DO
A GOOGLE FOR BARACK OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTER CRONY JAMIE DIMON
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA!
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.”
"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."
Bank Shares Slide on
Reports of Rampant Money Laundering
3
Shares of some major banks are tumbling before the market open
Monday following a report alleging those including JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard
Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to profit
from illicit dealings with disreputable people and criminal networks despite
being previously fined for similar actions.
According to the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists, leaked government documents show that
the banks continued moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned
they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with
mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.
The consortium says the
documents indicate that JPMorgan moved money for people and companies tied to
the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela, and the Ukraine.
The bank also processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade for
Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump,
according to the documents, which are known as the FinCEN Files.
JPMorgan’s stock declined 4.4
percent in premarket trading.
The consortium’s investigation
found the documents identify more than $2 trillion in transactions between 1999
and 2017 that were flagged by financial institutions’ internal compliance
officers as possible money laundering or other criminal activity — including
$514 billion at JPMorgan and $1.3 trillion at Deutsche Bank. Shares of Deutsche
Bank dropped 7.7 percent.
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
PAUL
ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the
"biggest corporate
socialist in America today" in a recent ad.
He may have a point — beyond what he intended.
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.
Paul Adler, Professor of
Management and Organization, Sociology and Environmental Studies, University of Southern
California
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
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.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-arent-wall-street-criminals.html
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
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!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html
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.
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. A recent study by the
Brookings
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.
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
PAUL
ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
This article was originally published
on The
Conversation.
Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the
"biggest
corporate socialist in America today" in a recent ad.
He may have a point — beyond what he intended.
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.
Paul
Adler, Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology and
Environmental Studies, University
of Southern California
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.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-arent-wall-street-criminals.html
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
JOSEPH
PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images.
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:
· FICC sales & trading revenue: $3.73 billion versus $3.67 billion
expected
· Equity sales & trading revenue: $1.74 billion versus $1.73 billion
expected
· 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
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/02/obama-and-his-banks-their-profits.html
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.
Former adviser to President Obama and
investor Robert Wolf told Politico that
the financial industry has changed over the last few decades and that Wall
Street-types are vastly more aligned with the Democrat establishment than
Trump’s GOP.
“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.”
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are
those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have
been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least
nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real
estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech
has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his
administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the
pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright
criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout.
His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from
the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living
standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“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.”
He was also
chosen by the Obama administration as its “pay czar” to ensure that the heads
of bailed-out Wall Street banks received multi-million-dollar bonuses in the
wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Consequently, while pushing a legislative agenda of public
bail-outs, the Obama Administration maintained a secret program of
multi-trillion dollar loans, including billions at below market interest rates.
The principal recipients of the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America,
Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan
Stanley. JONATHAN EMORD
The fix is in: Kenneth Feinberg to
oversee payouts to Boeing crash victims
Boeing’s appointment last week of Kenneth Feinberg to
administer the aerospace giant’s $50 million Community Investment Fund to
compensate the communities affected by the two 737 Max 8 crashes and the
resulting 346 deaths leaves little doubt that the account will be used to
defend the airplane manufacturer’s multi-billion-dollar profits.
Feinberg played a similar role when he was selected in July
2019 to head the $50 million Boeing Financial Assistance Fund. In that role, he
oversaw payments of a mere $144,500 to each family that lost a loved one on
either the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 outside of Jakarta,
Indonesia or Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019 near Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
In total, Boeing has pledged only $100 million to
compensate the crash victims’ families and neighborhoods for putting their
friends and relatives on the deadly Max 8 jets. For comparison, the company
reported revenues of $76.6 billion in 2019 and has pledged to pay airlines at
least $5 billion for their lost profits resulting from the two crashes. To
date, no executives at the company or regulators at the Federal Aviation
Administration, which were all aware of the deadly flaws in the Max 8, have
been prosecuted or even charged for the murder of the 346 men, women and
children who were killed.
The selection of Feinberg to oversee both funds was
approved by Boeing’s executives with good reason. As Wall Street’s preeminent
corporate “fixer,” he has repeatedly been called upon to protect the interests
of the country’s corporate and political elite. In recent times, he has chaired
an escrow account to minimize compensation to victims of the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks in the US. He was also chosen by the Obama administration
as its “pay czar” to ensure that the heads of bailed-out Wall Street banks
received multi-million-dollar bonuses in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Feinberg’s chief responsibility will be to ensure that
whatever money Boeing does eventually pay out is vetted in such a way that the
corporation will ultimately be absolved for manufacturing lethal airplanes.
While Tim Keating, the Boeing executive who is overseeing the funds, has stated
that Boeing is “empower[ing] the [crash victims’] families to decide how to
allocate these funds,” a press release on the Community Investment Fund makes
clear that “governments and other interested parties” will have the final say.
This is not the first time Feinberg’s services have been
employed to minimize damage to major manufacturers in the wake of their
criminal negligence. He was hired by General Motors in 2015 after it was
exposed that the automaker hid an ignition switch fault in low-end GM vehicles
that killed at least 169 people. Under rules set by the Obama administration,
Feinberg rejected 90 percent of the claims submitted against GM for the
company’s criminal negligence, saving GM several billion dollars in liability
costs.
The fixer is playing a similar role for Boeing. The payouts
that Boeing gave directly to its victims’ families amounted to less than what
ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg averaged in a month. The company is also using the
fund, and Feinberg’s skills, in an attempt to stave off other lawsuits. So far
only 50 families have come forward with additional claims, which Boeing has
settled out of court for $1.2 million for each life lost. If Feinberg is able
to convince the other 296 families that they should accept Boeing’s payout and
not seek further damages, it will save Boeing an estimated $355.2 million.
Other cases in which Feinberg has saved giant corporations
or the federal government hundreds of millions or billions of dollars include
suits by Vietnam citizens and US soldiers against Dow and Monsanto for
supplying Agent Orange to the American military, and ensuring that BP paid only
a quarter of what it originally claimed it would pay to people devastated by
the ecological catastrophe caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Feinberg, who emerged as a political figure as chief of
staff for Senator Ted Kennedy in the late 1970s, was also appointed trustee of
the victim compensation fund for the notoriously dangerous Dalkon Shield, a
birth control device made by A.H. Robins. It was established that Robins knew
of the dangers the device posed to women’s health, including causing death, and
suppressed and destroyed such information where and whenever it could.
The Dalkon Shield ultimately caused life-threatening pelvic
infections in more than 200,000 women, with side effects including complete
hysterectomy, chronic pelvic pain and/or permanent infertility. Feinberg
ensured that each woman injured would receive money from the fund only if she
forfeited her right to sue outside of the settlement. Those who accepted the
deal received an average of $725.
Boeing is eager to receive similar windfalls. Over the past
year, Boeing’s total stock value has fallen more than $72 billion. It has been
forced to pay nearly $19 billion as a result of the grounding of its 737 Max
fleet, including compensation to airlines for canceled flights and maintenance
costs.
Feinberg is being used to minimize the money going to the
company’s victims and to silence criticism so the aerospace giant can get back
to business as usual as soon as possible.
It is still unclear, however, when or even if the Max 8
will ever fly again. Since its grounding last March, a steady stream of
internal leaks, news reports, interviews with former employees and
congressional hearings have provided a mountain of evidence that the plane is
fundamentally unsafe and should remain grounded indefinitely.
Just last week, in a report to the FAA, Boeing revealed
that it found trash and debris in the fuel tanks of 35 of 50 inspected Max 8s
that were being reviewed in preparation for the plane’s reintroduction into
service. Objects that were discovered in the fuel tanks included tools, rags,
shoe covers and other detritus, all of which can cause fires, block fuel lines
and trigger other potentially catastrophic problems.
The planes that were reviewed are among the nearly 400 Max
8s that were made after the jets’ grounding, which are all now being inspected.
According to company spokesman Bernard Choi, “It’s still undecided,” if Boeing
will mandate the inspection of the other 385 jets that have been delivered to
customers. He claimed, despite the past year’s evidence to the contrary, that,
“Obviously, we’ll do what’s right for safety.”
Both Boeing and the FAA also missed a fault in the
electrical wiring related to the aircraft’s horizontal wing, which can create a
short and cause an unrecoverable, uncontrolled dive similar to the Lion Air and
Ethiopian Airlines crashes. Boeing argues that because the same wiring
configuration was authorized for use on the older 737 NG model, it shouldn’t
need to inspect the wiring for the Max 8, basing itself on safety regulations
from the early 1990s.
It is likely, however, that the FAA will force Boeing to
resolve the fault, pushing back the relaunch of the Max 8 by months, in order
to relieve pressure from other regulatory agencies, particularly the European
Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Even if the FAA approves the Max 8 to fly, it is
now a given that other countries will not allow the Max 8 to fly unless also
approved by the EASA, meaning that the Max 8 must satisfy two sets of
regulators if Boeing is to have any hope of pushing its flagship aircraft into
international aviation market
OBAMA-BIDEN AND THEIR
BANKSTERS:
The Rise of Wall Street
Thievery
How
corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the
middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from
the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a
tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of
respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while
20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32
percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these
mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that
bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that
corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the
corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal
political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent
supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly
control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was
declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of
the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build
significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social
contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and
Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other,
corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods
like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the
rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious
resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a
return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological
project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an
article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its
Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen,
whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for
blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that
particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can
achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism
that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United
States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had
prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic
boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the
lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and
argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent
problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries
like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When
that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was
clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and
all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection
Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of
those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social
contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a
functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent
standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story
through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn.
Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on
personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it
was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In
other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral
picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were
freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal
social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their
factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even
destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the
hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off
financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the
General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago
Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success.
“What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made
by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann
writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of
steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top
Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their
companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their
companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at
bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men.
Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by
devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry
as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind
of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a
return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated
to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad
guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who
has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad
people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions
for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about
lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United
States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech
in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is
just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing,
then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal
society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers
dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the
one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few
ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by
outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New
Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United
States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.”
But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States
like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the
U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality,
poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the
real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S.
welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American
people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare
eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below
the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens
mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be
without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street
pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people
noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence
unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the
price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a
splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance
public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the
Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the
Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
Before
his first day in office Barack Obama had sucked in more bribes from banksters
than any president in history.
During
the economic meltdown caused by Obama’s crony banksters, and Obama’s first two
years in office, banks made more money than eight years under pro-bankster
administration of George Bush.
Both
of Obama’s Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were chosen by the
banks because they were from law firms that had long protected big banks from
their victims.
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing
us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of
millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are
those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have
been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least
nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real
estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech
has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his
administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the
pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright
criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar
bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in
history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the
living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“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.”
Joe
Biden, the walking moron, was selected by Obama also because of his ties and
servitude to big banks!
OBOMB'S
CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE
THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN
HOME
VALUES AND NOW THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR
MORE WITH THE BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!
Decades of
decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide.
While the rich
accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have
been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of
the population
took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017,
that fell to only
61 percent.
NO
PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK
OBAMA!
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.”
NO ONE SERVED HIS CRONY BANKSTERS MORE THAN LAWYER ERIC
HOLDER AND KENNETH FEINBERG. THE BANKS HAVE BEEN MIGHTY GENEROUS WITH THE
OBOMB, WHAT WITH ALL THESE SPEECH FEES AT $500k A WACK!
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.
Former adviser to President Obama and
investor Robert Wolf told Politico that
the financial industry has changed over the last few decades and that Wall
Street-types are vastly more aligned with the Democrat establishment than
Trump’s GOP.
“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.”
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are
those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have
been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least
nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real
estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech
has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his
administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the
pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright
criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout.
His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from
the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living
standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“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.”
He was also
chosen by the Obama administration as its “pay czar” to ensure that the heads
of bailed-out Wall Street banks received multi-million-dollar bonuses in the
wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Consequently, while pushing a legislative agenda of public
bail-outs, the Obama Administration maintained a secret program of
multi-trillion dollar loans, including billions at below market interest rates.
The principal recipients of the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America,
Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan
Stanley. JONATHAN EMORD
The fix is in: Kenneth Feinberg to
oversee payouts to Boeing crash victims
Boeing’s appointment last week of Kenneth Feinberg to
administer the aerospace giant’s $50 million Community Investment Fund to
compensate the communities affected by the two 737 Max 8 crashes and the
resulting 346 deaths leaves little doubt that the account will be used to
defend the airplane manufacturer’s multi-billion-dollar profits.
Feinberg played a similar role when he was selected in July
2019 to head the $50 million Boeing Financial Assistance Fund. In that role, he
oversaw payments of a mere $144,500 to each family that lost a loved one on
either the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 outside of Jakarta,
Indonesia or Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019 near Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
In total, Boeing has pledged only $100 million to
compensate the crash victims’ families and neighborhoods for putting their
friends and relatives on the deadly Max 8 jets. For comparison, the company
reported revenues of $76.6 billion in 2019 and has pledged to pay airlines at
least $5 billion for their lost profits resulting from the two crashes. To
date, no executives at the company or regulators at the Federal Aviation
Administration, which were all aware of the deadly flaws in the Max 8, have
been prosecuted or even charged for the murder of the 346 men, women and
children who were killed.
The selection of Feinberg to oversee both funds was
approved by Boeing’s executives with good reason. As Wall Street’s preeminent
corporate “fixer,” he has repeatedly been called upon to protect the interests
of the country’s corporate and political elite. In recent times, he has chaired
an escrow account to minimize compensation to victims of the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks in the US. He was also chosen by the Obama administration
as its “pay czar” to ensure that the heads of bailed-out Wall Street banks
received multi-million-dollar bonuses in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Feinberg’s chief responsibility will be to ensure that
whatever money Boeing does eventually pay out is vetted in such a way that the
corporation will ultimately be absolved for manufacturing lethal airplanes.
While Tim Keating, the Boeing executive who is overseeing the funds, has stated
that Boeing is “empower[ing] the [crash victims’] families to decide how to
allocate these funds,” a press release on the Community Investment Fund makes
clear that “governments and other interested parties” will have the final say.
This is not the first time Feinberg’s services have been
employed to minimize damage to major manufacturers in the wake of their
criminal negligence. He was hired by General Motors in 2015 after it was
exposed that the automaker hid an ignition switch fault in low-end GM vehicles
that killed at least 169 people. Under rules set by the Obama administration,
Feinberg rejected 90 percent of the claims submitted against GM for the
company’s criminal negligence, saving GM several billion dollars in liability
costs.
The fixer is playing a similar role for Boeing. The payouts
that Boeing gave directly to its victims’ families amounted to less than what
ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg averaged in a month. The company is also using the
fund, and Feinberg’s skills, in an attempt to stave off other lawsuits. So far
only 50 families have come forward with additional claims, which Boeing has
settled out of court for $1.2 million for each life lost. If Feinberg is able
to convince the other 296 families that they should accept Boeing’s payout and
not seek further damages, it will save Boeing an estimated $355.2 million.
Other cases in which Feinberg has saved giant corporations
or the federal government hundreds of millions or billions of dollars include
suits by Vietnam citizens and US soldiers against Dow and Monsanto for
supplying Agent Orange to the American military, and ensuring that BP paid only
a quarter of what it originally claimed it would pay to people devastated by
the ecological catastrophe caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Feinberg, who emerged as a political figure as chief of
staff for Senator Ted Kennedy in the late 1970s, was also appointed trustee of
the victim compensation fund for the notoriously dangerous Dalkon Shield, a
birth control device made by A.H. Robins. It was established that Robins knew
of the dangers the device posed to women’s health, including causing death, and
suppressed and destroyed such information where and whenever it could.
The Dalkon Shield ultimately caused life-threatening pelvic
infections in more than 200,000 women, with side effects including complete
hysterectomy, chronic pelvic pain and/or permanent infertility. Feinberg
ensured that each woman injured would receive money from the fund only if she
forfeited her right to sue outside of the settlement. Those who accepted the
deal received an average of $725.
Boeing is eager to receive similar windfalls. Over the past
year, Boeing’s total stock value has fallen more than $72 billion. It has been
forced to pay nearly $19 billion as a result of the grounding of its 737 Max
fleet, including compensation to airlines for canceled flights and maintenance
costs.
Feinberg is being used to minimize the money going to the
company’s victims and to silence criticism so the aerospace giant can get back
to business as usual as soon as possible.
It is still unclear, however, when or even if the Max 8
will ever fly again. Since its grounding last March, a steady stream of
internal leaks, news reports, interviews with former employees and
congressional hearings have provided a mountain of evidence that the plane is
fundamentally unsafe and should remain grounded indefinitely.
Just last week, in a report to the FAA, Boeing revealed
that it found trash and debris in the fuel tanks of 35 of 50 inspected Max 8s
that were being reviewed in preparation for the plane’s reintroduction into
service. Objects that were discovered in the fuel tanks included tools, rags,
shoe covers and other detritus, all of which can cause fires, block fuel lines
and trigger other potentially catastrophic problems.
The planes that were reviewed are among the nearly 400 Max
8s that were made after the jets’ grounding, which are all now being inspected.
According to company spokesman Bernard Choi, “It’s still undecided,” if Boeing
will mandate the inspection of the other 385 jets that have been delivered to
customers. He claimed, despite the past year’s evidence to the contrary, that,
“Obviously, we’ll do what’s right for safety.”
Both Boeing and the FAA also missed a fault in the
electrical wiring related to the aircraft’s horizontal wing, which can create a
short and cause an unrecoverable, uncontrolled dive similar to the Lion Air and
Ethiopian Airlines crashes. Boeing argues that because the same wiring
configuration was authorized for use on the older 737 NG model, it shouldn’t
need to inspect the wiring for the Max 8, basing itself on safety regulations
from the early 1990s.
It is likely, however, that the FAA will force Boeing to
resolve the fault, pushing back the relaunch of the Max 8 by months, in order
to relieve pressure from other regulatory agencies, particularly the European
Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Even if the FAA approves the Max 8 to fly, it is
now a given that other countries will not allow the Max 8 to fly unless also
approved by the EASA, meaning that the Max 8 must satisfy two sets of
regulators if Boeing is to have any hope of pushing its flagship aircraft into
international aviation market
OBAMA-BIDEN AND THEIR
BANKSTERS:
The Rise of Wall Street
Thievery
How
corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the
middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from
the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a
tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of
respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while
20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32
percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these
mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that
bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that
corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the
corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal
political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent
supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly
control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was
declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of
the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build
significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social
contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and
Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other,
corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods
like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the
rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious
resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a
return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological
project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an
article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its
Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen,
whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for
blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that
particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can
achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism
that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United
States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had
prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic
boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the
lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and
argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent
problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries
like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When
that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was
clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and
all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection
Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of
those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social
contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a
functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent
standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story
through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn.
Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on
personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it
was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In
other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral
picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were
freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal
social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their
factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even
destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the
hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off
financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the
General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago
Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success.
“What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made
by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann
writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of
steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top
Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their
companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their
companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at
bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men.
Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by
devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry
as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind
of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a
return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated
to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad
guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who
has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad
people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions
for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about
lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United
States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech
in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is
just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing,
then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal
society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers
dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the
one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few
ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by
outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New
Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United
States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.”
But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States
like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the
U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality,
poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the
real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S.
welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American
people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare
eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below
the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens
mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be
without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street
pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people
noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence
unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the
price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a
splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance
public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the
Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the
Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
Before
his first day in office Barack Obama had sucked in more bribes from banksters
than any president in history.
During
the economic meltdown caused by Obama’s crony banksters, and Obama’s first two
years in office, banks made more money than eight years under pro-bankster
administration of George Bush.
Both
of Obama’s Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were chosen by the
banks because they were from law firms that had long protected big banks from
their victims.
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing
us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of
millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are
those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have
been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least
nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real
estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech
has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his
administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the
pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright
criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar
bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in
history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the
living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“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.”
Joe
Biden, the walking moron, was selected by Obama also because of his ties and
servitude to big banks!
OBOMB'S
CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE
THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN
HOME
VALUES AND NOW THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR
MORE WITH THE BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!
Decades of
decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide.
While the rich
accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have
been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of
the population
took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017,
that fell to only
61 percent.
NO
PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK
OBAMA!
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.”
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