Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Paul Krugman shills for Obama and capitalism


Obama attacks banks while raking in Wall Street dough

The Daily Caller – 18 hrs ago

Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street, a study by the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Project shows that President Barack Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other politician over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush.

In 2008, Wall Street’s largesse accounted for 20 percent of Obama’s total take, according to Reuters.

When asked by The Daily Caller to comment about President Obama’s credibility when it comes to criticizing Wall Street, the White House declined to reply.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says the distance between the president’s rhetoric and actions makes him look hypocritical.

“It’s almost as if President Obama won’t cross across a Wall Street picket line except to get inside with [his] hand out, so he can raise money,” Fleischer told TheDC, referring to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who the president has been encouraging over the past week. “That sort of support causes him to look hypocritical.”

Fleischer continued by saying that President Obama and Democrats, such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who has received approximately $8.7 million from Wall Street since 1989, should stop taking campaign donations from Wall Street banks if they are so offended by their actions.

“They can’t say we hate Wall Street, but we love their money,” Fleischer said. (RELATED: White House: Millionaire tax isn’t enough)

Being Wall Street’s campaign cash king is hardly the image President Obama has been trying to project in public, where he has been setting himself up as the champion of the progressive Occupy Wall Street movement and as the avenger of jilted Bank of America customers.

“Banks can make money,” Obama said last week, responding to questions during an interview with ABC News about Bank of America’s decision to levy a $5 monthly fee on debit card users. “They can succeed, the old-fashioned way, by earning it.”

In fact, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks lobbyist spending and influence in both parties, found that President Obama has received more money from Bank of America than any other candidate dating back to 1991.

An examination of the numbers shows that Obama took in $421,242 in campaign contributions in 2008 from Bank of America’s executives, PACs and employees, which exceeded its prior record contribution of $329,761 to President George W. Bush in 2004.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street firms also contributed more to Obama’s 2008 campaign than they gave to Republican nominee John McCain.

“The securities and investment industry is Obama’s second largest source of bundlers, after lawyers, at least 56 individuals have raised at least $8.9 million for his campaign,” Massie Ritsch wrote in a Sept. 18, 2008 entry on the Center for Responsive Politics’s OpenSecrets blog.

By the end of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, executives and others connected with Wall Street firms, such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, UBS AG, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, poured nearly $15.8 million into his coffers.

Goldman Sachs contributed slightly over $1 million to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, compared with a little over $394,600 to the 2004 Bush campaign. Citigroup gave $736,771 to Obama in 2008, compared with $320,820 to Bush in 2004. Executives and others connected with the Swiss bank UBS AG donated $539,424 to Obama’s 2008 campaign, compared with $416,950 to Bush in 2004. And JP Morgan Chase gave Obama’s campaign $808,799 in 2008, but did not show up among Bush’s top donors in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama’s close relationship with JP Morgan Chase was highlighted earlier this year when he tapped Bill Daley, a former top executive with the bank, to replace Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

Wall Street’s generosity to Obama didn’t end with his 2008 campaign either. Wall Street donors contributed $4.8 million to underwrite Obama’s inauguration, according to a Jan. 15, 2009 Reuters report.

So far Wall Street has raised $7.2 million in the current electoral cycle for President Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Obama’s 2012 Wall Street bundlers include people like Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs CEO and former New Jersey governor; Azita Raji, a former investment banker for JP Morgan; and Charles Myers, an executive with the investment bank Evercore Partners.

“When he calls Wall Street bankers fat cats, then his base cheers, so you’ll see him constantly trying to shift back and forth, and keep Wall Street happy at one point and his base happy at another point,” Jim Moorehead, current crisis adviser at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, explained in a July interview with FoxNews.com.

The Republican National Committee echoed Fleischer’s comments in a statement to TheDC, similarly accusing the president of Wall Street hypocrisy.

“The president wants his cake and eat it too,” RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski wrote in an emailed statement. “It’s the height of hypocrisy for President Obama to demonize Wall Street on the stump while looking the other way as they line his campaign coffers.”

Politcal analyst Dr. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics sums up Wall Street’s 2008 infatuation with Obama as having been more about wanting to back a winner than anything else.

“Two things have changed that. First, the economy is still rotten. Obama’s policies just haven’t worked — or at least not so anybody can tell,” Sabato said.  “Second, Obama has to direct the public’s anger and frustration somewhere if he’s to have a decent chance of reelection.”

“There is a great deal of animosity still present in the general public about Wall Street and the banks,” he continued. “The more Obama scapegoats them, the less inclined they are to back him this time. You don’t get the votes and money of people you insult.”

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Co-founder and co-editor, The American Prospect

Obama, Geithner, and the Next Financial Crisis

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Over the past few weeks, President Obama has at last "pivoted," in the widely used term, from emphasizing deficit reduction to focusing on jobs and taxation of millionaires. Spontaneous protest has done what the organized left failed to do; it has made Wall Street the appropriate target of diffuse economic frustrations. The labor movement has added its weight and institutional skills to these protests, and even President Obama has had some kind words for them.

Fox News and the Republicans have been usefully flummoxed, since it is awfully hard to rise to the defense of the Wall Street banks that caused the financial collapse and to retain credibility with anyone, even the Tea Party base.

But here comes the next phase of the financial crisis, and it will test President Obama's leadership like nothing else. It will also make or break the faltering credibility of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

In recent days, it has become clear that several large banks, most notably Bank of America, are teetering. Though the backlash against the giant bank's proposed five-dollar-a-month charge for debit cards has gotten the headlines, this is the least of its problems. The profits from this new charge would be chump change measured against the bank's chasms of losses, the legacy of its ill-advised purchases of Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch in 2008.

Worried investors have driven Bank of America stock down to the range of 5 to 6 dollars a share. Bank of America's books are still glutted with non-performing mortgage loans, and a grand solution to the mortgage crisis seems further away than ever.

Meanwhile, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley with their large holdings of Greek government bonds are also in some jeopardy, which adds to the general crisis of confidence. The Federal Reserve has been throwing "liquidity," otherwise known as nearly interest-free money, at the banks as necessary, to keep inter-bank markets from freezing up as they nearly did in 2008.

As recently as three weeks ago, at a "Delivering Alpha" financial conference, Geithner assured his audience that despite the European crisis American banks were in great shape:

Our financial system -- because of the actions we took early in the crisis -- is in a much stronger position to deal with these new risks than it was before this crisis. Much, much stronger position. Way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of making sure they have a stronger financial foundation to handle any type of shock.

This has been Geithner's strategy since the earliest days of the crisis: work with the Federal Reserve to throw money at the big banks, resist fundamental changes in their business model, and talk up their solvency even in the face of contrary evidence.

Given the proprietary data that Geithner surely sees as Treasury Secretary, he must know that these words are wishful at best and downright deceptive at worst. If his assurances turn out to be so much baloney, then Geithner, President Obama's re-election chances, and the economy could all be in big trouble.

The fact is that European banks are functioning only because the European Central Bank in spite of its reluctance has been flooding the system with liquidity, and at least one U.S bank -- Bank of America -- is barely solvent and heavily reliant on the Fed.

If events turn critical again and we face a repeat risk of the seizing up of financial markets as in the fall of 2008, the Obama administration's rhetorical populist turn will be of no use. The president will need to make a fateful decision.

Worst of all would be to let a large institution like Bank of America just fail. Outside of the hard-core Tea Party right, nobody supports this.

The second worst policy would be to just keep throwing money at a zombie institution to keep up the pretense that it is solvent. We tried that policy in 2008 and 2009. It helped entrenched bankers keep their jobs and their outsized profits, but a wounded banking system continued to be a lead weight on the rest of the economy.

So now President Obama, if faced with a repeat crisis of large banks, may get a do-over.
In the spring of 2009, when the leading zombie bank was Citigroup, then chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Geithner took the position that they could not seize, clean out, and break up Citi because they lacked the legal authority or the tools to do it. It's also clear from several accounts, including my own
A Presidency in Peril
and most recently Ron Suskind's new book
Confidence Men that Summers and Geithner did not want to do it. According to Suskind, Obama himself wanted to break-up of Citi as his preferred option, and Geithner slow-walked the president until the issue was moot.

But the Dodd-Frank Act now gives the treasury secretary explicit authority to find that a large, systemically significant financial company is "in danger of default"; to designate the FDIC as receiver; and to seize, break up, and reorganize failing large banks. Though there is surely contingency planning for the collapse of a large bank, Geithner seems loathe to use his new authority.

So, consider three possible scenarios in coming days or weeks.

First scenario: the big banks, thanks to advances from the Federal Reserve, keep barely afloat. Geithner's credibility survives, but the real economy continues to be a shambles. This is not exactly auspicious, either for economically frustrated Americans or for an incumbent president facing re-election.

Second scenario: Investors keep fleeing Bank of America, the giant bank finds itself frozen out of short term lending markets as Lehman Brothers was, and the bank finally turns to the government for emergency aid. There is a new financial crisis in the headlines, and it falls in on President Obama and his Treasury Secretary, who was been reassuring everyone that all is well with the large banks.

Third scenario: President Obama decides to get other opinions besides Geithner's and to get out ahead of the crisis. If things turn critical, he directs his Treasury Secretary to seize the bank, as authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act. Obama tells the citizenry that the alternative was endless bailouts or a Lehman-style collapse (just imagine the right trying to defend either), and that this way those who caused the crisis will be appropriately removed from their suites and bonuses while the bank is returned to health so that the broad economy can prosper.

Serious consideration of this last approach would take much more of a "pivot" on Obama's part than we have seen to date. I recall, in reading biographies of Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt, how both leaders sought multiple sources of advice. Kennedy would pick up the phone and speak to a relatively junior desk officer at the State Department to get his own information unfiltered by his gatekeepers. Roosevelt made sure he had direct access to multiple advisers who disagreed with each other. But Geithner has been astute at blocking access to the president for others who have different views, and Obama has been startlingly incurious and compliant. The man needs to get on the phone.

It also happens that Bank of America is headquartered in Charlotte, North Caroline, site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and the bank is expected to be one of the convention's top-tier corporate sponsors. Oh, my. Moving to resolve and break up the bank under Dodd-Frank, should it prove to be insolvent, would take uncharacteristic nerve.

In September 2008, the financial collapse fell in on George W. Bush and won the election for Barack Obama. A repeat collapse, if handled badly, would fall in squarely on Obama.

Populist rhetoric when angry people are in the streets demanding accountability for bankers is a start, but talk is cheap. If the banking mess turns critical again, we will see what this president has learned, and what he is made of.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.



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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

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THE BELOW FIGURES WERE PRE-FIRST TERM. OBAMA HAS SO SERVED HIS  CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THEY HAVE PUMPED EVEN MORE OF THEIR LOOTINGS INTO THIS CLOWN!

“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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An initial term sheet outlining a possible settlement emerged in March, with institutions including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo being asked to pay about $20 billion that would go toward
loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners.

In exchange, the attorneys general participating in the deal would have agreed to sign broad releases preventing them from bringing further litigation on matters relating to the improper bank practices.



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ONE REASON WHY DALEY WAS ASKED TO JOIN OBAMA’S LA RAZA INFESTED ADMINISTRATION IS BECAUSE HE EMBRACES OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS AGENDA TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED WITH HORDES OF ILLEGALS HOPING OUR  BORDERS AND JOBS.



(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.

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YOU HAVE TO BE A BANKSTER OR LA RAZA SUPREMACIST FOR OPEN BORDERS TO WORK IN OBAMA’S CORRUPT WHITE HOUSE.



FROM CREOLE FOLKS



Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post

The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist.  MSNBC and Greta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything when Barrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet.  All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow. 

(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.



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Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses




BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY





Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

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Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.

Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:

* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs, this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

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Praise for Obamanomics

“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author

“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama

“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul

“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guideto American History

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·         Hardcover: 256 pages

·         Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1596986123

·         ISBN-13: 978-1596986121



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Wall Street firms dole out record pay to executives


By Tom Eley
13 October 2010

While for millions of Americans 2010 has been a year of unemployment and wage-cutting, executives at a handful of finance firms will be paid a record $144 billion, according to a new survey by the Wall Street Journal. The sum is up 4 percent from last year’s haul of $139 billion, which was also a record.

The Journal found that executive pay for 2010 has gone up at 29 of the top 35 surveyed banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money management firms, and securities exchanges. The payroll increase will slightly outstrip the growth in revenue at these firms, which increased by 3 percent from $433 billion in 2009 to $448 billion in 2010. About a third of total Wall Street revenue is given over to employees.

While profits at the big finance houses have rebounded from the lows of 2008, when the entire financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, they remain 20 percent below the record set in 2006, or $61.3 billion now versus $82 billion four years earlier. Yet over the same period executive pay has increased by 23 percent.

Among the surveyed firms are Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Barclay’s Capital, Blackstone Group and Fortress Investment Group.

The record payout to the same financiers responsible for setting into motion the economic crisis shows, if any further proof were needed, that the bailout of the financial industry—backed by both Democrats and Republicans—had as its central aim the promotion of a tiny layer of the extremely wealthy.

It is of a piece with the rapid increase in corporate profits—even as workers’ wages stagnate—and the increase in net wealth of the very richest Americans, 400 of whom now control nearly $1.4 trillion. (See: “Forbes 400 list: 2010 has been very good to the richest Americans”.)

The increase in executive pay also demonstrates that the Obama administration’s appointment of “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg to oversee compensation at federally bailed-out financial firms was merely a smokescreen to pave the way for further self-enrichment. Or, as the Journal put it, the spiraling Wall Street pay shows that firms “continue to base their pay on economic and market conditions rather than the level of pressure coming from regulators in Washington and overseas.”

Since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been only cosmetic changes to Wall Street executive pay. Some firms have promoted payment in stock and other incentivized forms of remuneration to lend the appearance that there exists an identity of interests between executives and stockholders. But these changes in no way signal a reduction in compensation, the new figures make clear.

The huge payout of $144 billion to a relative handful of financiers is socially obscene. If the figure were ranked as national GDP—a measure of the value of all goods and services produced in a year—the Wall Street bankers would come in 49th, just ahead of Algeria, Hungary and Peru. If the figure were a discretionary item on the 2010 US budget, it would come in second place after defense spending and far ahead of housing, transportation and education. And it is about $20 billion greater than the combined budget deficits of all 50 states.

While the executives gorge themselves, just beyond Wall Street incomes are plummeting. According to data released by New York state’s Office of the Comptroller, personal income fell by 3.1 percent in 2010, the first decline in 70 years, and the average paycheck fell by 5.4 percent.

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US banks and corporations announce huge pay packages for 2009

Wells Fargo executives double their compensation

By Andre Damon
11 March 2010

US corporations are beginning to release figures on CEO pay for last year. Multi-million dollar packages are the norm in a year that saw the continued deterioration in the living conditions of the vast majority of the population.

Each of the top five executives at Wells Fargo at least doubled their compensation last year over 2008. The five men each received over $11 million in 2009, while Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John Stumpf, took home $21.3 million, far higher than his 2008 package of $8.8 million.

Mark Oman, the head of consumer business for Wells Fargo, nearly quadrupled his previous pay package to $13.5 million. Howard Atkins, the chief financial officer, received $11.6 million. The other Wells Fargo executives who received huge payouts were David Carroll, the head of the brokerage unit ($14.3 million), and David Hoyt, the head of wholesale banking ($13.5 million).

These latest reports come in the wake of Barack Obama’s statement last month that he does not “begrudge” the bonuses of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Blankfein got a $9 million bonus lat year, while Dimon received $16 million. (Their total packages have not yet been released).

“I’M NOT HERE TO PUNISH MY BANKSTER DONORS THAT DESTROYED THE LIFE SAVINGS OF MOST OF THIS NATION. I’M HERE TO SERVICE THEM FOR ANY AND ALL THEY WANT!” Barack Obama, the Bankster President (La Raza Party).

Obama defended the bonuses on the grounds that Blankfein and Dimon are “savvy businessmen.” This statement gave what amounted to official carte blanche for the multi-million-dollar bonuses paid to hundreds of other “savvy businessmen,” even as the government oversees a massive attack on the living conditions of the vast majority of the population.

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