Wednesday, March 4, 2020

WALL STREET BANKS DEMAND FULL UNLEASHING AS THEY MASTERMIND THEIR NEXT BOTTOMLESS BAILOUT


Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in Cambridge, Mass., on March 3, 2020. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in Cambridge, Mass., on March 3, 2020. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
US NEWS

Constitutionality of Consumer Bureau Challenged Before Supreme Court

BY MATTHEW VADUM

March 3, 2020 Updated: March 3, 2020
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, is unconstitutional because its director, unlike the typical federal official, isn’t accountable to the elected president of the United States who appointed the person, the Supreme Court heard.
The high court is expected to render its judgment in the case in coming months, a move that seems certain to enliven the election cycle no matter what it decides.
Democrats have long defended the 9-year-old agency, brainchild of presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) from the time when she was a bankruptcy law professor.
Then-President Barack Obama signed the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, creating the CFPB, and appointed Warren to take the lead role in establishing it. Former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee spearheaded the legislation, attended the Supreme Court hearing.
From the campaign trail, Warren took to Twitter as the court heard oral arguments in the case on March 3:
“Big banks & their allies will do anything to undermine the @CFPB – even ask the Supreme Court today to shut it down. We won’t let President Trump gut the consumer agency & let the big banks go back to cheating customers & gambling with our economy.”
House Democrats even filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging the justices not to take up the case, but the high court went its own way and agreed Oct. 18, 2019, to hear the matter, cited as Seila Law LLC v. CFPB.
The CFPB was designed to be free of the influence of the president. Federal law blocks the president from dismissing its director, who has to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, before that person’s five-year term lapses, unless the termination is for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The CFPB’s unusual funding mechanism also keeps the agency independent. Although it may seek funding from Congress, the agency is excluded from the normal congressional appropriations process, and instead receives most of the money it needs to operate from the Federal Reserve System.
Republicans have long accused the agency of overreach. Then-House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican who has since left Congress, called the CFPB “arguably the most powerful, least accountable agency in U.S. history,” in a 2017 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“CFPB zealots have the power to determine the ‘fairness’ of virtually every financial transaction in America. The agency defines its own powers and can launch investigations without cause, imposing virtually any fine or remedy, devoid of due process,” he wrote.
“The regulatory web spun by the CFPB can make every provider of financial services guilty until proven innocent, inviting selective enforcement and financial shakedowns.”
He said the agency embodies James Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 47 that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
The petitioner, Seila Law, a California-based law firm, had refused to honor CFPB’s request for information, called a civil investigative demand, and challenged the entity’s structure, claiming it was unconstitutional.
The firm’s attorney, Kannon Shanmugam, told the Supreme Court that the president’s inability to fire the CFPB director “at will” is a historical oddity in need of correction.
“The structure of the CFPB is unprecedented and unconstitutional,” he said.
“Never before in American history has Congress given so much executive power to a single individual who does not answer to the president. By significantly limiting the president’s ability to remove the CFPB’s director, Congress violated the core presidential prerogatives to exercise the executive power and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The Trump administration, represented in court by Solicitor General Noel Francisco, opposes the CFPB in its current iteration but did not ask the court to dissolve it.
Francisco told Justice Elena Kagan that “the problem with … [Dodd–Frank’s] for-cause removal restrictions is that they vest executive power in individuals who are not ultimately accountable to the people through their duly elected president.”
Although it has been the position of Seila Law that the CFPB is unconstitutional, in oral arguments, Shanmugam said it would be a bad idea for the court to “rewrite the Dodd–Frank Act to give the president the power to remove the director.”
“The court should leave to Congress the quintessentially legislative task of deciding how to fix the CFPB’s defective structure.”
When questioning Francisco, Kagan echoed Shanmugam.
“Why don’t we just leave it to the political branches, who actually know about these things?”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that the for-cause removal provision in the law was a “very modest restraint.”
Because the Trump administration refused to defend the law that created the CFPB, the Supreme Court appointed Paul D. Clement, who served as solicitor general under then-President George W. Bush, to represent the agency’s interests.
Clement told Justice Samuel Alito that he believed the statute that created the agency is “still perfectly constitutional.”



Sanders called JPMorgan’s CEO America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why he has a point

Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist in America today” in recent ad

PAUL ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the "biggest corporate socialist in America today" in a recent ad.
He may have a point — beyond what he intended.
With his Dimon ad, Sanders is referring specifically to the bailouts JPMorgan and other banks took from the government during the 2008 financial crisis. But accepting government bailouts and corporate welfare is not the only way I believe American companies behave like closet socialists despite their professed love of free markets.
In reality, most big U.S. companies operate internally in ways Karl Marx would applaud as remarkably close to socialist-style central planning. Not only that, corporate America has arguably become a laboratory of innovation in socialist governance, as I show in my own research.
Closet socialists
In public, CEOs like Dimon attack socialist planning while defending free markets.
But inside JPMorgan and most other big corporations, market competition is subordinated to planning. These big companies often contain dozens of business units and sometimes thousands. Instead of letting these units compete among themselves, CEOs typically direct a strategic planning process to ensure they cooperate to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation as a whole.
This is just how a socialist economy is intended to operate. The government would conduct economy-wide planning and set goals for each industry and enterprise, aiming to achieve the best outcome for society as a whole.
And just as companies rely internally on planned cooperation to meet goals and overcome challenges, the U.S. economy could use this harmony to overcome the existential crisis of our age — climate change. It's a challenge so massive and urgent that it will require every part of the economy to work together with government in order to address it.
Overcoming socialism's past problems
But, of course, socialism doesn't have a good track record.
One of the reasons socialist planning failed in the old Soviet Union, for example, was that it was so top-down that it lacked the kind of popular legitimacy that democracy grants a government. As a result, bureaucrats overseeing the planning process could not get reliable information about the real opportunities and challenges experienced by enterprises or citizens.
Moreover, enterprises had little incentive to strive to meet their assigned objectives, especially when they had so little involvement in formulating them.
A second reason the USSR didn't survive was that its authoritarian system failed to motivate either workers or entrepreneurs. As a result, even though the government funded basic science generously, Soviet industry was a laggard in innovation.
Ironically, corporations — those singular products of capitalism — are showing how these and other problems of socialist planning can be surmounted.
Take the problem of democratic legitimacy. Some companies, such as General Electric, Kaiser Permanente and General Motors, have developed innovative ways to avoid the dysfunctions of autocratic planning by using techniques that enable lower-level personnel to participate actively in the strategy process.
Although profit pressures often force top managers to short-circuit the promised participation, when successfully integrated it not only provides top management with more reliable bottom-up input for strategic planning but also makes all employees more reliable partners in carrying it out.
So here we have centralization — not in the more familiar, autocratic model, but rather in a form I call "participative centralization." In a socialist system, this approach could be adopted, adapted and scaled up to support economy-wide planning, ensuring that it was both democratic and effective.
As for motivating innovation, America's big businesses face a challenge similar to that of socialism. They need employees to be collectivist, so they willingly comply with policies and procedures. But they need them to be simultaneously individualistic, to fuel divergent thinking and creativity.
One common solution in much of corporate America, as in the old Soviet Union, is to specialize those roles, with most people relegated to routine tasks while the privileged few work on innovation tasks. That approach, however, overlooks the creative capacities of the vast majority and leads to widespread employee disengagement and sub-par business performance.
Smarter businesses have found ways to overcome this dilemma by creating cultures and reward systems that support a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that I call "interdependent individualism." In my research, I have found this kind of motivation in settings as diverse as Kaiser Permanent physicians, assembly-line workers at Toyota's NUMMI plant and software developers at Computer Sciences Corp. These companies do this, in part, by rewarding both individual contributions to the organization's goals as well as collaboration in achieving them.
While socialists have often recoiled against the idea individual performance-based rewards, these more sophisticated policies could be scaled up to the entire economy to help meet socialism's innovation and motivation challenge.
Big problems require big government
The idea of such a socialist transformation in the U.S. may seem remote today.
But this can change, particularly as more Americans, especially young ones, embrace socialism. One reason they are doing so is because the current capitalist system has so manifestly failed to deal with climate change.
Looking inside these companies suggests a better way forward — and hope for society's ability to avert catastrophe.
Paul Adler, Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology and Environmental Studies, University of Southern California
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.



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
Dominic Rushe in New York
 @dominicru
Thu 4 Apr 2019 12.45 EDTLast modified on Sun 7 Apr 2019 20.55 EDT
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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
Jeff Cox@JEFF.COX.7528@JEFFCOXCNBCCOM
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.



Author: Francois Aure @bullishtulips

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.
Source-PROPUBLICA-Bailout Tracker

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
Francois Aure @bullishtulips
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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