Sunday, December 20, 2020

JOSH HAWLEY - THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND LAWYER ERIC HOLDER BAILED OUT THEIR CRONY BANKSTERS

 Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.

Watch–Josh Hawley: Congress ‘Bailed Out the Banks’ But Hesitant to Provide Americans with Stimulus Checks

C-SPAN
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After bailing out the nation’s biggest banks, Congress is now hesitant on whether to provide Americans with a second round of stimulus checks as 24.5 million remain jobless or underemployed, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said in a speech on Friday.

During a speech on the Senate floor, Hawley blasted Congress — and specifically, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who objected to stimulus checks for Americans — for coming to the aid of Wall Street, Big Tech, and multinational corporations while arguing over whether to provide American citizens with direct relief following forced shutdowns by state and local governments.

Hawley’s plan would provide single Americans with $1,200 stimulus checks and couples with $2,400 checks. Each minor child in a family would be provided with a $500 check — the same plan was included in the CARES Act passed earlier this year.

Johnson objected to giving stimulus checks to Americans, saying he was concerned about the federal deficit, even as the spending bill would still include hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stimulus without the inclusion of Hawley’s plan.

“We bailed out the banks to such a tune that now they’ve got money left over,” Hawley said in response to Johnson. “Now we’re going to take money back because we spent so much on Wall Street and the banks in the first part of this year. That’s right.”

“Now, Wall Street is doing great. Big tech? They’re doing great. The big multinational corporations? Fantastic,” Hawley continued. “Working people? Working people are living in their cars. Working people can’t go to the doctor. Working people can’t pay their rent. Working people can’t feed their children.”

Hawley said the consideration of working and middle-class Americans “should be first … not last” when negotiating the stimulus package and asked Senators to explain to their constituents why they oppose direct relief to them.

“I just urge members of these bodies, go home and try explaining that to the people of your state,” Hawley said. “Go ahead. Just try. Try telling them why this body can bail out the banks.”

Indeed, the nation’s biggest banks were gifted billions in the CARES Act as they collected fee payments for processing loans to small businesses under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

In April, class action lawsuits were filed against JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America for allegedly prioritizing large PPP loans by big companies with political connections ahead of small loans for small and medium-sized businesses. PPP was designed to be first come, first serve but the lawsuit claims the banks reshuffled their applications to prioritize which loans would make the most money for the bank.

There are currently 24.5 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed, but all want full-time jobs, through no fault of their own mostly as a result of the pandemic. The economic nationalist policy has widespread, overwhelming support among Americans.

In September, a Gallup poll found that 70 percent of Americans supported a second round of stimulus checks, while polling from March by OnePoll found that 82 percent of Americans said stimulus checks should continue each month until lockdowns are completely ended.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World Hardcover 


 

 

 

Washington Post Notable Book of the Year • An Economist Book of the Year

“A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand what has already happened here in America and what lies ahead if Trump is reelected in November…. A magisterial account of the money and violence behind the world’s most powerful dictatorships.” –Washington Post

In this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes “capitalism’s monster”—global kleptocracy—and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us.

They are everywhere, the thieves and their people. Masters of secrecy. Until now we have detected their presence only by what they leave behind. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh Desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London.

They have amassed more money than most countries. But what they are really stealing is power.

In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis weaves together four stories that reveal a terrifying global web of corruption: the troublemaker from Basingstoke who stumbles on the secrets of a Swiss bank, the ex-Soviet billionaire constructing a private empire, the righteous Canadian lawyer with a mysterious client, and the Brooklyn crook protected by the CIA.

Glimpses of this shadowy world have emerged over the years. In Kleptopia, Burgis connects the dots. He follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators, and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the White House, the trail shows something even more sinister: the thieves are uniting. And the human cost will be great.

 Editorial Reviews

Review

“Burgis is a strong storyteller. We can visualize diamonds smuggled in a toothpaste tube for Swiss banking clients. We see a lawyer taking SIM cards with important contacts from her oligarch client and concealing them in a candy wrapper as he fled one snowy night on a private plane…. Meticulously reported…. A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand what has already happened here in America and what lies ahead if Trump is reelected in November. ”
(
Washington Post)

“Compelling…. The many strands in this complex global story are elegantly woven together and delivered in a form that makes the technicalities of finance accessible to the non-expert….  
Kleptopia illuminates the legalised secrecy around the hubs of big money and how integral dirty money is to political power.” (Financial Times)

"It is hard to write about international corruption in an accessible and colourful way, while retaining an urgent sense of moral condemnation. This book beautifully captures both the murkiness and turpitude involved. Its ultimate theme—the intersection of politics and personal enrichment—is one of the most important stories of the age." (
Economist Best Books of the Year citation)

“A meticulously reported piece of investigative journalism … written in the style of a fast-paced thriller…. A page-turner that lifts the lid on the murky world in which power is turned into money and money into power.” (
The Times (London))

“Corruption on a grand scale is fantastically complicated and tough to write about… 
Kleptopia does the job brilliantly. Burgis spins his tale of global corruption from the ground up, [beginning] with a hero straight out of a John le Carré novel…Kleptopia is wonderfully if grimly entertaining.” (The Economist)

“Depicts an unsavory coalition of corrupt strongmen, artful criminals, and rapacious élites who, abetted by a network of accountants, lawyers, and other professional facilitators, have managed to pillage money on a grand scale and hide it abroad….The monetization of public office, Burgis believes, is no longer an aberration but often the very “purpose of seeking that office.” The techniques of financial obfuscation have grown so sophisticated that theft is easy, and, for the thief who hires the right advisers, impunity is all but assured.” (
New Yorker)

“Burgis’s study of dark global realities casts a wide net, from Washington to Moscow, Kazakhstan and the Congo…. [Burgis is] an impressive investigator…. A ghastly and very important story.” (
The Guardian)

Kleptopia is a powerful, appalling, and stunningly-reported expose of the global corruption that runs like an underground river from the world's darkest and dirtiest dictatorships through some of the planet's richest banks and governments. It reads like fiction, but unfortunately is all too true: Burgis names names, and follows the money, right into the Trump White House, among other high places. His narrative shows how dark money has grown from a national problem into an international scourge.” (Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money)

“Read 
Kleptopia now. There is no time to lose. Read it now to understand that the struggle between dirty money and clean money has been won by dirty money. Tom Burgis demonstrates that money does indeed stink — and shows in Kleptopia how to follow its scent.” (Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah)

“Simultaneously clear, elegant and engaging, 
Kleptopia pulls together several seemingly disparate strands in an assured, daring piece of story-telling. In the process, Tom Burgis reveals exactly how in the last thirty years organized crime and financial capitalism have fused to create a force of such power that no government or leader is free from the pressure it is able to apply. This is Jane Mayer's Dark Money on a global scale. When you pick this book up, you won't be able to put it down.” 
(Misha Glenny, author of 
McMafia)

About the Author

Tom Burgis is an investigations correspondent at the Financial Times. He has reported from more than forty countries, won major journalism awards in the US and Asia and been shortlisted for eight others, including twice at the British Press Awards. His critically acclaimed book The Looting Machine, about the modern plundering of Africa, won an Overseas Press Club of America award.

Product details

· Publisher : Harper (September 8, 2020)

· Language: : English

· ISBN-10 : 0062883658

· ISBN-13 : 978-0062883650

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· Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction Hardcover –

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· #1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 

New York Times finance editor David Enrich's explosive exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, revealing its shadowy ties to Donald Trump, Putin's Russia, and Nazi Germany

“A jaw-dropping financial thriller” —Philadelphia Inquirer

On a rainy Sunday in 2014, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank was found hanging in his London apartment. Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year-old financial institution into a global colossus, and his sudden death was a mystery, made more so by the bank’s efforts to deter investigation. Broeksmit, it turned out, was a man who knew too much.

In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law.

Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump. Over the next twenty years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

· Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality—the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It is also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he’d seen at the bank—and his son’s obsessive search for the secrets he kept.

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· Editorial Reviews

Review

“In Dark Towers, David Enrich tells the story of how one of the world’s mightiest banks careened off the rails, threatening everything from our financial system to our democracy through its reckless entanglement with Donald Trump. Darkly fascinating and yet all too real, it’s a tale that will keep you up at night.” (John Carreyrou, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood)

"Enrich compellingly shows how unchecked ambition twisted a pillar of German finance into a reckless casino where amorality and criminality thrived." (
New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice))

“Riveting. … A cracking read. … Devastatingly accurate. …  This is an important book because it reveals how one bank, with questionable business practices to put it mildly, made it possible for Trump to bounce back from multiple bankruptcies, cast himself as a business visionary, and eventually run for president and win.” (
Sunday Times (London))

"A revelatory book about the rise and fall of the world’s biggest bank. … Has all the elements of a page-turning mystery novel" (
Washington Post)

"
Dark Towers is a devastating tale of a big bank gone bad. ... Enrich draws the reader in by focusing on the people in his story, displaying an Arthur-Miller-like eye for the worn-down Willy Lomans of today's Wall Street." (Financial Times)

“A jaw-dropping financial thriller.” (
Philadelphia Inquirer)

"Enrich delivers a master class in financial sleuthing. ... A first-rate read." (The Guardian)

“Exposes chaos and corruption at the bank that holds Trump's secrets.” (NPR.org)

“In this case, ‘epic’ is right - 
Dark Towers is a mystery, a thriller, a father-son drama. Did I mention Donald Trump? It’s a distinctly American drama of greed, hubris and power that kept me racing to the finish.” (James B. Stewart, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Den of Thieves and Deep State)

"In this masterful account of a bank gone bad, David Enrich turns financial journalism into gripping, page-turning crime reporting. Tracking the sordid history of Deutsche Bank—from financing robber barons, Nazis, and rogue states to laundering Russian money to underwriting Donald Trump to threatening global economic security — Enrich deftly delivers a compelling narrative that intertwines harrowing institutional corruption and engaging personal tales. It’s a wild ride and a great read." (David Corn, co-author, 
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump)

About the Author

David Enrich is the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times. He previously was the Financial Enterprise Editor of the Wall Street Journal, heading a team of investigative reporters. Before that, he was the Journal’s European Banking Editor, based in London, and a Journal reporter in New York. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2016 Gerald Loeb Award for feature writing. His first book, The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off On of The Greatest Scams in History was short-listed for the Financial Times Best Book of the Year award. Enrich grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Claremont McKenna College in California. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Product details

· Publisher : Custom House (February 18, 2020)

· Language: : English

· Hardcover : 416 pages

· ISBN-10 : 0062878816

· ISBN-13 : 978-0062878816

 

Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

 

JOHN BINDER

The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.

The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”

This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.

(Screenshot via the New York Times)

The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.

Leonhardt writes:

For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate taxAnd they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]

The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.

“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.

That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

 

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.

A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.

The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate 
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many 
economists to be skewed in favor of the 
wealthy.

But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.

Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.

Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

 

TRUMPERNOMICS:

Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019

28 December 2019

As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial oligarchy—continues unabated.

Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are continuing to surge.

On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018. Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.

To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.

The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion, down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116 billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and held on to second place at $113 billion.

The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500 billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of $79.3 billion.

It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist Branko Milanovic wrote:

"A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case."

The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and enrichment of the ruling elite.

In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.

The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent “gig” positions.

Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by 9,000 points. This year, Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied, carrying out three rate cuts and repeatedly assuring the markets it had no plans to raise rates in 2020.

This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon war budget.

This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of immigrants.

Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in taxpayer money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed social programs.

Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.

The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair share,” a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. The billionaires are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the Democratic fold.

Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200 million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.

The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US, society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals, affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges, transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”

The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy, record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wildfires and floods, electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a money-mad plutocracy.

Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians, aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.

Where social reform is impossible, social revolution is inevitable. The solution to the impasse is to be found in the growth of the class struggle. The movement of workers and youth all over the world—from mass strikes in France to strikes by autoworkers and teachers in the US, protests in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, strikes and mass demonstrations in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and India—reveals the social force that can and will put an end to capitalism.

The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”

 

Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’

 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/10/exclusive-mo-brooks-masters-universe-want-more-immigration-decrease-incomes-americans/

 

Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP

 10 Mar 2019122

3:19

 

 

 

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations to deplete the earnings of Americans.

Brooks said:

I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]

And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]

Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.

“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.

That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]

“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare … plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”

Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.

The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific). 

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

 

JPMorgan Chase Bank Wrongly Charged 170,000 Customers Overdraft Fees. Federal Regulators Refused to Penalize It.

Documents and records show that bank examiners have avoided penalizing at least six banks that incorrectly charged overdraft and related fees to hundreds of thousands of customers.

by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum

 

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with The Capitol Forum.

Federal bank examiners considered levying fines and sanctions when JPMorgan Chase informed them last year that faulty overdraft charges caused by a software glitch had impacted roughly 170,000 customers.

But the bank urged the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, its chief regulator, to take less severe action, according to two people directly involved in the probe and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

Rather than openly penalizing Chase, the nation’s largest bank, OCC officials decided to issue a quiet reprimand — a supervisory letter — that would go into the bank’s file and stay out of public view, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.

The agency’s deputy chief counsel, Bao Nguyen, approved the supervisory letter in June and accepted Chase’s explanation of the incident and its promise to repay its customers, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.

Since 2017, when President Donald Trump took office, the OCC has found at least six banks wrongly charged overdrafts and related fees, but in each case, the agency quietly rebuked the bank rather than pushing for fines and public penalties, the investigation by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum shows.

In several instances, front-line examiners who wanted the bank to be fined were overruled by OCC officials. The previously unreported cases show how the OCC under Trump quietly held back from punishing banks for abuses, while the administration sought more broadly to loosen banking rules and other consumer financial protections.

Brian Brooks, a former bank executive, has led the OCC on a temporary basis since May; last month, the president nominated Brooks to a full, five-year term.

Brooks and his predecessor at the OCC, Joseph Otting, both helped run OneWest Bank, a lender that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin founded in the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis.

Banks found to have charged excessive overdraft fees and other faulty charges include Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan Chase, American Express and U.S. Bank and large regional lenders such as Zions Bank, Union Bank and First Horizon.

An OCC spokesman said the agency would not comment on the specific instances cited in this story because such matters are confidential. The OCC has a range of tools to police bank misconduct, the spokesman said.

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“It is frequently the case that deficiencies can be corrected much more quickly — including correcting harm to customers — by using supervisory tools,” said spokesman Bryan Hubbard, referring to confidential sanctions. “Most importantly, the absence of a public penalty does not indicate a lack of action.”

A bank might be cited first with a confidential sanction and later punished openly, Hubbard said. “Our actions may or may not be complete.”

Big banks collect over $11 billion in overdraft-related fees each year, according to a report from the Center for Responsible Lending, which found in a study that punitive bank fees often hit vulnerable customers the hardest.

Overdraft policies vary by bank but the typical fee is $35, and a customer can accrue additional penalties multiple times a day, CRL reported. Banks could simply decline a charge if a customer lacked the funds, but instead lenders promote “overdraft protection” as a convenience that comes at a cost. For customers whose accounts often hover near zero, that convenience is just another snare in a financial trap, said Rebecca Borné, a CRL lawyer who worked on the study.

“Imagine you struggled to buy groceries over the weekend and you wake up Monday to $100 in overdraft fees,” Borné said. “That happens to people who can least afford to pay.”

Chase had promised some online customers that they would get an alert before their accounts went negative, but the bank told the OCC that did not happen as roughly 170,000 accounts dwindled to zero, according to industry and regulatory officials. Chase charges $34 for an overdraft and allows three such charges a day on an account with insufficient funds. A customer could be charged as much as $102 per day.

Chase, which operates nearly 5,000 locations nationwide, reported the faulty auto alerts to the OCC as required, but the problem had stayed out of public view until now.

“We found that some customers were not receiving some account alerts due to a systems issue in 2018,” Chase spokesman Michael Fusco said. “We have fixed the issue, proactively notified and reimbursed affected customers.”

Chase had roughly 52 million active digital customers at the end of last year, according to securities filings, and that figure has grown by millions each year over the last several years.

In interviews, several bank branch employees working in different parts of the country said Chase could have easily underestimated the number of customers who were impacted, based on the number of complaints they heard.

Chase insists its remediation work was reliable. “We completed a thorough review of all accounts and identified the impacted customers,” said Fusco.

Under the agreement between Chase and the OCC, the bank agreed to refund customers that it believes were wrongly charged, but with no outside, independent check on the work, officials said.

The Chase matter shows how faulty overdraft policies can take hold at a bank and weigh on customers.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has in recent years pushed the bank’s online presence and a corporate mantra “Mobile first, digital everything.” Chase encourages consumers to find a screen and open their own Total Checking accounts.

With a few clicks, a new Chase customer can choose to receive an account alert for everything from low balances to suspicious transactions. Customers who rely on online banking might rarely have cause to visit a Chase branch.

But customers did come knocking when their auto alerts failed and they were hit with surprise overdrafts and other penalties, said current and former employees interviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

Chase customers had complained about faulty auto alerts for more than 12 months when the bank brought the issue to the OCC late last year, according to regulatory officials and agency paperwork.

Chase insisted that the error was just a coding hiccup and that the fix was manageable, but some OCC officials believed the bank still deserved punishment since so many customers were hurt.

To some front-line examiners, the faulty alert program amounted to an “unfair and deceptive” practice that could draw a public penalty under the law.

The question of what to do next fell to Nguyen.

Nguyen joined the OCC in June 2018 as a deputy to Otting, then Trump’s OCC chief, and Nguyen had a large role in managing one of Otting’s top priorities: rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend in poor neighborhoods.

Otting presented the new CRA in May and stepped down a day later. The CRA rewrite will make it easier for banks to pull back from serving poor neighborhoods, according to several consumer-advocacy groups that are challenging the move in court.

When the Chase matter reached Nguyen’s desk, he agreed that the bank had been deceptive, but he ruled that no penalty was warranted, according to regulatory paperwork.

For one thing, Chase had stepped forward to admit the problem. Regulators can give banks credit for policing themselves, and Nguyen decided that would hold true in the Chase matter, regulatory officials said.

Nguyen did agree to record the incident in the supervisory letter added to the bank’s confidential file. Nguyen declined to comment and referred questions to the OCC.

Supervisory letters are one of the mildest rebukes that the OCC can issue, and critics say the letters have negligible impact.

After Wells Fargo admitted in 2016 that its employees created fake accounts to hit skyhigh sales goals, the OCC found that it had been issuing supervisory letters for seven years warning the bank about its sales practices.

Lawyers from the OCC and Chase worked together to write the final language of the supervisory letter in which the bank insisted that it did nothing wrong, according to regulatory officials.

Notably, said the officials, the OCC handled the matter itself and without help from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency created to ensure that financial firms do not mistreat ordinary customers.

“It would not have gone down well if the OCC did not involve us in a consumer matter,” said Richard Cordray, the first CFPB director who served President Barack Obama.

Cordray said that he would not second-guess any regulator’s decision about sanctions without knowing the facts, but that the Trump administration had clearly shown it was not eager to sanction bank wrongdoing.

“These are different times and different leaders,” he said, “but the OCC and CFPB used to take aggressive action together when we saw consumers being hurt.”

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.

Dubious disclosures and lax enforcement are part of many overdraft abuses, said Borné of the CRL, and they were a problem in the incidents handled by the OCC. American Express, the credit card giant, also offers short-term loans that are supposed to be repaid in regular monthly installments. Customers pay interest on the loan, of course, but American Express never explained that customers who missed a payment could also be charged interest on late fees and bounced checks, the OCC concluded. That was unfair and deceptive, OCC examiners determined in recent months, but the agency’s chiefs decided to hand the bank a quiet reprimand rather than a public sanction.

“Due to a technical error, some personal loan customers were incorrectly charged,” American Express said in a statement. The firm said it will now notify customers and issue credits for undue fees. American Express declined to say how many customers were affected but said the charges were generally less than $1 each.

Seven years ago, U.S. Bank unveiled a novel credit card program that the bank said could reduce costs for many customers. FlexControl Essentials promised to let customers first pay off everyday purchases — like gasoline and groceries — which the bank said could lower the monthly bill.

But customers of U.S. Bank, the nation’s fifth-largest lender, were baffled by the Byzantine system used to determine what was an “everyday” purchase and how much money they actually owed, according to several current and former bank employees.

U.S. Bank knew FlexControl Essentials was balky, and the bank spent five years trying to improve it before retiring the offer in 2018, the year the OCC took notice, according to bank and regulatory officials.

Within the OCC, some officials thought FlexControl Essentials was more than just a credit card program gone awry — it was a consumer abuse. For several weeks in early 2018, OCC lawyers debated next steps and whether they should dig deeper into how many customers might have been hurt, according to enforcement paperwork and two officials involved.

By the summer of 2018, though, the OCC decided to let the bank quietly scrap the program without paying a fine or facing a public sanction, according to regulatory sources.

In a statement, U.S. Bank declined to comment on the FlexControl Essentials program except to say it was retired in 2018. “Customers continue to have great flexibility with our products and we appreciate their continued support,” the bank said.

Three years before Chase grappled with errors in the auto alert program, the bank had to face a separate problem that was costing customers.

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When the pandemic started, several school districts in Indiana halted the long-standing practice. But one district has filed nearly 300 lawsuits against parents, and others also have returned to court.

Banks are expected to clear checks within a “reasonable period of time,” which in many instances means two days. But under the rules, the wait can stretch for a week or more. Ultimately, banks not only decide when to clear a check but whether to clear it at all and how much a check is even worth.

That was the issue in 2017 when bank examiners found flaws in Chase’s handling of checks that had stray markings, sloppy handwriting or were otherwise deemed illegible. Banks can take extra time to examine those checks and ultimately even decide what the checks are worth.

OCC examiners found that Chase customers were sometimes shortchanged and some agency officials wanted to openly sanction the bank, according to regulatory officials. In the end, Chase was allowed to push the issue aside with no penalty by the end of 2017.

In a statement, Chase said that the bank identified the problem itself in 2017 and then “worked quickly to resolve it and have since credited all impacted customers.”

Taken together with the faulty auto alerts program from this year, Chase was twice found to have wrongly charged customers but faced no public penalty.

Banks ultimately control the sequence of deposits and withdrawals in a way that can boost corporate profits. A bank customer who exceeds their balance in the morning and replenishes the account by sundown might still incur an overdrawn account fee.

Another customer who overdraws an account with one costly purchase — a sofa — might be charged a fee for that item plus all the other miscellaneous purchases they made that day from a gas fill-up to a cup of coffee.

Bank regulators allow some maneuvers as long as they are disclosed to the customer, but at least three banks in recent years were deemed to have wrongly snared customers in how they added and subtracted money from an account, according to regulatory and industry officials.

One offender was Zions Bank, the largest lender in Utah, which tucked three separate, fee-generating schemes into murky disclosures, according to OCC officials who tracked the matter for more than a year.

Zions Bank customers who pushed their accounts into negative territory with a single purchase were charged a $32 penalty for that one buy and then the same fee for every other purchase made that day, examiners found.

Zions Bank customers also could get charged many overdraft fees for being just a few bucks short, examiners agreed. The third abuse was that Zions Bank charged a daily overdraft penalty on top of individual purchase penalties, regulatory officials said.

At the heart of every Zions Bank infraction was faulty disclosures and that customers did not know they had a right to opt out of any overdraft program — a step that might mean more rejected charges for the customer but also fewer surprise fees, according to the enforcement officials.

The OCC determined that Zions Bank ran afoul of a 2010 banking rule that explicitly required banks to get customer consent before enrolling them in overdraft protection, according to two regulatory officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

In a statement, Zions Bank said it always abides by the law requiring a customer “opt in” for overdraft protection.

“Zions Bank is committed to maintaining the highest standards of fair and transparent customer services,” the bank said in a statement.

The Zions Bank abuses matched tactics at Union Bank, a leading lender in the west, according to industry and regulatory officials familiar with the matter. Union Bank was charging customers overdraft fees despite the customer having a positive balance at the end of the day, according to the officials. The problem had been going on for years when it came to the attention of bank examiners in 2017, but rather than sanction the bank publicly, the OCC filed a supervisory letter, according to regulatory sources.

A spokesman for Union Bank declined to comment for this story.

First Horizon, a leading lender in the south, came to the OCC last year to report problems with its own overdraft program, according to industry and regulatory officials.

The bank had wrongly charged customers overdraft fees when they went into the red for a few hours but ended the day with a positive balance, according to enforcement officials, and that practice ran contrary to the bank’s marketing and disclosure documents.

By the time the problem was detected, it had gone on for at least two years, although the bank promised to make customers whole, according to regulatory and industry officials.

The OCC opted not to punish the bank publicly and instead issued a private reprimand, regulatory officials said.

In a statement, First Horizon acknowledged the issue and said it tapped an outside consultant to manage customer refunds.

“The issue was corrected and our impacted customers were notified and refunded,” the bank said in a statement.

Do you have access to information about bank regulation and enforcement that should be public? Email Patrick Rucker at patrickmrucker@protonmail.com. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

Correction, Dec. 14, 2020: This story originally misspelled the name of a Center for Responsible Lending lawyer. She is Rebecca Borné, not Bourné.

 

JOE BIDEN’S BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS OLIGARCHY.... Is old Joe finished performing his ‘populist’ gig? 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/tucker-carlson-biden-oligarchy-and.html 

What matters, Joe Biden wants you to know is that this is a democracy, always has been, always will be and by electing Biden and the small secretive group of billionaires who choreograph his every move, this country has become even more democratic, small seat, democratic, of course. And that’s reassuring to hear honestly because some of us were starting to get other impressions, non-democratic ones.

Pretty much the same way retired hedge fund operator, Tom Styer gets to tell you what to think about the weather, or how 78-year-old Mike Bloomberg decides which guns you can buy, or how George Soros can choose your prosecutors or how Tim Cook of Apple runs our trade policy, or how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook can keep America’s borders open just because he feels like it, but nobody says anything because his friend, fellow billionaire, Jeff Bezos owns Washington, D.C.’s hometown newspaper, and may soon buy CNN. TUCKER CARLSON


Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/how-many-parasite-lawyers-will-lawyer.html

"Along with Obama (LAWYER) Biden (LAWYER), Pelosi and Schumer (LAWYER) are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration."       PATRICIA McCARTHY 

Add the Banksters’ rent boy Eric Holder (LAWYER) and the up and coming Swamp Empress Kamala Harris (LAWYER, SO IS HER SHADY HUSBAND)…but keep counting….(LAWYER) Brian Deese, Obama-Biden’s loot-for-Wall Street guy.

Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors. 

BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS NEXT!

Biden administration will be committed to austerity and back-to-work campaign aimed at forcing workers to pay for the corporate bailout no matter how many lives are needlessly lost to the pandemic.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/joe-bidens-wall-street-cabinet-biden.html

The selection of Deese and Adeyemo—who both previously served in the Obama administration—exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, DC, which operates constantly, regardless of which party controls the White House.

It is a further signal to the financial oligarchy that a Biden administration will dispense with its rhetoric about raising taxes on the wealthy and continue funneling trillions into the stock markets. “By picking folks with deep ties to large asset managers,” Tyler Gellasch, executive director of investor trade group Healthy Markets Association, told the Journal, “the administration can help assuage financial executives’ concerns. It sends a clear signal to the industry to breathe easier: They can plan for stability without likely facing massive new regulatory or tax risks.”

JOE BIDEN GLOBALIST 

SERVING THEIR CRONY RICH - If Biden and Harris win, the country will devolve to a kingdom of state and regional duchies composed of often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs (ILLEGALS). CLARICE FELDMAN 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-globalist-grifter-servant-of.html

 

In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.


For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story.  Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries.  In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose.  Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increasedgl

Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.

Detailed by the New York Times, Biden’s list of transition team members includes former Wall Street employees and those with close ties to Wall Street. Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.

The Times reports:

Commerce Department: The review team is led by Geovette Washington of the University of Pittsburgh, who previously served as general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget. Other members include Anna Gomez, a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein; Arun Venkataraman, who works in government relations at Visa (and was director of policy at the Commerce Department under Mr. Obama); and Ellen Hughes-Cromwick of the think tank Third Way, who served as chief economist at Mr. Obama’s Commerce Department and held a similar role at Ford. [Emphasis added]

Treasury Department: The team is led by Don Graves, who heads corporate responsibility at KeyBank and previously worked as director of domestic and economic policy for Mr. Biden. Others include Nicole Isaac of LinkedIn and Marisa Lago, who works at the New York City Department of City Planning and previously oversaw global compliance at Citigroup. [Emphasis added]

Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities Regulators: The team is led by Gary Gensler, a top Wall Street regulator in the Obama administration who is now a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team also includes Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, long a proponent of tougher rules for banks. [Emphasis added]

Gensler previously worked at Goldman Sachs and for failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. As Breitbart News reported, giant tech conglomerates are also getting representation on Biden’s transition team.

Likewise, the Wall Street Journal noted a number of Wall Street-types who are seriously being considered for cabinet positions in a potential Biden administration:

Roger Ferguson, chief executive of retirement manager TIAA-CREF, is in the mix for a cabinet post, according to people familiar with the matter. And financial executives like Morgan Stanley executive Tom Nides and former hedge-fund manager and presidential candidate Tom Steyer publicly backed Mr. Biden and could emerge with influence, or jobs, in his administration. [Emphasis added]

Some who are active in the party or who held positions in past Democratic administrations— such as finance veteran Jeffrey Zients, co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s transition team, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jake Siewert, who served as press secretary in the Clinton White House and in the Treasury Department under President Obama — could join the new administration, Democratic fundraisers say. [Emphasis added]

Another Goldman executive who could head to Washington is Margaret Anadu, the 39-year-old head of Goldman Sachs’s urban-investment initiatives, whose name is said to have been floated for an economic policy position.
[Emphasis added]

On the campaign trail, President Trump warned that Biden was “the one that takes all the money from Wall Street” while his donors tended to be police officers, business owners, homemakers, truckers, construction workers, and drivers.

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has attempted to push back against Biden’s potential for stacking an administration with Wall Street executives and those with deep ties to multinational corporations.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.