The Money Changers Serenade: A New Plot Hatches

Paul Craig Roberts

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a protege of Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers, has received his reward for continuing the Rubin-Summers-Paulson policy of supporting the “banks too big to fail” at the expense of the economy and American people. For his service to the handful of gigantic banks, whose existence attests to the fact that the Anti-Trust Act is a dead-letter law, Geithner has been appointed president and managing director of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus and is on his way to his fortune.

A Warburg in-law financed Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign. Part of the reward was Wilson’s appointment of Paul Warburg to the first Federal Reserve Board. The symbiotic relationship between presidents and bankers has continued ever since. The same small clique continues to wield financial power.

Geithner’s career is illustrative. In the 1980s, Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates. In the mid to late 1990s, Geithner served as a deputy assistant Treasury secretary. Under Rubin and Summers he moved up to undersecretary of the Treasury.

From the Treasury he went to the Council on Foreign Relations and from there to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). From there he was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked to make banks more profitable by allowing higher ratios of debt to capital, thus contributing to the financial crisis.

Geithner arranged the sale of the failed Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns, helped with the taxpayer bailout of AIG, and rejected saving Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in order to create the crisis atmosphere needed to more fully subordinate US economic policy to the needs of the few large banks.

Rubin, a 26-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, was rewarded by Citibank for his service to the banks while Treasury Secretary with a $50 million compensation package in 2008 and $126,000,000 between 1999 and 2009.

When a person becomes a Treasury official it is made clear that the choice is between serving the banks and becoming rich or trying to serve the public and becoming poor. Few make the latter choice.

As MIchael Hudson has informed us, the goal of the financial sector has always been to convert all income, from corporate profits to government tax revenues, to the service of debt. From the bankers standpoint, the more debt the richer the bankers. Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Geithner, and now banker Treasury Secretary Jack Lew faithfully serve this goal.

The Federal Reserve describes its policy of Quantitative Easing — the creation of new money with which the Fed purchases Treasury debt and mortgage backed securities — as a low interest rate policy in order to stimulate employment and economic growth. Economists and the financial media have parroted this cover story.

In contrast, I have exposed QE as a scheme for pumping profits into the banks and boosting their balance sheets. The real purpose of QE is to drive up the prices of the debt-related derivatives on the banks’ books, thus keeping the banks with solvent balance sheets.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” November 11, 2013), Andrew Huszar confirms my explanation to be the correct one. Huszar is the Federal Reserve official who implemented the policy of QE. He resigned when he realized that the real purposes of QE was to drive up the prices of the banks’ holdings of debt instruments, to provide the banks with trillions of dollars at zero cost with which to lend and speculate, and to provide the banks with “fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions.” (See: www.paulcraigroberts.org )

This vast con game remains unrecognized by Congress and the public. At the IMF Research Conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers presented a plan to expand the con game.

Summers says that it is not enough merely to give the banks interest free money. More should be done for the banks. Instead of being paid interest on their bank deposits, people should be penalized for keeping their money in banks instead of spending it.

To sell this new rip-off scheme, Summers has conjured up an explanation based on the crude and discredited Keynesianism of the 1940s that explained the Great Depression as a problem caused by too much savings. Instead of spending their money, people hoarded it, thus causing aggregate demand and employment to fall.

Summers says that today the problem of too much saving has reappeared. The centerpiece of his argument is “the natural interest rate,” defined as the interest rate at which full employment is established by the equality of saving with investment. If people save more than investors invest, the saved money will not find its way back into the economy, and output and employment will fall.

Summers notes that despite a zero real rate of interest, there is still substantial unemployment. In other words, not even a zero rate of interest can reduce saving to the level of investment, thus frustrating a full employment recovery. Summers concludes that the natural rate of interest has become negative and is stuck below zero.

How to fix this? The way to fix it, Summers says, is to charge people for saving money. To avoid the charges, people would spend the money, thus reducing savings to the level of investment and restoring full employment.

Summers acknowledges that the problem with his solution is that people would take their money out of banks and hoard it in cash holdings. In other words, the cash form of money provides consumers with a freedom to save that holds down consumption and prevents full employment.

Summers has a fix for this: eliminate the freedom by imposing a cashless society where the only money is electronic. As electronic money cannot be hoarded except in bank deposits, penalties can be imposed that force unproductive savings into consumption.

Summers’ scheme, of course, is a harebrained one. With governments running huge deficits, who would purchase bonds at negative interest rates? How would pension and retirement funds operate? Would they also be subject to an annual percentage confiscation?

We know that the response of consumers to the long term decline in real median family income, to the loss of jobs from labor arbitrage across national borders (jobs offshoring), to rising homelessness, to cuts in the social safety net, to the transformation of their full time jobs to part time jobs (employers’ response to Obamacare), has been to reduce their savings rate. Indeed, few have any savings at all. The US personal saving rate is currently 2 percentage points, about 30%, below the long term average. Retired people, unable to earn any interest on their savings from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, are being forced to draw down their savings in order to pay their bills.

Moreover, it is unclear whether the savings rate is an accurate measure or merely a residual of other calculations. With so many people having to draw down their savings, I wouldn’t be surprised if an accurate measure showed the personal savings rate to be negative.

But for Summers the plight of the consumer is not the problem. The problem is the profits of the banks. Summers has the solution, and the establishment, including Paul Krugman, is applauding it. Once the economy officially turns down again, watch out.

Americans warned bank 'bail-ins' coming

Experts say institutions will grab deposits without warning

WASHINGTON – With the United States facing a $17 trillion debt and an acidic debate in Washington over raising that debt limit on top of a potential government shutdown, Congress could mimic recent European action to let banks initiate a “bail-in” to blunt future failures, experts say.

Previously the federal government has taken taxes from consumers, or borrowed the money, to hand out to troubled banks. This could be a little different, and could allow banks to reach directly into consumers’ bank accounts for their cash.

Authority to allow bank “bail-ins” would be in lieu of approving any future taxpayer bailouts of banks that would be in dire need of recapitalization in order to survive.

Some financial experts contend that banks already have the legal authority to confiscate depositors’ money without warning, and at their discretion.

Financial analyst Jim Sinclair warned that the U.S. banks most likely to be “bailed-in” by their depositors are those institutions that received government bail-out funds in 2008-2009.

Such a “bail-in” means all savings of individuals over the insured amount would be confiscated to offset such a failure.

“Bail-ins are coming to North America without any doubt, and will be remembered as the ‘Great Leveling,’ of the ‘great Flushing’ (of Lehman Brothers),” Sinclair said. “Not only can it happen here, but it will happen here.

“It stands on legal grounds by legal precedent both in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.”

Sinclair is chairman and chief executive officer of Tanzania Royalty Exploration Corp. and is the son of Bertram Seligman, whose family started Goldman Sachs, Solomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers, Bache Group and other major investment banking firms.

Some of the major banks which received federal bailout money included Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.

“When major banks fail, they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts,” according to financial expert Michael Snyder. “This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the Western world.”

Given the dire financial straits the U.S. finds itself in, these financial experts say that Congress could look at the example of the European Parliament, which recently started to consider action that would allow banks to confiscate depositors’ holdings above 100,000 euros. Generally, funds up to that level are insured.

Finance ministers of the 27-member European Union in June had approved forcing bondholders, shareholders and large depositors with more than 100,000 euros in their accounts to make the financial sacrifice before turning to the government for help with taxpayer funds.

Depositors with less than 100,000 euros would be protected. Considering protection of small depositors a top priority, the E.U. ministers took pride in saying that their action would shield them.

“The E.U. has made a big step towards putting in place the most comprehensive framework for dealing with bank crises in the world,” said Michel Barnier, E.U. commissioner for internal market and services.

The plan as approved outlines a hierarchy of rescuing struggling banks. The first will be bondholders, followed by shareholders and then large depositors.

Among large depositors, there is a hierarchy of whose money would be selected first, with small and medium-sized businesses being protected like small depositors.

“This agreement will effectively move us from ad hoc ‘bail-outs’ to structured and clearly defined ‘bail-ins,’” said Michael Noonan, Ireland’s finance minister.

The European Parliament is expected to finalize the plan by the end of the year.

The purpose of this “bail-in,” patterned after the Cyprus model, is to offset the need for continued taxpayer bailouts that have come under increasing criticism of the more economically well-off countries such as Germany.

Last March, Cyprus had agreed to tap large depositors at its two leading banks for some 10 billion euros in an effort to obtain another 10 billion European Union bailout.

While this action prevented the collapse of Cyprus’ two top banks, the Bank of Cyprus and Popular Bank of Cyprus, it greatly upset depositors with savings more than 100,000 euros.

WND recently revealed that the practice of “bail-ins” by Cyprus a year ago was beginning to spread to other nations as large depositors began to see their balances plunge literally overnight.

A “bail-in,” as opposed to a bailout that countries especially in Europe have been seeking from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, is a recognition that such outside monetary injections won’t be forthcoming.

Sinclair said that the recent confiscation of customer deposits in Cyprus was not a “one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone ‘troika’ officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets.”

“A joint paper by the U.S. federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Bank of England (BOE) dated December 10, 2012 shows, that these plans have been long in the making, that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland, and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds,” Sinclair said.

He pointed that while few depositors are aware, banks legally own the depositors’ funds as soon as they are put in the bank.

“Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay,” Sinclair said.

“But until now, the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash,” he said. “Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into ‘bank equity.’ The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank.”

“With any luck,” Sinclair said, “we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.”

Such plans already are being used, or under consideration, in New Zealand, Poland, Canada and several other countries.

Exit Geithner

The Modern Day Metternich
by DEAN BAKER


Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama Administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. This was an impressive diplomatic feat given the popular contempt for Europe’s monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.

Just to remind everyone, during his tenure as head of the New York Fed and then Treasury Secretary, most, if not all, of the major Wall Street banks would have collapsed if the government had not intervened to save them. This process began with the collapse of Bear Stearns, which was bought up by J.P. Morgan in a deal involving huge subsidies from the Fed. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a second major investment bank, started a run on the three remaining investment banks that would have led to the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs if the Fed, FDIC, and Treasury did not take extraordinary measures to save them.

Citigroup and Bank of America both needed emergency facilities established by the Fed and Treasury explicitly for their support, in addition to all the below-market loans they received from the government at the time. Without this massive government support, there can be no doubt that both of them would currently be operating under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge.

Of the six banks that dominate the U.S. banking system, only Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan could have conceivably survived without hoards of cash rained down on them by the federal government. Even these two are question marks, since both helped themselves to trillions of dollars of below-market loans, in addition to indirectly benefiting from the bailout of the other banks that protected many of their assets.

Had it not been for Geithner and his sidekicks we would have been permanently rid of an incredibly bloated financial sector that haunts the economy like a horrible albatross. Along with the salvation of the Wall Street banks, Geithner also managed to restore their agenda of deficit reduction.

Even though the economy is still down more than 9 million+ jobs from its full employment level, none of the important people in Washington are talking about measures that would hasten job creation. Instead the focus is exclusively on deficit reduction, a process that is already slowing growth and putting even more people out of work. While lives that are being ruined today by the weak economy, Geithner helped create a policy agenda where the focus of debate is the budget projections for 2022.

These projections are hugely inaccurate. Furthermore the actual budget for 2022 is largely out of the control of the politicians currently in power, since the Congresses elected in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, along with the presidents elected in 2016 and 2020, may have some different ideas. Nonetheless, the path laid out by Geithner’s team virtually ensures that these distant budget targets will serve as a distraction from doing anything to help the economy now.

There are two important points that should be quashed quickly in order to destroy any possible defense of Timothy Geithner. It is often asserted that we were lucky to escape a second Great Depression. This is nonsense.

The first Great Depression was not simply the result of bad decisions made in the initial financial crisis. It was the result of 10 years of failed policy. There is zero, nothing, nada that would have prevented the sort of massive stimulus provided by World War II from occurring in 1931 instead of 1941. We know how to recover from a financial collapse; the issue is simply political will.

This is demonstrated clearly by the case of Argentina, which had a full-fledged collapse in December of 2001. After three months of free fall, its economy stabilized in the second quarter of 2002. It came roaring back in the second half of the year and had made up all of the lost ground by the middle of 2003. Its economy continued to grow strongly until the 2009 when the world economic crisis brought it to a standstill. There is no reason to believe that our policymakers are less competent than those in Argentina; the threat of a second Great Depression was nonsense.

Finally the claim that we made money on the bailouts is equally absurd. We lent money at interest rates that were far below what the market would have demanded. Most of this money, plus interest, was paid back. However claiming that we therefore made a profit would be like saying the government could make a profit by issuing 30-year mortgages at 1.0 percent interest. Surely most of the loans would be repaid, with interest, but everyone would understand that this is an enormous subsidy to homeowners.

In short, the Geithner agenda was to allow the Wall Street banks to feed at the public trough until they were returned to their prior strength. Like Metternich, he largely succeeded. Of course democracy did eventually triumph in Europe. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take quite as long here.

The four business gangs that run the US

Ross Gittins
The Sydney Morning Herald's Economics Editor


IF YOU'VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ''Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,'' he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ''corporatocracy''.

First is the well-known corporate military-industrial complex. ''As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,'' he says.

Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.

These days, almost every US Treasury secretary - Republican or Democrat - comes from Wall Street and goes back there when his term ends. The close ties between Wall Street and Washington ''paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government''.

Third is the Big Oil-transport-military complex, which has put the US on the trajectory of heavy oil-imports dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East, he says.

''Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.''

Big Oil has consistently and successfully fought the intrusion of competition from non-oil energy sources, including nuclear, wind and solar power.

It has been at the side of the Pentagon in making sure that America defends the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, in effect ensuring a $US100 billion-plus annual subsidy for a fuel that is otherwise dangerous for national security, Sachs says.

''And Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.''

Fourth is the healthcare industry, America's largest industry, absorbing no less than 17 per cent of US gross domestic product.

''The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control,'' Sachs says. ''Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.

''The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.''

Now do you see why the industry put so much effort into persuading America's punters that Obamacare was rank socialism? They didn't succeed in blocking it, but the compromised program doesn't do enough to stop the US being the last rich country in the world without universal healthcare.

It's worth noting that, despite its front-running cost, America's healthcare system doesn't leave Americans with particularly good health - not as good as ours, for instance. This conundrum is easily explained: America has the highest-paid doctors.

Sachs says the main thing to remember about the corporatocracy is that it looks after its own. ''There is absolutely no economic crisis in corporate America.

''Consider the pulse of the corporate sector as opposed to the pulse of the employees working in it: corporate profits in 2010 were at an all-time high, chief executive salaries in 2010 rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, Wall Street compensation in 2010 was at an all-time high, several Wall Street firms paid civil penalties for financial abuses, but no senior banker faced any criminal charges, and there were no adverse regulatory measures that would lead to a loss of profits in finance, health care, military supplies and energy,'' he says.

The 30-year achievement of the corporatocracy has been the creation of America's rich and super-rich classes, he says. And we can now see their tools of trade.

''It began with globalisation, which pushed up capital income while pushing down wages. These changes were magnified by the tax cuts at the top, which left more take-home pay and the ability to accumulate greater wealth through higher net-of-tax returns to saving.''

Chief executives then helped themselves to their own slice of the corporate sector ownership through outlandish awards of stock options by friendly and often handpicked compensation committees, while the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way. It's not all that hard to do when both political parties are standing in line to do your bidding, Sachs concludes.

Fortunately, things aren't nearly so bad in Australia. But it will require vigilance to stop them sliding further in that direction.

The Fiscal Cliff Is A Diversion

The Derivatives Tsunami and the Dollar Bubble

December 17, 2012 | Paul Craig Roberts

The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones.

The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action itself to cut spending and to raise taxes. In other words, the “fiscal cliff” is going to happen either way.
The problem from the standpoint of conventional economics with the fiscal cliff is that it amounts to a double-barrel dose of austerity delivered to a faltering and recessionary economy. Ever since John Maynard Keynes, most economists have understood that austerity is not the answer to recession or depression.
Regardless, the fiscal cliff is about small numbers compared to the Derivatives Tsunami or to bond market and dollar market bubbles.

The fiscal cliff requires that the federal government cut spending by $1.3 trillion over ten years. The Guardian reports that means the federal deficit has to be reduced about $109 billion per year or 3 percent of the current budget. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/27/fiscal-cliff-explained-spending-cuts-tax-hikes

More simply, just divide $1.3 trillion by ten and it comes to $130 billion per year. This can be done by simply taking a three month vacation each year from Washington’s wars.
The Derivatives Tsunami and the bond and dollar bubbles are of a different magnitude.
Last June 5 in “Collapse At Hand” http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/06/05/collapse-at-hand/ I pointed out that according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s fourth quarter report for 2011, about 95% of the $230 trillion in US derivative exposure was held by four US financial institutions: JP Morgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs.
Prior to financial deregulation, essentially the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the non-regulation of derivatives–a joint achievement of the Clinton administration and the Republican Party–Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank were commercial banks that took depositors’ deposits and made loans to businesses and consumers and purchased Treasury bonds with any extra reserves.

With the repeal of Glass-Steagall these honest commercial banks became gambling casinos, like the investment bank, Goldman Sachs, betting not only their own money but also depositors money on uncovered bets on interest rates, currency exchange rates, mortgages, and prices of commodities and equities.

These bets soon exceeded many times not only US GDP but world GDP. Indeed, the gambling bets of JP Morgan Chase Bank alone are equal to world Gross Domestic Product.

According to the first quarter 2012 report from the Comptroller of the Currency, total derivative exposure of US banks has fallen insignificantly from the previous quarter to $227 trillion. The exposure of the 4 US banks accounts for almost of all of the exposure and is many multiples of their assets or of their risk capital.

The Derivatives Tsunami is the result of the handful of fools and corrupt public officials who deregulated the US financial system. Today merely four US banks have derivative exposure equal to 3.3 times world Gross Domestic Product. When I was a US Treasury official, such a possibility would have been considered beyond science fiction.

Hopefully, much of the derivative exposure somehow nets out so that the net exposure, while still larger than many countries’ GDPs, is not in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Still, the situation is so worrying to the Federal Reserve that after announcing a third round of quantitative easing, that is, printing money to buy bonds–both US Treasuries and the banks’ bad assets–the Fed has just announced that it is doubling its QE 3 purchases.

In other words, the entire economic policy of the United States is dedicated to saving four banks that are too large to fail. The banks are too large to fail only because deregulation permitted financial concentration, as if the Anti-Trust Act did not exist.

The purpose of QE is to keep the prices of debt, which supports the banks’ bets, high. The Federal Reserve claims that the purpose of its massive monetization of debt is to help the economy with low interest rates and increased home sales. But the Fed’s policy is hurting the economy by depriving savers, especially the retired, of interest income, forcing them to draw down their savings. Real interest rates paid on CDs, money market funds, and bonds are lower than the rate of inflation.

Moreover, the money that the Fed is creating in order to bail out the four banks is making holders of dollars, both at home and abroad, nervous. If investors desert the dollar and its exchange value falls, the price of the financial instruments that the Fed’s purchases are supporting will also fall, and interest rates will rise. The only way the Fed could support the dollar would be to raise interest rates. In that event, bond holders would be wiped out, and the interest charges on the government’s debt would explode.

With such a catastrophe following the previous stock and real estate collapses, the remains of people’s wealth would be wiped out. Investors have been deserting equities for “safe” US Treasuries. This is why the Fed can keep bond prices so high that the real interest rate is negative.

The hyped threat of the fiscal cliff is immaterial compared to the threat of the derivatives overhang and the threat to the US dollar and bond market of the Federal Reserve’s commitment to save four US banks.

Once again, the media and its master, the US government, hide the real issues behind a fake one. The fiscal cliff has become the way for the Republicans to save the country from bankruptcy by destroying the social safety net put in place during the 1930s, supplemented by Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” in the mid-1960s.

Now that there are no jobs, now that real family incomes have been stagnant or declining for decades, and now that wealth and income have been concentrated in few hands is the time, Republicans say, to destroy the social safety net so that we don’t fall over the fiscal cliff.

In human history, such a policy usually produces revolt and revolution, which is what the US so desperately needs.

Perhaps our stupid and corrupt policymakers are doing us a favor after all.

A Sign That Obama Will Repeat Economic Mistakes

Friday, December 7, 2012 by TruthDig.com
by Robert Scheer

Please don’t tell me that these reports in the business press touting Sallie Krawcheck as a front-runner for chairman of the SEC or even a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary are true. Who is she? Oh, just another former Citigroup CFO, and therefore a prime participant in the great banking hustle that has savaged the world’s economy. Krawcheck was paid $11 million in 2005 while her bank contributed to the toxic mortgage crisis that would cost millions their jobs and homes. Sallie Krawcheck.

Not that you would know that sordid history from reading the recent glowing references to Krawcheck in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News that stress her pioneering role as a leading female banker—a working mother no less—but manage to avoid her role in a bank that led the way in destroying the lives of so many women, men and their children. Nor did her financial finagling end with Citigroup, as Krawcheck added a troubling stint in the leadership at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America to her résumé.

A woman who would be an excellent choice as the most experienced as well as principled candidate to head the SEC or Treasury is Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC, who labored to protect consumers rather than undermine them. Indeed, her outstanding book “Bull by the Horns,” chronicling her fight in the last two administrations to hold the banksters accountable, should be required reading for the president and those who are advising him on selecting his new economic team.

The SEC is supposed to supervise the banks rather than abet them in their chicanery. And although the Treasury Department has been a captive of Wall Street lobbyists for most of the modern era, one would expect something better from the second coming of Barack Obama. Those are key appointments in determining whether the president can turn around the still-moribund economy by channeling the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Or will he continue to plod along on the course set by George W. Bush, bailing out the banks while ignoring beleaguered homeowners and the many other victims of this banking-engineered crisis?

Obama was given a pass on the economy by voters only because Mitt Romney was an even more craven enabler of Wall Street greed. But the outlines of the Bush Wall Street payoff remain in place, with the Federal Reserve continuing to bail out the banks with virtually free money and the purchase of $40 billion in toxic mortgage-based bonds every month to add to the more than trillion dollars in that junk that the Fed previously had taken off the banks’ books.

The money printing by the Fed is at the heart of the massive debt crisis. But it has been great for the bankers, with compensation at the 32 largest banks slated to hit an all-time high of $207 billion this year, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate. This reward for ripping off the public is almost three times the amount the federal government spends on education. Once again the bankers are blessed for their failures, receiving such wildly excessive compensation despite the fact that banking revenue is down 7.2 percent over the last two years.

A prime example is Krawcheck’s old bank, Citigroup, whose new CEO this week announced that the company has been forced to engage in a major retrenchment, eliminating 11,000 jobs and closing 84 branches. The bank has been deeply troubled ever since the housing meltdown it helped trigger first began, and it was saved from bankruptcy only by a direct infusion of $45 billion in taxpayer money and a commitment of an additional $300 billion in underwriting of Citigroup’s bad paper.

The ugly tale of America’s Great Recession is inextricably entwined with the deplorable practices of Citigroup, the too-big-to-fail bank made legal by Bill Clinton’s signing off on reversing the Glass-Steagall law that prevented the merger of investment and commercial banks. The first beneficiary of the revised law was the newly created Citigroup, saved from bankruptcy a decade later by the taxpayers.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Krawcheck would be considered a viable nominee for a central position in managing our economy. After all, her colleague in the top ranks at Citigroup during the years of financial depravity, Robert Rubin, is considered a significant adviser to the Obama administration, and his protégés, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, are still directing policy. It was Rubin who pushed through the reversal of Glass-Steagall, an act of betrayal of the public interest that was rewarded with obscene amounts of money when he ultimately took the job of leading the bank he made legal.

The very fact that these folks remain influential, as witnessed by Krawcheck being considered to head the SEC rather than being the subject of one of its much-needed investigations, gives further evidence of the enduring but ultimately terminal illness of crony capitalism.

Too Big (NOT) to (Merge...or) Fail...

How to Cut Corporate Power

Occupy Corporations
by BILL QUIGLEY

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

– Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm. The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread. The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions in fines. Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread. For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto the devil for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world. Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights. There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood. At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation. Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the constitution.

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission. The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they can use their money to influence elections.

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the people to change the laws back. An amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree then three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify. This will take real work. But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back.

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate election advocacy. In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse the decision. More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012 to challenge the Citizens United decision.

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional rights. Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and cannot contribute to political campaigns.

There are also many energetic actions at the state level. People for the American Way list organizational efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate influence in elections or amend the constitution.

Massive corporations now rule the earth. But they are recent arrivals which can and should be dispatched. It is time for people to again take control. The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease. Join the efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.

Labor and Poverty

A House Divided?

by JOSEPH GROSSO

 

What is it about the even barely noticed presence of poverty that sends so much of American politics and culture into attack mode? Harsh treatment of the poor of course has a long history in the work houses, debtors’ prisons, and chimney-sweepers, as any reader of Blake, Dickens, Hugo, and Zola can recognize. Yet in the present-day one would be hard-pressed to find a society more intolerant than the present United States. By now the facts have been so rehashed as to become strangely easier to ignore: the highest rate of poverty in the Western world, highest child poverty, highest permanent poverty, highest income inequality, highest rate of incarceration, highest health-care costs, it can go on and on. On top of it all one will probably the only society where one will find more, or at least as many, protests against improving any of this as for; where else in the world are there pro-austerity marches?

It’s not as if the wealthy, as personified by Wall Street, have been behaving well. Last year Goldman Sachs paid $550 million to settle SEC charges that it withheld information from investors on a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) it sold that soon after was worthless. A federal judge this past November refused to endorse a similarly $285 million agreement that would have allowed Citigroup to avoid admitting any wrong doing when it marketed and sold a toxic CDO while taking a short position against it at the same time realizing a tidy $160 million for the bank while costing investors more than $700 million. Leaving finance and going back a couple of years and one finds pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer paying a record $2.3 billion and pleading guilty to a felony count for illegal marketing- all these fines a mere pittance next to these companies bottom lines.

What’s this corporate mischief next to welfare mothers and drunks on the public dole?
It’s easy to see the persistence of poverty as a sort of insult to the American Dream in the mind of true believers. After all, what good is a class system in the land of opportunity? The excess riffraff that stand outside such nationalistic pride are easily detested.

Beyond such prideful chauvinism is an even darker scar that explains why the poor pay through the nose while the rich get off with pocket change. In What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank famously posited that the white middle and working classes of the heartland are diverted with ‘moral’ issues such as gay rights and abortion into supporting the right wing economics that ultimately destroys them. This could be traced to the 1970s coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism in a time of economic stagflation.

Yet as Jefferson Cowie describes in Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, the 1970s were also a time a great labor unrest, the most unrest in fact since the mid-1940s. In 1970 alone over 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale stoppages. The United Mine Workers and United Auto Workers saw significant insurgencies against stale leadership and for greater industrial democracy. The United Farm Workers still had life. For all his petty bigotry it shouldn’t be overlooked that Archie Bunker, the enduring symbol of 70s popular culture, was a union man who worked on a loading dock. Still the 1970s were also the only decade other than the 1930s when Americans ended up poorer than they began. Robert Reich in Aftershock traces the rise of the anti-tax movement to the early 1970s, not as a movement towards social conservatism but as simply a protest about paying taxes with incomes that had stagnated.

Nonagricultural workers earnings declined by about 13% with family income only staying level with wives entering the workforce.

It was also the decade of deindustrialization, inflation, and a fierce white backlash against busing and affirmative action (Archie Bunker aptly summed up what many white men were probably feeling when he yelled at his progressive, ‘meathead’ his son-in-law Mike: ‘Look at me. I know I have a lot going against me. I’m white, I’m protestant, I’m hardworking. Can’t you find one lousy amendment to protect me?!’). Crowie quotes Cleveland Robinson, one of the founders of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, explaining “The basic ingredient to successful affirmative action is full employment.” Otherwise “you will have both blacks and whites fight for the same jobs.” Needless to say, full employment was far off the agenda by decade’s end, leaving that very dynamic in the minds of many working class whites.

Of course since its inception the American working class has been divided. Going back to the 1850s conflict between Yankee (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) and immigrant Irish (Catholic) workers undermined early organizing efforts, a pattern that would emerge in subsequent generations. An important point to bear in mind is that for all the anti-Catholic hysteria of the ‘know-nothings’ the overall trend was towards both separation and assimilation. Mike Davis brilliantly described this in Prisoners of the American Dream:

The ingenuity of American Catholicism, already becoming apparent in the 1850s, was that it functioned as an apparatus for acculturating millions of Catholic immigrants to American liberal-capitalist society while simultaneously carving out its own sphere of sub-cultural hegemony…

Thus what developed, according to Davis, was ‘two corporatist subcultures along a religious divide’, leaving the working class as a whole fractured at the time of grave national crisis unable to form an independent party, certainly unable to form some kind of alliance with oppressed black slaves- an inability that would extend right through the New Deal, which also excluded African Americans. This would continue as successive waves of European immigrants followed the same dynamic: initial discrimination, eventually achieving the status of ‘whiteness’ while keeping separate largely conservative subcultures, thereby reinforcing both American capitalism and a splintered working class.

If a divided working class is one side of the coin, the other mutually reinforcing side has been a state that for the most part has been callous in addressing the needs of working poor. This too has a long history that continues right through the present. Violence was always part of the equation. American labor history is far bloodier than any other industrial nation whether it was striking workers and their families at Ludlow, the martyrs of Haymarket, or the striking workers killed at Pullman.

For all the ire liberals direct at the likes of Hoover and Reagan, the marginalizing of labor has been a bipartisan affair. Barack Obama has typically ignored the concerns of labor, a constituency that worked hard for his election, not even muttering a phrase like ‘living wage’ or voicing a peep for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make unionizing somewhat easier.

Historically divided and penned in by an indifferent and hostile state, a nasty strain of producerism has always been part of working class culture, a producerism that doesn’t spare the rich but whose main target has always been the poor and working poor, particularly when it lazily aligns itself to conservative interests and parties; the poor always being an easier target than the rich.

Traces of this can be found all the way in the Omaha Platform, which launched the Populist Party back in 1892. While the populists railed against war and trusts there was a resolution about ‘the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage earners’. It is not hard to see the same sentiment in the more recent rants against immigrants and the welfare state (i.e. big government): social Darwinism where only the few prosper in their gated communities and pent houses while the many are left to stew in bitterness and cynicism at their neighbors.

Given the roots of this it is hard to imagine much improvement in the short term. The political landscape is barren of any serious alternatives. Corporations have an even tighter grip on national elections and Obama has long discarded the opportunity early in his presidency to serious confront Wall Street. The main duty of the American Left should be to return to working class politicians with the difficult goal of uniting the working class with a sense of solidarity that runs across its diverse spectrum, with the ultimate long term goal of doing the same for society as a whole. That may seem sanctimonious and utopian, but is there any other way to seriously reduce poverty?

Nastiest Scams, Rip-Offs and Tricks From Wall Street Crooks

How many high-level Wall Street players have been put in jail for the crimes that led to the financial crisis? Not. Even. One. 

By Dave Johnson, AlterNet
Posted on December 26, 201

How many high-level Wall Street players have been put in jail for the crimes that led to the financial crisis?  Not. Even. One.   

Last week several executives from the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, known as “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,”were sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for civil fraud. They were charged with misleading investors about the quality of the loans they were buying.  But this is a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution, so they face no possibility of jail time.  And the SEC is notoriously ready to settle these cases, accepting fines without admission of guilt. 

Meanwhile, last month Bloomberg News revealed that the Federal Reserve secretly loaned  $1.2 trillion to banks on Dec. 5, 2008, their neediest day, even as some of their CEOs were assuring investors their banks were healthy.  Are these CEOs facing prosecution or even civil fraud suits for doing the very same thing?  Not so much. 

These stories barely even reveal the tip of the iceberg of financial malfeasance.  We have been hearing for years now about the scams, frauds, rackets, schemes, tricks and various other ways that people on Wall Street made gazillions while crashing the economy.  The one thing we haven’t heard anything about is anyone at the top being held criminally accountable … for anything! 

Given these recent developments, the end of a bad year seems like a good time to take a look back at just a few examples of what was, and in too many cases, still is going on. So here is a little holiday-season nudge to all the attorneys general who may be hesitant to take them on -- if not with jail time, then at least  The banksters still have faced no accountability. 

They got bailed out … will We, the People continue to get sold out?

1. Fraudclosure/Robosigning

After the housing bubble collapsed, and the “innovative” mortgage “products” that were created by the financial industry began to blow up, with people’s payments rising into the stratosphere just as housing prices dropped and people were losing their jobs, the banks were faced with literally millions of foreclosures to process.  But, being Wall Street outfits, they didn’t want to be responsible for doing any actual work themselves.  Best to outsource the work to someone … cheap.  And that is what they did – and are still doing. 

The banks hired “robosigning” outfits to process the foreclosures, which resulted in accusations of documentation fraud, where the outfits file affidavits claiming to have documents they do not have.  The original mortgages often did not include proper paperwork to clearly prove who signed the loans or who had title, etc.  These firms would forge signatures, sign affidavits saying they had proper paperwork when they did not, and a number of other ruses to speed foreclosures.  And courts set up what were called “rocket dockets” to assist the process.  David Dayen at Firedoglake (Sept 2010): Foreclosure Fraud as Cover-Up for Mortgage Fraud, 

Banks never had the proper documentation for these loans, after handing them out to anyone with a pulse, and slicing and dicing them through securitization. The fraud allows banks and the state and local governments explicitly facilitating this by setting up special, speedy foreclosure courts the ability to paper over these objections. If the lenders had to obey the law and use a deliberative process to affirm the title ownership, practically nobody would get evicted. If enough of those struggling can be forced out of their homes, and the fraudulent mortgages thrown in the dumper, the banks can save their balance sheets.

This fraudulent process caught up with the banks, and once again the government offered “settlements” that, instead of prosecuting the fraud, offered immunity from prosecution before the states even had a chance to fully investigate charges. California’s Attorney General Kamela Harris backed away from this deal. Several other state Attorneys General, including New York’s Eric Schneiderman and Delaware’s Beau Biden are independently investigating foreclosure fraud, along with those in Nevada, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Kentucky.

We’ll see if the “settlement”  comes through, blocking a more comprehensive investigation and possible prosecutions. Recently Massachusetts filed the first foreclosure-fraud lawsuit, followed by Nevada.

2. Pushing Subprime Loans

The initial wave of mortgages to go bad were the “subprime” mortgages that were given to people barely able or even unable to make their payments.  Why were there so many of these mortgages in the system?  These mortgages were pushed on people by “predatory lenders” who would make a quick buck on upfront fees and commissions and then sell the loans to Wall Street to be repackaged into “CDOs” – the “toxic assets” that took down much of the financial system. 

You may have come across the recent story in the news about the Sheriff and movers refusing to evict a 103-year-old woman and her 83-year-old daughter from the home they have lived in for 53 years.  So here is a question: Why does a 103-year-old woman who has been in her house for 53 years even have a mortgage? Because many banks were pushing minority borrowers into expensive subprime loans, even if they qualified for standard mortgages.

According to Think Progress, “Wells Fargo had perhaps the most horrifying practices in this department, calling the subprime loans that they pushed in poor, black neighborhoods “ghetto loans.”


Predatory lending isn’t just about steering borrowers into very expensive loans, it is also about hard-selling people into borrowing money in the first place.  According to The Leadership Conference, “Predatory lending occurs when a lender uses unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent practices when selling a loan to a consumer. Borrowers are steered toward unaffordable loans, or charged higher fees or interest rates than those they qualify for. “

Predatory and subprime lending has died down, thanks to some degree of a restoration of sanity and new lending standards. But no one stepped in and stopped it when the practice was at its … prime. 

Meanwhile yet another “settlement” with no criminal charges is occurring. On Wednesday the government announced a $335 million settlement with Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial unit for overcharging minorities and pushing them into subprime loans.

3. Betting Against Designed-to-Fail Bonds

Even in collapsing markets there is money to be made by placing bets against assets that are overvalued, and then when their price drops the bets pay off.  And if you know where the toxic assets are, in advance, you can make a ton of money. The best way to know where toxic assets are is if you put them there, on purpose, in order for them to collapse. A ProPublica story, Did Citi Get a Sweet Deal? Bank Claims SEC Settlement on One CDO Clears It on All Others, says CitiBank created toxic assets on purpose in order to make bets that they would fail, 

In the run-up to the global financial collapse, Citigroup’s bankers worked feverishly to create complex securities. In just one year, 2007, Citi marketed more than $20 billion worth of deals backed by home mortgages to investors around the world, most of which failed spectacularly. Subsequent lawsuits and investigations turned up evidence that the bank knew that some of the products were low quality and, in some instances, had even bet they would fail.

Citibank made a lot of money from these bets because they knew where the toxic assets were, because they put them there, on purpose, in order to bet against them. CitiBank created these CDO toxic assets in a way that was designed to fail, and sold them to customers as solid investments, and then made bets that these assets were worthless. When the designed-to-fail assets failed, CitiBank made money, the customers were wiped out. 

The Securities and Exchange Comission (SEC) offered to “settle” this case with CitiBank, accepting a cash fine in exchange for dropping any prosecution or even making CitiBank admit wrongdoing.  But promsingly this was rejected by the judge.  DailyKos: Judge Rakoff stands up to SEC and Citigroup, 

Today, Judge Rakoff added to his legacy of independence by rejecting the SEC's efforts to settle with Citigroup for $285M over mortgage-backed securities fraud allegations.

… Under the law, Judge Rakoff was obligated to determine whether this settlement was "fair, reasonable, and in the public interest"; the SEC argued that no, the public interest didn't actually matter—and, if it did, the SEC itself could assess what the public needed. No no no, said the Judge.

Goldman Sachs also received a earlier settlement-without-prosecution for operating a similar scheme.  Washington Post: Goldman Sachs to pay record settlement in fraud suit, change business practices, 

Goldman Sachs agreed Thursday to pay $550 million to settle a fraud suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused the storied Wall Street bank of selling a subprime-mortgage investment that was secretly designed to fail.

The crux of the case alleges that Paulson & Co., a hedge fund, was looking for a way to bet on a drop in the housing market and that it asked Goldman to help create a financial product that would allow such a wager. Paulson, led by hedge fund manager John Paulson, essentially bought insurance against the investment -- much like taking out an insurance policy on a person who secretly has a potentially deadly disease. …

The investment ultimately lost virtually all its value, costing investors $1 billion.

Word is these schemes were not uncommon.  Ney getting that an investment is going to blow up if you’re the one who put the bomb in it and set the timer in the first place.

4. An “Epidemic” Of Mortgage Fraud

For years regulators were warned about “an epidemic” of mortgage fraud, but looked the other way. For example, a CNN news story is from 2004, years before the financial collapse, FBI warns of mortgage fraud 'epidemic', warned,

Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an "epidemic" of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become "the next S&L crisis."

… The FBI has dispatched undercover teams across the country in an urgent investigation into dealings by suspect mortgage brokers, appraisers, short-term investors, and loan officers, Swecker, flanked by FBI executives and Justice Department prosecutors, revealed.

The Bush administration’s reaction was to pull FBI agents off of white collar crime like mortgage fraud, reducing the numer of agents looking at banking fraud from 1,000 during the S&L Crisis investigation down to around 100. 

5. Ratings Agencies Gave AAA to CDOs

Subprime and just fraudulent mortgages were getting bundled up into complex bonds and sold by the big Wall Street banks to investors looking for higher yields than they could get from other investments.  (They didn’t even bother to make sure they had proper documentation proving who had signed the loans, and who should receive the payments. More on this later.)

But investors wanted to buy bonds that were safe. So they turned to the ratings agencies.  These are the companies responsible for determining the safety of investments. The ratings agencies had conflicts of interest, being paid in various ways by Wall Street to help mislead investors and tell them that the “toxic assets” bonds that Wall Street was selling had the highest safety rating of AAA.  Then the investors lost, the economy was tanked and the taxpayers are now and into the future paying the bill. 

William Black was a regulator during the S&L crisis.  He explains at the Huffington Post, writing in, The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Better Understand the Crisis, 

The first document everyone should read is by S&P, the largest of the rating agencies. The context of the document is that a professional credit rater has told his superiors that he needs to examine the mortgage loan files to evaluate the risk of a complex financial derivative whose risk and market value depend on the credit quality of the nonprime mortgages "underlying" the derivative. A senior manager sends a blistering reply with this forceful punctuation:

Any request for loan level tapes is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!! Most investors don't have it and can't provide it. [W]e MUST produce a credit estimate. It is your responsibility to provide those credit estimates and your responsibility to devise some method for doing so.

The rating agencies never reviewed samples of loan files before giving AAA ratings to nonprime mortgage financial derivatives. … 

…Worse, the S&P document demonstrates that the … banks … engaged in the same willful blindness. They did not review samples of loan files because doing so would have exposed the toxic nature of the assets they were buying and selling. The entire business was premised on a massive lie -- that fraudulent, toxic nonprime mortgage loans were virtually risk-free. The lie was so blatant that the banks even pooled loans that were known in the trade as "liar's loans" and obtained AAA ratings despite FBI warnings that mortgage fraud was "epidemic."

In other words, superiors at the ratings agencies told their underlings to just make up fraudulent credit ratings.  

Today the people who were at the top of the ratings agencies and the Wall Street firms have millions and live in big houses.  How many of the rest of us now or will have to live in cars and cardboard boxes because of what they did? 

6. Banksters Who Made Out Like … Bandits

Many financial-company executives made millions (hundreds of millions, actually) while they were doing questionable things that ended up crashing their companies and the economy.  But they got to keep the money.  For example, when you hear that Wall Street firm “Lehman Brothers” went bankrupt, you might think, “serves them right.” But what actually happened was that a lot of regular people ended up losing their jobs while a few people at the top got really, really rich.  CEO Richard Fuld, for example, ended up with almost half a billion. 

(Really, really rich.)  Business Week: How Much Did Lehman CEO Dick Fuld Really Make? 

"Mr. Fuld will do fine," Waxman said. "He can walk away from Lehman a wealthy man who earned over $500 million. But taxpayers are left with a $700 billion bill to rescue Wall Street and an economy in crisis."

So, no, “they” didn’t get what they deserved – and neither did top executives like Fuld. 

 

7. Insiders Profiting From Being … Insiders

Stephen Friedman was a member of the Board of Goldman Sachs at the same time as he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has to resign from the NY Federal Reserve, keeping his position with Goldman Sachs, after it was revealed that he had purchased $3 million worth of Goldman Sachs stock while the Federal Reserve was regulating the company after it became a bank holding company in September 2008. This was around the time that the NY Fed negotiated for Goldman Sachs to receive payments from AIG, that would be paid at 100 cents on the dollar, even though AIG was in default. 

According to an Oct. 27, 2009 Bloomberg report, New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers,

The deal contributed to the more than $14 billion that over 18 months was handed to Goldman Sachs, whose former chairman, Stephen Friedman, was chairman of the board of directors of the New York Fed when the decision was made. Friedman, 71, resigned in May, days after it was disclosed by the Wall Street Journal that he had bought more than 50,000 shares of Goldman Sachs stock following the takeover of AIG. He declined to comment for this article.

Congress finally, finally voted to audit the Federal Reserve.  It was a one-time, limited audit, but that is a lot more than We, the People were allowed to know about the Fed before the audit.  What did we learn?  Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi, in The Real Housewives of Wall Street, tells us.

The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

For just one example of what has been going on with the Fed, one company, named Waterfall TALF Opportunity, received nine loans totaling around $220 million.  Among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.  Tiabbi explains why you care, writing,

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

Insiders getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the Fed, in secret. That is just one example of the shenanigans discovered when the Fed was audited.  Is there any investigation of this underway?  Not that the public has been told, and not likely ever. 

More recently there was another example of insiders potentially profiting from being on the inside track was in the news recently.   President Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson may have tipped off a group of hedge fund managers with specific information about what the government would be doing. 

Again, no one is being prosecuted. 

Impunity? 
There are so, so many other outrages.  And these are only the things that have hit the news.  Are some or all of these not just outrages, but actual crimes?  After the “S&L Crisis” there were 1,100 prosecutions and more than 800 bank officials went to jail.  This time – even with the appearance of widespread criminality in the financial industry – not so much.  In fact, not any.   

Were crimes committed by people high up in the financial industry?  It looks that way, but we really have no way of knowing if our government again and again offers “settlements” that block the comprehensive investigations that come with prosecutions.  

Why won't our legal system prosecute anyone on Wall Street for anything?  We see outrage after outrage, and they put poor people in jail for life for stealing a hot dog when they are hungry.  Meanwhile Wall Street is funding an effort to blame government for the financial collapse, to block regulation and defund the regulatory agencies.  This is an effort to subvert government and turn people against democracy so that plutocracy – government of by and for the 1% – can reign. 

We should all be demanding that the legal system do its job to sort this out instead of actively blocking prosecutions by approving “settlements.” People lose faith in government when it looks like the 1% can get away with any outrage. And now we know that when We, the People gather to demand something be done about this we are met with pepper spray and batons.

5 Behemoth Banks That Hold Our Political System Hostage

The banks' ranks are based on how shamelessly they game the political process through lobbying, revolving door politics and campaign donations.
By Sarah Jaffe and Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on October 19, 2011


The economic crash led to the loss of 9 million jobs and the biggest drop in American home-ownership since the Great Depression. Long-term unemployment, poverty and hunger have increased dramatically. People are angry. The Occupy Wall Street movement, a stand against Wall Street's greed, excess and criminality, has captured the imagination and participation of millions across the nation and the globe.

The giant mortgage bubble and the irresponsible and corrupt practices that caused the catastrophic economic crash didn't emerge out of thin air. They were a consequence of decades of pay-to-play politics rife with conflicts of interest; a political system awash in cash and legal pay-offs, designed to undermine the checks and balances that could have prevented the meltdown.

Many of these checks and balances were implemented during the Great Depression. How they were eroded and eventually abandoned is the story of a small group of banks, financial companies and elites involved in major conflicts of interest, revolving-door politics and backroom deal-making -- all to protect the interests of the global elite at the expense of the American public.

Big Finance has a long history of working hard to deregulate the American economic system on behalf of global capitalism run amok. One of its biggest coups was the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that created a firewall between investment banking and the commercial banks that hold deposits and make loans.

The first victory in the quest to overturn this major protection came in 1986. Under intense pressure from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve reinterpreted a key section of Glass-Steagall, deciding that commercial banks could make up to 5 percent of their gross revenues from investment banking. After the board heard arguments from Citicorp, J.P. Morgan and Bankers Trust, it loosened the restrictions further: in 1989, the limit was raised to 10 percent of revenues, and in 1996, they hiked it up to 25 percent.

Then, according to a report by PBS' Frontline, “In the 1997-'98 election cycle, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries (known as the FIRE sector), spen[t] more than $200 million on lobbying and [made] more than $150 million in political donations” – most of which were “targeted to members of Congressional banking committees and other committees with direct jurisdiction over financial services legislation.”

The following year, after 12 unsuccessful attempts, Glass-Steagall, which would have made the crash of 2007-2009 impossible, was finally repealed. And it was only then that the explosion of shaky mortgage-backed securities began. “Subprime” loans, which made the mortgage system so vulnerable, made up 5 percent of all mortgages in the U.S. the year before repeal, but had skyrocketed to 30 percent of the total at the time of the crash.

The Glass-Steagall act was killed by financial interests seeking to maximize deregulation. The result was a casino-like environment that almost destroyed the U.S. and global economy. The giants of Wall Street enjoyed a massive bailout courtesy of American taxpayers, and they're still hard at work gaming the system, lobbying hard against new regulations that might avert the next bubble-led crash.

AlterNet, in partnership with the Media Consortium, looked at the five banks that exert the most influence on our democracy. Based on their size, the amount of money they spend on campaign donations and lobbying, and the number of employees who’ve gone through the revolving door into public service, or vice versa, we determined which banks have had the worst impact on the country. We’ll rank each one based on our research, and come up with the worst of the worst--the big bank that’s done the most damage to America's economy and society.

A word of caution is in order. This report is based only on what the banks are forced to disclose. It doesn't include lobbying by corporate front-groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and it doesn't include the “independent” campaign spending that has exploded in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which corporations are no longer required to disclose to the public. This is a classic story of American political corruption writ large.


Meet the Big Banks
You’re no doubt familiar with Bank of America. Just recently BofA has made news because it's been sued for $10 billion over “toxic” mortgage-backed securities, and it's imposing an arbitrary and unfair $5-a-month fee for customers who use their debit cards. Bank of America’s on shaky ground these days and its stock price has dropped significantly, in part because of its purchase of Countrywide Financial, a mortgage lender that wrote a huge chunk of the bad mortgages that broke the economy. Still, it remains a giant company, ranked number 9 on the Fortune 500 list of largest corporations for 2011, right under General Motors and right above Ford.

BofA is the behemoth it is because the bank has taken over 13 other financial institutions since the 1990s, including US Trust, NationsBank, BayBanks, and most recently the large investment company Merrill Lynch, but it's no longer the biggest of all. According to its most recent filings, JPMorgan Chase is the biggest financial firm in the country (it ranks number 13 on the Fortune 500, right below AT&T), with $2.29 trillion in assets. In 2010, the bank had $115 billion in revenues, and turned a neat profit of $17.4 billion. Chase is the conglomerate’s retail banking and credit branch, while JP Morgan has been the investment, asset management and private banking end of operations since the merger in 2000 of JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan. In 2008, JPMorgan Chase swallowed up Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual; despite common complaints of “too big to fail,” the big banks mostly got even bigger after the economic crisis. JPMorgan Chase is now headquartered in midtown Manhattan, many blocks north of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the financial district.

Bank of America still has $2.22 trillion in assets even after a steep decline. Last year, it made $134 billion in revenues, and reported a loss of $2.24 billion. (The protest group US Uncut loves to point out that Bank of America received a $1 billion tax refund in 2010.) It's headquartered in Charlotte and has branches around the country -- though it may be closing up to 600 of them. Interestingly, the Democratic party will hold its 2012 convention in Charlotte, where BofA is the big dog in town.

Hot on JPMorgan and BofA’s heels in the size race is Citigroup, which just announced this week that it would be charging its depositors a $15 monthly fee if they don’t maintain a $6,000 balance in their checking accounts--yet another unfair and regressive fee, even though Citigroup isn’t exactly hurting for money. It is number 14 on the Fortune 500, with $1.91 trillion in assets, $111 billion in revenues and $10.6 billion in profits in 2010.

Wells Fargo reported profits of $12.36 billion last year, and sits at number 23 on the Fortune list, just above Procter & Gamble. The California-headquartered bank acquired Wachovia, which had itself previously absorbed First Union and the Money Store among others, in 2008, in the throes of the financial meltdown, and as of 2010 has $1.26 trillion in assets and $93 billion in revenues.

Goldman Sachs, the famed “vampire squid” in Matt Taibbi’s formulation, is the only investment bank on our list. However, no look at the corrupting influence of Big Finance would be complete without it. It's “only” at 54 on Fortune’s list, but still higher than, among others, Intel, Chrysler and Sears, with $911.3 billion in assets and $46 billion in revenues, and profits of $8.35 billion in 2010. For many, Goldman Sachs is the face of all that’s wrong with Wall Street, stoking massive anger when CEO Lloyd Blankfein told a reporter that he was “doing God’s work.”

Meet Their Bailouts
The big banks weathered the economic crash thanks to large injections of taxpayer dollars. The original bailout plan, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was signed into law by George W. Bush and gave direct handouts to the banks to keep them from collapsing.

Economist Dean Baker told AlterNet that Big Finance “never wanted to see the removal of the government from the market. They wanted the government to come in and bail them out.”

They were also happy to accept “government deposit insurance or the back-up lines of credit provided by the Fed through the discount window,” he said. “What the financial industry wants is to have these incredibly valuable government safeguards without restrictions on the banks' behavior.”

Among our big five, Citigroup was the largest beneficiary of these funds, with $45 billion, but even Goldman Sachs got $10 billion. Wachovia/Wells Fargo and JPMorgan got $25 billion each, while Bank of America got $30 billion. According to ProPublica’s calculations, the big five have all paid back their TARP funds.

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But TARP was only one way in which the federal government subsidized the big banks. The Federal Reserve also handed out trillions in unsupervised loans during the so-called crisis period.

Dean Baker noted in his book False Profits that the Fed loans were actually more significant than the bailouts. “The vote on the TARP was a way to get Congress’s fingerprints on the policy of subsidizing the banks,” he wrote, “just as the war authorization bill approved in October 2002 implicated Congress in President Bush’s subsequent decision to wage war on Iraq under false pretenses.”

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And if those numbers weren't big enough, just this August Bloomberg reported even more secret Fed loans to the big banks: “The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 -- the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg -- was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.”

These staggering numbers in direct bailouts and loans don’t even take into account the other ways in which these banks benefited from federal handouts: loans to other banks that were used to pay back debts to the big five; government support for consolidation, making the too-big-to-fail banks even bigger. For instance, in addition to its own bailout funds, Goldman Sachs got $12.9 billion from the funds the government used to bail out insurance giant/seller of derivatives AIG.

“Without question, direct government support was critical in stabilizing the financial system, and we benefitted from it,” Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein said.

Campaign Donations
The big banks are some of the biggest donors to political campaigns in the country. Yet, when you compare what they spend on candidates to what they got in bailouts, it’s pennies on the dollar. In other words, it’s a worthwhile investment to spend money on candidates.

Corporations can't give money directly to politicians running for federal office. They get around that sticking point in several ways. First, they can donate to campaigns through their political action committees (PACs). (A corporation can't fund its PACs from its revenues directly; it can create a PAC, pick up its administrative costs, and then solicit contributions from the company's executives and shareholders.) But corporate PACs can give no more than $5,000 a year to a given federal candidate.

Another way is through the use of what's known as “soft money.” Soft money is used to build party infrastructure or to buy political ads that are produced independently from a campaign. Soft money ads are ostensibly used to educate voters about various issues, but they often look exactly like campaign ads that convey a clear message of whom a voter should or shouldn't support.

“Bundling” is another way corporations inject money into politics. There are limits on how much an individual can give to a candidate for federal office, so wealthy donors seek out contributions from friends, family and business associates, and “bundle” them into large pots of cash. In exchange, they usually become part of a club – like the Bush “Rangers” – and get invited to insiders' events where they have plenty of opportunities to influence a candidate.

OpenSecrets.org's list of the top all-time political donors from 1989 to 2012 includes contributions from individuals associated with a company, from Corporate PACs and soft money through 2010 (more on that below). Where do the banks stack up? Goldman Sachs is number 25, five slots higher than the National Rifle Association. It also spends more on candidates than the American Hospital Association, the AFL-CIO and defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Citigroup (number 39 on the list, just above Microsoft), JPMorgan Chase (number 46, just below Blue Cross/Blue Shield) and Bank of America (number 50) are all heavy hitters. Of our big-spending financial institutions, only Wells Fargo didn't make the cut for the top 50.

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As far as corporate PACs alone, Bank of America leads among commercial banks this election cycle, despite – or perhaps because of – its struggles, having already spent $249,500 on candidates for 2012--$153,000 of that on Republicans. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are close on its heels, with $171,500 and $166,499 respectively, and they both follow the trend, in 2012, of leaning Republican. (The finance industry as a whole gives about 69 percent of its donations to the GOP). Citigroup's PAC donated $56,000 thus far for 2012. And Goldman Sachs leads the pack among investment banks this cycle, having already shelled out nearly $300,000.

Just who are the recipients of all this largesse? There are many, but most play key roles on Congressional committees that oversee their businesses. Consider just one example: Senator Chuck Schumer, D-New York, one of the most powerful members of Congress (Schumer is known as “the senator from Wall Street”).

According to the National Journal's rankings, Schumer is tied with two others as the 10th “most liberal” member of the upper chamber. But he owes his career to Wall Street. As Salon editor Steve Kornacki noted, in the early 1980s, when he was a little-known back-bencher in the House, Schumer managed to get himself a seat on the House Banking Committee, and immediately “set about making friends on Wall Street, tapping the city’s top law firms and securities houses for campaign donations.” "I told them I looked like I had a very difficult reapportionment fight. If I were to stand a chance of being re-elected, I needed some help," he would later tell the Associated Press.

Wall Street would continue to have his back as his career progressed. According to Open Secrets, between 2007 and the current cycle, Schumer raked in $3.9 million from the securities, banking and insurance industries – over 20 percent of all his fundraising. He has raised more from Wall Street than any other lawmaker over the last two years. Over the course of his political career, the securities and investment industries are his top contributors; the four most generous institutions during his time in the Senate have been Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, in that order.

The ostensibly liberal senator from New York, who sits on the Senate Finance and Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committees – and chairs the all-important Committee on Rules and Administration (which deal with, among other things, lobbying restrictions) – has returned that friendship consistently.

Although he voted for the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in 2010, earlier this year, he joined several other lawmakers in a letter urging federal legislators not to adopt new regulations on derivatives, arguing that they would “inevitably result in significant competitive disadvantages for U.S. firms operating globally.” He voted to extend the Bush tax cuts on capital gains in both 2005 and 2006.

In 2008, the New York Times analyzed Schumer's voting record, and found that he has consistently sided with Wall Street on issue after issue, often crossing the aisle to do so.

That's just Congress. The presidential election in 2012 will be the most expensive in history; Barack Obama has already raised over $89 million for his reelection, while his GOP opponents are raising and spending boatloads of cash as well.

The banking industry is by and large leaning more Republican for 2012 than it did in 2008 (This only includes direct contributions to the campaigns; it doesn't include money Obama has raised for the Democratic National Committee, which will help support his re-election efforts). Through the 2nd quarter of 2011, the Obama campaign has only raised $857,000 from the securities and investment industries, $44,750 from Goldman Sachs, the only one of our top five to make it onto OpenSecrets’ top contributors' list.

Two of Obama’s top bundlers are also connected to Goldman Sachs. Vicki Heyman has brought in between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama, according to OpenSecrets, and David Solow between $50,000 and $100,000. (In comparison, by the end of the 2008 election, Obama had gotten $1,013,000 from Goldman Sachs, $808,000 from JPMorgan Chase and $736,000 from Citigroup.)

Mitt Romney is the clear favorite candidate of Wall Street this year, having taken in $2,339,588 from securities and investment companies. Goldman Sachs is the top contributor to Romney’s campaign, having given $293,250 between political action committees, employees and their families. Bank of America has kicked in $59,000, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan around $45,000 each and Citigroup brings up the rear with $33,000.

Wells Fargo tossed a few thousand to Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain as well. It's always good to cover one's bases.

We should note that this report, like all others on this topic, is necessarily incomplete. Corporations don't like airing their campaign spending in public, and there are two ways they can and do avoid it.

First, corporate front-groups like the Chamber of Commerce effectively “launder” corporate campaign cash, keeping a company's fingerprints from appearing on lobbying and campaign disclosure reports. The Chamber is not required, and does not disclose its members, but according to Think Progress, “several confirmed Chamber members are banks which were bailed out by taxpayers.” These include Citigroup, Marshall & Ilsley Bank and the New York Private Bank & Trust. According to Americans for Financial Reform, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, PNC Financial Services and M&I Bank are also Chamber members.

Prior to the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens' United v. FEC, there were limits on corporations' (and unions') independent expenditures and on “electioneering communications” – ads that explicitly call for the election or defeat of a candidate before an election. All campaign spending had to come from individual execs and shareholders or be funneled through corporate PACs. But the decision changed the entire landscape, allowing corporations and unions to spend unlimited dollars on politics, directly from their treasuries and without the disinfecting light of disclosure. Following the decision, a bill that would have forced corporations to disclose these donations had enough bipartisan support for passage, but a vote on the measure was blocked three times by Senate Republicans.

Lobbying
After the economic crisis, one might have expected the big banks to have less money to spend on lobbying. But financial reform was on Washington's agenda, so the bankers coughed up the cash for lobbyists in an effort to make sure the final result wasn't too hard on them or their bottom line. The lobbying numbers for all five of the banks in our report went up dramatically in recent years, starting their dramatic spike in 2006 and peaking in 2010, when the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill was under consideration.

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Banks have spent more than any other sector on lobbying between 1998 and 2011, and Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo were at the top, dropping $12,020,000 between them in 2011 alone. And those efforts have paid off for them, as they’ve been able to maintain most of their business practices practically unchanged since before the crash.

Their interests were clear. According to a report by the inspector general of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the banks lobbied heavily against limitations on executive pay that legislators had tried to attach to the bailout money. They worked hard to preserve their fat bonuses, their right to virtually no oversight and their ability to continue business as usual.

Anupama Narayanswamy at the Sunlight Foundation wrote of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, “The Wall Street reform bill was a mammoth undertaking, consisting of more than 2,300 pages, and requiring agencies to write a total of more than 240 new regulations. With 108 new rules due to be adopted this summer on the first anniversary of its enactment, and a dozen bills introduced by Republican members to repeal the bill in whole or in part, government-relations wings of the Wall Street banks and lobbying firms in Washington, D.C., have been busy.”

Bill Allison, also at Sunlight, reported, “Since passage of Dodd-Frank, federal agencies implementing the law have logged more than 2,100 meetings with interests aiming to influence the many new rules that Dodd-Frank requires, including 83 with executives and lobbyists for Goldman Sachs, 73 with JP Morgan Chase, 58 with Morgan Stanley and 55 with Bank of America.”

The banks also lobby through the American Bankers Association, which has spent $4.6 million this year alone on lobbyists, and the Financial Services Roundtable, which the New York Times’ Ben Protess describes as “a fellow trade group that represents 100 of the nation’s largest financial firms.” These two organizations and others helped fund the slew of lobbyists fighting to keep regulators from having much of an impact on the financial sector.

The vast army of lobbyists that represent the big banks in Washington include some former power brokers from Congress; former Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, through his Gephardt Group, got $60,000 from Goldman Sachs to argue for their cause, which according to the Center for Responsive Politics, he did personally. John Breaux, former Democratic Senator from Louisiana, also lobbies for Goldman, and his partner in the Breaux Lott Leadership Group, Trent Lott, driven out of his position as Senate Minority Leader for comments that appeared to endorse Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president, represents both Goldman and Citigroup. (Citigroup paid them $180,000 for lobbying last year, and Goldman a full $300,000, as much as General Electric.)

The Gephardt Group took in $3.2 million just last year, from Boeing, Comcast, Sodexho and many more as well as Goldman Sachs, and Breaux and Lott pocketed nearly $6 million from clients ranging from Citigroup and Delta Airlines to AT&T and defense contractor Raytheon.

Bank of America and Wells Fargo both retain the services of the Podesta Group, run by well-known Washington insider Tony Podesta, who was a founder of People for the American Way. (Podesta's brother, John Podesta, is president of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal DC think tank and a former Clinton chief of staff -- he also headed Obama's transition.) Wells Fargo paid the Podesta Group $340,000 in 2011, $100,000 more than Wal-Mart, another Podesta client.

While JPMorgan Chase’s lobbyist roster doesn’t have quite the pedigree of some of the others, it makes up for that in sheer spending power, having dropped $66,696,173 in lobbying dollars between 1998 and 2011. In total spending it still comes in second, though, behind Citigroup’s $82,350,000, handing it the crown for biggest spender as far as lobbying goes.

All together, the finance sector is the top spender on lobbying between the years of 1998 and 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, having poured $4,631,844,938 into lobbyists’ pockets. $230,200,953 of that came directly from the five banks surveyed here.

And what did they get for all that money? Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs and author of the new book Black Tuesday, explained to AlterNet:

“The Dodd-Frank Bill contains a slew of minor, cosmetic adjustments to the status quo manner in which the largest banks operate, and even they are being battled against by the financial industry lobbyists. The bottom line is that this bill does not fundamentally alter the structure of Wall Street - it does not separate banks cleanly, or in any other way remotely reminiscent of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, into commercial banks that deal with the basics of deposit and lending operations vs. investment banks that create dangerous and complex securities and leverage them into all manner of speculative activity.

She continued,

“Even though the bill calls for a consumer financial protection agency, it should be noted that such a department existed already within the Fed during the build-up to this crisis, that by virtue of political weakening and position within the Fed and political hierarchy was rendered ineffective in practice. The bill does not end the conflicts of interest and the revolving doors between the regulatory bodies and other key positions in Washington vs. those coming from, or going to, Wall Street.”

Revolving Door
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the financial industry's influence on our political system is the extent to which financial insiders end up in positions where they're actually making policy.

The “revolving door” works both ways. According to Open Secrets, fully 74 percent of registered lobbyists for the finance and insurance industry previously worked in government, many of them for members of Congress sitting on committees that set banking regulations, or for the regulatory agencies that enforce them.

The nuts and bolts of legislation is crafted by Congressional staffers, and in the Senate, the Finance Committee (117) is second only to the Judicial Committee (119) in the number of staffers-turned-lobbyists or lobbyists-turned-staffers.

Building relationships as an elected official, regulator or legislative staffer can later bring rich financial rewards when one moves to the private sector. Economists Jordi Blanes Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen tried to figure how much those relationships were worth in a 2010 study conducted for the Center for Economic Performance (PDF). Using disclosure forms, they looked at how former staffers-turned-lobbyists' income changed when their former bosses left Congress. The researchers found “evidence that the existence of a powerful politician to whom the lobbyist is connected is a key determinant of the revenue that he or she is able to generate... in other words, lobbyists are able to 'cash in on their connections,' since connections are an asset with a separate value to their experience, human capital or general knowledge of how government works.”

Specifically, they found that when a senator left office, their former staffers-turned-lobbyists saw their incomes drop by an average of 24 percent and when members of the House left office, their old staffers' incomes dropped by 10 percent. But those are the averages. They also found, “Consistent with the notion that lobbyists sell access to powerful politicians," that lobbyists lost more revenue if their departing ex-bosses were more senior and held powerful committee assignments.

As you can see in the graphic below, Citigroup leads through Congress' revolving door, followed by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and followed up by Goldman Sachs, according to Legistorm's database.

Lobbyists who worked for members of Congress or were themselves legislators
	20	Including Sanders Larsen Adu, former staff director of a House Financial Services subcommittee, Tim Keeler, former staffer on the Senate Finance Committee (Keeler has also lobbied on behalf of BofA and JP Morgan Chase, among others) and Chris Rosello, a former staffer on the House Financial Services Committee.
	81	Including former Senator John Breaux, D-Louisiana, who was a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, and chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy.
	72	Including former Rep. Rick Lazio, R-NY, who served as Deputy Majority Whip, Assistant Majority Leader, and chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity.
	39	Including, until recently, Senator Dan Coats, R-Indiana, who served in the Senate until 1999, retired to lobby his former colleagues and serve a stint as ambassador to Germany, and then returned to the Senate this year. The New York Times reported that Coats, lobbying for Cooper Industries, “served as co-chairman of a team of lobbyists in 2007 who worked behind the scenes to successfully block Senate legislation that would have terminated a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cash flow” for the company. Coats curently sits on the Joint Economic Committee.
	18	Including former Rep Dick Gephardt, D-Missouri and former Rep. Harold Ford, Sr., D-TN. Gephardt served as the House Majority leader; Ford sat on the House Banking Committee.

The revolving door between Wall Street and government doesn't just lead into and out of Congress. Consider the circuitous career path taken by former White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. Bolten graduated with a law degree in the early 1980s, and between 1985 and 1989, he bounced between the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers, which represents Goldman Sachs -- and is a registered lobbyist for Citigroup, according to Legistorm ($$) -- and the Senate Finance Committee.

After a brief stint in the first Bush administration, Bolten went over to Goldman Sachs, where he served as executive director of legislative affairs for five years. Then he became policy director on George W. Bush's 2000 campaign. After the election, he worked his way up from assistant to the president to director of the Office of Management and Budget and, finally, to White House Chief-of-Staff, which some believe to be the second most powerful position in the government. In that role, he was credited with recruiting then-Goldman CEO Henry Paulson to head up the Treasury Department, where he would preside over the bank bailouts – much to Goldman's benefit. After leaving the White House, Bolten got a cushy sinecure as the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor at Princeton.

It's an exceptional career, but not an unusual story. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, was vice-chairman at Goldman before helping to orchestrate the deregulation of just the kinds of complex financial instruments that took down the economy. After his stint at Treasury, Rubin landed at Citigroup, where he raked in $128 million over the course of eight years. In 2008, as the financial sector was teetering on the brink of collapse – and just after Citi had written down $24 billion in losses due in large part to, as Fortune put it, “greed, cynicism, and bad judgment” -- Rubin downplayed the mess he'd helped create, saying it was "all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption." He blamed the crash “on just about everyone but the major U.S. financial players.”

The Obama White House is no exception to the rule. Last spring, Politico reported that Rubin, who “watched his reputation as an economic titan shatter after he left the Clinton White House...still wields enormous influence in Barack Obama’s Washington, chatting regularly with a legion of former employees who dominate the ranks of the young administration’s policy team.”

Lewis Alexander went from the Federal Reserve to the Commerce Department and then did a stint at Citi before returning to politics as a counselor at the Treasury Department, and Maura Solomon went from the Office of Thrift Supervision, one of the bank regulators, to Citigroup, where she is presumably better compensated. And so, of course, did Peter Orzsag. Jacob J. Lew, who replaced Orzsag at the Office of Management and Budget (an office he also held under President Clinton), spent his time between those appointments as executive vice president of New York University and then at Citigroup. Gary Gensler, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury who spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, now oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Association.

According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the Securities and Exchange Commission – the primary agency for policing the financial industry – is inundated with former bankers. POGO's database of lobbyists includes, “219 former SEC employees [who] filed 789 statements between 2006 and 2010 announcing their intent to appear before the SEC or communicate with its staff on behalf of private clients.”

"Many former SEC employees leave the agency to join [lobbying] firms that represent clients in the securities industry. Several recent reports by the SEC Inspector General have raised troubling questions about whether the promise of future employment representing Wall Street causes some SEC officials to treat potential employers and their clients with a lighter touch."

Social Costs
Does anyone need to be reminded how the big banks broke the economy and then pocketed billions of tax dollars in bailouts? Have people already forgotten Henry Paulson (Treasury Secretary, 2006-2008; Goldman Sachs, 1974-2006) standing before Congress and demanding $700 billion in nearly oversight-free money to buy up the banks’ “toxic assets”—which were, of course, bad mortgages packaged into securities that were suddenly worthless. The bailouts received bipartisan support, and Obama pressed for the passage of what eventually became TARP, proving the value of those bipartisan campaign donations.

Perhaps you are underwater on your mortgage because of the crash in home values after the popping of the housing bubble, which was created by the insatiable need for profits, for more mortgages to package into securities to sell on the market. Perhaps you’re dealing with Bank of America or another one of the banks that are still unwilling to modify the majority of mortgages, continuing to foreclose on homes and throw families out.

Or perhaps you rent, but are unemployed. Perhaps you have a job but haven’t seen a raise since the crash, or have been pressured to put in more hours. The core problem in the brick-and-mortar economy is a lack of demand, and that drop in demand is a result of the $14 trillion in household wealth lost in the crash that Wall Street’s gamblers precipitated -- from stocks and bonds, real estate values and retirement accounts. The popping of the housing bubble alone and the corresponding drop in home values, according to Dean Baker, creates the loss of some $8 trillion in wealth, or $110,000 per homeowner.

The size of the financial industry alone is worrisome. As Katrina vanden Heuvel pointed out at the Washington Post, “Obama has said that we can't go back to an economy where the banks make 40 percent of all corporate profits. But the big banks are emerging from the crisis more concentrated than ever, and financial sector profits are already up to nearly 30 percent of total corporate profits.” Banking, like trucking, is known as an “intermediary good” -- nothing is produced by the industry – and if any other intermediary good represented around 10 percent of the U.S. economy, people would consider that a major problem.

To create those complex financial instruments, finance has begun to cannibalize the “best and brightest” college graduates--or at least those looking for the fattest paychecks, whether purely out of greed or a need to pay off heavy student loan burdens (often owed to the same banks).

Pat Garofalo at Think Progress noted that “The four biggest banks issue 50 percent of mortgages and 66 percent of credit cards: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup issue one out of every two mortgages and nearly two out of every three credit cards in America.” Not only that, but he also pointed out that the five banks we’ve tracked here are the ones that control 95 percent of the derivatives in the country--the complex financial instruments that investor Warren Buffet called “financial Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Perhaps the most pernicious effect of Wall Street’s influence is yet to come. By watering down or killing off new regulations designed to prevent the next bubble-induced meltdown, they imperil future generations’ prosperity just as they did when they lobbied hard to kill financial regulations in the 1990s--resulting in, to give one example, the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which kept derivatives and credit default swaps unregulated and allowed the banks to keep gambling without oversight.

The banks have simply gotten too powerful; ”too big to fail” has become too big to regulate. Yet, even as they grow, spend on lobbying and campaigns and institute fees, they represent a giant ticking time bomb at the heart of our economy.

It can be difficult to gauge which of the big banks has had the greatest negative impact on society, as so many of the problems were created by the combined practices of the entire industry. Bank of America stands out for its sheer size. It is the country’s biggest bank, controlling 12 percent of the nation’s deposits, and 20 to 25 percent of the mortgage market (and a huge chunk of its mortgage fraud as well). While it continues to face lawsuit after lawsuit for fraudulently selling securities -- from both the government and private companies -- its plummeting stock price is bringing it ever closer to collapse. What’s the endgame if America’s largest bank runs out of money? If ever a bank was too big to fail, it is Bank of America.

Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the American Prospect, wrote of the prospect of the giant going under:

"Worst of all would be to let a large institution like Bank of America just fail. Outside of the hard-core Tea Party right, nobody supports this.

"The second worst policy would be to just keep throwing money at a zombie institution to keep up the pretense that it is solvent. We tried that policy in 2008 and 2009. It helped entrenched bankers keep their jobs and their outsized profits, but a wounded banking system continued to be a lead weight on the rest of the economy."

Bank of America is no doubt the biggest lead weight on the economy right now, and its zombie status keeps everyone wondering what the endgame will be. One of the things that was included in the Dodd-Frank bill was a provision that would allow the FDIC to take failing banks into receivership, seize them, break them up and reorganize them. The question is, will an administration that’s proven unwilling to make any serious changes to the financial industry take that step? Or will it instead bail out BofA yet again -- a step that Kuttner warns could be a political and economic disaster.

Even with all this, it's hard to rank the banks in this category. Citigroup just last weekend had 24 people arrested for criminal trespass in New York City when they attempted to close out their accounts, and is hiking fees while its profits soar. JPMorgan's purchase of the failing Washington Mutual was nearly as toxic as Bank of America's purchase of Countrywide, taking over more fraudulent loans. Goldman Sachs has tentacles in absolutely everything; Wells Fargo has some of the worst predatory lending practices to people of color. It's clear that the social costs of the banking industry as a whole are simply too big to bear.

And the Winner Is...

Ranking of 'Worst' Mega Banks in Political Corruption
	Campaign Contributions	Lobbying	Revolving Door	Negative Social Costs	"Worst" Score
Citigroup	2	1	1	2	18
JP Morgan Chase	3	2	2	3	14
Bank of America	4	3	3	1	13
Goldman Sachs	1	4	5	4	10
Wells Fargo	5	5	4	5	5
A bank gets 5 points for being the 'worst' in a category, 4 for second worst, etc.

Ranking the big banks isn’t an easy task. Sure, it’s easy enough to add up the size of the bailouts and the amount spent on campaign donations, or the number of people who’ve spun through the revolving door. It’s harder to gauge the impact on millions of people as the economy collapsed and continues to sputter. And the story of lobbyists and well-placed former employees isn’t just one of numbers, but of influence and success.

Still, when we looked at all of our research, there was one bank that came in first in two categories, and second in another. That bank is Citigroup. It was the clear winner in lobbying spending with $82,350,000, has the most former politicians, executives and lobbyists spinning through its revolving door, and followed only Goldman Sachs in terms of measurable campaign donations.

It’s the current employer of former Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag and former employer of ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the donor of nearly $17 million to campaigns Republican and Democratic, and the recipient of $45 billion in TARP funds.
Of course, one could make an argument for nearly every bank on this list. Goldman Sachs far outspends the others on campaign donations, and Citi might have won the overall lobbying spending race but has been outspent in the past few years by JPMorgan Chase--by nearly $3 million. And Bank of America’s snowballing legal troubles seem evidence enough of malfeasance.

What is clear, any way you slice it, is that the big banks have far too much influence over our politics, and it has enabled them to gain far too much influence over our entire economy.

We are living with the results: real unemployment in the double digits, falling incomes, skyrocketing debt. What can we do about it? With the banks’ deep connections to both parties in Washington, it has long seemed that reining them in is an uphill battle. Yet Wall Street appears to have over-reached, and we're now seeing the blow-back as tens of thousands of people join the Occupy Movement in cities and towns across the country and across the world. Americans are tired of the reign of the big banks, and they're coming together to do something about it. People are moving their money to credit unions, they're fighting to keep families in their homes and they're taking their anger directly to the Titans of Wall Street. Most importantly, they're building a people-powered movement to hold the banks accountable, and if history is any guide, once united in a cause, the American people usually win.