CEOs Off-Loaded Millions of Dollars in Stock in December to Avoid Higher Taxes
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 10 January 2013
Many of the executives who sold stock in December said they did not do so for tax purposes, and according to the Journal, their selling patterns mirrored those in previous months.

As the possibility of increased tax rates approached at the end of 2012, dozens of executives sold stock and took advantage of lower tax rates. According to the Wall Street Journal’s analysis, executives off-loaded millions of dollars in stock in December, avoiding the higher tax rates Congress approved at the beginning of 2013. And because Congress raised rates on capital gains income, executives who sold well-performing stocks saved the most, the Journal reports:

A Wall Street Journal review of securities filings found that 58 executives sold stock valued at $10 million or more in December as talks intensified over raising tax rates.

Capital gains were hit more than other types of income, according to David Kautter, the managing director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University in Washington, D.C. “So if you could move that into 2012, you saved the most of anyone.”

Many of the executives who sold stock in December said they did not do so for tax purposes, and according to the Journal, their selling patterns mirrored those in previous months. Others, however, admitted that the sales occurred for “tax planning” purposes. Cablevision CEO James Dolan, who also manages Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks, gained $26 million from stock sales in December. He had not previously sold stock since 2009. And Robert Kauffman, co-founder of an investment firm, ...

The Dangers of a Data-Driven World
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 30 November 2012
“For those employed in creative endeavors, it’s comforting to believe that technology's use in the information economy begins and ends with the kind of straightforward processes (data entry, dictation, etc.) that require little cognitive analysis and even less artistic thinking.”

 

If the recent political era has taught us anything, it has reiterated the enduring truth of George Santayana's aphorism about memory and duplication. Whether once again watching tax cuts fail to deliver a promised economic boost or witnessing more wars fail to deliver stability, we are reminded that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

But then, as much as those haunting words are meant as a warning, technology today is coding Santayana's principle into society's operating system, as if mimicking history is an admirable objective. Indeed, whether it's movie studios, record companies, government intelligence agencies or corporate human resources departments, algorithms that use the past to predict — and create — the future are making more and more decisions.

For those employed in creative endeavors, it's comforting to believe that technology's use in the information economy begins and ends with the kind of straightforward processes (data entry, dictation, etc.) that require little cognitive analysis and even less artistic thinking. Yet, as Christopher Steiner shows in his mind-blowing new book "Automate This," algorithms taking into account past commercial successes are being deployed by the film and music industries to choose which movie and album proposals will be produced. What's more, an increasing number of the algorithms' selections have proven profitable.

Steiner also documents the Central Intelligence Agency's seeming preparation for a real-life version of the WOPR from the 1980s flick ...

Tax Rates For America’s Wealthiest Fell In 2010
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 26 November 2012
“The average effective tax rate fell for all income groups above $500,000, continuing a drop that has occurred for years.”

 

With debate in Washington focused on the taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans, new data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that the effective tax rates for America’s top earners fell even lower in 2010.

The average effective tax rate fell for all income groups above $500,000, continuing a drop that has occurred for years. For incomes above $10 million, the average rate fell from 22.4 percent in 2009 to 20.7 percent in 2010. The reason for the continual drop is clear: the 2003 high-income Bush tax cuts lowered the rate on investment income, and wealthy Americans are deriving more income from investments than they ever have, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The reason for the drop in average tax rates is no secret: It’s the special 15% top rates for capital gains and dividends that President George W. Bush pushed through. In 2009, taxpayers with incomes exceeding $10 million reported 35.8% of their income as capital gains and dividends. That rose to 48.5% for 2010.

Low capital gains rates have helped the wealthy pay lower and lower tax rates even as their incomes have skyrocketed. And while capital gains income makes up almost half of the incomes of the wealthiest Americans, it accounts for 2.2 percent or less for earners under $200,000. Half of all capital gains income goes to just to the richest 0.1 percent of Americans.

The capital gains rate has been steadily eroded since President Ronald Reagan taxed such income equal to wages in the 1980s, and the result has ...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: This is What Corporate Governance Looks Like
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 20 November 2012
“Since the Obama administration came to power in January of 2009, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has become a quiet priority for the U.S.”

In 2008, the United States Trade Representative Susan Schwab announced the U.S. entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks as “a pathway to broader Asia-Pacific regional economic integration.” Originating in 2005 as a “Strategic Economic Partnership” between a few select Pacific countries, the TPP has, as of October 2012, expanded to include 11 nations in total: the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia, with the possibility of several more joining in the future.

What makes the TPP unique is not simply the fact that it may be the largest “free trade agreement” ever negotiated, nor even the fact that only two of its roughly 26 articles actually deal with “trade,” but that it is also the most secretive trade negotiations in history, with no public oversight, input, or consultations.

Since the Obama administration came to power in January of 2009, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has become a quiet priority for the U.S., which overtook the leadership role in the “trade agreement” talks. In 2010, when Malaysia joined the TPP, the Wall Street Journal suggested that the “free-trade pact” could “serve as a counterweight to China’s economic influence,” with Japan and the Philippines both expressing interest in joining the talks.

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Coal Stocks Plunge Post-Election
Taylor
Published: Thursday 8 November 2012
“The collapse of sardine fisheries in the southern Caribbean during the past decade may have been driven by global climate change, according to a study.”

Investors wasted no time running from what had been a nice little three-month rally in coal stocks ahead of the 2012 presidential election. [Market Watch]

US President Barack Obama has hinted he will make another push to fight climate change after cruising to a new term, but his room for maneuver will be limited even with a new focus after megastorm Sandy. [AFP]

Barack Obama’s invocation of “the destructive power of a warming planet” in his victory speech has stoked ...

Twisting Benghazi Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 30 October 2012
If, as so many Republicans have claimed, the administration’s handling is a cover-up more significant than Watergate, then what is being covered up?

 

Two of the prime terrorist suspects in the Benghazi attack have been captured (one is dead), dozens more have been arrested in Libya, and the suspect group is dispersed and hunted, with its Benghazi headquarters dismantled -- but one wouldn’t know this listening to Republicans inside the Benghazi media bubble, whether partisans or reporters. 

 

“This issue of Benghazi is really bubbling up,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said on Fox News Oct. 28, echoing a talking point repeated on other networks and elsewhere by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Reince Priebus, Carly 

Koch Industries Warns 45,000 Employees of ‘Consequences’ if They Don’t Vote for Republicans
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 16 October 2012
The Koch mailer is one of several recent examples of executives warning that employees may lose their jobs if Republicans do not win in November.

The Koch brothers’ $60 million pledge to defeat President Obama — along with their political network’s $400 million spending — make them two of the most influential conservatives this election.

Not content with their unprecedented influence in politics, the Kochs have also taken to influencing the votes of their employees. According to In These Times, Koch Industries sent 45,000 mailers to employees at Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific, urging votes for Romney and other conservative candidates. The letter warns ominously of “consequences” for the workers if Republicans lose. 

The Koch mailer is one of several recent examples of executives warning that employees may lose their jobs if Republicans do not win in November. Here is an excerpt ...

Highly Debatable: The Big Liar’s Biggest Lies
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 9 October 2012
The Republican’s own chief advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, had glibly described the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy they would deploy in the general election, to make swing voters forget the “severe conservative” of the primaries.

 

“It's not easy to debate a liar,” complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate — and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life, thanks to the inviolable taboo in the mainstream media against calling out a liar (unless, of course, he lies about sex).

Yes, President Obama ought to have been better prepared for Romney's barrage of blather and bull. The Republican's own chief advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, had glibly described the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy they would deploy in the general election, to make swing voters forget the “severe conservative” of the primaries. Romney executed that pivot on Wednesday night, but he could do so only by spouting literally dozens of provably fraudulent assertions — which various diligent fact-checkers proceeded to debunk.

Knowing that he is vulnerable on taxation and the budget for many reasons, including his own peculiar and secretive tax history, Romney made several contradictory claims regarding his economic plan. He has no plan to lavish $5 trillion in tax breaks on the wealthy. He won't cut taxes for the rich at all. He vowed to provide tax relief to the middle class and won't increase their tax burden. He swore that his tax cuts ...

The New “Golden Age of Oil” That Wasn’t
Taylor
Published: Thursday 4 October 2012
Forecasts of Abundance Collide with Planetary Realities

 

Last winter, fossil-fuel enthusiasts began trumpeting the dawn of a new “golden age of oil” that would kick-start the American economy, generate millions of new jobs, and free this country from its dependence on imported petroleum.  Ed Morse, head commodities analyst at Citibank, was typical.  In the Wall Street Journal hecrowed, “The United States has become the fastest-growing oil and gas producer in the world, and is likely to remain so for the rest of this decade and into the 2020s.”

 

Once this surge in U.S. energy production was linked to a predicted boom in energy from Canada’s tar sands reserves, the results seemed obvious and uncontestable.  “North America,” he announced, “is becoming the new Middle East.”  Many other analysts have elaborated similarly on this rosy scenario, which now provides the foundation for Mitt Romney’s plan to achieve “energy independence” by 2020.

By employing impressive new technologies -- notably deepwater drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking) -- energy companies were said to be on the verge of unlocking vast new stores of oil in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and shale formations across the United States.  “A ‘Great Revival’ in U.S. oil production is taking shape -- a major break from the near 40-year trend of falling output,” James Burkhard of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) 

Tedious Attacks on ‘Mainstream Media’
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 29 September 2012
In Rolling Stone magazine, Matt Taibbi regales us on "the incredible untold story of the 2012 election," which is this: Romney's "hypocrisy" in railing against federal debt after his Bain Capital loaded down companies with debt so heavy they sometimes collapsed.

 

Last week, the most-read items on the RealClearPolitics website were complaints about the "mainstream media." Basically, it was Mitt Romney supporters claiming that their man was behind in polls because the so-called mainstream media were biased against conservatives. On the left, meanwhile, the beefs tend to focus on "what the media aren't reporting" — most often plundering by big business. About 11 out of 10 times these commentators know "what the media aren't reporting" because they read about it ... where?

Let's linger on the left side for a moment. In Rolling Stone magazine, Matt Taibbi regales us on "the incredible untold story of the 2012 election," which is this: Romney's "hypocrisy" in railing against federal debt after his Bain Capital loaded down companies with debt so heavy they sometimes collapsed. Taibbi is always an entertaining read, and his portrayals are mostly accurate, even though they often make faulty connections. (Corporate debt and federal debt are two different things.)

But the "untold story" of what Bain did to companies and their employees, including the debt part, has been told about a million times. It's been told in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek and leading newspapers from Maine to Hawaii, from Florida to Alaska. Every fact pertinent to Taibbi's thesis was revealed elsewhere in the media. It is entirely possible that many of Taibbi's readers — like the millions who get their news from right-leaning Fox News — don't spend much time ...

“Why Obama Is Likely to Lose in 2012”
Taylor
Published: Thursday 13 September 2012
I’m a reporter, and it’s not my job to preserve Democrats. But preserving democracy, with that fragile little d, that means something to me.

The following is an excerpt from Greg Palast's upcoming book "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits." Stay tuned to NationofChange for updates on the book's release.  

“Why Obama Is Likely to Lose in 2012” is the title of a column Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June 2011.

It’s not Rove’s prediction: this is his plan to make sure Obama will lose. That’s fine with me—if Rove prefers vanilla to chocolate, hey, it’s a free country. But how Rove plans to take Obama down is contained in the subhead, and it gives me the chills:

“even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out [Obama’s] winning margin in North Carolina.”

Here, Rove is not talking about winning by convincing black voters to vote Republican. The key to victory is preventing the black vote. Period. Rove suggests, with a wink and nudge, the Game Plan:

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Finders Weepers: Early Bain Disputes Cast New Light on Its Business
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 11 September 2012
Private equity firms often claim that they develop companies, helping them to grow more quickly and professionally.

 

It was one of the “quickest big hits in Wall Street history,” as the Wall Street Journal put it at the time.

In 1996, an investment group including Bain Capital, the firm then run by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, sold the consumer credit information business Experian to a British retailer, making a $500 million profit. Bain and the other investors who reaped that windfall had closed the acquisition a mere seven weeks earlier, stunning the investing world.

Another party was stunned by the deal, but for a different reason. James McCall Springer believed that he had brought the idea to buy Experian to Bain in the first place.

Springer sued to get what he contended was his rightful finder's fee, eventually settling. And he wasn't the only one. At least three other parties had similar legal disputes with Bain during the early 1990s, when Romney led the company, raising questions of how rough-and-tumble the company could be. The suits also shed light on how Bain actually operated, complicating one of the main narratives Bain, the Romney campaign, and many commentators have used to describe the private equity firm.

The Romney campaign declined to ...

America is a Democracy? Really?
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 4 August 2012
“Forget that the government is increasingly trampling on the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, with a burgeoning surveillance program and a growing militarization of the police.”

We Americans are taught it in school. The propaganda put out by Voice of America repeats the idea ad nauseum around the globe. Politicians refer to it in every campaign speech with the same fervor that they claim to be running for office in response to God’s call: America is a model of democracy for the whole world.

But what kind of democracy is it really that we have here?

Forget that only half of eligible voters typically vote in quadrennial presidential elections (less than 30% in so-called “off-year” elections for members of the House and a third of the Senate, and less than 25% in municipal and state elections). Forget that the government is increasingly trampling on the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, with a burgeoning surveillance program and a growing militarization of the police.

The US government doesn’t even do what the majority of the citizens want. In fact, these days it flat out ignores what we the people want.

Consider the polls, and what they show public sentiment to be on key issues, and then look at what the government, composed of supposedly elected representatives and an elected president, actually does:

1. Military spending

Most polls show that Americans, tired of the endless wars that have been raging almost without pause since the end of World War II, and the huge amount of taxes devoted to the military (currently over $1 trillion per year!), favor cutting the military. Just recently, the Center for Public Integrity conducted a poll and found that when asked whether they wanted to cut funding for education, veterans’ benefits, homeland security and other areas, or military spending, 65% of people said they wanted military spending to get the axe. Overall, people favored an 18% cut in the military budget. Democrats wanted a 22% cut, while even Republicans, usually perceived as pro-military, ...

No R.I.P. for Alex Cockburn
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 22 July 2012
“I cannot call Alex a personal friend, as I never got to know him that well, but he was an important mentor of sorts, as well as a writing inspiration.”

ThisCantBeHappening! lost a valued friend Friday night with the death, from cancer, of Alexander Cockburn, 71. Alex and his comrade-in-arms Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch magazine have helped our struggling little online left alternative newspaper mightily by running most of our articles on their site when other allegedly progressive news aggregator sites have rejected stories as being too radical, or in the case of Truthout, have simply barred us from their site.

I cannot call Alex a personal friend, as I never got to know him that well, but he was an important mentor of sorts, as well as a writing inspiration. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I began working as a freelance journalist, Alex and his writing colleague James Ridgeway encouraged me to contribute articles which they sometimes ran as part their own page in the Village Voice in New York, thus sparing me having to deal with the editor and the editorial cliques at the paper, which were not particularly open to newcomers like myself.

I appreciated that Alex, despite having a lot of writing projects of his own going all the time, was always available when I would visit the Voice to discuss a story idea or deliver my copy. He was quick with an incisive comment or a suggestion for a turn of phrase, and while I’ve never developed his rapier-sharp wit, it remains something to which I continually aspire.

Alex was a scourge of the capitalist elites and their fawning apologists in the corporate media, of course, but he also played an important role as a merciless critic of those so-called progressive journalists who lost their courage, sold out or were simply wrong on an issue. If it was just a matter of disagreeing about a specific issue -- say climate change, where Alex remained a skeptic -- he could be courteous and respectful in his dismissal of an argument, but woe to those, like the late Christopher ...

The Truth About Obama’s Tax Proposal (And the Lies the Regressives are Telling About It)
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 11 July 2012
“Everyone gets a one-year extension of the Bush tax cut on the first $250,000 of income.”

To hear the media report it, President Obama is proposing a tax increase on wealthy Americans. That’s misleading at best. He’s proposing that everyone receive a continuation of the Bush tax cuts on the first $250,000 of their incomes. Any dollars they earn in excess of $250,000 will be taxed at the old Clinton-era rates.

Get it? Everyone is treated exactly the same. Everyone gets a one-year extension of the Bush tax cut on the first $250,000 of income. No “class warfare.”

Yet regressive Republicans want Americans to believe differently. The editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal say the President wants to extend the Bush tax cuts only “for some taxpayers.” They urge House Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for “everyone” and thereby put Senate Democrats on the spot by “forcing them to choose between extending rates for everyone and accepting Mr. Obama’s tax increase.”

Pure demagoguery. 

Regressives also want Americans to think the President’s proposal would hurt “tens of thousands of job-creating businesses,” as the Journal puts it.

 More baloney.

A small business owner earning $251,000 would pay the Bush rate on the first $250,000 and the old Clinton rate on just $1,000.

Congress’s Joint Tax Committee estimates that in 2013 about 940,000 taxpayers would have enough business income to break through the $250,000 ceiling – and, again, they’d pay additional taxes only on dollars earned above $250,000.

All told, fewer than 3 percent of small business owners would even reach the $250,000 threshold.

A third lie is Obama’s proposal will “increase uncertainly and further retard investment and job creation,” as ...

O’Reilly and the Enduring Threat of Uncertainty
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 1 July 2012
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly is still blaming health care reform legislation for “uncertainty” that he warned is harming jobs growth - even after the Supreme Court issued a final ruling that the law is constitutional.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly is still blaming health care reform legislation for "uncertainty" that he warned is harming jobs growth - even after the Supreme Court issued a final ruling that the law is constitutional. Economists and small business owners have said that lack of demand, not uncertainty, has held back jobs growth.

 

O'Reilly On Supreme Court's Health Care Ruling: "Uncertainty" For Businesses "Continues"

O'Reilly On Supreme Court's Health Care Ruling: "The Uncertainty Continues, The Hiring Is Going To Be Blunted." Calling in to his Fox News show, which was being guest-hosted by Laura Ingraham, to discuss the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, Bill O'Reilly said: "[F]or business, it's bad. Because the uncertainty continues, the hiring is going to be blunted, and the economy is going to be harmed." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 6/28/12]

But The Ruling Settled Much Of The Alleged Uncertainty For Businesses Over The Health Care Law

EPI: Health Care Ruling "Gives Clarity And Certainty" To Businesses. Elise Gould, economist and director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote that the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the health care law is "important because it gives clarity and certainty to states and private industry that they should start preparing for the main provision to kick in in 2014. It resolves any uncertainty that was felt throughout the country by the important players, and now provides the necessary push for its ...

President Obama: Corporate Globalizer
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 30 June 2012
In October 2007...the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Republican] party could be facing a brand crisis as “some business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

 

With recent revelations about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, it is now safe to say that President Obama has surpassed George W. Bush as a champion of the flawed and offensive ideology of corporate globalization.

This argument requires some explanation. Here’s the backstory: As the Bush administration commenced in the early 2000s, many argued that his foreign policy represented a continuation of the Clinton-era approach to promoting “free trade” neoliberalism overseas. However, I contended that, especially after the launch of the Iraq war in 2003, the unilateralist bullying of the neocons represented a split from past practice.

No doubt, big arms and big oil had their needs met by the Bush agenda. But his administration was wary of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which were central instruments of U.S. policy under Clinton. The Bush approach relied on our-way-or-the-highway, coalition-of-the-willing hard power. This made a significant portion of corporate America uncomfortable, especially businesses trying to navigate and expand in foreign markets. It also left the soft-power agenda of “free trade” in an uncertain state.

This was essentially the thesis of my 2008 book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. Around the time the book came out, I wrote:

In October 2007...the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Republican] party could be facing a brand crisis as “[s]ome business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

 

When it comes to corporate responses to [Bush’s] Global War on ...

The Euro is a Big Success - No Kidding
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 26 June 2012
“The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.”

 

The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.

That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.

Mundell, then, was more concerned with his bathroom arrangements. Professor Mundell, who has both a Nobel Prize and an ancient villa in Tuscany, told me, incensed:

“They won't even let me have a toilet. They've got rules that tell me I can't have a toilet in this room! Can you imagine?”
As it happens, I can't. But I don't have an Italian villa, so I can't imagine the frustrations of bylaws governing commode placement.

But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)
“It's very hard to fire workers in Europe,” he complained. His answer: the euro.

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little ...

Former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine Gets $8 Million Pay Package After Firm Went Bankrupt
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 22 May 2012
Though Corzine may be the most extreme example, he isn’t the only financial industry CEO whose pay is out-of-whack with the performance of the company he oversees

Jon Corzine, the former chief executive of bankrupt financial firm MF Global, received an $8 million pay package in the year his company plummeted into bankruptcy and faced a shortfall in customer funds totaling $1.6 billion.

Corzine resigned from the firm and turned down an $11 million severance package after MF Global filed for bankruptcy October, and he is not likely to realize the more than $5 million of his pay package that is tied to the firm’s now worthless stock. But he didn’t walk away empty-handed, the Wall Street Journal reports:

About $5.35 million of Mr. Corzine’s compensation came in the form of stock options, which are now worthless as a result of MF Global’s failure. Still, the former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chairman got more than $3 million in cash compensation, including a $1.25 million bonus.

Though Corzine may be the most extreme example, he isn’t the only financial industry CEO whose pay is out-of-whack with the performance of the company he oversees. In 2011, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan made six times what he made in 2010 even as the bank’s stock price was cut in half. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s pay increased 13.7 percent (to $19 million) in 2011, even as shareholder return declined 45.6 percent. Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf received a 2.1 percent bump in pay (to $17.9 ...

For He’s a Jolly Good Scoundrel
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 20 April 2012
“Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

This article was originally posted on Truthdig.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John ...

Koch-Funded Reason Institute Trivializes Severity of Bullying Young People Experience
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 2 April 2012
Is America really in the midst of a “bullying crisis,” as so many now claim?

The Reason Foundation, a self-described “libertarian” think-tank funded by the Koch Family Foundations and tied strongly to the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, is now trying to downplay the severity of bullying young people experience. In a column and interview with the Wall Street Journal, Reason Vice President Nick Gillespie suggests that kids “are safer and better-behaved” than in decades past and that parents are just “overprotective and thin-skinned”:

But is America really in the midst of a “bullying crisis,” as so many now claim? I don’t see it. I also suspect that our fears about the ubiquity of bullying are just the latest in a long line of well-intentioned yet hyperbolic alarms about how awful it is to be a kid today.[...]

Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free, and soda-free, parents, administrators, and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.

Gillespie relies on data that suggests that bullying has not increased, but he only refers to reports about what is documented in schools. Despite acknowledging the technology young people have access to, he completely ignores the significant impact that cyber bullying now has on young people. Last year, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that nine out of ten have witnessed the cyber bullying of their ...

Do We Need a Stock Exchange?
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 25 March 2012
“Conventional wisdom says stock markets are the best way in history to generate wealth.”

Occupy Wall Street is now back where the movement began, and there are even more society-shaping questions in the wild then last October. Since the housing market crash decimated our country we’ve been examining our economy from the grassroots level up to far-reaching government initiatives. We’ve seen widespread protests against dubious banks and the financial instruments which have allowed them to plunder the national wealth. But one elephant is still sitting in the middle of the room... no few have been questioning if the very logic of a stock exchange is unhealthy in the long run. Conventional wisdom says stock markets are the best way in history to generate wealth. Some maintain that this wealth does not get redistributed to the public in any significant manner. Arguments against stock markets include the cost of entry and the complexity of the rules governing transactions.

 

To understand the dysfunctions of the stock market, we must understand what a stock market is. As early as the 1600s the concept of shared corporate interest was cemented in modern Western civilization when the dutch offered ownership stakes in the Dutch East India Company. The basis for collective ownership, however, may have been introduced to Europe as early as the Bronze Age. Sharing risk and resources among many stakeholders is a natural infusion of the most primitive principles of human cooperation. The concept of a publicly participatory stock market, however, is a much more recent invention.

 

Stock markets, in their purest form, are collectives of stock brokers who form agreements to trade with one another. In theory it’s as simple as children trading baseball cards in a schoolyard, except that the cards are bought by other people and those people always expect to be able to sell their baseball cards for more than they paid. Trust in the traders is paramount. To make their jobs easier, traders with good collections decided ...

REVEALED: Romney’s Top Funders Made Billions on Auto Bail-Out
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 23 February 2012
“John Paulson of Paulson & Co and Paul Singer of Elliott International, known on Wall Street as ‘vulture’ investors, have each written checks for one million dollars to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Romney’s candidacy.”

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney called the federal government’s 2009 bail-out of the auto industry, “nothing more than crony capitalism, Obama style... a reward for his big donors to his campaign."  In fact, the biggest rewards ­­– a windfall of more than two billion dollars care of U.S. taxpayers ­­­–– went to Romney's two top contributors. 

 

John Paulson of Paulson & Co and Paul Singer of Elliott International, known on Wall Street as “vulture” investors, have each written checks for one million dollars to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Romney’s candidacy.

 

Gov. Romney last week asserted that the Obama Administration’s support for General Motors was a, “payoff for the auto workers union.” However, union workers in GM’s former auto parts division, Delphi, the unit taken over by Romney’s funders, did not fair so well.  The speculators eliminated every single union job from the parts factories once manned by 25,200 UAW members. 

 

The two hedge fund operators turned a breathtaking three-thousand percent profit on a relatively negligible investment by using hardball tactics against the U.S. Treasury and their own employees.

 

Under the control of the speculators, Delphi, which had 45 plants in the U.S. and Canada, is now reduced to just four factories with only 1,500 hourly workers, none of them UAW members, despite the union agreeing to cut contract wages by two thirds.

 

It wasn’t supposed to be quite so bad.  The Obama Administration and GM had arranged for a private equity investor to provide half a billion dollars in new capital for Delphi, but that would have cut the pay-out to Singer and Paulson.  The speculators blocked the Obama-GM plan, taking the entire government bail-out hostage.  Even ...

Right-Wing Media Aren’t Concerned About Helping the Poor, but They Sure Want to Help the Rich
Brian Walker
Published: Wednesday 8 February 2012
Sean Hannity: “The thing we’ve got to deal with more than anything else in this country is deal with this entitlement mindset, the government’s going to help me in every aspect of my life.”

As income disparities continue to increase, and the effective tax rate paid by the rich remains at historic lows, right-wing media figures work hard to make sure none of that changes. They routinely attack the poor and programs designed to assist them, while simultaneously extolling the rich and defending them against any attempt to get them to pay their fair share of taxes.

Conservative Media Frequently Deride The Plight Of The Poor As Well As Programs To Aid Them ...

... But Fiercely Defend The Rich ...

... Often Relying On ...

The Way to Occupy a Bank is to Own One
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 17 December 2011
“The public bank concept is not new. It has been proposed before in San Francisco and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota.”

The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" -- move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks.

Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.

Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled “Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea,” David Weidner writes:

READ FULL POST 22 COMMENTS

The Occupiers’ Responsive Chord
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 1 November 2011
“I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a ‘class warrior.’ Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.”

A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing.

As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America.

Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news – it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s.

But it’s the first time such news made the front page of the nation’s major newspapers.

Why? Because for the first time in more than half a century, a broad cross-section of the American public is talking about the concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

Score a big one for the Occupiers.

Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.

A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.

I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a “class warrior.” Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.

And they blame Republicans for stacking the deck in favor of the rich. On that New York Times/CBS News poll, 69 percent of respondents said Republican policies favor the rich (28 percent said the same of Obama’s policies).

The old view was anyone could make it in America ...

A Business Plan is Not Public Policy
Moderator
Published: Thursday 27 October 2011
“Despite record profits the underemployment rate teeters precariously on the threshold of 20% and 48 states are currently experiencing budget shortfalls.”

What do you call a private, profit-driven, market solution to a public, collective concern? I call it a business plan masquerading as public policy. I call it TARP.

Those on the political right claim that the achievement of personal responsibility commingled with the privatization of public services and institutions will guarantee social equity, freedom, and inclusion. To this end, they champion an ideology intent on uprooting public institutions by architecting a world premised less, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, “on the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified,” and more on the suffocation of the commons.

Some days I wonder whether terms like “public good” and “the commons” will be recognizable to my children. At their core, public institutions are intended to support the public good. In theory, at least, they ought to reflect the indigenous needs of “everyday” people and remain both accessible and accountable to the communities in whose trust they’ve been chartered. But in an era of “the privatization of everything,” what successful examples do we have of public—not private— solutions to collective social challenges?

For nearly four years now the federal government’s response to the economic crisis has been characterized by a cavalcade of bailout programs for the largest banks and financial institutions, with notably little assistance offered to citizens. The U.S. unemployment rate, for instance, remains virtually unchanged since the beginning of the crisis in mid-2007.  Instead of enacting programs aimed at reducing unemployment or the incidence of poverty the government has (without much oversight) introduced public funds into the private banking system in hopes of restoring private lending to pre-crisis levels through the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

TARP was created by the passage of H.R. ...

Why Conservatives Hate Warren Buffett
Elizabeth
Published: Thursday 29 September 2011
Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary.

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.

Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.

 

Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He’s said this for years, but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.

Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page call on Buffett to “let everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasing his tax returns.”

Somehow, the Journal did not think to ask its friends who battle vigorously for low taxes on capital gains to release their tax ...

Right-Wing Media Fight Experts on Air Quality
Elizabeth
Published: Wednesday 27 July 2011
"WSJ Op-ed Claims It Is Not "Even Clear" A Stricter Standard Is "Necessary Or Desirable."

Conservative media claim stricter standards for ground-level ozone, the primary component of smog, are unreasonable and unnecessary. In fact, EPA is strengthening the standards because health experts, including the scientific panel that advised the Bush administration, have said that the standards set in 2008 are not sufficient to protect the public.

Conservative Media Claim Stricter Ozone Standards Are Unnecessary

WSJ Op-ed Claims It Is Not "Even Clear" A Stricter Standard Is "Necessary Or Desirable." In aWall Street Journal op-ed, John Engler, the President of the Business Roundtable, asserted: "There's nothing reasonable or balanced about the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to tighten national air-quality standards for ozone emissions at this time." Calling for the EPA to delay rulemaking until 2013, Engler added: "There is no reason to rush through new standards before it is even clear they are necessary or desirable. [Wall Street Journal, 7/26/11]

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