Monday, March 2, 2020

OBAMA REMINDS WALL STREET THAT BIDEN WILL PROTECT SOCIALISM AND BAILOUTS FOR BANKSTERS

NO ONE HAS EVER SERVED CRIMINAL 

BANKSTERS, WALL STREET OR THE RICH 

MORE THAN THE OBAMA-BIDEN TEAM 

OF CORRUPTION



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

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.

Source-AZ Quotes
Jamie Dimon is wrong because he doesn’t understand that he is himself, a billionaire product of corporate socialism. CEOs love to talk about how corporations should legally be treated as individuals, so we can probably just call it socialism.
A person who is down and out in society is no different from a bankrupt Wall Street firm when it comes to needing a handout. Whatever the result, or the amount in question, they are all part of the same system.
Bernie Sanders is right to tell you not to listen to people like Jamie Dimon, who criticize socialism when they don’t need it, yet are first in line and full of excuses when they do. Secondly, please don’t believe word for word everything Bernie Sanders says about Wall Street, because he is often exaggerating to make his point.



Obama Breaks Silence Ahead of Super Tuesday Showdown Between Sanders and Biden

DES MOINES, IOWA - JANUARY 14: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (R) listen as former Vice President Joe Biden (L) speaks during the Democratic presidential primary debate at Drake University on January 14, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa. Six candidates out of the …
Scott Olson/Getty Images
1:37

Former President Barack Obama broke his silence after former Vice President Joe Biden won big in the South Carolina presidential primary on Saturday.
Obama reportedly called Biden, according to “sources close to” the former president to congratulate him for re-energizing his presidential campaign in South Carolina.
The former president broke his silence as the party faces the possibility that Sen. Bernie Sanders has a chance for a big delegate lead ahead of Super Tuesday, wherein 14 states will vote for their choice for candidate.
It also appears to be a rare departure from his set precedent of not getting involved in the primary process.
There were no reports of Obama calling former Mayor Pete Buttigieg after he won Iowa or Sanders after he won New Hampshire or Nevada.
Buttigieg announced his decision to drop out of the race on Sunday night, which shocked his supporters who felt that he could still compete.
Obama still will not endorse Biden or any other candidates before the primary, according to reports, a position he staked out at the beginning of the process. Obama met with Biden before his former vice president announced his campaign and even hinted that he probably should not run, according to reports.
Biden said he asked the former president not to endorse him and said in December 2019 that he did not need the endorsement.
“[E]veryone knows I’m close with him,” Biden said. “I don’t need an Obama endorsement.”


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 ElectricKaiser 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 physiciansassembly-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.



Billionaire JP Morgan chief attacks socialism as 'a disaster'

 This article is more than 10 months old
·         Jamie Dimon: socialism leads to ‘corruption and favouritism’
·         America’s top banker, paid $31m last year, defends capitalism
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 Jamie Dimon said capitalism was ‘the most successful economic system the world has ever seen’. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The world’s most powerful banker has attacked socialism, saying it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse”.

 Jamie Dimon, spare us your crocodile tears about inequality

Robert Reich

Read more
JP Morgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, took aim at socialism in his annual letter to shareholders, and warned it would be “a disaster for our country”.
Dimon, who was paid $31m last year as the head of America’s largest bank and who is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.3bn, took his swipe as a new wave of left politics has emerged in the US.
Democratic socialism has been embraced by a new generation of politicians, including New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and supporters of Bernie Sanders, a longtime socialist now making a second bid for the presidency.
Dimon’s attack also comes as many leftwing Democrats, including Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, have called for the breakup of big businesses and greater regulation of banking in particular.
In his letter, Dimon wrote: “When governments control companies, economic assets (companies, lenders and so on) over time are used to further political interests – leading to inefficient companies and markets, enormous favoritism and corruption.”
He went on: “Socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse – such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives – which they frequently do to maintain power. This would be as much a disaster for our country as it has been in the other places it’s been tried.”
Socialism is set to be one of the key issues of the 2020 election cycle. Donald Trump has already begun campaigning against socialism and used his State of the Union address to declare that “America will never be a socialist country.”

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Dimon has previously warned income inequality is dividing America.
“It is absolutely obvious that a big chunk of [people] have been left behind,” Dimon said last month. “Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids [annually].”
In his letter, Dimon acknowledged capitalism’s “flaws” but praised it as “the most successful economic system the world has ever seen”.
He wrote: “This is not to say that capitalism does not have flaws, that it isn’t leaving people behind and that it shouldn’t be improved. It’s essential to have a strong social safety net – and all countries should be striving for continuous improvement in regulations as well as social and welfare conditions.”



JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon takes on socialism, says it will lead to an ‘eroding society’

PUBLISHED WED, JAN 22 20207:58 AM ESTUPDATED WED, JAN 22 20208:57 AM EST
KEY POINTS
·         J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon criticized socialism, saying it leads to an “eroding society.”
·         Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dimon told CNBC that capitalism is not perfect but is capable of fixing the problems of today.
WATCH NOW
VIDEO01:59
Jamie Dimon: ‘I don’t think people understand what socialism is’
Socialism has failed where it’s been tried and ultimately leads to an “eroding society,” J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Wednesday.
With democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders among the leaders in the Democratic presidential race and other candidates espousing similar-sounding ideas, the head of the nation’s biggest bank by assets said the idea of socialist control of the means of production would be detrimental to the U.S.
“I honestly don’t think they understand what socialism is,” Dimon told CNBC during a “Squawk Box” interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, referring to a question about millennials.
WATCH NOW
VIDEO19:31
Watch CNBC’s full Davos interview with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon
“Most state-owned enterprises don’t do a particularly good job,” he added. “You look around the world and they become corrupt over time. That doesn’t mean that capitalism is perfect. That doesn’t mean that every public company is perfect. No, there are flaws.”
Sanders has been the most out front of the candidates in backing socialism, though many of his opponents in the Democratic race also back universal health care, increased business taxes and greater government control over private enterprise.
Dimon said he did not want to address any specific candidates. But he said that socialist governments traditionally have done a poor job allocating capital and end up backing politically popular endeavors and “bridge to nowhere” projects.
“Once you do that, you will have an eroding society,” he said.
“They do need to fix inner-city schools, infrastructure, health care,” Dimon added. “We can fix all of those in a capitalist society.”






Bernie Sanders Slams Jamie Dimon On Socialism – They’re Both Wrong

Bernie Sanders has hit back against Jamie Dimon's comments about socialism, but they're both missing the point on Wall Street greed.




Bernie Sanders is looking to school Wall Street giant Jamie Dimon on socialism but does the Senator really know better? | Source: Getty Images /AFP/REUTERS/Edited by CCN
·         Bernie Sanders went after Jamie Dimon on Twitter calling him a hypocrite for his comments on socialism.
·         Senator Sanders is not telling the whole truth when it comes to Wall Street bailouts.
·         Jamie Dimon is also wrong as corporate welfare is rampant, and creating a dangerous imbalance in U.S. society.
What is the saying about people in glass houses? Jamie Dimon has been getting a lot of press for his comments on several economic topics at the billionaire ski-meet, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum in Davos. Of particular interest were his comments regarding socialism, of which the JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman were very critical. The United States’ most famous socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, is not having it, and reminded Dimon of a very inconvenient truth.
Source-Twitter

Bernie Sanders Stretches The Truth To Slam Jamie Dimon

While the above tweet will no doubt get Bernie Bros feeling the Bern and pumping their fists, a note of caution. JPMorgan Chase did pay back their bailout money, and Bernie Sanders must be referring to Wall Street as a whole, not specifically Jamie Dimon’s bank, which only received $25 billion.

The JPMorgan Chase CEO Owes A Lot Of His Considerable Wealth To Socialism

So Sanders is not telling it precisely as it is here. The point he is really making paraphrases as “don’t insult the concept of receiving aid from the government when your corporation went broke and used Wall Street food stamps.” The senator has a point.
What truly irks the everyday American is not that some people rise to the top of the corporate ladder on Wall Street and earn billions. What annoys them is when those CEO’s mess up, get everything wrong, screw over the working man and crash the housing market, and still walk away with their vast compensation packages.
Yes, the taxpayer technically got most of it back, but a large contingent of those people didn’t get the jobs or houses back that they lost in the recession.

Fed Interventions Are Enabling Wall Street Recklessness, Again

The same economic mistakes that required the Federal Reserve to put the U.S. economy on life support have, in turn, stagnated wage growth and disproportionately benefited the financial class that got so greedy in the first place.
Now that Jamie Dimon has shown that JPMorgan paid back their bailout money, what’s to stop them from taking excessive risks and blowing everything up again? Rinse and repeat, as Wall Street relies on government handouts to catch it when it falls.
Long considered somewhat of a conspiracy theory, more and more market voices are speaking up against the Fed’s interventions in financial markets. Scott Minerd, the CIO of Guggenheim Partners, is about as mainstream a figure as you can get in the hedge fund world, and he called the stock market a “Ponzi scheme” in Davos.

You Can’t Cherry-Pick What Is Socialism & What’s “Necessary”

So Bernie Sanders is absolutely right. Taxpayer funds were used to make the rich richer but looks to be wrong that these were not a good investment from perspective of taxpayer funds.
Source-AZ Quotes
Jamie Dimon is wrong because he doesn’t understand that he is himself, a billionaire product of corporate socialism. CEOs love to talk about how corporations should legally be treated as individuals, so we can probably just call it socialism.
A person who is down and out in society is no different from a bankrupt Wall Street firm when it comes to needing a handout. Whatever the result, or the amount in question, they are all part of the same system.
Bernie Sanders is right to tell you not to listen to people like Jamie Dimon, who criticize socialism when they don’t need it, yet are first in line and full of excuses when they do. Secondly, please don’t believe word for word everything Bernie Sanders says about Wall Street, because he is often exaggerating to make his point.
Finally, it’s impossible to have an article about socialism and not give former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the last word.
This article was edited by Samburaj Das.
Last modified: January 23, 2020 9:29 AM UTC
Financial speculator & author living in the hills in Los Angeles. J.D. but very much not a lawyer. Favorite trading books are anything written by Jack Schwager. Email: bullishtulips@gmail.com,
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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.

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