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!!!
Thursday, March 5, 2020
CORONAVIRUS KILLS AT MORE THAN 20xs RATE OF SEASONAL FLU - TRUMP WANTS TO KNOW IF BANKSTERS ARE SAFE
Coronavirus kills at more than 20 times the rate of seasonal flu
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Tuesday that the mortality rate for reported cases of COVID-19 has risen to 3.4 percent, based on the ratio of the current number of deaths caused by the virus to the confirmed infections. At the time of the announcement, those figures stood at 3,254 and 95,184, respectively.
The coronavirus fatality rate is more than 20 times the death rate of the seasonal flu, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—a stark measure of the dangers the novel coronavirus poses to the world’s population.
This number is an increase over early estimates of the mortality rate by the WHO at just above 2 percent. It reflects the spread of the coronavirus to 83 countries and territories outside of China. The fatality ratio has stayed relatively constant since February 25, even as new cases and new deaths have been confirmed. It is unclear whether the current mortality rate will hold or change in the coming days.
One of the many causes of the spread of COVID-19 is the fact that workers are unable to take sick days, even when exhibiting symptoms of the infection. Chipotle workers in New York City yesterday held a protest against the fast food chain demanding that the company stop forcing workers to work while sick, especially in light of the spread of the coronavirus in the state. They exposed retaliation by the company against workers who stayed home to recover and prevent the spread of the disease in spite of orders by management.
Questions are also being raised as to whether a vaccine will reduce the impact of the disease, especially if it is not distributed freely. Asked at a congressional hearing last week to guarantee that once a vaccine against the virus is developed it will be available to all, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive, refused. “We would want to ensure that we worked to make it affordable,” he said, “but we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest. Price controls won’t get us there.”
As the spread of the coronavirus continues, the WHO is very concerned that the medical supplies necessary to combat the disease could run out. A statement issued by the organization on March 3 warned that “supplies are rapidly depleting.” It said the medical industry had to increase manufacturing by 40 percent if the demands placed upon the world’s health care infrastructure by the pandemic were to be met.
In raw numbers, the world needs 89 million medical masks, 76 million examination gloves, 30 million gowns, 1.6 million goggles and 2.9 million liters of hand sanitizer each month until the pandemic is contained. The WHO has also called for “the rational and appropriate use of personal protective equipment in healthcare settings, and the effective management of supply chains,” after prices for gowns doubled, respirators tripled and surgical masks increased six-fold.
This shortage is especially dangerous in regions with a higher fatality ratio or where coronavirus cases have been surging. While the number of new cases in China dropped to 119 yesterday, South Korea, Italy and Iran reported 435, 587 and 586 new cases, respectively. Those countries also reported 3, 28 and 15 new deaths, raising concerns that COVID-19, given its two week incubation period, has already infected large swaths of those countries.
There are also worries that the virus is much more widespread than currently reported in the United States. To date, 11 out of the 154 known cases have resulted in the patient’s death. Assuming that the average mortality rate of 3.4 percent holds true, the 11 confirmed deaths predict that there are actually 324 cases of the coronavirus in the country, and that 170 of them have gone unreported.
While there are many reasons that an infection of COVID-19 might be missed, the most prominent is the enormous cost for Americans to visit a doctor. Costs for those who have been tested for the coronavirus have reportedly been as high as $3,200.
Moreover, the response by federal, state and local governments to the crisis has been improvised and disorganized at best. The CDC has been unable to provide testing kits on a mass scale for hospitals around the country. Thus far, only 472 tests for COVID-19 have been carried out in the US, as compared to 23,345 in Italy, 109,591 in South Korea and tens of millions in China. The CDC insists that hospitals and laboratories in the US use its testing procedure and equipment, rather than those of the World Health Organization. This has essentially crippled the ability of medical professionals in the US to detect the coronavirus and protect their patients and themselves.
Typical of commentaries on US social media, Twitter user Matt Stoller wrote: “Just spoke with ER doc who say[s] he’s seeing cases he’s 99 percent sure are #coronavirus. Negative for flu, recent travel, work in airports. Not allowed to test. Patients return to work because they can’t take time off w/out a firm diagnosis. Other ER docs seeing the same thing.”
In addition to spreading, there is now evidence that it has developed into different types. A study published Tuesday in the National Science Review found genetic markers indicating that a subset of the virus in Wuhan evolved from a less aggressive S-cov to a more transmittable and deadly L-cov, but that the spread of L-cov was largely curbed by the quarantine of Hubei province.
This is little comfort. Mutations that happen once can happen again. Given the spread of the coronavirus around the world, a version that is more aggressive and lethal has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands and infect tens of millions.
The world’s resources must be mobilized at once against this pandemic to contain the disease, treat the sick and save lives.
Coronavirus outbreak takes hold in New York
Developments over the past few days have underscored that New York City, the largest in the United States, may well be on the verge of a medical and social catastrophe. There are now 11 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus infection in New York state, and about 1,000 people are quarantined or self-quarantined in Westchester County, just north of New York City.
Most of the cases are tied to a New Rochelle-based attorney who works in Manhattan with no apparent links to people who traveled to coronavirus hot spots, indicating community spread.
The first confirmed case of COVID-19, the official name of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in New York was of a health worker who returned from Iran to Manhattan and shortly after began experiencing symptoms of the disease and was diagnosed on Sunday. She is not currently believed to have transmitted the virus to anyone else.
Earlier this week, the New Rochelle attorney was diagnosed with COVID-19, and on March 4 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that several people tied to the man, including his entire family, the neighbor who drove him to the hospital and his neighbor’s entire family, had been diagnosed as well. About 1,000 people are now quarantined or self-quarantined due to their connections with these cases, including members of the man’s synagogue, where he attended a funeral and a bat mitzvah recently.
Yeshiva University, where the man’s son is a student, and the Bronx high school where the man’s daughter is a student are temporarily closed, and those who interacted with the since-diagnosed children have been ordered to self-quarantine.
Two members of the man’s family are asymptomatic and were only tested for COVID-19 due to their known close connection with the attorney. Given the number of people who exhibit few or no symptoms and the lack of widespread testing, it is highly likely that the disease is much more widespread than presently known, in New York and globally.
The attorney’s coworkers are currently being tested, and it is known that he commuted via Metro-North Railroad, which may have exposed other passengers to the virus. What is known about COVID-19 indicates that it is highly contagious and can spread via respiratory droplets and physical proximity. It also has an incubation of up to 14 days. China’s National Health Commission now recognizes both feces and urine as possible modes of transfer as well, raising new difficulties.
There are other possible cases of the virus in New York, including a New York City public school teacher in self-quarantine after showing symptoms and a Brooklyn man who returned from Tokyo with symptoms yet was not tested while in the hospital because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said he was not sick enough.
A number of universities in the New York area have canceled nonacademic events and travel, and Governor Cuomo announced that students in New York’s public university systems studying abroad in five countries hit the hardest by the epidemic would be flown back to the US on chartered planes and quarantined for 14 days.
One especially disturbing development in the coronavirus epidemic in New York has been the media’s tendency to fan anti-Chinese xenophobia. The New York Times and the New York Post, in reporting on New York’s first coronavirus case, used photos of Flushing, a well-known neighborhood in Queens with a large Asian-American, especially Chinese-American, population. Both of the photos showed residents who appear to be Asian wearing masks.
Given the facts of the case—a virus contracted in Iran by a patient who lives in Manhattan—along with the fact that presumably those involved in selecting the photos know about New York City, it is hard to believe that these were both honest mistakes. The New York Post is a right-wing, Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, while the Times, the liberal “paper of record,” in an October 2019 editorial, denounced the “dangerous and growing threat” posed by the “aggressive … Communist [Chinese] state.”
There are a number of factors that make the US a “perfect storm” in terms of the coronavirus despite its status as the world’s wealthiest country. These include the high cost of healthcare and lack of paid time off. The New York metropolitan area has more undocumented immigrant workers, who have even fewer rights to sick leave than other workers, than any other city in the country.
As of this writing, there are 158 confirmed cases in the US and 11 deaths, all in Washington state with the exception of a death Wednesday in California. The interplay of the “perfect storm” factors helps explain how 11 people have died from COVID-19 while countries with more cases have between zero and six deaths.
New York City combines these factors with a public transit system that is used by over 5 million people daily, by far the largest public transit system in the country. Especially during rush hour, passengers are in close proximity. It is not clear what role this could play in disease transmission, with one study finding that the subway would account for 4 percent of transmission in a flu epidemic.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways, buses and commuter rail in and around New York City, has announced Monday that it is disinfecting every subway car and bus every 72 hours in response to the epidemic, and that stations are being cleaned on a daily basis using outside contractors—an expansion of a loophole allowed by the Transport Workers Union in the latest contract.
A number of medical professionals have sounded the alarm on the criminally negligent response of the Trump administration in particular to the epidemic. Matthew McCarthy, a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and author of Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic, tweeted Sunday: “Coronavirus has been circulating in the United States for weeks. We didn’t detect it because we weren’t testing it properly. There may have been cryptic transmission in Washington State since January. If I sound alarmed, it’s because I am.”
Howard Forman, a professor at Yale University who teaches radiology and healthcare management, told Business Insider: “It is well within the realm of possibility that there are 100,000 people infected with this right now in the United States. Healthcare providers may be being exposed, other patients may be being exposed, and until you can give confidence to people about those answers, we are in a crisis here.”
When the first case was diagnosed in New York this weekend, the CDC had run fewer than 1,000 tests, despite having several weeks of notice since the novel coronavirus began spreading rapidly in Hubei Province, China, where it is thought to have originated. COVID-19 has spread internationally, with over 80,000 cases in mainland China, over 5,000 in South Korea, about 3,000 each in Italy and Iran, and over a hundred each in Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong and the US.
In an initial indication of the explosive class implications of the epidemic, workers at the Chipotle restaurant chain protested Wednesday in New York City demanding paid sick days, a crucial demand in any initiative to combat the epidemic. That workers must demand basic rights such as sick time off—all the more necessary during a public health emergency—in the same city as Wall Street firms receiving yet another interest rate cut to inflate the stock market illustrates the inability of capitalism to solve any major issue in a socially progressive way.
Federal Reserve Retools Capital Rules for Largest U.S. Banks
New Fed rule creates capital buffer tied to annual stress tests
The overhaul reflects the latest moves by the Federal Reserve to recalibrate oversight of big U.S. lenders.
PHOTO: LIU JIE/XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS
By
Andrew Ackerman
Fed officials on Wednesday said the changes would simplify rules for big banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. without posing risks to the stability of the financial system.
The overhaul “simplifies the post-crisis capital framework for banks, while maintaining the strong capital requirements that are the hallmark of the framework,” Fed Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles said in a statement.
The overhaul reflects the latest moves by the Fed to recalibrate oversight of big U.S. lenders. Already, officials have completed separate changes aimed at easing liquidity and capital rules for regional U.S. banks and retooled speculative trading limits for large firms.
Fed governor Lael Brainard, an Obama-era appointee, cast the sole dissenting vote against the plan, saying she believed it would reduce banks’ required capital levels and the amount they set aside as a buffer above their regulatory requirements.
In a statement, she said the plan “gives a green light for large banks to reduce their capital buffers materially, at a time when payouts have already exceeded earnings for several years on average.”
Ms. Brainard said she expects a reduction in capital largely because the overhaul requires banks to set aside funds for dividend payments for four quarters, down from the current nine.
But Mr. Quarles said the changes would maintain the overall level of capital in the system and modestly increase required capital levels for the largest firms. His estimates were based on stress-test data from 2013 to 2019, he said.
Parts of the overhaul are likely to be welcomed by big banks, including changes that streamline aspects of stress tests, which require 34 large banks to show how they would weather simulated market and economic shocks.
Wednesday’s plan reduces the total number of big-bank capital requirements to eight from 13, the Fed said. For large Wall Street firms, those changes could be offset by a new “stress capital buffer.”
Banks’ annual stress-test results would be used to calculate the size of the new buffer, which the firms would have to meet during the ensuing year. If a firm’s capital fell below this level, it would face limits on its capital distributions and bonus payments.
Under the Trump administration, regulators have sought to soften the impact of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, which was intended to prevent another financial crisis, saying its requirements were too stringent and inflexible.
A law signed by President Trump in 2018 rolled back restrictions for banks with less than $250 billion in assets and served as the impetus for further regulatory changes.
Some of Wednesday’s changes incorporate adjustments sought by banks. The Fed’s stress tests would assume lenders restrain growth in their balance sheets during stressful periods, which doesn’t happen under current rules. That would likely have the effect of boosting banks’ capital levels in the stress tests.
The Fed held off on making some changes to the stress tests envisioned by Mr. Quarles, such as incorporating a dormant policy tool to combat credit crunches in a downturn known as the countercyclical capital buffer. The Fed would have to separately propose such changes.
Sanders called JPMorgan’s CEO America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why he has a point
Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist in America today” in recent ad
With his Dimon ad, Sanders is referring specifically to the bailouts JPMorgan and other banks took from the government during the 2008 financial crisis. But accepting government bailouts and corporate welfare is not the only way I believe American companies behave like closet socialists despite their professed love of free markets.
In reality, most big U.S. companies operate internally in ways Karl Marx would applaud as remarkably close to socialist-style central planning. Not only that, corporate America has arguably become a laboratory of innovation in socialist governance, as I show in my own research.
Closet socialists
In public, CEOs like Dimon attack socialist planning while defending free markets.
But inside JPMorgan and most other big corporations, market competition is subordinated to planning. These big companies often contain dozens of business units and sometimes thousands. Instead of letting these units compete among themselves, CEOs typically direct a strategic planning process to ensure they cooperate to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation as a whole.
This is just how a socialist economy is intended to operate. The government would conduct economy-wide planning and set goals for each industry and enterprise, aiming to achieve the best outcome for society as a whole.
And just as companies rely internally on planned cooperation to meet goals and overcome challenges, the U.S. economy could use this harmony to overcome the existential crisis of our age — climate change. It's a challenge so massive and urgent that it will require every part of the economy to work together with government in order to address it.
Overcoming socialism's past problems
But, of course, socialism doesn't have a good track record.
One of the reasons socialist planning failed in the old Soviet Union, for example, was that it was so top-down that it lacked the kind of popular legitimacy that democracy grants a government. As a result, bureaucrats overseeing the planning process could not get reliable information about the real opportunities and challenges experienced by enterprises or citizens.
Moreover, enterprises had little incentive to strive to meet their assigned objectives, especially when they had so little involvement in formulating them.
A second reason the USSR didn't survive was that its authoritarian system failed to motivate either workers or entrepreneurs. As a result, even though the government funded basic science generously, Soviet industry was a laggard in innovation.
Ironically, corporations — those singular products of capitalism — are showing how these and other problems of socialist planning can be surmounted.
Take the problem of democratic legitimacy. Some companies, such as General Electric, Kaiser Permanente and General Motors, have developed innovative ways to avoid the dysfunctions of autocratic planning by using techniques that enable lower-level personnel to participate actively in the strategy process.
Although profit pressures often force top managers to short-circuit the promised participation, when successfully integrated it not only provides top management with more reliable bottom-up input for strategic planning but also makes all employees more reliable partners in carrying it out.
So here we have centralization — not in the more familiar, autocratic model, but rather in a form I call "participative centralization." In a socialist system, this approach could be adopted, adapted and scaled up to support economy-wide planning, ensuring that it was both democratic and effective.
As for motivating innovation, America's big businesses face a challenge similar to that of socialism. They need employees to be collectivist, so they willingly comply with policies and procedures. But they need them to be simultaneously individualistic, to fuel divergent thinking and creativity.
One common solution in much of corporate America, as in the old Soviet Union, is to specialize those roles, with most people relegated to routine tasks while the privileged few work on innovation tasks. That approach, however, overlooks the creative capacities of the vast majority and leads to widespread employee disengagement and sub-par business performance.
Smarter businesses have found ways to overcome this dilemma by creating cultures and reward systems that support a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that I call "interdependent individualism." In my research, I have found this kind of motivation in settings as diverse as Kaiser Permanent physicians, assembly-line workers at Toyota's NUMMI plant and software developers at Computer Sciences Corp. These companies do this, in part, by rewarding both individual contributions to the organization's goals as well as collaboration in achieving them.
While socialists have often recoiled against the idea individual performance-based rewards, these more sophisticated policies could be scaled up to the entire economy to help meet socialism's innovation and motivation challenge.
Big problems require big government
The idea of such a socialist transformation in the U.S. may seem remote today.
But this can change, particularly as more Americans, especially young ones, embrace socialism. One reason they are doing so is because the current capitalist system has so manifestly failed to deal with climate change.
Looking inside these companies suggests a better way forward — and hope for society's ability to avert catastrophe.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Barack Obama is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed Barack Obama his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
“The response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
Why aren’t the Wall Street criminals prosecuted?
In May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon revealed that his bank had lost billions of dollars in speculative bets, President Barack Obama publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO, calling him “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention is that Dimon is a criminal.
JPMorgan is not the exception; it is the rule. Virtually every major bank that operates on Wall Street has settled charges of fraud and criminality on a staggering scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 630-page report on the financial crash of 2008 documenting what the committee chairman called “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
These multiple crimes by serial lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive consequences. The entire world has been plunged into an economic slump that has already lasted more than five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of millions of families have lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages pushed by JPMorgan and other Wall Street banks.
Biden Bashes Influence of Billionaires While Relying on their Money
Former Vice President Joe Biden is bashing the outsize influence billionaires are having on the race for the 2020 Democrat nomination, despite his own campaign relying heavily upon their money.
In a fundraising email sent to supporters on Thursday, Biden’s campaign excoriated two of his Democrat rivals for using their personal fortunes to underwrite their presidential ambitions. The email, titled “the billionaires are coming,” took direct aim at Tom Steyer and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for spending heavily to “saturate your airwaves and news feeds.”
In particular, Biden’s campaign lambasted Steyer for using his fortune to gain access to the Democrat debates, while attacking Bloomberg for skipping early primaries and spending $100 million in delegate-heavy Super Tuesday states.
“One billionaire is buying his way onto the Democrat debate stage, and one is buying his way out of it,” Biden’s campaign wrote, before proceeding to argue both billionaires were undermining “how democracy is supposed to work.”
The former vice president’s attack on the influence Steyer and Bloomberg are having is surprising given the fact his own campaign has relied heavily on billionaires to underwrite his White House hopes.
A recent report by Forbes indicates Biden has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the billionaire donor class since launching his candidacy. In the last fundraising quarter alone, the former vice president pulled in contributions from 44 billionaires—the most of any 2020 Democrat. Many of those contributing opted to max out, giving the largest sum possible for a primary campaign under federal law.
The money rolled in from Silicon Valley titans, Wall Street elites, and some of the country’s largest real estate tycoons.
Among the donors was Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google who stirred controversy in January 2017 when claiming President Donald Trump would do “evil things” in office. Schmidt donated $2,800 to Biden’s campaign in May, less than a week after the former vice president entered the race. In the past the former Google executive has heavily backed Democrat candidates up and down the ballot, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Employees from Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., have donated more than $37,000 to Biden’s campaign to date, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The hefty contributions have ensured Alphabet is one of the former vice president’s top 20 contributors. Joining a list that includes another Silicon Valley giant, Microsoft Corp.
Biden’s support in Silicon Valley has not been confined to traditional Democrats. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a one time Republican nominee for governor of California, donated $2,800 in September. In 2016, Whitman broke ranks by endorsing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Trump. Since that time, the former eBay executive has become a consistent ‘Never Trumper.’
On America’s other coast, the former vice president has elicited prime backing from Wall Street and the real estate industry.
Topping the list of Biden’s Wall Street backers is Judy Dimon, the wife of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Although her husband, himself, has not donated, Dimon maxed out to Biden in mid-September.
The contribution comes with its own controversial history. In 2008, then-Sen. Joe Biden supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which granted large financial institutions bailouts to survive the recession. JPMorgan was one such institution, taking more than $25 billion in taxpayer money—one of largest bailouts granted to any company under the program.
The bailout came even though JPMorgan’s mortgage lending practices helped create the housing bubble that, when it burst, ultimately led the to the recession. In 2013, the bank agreed to pay a civil fine of $13 billion for its unscrupulous lending practices.
Apart from Dimon, Biden received maxed out contributions from private equity executives, like Blackstone President Jonathan Gray. Blackstone recently made a $250 million investment in a startup that helps outsource American jobs overseas.
In total, the former vice president has filled a significant portion of his campaign account from Wall Street donors, including nearly a million dollars from the securities and investment sector.
Wall Street’s contributions, however, paled in comparison to the amount of money real estate tycoons have donated to Biden. In between April and the end of September, the former vice president garnered more than one million from real estate interests.
The funds poured in from longtime allies like Neil Bluhm, a casino and real estate magnate, and George Marcus, the leader of America’s largest commercial property brokerage firms. Although Bluhm and Marcus have only donated $2,800 each, both men have hosted lavish fundraisers on Biden’s behalf that have raised unknown amounts.
Biden’s reliance on such billionaires is one of the reasons his campaign has struggled to compete financially with the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Although Biden started the race with a strong funding advantage, thanks to support from high-dollar donors, he ended the most recent fundraising period well behind his competitors. In between July and the end of September, Biden only raised $15.2 million. The sum was dwarfed by that raised by Sanders ($25.3 million), Warren ($24.6 million), and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg ($19.1 million).
The former vice president’s fundraising troubles stem from an inability to make in-roads with small-dollar donors. Unlike Warren or Sanders, more than 2,900 donors have already maxed out to Biden’s campaign.
In fact, top-dollar donors make up a far higher percentage of Biden’s campaign coffers than those of his competitors. In comparison, only 38 percent of the campaign’s funds to date have come from individuals donating less than $200. Such a ratio poses a long term issue, especially when top contributors are prohibited by law from donating again until after the primary.
The disparate support between billionaires and small donors was seen as a primary motivator for Biden’s decision to jettison opposing outside help from Super PACs. Since such groups can raise and spend unlimited funds, the former vice president’s billionaire donors are no longer subject to contribution limits when supporting his campaign.
Biden, though, did not mention any of this in his email to supporters on Thursday. Instead, the former vice president kept his fire aimed at Steyer and Bloomberg, while downplaying his own support from the billionaire donor class.
“Since the day that this campaign launched, we have relied on grassroots support to power this campaign,” Biden’s team wrote.
JPMorgan shares climb after the bank posts record earnings and revenue
Jamie Dimon arriving to testify before Congress. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters
·JPMorgan reported first-quarter earnings results on Friday, kicking off another earnings season for the largest US banks.
JPMorgan Chase reported record first-quarter results on both the top and bottom lines Friday morning. Shares climbed 2.3% in early trading to $108.68.
Here's how the results stacked up with Wall Street's expectations as compiled by Bloomberg.
·Adjusted net income: $9.18 billion versus $7.7 billion expected
·Earnings per share: $2.65 versus $2.34 expected
·Revenue: $29.85 billion versus $28.4 billion expected
·Expenses: $16.4 billion versus $16.7 billion expected
"In the first quarter of 2019, we had record revenue and net income, strong performance across each of our major businesses, and a more constructive environment," CEO Jamie Dimon said in the earnings release. "Even amid some global geopolitical uncertainty, the US economy continues to grow, employment and wages are going up, inflation is moderate, financial markets are healthy, and consumer and business confidence remains strong."
A deeper look into the numbers showed the trading and investment-banking businesses exceeded expectations, though trading declined 17% from the year earlier:
·Investment-banking revenue: $1.75 billion versus $1.63 billion expected
Obama's Wall Street cabinet
6 April 2009
A series of articles published over the weekend, based on financial disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday concerning top White House officials, documents the extent to which the administration, in both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions, and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous character of relations between the Obama administration and the American financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and “unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from industry than from finance.
In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war.
“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).”
OBAMA and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR
In May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon revealed that his bank had lost billions of dollars in speculative bets, President Barack Obama publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO, calling him “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention is that Dimon is a criminal.
JPMorgan is not the exception; it is the rule. Virtually every major bank that operates on Wall Street has settled charges of fraud and criminality on a staggering scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 630-page report on the financial crash of 2008 documenting what the committee chairman called “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
These multiple crimes by serial lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive consequences. The entire world has been plunged into an economic slump that has already lasted more than five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of millions of families have lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages pushed by JPMorgan and other Wall Street banks.
Amid poverty wages and tax cuts for the rich
"This decades-long ruling class offensive was accelerated in response to the 2008 financial crisis. President Barack Obama oversaw the channeling of trillions of dollars to the banks and financial markets in order to pay off the debts of the bankers and speculators, whose reckless and criminal activities had led to the crisis, and make them richer than ever. At the same time, he imposed a restructuring of the auto industry based on a 50 percent across-the-board pay cut for new-hires and an expansion of temporary and part-time labor,"
The devastating human cost of the plundering of society by the corporate-financial oligarchy is registered in declining life expectancy, rising mortality and record suicide and drug addiction rates.
BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!
The new aristocrats, like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government panels documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
JPMorgan Chase records the biggest profit of any bank in US history
JPMorgan Chase, the most valuable private bank in the world, made $36.4 billion in 2019, the biggest annual profit of any bank in American history. The news, reported Tuesday, sent the company’s stock up by 2 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the company took in $8.5 billion, also a record, making it the tenth largest publicly traded company in the world, with a market cap of $437 billion.
JPMorgan Chase’s record profits were joined by Morgan Stanley, which also reported both record profits and record revenues for 2019, sending its stock price surging 6.6 percent on Thursday.
News of these record gains came as the six largest US banks revealed that they saved a combined $32 billion last year from President Donald Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut. The tax windfall was up from 2018 for all but one of the banks. JPMorgan’s tax cut went from $3.7 billion in 2018 to $5 billion last year.
At Wednesday’s signing ceremony for the phase one trade deal with China, attended by an array of corporate executives, Trump turned to Mary Erdoes, a top executive at JPMorgan Chase. Calling the bank’s earnings report “incredible,” he joked, “Will you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ at least?”
The tax cuts for the corporations and the rich,
enacted with only token opposition from the
Democrats, are only one factor in the surge
in profits over the past year. When stocks
plunged at the end of 2018, Trump stepped
up his demand that the Federal Reserve
reverse its policy of gradually raising interest
rates to more normal levels, following years
of near-zero rates in the aftermath of the 2008
financial crisis. Acting as the mouthpiece of
Wall Street, he demanded that the Fed begin
cutting rates once again in order to pump
more cash into the financial markets.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell dutifully complied, cutting interest rates three times in 2018 and assuring the markets that he had no intention of raising them again any time soon. Then, beginning in the late fall, the Fed began pumping tens of billions of dollars a week into the so-called “repo” overnight loan market, resuming the money-printing operation known as “quantitative easing.”
This de facto guarantee of unlimited public funds to backstop stock prices has produced record highs on all of the major US indexes, sending billions more into the private coffers of the rich and the super-rich.
These measures are a continuation and intensification of policies carried out on a bipartisan basis for four decades to redistribute wealth from the working class to the corporations and the financial elite. They have effected a fundamental restructuring of class relations in America, drastically lowering the social position of the working class. Decent-paying, secure jobs have been wiped out and largely replaced by poverty-wage, part-time, temporary and contingent employment—the so-called “gig” economy exemplified by corporations such as Amazon and Uber.
This decades-long ruling class offensive was accelerated in response to the 2008 financial crisis. President Barack Obama oversaw the channeling of trillions of dollars to the banks and financial markets in order to pay off the debts of the bankers and speculators, whose reckless and criminal activities had led to the crisis, and make them richer than ever. At the same time, he imposed a restructuring of the auto industry based on a 50 percent across-the-board pay cut for new-hires and an expansion of temporary and part-time labor.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has actively participated in this process, enshrining the new “flexible” labor system in sellout contracts in 2015 and 2019. This template of expendable, benefits-free labor has become the new norm for labor relations across the country and throughout the world.
Meanwhile, state, local and federal government programs have been dramatically slashed. Education, housing, Medicaid and food stamps have been particularly hard hit. This process has been accelerated under Trump, along with the removal of occupational safety and environmental regulations, with no opposition from the Democrats, who represent sections of the financial elite and wealthy upper-middle class.
Institution found that 53 million people in the US—44 percent of
all workers—“earn barely enough to live on.” The study found that
the median pay of this group was $10.22 per hour, around
$18,000 a year. Thirty seven percent of those making $10 an
hour have children. More than half are the primary earners or
“contribute substantially” to family income.
Similarly, a Reuters report from 2018 found that the average income of the bottom 40 percent of workers in the United States was $11,600.
A recent study by Trust for America’s Health found that in 2017 “more than 152,000 Americans died from alcohol- and drug-induced fatalities and suicide.” This was highest number ever recorded and more than double the figure for 1999. Among those in their 20s and early 30s, the prime working life age, drug deaths have increased more than 400 percent in the last 20 years.
At the other pole of society, the Dow Jones Industrial index is now double what it was at its peak in 2007, prior to the implosion of the financial system. Between March 2009 and today, the Dow has risen from 6,500 to over 29,000. The stock market, buttressed by central bank and government policy, has become the central instrument for funneling wealth from the bottom of society to the top. As a result, the top 10 percent of society now owns about 70 percent of all wealth, whereas the bottom 50 percent has, effectively, nothing.
In the midst of this orgy of wealth accumulation at the very top of society, every demand of workers for jobs, decent pay, education, housing, health care and pensions is met with the universal response: “There is no money.” Hundreds of thousands of teachers have struck over the past two years to demand the restoration of funds cut from the public schools and substantial increases in pay and benefits. None of their demands have been met. The same applies to auto workers who struck for 40 days last fall to demand an end to two-tier pay systems and the defense of jobs.
JPMorgan’s $36.4 billion profit in 2019 is more than half the education budget of the US federal government.
Meanwhile, Americans are deeper in debt to JPMorgan and the other banks than at any time in history. Collective consumer debt in the United States approached $14 trillion last year. Credit card debt has surpassed $1 trillion for the first time. Auto debt is at $1.3 trillion and mortgage debt is now $9.4 trillion. Student loan debt has increased the fastest, surging from $500 billion in 2006 to $1.6 trillion today.
These are the conditions, rooted in the historical bankruptcy and crisis of the capitalist system, that have sparked a global upsurge in the class struggle and the growth of anti-capitalist and pro-socialist sentiment. The past year has seen a dramatic expansion of working class struggle that is only a glimpse of what is to come. India, Hong Kong, Mexico, the United States, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, Iraq, France, Chile and Brazil are only some of the places where mass struggles have erupted.
What is becoming increasingly clear to hundreds of millions of people around the world is that the social problems confronting humanity in the 21st century—poverty, debt, disease, global warming, war, fascism, the assault on democratic rights—cannot be solved so long as this parasitic and oligarchical financial elite continues to rule. The turn is to the American and international working class—to unite, take power and seize control of the wealth which it produces to ensure peace, prosperity and equality for all people.
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