Sunday, May 10, 2020

KING OF FORECLOSURES STEVEN MNUCHIN SAYS GOLDMAN SACHS MAY EXPERIENCE ECONOMIC DAMAGE WITHOUT BIGGER BAILOUTS FOR BANKSTERS

TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA

Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart


TRUMP'S GOLDMAN SACHS CRONY


Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008



Mnuchin: ‘Permanent Economic Damage’ if Country Doesn’t Reopen

PAM KEY
0
1:17

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday,” America could suffer “permanent economic damage,” if we do not reopen the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked about the danger of reopening the economy too soon, Mnuchin said, “If we do this carefully working with the governors, I don’t think there’s a considerable risk. As a matter of fact, I think there’s a considerable risk of not reopening. You’re talking about what would be permanent economic damage to the American public.”
He added, “We are going to reopen in a very thoughtful way that gets people back to work safely, that has them social distance. One of the things we’ve seen, Chris, is a lot of businesses can do telework. Not ever, but he has to come back into the office at the same time, but people will be able to go into stores. Some of them will have reservations when they go in, but businesses will be able to reopen. I think, as you know, certain parts of the country had very devastating impacts, like New York and certain parts of the country didn’t. And this is all being monitored very, very carefully.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN




OBAMA CRONY DONORS 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.

 

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz

Illustration: Joe Darrow
Steve Mnuchin knows his way around a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200 million. That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good graces of a Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of the party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White House.
Thus far, the COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip. Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund.
Which is to say: We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this one.
Of course, it wasn’t really God who opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the profiteering of all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the financial crisis, then sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty contracts out those jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an economic system that keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from financial ruin — and another tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.
From the first capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel collective prosperity.
Mnuchin’s career and the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises. In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk, high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so invested in it.
Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission, its wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been harder for Mnuchin to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher still. The former would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the latter mere fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic sycophancy — and the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.
At Goldman, Mnuchin’s colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).
After Mnuchin paid his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.
Early in his career, Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this game before.”
He played it like a natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid. Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock-full of toxic assets — the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.
This was not enough to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.
Purchasing IndyMac secured OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve: Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and backdating documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed on the first count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the California attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the second and requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s unclear exactly why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request. But as the investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an entity with OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large sums of the public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government could afford to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state could hold all its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.
In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of the future GOP nominee’s campaign.
This decision baffled some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in August 2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end up in the administration.”
Mnuchin is the last of the “adults in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.” Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill. “Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand” devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”
The soft skills Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.
But this is still a Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health systems and services could abruptly be suspended.
Most of all, the legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management for personal profit.
The White House’s next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a pandemic.
Nevertheless, could we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90 billion in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for instance, the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American Enterprise Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic risk-takers.

Mnuchin Courts Goldman Advisers to Oversee $200 Billion Bailout

By 
Saleha Mohsin
 and 
Sridhar Natarajan
 
U.S Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is seeking to tap executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms to help oversee more than $200 billion in bailout packages that the Trump administration is proposing to ease the economic damage of the coronavirus outbreak, people familiar with the matter said.
Mnuchin’s team is considering executives with broad experience to help administer loans to airlines, hotels and other industries suffering as the virus shuts down parts of the economy, the people said. The government is also considering taking equity stakes in some companies in exchange for aid, a program that financiers and bankers could administer.
Spokesmen for the Treasury didn’t reply to a request for comment. Goldman declined to comment.
The White House and Democrats are negotiating with Senate Republicans over a GOP draft stimulus bill that would create the bailout program. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he’d like to hold a vote on Monday.
During the last global financial crisis more than a decade ago, Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner brought in additional staff, including prominent Wall Street figures, to help manage the bailouts of U.S. banks and auto companies.

Fed Expertise

Mnuchin is also looking for expert guidance as the Treasury Department works closely with the Federal Reserve. Mnuchin this week authorized the Fed to launch four separate emergency lending programs to keep cash flowing into the U.S. economy.
The Fed is expected to launch more crisis-level programs that will require authorization and help from the Treasury Department, which would have to group individual companies in travel-related industries together to make them eligible for Fed assistance. President Donald Trump has already singled out Boeing Co. as needing government assistance in some form.
Mnuchin’s Treasury Department is short-staffed. It has more than half a dozen vacancies in its senior political ranks. The domestic finance department, which oversees the $16 trillion Treasuries market amd the Financial Stability Oversight Board, has no undersecretary.
Deputy Secretary Justin Muzinich has been overseeing the unit since June when Craig Phillips departed as a counselor. Muzinich is also serving as acting undersecretary of the Treasury’s sanctions unit.

‘Government Sachs’ Reunites When Mnuchin Dines With Goldman Pals

By 
Max Abelson
 and 
Sridhar Natarajan
Picture this: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at a dinner table in New York, surrounded by Hank Paulson, Jon Corzine and Gary Cohn, along with David Solomon. It’s not a Bernie Sanders nightmare -- just the Goldman Sachs alumni dinner.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and governments worldwide have a long history of swapping senior leaders, earning the bank the nickname “Government Sachs.” But the firm often takes pains not to look too chummy with its friends in high places.
That’s why some Goldman veterans said they were surprised last month when Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, who has led the administration’s efforts to reshape financial regulation, attended the firm’s annual dinner for retired partners in New York’s Hudson Yards. While sitting in public office, especially in positions that allow them to oversee Wall Street, former executives have tended to avoid the soiree.
Mnuchin requested clearance to attend the dinner and received it, according to a spokesman for the Treasury Department, who said he was there in a personal capacity. A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment.
The Goldman alumni dinner is less a college reunion and more a way to maintain ties between executives who’ve moved on to some of the most powerful spots in banking, private equity, hedge funds and government.
Mnuchin, who left the firm in 2002, was one of the dinner guests who’ve helped shape American policy in the 21st Century. Paulson was Treasury Secretary at the depths of the financial crisis, Corzine was a U.S. Senator and governor of New Jersey, and Cohn was the first director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council. They were joined by Solomon, the bank’s chief executive officer, and Lloyd Blankfein, his predecessor.
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both senators, are among the Democratic presidential candidates who have criticized the bank. Trump recruited the firm’s veterans for his administration even after one of his 2016 campaign ads showed Blankfein’s face as the candidate’s voice warned about a corrupt global power machine.

Then Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose main purpose was to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.

 

Coronavirus deaths in US nearing 4,000 as Trump washes his hands of responsibility

 
The coronavirus killed at least 812 people in the United States Tuesday, the highest death toll since the pandemic began, while nearly 25,000 new cases were reported, bringing the total number infected to more than 188,000, the largest number in the world by far.
Along with the unprecedented scale of the infection, its sheer speed is staggering. On March 10, there were only 1,000 reported coronavirus infections in the United States. Three weeks later, it is nearing 200 times that level. Another such three weeks would see 40 million people infected in the United States.
The US death toll has not yet reached the level of Italy (12,428) or Spain (8,464), but that is only a matter of days. And White House officials continue to escalate their projections of the total number of deaths in a “best-case” scenario, setting the figure at a staggering 240,000, with Trump himself hinting that the total could be double that.
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, March 13, 2020, in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
Four countries—Italy, Spain, the US and France—have now seen more deaths than China, where the epidemic first broke out in the city of Wuhan last December. After 3,305 deaths, China claims to have largely suppressed the outbreak through systematic testing, contact tracing and quarantining of those exposed to the coronavirus.
The American media and the Trump administration continually describe efforts to counteract the coronavirus as a war, where the frontlines are being drawn in emergency rooms and ICUs throughout the United States, and especially in the New York metropolitan area, where half of all COVID-19 cases are located. On Tuesday the death toll in New York City itself hit 1,096, and 10,000 people were hospitalized, with 2,700 of them requiring ventilators.
But in this war, under the incompetent “commander-in-chief” Trump and his hapless lieutenants among the state governors, the troops are being sent into battle haphazardly, without weapons, and largely without regard for their own safety. Healthcare workers lack sufficient personal protection equipment, and they are being infected and incapacitated at an alarming rate, with many deaths.
In Spain, the healthcare workers accounted for 14 percent of the country’s cases, while in Italy, they accounted for 10 percent. The same process is under way in the United States. NPR reported that 345 employees of Boston’s four largest hospitals have tested positive for COVID-19. In New York City, hundreds of workers have fallen ill. At Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, 50 percent of the intensive-care staff have been infected.
The result is that in addition to the shortages of hospital rooms, ICU beds, masks, and ventilators, there is a growing shortage of medical staff who can cope with the increasing volume of patients seeking medical attention.
Meanwhile, hospitals and healthcare systems are threatening doctors and nurses who make their concerns over working conditions public. An emergency room physician, Dr. Ming Lin, in Washington state, was fired because he gave an interview to a newspaper complaining about inadequate protective equipment. Ruth Schubert, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Nurses Association, told Bloomberg, “Hospitals are muzzling nurses and other healthcare workers in an attempt to preserve their image.” Nurses who have spoken under conditions of anonymity with WSW S reporters said that they have been told they would be fired if they talked to the media.
In some cases, state governors have made statements that amount to a confession of bankruptcy. On CNN Live, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland said, “We are all trying to get more testing, but this is a pinch point on testing, on supplies, and materials, and PPE and ventilators. Everybody in America knows we don’t have enough of these things … and without the tests we are really flying blind. We are guessing about where the outbreaks are, what the infection rates in the hospitals are, and the mortality rates.”
However, the Trump White House manages to combine moronic expressions of optimism (largely in the form of testimonials to Trump’s personal genius) with ever more ominous declarations that the death toll in the United States will reach six or even seven figures.
On Sunday, White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said that 100,000 to 200,000 deaths was a midrange figure that could be substantially lowered if proper measures were taken. On Monday, White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that 100,000 to 200,000 was now the floor, the best-case scenario if everything went perfectly, while Trump himself declared that a death toll in that range would represent “a good job” by his administration.
On Tuesday, Fauci and Birx presented a slide show to a press briefing indicating projections that without severe mitigation, total deaths due to COVID-19 could reach 1.2 million to 2.2 million. Birx admitted that even with strict mitigation efforts throughout the month of April, the number of deaths could range as high as 240,000. At the peak of such a “best-case” outcome, 4,000 to 5,000 people would be dying every day.
Shocking as such figures are, even more outrageous is the blithe indifference displayed by Trump personally and his closest aides to the likely results of their own policy of refusing to conduct a serious struggle to contain the pandemic, not merely mitigate it.
Trump himself, towards the end of the press “briefing” that lasted more than two hours—a clear indication, in and of itself, that the White House antivirus campaign is an exercise in political propaganda and media manipulation—made comments that amounted to a self-indictment for criminal negligence on a monumental scale.
“We’re going through the worst thing this country has probably ever seen,” he said. “Look, we had the Civil War. We lost 600,000 people, right? Had we not done anything, we would have lost many times that, but we did something, so it’s going to be hopefully way under that. But you know, we lose more here potentially than you lose in world wars as a country.”
Given that the US death toll in the Second World War was 405,000, Trump is saying, in his semiliterate and meandering way, that the US death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic could well be between 400,000 and 600,000.
There was remarkably little push-back from the journalists of the corporate media who appeared to be in a daze. While several media outlets had taken note that on Tuesday morning, more Americans had died from coronavirus than were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not even this comparison, inadequate as it is, was made.
The US government’s response is best characterized as malign neglect to a pandemic that was both foreseen and preventable. With complete indifference to the fate of the people, the Trump administration’s primary focus was on ensuring the financial markets were protected. Only when the markets began to implode did the government’s machinery begin to churn to prevent its complete collapse. Everything else was deemed an afterthought.
First, on March 3, the Federal Reserve slashed rates by 0.5 
percent, the most significant cut since the 2008 financial crisis. 
On March 12, the Federal Reserve added $1.5 trillion of liquidity
 into the banking systems by massively expanding short-term 
loans to the banks to keep money markets stable and provide 
banks with cash in hand. When the markets continued to 
plummet on March 15, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a
full percentage point down to almost 0.00 percent. They also 
resumed quantitative easing by purchasing $500 billion in 
treasuries and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities. 
Then Congress rushed through a record 
$2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose 
main purpose was to provide the Treasury 
and the Federal Reserve the necessary 
authority to bail out corporate America 
and Wall Street.
Comparing the gargantuan and energetic efforts to save the markets with the slapdash, indifferent and grossly incompetent actions in relation to public health, it is easy to see what are the priorities of the American financial aristocracy.
But there is another force to be heard from in this crisis—the working class. Instacart, Amazon, and Whole Foods workers have initiated strike actions against forced work under unsafe conditions. Workers at General Electric have protested, demanding their company begin producing ventilators. Many other workers are rebelling against being forced to remain on the job without protective gear.
As the crisis escalates, the decisive question is for the working class to develop a conscious political response, recognizing that it must fight the capitalist system as a whole, based on a socialist program.

TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested administration.

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


BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY

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

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




Gary Cohn: ‘I Am a Globalist 

 

— I Believe We Live in a 

 

Globalized World’



 18 Dec 2018211
0:54
Former President Donald Trump economic adviser and 
former Goldman Sachs COO Gary Cohn, when asked 
Tuesday on CBS’s “This Morning” about Trump calling him a “globalist” and if it was an anti-Semitic remark, proudly proclaimed himself as a globalist.

“I’m absolutely not offended by the term ‘globalist’ as I am a 
globalist,” Cohn stated. “I believe we live in a globalized 
world. I think the United States is an integral part of a 
globalized world. And we have to figure out how to live as a 
good citizen in a globalized earth — so do the Chinese, so do 
the Russians, so do the Middle Eastern countries.”

“We are globalized. We cannot change that fact,” he 
concluded.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent


CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?


The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.

Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.


TRY TO SEPARATE THE CLINTON MAFIA AND DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES FROM THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS!

Can’t be done!


NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations nightmare, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation, helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in practices that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.


GET THIS BOOK!

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

NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations nightmare, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation, helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in practices that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.


.

Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.


It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office:  the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn

"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."

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

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

 BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS JOHN McCAIN

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL

DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg

Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.

 Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily News analysis of campaign records shows.




“The administration has been pushing hard for a 

settlement among state attorneys general, the nation's five 

largest mortgage servicers — Bank of America 


Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. — and certain federal agencies.”

 

TRY TO SEPARATE THE CLINTON MAFIA AND DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES FROM THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS!

Can’t be done!


NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations nightmare, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation, helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in practices that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.


*
“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”

 

TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA

Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart


Bailout of US corporations expands while workers see little relief

Two weeks after the passage of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic corporate bailout bill, grotesquely misnamed the CARES Act, it is clear that it was only the initial shot in the funneling of countless trillions of dollars to the corporate-financial aristocracy that rules America.
While billions have already flowed to the corporations and banks, the limited provisions of the act that were touted by both parties as a boon to working people hit by the shutdown of much of the economy have yet to kick in, and for millions they likely never will.
The act includes $454 billion as a Treasury 
backstop to enable the Federal Reserve to 
provide some $4 trillion in cheap loans to 
major corporations and banks, meaning the 
real scale of the bailout—thus far—is more 
than $6 trillion.
The vast bulk of the money allocated goes to covering any losses suffered by major corporations and fueling a new surge in the stock market. That it has succeeded, at least for the present, in lifting the markets is seen in more than 10 percent surge in the Dow over the past several trading days. This has occurred in the midst of an ever-rising toll of death and suffering from the pandemic and grim projections by bankers and economists of a depression-level contraction in the economy and a catastrophic growth of unemployment.
The expanding scale of the bailout and euphoria on the financial markets, alongside the economic and social catastrophe facing the broad mass of the population, demonstrates that the interests of the ruling class and those of the working class are diametrically opposed. The response of the ruling elite and its two political parties to the crisis has from the onset been single-mindedly focused on defending the economic interests of corporate-financial oligarchy, no matter the cost in human life.
In just the last several weeks, the Federal Reserve Board has announced at least 12 major measures to rescue the financial markets and backstop big business. These include:
·         Two emergency interest rate cuts, bringing the benchmark lending rate back down to near-zero
·         A pledge to purchase at least $500 billion in Treasury securities and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities and to continue the program for “as long as needed”
·         Nearly unlimited sums in short-term loans to 25 large financial institutions that control the market for repurchase agreements, or repos, including $1.5 trillion in the days following the announcement
·         Foreign exchange swap lines, the purchase of short-term loans to US corporations in the commercial paper market, short-term loans to 24 large financial institutions, and, for the first time ever, direct purchases of corporate bonds and direct loans to corporations.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Jean Boivin, head of BlackRock Investment Institute, as saying, “The amount of measures taken in a short amount of time is surreal and unprecedented.”
“It’s kind of crazy how they’ve almost done as much in this week as they did in several months in 2008,” JPMorgan’s chief US economist Michael Feroli said last month. “Now they do have the advantage of just being able to dust off [former Fed Chairman] Bernanke’s playbook.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell gave a blanket 
guarantee of unlimited funds to corporate 
America, telling the “Today” show this week, 
“Where credit is not flowing, we have the 
ability in this unique circumstance to step in 
and provide those loans.”
Now both the Trump administration and the Democrats have committed to provide an additional $250 billion to the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program.” That is the Orwellian name given by the two parties to the $350 billion program ostensibly established to provide government-backed loans to small businesses, many of which face bankruptcy as a result of the shutdown of much of the economy, and save the jobs of their workers over the next eight weeks. (That this is farcically inadequate, even if implemented in full, in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, is self-evident).
The program is designed to provide a windfall for the big banks, which actually extend and administer the loans that are backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). This ensures that Wall Street receives billions of dollars in fees and other charges.
On the eve of the official launching of the program last Friday, the law was amended, under pressure from the banks, to double the interest rate from 0.5 percent to 1.0 percent. Now the banks are demanding that the Fed buy any loans they extend to small businesses so as to remove them from their balance sheets. This will allow them to more freely engage in financial speculation and parasitic activities such as stock buybacks.
Moreover, the great bulk of the money will go not to mom-and-pop groceries, gas stations or eateries, but rather to large corporations that are included in the program. Thus, for example, the program was amended to include billion-dollar restaurant and hotel chains.
Small businesses desperate for cash are finding it difficult if not impossible to actually find lenders who will provide the loans, even if their applications are approved by the SBA. Banks, intent on maximizing profits, are turning down applications right and left.

Citigroup is refusing to participate. Bank of America is not accepting applications from companies that have borrowed from other banks. Wells Fargo says it has already reached “capacity.”
Hundreds of thousands of businesses have applied under the program, but to date only a handful have received any money.
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are pressing the Trump administration to expand the $50 billion bailout of the airlines included in the CARES Act. This is, supposedly, another “jobs-saving” effort. Delta, for its part, has already laid off thousands of its employees.
There are no real restrictions in the law on how the corporations use the money they are given by the government. No one should doubt that the airline carriers, which spent some $16 billion over the past three years to purchase their own stock—in order to further enrich their top executives and major investors by driving up the stock price—will use their bailout money to do more of the same.
The Trump administration, for its part, is reportedly considering such additional “stimulus” measures as a payroll tax cut—which would starve Social Security of funding—a capital gains tax cut, 50-year Treasury bonds and a waiver that would relieve businesses of liability for employees who contract the coronavirus on the job.
Trump has moved to negate even the token congressional oversight of the bailout program mandated in the law. On Monday, he named a White House lawyer and Trump loyalist, Brian Miller, as inspector general of the Treasury Department’s $350 billion small business (“Payroll Protection Program”), and on Tuesday he removed Glenn Fine as head of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, tasked with monitoring the entire $2.2 trillion program. Trump replaced him with a “senior policy adviser” at US Customs and Border Protection, Jason Abend.
Workers are finding that the promised relief from the bailout law—which accounts for only a small fraction of the total cost of the measure—is uncertain if not entirely illusory.
The New York Times reported Monday that many Americans will not receive the promised relief check of $1,200, plus $500 for each child, until August or September. As many as 10 million low-income, childless adults who are eligible for the stimulus payment program may receive nothing because they have not filed tax returns. Millions more, including undocumented workers, prisoners, students and adult dependents are excluded.
As for the $250 billion expanded jobless benefit part of the law, which is supposed to extend state benefits for 13 weeks and add $600 a week in federal funds for up to four months, workers are finding it all but impossible to apply. Multiple state unemployment websites have crashed under the crush of millions of applicants, and scenes of hundreds of workers lining up, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, to apply in person are proliferating around the country.






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