502 Were IMF funds used to pay for Prostitutes as a Business Expense?

Were IMF funds used to pay for Prostitutes as a Business Expense?

THE US ratings agencies have been top of the tree for years now.
Finally, they are being held accountable themselves (items 3-4).

(1) Were IMF funds used to pay for Prostitutes as a Business Expense?
(2) Strauss-Kahn charged in France with "aggravated organized
Procurement of Prostitutes"
(3) S&P sued for giving its highest AAA rating to derivative-linked
notes that in fact were
(4) S&P can’t blame Global Crisis for Notes’ collapse, Lawyer says
(5) Western Union, and an Australian bank, wiring drug money -
Australian Federal Police
(6) WALL STREET CONFIDENCE TRICK: How "Interest Rate Swaps" Are
Bankrupting Local Governments
(7) Chicago G8 Summit, facing Occupy-style protests, moved to Camp David

(1) Were IMF funds used to pay for Prostitutes as a Business Expense?

Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2012 08:29:01 +0700
Subject: Re: Strauss-Kahn had sex with woman as five other men looked on
- Brothel keeper
From: Anthony Lawson <lawson911@gmail.com>

> Strauss-Kahn had sex with woman as five
> other men looked on - Brothel keeper

Much more suave than having sex with five men with a women looking on,
donchathink?

Reply (Peter M.):

You are poking fun at my coverage of this story.

Some readers might protest that these reports about Strauss-Kahn are
lurid like Rupert Murdock tabloids.

The point is that Strauss-Kahn is no ordinary serial-rapist. He was the
highest-paid public official in the world, and used the "diplomatic
immunity" of UN/International Agencies as carte blanche.

When prosecutors mounted criminal cases against him, in both the US and
France, he used his immense wealth to buy lawyers and PR spinners to
discredit his victims and have charges withdrawn.

An escort agency in France flew Prostitutes all over the world to have
sex with Strauss-Kahn & co. at their orgies. Strauss-Kahn MUST have
known that they were Prostitutes. The money to pay them came from
company funds, in at least one case (in France), ie was accounted a
Business Expense.

There is also the question whether IMF funds were used to pay for
Prostitutes, when Strauss--Kahn was head.

On at least one occasion, the escort agency flow a Prostitute from
France to Washington DC when Strauss-Kahn was head of the IMF. Who paid
- him or the IMF?

A broader issue is whether any organizations Strauss-Kahn was associated
with claimed Prostitution as a Business Expense and Tax Deduction.

This is a story about corruption at the highest levels.

It's also a story of Social Class - exploitation of the poor by the rich.

What will happen if the US Courts decide that Strauss-Kahn DOES have
Diplomatic Immunity, in this Rape case?

Then the spotlight will shift to the IMF, the UN and associated
agencies. They lecture everyone else about Human Rights, but here they
are shielding a serial rapist. To avoid such a taint to their
reputation, they will cast Strauss-Kahn adrift. The Maid will have her
day in court.

But for her whistleblowing, Strauss-Kahn would presently be contesting
the election for President of France - with a good chance of winning. So
the whole world should be thankful to her.

(2) Strauss-Kahn charged in France with "aggravated organized
Procurement of Prostitutes"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/03/27/bloomberg_articlesM1I3V50D9L3501-M1JH8.DTL

Strauss-Kahn Charged in France With Prostitute Procurement

Heather Smith, ©2012 Bloomberg News

March 27 (Bloomberg) --

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary
Fund, was charged by three investigating judges in the northern French
city of Lille with procurement in a prostitution ring, prosecutors said.

The charge stems from an investigation into a prostitution ring linked
to the Carlton hotel in Lille. Investigators uncovered evidence women
had been hired to travel as far as Washington to have sex with the
then-chief of the IMF.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, turned himself in Feb. 21 and was held overnight to
answer questions as investigators sought to determine whether he knew
the women were prostitutes, or how they were paid. French builder
Eiffage SA (FGR) filed a complaint for embezzlement after an internal
probe found an employee spent as much as 50,000 euros ($66,790) to pay
for prostitutes for Strauss-Kahn.

“The three investigating judges in Lille in charge of the so-called
Carlton affair have charged Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn with aggravated
organized procurement of prostitutes,” prosecutors said last night in a
statement.

The charges followed a closed-door meeting yesterday between
Strauss-Kahn and judges. Prosecutors said Strauss-Kahn was ordered not
to contact other people involved in the case, including the eight other
people charged in the case, witnesses and the press, according to the
statement. He was released on a 100,000 euro bond.

Paying for sex is legal in France, while procuring prostitutes for
someone else isn’t. Under the French penal code, procurement in the
context of a prostitution ring can be punished by as much as 20 years in
jail and 3 million euros.

Strauss-Kahn “declared with the greatest firmness that he is not guilty
of any of these deeds and never had the least awareness that the women
he met could have been prostitutes,” Richard Malka, one of his lawyers,
said last night upon leaving the judges’ offices in Lille. His lawyers
will hold a press conference today in Paris.

The former IMF managing director gave up his post last year after being
arrested in New York on charges he sexually assaulted a hotel maid.
Local prosecutors dropped that case because of concerns about his
accuser’s credibility and Strauss- Kahn returned to France, where he
faced a separate accusation of attempted rape, which was also dropped.

The New York case is Diallo v. Strauss-Kahn, 11-307065, New York State
Supreme Court (Bronx County).

(3) S&P sued for giving its highest AAA rating to derivative-linked
notes that in fact were Junk

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-30/s-p-aaa-rated-notes-sold-in-australia-decried-as-junk.html

S&P AAA-Rated Notes Sold in Australia Decried as Junk

By Joe Schneider and Susan Li - Fri Mar 30 03:35:51 GMT 2012

March 30 (Bloomberg) –

Standard & Poor’s, facing lawsuits by Australian towns for giving its
highest rating to derivative-linked notes that lost almost all their
value, should have known the investments didn’t deserve the ranking, an
analyst said.

“It should’ve been junk,” said Peter Tchir, who developed collateralized
debt obligation investments at Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG before
founding TF Market Advisors. “It’s good Australia is pushing this,” he
said in a Bloomberg Television interview today.

The case, the first of its kind worldwide, claims S&P misled investors
with its system for labeling a borrower’s creditworthiness, according to
IMF (Australia) Ltd., which is funding the litigation. Twelve Australian
townships as a group claim in their lawsuit that they lost A$15 million
($16 million) of A$16 million invested in notes called Rembrandt that
were rated AAA by S&P. A 13th town sued separately after losing more
than 90 percent of its A$1 million investment.

The towns claimed S&P gave the notes the highest investment rating after
pressure from ABN Amro Bank NV, which became the Australian affiliate of
Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. (RBS) ABN Amro Bank and S&P have
denied the allegation.

The value of the so-called constant proportion debt obligations, created
by ABN Amro Bank, was linked to movements in the iTraxx credit default
swap index in Europe and the Dow Jones CDX in the U.S.

Second-Lowest Ranking

The assets backing the securities may have been worthy of BBB, S&P’s
second-lowest investment rating, Tchir said. The notes used borrowing to
magnify gains or losses, making them riskier, he said.

“Taking something that is BBB and leveraging it shouldn’t make it safer,
but according to them it did,” Tchir said.

In rating the notes, S&P ignored lessons from the collapse of Enron
Corp. and Worldcom Inc. in 2001 and the sudden changes in credit markets
such events can create, he said.

Tchir said he hoped more investors would hold rating companies
accountable, although U.S. free-speech laws protect the firms in that
country from lawsuits such as the one filed in Australia.

The notes were unwound less than two years after the towns bought them
as credit spreads increased, and their cash value was exhausted in 2008.
Borrowing costs rose amid the most extreme financial conditions since
the Great Depression, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings
Inc., ABN Amro Bank said in written submissions.

The bank said it sold $5 billion of the CPDO notes and no one else sued,
because most were sold to institutional investors able to properly
assess the risks.

The Australian towns failed to make responsible efforts to understand
the investment, S&P said in written submissions to Federal Court Justice
Jayne Jagot, who will decide the case.

The case is: Bathurst Regional Council v. Local Government Financial
Services Ltd. NSD936/2009. Federal Court of Australia (Sydney).

To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Schneider in Sydney at
jschneider5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Douglas Wong at
dwong19@bloomberg.net

(4) S&P can’t blame Global Crisis for Notes’ collapse, Lawyer says

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-27/health-care-law-goldman-deutsche-bank-jpmorgan-in-court-news.html

Standard & Poor’s can’t blame the 2008 global financial crisis for the
collapse of notes it recommended because it rated the debt as a
long-term investment, said a lawyer for an Australian financial adviser.

Local Government Financial Services Ltd. sued S&P in Federal Court in
Sydney, accusing the company of breach of duty and negligence in giving
the notes the highest investment rating. LGFS filed the lawsuit after it
was sued by a dozen Australian towns that lost more than 90 percent of
their investment.

S&P may face potentially unlimited, or so-called indeterminable, claims
if it’s found liable for its ratings, the New York-based unit of
McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP) said in written submissions that it’s scheduled
to present to the court this week. S&P blamed the global financial
crisis, when credit markets froze following the 2008 bankruptcy of
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., for the notes’ collapse.

“To say adverse economic conditions, even very adverse economic
conditions” could be blamed for the collapse of a AAA- rated 10-year
investment is “totally unreal,” Guy Parker, LGFS’s lawyer said in his
closing statement yesterday before Justice Jayne Jagot.

LGFS and the Australian townships also sued ABN Amro Bank NV, which
became the Australian affiliate of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc
(RBS), and manufactured the investments, according to Parker. ABN Amro
Bank in turn sued S&P, saying the ratings company failed to rate the
notes “well and competently.”

The case is: Bathurst Regional Council v. Local Government Financial
Services Ltd. NSD936/2009. Federal Court of Australia (Sydney).

(5) Western Union, and an Australian bank, wiring drug money -
Australian Federal Police

http://www.donnybrookmail.com.au/news/national/national/general/western-union-linked-to-wiring-drug-money/2501724.aspx

Western Union linked to wiring drug money

NICK MCKENZIE, RICHARD BAKER

27 Mar, 2012 12:00 AM

WESTERN UNION money remitters are suspected of facilitating the movement
of tens of millions of dollars in drug money out of Australia over the
past five years, according to inquiries by federal law enforcement agencies.

Police investigations have also identified the branch of a well-known
Australian bank remitting millions out of the country on behalf of
Balkan organised crime figures. Since 2007, investigations by the
federal police and the Australian Crime Commission have identified
millions in suspected drug dollars being wired offshore by money
remitters, including Western Union sub-agents.

A law enforcement document states that the federal police's Operation
Basti identified ''multiple Western Union sub-agencies'' in Sydney
sending money suspected to be the proceeds of drug trafficking.

Another briefing circulated among law enforcement agencies states that:
''Western Union moved over $700 million in funds from Australia in the
last financial year and is in direct competition with Australia's big
four banks … [law enforcement officials suspect] that a significant
proportion of these funds are criminal proceeds.''

Investigators believe a small number of Western Union sub-agencies and
other independent remitters have moved tainted cash by mixing it in with
legal funds or dividing it up and sending it in amounts under $10,000.
Amounts less than $10,000 are not required to be reported to the
government's anti-money laundering agency, Austrac.

A Western Union spokesman said the company had ''co-operated with law
enforcement on investigations of specific agent locations''.

''To the best of our knowledge, no agents or their sub-agents have been
prosecuted for offering Western Union branded remittance services in
Australia … In any event, we work closely with Australian law
enforcement with the aim to deter anyone seeking to violate the service
we offer.''

Western Union services in Australia sent money to 198 countries last year.

(6) WALL STREET CONFIDENCE TRICK: How "Interest Rate Swaps" Are
Bankrupting Local Governments

From: Ellen Brown <ellenbrown3@gmail.com> Date: 23 March 2012 16:43

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article33750.html

Mar 22, 2012 - 12:32 PM

By: Ellen Brown

Far from reducing risk, derivatives increase risk, often with
catastrophic results. — Derivatives expert Satyajit Das, Extreme
Money (2011)

The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last
week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman
Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other
recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates
involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the
banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA
(International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into
question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default”
requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek
sovereign debt.

Interest rate swaps are less often in the news than credit default
swaps, but they are far more important in terms of revenue, composing
fully 82% of the derivatives trade. In February, JP Morgan Chase
revealed that it had cleared $1.4 billion in revenue on trading interest
rate swaps in 2011, making them one of the bank’s biggest sources of
profit. According to the Bank for International Settlements:

[I]nterest rate swaps are the largest component of the global OTC
derivative market. The notional amount outstanding as of June 2009 in
OTC interest rate swaps was $342 trillion, up from $310 trillion in Dec
2007. The gross market value was $13.9 trillion in June 2009, up from
$6.2 trillion in Dec 2007.

For more than a decade, banks and insurance companies convinced local
governments, hospitals, universities and other non-profits that interest
rate swaps would lower interest rates on bonds sold for public projects
such as roads, bridges and schools. The swaps were entered into to
insure against a rise in interest rates; but instead, interest rates
fell to historically low levels. This was not a flood, earthquake, or
other insurable risk due to environmental unknowns or “acts of God.” It
was a deliberate, manipulated move by the Fed, acting to save the banks
from their own folly in precipitating the credit crisis of 2008. The
banks got in trouble, and the Federal Reserve and federal government
rushed in to bail them out, rewarding them for their misdeeds at the
expense of the taxpayers.

How the swaps were supposed to work was explained by Michael McDonald
in a November 2010 Bloomberg article titled “Wall Street Collects $4
Billion From Taxpayers as Swaps Backfire”:

In an interest-rate swap, two parties exchange payments on an
agreed-upon amount of principal. Most of the swaps Wall Street sold in
the municipal market required borrowers to issue long-term securities
with interest rates that changed every week or month. The borrowers
would then exchange payments, leaving them paying a fixed-rate to a bank
or insurance company and receiving a variable rate in return. Sometimes
borrowers got lump sums for entering agreements.

Banks and borrowers were supposed to be paying equal rates: the fat
years would balance out the lean. But the Fed artificially manipulated
the rates to the save the banks. After the credit crisis broke out,
borrowers had to continue selling adjustable-rate securities at auction
under the deals. Auction interest rates soared when bond insurers’
ratings were downgraded because of subprime mortgage losses; but the
periodic payments that banks made to borrowers as part of the swaps
plunged, because they were linked to benchmarks such as Federal Reserve
lending rates, which were slashed to almost zero.

In a February 2010 article titled “How Big Banks' Interest-Rate Schemes
Bankrupt States,” Mike Elk compared the swaps to payday loans. They
were bad deals, but municipal council members had no other way of
getting the money. He quoted economist Susan Ozawa of the New School:

The markets were pricing in serious falls in the prime interest rate. .
. . So it would have been clear that this was not going to be a good
deal over the life of the contracts. So the states and municipalities
were entering into these long maturity swaps out of necessity. They were
desperate, if not naive, and couldn't look to the Federal Government or
Congress and had to turn themselves over to the banks.

Elk wrote:

As almost all reasoned economists had predicted in the wake of a
deepening recession, the federal government aggressively drove down
interest rates to save the big banks. This created opportunity for banks
– whose variable payments on the derivative deals were tied to interest
rates set largely by the Federal Reserve and Government – to profit
excessively at the expense of state and local governments. While banks
are still collecting fixed rates of from 4 percent to 6 percent, they
are now regularly paying state and local governments as little as a
tenth of one percent on the outstanding bonds – with no end to the low
rates in sight.

. . . [W]ith the fed lowering interest rates, which was anticipated, now
states and local governments are paying about 50 times what the banks
are paying. Talk about a windfall profit the banks are making off of the
suffering of local economies.

To make matters worse, these state and local governments have no way of
getting out of these deals. Banks are demanding that state and local
governments pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to exit
these deals. In some cases, banks are forcing termination of the deals
against the will of state and local governments, using obscure contract
provisions written in the fine print.

By the end of 2010, according to Michael McDonald, borrowers had paid
over $4 billion just to get out of the swap deals. Among other
disasters, he lists these:

California’s water resources department . . . spent $305 million
unwinding interest-rate bets that backfired, handing over the money to
banks led by New York-based Morgan Stanley. North Carolina paid $59.8
million in August, enough to cover the annual salaries of about 1,400
full-time state employees. Reading, Pennsylvania, which sought
protection in the state’s fiscally distressed communities program, got
caught on the wrong end of the deals, costing it $21 million, equal to
more than a year’s worth of real-estate taxes.

In a March 15th article on Counterpunch titled “An Inside Glimpse Into
the Nefarious Operations of Goldman Sachs: A Toxic System,” Darwin
Bond-Graham adds these cases from California:

The most obvious example is the city of Oakland where a chronic budget
crisis has led to the shuttering of schools and cuts to elder services,
housing, and public safety. Oakland signed an interest rate swap with
Goldman in 1997. . . .

Across the Bay, Goldman Sachs signed an interest rate swap agreement
with the San Francisco International Airport in 2007 to hedge $143
million in debt. Today this agreement has a negative value to the
Airport of about $22 million, even though its terms were much better
than those Oakland agreed to.

Greg Smith wrote that at Goldman Sachs, the gullible bureaucrats on the
other side of these deals were called “muppets.” But even sophisticated
players could have found themselves on the wrong side of this sort of
manipulated bet. Satyajit Das gives the example of Harvard University’s
bad swap deals under the presidency of Larry Summers, who had fought
against derivatives regulation as Treasury Secretary in 1999. There
could hardly be more sophisticated players than Summers and Harvard
University. But then who could have anticipated, when the Fed funds
rate was at 5%, that the Fed would push it nearly to zero? When the
game is rigged, even the most experienced gamblers can lose their
shirts.

Courts have dismissed complaints from aggrieved borrowers alleging
securities fraud, ruling that interest-rate swaps are privately
negotiated contracts, not securities; and “a deal is a deal.” So says
contract law, strictly construed; but municipal governments and the
taxpayers supporting them clearly have a claim in equity. The banks
have made outrageous profits by capitalizing on their own misdeeds.
They have already been paid several times over: first with taxpayer
bailout money; then with nearly free loans from the Fed; then with fees,
penalties and exaggerated losses imposed on municipalities and other
counterparties under the interest rate swaps themselves.

Bond-Graham writes:

The windfall of revenue accruing to JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and their
peers from interest rate swap derivatives is due to nothing other than
political decisions that have been made at the federal level to allow
these deals to run their course, even while benchmark interest rates,
influenced by the Federal Reserve’s rate setting, and determined by many
of these same banks (the London Interbank Offered Rate, LIBOR) linger
close to zero. These political decisions have determined that virtually
all interest rate swaps between local and state governments and the
largest banks have turned into perverse contracts whereby cities,
counties, school districts, water agencies, airports, transit
authorities, and hospitals pay millions yearly to the few elite banks
that run the global financial system, for nothing meaningful in return.

Why are these swaps so popular, if they can be such a bad deal for
borrowers? Bond-Graham maintains that capitalism as it functions today
is completely dependent upon derivatives. We live in a global sea of
variable interest rates, exchange rates, and default rates. There is no
stable ground on which to anchor the economic ship, so financial
products for “hedging against risk” have been sold to governments and
corporations as essentials of business and trade. But this “financial
engineering” is sold, not by disinterested third parties, but by the
very sharks who stand to profit from their counterparties’ loss.
Fairness is thrown out in favor of gaming the system. Deals tend to be
rigged and contracts to be misleading.

How could local governments reduce their borrowing costs and insure
against interest rate volatility without putting themselves at the mercy
of this Wall Street culture of greed? One possibility is for them to
own some banks. State and municipal governments could put their
revenues in their own publicly-owned banks; leverage this money into
credit as all banks are entitled to do; and use that credit either to
fund their own projects or to buy municipal bonds at the market rate,
hedging the interest rates on their own bonds.

The creation of credit has too long been delegated to a cadre of private
middlemen who have flagrantly abused the privilege. We can avoid the
derivatives trap by cutting out the middlemen and creating our own
credit, following the precedent of the Bank of North Dakota and many
other public banks abroad.

Ellen Brown is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global
Research Articles by Ellen Brown

© Copyright Ellen Brown , Global Research, 2012

(7) Chicago G8 Summit, facing Occupy-style protests, moved to Camp David

http://occupywallst.org/article/facing-mass-protest-obama-hides-g8-camp-david/

Facing Global Protest, G8 Retreats

Posted 11 hours ago on March 6, 2012, 4:48 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

The Group of 8 Summit, a meeting of the governments of the world's eight
largest economies, was supposed to convene in Chicago this May. For
months, Occupy Chicago, international anti-war groups, Anonymous, and
hundreds of allies have publicly planned to shut it down. Now, only two
months before the meeting is scheduled to begin, U.S. President Barack
Obama is moving the assembly of over 7,000 leaders from the world’s
wealthiest governments to the Camp David presidential compound, located
in rural Maryland near Washington, DC, one of the most secure facilities
in the world. The Chicago Tribune reports that summit organizers are
"stunned" by the news.

Occupiers and allies celebrated the decision with a victory party last
night. The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda (CANG8) and
Occupy Chicago issued the following statement: The G8 moving to Camp
David represents a major victory for the people of Chicago. The leaders
of the 1% are moving because of the overwhelming resistance to the
NATO/G8 war and poverty agenda in Chicago. Our city is filled with tens
of thousands of people who are struggling to keep their heads above
water, fighting against the effects of the economic crisis caused by the
leaders who would have been gathering here. The communities of Chicago
are fighting to save their schools, keep healthcare available, and to
defend their jobs from cutbacks that are a hallmark of the governments
of the G8.

The city has carried out a campaign to intimidate and vilify protesters,
claiming that protests lead to violence. In fact, the main source of
violence in the world today is the wars being waged by NATO and the US.
“We will march on May 19th to deliver our message: Jobs, Housing,
Healthcare, Education, Our Pensions, the Environment: Not War! We and
tens of thousands will be in the streets that day for a family friendly
rally and march, with cries so loud they will be heard in Camp David and
across the globe. We will be in the streets that day to fight for our
future, and speak out against the wars and their cutbacks are designed
to benefit the 1% at the expense of the 99% of the world.”

While officials claim the decision to move the G8 was not related to
fear of protesters, Chicago police have admitted to expecting tens of
thousands to show up in Chicago this May, and have been stocking up on
"less lethal" weapons to use against protesters. Following Occupy
Chicago’s Call of Action and Adbuster’s call for 50,000 people to come
to Chicago, the City Council granted Chicago Mayor Emanuel extraordinary
powers to make security decisions and suppress free speech during the
NATO and G8 summits. The city also tried to spread fear by warning
downtown businesses to ramp up their security in anticipation of
conflicts between riot police and protesters.

Chicago will still host NATO allies and partners on May 20 and 21 to
discuss the war in Afghanistan and other topics, and will remain a focal
point for the Occupy movement this spring and beyond. Everyone is still
encouraged to go to Chicago this May for a major mobilization, or
organize actions locally! Occupy DC and Occupiers in Maryland have also
begun to consider their response to the moving of the G8 to their area.

Coinciding with the G8 and NATO summits in the U.S., the Occupy
movement, trade unions, organizations of migrant workers and the
unemployed, environmentalists, youth, and anti-war protesters throughout
Europe have also called for days of action from May 17th to 19th
centered in Frankfurt, Germany against "the crisis dictatorship of the
European Union:"

We resist the disaster that is applied to Greece and other countries,
against the impoverishment and denial of rights of millions of people
and the practical abolition of democratic procedures resulting from the
decisions of the Troika consisting of ECB, EU and IMF. The days of
protest in Frankfurt directly succeed to the International Action Day on
May 12th and the anniversary of the first assembly in Madrid on May
15th. We are therefore sending a visible sign of solidarity to those
people in Europe who have been and are resisting against the debtocracy
of the Troika and the attacks on their livelihood and their future.
Simultaneously, protests are being organised in the US against the G8
Summit in Chicago.

The choice of Frankfurt for the protests results from the role that the
city has as headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) and of
powerful German and international banks and corporations. On May 17, we
will occupy parks and main squares of the city to create spaces for
discussion and exchange. On May 18, we will block the running business
of banks in Frankfurt and turn our anger about the Troika's policies
into action. We will gather for a large demonstration on May 19 and
visualise the broad base of the protests. From many countries and
regions of the world people will travel to Frankfurt and participate in
the days of protest.

The decision to move the G8 is a victory; it shows that the political
and economic powers-that-be are scared by the power of the 99% when we
awaken and join together. We must continue to use our collective
strength to fight the greedy agenda of the G8 governments, who only
serve the interests of the global 1%. Occupy Chicago and their allies
continue to mobilize. Stay involved in organizing against the G8 at Camp
David and NATO in Chicago! Follow #OccupyCampDavid, #CANG8, #GTFOG8,
@OccupyTheG8, and @OccupyChicago on Twitter.

While Obama may think he can hide world leaders from dissent or shield
them from our protest, our message will be heard clearly across the
world - including Camp David. Those responsible for the economic crisis,
widespread inequality, and manufactured austerity - the G8, NATO, EU,
IMF - will be held accountable, wherever they choose to meet. From
Chicago to Camp David to Frankfurt, the #GlobalSpring is upon us.