organizations.
It is followed by four mutual affiliations with McKinsey & Co., and three affiliations each between the bank and the former Merrill Lynch (now owned by Bank of America), Columbia University, the Brookings Institution, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Further, the bank has two individual affiliations with each of the following: the World Economic Forum, the Business Council, Merck & Co., President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the Conference Board, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Stanford University and Alcoa.

At Morgan Stanley, like elsewhere among the big Wall Street banks, an elite class of individuals connected through their institutional affiliations and social groups exert incredible influence over finance, corporations, the government, media, policy, educational institutions and global society at large. Regardless of the immense suffering that Morgan Stanley and its like institutions inflict on the world, so long as it is able to profit from that suffering, it considers itself safe and secure.
Too big to fail. Too big to jail. Too cancerous to care.

By Andrew Gavin Marshall.
From here with much more detail, including list of elite individuals.

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