Tuesday, January 18, 2011

OBAMA, HIS BANKSTER DONORS & THE ON GOING PILLAGE OF A NATION - CHANGE? DIDN'T WE GET PUNCKED OBAMA-STYLE?

HAVE OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS DONE WELL UNDER THE BANKSTER PRESIDENT?


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OBAMA’S CON JOB ON REGULATION WILL NOT IMPACT HIS LARGEST BANKSTER DONORS! WHO’D OF THOUGHT???



“Obama's rhetoric covered the whole financial industry, but the key changes will affect only a few high-profile players, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., while sparing investment banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”

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WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

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“JPMorgan Chase’s profit report for 2010, released Friday, has become the occasion for a celebration by the American plutocracy of the return of the good old days before the Wall Street crash of 2008. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO, summed up the general mood of the financial elite when he declared the bank’s record profits to be evidence of a “broad-based economic recovery,” adding, “I think the future is extremely bright.”

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The New York Times reported, “Across the company, bankers expect to reap the benefits” of “the most profitable year in the history of JPMorgan.”

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BANKSTERS’ PROFITS UP! FORECLOSURES UP! ILLEGALS OVER OUR BORDERS UP!



NON-ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS DOWN! BORDER SECURITY DOWN! BANKSTER REGULATION NON-EXISTENT



THE HISPANDERING LA RAZA BANKSTER OWNED PRESIDENT… BROUGHT IN J.P. MORGAN’S MAN, DALEY TO REPAY MORGAN FOR ALL THE BRIBES THEY’VE PAID OBAMA, AND BECAUSE DALEY IS AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO ASSURE HORDES MORE ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!

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Wall Street celebrates record profits

18 January 2011

JPMorgan Chase’s profit report for 2010, released Friday, has become the occasion for a celebration by the American plutocracy of the return of the good old days before the Wall Street crash of 2008. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO, summed up the general mood of the financial elite when he declared the bank’s record profits to be evidence of a “broad-based economic recovery,” adding, “I think the future is extremely bright.”

The very fact that Dimon can speak this way in the midst of the worst social crisis since the Great Depression without any repercussions from the government or the media is an expression of the immensity of the chasm separating the modern-day aristocrats from the people.

Such remarks—under conditions where the official unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent, hunger and poverty are soaring, record numbers of homes are being seized by the banks, household wealth is being devastated by the collapse in home values, wages are declining, and school closures and cuts in social services are spreading across the country—could come only from someone secure in knowledge that the Obama administration, both political parties, Congress and all of the other official institutions are securely in his pocket.

JPMorgan’s announcement kicked off a week of earnings reports that is expected to show that 2010 was a record-setting year for America’s banks and corporations.

The banking giant reported a 48 percent increase in profits over 2009 and a 47 percent increase for the fourth quarter of 2010 over the same period the previous year. JPMorgan netted a profit for the year of $17.4 billion, a figure equivalent to the gross domestic product of Bolivia. Its fourth quarter performance lifted the stocks of the other major banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, which are slated to release their 2010 results this week.

The New York Times reported, “Across the company, bankers expect to reap the benefits” of “the most profitable year in the history of JPMorgan.” Out of more than $102 billion in revenue, some $28.1 billion has been set aside to compensate employees, “much of which will be paid out as bonuses.” Employees in JPMorgan’s investment banking wing are taking home an average of nearly $370,000 for 2010, while top executives “can still expect to collect multi-million-dollar bonus checks.”

The profit windfall in the financial sector is part of a broader surge in US corporate profits, which analysts estimate rose 27.1 percent in the fourth quarter, nearly triple the median profit growth since 1988. This comes on the heels of record-setting year-over-year profit increases (37 percent, 51 percent and 92 percent) reported for the first three quarters of 2010.

For the broad mass of the population, there are records of a different sort. The official unemployment rate has been higher than 9 percent for 20 straight months, the longest such span since the Great Depression. Home prices have fallen by 26 percent since June of 2006, breaking the record 25.9 percent decline that took place in the Depression between 1928 and 1933. Household wealth has fallen precipitously and the official poverty rate is as high as it was in the mid-1960s.

From day one, the policy of the Obama administration has been to utilize the economic crisis to effect a vast restructuring of class relations in favor of the financial elite. While ruling out any serious measures to put the unemployed to work, Obama has overseen the funneling of trillions of dollars to the banks, intervened to block legislation limiting bonuses at banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, and given the signal for a campaign of wage cutting across the country by imposing a 50 percent wage reduction on newly hired auto workers as part of the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler.

The administration has refused to provide significant aid to states and localities facing gaping budget deficits as a result of the recession, tacitly supporting cuts in jobs, wages and pensions for teachers and other public employees and crippling cuts in social services.

The Federal Reserve Board has kept interest rates at near-zero and electronically printed hundreds of billions of dollars in order to provide the corporations with virtually free credit and boost corporate profits and the stock market. Since March of 2009, US stock indexes have climbed by nearly 80 percent. Corporate America has amassed a multi-trillion-dollar cash hoard as a result of government subsidies and its own cost-cutting drive, while refusing—without encountering any opposition from the government—to use its mountain of cash to hire workers and expand basic production.

The policies of the government have enabled the major banks to tighten their stranglehold over the economy. According to data from the Federal Reserve, just five banks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs—now control $8.6 trillion in assets, or 13.3 percent of all financial firms’ holdings. The three largest commercial banks by themselves control 33 percent of all US deposits and over half of all home mortgage originations.

In his book Overhaul, Steven Rattner, the Wall Street insider selected by Obama to head his Auto Task Force, bluntly acknowledges the manipulation of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. “More than once, I would think of [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel saying, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste,’ as we used the growing economic catastrophe to achieve changes and sacrifices that would have been impossible in another environment,” he writes.

The attack on the working class is about to be intensified. Obama’s right-wing policies resulted in an electoral debacle for the Democratic Party in the November elections, with tens of millions of youth and working class voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2008 staying away from the polls. The response of the administration has been to shift further to the right and, in the name of bipartisanship, pursue its pro-corporate policy even more brazenly.

Hardly had the votes been counted when Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposed cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, layoffs and pay cuts for government workers, and new taxes on consumer goods and employee health insurance—coupled with a drastic cut in corporate taxes and income taxes for the rich.

Obama then shepherded through the Democratic-controlled 111th Congress a tax package that extended Bush-era income tax cuts for the richest Americans and drastically reduced the tax rate on the estates of multimillionaires. The White House has further signaled its readiness to carry through the corporate agenda by installing former Clinton administration commerce secretary and JPMorgan Chase executive William Daley as his new chief of staff.

The breakdown of the capitalist system is bringing to the surface ever more clearly the fundamental class divisions within society. Nowhere is the gulf between the ruling elite and the masses of working people more stark than in the US. There is barely a pretense of concern by the Obama administration, Congress, the corporate establishment or the media over the suffering of the unemployed and the destruction of future prospects for an entire generation of working class and many middle-class youth.

The Obama administration testifies to the bankruptcy of all claims that reforms can be extracted by putting pressure on the Democratic Party. As for the unions, throughout the crisis they have functioned more openly than ever as adjuncts of the corporations and government, redoubling their efforts to suppress the resistance of working people to the attacks on their living standards. The undisguised insolence and indifference of the financial aristocracy is itself a harbinger of the immense social struggles that are coming. The critical question is the development of the revolutionary leadership and perspective necessary to unite the working class and mobilize it for the overthrow of the profit system and establishment of socialism.

The Socialist Equality Party is holding a series of public conferences in April to discuss the fight for socialism today. We urge all those who see the need for this struggle to register for the conferences and make plans to attend.

Tom Eley

WSWS.org



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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com



“This return of corporate power comes in part because the revolving door between government influence and corporate paydays has begun to turn anew. Even President Obama has submitted to its centrifugal force. His new White House chief of staff, William Daley, comes directly from J.P. Morgan Chase. Daley scored that lucrative gig after serving as commerce secretary during Bill Clinton's second term.”



TWO YEARS OF OBAMA:



Fifteen million Americans are out of work, thanks in part to reckless Wall Street activities. Yet corporate profits are at record highs, companies are sitting on vast amounts of cash, and, after a tough two years, business interests are again atop the Washington power structure.

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OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS & AMNESTY AGENDA IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!



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BEYOND HISPANDERING OBAMA, PROBABLY THE BIGGEST DRIVER OF OPEN BORDERS FOR DEPRESSED WAGES IS THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE, ENEMY No. 1 OF THE AMERICAN WORKER.

BANKSTERS’ PROFITS AND BONUSES ARE SOARING, AS ARE FORECLOSURES!

AND TO MAINTAIN THESE ARTIFICIALLY HIGH PROFITS, THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS’S POCKETS MUST BE PERPETUALLY PICKED!

THAT’S SOMETHING OBAMA IS GOOD AT! HE’S REPAID HIS BANKSTER DONORS WITH “I’m not here to punish banks!” FROM THE SENATE FLOOR, ALONG WITH MASSIVE NO-STRINGS BAILOUTS, NO (REAL)REGULATION, AND STACKED HIS ADMIN WITH EVERY DIRTY BANKSTER HE COULD FIND!

OBAMA’S LAST IS DALEY, ALSO OWNED BY OBAMA DONOR J.P. MORGAN, AND LIKE OBAMA, AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS!





Big business is back in business

By Dana Milbank

Wednesday, January 12, 2011;

There was a festive atmosphere at U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters Tuesday morning as the corporate lobby delivered its annual "State of American Business" address.

Margaret Spellings, the former Bush Cabinet officer who cashed out and joined the business group, made the introductions, telling members that despite "the worst economic climate since the Great Depression," the chamber had scored a "number of legislative victories, tremendous success in the elections and another strong year of fundraising."

Thanks to the chamber, Spellings boasted, "the American business community always has a seat at the table."

A seat? Business has just about all the seats at the table - and more on back order.

Fifteen million Americans are out of work, thanks in part to reckless Wall Street activities. Yet corporate profits are at record highs, companies are sitting on vast amounts of cash, and, after a tough two years, business interests are again atop the Washington power structure.

This return of corporate power comes in part because the revolving door between government influence and corporate paydays has begun to turn anew. Even President Obama has submitted to its centrifugal force. His new White House chief of staff, William Daley, comes directly from J.P. Morgan Chase. Daley scored that lucrative gig after serving as commerce secretary during Bill Clinton's second term.

As Daley came in through the revolving door, OMB Director Peter Orszag had just gone out. He cashed out to become a vice chairman of Citigroup, where his government expertise should be worth seven figures annually. One of Orszag's partners on Obama's economics team, Larry Summers, is returning to Harvard - but that won't stop him from delivering the keynote address to the Global Hedge Fund Summit in Bermuda.

The thrill of cashing out has been endorsed by Obama himself. Explaining press secretary Robert Gibbs's decision to depart, the president told the New York Times: "He's had a six-year stretch now where basically he's been going 24/7 with relatively modest pay." The poor Gibbs, who had been earning a "modest" $172,200 a year, is now contemplating making much more than that representing corporate clients.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, corporate interests are becoming increasingly brazen. Lobbyists have snagged key staff jobs in the new GOP House leadership and chief-of-staff positions in many new lawmakers' offices. On the day John Boehner was elected speaker last week, lobbyists were literally strutting their stuff on the House floor.

Bob Livingston, the former Republican congressman, was buttonholing members; he's the head of a lobbying firm that advertises Livingston as "the only practicing former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee." Also on the floor, Marty Russo, the longtime Democratic congressman who had just stepped down as head of the lobbying giant Cassidy and Associates, shook Boehner's hand.

A House Republican source says Livingston left when informed that, as a registered lobbyist, he was not allowed to be on the House floor.

Such behavior by lobbyists - both registered lobbyists and unregistered corporate "advisers" - has become more common. At last year's State of the Union address, Post congressional correspondent Paul Kane observed, on the House floor, former members Mike Ferguson, who runs a lobbying firm, and Jim Greenwood, CEO of the biotech lobby. Kane has also spotted former senator Bill Cohen, who runs a big lobbying and consulting firm, on the Senate floor; former representative Sherry Boehlert, now a lobbyist, in the Speaker's Lobby off the House floor; and lawmaker-turned-lobbyist Al Wynn entertaining clients in the members' dining room.

The Center for Responsive Politics has identified more than 340 former members of Congress, and 3,665 former staffers, in lobbying or related fields. The few rules to slow the revolving door do little, both because of the routine granting of waivers and because of loose registration requirements for lobbying.

All of this gave the business lobby much to celebrate as chamber members discussed the State of American Business over mini-muffins and banana bread Tuesday morning. Tom Donohue, the chamber's white-maned CEO, hailed the "new tone coming from the White House" since the elections - which the chamber influenced by spending tens of millions of dollars from donors kept anonymous, Donohue explained, so opponents couldn't "demagogue them." Donohue said he's "absolutely convinced" that the new business-friendly White House will move his way on regulation and trade.

A reporter asked Donohue for a suggestion of what corporate America, with its record profits, should do to put people back to work. "I got to think about this for a minute," Donohue said, then added: "I think the most important thing to tell a company is to return a reasonable return to their investors."

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OBAMA’S CREDIBILITY WITH HIS BANKSTERS RATES TRIPLE-A!



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Lou Dobbs Tonight

Thursday, July 9, 2009

And Harvard economics professor JEFFREY MIRON will weigh in on the state of the U.S. economy—and why the only plausible argument for bailing out banks crumbles on close examination.

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"There is a populist and conservative revolt against Wall Street and financial elites, Congress and government," Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg warned in an analysis this week. "Democrats and President Obama are seen as more interested in bailing out Wall Street than helping Main Street."



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OBAMA’S CON JOB ON REGULATION WILL NOT IMPACT HIS LARGEST BANKSTER DONORS! WHO’D OF THOUGHT???



“Obama's rhetoric covered the whole financial industry, but the key changes will affect only a few high-profile players, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., while sparing investment banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”

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WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

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January 26, 2010

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Obama’s Credibility Gap

By BOB HERBERT

Who is Barack Obama?

Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

Mr. Obama’s campaign mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

“Tonight, more Americans are out of work, and more are working harder for less,” said Mr. Obama in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. “More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”

Voters watching the straight-arrow candidate delivering that speech, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, would not logically have thought that an obsessive focus on health insurance would trump job creation as the top domestic priority of an Obama administration.

But that’s what happened. Moreover, questions were raised about Mr. Obama’s candor when he spoke about health care. In his acceptance speech, for example, candidate Obama took a verbal shot at John McCain, sharply criticizing him for offering “a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits.”

Now Mr. Obama favors a plan that would tax at least some people’s benefits. Mr. Obama also repeatedly said that policyholders who were pleased with their plans and happy with their doctors would be able to keep both under his reform proposals.

Well, that wasn’t necessarily so, as the president eventually acknowledged. There would undoubtedly be changes in some people’s coverage as a result of “reform,” and some of those changes would be substantial. At a forum sponsored by ABC News last summer, Mr. Obama backed off of his frequent promise that no changes would occur, saying only that “if you are happy with your plan, and if you are happy with your doctor, we don’t want you to have to change.”

These less-than-candid instances are emblematic of much bigger problems. Mr. Obama promised during the campaign that he would be a different kind of president, one who would preside over a more open, more high-minded administration that would be far more in touch with the economic needs of ordinary working Americans. But no sooner was he elected than he put together an economic team that would protect, above all, the interests of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance companies, and so on.

How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?

Now with his poll numbers down and the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin in the Senate about to vanish, Mr. Obama is trying again to position himself as a champion of the middle class. Suddenly, with the public appalled at the scandalous way the health care legislation was put together, and with Democrats facing a possible debacle in the fall, Mr. Obama is back in campaign mode. Every other utterance is about “fighting” for the middle class, “fighting” for jobs, “fighting” against the big bad banks.

The president who has been aloof and remote and a pushover for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, who has been locked in the troubling embrace of the Geithners and Summers and Ben Bernankes of the world, all of a sudden is a man of the people. But even as he is promising to fight for jobs, a very expensive proposition, he’s proposing a spending freeze that can only hurt job-creating efforts.

Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.

They want to know who their president really is.

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NEW YORK TIMES



January 10, 2010

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Other Plot to Wreck America

By FRANK RICH

THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

He wants to examine the financial sector’s “greed, stupidity, hubris and outright corruption” — from traders on the ground to the board room. “It’s important that we deliver new information,” he said. “We can’t just rehash what we’ve known to date.” He understands that if he fails to make news or to tell the story in a way that is comprehensible and compelling enough to arouse Americans to demand action, Wall Street and Washington will both keep moving on, unchallenged and unchastened.

Angelides gets it. But he has a tough act to follow: Ferdinand Pecora,

Even now — despite its near-death experience, despite the departures of Weill, Prince and Rubin — Citi remains as imperious as it was before 9/15. Its current chairman, Richard Parsons, was one of three executives (along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and John Mack of Morgan Stanley) who failed to show up at the mid-December White House meeting where President Obama implored bankers to increase lending. (The trio blamed fog for forcing them to participate by speakerphone, but the weather hadn’t grounded their peers or Amtrak.) Last week, ABC World News was also stiffed by Citi, which refused to answer questions about its latest round of outrageous credit card rate increases and instead e-mailed a statement blaming its customers for “not paying back their loans.” This from a bank that still owes taxpayers $25 billion of its $45 billion handout!

If Citi, among the most egregious of Wall Street reprobates, feels it can get away with business as usual, it’s because it fears no retribution. And it got more good news last week. Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the Banking Committee may fall next year to Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.

If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.

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