Grassroots supporters of Howie Hawkins’ Green Party campaign for Governor of New York are holding an online “money bloom” today, Friday 22 October, with the goal of raising $10,000 for voter outreach.

Rep. Edolphus Townes, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has called for a national moratorium on home foreclosures.

New York Green Party gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins put out a release Sept. 28th that covered the NY governor’s race and his Green New Deal proposal as well as the Middle East resource wars, the FBI raids on peace activists, and the One Nation Working Together rally.

No sooner had the dust settled over Carl Paladino’s purity victory over Rick Lazio in the New York state Republican gubernatorial primary than he immediately set to making the sort of utterly whacked-out pronouncement for which the teabagger wing of the GOP is notorious.

The traditional media has been looking for a horse race angle for the Andy Cuomo race.The real story here, is that Cuomo is running on a populist, pretty far left platform.

My Dad used to say that greed knows no boundaries. It was one of the reasons that he loved to sue big companies, to put the screws to them for the little guy who had been hurt by corporate greed. The other thing about greed is that it is rarely fully engaged by a single person, the amount of damage that one person acting on his own pales compared to the damage that happens when greed, and illegal acts are abetted.

Which brings us to that uber-Ponzi schemer, Bernie Madoff. One of the questions that have swirled around his 50 billion dollar fraud is how could it go on so long without being detected. Well, based on the case brought by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo the answer is that it was known, at least by some in the investment banking world.

On Tuesday AG Cuomo brought a civil suit against Ivy Asset Management (a wholly owned company under Bank of New York Mellon) and two of its former top officers. The suit alleges that Ivy Management execs knew that there was something very wrong with the Madoff investment firm. Not only did they not tell the SEC but they kept giving advice to their clients to buy into this Ponzi scheme.

The indictment alleges that 11 year before the fraud collapsed, in 1997, Ivy found that there was only about half of the number of options available for trade than would be needed to support his supposed strategy and give the kind of returns Madoff was claiming.

All kinds of goings in in New York today.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has issued subpoenas to several top Merrill Lynch executives who were each paid more than $10 million in cash and stock last year, according to people familiar with the situation. The executives whose testimony is being sought include Andrea Orcel, the top investment banker at Merrill, global sales and trading chief Thomas Montag, and Peter Kraus, Merrill’s former head of strategy.