The head of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jamie Dimon, is recovering from emergency heart surgery on Thursday. Dimon, the longest-serving head of a major U.S. bank, is perhaps best known for his role in the 2008 financial crisis.
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
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
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.
While socialists
have often recoiled against the idea individual performance-based rewards,
these more sophisticated policies could be scaled up to the entire economy to
help meet socialism's innovation and motivation challenge.
Big problems require big government
The idea of such a socialist transformation in the U.S. may seem
remote today.
But this can change, particularly as more Americans, especially
young ones, embrace
socialism. One reason they are doing so is because the current capitalist
system has so manifestly failed to deal with climate change.
Looking inside these companies suggests a better way forward
— and hope for society's ability to avert catastrophe.
This article is republished from The Conversation under
a Creative Commons license.
Barack Obama is rather typical of the
Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled
with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own
political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Banks, hedge funds and other financial
firms lavishly backed Barack Obama his presidential bid, giving him
considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John
McCain.
Trump criticized Dimon in
2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s economic
downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case
and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst
banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
“The response of the
administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to
power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he
subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration dominated by the
interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers
and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close
personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from
corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major
financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their
role in the financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric
Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden
Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"One of the premier institutions of
big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the
Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in
pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules
America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or
convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate
committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute
the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on
the national economy.”
"One of the
premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued
an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008
crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis”
was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that
effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving
inequality between asset owners and labor."
Why
aren’t the Wall Street criminals prosecuted?
In
May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon revealed that his bank
had lost billions of dollars in speculative bets, President Barack Obama
publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO, calling him “one of the smartest
bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention is that Dimon is a criminal.
JPMorgan
is not the exception; it is the rule. Virtually every major bank that operates
on Wall Street has settled charges of fraud and criminality on a staggering
scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a
630-page report on the financial crash of 2008 documenting what the committee
chairman called “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest
and wrongdoing.”
These
multiple crimes by serial lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive
consequences. The entire world has been plunged into an economic slump that has
already lasted more than five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of
millions of families have lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages
pushed by JPMorgan and other Wall Street banks.
Biden Bashes Influence of Billionaires While Relying on
their Money
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
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