Hit bankers where it hurts

My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters

By Matt Taibbi - Rolling Stone

October 12, 2011

I've been down to "Occupy Wall Street" twice now, and I love it. The protests building at Liberty Square and spreading over Lower Manhattan are a great thing, the logical answer to the Tea Party and a long-overdue middle finger to the financial elite. The protesters picked the right target and, through their refusal to disband after just one day, the right tactic, showing the public at large that the movement against Wall Street has stamina, resolve and growing popular appeal.

But... there's a but. And for me this is a deeply personal thing, because this issue of how to combat Wall Street corruption has consumed my life for years now, and it's hard for me not to see where Occupy Wall Street could be better and more dangerous. I'm guessing, for instance, that the banks were secretly thrilled in the early going of the protests, sure they'd won round one of the messaging war.

Why? Because after a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.

That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV.

There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.

No matter what, I'll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement's basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on. But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.
2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.
3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can't do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.
4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.
5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company's long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.

To quote the immortal political philosopher Matt Damon from Rounders, "The key to No Limit poker is to put a man to a decision for all his chips." The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they're never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table. If Occupy Wall Street can do that – if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness – it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement. All it has to do is light a match in the right place, and the overwhelming public support for real reform – not later, but right now – will be there in an instant.

The Perfect Storm That Threatens American Democracy

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Posted on October 24, 2010

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.

Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.

Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Here’s the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that’s working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.

Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.

There’s no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can’t find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn’t reach half of the unemployed.

Washington says nothing can be done. There’s no money left.

No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.

Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway — subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.

Congress won’t even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration – which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.

It won’t limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multi-million dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can’t meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)

There’s plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

How to Earn $900,000 an Hour While Unemployment Soars

The top 10 hedge fund honchos each averaged $1.87 billion in 2009 -- wouldn't you like to know their secrets? Here are a few.
By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on October 18, 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week (Oct 14, 2010).

Let's be honest. Wouldn't you like to rake in a cool $900,000 for one hour's work? No? Still have hippie ideals, perhaps? You could work for just 10 minutes and walk off with $150,000. Push yourself to work one entire day and we're talking $7.2 million. Hang in there for a month, and you'll pull in more than the richest athletes make in 10 years -- $256.5 million. And in one year? Well, you'll be earning what the top ten hedge fund honchos each averaged in 2009 -- $1.87 billion. Wouldn't you like to know their secrets? Here are a few:

Step 1: Check your conscience at the door.
You must be able to live with the knowledge that while you were making $900,000 an hour, more than 29 million other Americans had no job at all or were forced into part-time work. Also you'd have to live with the uncomfortable fact that your sector -- high finance -- crashed the economy, leaving eight million Americans jobless in a matter of months.

You're obviously good at math so you'll be able to calculate that it will now take 22.5 million new jobs to bring the economy back to full-employment (an unemployment rate of 5 percent or less). That's the equivalent of creating 630 new corporations the size of Apple Corp. (35,000 employees each). Sadly, you're also a realist, so you know that unemployment is likely to remain at record post-WWII highs for years to come.

Feeling guilty? Don't. Remind everyone again and again that hedge funds like yours didn't get bailed out. You're not too big to fail. You just figured out how to be better at investing than anyone else. You're what capitalism is supposed to reward. You earned your $900,000 an hour fair and square! Suppress all your doubts and just keep telling yourself -- and everyone else -- that you have nothing to do with rising poverty or the fact that nearly 50 million people can't afford health care. You're the solution, not the problem. Conscience be damned!

Step 2: Remember: None of this is your fault!
Yes, a few tiresome critics will keep pointing the finger at you, saying that the financial sector crashed the economy. Ignore them and put the blame where it belongs - somewhere else. When in doubt, seek guidance from the pros on Wall Street. They know exactly who to blame:

• The few bad apples who gave out mortgages like candy
• The greedy Americans who bought homes they couldn't afford (they should have ignored the bankers who told them they could!)
• The politicians who pushed for risky loans for "low-income" buyers (subtext: favoritism for minorities.)
• The Fed, which kept interest rates too low for too long, inflating the bubble
• And, most importantly, American consumers who "lived beyond their means," running up too much debt. (Those people, not you, really need to tighten their belts!)

Assert with the utmost confidence that it's Wall Street billionaires who make our system the envy of the world, so help me god.

Step 3: Proclaim that you are the solution:
It's not enough to dodge the blame. You've got to convince academics and journalists to anoint you as the savior. You see, it's you and your fellow high finance moguls who will save us from ever having to endure a crisis like this again. Fortunately for you, they've already bought the story. For example, in More Money than God, Sebastian Mallaby writes:

How can governments promote small-enough-to fail institutions that manage risk well? This is the key question about the future of finance; and one part of the answer is hiding in plain sight. Governments must encourage hedge funds....The chief policy prescription can be boiled down to two words: Don't regulate." (p 380-81)

Imagine that! Top hedge fund managers who earn $900,000 an hour are the answer to too-big-to-fail bailouts, and you don't even need government regulations to keep them honest! People who suggest that Wall Street billionaires are essentially card counters in a Las Vegas casino? They're just envious. People who question whether the entire casino has any redeeming social or economic value at all? They're just stupid. (For my envious and stupid account, see The Looting of America.)

Step 4: Tell people, "Sure, go ahead and raise taxes on the super-rich!" (wink, wink): 
Because of Wall Street billionaires our income distribution is the most extreme since 1929. By some estimates it's even worse, with the top 1 percent hoarding nearly 50 percent of our nation's wealth. And yet, a recent academic survey suggests that most Americans have no idea things are so skewed. The vast majority actually said they would prefer a wealth distribution more like Sweden's. Heaven forbid!

So -- why on earth would someone like Warren Buffett be offering to pay more taxes? Well, for one thing, there are worse things than higher income tax rates. What you want to avoid at all cost is any reform that might reduce financial industry profits -- like controls on derivatives and financial transaction fees.

As for raising taxes: Just because you say you're willing to pay them doesn't mean you'll actually ever have to. Everyone knows that the moment anyone actually tries to tax the super-rich, a Greek chorus of greed will chant: "Investor confidence will crash! Small businesses will suffer! Jobs will crumble! The recovery will stall!"

So, once you get to be a billionaire, join the cavalcade of gurus who insist they should at least pay the same tax rates as their secretaries. And if those weak-kneed politicians simply refuse to raise your taxes, well, what's a billionaire to do?

Step 5: Count on America's admiration:
Americans may say they want wealth to be distributed much more evenly. But they also have a perpetual love affair with the super-rich. Any effort to rein in billionaires grates against one of our most fundamental values: the right to make as much money as we can, however we can, whenever we can. The very existence of Wall Street billionaires opens up the possibility that we ourselves will become super rich someday.

Fortunately for Wall Street billionaires, Americans tend to view even modest proposals to redistribute wealth as cataclysmic. (Remember Joe the Plumber?) When I propose that maybe we would be better off without Wall Street billionaires, even non-plumbers tell me: "Oh, no. We don't want to live in a socialist society where incomes are flat. Everyone would lose their motivation. And we'd be stuck with only one flavor of ice cream at our dilapidated collectivist food co-op!" In our political culture, there seem to be no mental resting points between North Korean communism and an economy that lets Wall Street billionaires run wild.

However, every once in a while we get pissed off. In 1913 we passed a constitutional amendment to legalize income taxes on plutocrats. From the 1930s to the 1970s we enacted tax rates on the super-rich that hovered between 70 and 90 percent. And long before that Andrew Jackson vetoed the National Bank because, as he said, "the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes." The rigged Bank laws, he argued, "make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. ()

We're still complaining. We get upset at government because it seems to favor the super-rich. Yet in the end we protect our Wall Street billionaires by attacking regulations and taxes on the wealthy.

Step 6: Thank the lord for sex, drugs and rock'n roll: 
Reagan and company may have hated the 1960s youth rebellion, but they sure glommed on to a key feature of it: People wanted to be liberated from society's constraints and from a government that was betraying our nation's ideals. Through either insight or dumb luck, the Reagan revolution successfully melded the idea of accumulating wealth with the idea of gaining freedom from everyone and everything -- the ultimate form of "doing your own thing." (My surfer friend called it "takeoff velocity.")

Few of us who came out of the 1960s trusted government. After all, it had waged an unjust and un-winnable war in Vietnam. Public figures seemed to lie to us on a regular basis -- from Mai Lai to Watergate. You want that kind of government running the economy too?

"Do your own thing" economics also caught on. Free love and free markets may have had a lot in common. Milton Friedman (who also opposed criminalization of drugs) led the way among American economists, arguing that government interference always distorts free markets. Only when markets are left entirely alone can they operate efficiently and create prosperity for all. Friedman's free market philosophy won over the academic and policy establishment. They saw the rise of Wall Street billionaires as a sign of our nation's economic health and prosperity. It wasn't just that their vast wealth might trickle down to the rest of us. It was that the accumulation of such wealth in the first place signaled a strong underlying economy.

According to the free market economists, under our system you can't possibly earn $900,000 an hour unless you produce $900,000 worth of something. So financial industry billionaires must, by definition, have the knowledge, skills, and experience to create that enormous value. Because nobody would cough up that sum of money unless they got equivalent value in return.

Therein may lie the biggest secret of all: Wall Street moguls are confident that Americans will always believe that that the big boys are really worth their money.

But for how long? Will our millions of unemployed workers eventually get fed up? Will the middle class finally get angry at the plutocrats who stole their dreams? Or will our anger continue to focus on government regulations, social spending and taxes instead of on our financial plutocrats? Eventually we'll have to choose or the choice will be made for us: Do we want a $900,000 an hour Valhalla for the few? Or a prosperous America for the rest of us?

Executive Excess

by Jim Hightower - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 by Creators Syndicate

Look out, they're angry. Foaming-at-the-mouth angry. And they're lashing out, saying they won't take it anymore. As one of their leaders angrily cried, "It's a war." Indeed — they're on the move to take their country back.

Forget the tea party rowdies, this is the champagne party! More precisely, it's the Dom Perignon-$1,000-a-bottle-champagne-party, propelled by — get this — billionaire's rage.

Yes, some of the richest, most pampered people on the planet — people who literally wallow in luxury every day, with never a concern about losing a job, a home or health care, or getting their kids into college — these people are wailing in self-pity. They are Wall Street hedge-fund operators, which essentially means they are high-flying financial flimflammers. What has stoked them into an elitist fury is a Barack Obama proposal to close off a ridiculous tax loophole that has let them pay only 15 percent of their lavish income in taxes, rather than the 35 percent rate that us commoners pay.

One of the richest of the ragers, Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, sees Obama's proposal as an outrageous intrusion into the suites of the elite, comparing it to "when Hitler invaded Poland." This over-the-top-tantrum comes from a multibillionaire — a guy who spent $3 million in 2007 just to throw himself a birthday party! Come on, Steve, you're filthy rich. Stop hyperventilating, and pay your taxes!

Pathetically, the real root of this sad Hedge Fund Rebellion is a feeling by these powerful, super-privileged megalomaniacs that they are being picked on. One even whined that asking hedge-funders to pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else amounts to the "persecution of the minority."

Good grief, man, get a grip! Next thing you know, these doofuses will hire Glenn Beck to host a weepy telethon to "Save the Billionaires Tax Loophole."

But it's not enough that the wealthy elite want to exempt their excessive, ill-gotten income from any fair contribution to the public good — they also want to slash our incomes.

Many of America's top-paid CEOs are the very ones who're ruthlessly axing America's middle-class jobs, and they are reaping gains from our pains.

A new survey finds that corporate chieftains who inflict economic pain on the company's workers receive more financial gain for themselves. The Institute for Policy Studies examined the layoff-payoff records of America's 500 largest corporations during the past couple of years. IPS researchers report that the 50 CEOs who fired the most rank-and-file employees averaged 42 percent higher pay than their peers, averaging an extra $3.5 million each.

One of the champions in this contest of convoluted corporate compensation was Mark Hurd. As chief executive of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, Hurd dumped 6,400 workers in 2009 — a year in which he pocketed a paycheck of $24.2 million. Earlier this year, Hurd was forced to resign from HP after an internal investigation found that he falsified some expense reports. No need to weep for Mark, though — he was comfortably compensated for this bad turn of fortune, receiving a severance package reportedly worth $40 million.

Being bad, you see, can be awfully good for a CEO's bottom line. For example, IPS documented one category of badness-to-goodness that is especially infuriating. Five of the 50 leading pink-slip-issuers last year were also bailout barons. Among them was Kenneth Chenault, honcho of American Express, which got $3.4 billion from us taxpayers in 2008 to save it from financial ruin. In gratitude, Chenault subsequently offed 4,000 employees, then helped himself to a paycheck of nearly $17 million, including a $5 million cash bonus.

To see the full IPS report, titled "Executive Excess 2010," and to help stop the excess, go to www.ips-dc.org.