Working America organizers set up a “Not Your ATM” booth at Occupy Portland. It was definitely a hit! We were also able to talk to many Portlanders about how big banks like Bank of America are nickel and diming consumers with new fees despite huge profits.
Tags: Corporate Accountability, Oregon, Portland, Wall Street
As the old saying goes, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And to Eric Cantor, everything looks like an opportunity to shovel more money to the very wealthiest.
After referring to the Occupy Wall Street protestors as “mobs,” Rep. Cantor, a Virginia Republican, is trying to shake off his well-deserved reputation as the smug, shameless defender of the corporate-money agenda by giving a talk on economic inequality this Friday. The second-highest-ranking House Republican must be feeling some heat, because saying we need to “take care of the income disparity in this country” is not exactly in Cantor’s standard talking-point arsenal.
Cantor’s showy display of concern is a sign that the Occupy Wall Street protests are changing our national political conversation for the better. The message is getting out there even as the typical array of right-wing political strategists, well-connected business reporters and corporate-funded think tanks are desperately trying to dismiss, demonize or neutralize the protests.
So what does Cantor have to offer as a solution to the very real problem of economic inequality? Surprise! It’s exactly what Eric Cantor was offering last week, the week before and the week before that. It’s more tax cuts to corporations and the very wealthy, more rollbacks of regulations that protect workers and consumers, and more slashing of services and support systems that people hit by the recession really need. In particular, Cantor and his allies are looking to eliminate even the modest, insufficient regulations we currently have on Wall Street and the big banks who caused the financial crisis. If Cantor were capable of embarrassment, he might be hesitant to advance a “jobs plan” that doesn’t create jobs.
Cantor claims that his agenda is going to promote economic growth because it “gives private enterprise a chance to grow.” But the problem facing our economy isn’t that businesses are insufficiently profitable or insufficiently flush with cash to create jobs. It’s that high unemployment, lost wealthy and stagnant incomes are holding back demand. There is zero wrong with our economy that can be fixed by directing more money towards the companies who are failing to create jobs despite sitting on trillions in cash. Cantor’s economic prescription is based on wishful thinking.
In addition to being wrong, Cantor’s argument here is just plain lazy. Low taxes on the very wealthiest, light or nonexistent regulation of big businesses and reduced services are what politicians like Cantor always offer, regardless of the circumstances. And they’re what we’ve tried already—after all, the grim job and income record of the Bush administration came at a time when Cantor and his party controlled the levers of policy. It only “worked” to create economic growth for a tiny sliver of the very wealthiest, which may be the only kind of economic growth that actually matters to Cantor.
You can thank the Occupy Wall Street protestors for changing our national conversation so much that even Eric Cantor feels he has to show he cares about inequality. But he’ll have to try a lot harder to actually propose solutions that are anything more than reheated leftovers of the failed policies of the past decade.
Tags: Corporate Accountability, Eric Cantor, taxes, Wall Street
Google Inc. is hiring. The company plans to hire over 6,000 new employees this year. From NPR:
The company outlined its hiring plans Tuesday with The Associated Press without providing many specifics beyond its pledge to hire more people than it did in 2007 when it added 6,131 workers. Google hired nearly 4,600 people last year to end 2010 with 24,400 employees. Based on its hiring commitment, Google’s work force will increase by at least 25 percent this year.
Wow! A big company, doing so well that they want to hire thousands of new employees! This is great news, right?
Uh…not so much….
But Google’s push to further expand a work force that grew by 23 percent last year may not be as well received on Wall Street, where the Internet search leader’s spending has annoyed some investors who would prefer a more frugal approach in hopes of fatter returns.
Wall St believes that as long as the rising tide lifts the luxury liner, the rest of the boats can founder.
Tags: Jobs, Wall Street
“In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks,” he said.
Who said that? Only the incoming chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL).
He plans to spend his time in charge of that committee serving the banks. How do you think that’s going to work out for the average bank customer?
Tags: banks, Wall Street
Wall Street may earn $19 billion in 2010, its fourth-most profitable year, even as regulatory changes and a weakened economy limit its ability to generate profit, New York state’s comptroller said.
and
DiNapoli said Wall Street has nonetheless benefited from federal bailouts and low interest rates, and may see profitability settle near levels that prevailed prior to 2007 and 2008, when it lost $54 billion overall.
It sure was nice of us to bail them out, after they almost destroyed the US economy. And even though at least 10% of us are unemployed and struggling, and there’s opposition to further extending unemployment benefits that expire just before Christmas, here’s news that will make us feel all warm and fuzzy:
DiNapoli expects to provide his annual tally of Wall Street bonus payouts in early 2011. Overall Wall Street bonuses totaled $20.3 billion in 2009, up 17 percent from 2008.
According to the pay consultant Johnson Associates Inc, Wall Street workers may see individual bonuses rise an average 5 percent this year, though weak trading results may lead to declines for some employees.
Of course a more cynical person than I might call this …..greed. Someone like Jim Hightower:
By the laws of economics, if not physics, bonuses should fall to earth this year, because the bankers have performed poorly. Trading is down, profits are flat (despite being given trillions of dollars in almost-interest-free money by the feds), firms are firing lower-level employees, and banker greed has ruined the public reputations of the financial giants.
Who cares, shriek the big shots – its bonus time, baby, so grab all you can! The CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and others have set aside billions of dollars to flood their executive suites with bonus cash at the end of the year – money that should go to shareholders. Their claim is: “We deserve it, for we took low pay during the crash of 2008-2009.” For example, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’ boss was paid a mere $9 million last year, so this year he wants that “sacrifice” to be made up to him.
Blankfein provides us with a perfect illustration for the phrase “having no shame.”
Tags: Wall Street
It’s worth revisiting something Chris Hayes said at our Working Class at the Tipping Point event in June.
“At the bottom of the pyramid,” he said, “America is a ruthlessly punitive and accountability-obsessed society. At the top of the pyramid, it is endlessly forgiving. Before trust can be restored, accountability has to be established.”
A Morgan Stanley wealth manager will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because Colorado prosecutors don’t want him to lose his job.
Martin Joel Erzinger, who manages more than $1 billion in assets for Morgan Stanley in Denver, is being accused only of a misdemeanor for allegedly driving his Mercedes into a cyclist and then fleeing the scene, Colorado’s Vail Daily reports. The victim, Dr. Steven Milo, whom Erzinger allegedly hit in July, suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and, according to his lawyer Harold Haddon, “lifetime pain.”
The prosecutor’s official rationale seems to be that Erzinger will be paying restitution to Milo as the presumed outcome of a civil suit, and that therefore it’s in Milo’s interest to have Erzinger employed. But, uh, do you believe that? I don’t believe that. Because that logic could be applied to just about anyone who does anything to hurt anyone else. You could be making minimum wage and the person you ran over would still have more chance of getting money from you in the future if you didn’t have a felony on your record. So unless this prosecutor has used this logic in a case where a, I don’t know, assistant in a nursing home hit someone and fled, it sure looks like this is a case of someone getting away with a crime because he’s wealthy.
Ruthlessly punitive at the bottom, endlessly forgiving at the top. Until we start to change that, some number of people at the top will keep on doing anything they think they can get away with. We knew they’d been getting away with taking people’s paid-for houses and the like. But leaving a man bleeding by the side of the road? It’s not necessarily worse, but you’d think at least it would be harder to use “but I’m a wealthy banker” as a way to evade justice.
Tags: Wall Street
Do you see a pattern?
Increasing income disparity in the US puts us worse than or on par with much of Latin America in that category.
A former economic advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain is advocating lowering the minimum wage.
Someone making $100 million per year pays a tax rate just two points higher than someone making $175,000 per year.
Wall Street bonuses are expected to rise this year.
Businesses with rising profits are not hiring more workers.
CEOs who lay off more workers get paid more.
Senator David Vitter represents a state where the average household income is $43,635, but he looks out at an audience and tells them that a plan to repeal a tax cut for households making more than $250,000 per year would affect “virtually everybody in this audience.”
Senator Jon Kyl is fighting to protect tax cuts to the wealthiest. He also fought to block an extension of unemployment benefits to struggling families in an attempt to get an estate tax bill that would benefit…you guessed it, the very wealthiest families.
55% of all adults in the workforce say that since the recession began they have been unemployed, had their pay cut or their hours reduced, or become involuntary part-time workers.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay says jobless workers don’t go back to work because of unemployment benefits.
JPMorgan Chase pretty much agrees with DeLay.
The pattern I see is working people struggling more and more, wealthy people having more and more, and Republican politicians and Wall Street allied to get more and more from working people and give more and more to wealthy ones.
And they like to say that anyone asking for a living wage, or to close a tax loophole for billionaires, is engaging in class warfare. What they really mean is, that opposes their own war on working people.
Tags: income inequality, minimum wage, unemployment, unemployment benefits extension, Wall Street
Making the rounds, complete with miniature horses:
Incentives at financial firms should rise from 2009 levels but remain below the record payouts of 2007, according to compensation consultant Johnson Associates.
Average compensation at investment and commercial banks is set to rise for the second straight year, while payouts at asset managers should rebound from a 2009 trough, the report said.
I’m torn between defensive sarcasm—“Of course Wall Street bonuses should rise this year! I can’t think why not, can you?”—and crawling under a rock and not reading the news for a few days.
Tags: Wall Street
In the waning days of the Bush administration, and before the implementation of restrictions on some executives’ pay, the highest paid bankers at 17 of the firms bailed out by the Bush Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) also got bonuses totaling $1.6 billion in the period from October 2008 to February 2009.
Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master on executive pay, issued a report today identifying the 17 banks, many of them among the nation’s largest, following an inquiry into compensation at all firms receiving TARP funds. The report does not include specifics on the amounts paid out at any of the banks.
At a news conference on Friday, Feinberg stressed that the firms did nothing illegal, but that their actions reflected “bad judgment” that was “contrary to the public interest.”
Later, President Obama, speaking briefly at the White House, said the review was meant to put firms on notice “that continued to pay out lavish bonuses” as they received government assistance.
The inquiry focused on the five month period during which banks received TARP money but were not yet subject to the new compensation oversight provisions. During those five months alone nearly 3 million American workers had their jobs taken from them by the Great Recession caused by Wall Street and the Bush administration’s failures.
Of the 17 banks identified, 6 have not yet repaid the TARP funds. NPR provides a list:
Here are the 17 firms that Feinberg says made ill-advised payments. Those that have not yet fully repaid taxpayer bailouts are listed in bold:
* American Express
* AIG
* Bank of America
* Boston Private Financial Holdings
* Capital One
* CIT
* Citigroup
* JPMorgan Chase
* M&T Bank
* Morgan Stanley
* Regions Financial
* SunTrust Banks
* Bank of New York Mellon
* Goldman Sachs
* PNC Financial Services Group
* U.S. Bancorp
* Wells Fargo
Tags: banks, TARP, Wall Street
