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Former President Jimmy Carter recently stated that “[n]ow [the United States is] just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congressmembers. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors[.]” His candid statement has joined to The Intercept’s following list of politicians...

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder “has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling” where he “will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence” after spending the last six years as “the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had,” according to Journalist Matt Taibbi of ...

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently restricted mortgage servicing operations at Wells Fargo, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Santandar Bank, U.S. Bank, and EverBank based on their failure to comply with the mortgage servicing standards the banks agreed to within the consent orders they entered into following “scandals involving the so-called robo-signing of foreclosure documents by officials without knowledge of the facts as well as other legal shortcuts, lost paperwork and imprope...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement concerning 40% of the world economy that is currently being negotiated behind closed doors between representatives of multinational corporations and the following 12 countries: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam). (Note: Although the TPP is branded as a trade deal, only 5 of the 29 chapters are believed to concern interna...

As reported in this PBS NewsHour video by anchor Judy Woodruff: Five major institutions pled guilty to rigging currencies and manipulating the foreign exchange market. The banks also agreed to pay more than $5 billion combined in new penalties. The fines were some of the biggest brought to date by the federal government. The banks were accused of manipulating the world’s largest and least regulated trading market, where trillions of dollars change hands. Among those pleading guilty, J.P. M...

 “Despite what you may have heard, the foreclosure crisis is far from over, especially in Florida, which leads the nation, more than 300,000 cases still pending, another half-a-million homeowners delinquent, hundreds of thousands of modified loans about to balloon in payments,” according to economics correspondent Paul Solman in this PBS NewsHour video, which highlights several examples of the "600,000 Florida families who have lost their homes since 2007, 5.5 million homes lost nationw...

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has prevailed against the second largest bank of Switzerland Credit Suisse’s motion to dismiss the Attorney General’s $10 billion lawsuit against the bank for fraud concerning the sales of mortgage-backed securities prior to the 2008 financial crisis. This suit was filed back in 2012 as a result of allegations that the bank misrepresented to investors the downside risks of mortgage-backed securities which the bank was hawking prior to the finan...

Journalist Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone recently exposed the story of Alayne Fleischmann, the Department of Justice's key witness supporting the $9 billion (claimed to be $13 billion) mortgage & securities fraud related settlement of November 19, 2013. Fleischmann provides a long and detailed account of the circumstances leading up to the DoJ's resolution of JPMorgan Chase's culpability in relation to what Fleischmann describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" within the bank's mort...

Swiss banker Raoul Weil is currently on trial in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for allegedly conspiring to hide the assets of thousands of wealthy United States clients worth $20 billion from the IRS while working as the head of UBS’s global wealth management business. Business Insider provided the following background and summary of this trial: In 2008 Bradley Birkenfeld, an American working for UBS, blew the whistle on the giant Swiss bank's offshore operations, which had helped thousands of ...

As Florida voters exercise their democratic right to choose between two unpopular multimillionaires, the cross-accusations of fraud and corruption continue to escalate. This week, political chameleon Charlie Crist released another attack ad to remind voters that Republican incumbent Rick Scott presided over the largest instance of Medicare fraud in history (at the time) as CEO of  Columbia/HCA. The attack ad (which is the video included with this article) takes the form of a televised “pre...