When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Saturday, May 5, 2018
ARIZONA TEACHERS SAY HELL NO TO MORE OF THEIR CORRUPT UNION'S SELLOUT and CALL FOR NATIONWIDE STRIKE!
“If the workers united we would be
a
dominating force”
Arizona
teachers oppose union sellout and call for nationwide strike
By
Will Morrow
5 May 2018
Schools reopened across Arizona on Friday, as teachers returned to
work following the betrayal of their courageous week-long strike by the unions,
the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and
the nominally “independent” union front group, Arizona Educators United.
The deal is virtually identical to the proposal of Republican governor Doug Ducey
that teachers rejected before the strike began, and meets none of the main
demands of teachers or support staff.
The unions’ sellout is the latest in a series of betrayals of
strikes by teachers, including in West Virginia and Oklahoma. They have worked
to isolate the expanding strike wave on a state-by-state basis. The unions were
all the more determined to end the Arizona strike yesterday, with teachers in
Puebl0, in neighboring Colorado, set to walk out on Monday. On May 16, teachers
will shut down schools across North Carolina, after thousands of teachers have
already called off work.
Teachers spoke yesterday and denounced the sellout of the strike by the
Arizona Education Association and AEU.
Amy, a seventh- and eight-grade teacher in Mesa, told the WSWS
that the union had been determined to stop the strike on Wednesday “when the
teachers got really angry and began to take the power away from the union
leaders.”
Amy noted that on Tuesday, the AEU had instructed teachers to
return to work on Thursday. “They didn’t send out a poll or survey. I thought:
‘How do you know we’re ready?”
“The teachers were chanting angrily on Wednesday, circling inside
and outside the capital. The union leaders weren’t anywhere to be seen. Then
later in the afternoon, the AEA and AEU leaders appeared, and broke us all into
districts. Our leader was super agitated. They told us to vote on returning to
school. He tried to guilt us into it. He said the certified workers were not
getting paid for the day off, and that we were depriving them of money by not
going back to school.”
“We thought, ‘this is ridiculous! Why are you making us feel bad
when we’re out here fighting for them?!’ My school actually put together a
GoFundMe page and raised $1,500 to give to our certified staff.
“I started making negative comments about him to the people around
us. People were listening… We all voted to not go back to work on Thursday.”
This “really freaked the union leaders out.”
Amy explained that the following day, as teachers arrived at the
capitol, the AEU and AEA had a “whole new spin.” It was “like a pep rally at
high school: They said it was ‘historic.’ The punch line was, ‘go back to your
schools, welcome your students.’”
Within thirty minutes, teachers began receiving emails that
schools were reopening the following day. “They had to have coordinated it the
night before,” she said. “There was also a news conference. They told the media
to come. It was an agreement with the school districts and the legislature to
put an end to it ‘before the teachers completely take the power away from us.’
It’s disgusting. A lot of us felt betrayed by the union.
“I said to my colleague: What would happen if someone else had the
microphone, and said, ‘we are not done; we have not got what we want.’ It would
have been totally different. I heard snippets of others in the crowd making
pissed-off comments, like ‘what’s going on?’”
Amy rejected the lie promoted by the AEU and AEA, that the strike
had to be brought to an end because teachers risked losing public support. “It
had become extremely powerful,” she said. “The public were all behind us. We
had the momentum and the numbers to tell them: ‘Take your budget, and we will
stay out of school until you make it what we want.’ But the union and AEU said:
‘We’ve gotten as much as we can.’”
Instead, the unions insisted that teachers could only vote for
Democrats in November. “The slogan, ‘Remember in November’ was really heavily
promoted,” Amy noted. “Then today they kept putting things on the Facebook
saying this is ‘Red for November.’ Voting will not do anything. The legislators
have been taking $1 billion from education funding since 2008.”
When the union and AEU announced the shutdown of the strike,
however, there was no alternative organization, independent of the union and
democratically run by the teachers, that could take the strike into its own
hands. This allowed the unions to impose their sellout despite widespread
opposition.
Amy said that “everyone was following those who had been our
cheerleaders,” but that “they turned on us and we didn’t have any way to bring
it back together.” She said that a rank-and-file committee called for from the beginning of the strike, is “what needs
to happen. You need to have multiple voices all along the stage so that no one
individual is really leading it; it’s the group leading together.
“It needs to be nationwide strike. That’s what it would take. And
it needs to be just run by the teachers: a teacher force doing it, and the
parents getting involved. They’re actually interested in their children and
grandchildren getting a public education. It could be huge for teachers through
all the nation to all strike together and refuse to stop until we get what we
want.
“I think that the workers are more powerful than the state and even
the federal government. The majority of America is the working class. They [the
ruling class] are a very small population. If the workers united, together,
we’re a much more powerful force than the small minority that’s wealthy that
dominates our country. But we could be a dominating force just in sheer
numbers. We’re the ones that struggle. We’re the ones that fight every day—not
them. And we produce all of the wealth—for them.”
“There are a
lot of people who are upset. We won nothing. It’s the same deal that
essentially we went on strike against. We did all this effort to make the
biggest strike in modern history and then went home.
“On Tuesday night, I look on my phone and Noah [Karvelis], Dylan
[Wegala] and all the others from the AEU were on video saying, ‘we’re going
back to school on Thursday.’ I thought: ‘What?!’”
Roger said that he had heard “rumors” that the union “would sell
us out by using a ballot initiative” to channel teachers’ opposition. “An
Oklahoma teacher hit me up and warned that in Oklahoma, the unions convinced
them to go back to school and say, ‘vote Democrat in November.’ Then sure
enough, that’s what happened.”
Roger said that while the drive for the strike came from
rank-and-file teachers, and that “at every school began organizing on their
own,” the AEU had “piggy-backed on that and tried to get everybody to join the
union.
“The union now is just ‘pay dues and vote Democrat,’” he said.
“The Democrats were trying to embrace us in the capitol. But when Obama was
president, his secretary, Arne Duncan, was all about private schools.”
Roger said he thought there needed to be a united struggle by the
whole working class. “It’s not just teachers; it’s everybody,” he said. “It’s
every person, in every job. They don’t get paid enough; they don’t get enough
benefits. We have to organize and strike. It would be revolutionary. When we
were in the legislature, what was going through my mind the whole time was: ‘If
this was a representative democracy, these people would listen to us.’ But it’s
not.”
HAS AMERICA DESTROYED ITSELF MERELY TO MAKE THE RICH SUPER RICH?
This week, we’re excited to be publishing Viking Economics, George Lakey’s look at how the Nordic countries, in a very short span of time, managed to move past many of the problems faced by nations like the US and UK today — problems with inequality, infrastructural weakness, the cost of education, and personal freedom. Today, the people of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden enjoy widely-shared prosperity, low crime rates, reliable infrastructure, affordable education, great personal freedoms — some of the highest standards of living in the world.
Particularly as both the US and the UK face some of our biggest challenges in a generation — and, in both cases, under new leadership — Viking Economicsoffers some crucial examples of how we might get some things right.
Here’s a brief excerpt to read on the longship ride over to your local bookstore to buy a copy; please try not to get herring on it.
Like most Americans today, Norwegians a century ago didn’t like the results of a wealth gap: the hunger and poverty, the crime, elderly friends warehoused or left in isolation, young people without hope of a good job. Norwegians also didn’t like the attitudes that went with inequality: an inclination toward arrogance among higher-income people and the feeling among lower-income people that they were losers, defeated by the system.
Early in the twentieth century, Norway had the formal institutions of parliamentary democracy, but ordinary people were not empowered: they did not set the direction of their society. The direction was set, instead, by the economic elite, through the political parties they dominated and the businesses they ran. Career options were limited, and there was little social mobility.
The differences between then and now are striking: If you’re a Norwegian teenager today and the job you’re interested in pursuing doesn’t require higher education, you can choose among good public vocational courses. If you learn better in a hands-on apprenticeship mode, publicly supported programs help you do that. If, instead, you prefer to develop a talent in art or music, or follow a career at sea or in engineering, you can attend a free post-secondary school.
Paid maternity and paternity leave (including for adoptive parents) is built into the system, and your job is held until you return. After the leave is over, child support is increased if you choose to be a full-time parent. If your choice is to go back to work, affordable childcare is available.
Extensive, subsidized public transport means that you probably won’t need a car to get to work. High educational standards prevail in big-city schools, as well as in the suburbs. Small towns receive subsidies to make them attractive for people who might otherwise feel forced to live in a city for cultural amenities, again increasing your options. The economy subsidizes family farming both for its own sake and for food security, so farmers can earn a reasonable income, another freedom denied in many industrialized countries.
The government offers free vocational counseling, education, and job-training resources for people seeking a career change, and entrepreneurialism is encouraged through free health care and a public pension for all: In Norway, you have the freedom to fail without becoming a failure.
Money doesn’t dominate the political system, so citizens are freer to participate meaningfully in political life—and they’re more likely to be exposed to newspapers with a variety of points of view, because journalism is subsidized to avoid a narrowing of perspective. According to Freedom House, in 2013, Norway was tied with Sweden at number one in the world for freedom of the press. Denmark was sixth, and Iceland was tenth. (The United States was twenty-sixth.) Indeed, this approach to public life has a long lineage in the region: Sweden was the first country in the world to establish freedom of the press—in 1766.
The Nordics are among the longest-living people in the world, and older citizens continue to benefit from an economy designed for personal freedom. The Global Watch Index studied ninety-six countries and rated Norway as the best place to grow old, followed closely by Sweden. The pension system enables you to live at home with health aides or in a senior living facility. You don’t need to fear hunger or lack of medicines or of health care. Every small town has a music and culture center where you can enjoy the arts and pursue your hobbies.
The crime rate is very low, partly because societies with high equality tend to experience less crime. Even in their largest city, Norwegians enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom from fear about personal safety.
Designing an economy that supports freedom and equality pays off in happiness, judging from the Vikings’ descendants making the top ten in the UN’s International Happiness Index. In 2015, the ratings showed Denmark, Iceland, and Norway sharing first place with Switzerland, while Sweden was close to its cousins.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), composed of thirty-four of the most-developed nations, compared life satisfaction experienced by the people in each country in 2013. The OECD found Norway second, Iceland third, Sweden fourth, and Denmark fifth.
And yet in spite of all this security and support, the Nordic yen for adventure has not disappeared. Americans, too, have a strong yearning for both freedom and equality, so the Nordic desire for both isn’t surprising. What is surprising, though, is that they went ahead and built an economy to serve those values. That’s the story in this book.
Like their Viking ancestors, the moderns made mistakes in their explorations. Iceland’s financial collapse of 2008 was a spectacular error, and, as I’ll describe, back in the 1980s, the Norwegians and Swedes made a series of serious economic mistakes. The Nordics haven’t built a utopia: Norwegians see themselves as “a nation of complainers,” and this book doesn’t shy away from the challenges that face them and their Nordic cousins.
Still, it’s useful for us as outsiders to observe the Nordics’ expeditions and to use them to reflect on our own situations. There are many important lessons to be learned.
Part of Trump tax bill bonanza for the
wealthy
"The $100 billion figure is not so much a record as it is another dimension in corporate plunder."
“It has been estimated that the cost of an iPhone, retailing for around $650 to $700, is made up of $220 for the components and $5 for the labor of assembly.”
"In the past week, at least one prominent Republican,
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, has publicly admitted that
"It will, in fact, no more provide decent-paying jobs and improved wages than the previous tax “reforms” carried out over the past three-and-a-half decades. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut in 1997 and George W. Bush’s tax “reform” of 2001 were all part of a ruling class offensive against the working class, which included sweeping attacks on wages, jobs, pensions, education, health care, housing and other social benefits."
Apple hands out $102 billion to shareholders
By Patrick Martin 3 May 2018
Apple, Inc. announced Tuesday that it would convert much of its overseas profits, held in a huge cash hoard for several years, into a $102 billion windfall for corporate executives and other shareholders. The financial bonanza for a single company is comparable to the GDP of Ecuador or Sri Lanka.
The maker of the iPhone, the Mac personal computer and other consumer electronics is raising its quarterly dividend by 16 percent, from 63 cents a share to 73 cents a share, a move that will provide $2 billion in increased income directly to owners of the company’s stock. Apple will become the largest payer of dividends in corporate America, surpassing ExxonMobil.
As princely as this payout is, it is dwarfed by the $100 billion buyback of Apple stock, to be carried out over the course of the year. Its effect will be to boost the company’s share price indirectly. Moreover, by reducing the number of Apple shares in circulation, it will dramatically increase such financial indicators as earnings per share, the principal measure by which Wall Street judges a company and which corporate boards use to set executive pay levels.
The $100 billion figure is not so much a record as it is another dimension in corporate plunder. With that sum, Apple could have bought every share of stock in UPS, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs or Boeing. It is greater than the market value of 460 of the Fortune 500 largest US companies.
The funneling of $102 billion from Apple to its shareholders is a distribution of wealth within the ruling elite. The top five individual shareholders are all Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook. The top three institutional shareholders, holding nearly 18 percent of the stock, are Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street, three giant investment funds. These and others like them will reap the bulk of the financial plunder from the dividend payout and buyback.
The bonanza for the super-rich is the product of two interrelated processes. First is the sweatshop labor of millions of workers in Asia, mainly China, who manufacture components and assemble the iPhones, laptops and watches Apple sells. Second is the tax cut pushed through last December by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress, with only token opposition from the Democrats.
Apple reaps superprofits from the labor of cruelly exploited workers in Asia, most of them employed through subcontractors, as well as through monopoly rents generated by its control of intellectual property rights to the underlying technology. As written , “It has been estimated that the cost of an iPhone, retailing for around $650 to $700, is made up of $220 for the components and $5 for the labor of assembly.”
This accounts for the cash hoard accumulated abroad, and deliberately held there in a tax avoidance scheme, while the company’s paid lobbyists obtained the support of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers to back a “one-time” cut in the tax rate to induce American companies to return these funds to the United States.
Such a measure was initially proposed by Obama and backed by congressional Democrats, but it was not finally adopted until it could be incorporated into the broader tax cut for corporations and the wealthy proposed by Trump and congressional Republicans.
The resulting tax cut legislation slashed the basic corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, the largest single business tax cut in US history. Apple was already paying an effective rate of only 26 percent on its current US earnings, because of various financial manipulations and tax breaks.
By far the biggest benefit for Apple came from the provision allowing global companies to bring home profits held overseas and pay a one-time low rate of only 15.5 percent, less than half the statutory rate of 35 percent. Apple had the largest single stockpile of such profits, a staggering $257 billion, accumulated in part from global sales and in part from bookkeeping transactions that artificially diverted profits to overseas accounts to escape US taxation, pending the passage of such a bill.
As part of the repatriation of this cash hoard, the company will pay $38 billion in taxes to the Treasury—an amount that will no doubt be hailed as the largest single corporate tax payment in history—but this represents a saving of $47 billion over what Apple would actually have paid if US tax laws had been enforced instead of being treated as a dead letter by giant corporations.
Trump’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 would have been better named the “Amnesty for Corporate Tax Cheats Act,” or perhaps the “An Act to Give Apple $47 Billion While Starving Schools and the Poor.”
In a democratically organized and rationally planned society, much better use would have been found for the $102 billion being used to enrich those already wealthy. As the chart suggests, Apple’s $102 billion windfall could have paid for the entire budget of the federal Department of Education, or paid the full tuition cost for every US college student, with $20 billion left over. It is double what all US public schools spend on capital improvements (buildings, playgrounds, school buses, equipment) and nearly twice as much money as the federal government spends on food stamps for more than 40 million low-income families. It is more than three times what the United Nations estimates is needed to feed every hungry family in the world for the next year.
When the tax cut bill was passed last December, the White House began hyping a series of announcements by major companies of plans to raise wages, hire more workers, or invest in new facilities, in order to provide “evidence” for its phony claims that the legislation was aimed at benefiting American workers.
Apple, for example, has pledged to hire another 20,000 workers over the next five years, at a cost of $5 billion ($50,000 a year per worker, counting wages and benefits, below the median wage in the United States). Even if this $5 billion materializes, it would represent only 2 percent of Apple’s total repatriated funds. It is dwarfed by the $102 billion handout to shareholders.
In the past week, at least one prominent Republican, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, has publicly admitted that the tax bill was sold under false pretenses. In an interview with British magazine The Economist, Rubio said, “There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers … In fact, they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”
Surveys by business groups have confirmed that the lion’s share of the tax cut gains will go the stock buybacks and dividends, while wage gains are estimated at 15 percent (which includes, of course, bonuses and salary increases for executives, as opposed to options and other stock-related compensation) to as low as 6 percent of the total.
Wall Street analysts now estimate that stock buybacks and dividend increases will top $1 trillion in 2018, nearly doubling the previous record set in 2007, the year before the financial crash. In the first quarter alone, stock buybacks and cash takeovers topped $305 billion, before Tuesday’s $102 billion declaration by Apple.
As for working people, nearly half own no stock at all, and the rest have minimal amounts in 401(k) retirement accounts and pensions. The bottom 80 percent of the population—the entire working class and sections of the middle class—own just 8 percent of stocks. The richest 10 percent of Americans own 80 percent of all shares.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a 11 TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF BEZOS PLAN FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
AS WALL STREET PLUNDERS: A Nation of One Million Homeless and Overrun By Mexico’s Export of “cheap labor”!
“But a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in record levels of wealth.”
Report: Amazon Importing More Foreign Workers to Take Coveted Tech Industry Jobs than Facebook, Google Combined
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
Data reported by Statista reveals that Amazon requested to import 2,515 foreign H-1B workers in 2017, more than the 720 foreign workers that Facebook asked for and the 1,213 foreign workers Google has attempted to bring to the U.S.
In 2017, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple all requested more foreign workers to take U.S. jobs than the year before. In 2016, Amazon was one of the top 20 corporations demanding foreign workers to take jobs.
As Breitbart News reported, tech conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple hide their H-1B foreign worker hires through outsourcing firms like Cognizant, Tata, and Infosys. The practice allows the corporations to claim they are not undercutting or replacing American workers at extraordinary rates, as they simply contract the foreign workers through the outsourcing firms.
Meanwhile, the H-1B visa program and importation of foreign workers has crowded out American young people and STEM graduates from high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley, the tech hub of the world, Breitbart News reported.
Data analyzed by the Seattle Times revealed that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
Though not specified in the analysis, a wide number of the tech industry’s foreign tech workers are imported to the United States through the H-1B visa, which brings more than 100,000 foreign workers to the U.S. every year.
Oftentimes, importing a foreign worker on the H-1B visa is the first step in a multinational corporations’ effort to outsource the American job, as the foreign worker arrives in the U.S., is trained in the job, and then is eventually sent back overseas with the job.
The growing foreign-born population dominating the workforce in Silicon Valley comes as nearly 500,000 Americans graduate in the STEM fields every year. Those American graduates are forced to compete with a booming foreign-born population in the U.S. and foreign workers who are imported by outsourcing firms and major tech conglomerates.
The foreign-born population in Silicon Valley is likely heavily weighted and biased to male Indian nationals, as they make up nearly 70 percent of all imported foreign workers on the H-1B visa, as cited by the Center for Immigration Studies.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
JEFF BEZOS, BILL GATES AND WARREN BUFFET and SWAMP KEEPER TWITTER TRUMPER….
(JEFF BEZOS)
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION II WILL IS PAVED BY THE LOOTING BILLIONAIRE CLASS AND WILL TRAMPLE THE POLS THAT GROVEL AT THEIR FEET FOR BRIBES!
In an unfortunate coincidence for Amazon, on the same day a puffy public relations piece about the retail giant’s pampering of 6,000 dogs made the rounds through our compliant media, so dida report about warehouse employees being forced to urinate into bottles in order to keep up with their respective work quotas without sanction.
At the retail giant’s 8.1 million square foot Seattle headquarters, life is not only good for Amazon’s employees, but 6,000 of their pets, who are not only allowed to spend the day with their owners at work, but enjoy all kinds of perks, including treats at every reception desk, a doggie deck where they can run around, and even a leash-free park.
While no one with a heart could begrudge the pampering of any animal, especially man’s best friend, the comparison to how poorly Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (who also owns the far-left Washington Post) reportedly treats a countless number of his employees, could not be more striking.
“The target grows every year. I do not have two more legs yet to make the 100% to pick, where you actually need to run and go to the toilet just during the break,” one Amazon warehouse worker who works in the UK, reported. Others claimed that they avoid “drinking water throughout their work shift for fear of having to use the toilet.”
For those of us who worked on the top floor, the closest toilets were down four flights of stairs,” claimed James Bloodworth, an undercover investigator. “People just peed in bottles because they lived in fear of being disciplined over ‘idle time’ and losing their jobs just because they needed the loo.”
Other reports have found that, unlike those Seattle-based dogs and their 17th floor bathroom amenities, one fulfillment center (read warehouse) in the UK offered its working class employees “disgusting and ill-maintained toilets are over a quarter mile away within the vast complex.” At this same complex, an investigative reporter found “staff asleep on their feet, exhausted,” adding that “those who could not keep up with the punishing targets faced the sack – and some who buckled under the strain had to be attended to by ambulance crews.”
According to these reports, Bezos appears to have created a disturbing caste system within his empire. The white collar employees and their pets are treated like royalty, while the working class are treated like paid slaves.
Bezos’ Washington Post, the left-wing news outlet President Trump has accused of acting as an Amazon lobbying firm, has already published 39 stories about Amazon this month, many of them in defense of Amazon, but not a word about Monday’s undercover report about working conditions being so bad, warehouse workers are peeing in bottles.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
With $1 billion fine, Wells Fargo's tough year gets even worse
The initial $185 million settlement cost Wells Fargo lucrative bond deals with government agencies, led to contentious congressional hearings and spurred the abrupt retirement of then-Chairman and CEO John Stumpf.
Associated Press
The amount may change as the San Francisco-based lender continues talks with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Comptroller of the Currency's Office, potentially altering the preliminary first-quarter profit growth reported on Friday. Wells Fargo's brand has been tarnished since it conceded in late 2016 that 5,000 workers had been fired over a five-year period for creating more than 3 million unauthorized customer accounts in order to meet ambitious sales targets.
The initial $185 million settlement cost the bank lucrative bond deals with government agencies, led to contentious congressional hearings and spurred the abrupt retirement of then-Chairman and CEO John Stumpf. Under his successor, Tim Sloan, the bank conceded it was also facing reviews of prior mortgage practices as well as the sale of unneeded insurance policies to auto-loan applicants who were told they might not qualify otherwise.
The latest settlement talks show Wells Fargo "still has wood to chop regarding the consumer-related issues the company faces," Brian Kleinhanzl of brokerage Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, said in a note to clients.
Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve imposed a cap on Wells Fargo's growth until it improves corporate oversight, a move that Sloan has said will curb the lender's profit by as much as $400 million. The directive requires the San Francisco-based lender to keep its assets at or below the roughly $2 trillion held at the end of December 2017. At that time, it was the nation's third-largest bank, behind New York-based JPMorgan Chase and Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America.
The cap isn't hurting Wells Fargo's ability to expand lending in areas where it seeks growth since it can compensate by selling assets in other sectors, Sloan has said, a point he reiterated on an earnings call Friday.
"Our folks are out there facing off with our customers every day across the entire platform," the CEO told analysts. At the same time, the lender is committed to resolving regulatory concerns and is reviewing all its businesses to ensure they meet compliance standards.
"We've certainly had a thorough look in every nook and cranny in the company, and we're continuing to," Sloan said. "One of the lessons learned for us, candidly, over the last few years is that we should have been doing a better job of that when we were performing quite well in the prior years, and we're not going to make that mistake again."
Wells Fargo shares fell 3.1 percent to $51.05 in New York trading on Friday. Based on the lender's preliminary figures, net income climbed 5.4 percent to $5.9 billion, or $1.12 a share, in the three months through March.
Updated 4/13/18, 12:07 PM: Updated with analyst comment in fourth paragraph.
THE PLUNDERING BARONESS PELOSI:
Nancy Pelosi triples her loot since the banksters nearly destroyed America’s economy and demands endless hordes of illegals to keep wages depressed!
MAKES YOU WONDER HOW MANY ILLEGALS SHE EMPLOYS AT HER ST. HELENA, NAPA WINERY …. The same county where an ILLEGAL started a fire that killed dozens and did millions of dollars in property damage!
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a 11 TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
Though there are numerous questions I could ask to determine if a fellow American gets his "news" from the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex), I usually lead with this one: "What political party is the party of the wealthy?"
If the answer is "the Republican Party," I know that the individual is a regular consumer of DMIC propaganda. It's tempting to get angered at the individual, but I know that two of the ways the DMIC lies are by distorting and withholding.
The Democratic Party is the party of the mega-, mega-wealthy. This is one of the dangerous cover-ups of the DMIC. Let's go to the tale of the tape. BLOG: BELOW IS A WHO'S-WHO OF BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
Here are the top ten American billionaires, according to Forbes:
Bill Gates, $86 billion
Warren Buffet, $75.6
Jeff Bezos, $72.8
Mark Zuckerberg, $56.0
Larry Ellison, $52.2
Charles Koch, $48.3
David Koch, $48.3
Michael Bloomberg, $47.5
Larry Page, $40.7
Sergey Brin, $39.8
Well, well, well – look at all that wealth that could be redistributed! The above wealth totals $567 billion. The Ds above outnumber the Rs 7-3 (I counted the Kochs twice, even though they could be counted as one; the third is Ellison), with 74% of the wealth owned by the Democrats.
Oh, the hypocrisy, the hypocrisy! Perhaps you're asking yourself: What's my fair share of all those billions?
Democrats spread their wealth to other Democrats
Make no mistake: in addition to campaign contributions, which can be viewed at OpenSecrets.org (I have no affiliation), the Democrat billionaires do believe in wealth redistribution, which is why they've invested their monies across every Democrat-friendly industry – from media to technology to anti-Second Amendment groups. It's the Democrats' (legal) version of a Madoff scheme.
In 2016, the Kochs – favorite targets of Democrats – spent over $31 million ($11 million to candidates and political action committees and $20 million on lobbying). These big bucks certainly are not chump change, but they're ranked 39 among all donors to candidates and PACs and 27 among all lobbyist spending.
Whatever one's opinion of money in politics, in all its forms – soft, hard, dark, by individual, by family – it's indisputable that it is a wide and deep hole that both major parties have leveraged.
But why stop at the Democrat gazillionaires? Let's take a look at other Democrat 1-Percenters.
I checked dollar amounts at the Federal Election Commission, where campaign contributions are tabulated (keep in mind that there is usually a lag in tabulations – sometimes up to a year due to off-year election years). Here's a 2014 graph; there's some crossover, but the D contributions outnumber R by almost half a billion dollars, and this is over the last 25 years.
For 2016 federal contributions to organizations, seven of the top 10 (including number 1) went to Democrats, totaling over $300 million.
For 2016 federal contributions to individuals, six of the top 10 (including number 1) went to Democrats, totaling nearly $250 million.
In the 2016 Presidential election, President Trump spent $325 million; Clinton spent $563 million.
The Democrat myth of publicly financed elections
Does one really think Democrats want campaign finance reform, or publicly financed elections, or higher taxes for the wealthy? The Democrats' counter is always well, those are the rules of the game, and we're playing the game. Money in politics is a legitimately concerning issue, but Democrats need to spare us the sanctimonious moralizing that they give mucho dinero out of the sheer kindness of their hearts.
Democrats love money in politics as much as Republicans, and they keep their sheep voters occupied with hating the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling inCitizens United v. FEC, which had nothing to do with campaign contributions; it had to do with the constitutionality of airing on television a Citizens United-produced documentary about Hillary Clinton before the 2008 Democratic Party primary.
Marxist warfare
Money in politics is more ammo in the Democrats' Marxist war of economic hate and envy. President Trump's election, in large part, stemmed from small business owners and dirty-fingernails workers who have grown tired of the condescending "you didn't build that" remarks made famous by President Obama and U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren. The super-rich do well no matter who's president, and they did extraordinarily well under Obama. (Obama's net worth, it should be noted, is approximately $8 million; his net worth was around $1.7 million when first elected president, and his 2015 tax return showed an effective tax rate of around 19% – lower than Warren Buffett's secretary's!). It's estimated that 90% of income gains went to the top 1% under Obama, who spent a cool $1.9 billion in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
Let's give "honorable mention" to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who is the fourth wealthiest billionaire in the world and a majority stakeholder in The New York Times Company. Over the years, Slim, both personally and through his company, Telmex, has contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. All this means that Mr. Slim, a Mexican citizen, has heavily involved himself in American politics. Sounds an awful lot like collusion, doesn't it?
The DMIC (of which Mr. Slim is a member) has carefully, and effectively, crafted a narrative that the GOP is the party of wealthy whites. As usual with anything Democrat, the opposite is true: wealthy whites predominantly vote for and fund Democrats, and the top ten most expensive cities in America are populated by mostly white, limousine liberal Democrats.
Conversely, Democrat policies in the inner cities are guaranteed to fail. Here's the proof.
But your Democrat friends and relatives knew all this from Bill Gates, Rachel Maddow, and Media Matters for America, right?
Rich Logis is the host of The Rich Logis Show, at TheRichLogisShow.com, and author of the upcoming book 10 Warning Signs Your Child is Becoming a Democrat. He can be found on Twitter at @RichLogis.
NANCY PELOSI, and her LA RAZA SISTERS, SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, FORMER SEN. BARBARA BOXER and NOW SEN. KAMALA HARRIS are a pantheon of staggering self-serving corruption.
They and their families have all gotten filthy rich off of these women’s elected office.
Their endless hispandering for the illegals’ votes has turned California into Mexifornia, a drug, gang and anchor baby welfare third-world dumpster!
“Liberal governing has transformed beautiful California into the poverty capital of America with the worst quality of life. Crazy taxes, crazy high cost of living, and crazy overreaching regulations have crushed the middle class, forcing the middle class to exit the Sunshine State. All that is left in California are illegals feeding at the breast of the state, rapidly growing massive homeless tent cities, and the mega-rich.” LLOYD MARCUS
Democrats Reject Trump’s Amnesty Framework, Seek Alliance With GOP’s Business Wing… OTHER PARTNERS INCLUDE MEXICO, U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE, ALL BILLIONAIRES WHO HIRE FOREIGNERS ONLY!
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
Billionaire Mexicans tell their poor to JUMP U.S. OPEN BORDERS and LOOT THE STUPID GRINGO… and loot they do!
Billions of dollars are sucked out of America from Mexico’s looting!
1) Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the USA. The expands territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and culture and genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign Remittance Income.
AS WALL STREET PLUNDERS: A Nation of One Million Homeless and Overrun By Mexico’s Export of “cheap labor”!
“But a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in record levels of wealth.”
MASSIVE TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH: YOUR DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK…. for Wall Street, Banksters, Billionaires and LA RAZA.
“But a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in record levels of wealth.”
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