Category: #OccupyWallStreet

Co-president Dimon whips Dem votes

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

teamwork

Geeze, they’re not even subtle anymore. If there was any doubt that the fox was in the henhouse, this little episode has clarified things considerably, am I right? Think about this: The president of the United States and unindicted criminal Jamie Dimon were working together to push a bill that will bail out Wall Street’s losses at the gambling table.

That’s a potential of $303 TRILLION for which taxpayers are on the hook:

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made calls to lawmakers on Thursday urging them to support the “cromnibus” spending bill, House Financial Services Committee ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told reporters.

Dimon’s involvement came amidst progressives enraged that the House “cromnibus” included a provision that they said would weaken Wall Street regulations.

“I think we got hurt when Jamie Dimon and the president started to whip,” Waters told reporters after the vote. “That’s when I think we lost some votes.”

The Washington Post first reported news of Dimon’s involvement in the negotiations.The House voted to approve a $1.1 trillion bill funding most of the government through September on a 219-206 vote. Fifty-seven Democrats voted for the bill, while 139 Democrats — including Waters — opposed it.

Waters and progressives opposed the budget due to changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Law that were supported by Dimon and other big banks.

“What does it say? It just seems very odd,” Waters said. “It is just very strange that the two of them would be working for the support of this bill.”

When asked if she thought that Obama had sold out to Wall Street, Waters replied: “That’s not for me to determine. I know that the president was whipping. I know that Jamie Dimon was whipping and calling directly into members’ offices. And that’s odd. That’s an odd combination.”

In other news, Jamie Dimon has been pronounced free of cancer. Now he just spreads it around Washington instead!

CRomnibus passes House

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Party at Jamie Dimon’s house!

berniesez

Warren vs. Weiss

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Aunt Bibban's Memorial

She gave a barnburner of a speech yesterday:

Speaking at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, Warren cast her opposition to Weiss as part of a bigger battle against the influence of the finance industry in Washington.

“Why does the revolving door matter?” she said. “Because it means that too much of the time, the wind blows from the same direction. Time after time in government, the Wall Street view prevails, and time after time, conflicting views are crowded out.”

Warren also continued to make the case for why Weiss specifically should not be confirmed. She said Weiss’ defenders haven’t shown that his experience as Lazard’s head of global banking prepares him for a job focused on domestic markets and financial regulation. She railed against his ties to Wall Street as “a corporate deal maker” and stood by her criticism of the Obama administration for selecting too many bankers for government posts.

“For me, this is one spin of the revolving door too many,” Warren said. “Enough is enough.”
Warren said the undersecretary job entails more than just peddling U.S. Treasuries to foreign investors and that Weiss would play a key role in crafting policy.

Trading policy positions for contributions

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Yves Smith on the nomination of Antonio Weiss to head Treasury, and the ensuing attacks on Elizabeth Warren. Go read it all, it’s fascinating. But this is a key point:

So what Sorkin is trying to spin as a plus is something we warned about earlier: that the Obama Administration is now making important policy roles into patronage positions, to be handed out as prizes to important fundraisers. Before, that sort of thing used to be limited to ambassadorships and secondary posts like head of the Export-Import Bank. Now it’s going to unquestionably important roles.

Bernie unveils his economic plan

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Sen Bernie Sanders Rep John Conyers Progressive Round Table

Bernie Sanders revealed his economic plan on the floor of the Senate yesterday:

Sen. Sanders said, “Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?…Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median male worker earned $783 less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median female worker made $1,337 less last year than she earned in 2007. Since 1999, household income for the median middle-class family is less than it was a quarter century ago. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing. Real unemployment today is not 5.8 percent, it is 11.5 percent if we include those who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is 18.6 percent and African-American youth unemployment is 32.6 percent.”

Sanders detailed a 12-point economic program to,

– Invest in our crumbling infrastructure with a major program to create jobs by rebuilding roads, bridges, water systems, waste water plants, airports, railroads and schools.

– Transform energy systems away from fossil fuels to create jobs while beginning to reverse global warming and make the planet habitable for future generations.

– Develop new economic models to support workers in the United States instead of giving tax breaks to corporations which ship jobs to low-wage countries overseas.

– Make it easier for workers to join unions and bargain for higher wages and benefits.

– Raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour so no one who works 40 hours a week will live in poverty.

– Provide equal pay for women workers who now make 78 percent of what male counterparts make.

– Reform trade policies that have shuttered more than 60,000 factories and cost more than 4.9 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs.

– Make college affordable and provide affordable child care to restore America’s competitive edge compared to other nations.
Continue reading “Bernie unveils his economic plan” →

Mitch to ditch campaign finance rules

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

The Daily Show --There have been rumors...

Sure wish these craven tools weren’t in charge. Oh well!

WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to use a massive appropriations bill to loosen campaign finance rules.

The Republican leader’s office is attempting to attach a policy rider to the omnibus bill that would effectively end limits imposed on coordinated spending by federal candidates and political party committees.

Currently, coordinated spending by candidates and political parties is limited based on a series of formulas for different offices. For example, the total amount presidential candidates may coordinate with political parties is calculated as the national voting-age population multiplied by two cents — a figure that is adjusted for the cost of living each election cycle.

The McConnell rider would allow parties to consult with candidate campaigns on advertising or other electoral advocacy without having the resulting spending count towards their coordinated limit, so long as the spending is not “controlled by, or made at the direction of” the candidate. The change would create a loophole essentially making the coordinated limits moot.

IKEA is a tax shelter

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

IKEA

No, really. They’re not even Swedish! They’re a “charity” that’s based in the Netherlands, allegedly to promote design and architecture. But they don’t spend much of their money – they seem to be a big old tax shelter:

Ikea’s association with Swedishness and Swedish values is so ironic that one would be hard pressed to know where to begin. One obvious place to start would be to note that the Swedish government is using taxpayer money to give free advertising to a corporation that left Sweden to avoid paying taxes. Ikea contributes next to nothing to Sweden in the form of corporate tax, all while making billions off of its Swedish image. In fact, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid giving anything back to the national budgets of their host nations.

Ikea’s corporate structure is complicated, but the key point is that Ikea is a Netherlands-based “charity.” For many years, the vast majority of its outlets have been controlled by the Dutch company Ingka Holding, which in turn is owned by the not-for-profit Stichting Ingka Foundation, which was created in 1982 by the founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, for the purpose of ”furthering the advancement of architecture and interior design.” The Stichting Ingka Foundation is often listed as the wealthiest charitable foundation in the world, with assets in excess of $35 billion. As a result, Ikea pays a minuscule 3.5 percent nonprofit tax rate, far lower than its for-profit counterparts. In addition, recent revelations from LuxLeaks, an investigative project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, show the company has made deals with the government of Luxembourg in order to pay as little tax as possible to anyone, anywhere.

Via Forbes:

This nonprofit is dedicated to “innovation in the field of architectural and interior design.” Indeed, the Foundation donated a few million to some Swedish universities, but the money is the singular, conventional nonprofit donation.

The Foundation’s cash is transferred to Stichting IKEA Foundation, another Dutch-registered charity, which can use the money for “for investing long-term in order to build a reserve for securing the IKEA group, in case of any future capital requirements.” Nice charity, if you can get it.

This is not the end of IKEA’s legal structure, however. Inter IKEA Systems, another private Dutch company but not part of the Ingka Holding group, holds the intellectual property rights to its “trademark” and “concept.” The owner of this Dutch entity is Inter IKEA Holding, registered in Luxembourg. A separate company in the Netherlands Antilles owns it, which in turn is run by a trust registered in Curaçao.

IKEA ends up paying roughly 3% in corporate taxes!

H/T Christian Christensen.

Of course it was a policy

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

jump-you-fuckers

Real shocker, right? We might be out of this mess by now if they’d thrown these people in jail:

U.S. government protection of big banks is a policy the Obama administration has adamantly denied, but during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Friday, William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, candidly admitted to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, that the policy was indeed a reality.

Under the Obama administration, despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, large financial organizations have avoided criminal prosecution for the following: laundering money for suspected terrorists and drug cartels, manipulating interest rate benchmarks, rigging various commodities markets, misleading investors in mortgage-linked securities, tricking homeowners into taking out expensive mortgages, manipulating municipal debt markets, and breaking state and federal rules when seizing homes from borrowers who were behind on their payments, according to the Huffington Post.

“We were not willing to find those firms guilty before, because we were worried that if we found them guilty, that could somehow potentially destabilize the financial system,” Dudley said during the hearing. “We’ve gotten past that and I think it’s really important that we got past that.”

It’s the first admission from a federal official acknowledging the explicit policy of protecting big banks from prosecution, despite lawmakers having long suspected such an arrangement.