Category: #OccupyWallStreet

‘Paul Krugman won’t save us’

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

While the Occupy Movement changed the mind & speech of the public, people began noticing something was wrong. the illusions played daily on TV began to fade. the poor felt it as they got hit most as always. An awakening began of truth unlike ever before a

Thomas Frank on why academic language and charts won’t do a damned thing about the rigged economic game. I do urge you to go finish the whole thing:

The one thing that just about everyone knows about inequality is that it’s a complex, highly technical problem, with many confusing causes and expressions. “Inequality is a complicated, complicated thing,” as a puzzled writer declared in the Atlantic a few weeks ago. “What exactly is income inequality?” wondered NPR’s Audie Cornish in January. “Ask six economists and you’re likely to get six different answers.” (That it’s economists you’re supposed to ask was simply taken for granted.)

I admit that the issue is complicated in its details, but it’s also — in its basic, brutal thrust — something  dead simple: Inequality happened because our leaders set out to make it happen. On the first page of Kevin Phillips’ 1990 (!) bestseller on the subject, “The Politics of Rich and Poor,” he stated this obvious truth. “The 1980s were the triumph of upper America,” he wrote.

But while money, greed and luxury had become the stuff of popular culture, hardly anyone asked why such great wealth had concentrated at the top, and whether this was a result of public policy. Despite the armies of homeless sleeping on grates, political leaders—even those who professed to care about the homeless—had little to say about the Republican party’s historical role, which has been not simply to revitalize U.S. capitalism but to tilt power, policy, wealth and income toward the richest portions of the population. (emphasis added)

The rich got so goddamn rich, in other words, because the signature policies of the Great Right Turn were designed to make them rich. And, as the world knows, these policies weren’t limited to Republicans; Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—plus, of course, their resident economists and cabinet members—all more or less endorsed the basic tenets of the free-market faith. They are all implicated.

So inequality, now that we’re having a “conversation” about it, must of course turn out to be massively complicated, something no one could possibly have seen coming — sort of like the 2008 financial crisis, come to think of it. Furthermore, it must be seen as another technical problem, a matter for the experts to solve, like the budget deficit or entitlement spending.

* * *
Then again, why do I quibble? Most of the experts I refer to here aren’t actually wrong. I have quoted them myself on occasion; I have shown PowerPoint slides of Piketty-Saez graphs to audiences of unbelieving college students. Many of the essays in the Times’ “Great Divide” series have been admirable, as will surely be much of the “cutting-edge analysis” scheduled to be produced by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. What difference does it make if it’s a Nobel laureate who tells us what’s happened to the middle class or the leader of a local union somewhere?

My suspicion is that it makes an enormous difference. “Inequality” is not some minor technical glitch for the experts to solve; this is the Big One. This is the very substance of American populism; this is what has brought together movements of average people throughout our history. Offering instruction on the subject in a classroom at Berkeley may be enlightening for the kids in attendance but it is fundamentally the wrong way to take on the problem, almost as misguided as it would be if we turned the matter over to the 1 percent themselves and got a bunch of billionaires together at Davos to offer pointers on how to stop them from beating us over and over again in the game of life. (Oops — that actually happened.)

“Inequality” is the most basic issue of them all, the very reason for liberalism’s existence. It is about who we are and how we live. Virtually every other liberal cause pales by comparison. This is the World War II of political subjects, and if we are going to win it must be a people’s war, not a Combat of the Thirty between the plumèd knights of the Beltway. We owe the economists thanks for making the situation plain, but now matters must of necessity pass into other hands. If the destruction of the middle class is ever to be addressed and solved, the impetus must come from below, not from above. This is a job we have to do ourselves.

Mickey D’s coughs up the cash for wage theft

~ susie

Restaurant McDonald's - Montréal
I am so damned happy to see this:

Seven McDonald’s franchises in New York owned by Richard Cisneros will pay nearly $500,000 to fast food workers who claimed they were victims of wage theft under a settlement reached by state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, the Huffington Post reports.

More than 1,600 current and former employees will receive payment. The labor bureau “found that cashiers regularly performed off-the-clock work before and after their shifts,” Dave Jamieson writes, doing work without earning any extra income, and were also made to pay for cleaning their own uniforms and didn’t get an extra hour of pay after shifts where they worked 10 hours in a row. All of these practices violate New York State labor laws.

The state also recently won a $1.3 million settlement for workers at Domino’s in New York City who claimed they experienced similar wage theft tactics.

Given how widespread wage theft is among New York City’s fast food businesses, on Tuesday Public Advocate Letitia James announced a proposal to tamp down on these practices, including an anonymous whistleblower hotline for workers, expanding the authority of city agencies to investigate, and urging McDonald’s to amend franchisee agreements so that it can hold them accountable when they violate labor laws.

McDonald’s faces much larger charges of wage theft beyond New York, as workers have brought seven class action lawsuits against the corporate entity as well as some franchisees in three states. They allege they were underpaid when the company made them work off the clock, didn’t pay them overtime, made them pay for their uniforms out of their own pockets, erased hours from their timecards, and denied them breaks for meals and rest.

While many of the lawsuits over wage theft in the fast food industry, such as the one in New York, target franchisees, the class action suits argue that corporate shares liability. The company has defended itself by saying that franchisees operate independently, so it can’t be held accountable for their actions. But workers allege that McDonald’s corporate was directly involved in monitoring labor costs at the store level, leading to the illegal wage tactics.

Pitchfork time

~ susie

LCC - Teaser

What can you do when the oligarchs and the politicians in their pockets are completely shameless?

Harry Reid said the billionaire Koch brothers’ influence extends so far into national affairs that the Kochs are blocking a bill to aid Ukraine.

Democratic leaders alleged on Thursday that GOP House and Senate leaders want to trade a delay in IRS rules changes affecting the political activities of nonprofits for passage of a broad Ukraine aid package including controversial International Monetary Fund reforms. Those IRS rules could affect the Koch-backed Super PAC Americans for Prosperity, which is running millions of dollars of attack ads against incumbent Democratic senators.

Sens. Reid, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) all said that Republicans are more interested in protecting conservative-leaning outside groups than in aiding an embattled country.

“The Koch brothers continue to hold up the situation we have in Ukraine,” Reid said, part of another day-long offensive against the brothers.

The NY Post breaks a big story

~ susie

Wells Fargo

Wow, what crooks:

Wells Fargo, the nation’s biggest mortgage servicer, appears to have set up detailed internal procedures to fabricate foreclosure papers on demand, according to allegations in papers filed Tuesday in a New York federal court.

In a filing in New York’s Southern District in White Plains for a local homeowner in bankruptcy, attorney Linda Tirelli described a 150-page Wells Fargo Foreclosure Attorney Procedures Manual created November 9, 2011 and updated February 24, 2012. According to court papers, the Manual details “a procedure for processing [mortgage] notes without endorsements and obtaining endorsements and allonges.”

Those are the technical terms for the paperwork proving that the company that’s foreclosing owns the loan, and therefore has the right to kick a family out of its home. Wells Fargo services roughly 9 million home loans, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

A Wells Fargo spokesman denied that the manual could be used to order improper documents. “No note is endorsed without the proper authority,” he said. “Wells Fargo’s foreclosure processes—today and back in 2012—are legal [and] appropriate.”

Attorneys, forensic accountants and consumer advocates have long suspected that banks were systematically creating improper documents to prove ownership of loans. Foreclosure defense lawyers use the term ‘ta-da’ endorsement to describe situations in which they say a document appears, as if by magic, in the bank’s possession as needed in a foreclosure case—even though the proper endorsement was not included in the original foreclosure filing. It might sound like a technicality, but correct proof of ownership lies at the heart of the foreclosure crisis for securitized loans, which were sold by the lender that originally issued the mortgage. To legally transfer a securitized loan, the endorsements and allonges have to be created in a very specific way and within a specific time frame, usually 90 days after a residential mortgage trust closes. For many loans in foreclosure now, which were originated years ago and then sold, it’s way too late to correct incomplete documents, experts said.

If the allegations in Tirelli’s court filing are true, this manual represents the first time ‘ta-da’ endorsements are “being described and admitted to be a procedure” at a major bank, as Tirelli claimed to The Post.

H/t Jason Kalafat Defense Attorney.

GOP tax plan: Phase out mortgage interest deduction

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Everybody gets pissed off whenever I say this is a good idea, so maybe you’ll listen to David Cay Johnston:

Imagine you make $50,000 to $75,000. Statistically you would save $75 a month in federal income taxes if you bought a house, the congressional study shows. Now which option would you prefer?

• Pay $300,000 for your house, the median for Sacramento in late 2013, and save $900 annually on your federal income tax by deducting the mortgage interest?

• Pay $200,000 for your house, but without being able to deduct your mortgage interest?

Warren: Tax millionaires to refinance student debt

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Remember how the fringe-iest wingnuts introduced the same extreme legislation year after year, were ridiculed for it, and then suddenly, it was passed? That’s what Warren is doing:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) laid out a new plan that would tax millionaires and use that revenue to help students refinance their student loans.

Delivering the keynote address at the Higher Ed Not Debt Campaign launch event on Thursday at the Center For American Progress, Warren argued that America faces a choice: “Do we invest in students, or millionaires?” Warren plans to introduce a bill that would create an “America that invests in those who get an education” by revising the tax code and enacting the Buffet rule.

The Buffet rule is named after billionaire Warren Buffet and would establish a minimum tax on income in excess of $1 million. The measure, which never got out of Congress, raises approximately $50 billion in revenue and ensures that millionaires do not pay lower tax rates than middle-class families.

Congress acted to lower the federal unsubsidized student loan interest rate to 3.86 percentfor undergraduates for the 2012-2013 academic school year. But unless it acts again, the $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt will continue to grow.

Warren’s plan would allow students with outstanding student loans to refinance at lower rates. The cost of the change would be covered by a “dollar for dollar” effort where for “every dollar the Buffet rule brings in, we use that dollar to refinance student loan debt,” she explained. She estimated that recent graduates who borrowed the maximum in undergraduate loans could see their payments drop by $1,000 a year and total interest paid over the life of the loan could be cut nearly in half. Students with graduate loans or borrowers from private lenders would save even more, Warren projected.

Honest broker

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Time Out For Fun
Enron billionaire John Arnold assures us he can tell us what we should do about worker pensions because he has no investment in it.

In his response to Pando’s investigative reporting, Arnold is asserting that his status as a billionaire with “no financial interest” in the debate should make him more credible and beyond reproach. But would it?

One school of thought says yes it would, because he would have nothing personally to gain or lose in the debate. The idea is that the concerns and arguments of public-sector workers and retirees should be dismissed, or downplayed, because their economic survival depends on the public pension debate’s outcome. At the same time, the idea is that the oligarch is uniquely able to be objective because his wealth means he doesn’t really have a personal stake in whether to fulfill pension obligations or to renege on those obligations and throw untold numbers of retirees into poverty.

This is the self-serving notion typically forwarded by plutocrats to try to appropriate even more privilege than their billions afford them — and there is at least some logic undergirding it.
Continue reading “Honest broker” →

Was the fix in?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

JAPAN GOLD

Well, why wouldn’t they? It’s not as if they’d be sent to jail, amirite?

The London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say.

Unusual trading patterns around 3 p.m. in London, when the so-called afternoon fix is set on a private conference call between five of the biggest gold dealers, are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, New York University’s Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service, wrote in a draft research paper.