HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS MADE MORE MONEY DURING THE FIRST
TWO YEARS UNDER OBAMA, THAN THEY DID ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
NOT ONE HAS GONE TO PRISON, EVEN HAS HUNDREDS OF OCCUPY WALL
ST PROTESTORS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED.
IN FACT, THE SHIFT THIS NATION’S ECONOMY DEEPER INTO THE
POCKETS OF THE RICH HAS CONTINUED UNABATED UNDER OBAMA!
HE IS THE 1% PRESIDENT, AND IF YOU’RE A BANKSTER, OR STRONG
TIE$ TO BANKSTERS, OR A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER, YOU CAN COME WORK FOR THE
BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT!
“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.”
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.
*
THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE,
LIKE OBAMA, ADVOCATES NO BORDERS WITH MEXICO, NO E-VERIFY, AND AMNESTY, OR AT
LEAST CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT. IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, January 12, 2011;
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."
*
NEW YORK TIMES
January 10, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Other Plot to Wreck America
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.
The window for change is
rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have
exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially
in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers,
has repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is
over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and
certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record
profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs,
homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political
system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door
between finance and government never stops spinning.
It’s against this
backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis
Inquiry Commission are so critical. This
is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what
happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who
is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has
been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the
proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless
bloviation.
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, the legendary prosecutor who served as chief counsel to the Senate
committee that investigated the 1929 crash as F.D.R. took office. Pecora was a
master of detail and drama. He riveted America even without the aid of
television. His investigation led to indictments, jail sentences and,
ultimately, key New Deal reforms — the creation of the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the formation of
banks too big to fail.
As it happened, a major
Pecora target was the chief executive of National City Bank, the institution
that would grow up to be Citigroup. Among other transgressions, National City
had repackaged bad Latin
American debt as new securities that it then sold to easily suckered investors during the
frenzied 1920s boom. Once disaster struck, the bank’s executives helped
themselves to millions of dollars in interest-free loans. Yet their own
employees had to keep ponying up salary deductions for decimated National City
stock purchased at a heady precrash price.
Trade bad Latin American
debt for bad mortgage debt, and you have a partial portrait of Citigroup at the
height of the housing bubble. The reckless Citi executives of our day may not
have given themselves interest-free loans, but they often walked away with the
short-term, illusionary profits while their employees were left with shredded
jobs and 401(k)’s. Among those Citi executives was Robert Rubin, who, as the
Clinton Treasury secretary, helped repeal the last
vestiges of Glass-Steagall after
years of Wall Street assault. Somewhere Pecora is turning in his grave
Rubin has never
apologized, let alone been held accountable. But he’s hardly alone. Even after
all the country has gone through, the titans who fueled the bubble are
heedless. In last Sunday’s Times, Sandy Weill, the former chief executive who
built Citigroup (and recruited Rubin to its ranks), gave a remarkable interview
to Katrina Brooker blaming his own hand-picked successor, Charles Prince, for
his bank’s implosion. Weill said he preferred to be remembered for his
philanthropy. Good luck with that.
Among his causes is
Carnegie Hall, where he is chairman of the board. To see how far American
capitalism has fallen, contrast Weill with the giant who built Carnegie Hall. Not only is Andrew Carnegie remembered for far more epic and generous philanthropy
than Weill’s — some 1,600 public
libraries, just for starters — but
also for creating a steel empire that actually helped build America’s
industrial infrastructure in the late 19th century. At Citi, Weill built little
more than a bloated gambling casino. As Paul Volcker, the regrettably powerless chairman of
Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said recently, there is not “one shred of neutral evidence”
that any financial innovation of the past 20 years has led to economic growth.
Citi, that “innovative” banking supermarket, destroyed far more wealth than
Weill can or will ever give away.
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.
Though bad history shows
every sign of repeating itself on Wall Street, it will take a near-miracle for
Angelides to repeat Pecora’s triumph. Our zoo of financial skullduggery is far
more complex, with many more moving pieces, than that of the 1920s. The new
inquiry does have subpoena power, but its entire budget, a mere $8 million,
doesn’t even match the lobbying expenditures for just three banks (Citi, Morgan Stanley,
Bank of America) in the first nine months of 2009. The firms under scrutiny can
pay for as many lawyers as they need to stall between now and Dec. 15, deadline
day for the commission’s report.
More daunting still is
the inquiry’s duty to reach into high places in the public sector as well as
the private. The mystery of exactly what happened as TARP fell into place in
the fateful fall of 2008 thickens by the day — especially the
behind-closed-door machinations surrounding the government rescue of A.I.G. and
its counterparties. Last week, a Republican congressman, Darrell Issa of
California, released e-mail showing that officials at the New York Fed,
then led by Timothy Geithner, pressured A.I.G. to delay disclosing to the
S.E.C. and the public the details on the billions of bailout dollars it was
funneling to its trading partners. In this backdoor rescue, taxpayers unknowingly
awarded banks like Goldman 100 cents on the dollar for their bets on
mortgage-backed securities.
Why was our money used
to make these high-flying gamblers whole while ordinary Americans received no
such beneficence? Nothing less than complete transparency will connect the
dots. Among the big-name witnesses
that the Angelides commission has called for next week is Goldman’s Blankfein. Geithner, Henry
Paulson and Ben Bernanke should be next.
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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