Obama and Romney share bed with a monster

How’d you like your own private court, tilted in your favor, where you could take your complaints against the government?

Pretty sweet deal, huh?

That’s exactly what a bunch of corporate lobbyists are setting up in secret right now, under the guise of negotiating a massive new trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And this slimy secret deal is being pushed by the Obama administration.

It’s a complete betrayal by President Obama, who as a candidate campaigned strongly against previous secret trade agreements, like NAFTA, that cripple government’s ability to enforce their  own worker safety, environmental, public health or financial regulation. In an effort to distinguish himself from his primary opponent, now Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the president said: “Ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America…Well, I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America — and I never have.”

As a candidate in 2008, President Obama also said: “We can’t keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers’ interests...”

Since he became president, he’s signed trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. But the TPP, which includes along with the U.S, Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam, and Malaysia, is the first trade deal created solely on President Obama’s watch. And it’s being concocted just like previous trade negotiations: with the corporate lobbyists firmly on the inside and the rest of us, as well as our elected representatives, shut completely out.

If you’re waiting for the Republicans to raise a stink, don’t hold your breath.

Mitt Romney has already said the Trans-Pacific agreement should be pushed through as quickly as possible. The Republican presidential candidate’s support for TPP is also a foul betrayal  – of all the free market principles he supposedly holds so dear.

Last week, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch ripped the cloak of secrecy that surrounds the TPP when it got hold of a document that detailed the secret court and leaked it.

I wrote about the dangers of the TPP back in April, calling it a “free trade Frankenstein,” a monster that in fact is not free and has nothing to do with trade. It should be called a “corporate bill of rights” that grants big business all kinds of special privileges to stomp on the rights enjoyed by the rest of us.

Lori Wallach, Global Trade Watch’s executive director, compared the TPP to another monster, one that also flourishes in the dark.

Wallach told Democracy Now that “these agreement are a little bit like Dracula. You drag them in the sunshine, and they do not fare well. But all of us, and also across all of the countries involved, there are citizen movements that are basically saying, `This is not in our name. We don’t need global enforceable corporate rights. We need more democracy. We need more accountability.’ ”

Wallach pointed out that under similar provisions in NAFTA, special “trade courts” have forced governments have paid out $350 million to corporations which claimed to have been wronged by a variety of zoning laws, bans on toxic materials and logging regulations.

Shame on President Obama for reversing himself and hatching this monster in the dark. Shame on Governor Romney for slithering into bed with it so cozily as if it was a beauty queen he couldn’t resist.

The time to stop it is now.

The way these trade deals work is that the administration jams it through Congress with no debate allowed on its various provisions, only an up or down vote.

Does this sound anything like democracy?

Ironically, the TPP “negotiations” resume the 4th of July weekend at the Hilton Bayfront in San Diego.

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and suggest that the “negotiators” should do their patriotic duty and deliver the wretched mess where it belongs – to the nearest toxic waste dump.

If you’re elsewhere, let your congressional representative know you won’t be fooled by “free trade” anymore, and neither should they.

We know a monster when we see one.

 

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / TPP - 06/16/2012

King of the Hill

Though we need to wait until November to find out who the next president will be, we already know who the king is.

That would be JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who got the regal treatment from the Senate Finance Committee this week when he was called to testify about the disastrous trades that has cost his firm more than $3 billion so far and reduced the firm's market value by $27 billion.

You know, the trades that Dimon originally dismissed as a “tempest in a teapot.”

Which gives you some idea of the teapots that President Obama’s favorite banker can afford. President Obama has particularly close ties to the bank: JPMorgan’s PAC was one of the top donors to his 2008 campaign, offering more than $800,000, and the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, was a top executive there.

Dimon is equally popular on Capitol Hill. Instead of a grilling him about his failure to take action for months after questions were raised about the strategy surrounding the failed trades, most of the senators treaded lightly.

Instead of scrutinizing the foreclosure fraud and failure that led to JPMorgan’s $5.3 billion share of a $26 billion settlement with state attorneys generals, several senators took the opportunity to offer Dimon a platform to continue his campaign against regulation of Wall Street, including modest reforms like the Volcker rule which many say could have prevented the JPMorgan loss – had it been in place.

For his part, Dimon denied that he knew anything, took some vague responsibility and minimized the losses as an isolated event.

The route to traditional royalty is through birth or marriage. Dimon won his political crown through another time-honored path – he bought it. Most of the senators he faced had benefited from the generosity of his bank’s campaign contributions. As the Nation’s George Zornick reported, the senators had received more than $522,000 from JPMorgan, about evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

The staff of the Finance Committee and JPMorgan are connected through a web of revolving door contacts. The banking committee’s staff director is a former JPMorgan lobbyist, Dwight Fettig. One of the banks’ top lobbyists is a former staffer for banking committee member Sen. Chuck Schumer, while three of its outside lobbyists used to work for the committee or one of its members.

J.P. Morgan has pummeled Congress and regulators with more than $7.6 million worth of lobbying in an effort to get banking rules written to favor the bank.

The king’s appearance before his subjects on the Senate Finance Committee was a powerful demonstration, for those who still need it, of just how little of the spirit and the practice of real democracy remains in an institution that is supposed to embody it.

If our representatives were truly beholden to us, rather than to Dimon and others with large supplies of cash to dole out, his testimony would have had a starkly different tone.

He has a lot to answer for. So do those who let him off so easy.

And it’s not just Dimon that the senators have failed to oversee. While bankers’ profits are back, the banking system is still broke.

If those senators were serving us, rather than serving as lapdogs to bankers, Dimon and other Wall Street monarchs might be looking at prison cells, not red carpets.

 

Martin Column / Too Big To Fail / Uncategorized - 06/14/2012

What's the `worst CEO' worth?

Why did the nation’s largest pension fund take a strong stance against Citibank’s excessive CEO compensation, but then turn around and vote for Bank of America’s lesser, but still outrageous, pay plan?

The California pension fund, CalPERS, was among the 92 percent of shareholders who went along with Bank of America in an advisory vote on CEO compensation earlier this week. In Wednesday’s vote, CalPERs did vote for measures that would have required disclosure on B of A’s lobbying activities as well an independent review of the bank’s foreclosure actions.

While But Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan faced noisy protests and pointed questions at the bank’s annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C,  both of those initiatives, like say on pay, were defeated.

In their nonbinding “say on pay” vote, Bank of America shareholders approved a $7 million 2011 pay package for Moynihan. Last month, 55 percent of Citibank’s shareholders, including CalPERS, voted against a 15 percent pay hike for their CEO, Vikram Pandit, who had been getting along on $1 a year in 2009 and 2010 while Citibank floundered.

CalPERS’ position this week is strangely at odds with its previous positions.

In the past, CalPERS has been has been particularly tough on Bank of America. In 2010, it cast an unusual vote against all of the bank’s directors, including then-CEO Ken Lewis.

Asked for comment on Wednesday’s Bank of America CalPERS vote, a spokesperson referred me to the pension board’s 79-page governing principles, specifically the provisions covering executive compensation. CalPERS declined to answer any questions about why the pension fund voted for Moynihan’s compensation fund, but against Citibank’s.

True, Moynihan’s pay is less ($7 million) than Pandit’s ($15 million), but that doesn’t make either of them acceptable, much less understandable, by anything but the tortured logic of the too big to fail, government-coddled banks.

To approve Moynihan’s pay, shareholders had to overlook mountains of evidence that the bank is on the wrong track. Back in October, the bank retreated on a scheme to soak its customers for a $5 a month fee on debit cards after President Obama blasted it. The bank, which Bloomberg News estimates received more than $1.5 billion in federal bailout aid, has repeatedly been the target of criticism for underperforming in voluntary government loan modification programs. Earlier this year, B of A was among the big banks that settled foreclosure fraud charges with the feds and states attorney general. Though it was touted as $25 billion settlement, it actually only cost the banks $5 billion. But the bank fraud it highlighted was real.

Richard Eskow of Campaign For America’s Future outlined Moynihan’s dark career trajectory, from B of A general counsel to head of its retail division to CEO, while the bank completed its disastrous $2.5 billion acquisition of slimy subprime lending king Countrywide. When Moynihan joined senior management the bank’s stock traded around $52 a share. Today it trades around $7 or $8 a share.

Tallying the eventual costs of the Countrywide acquisition, Eskow includes a massive $8.4 billion settlement with states over illegal behavior, $600 million to settle a class action suit,  $335 million to settle a discrimination suit and $50 to $55 million for its part of lawsuits against Countrywide’s former CEO.

One bank analyst, Michael Mayo, recently ranked the worst CEOs. Moynihan was at the top of the list (with Citibank’s Pandit not far behind). Mayo cited the stock slide along with the debit card fee debacle and the bank’s failure to stem its foreclosure fraud and mortgage servicing problems.

Eskow hits the nail on the head when he asks: By what standard does Moynihan still have a job, let alone a multimillion-dollar salary?

And by what standard does he merit a vote of confidence by CalPERS, which less than a month earlier had taken a strong stand against excessive pay for another failed bank executive, Pandit?

Especially after the pension fund’s chief investment fund officer, Joe Dear, vowed after the Citibank vote to get even more activist. “Excessive CEO pay is not in the interest of the shareowners and not in the interest of companies,” Dear told CNNMoney.

CalPERS has long been an advocate for improved corporate governance, but its credibility has sagged after it suffered staggering losses in the financial collapse and was caught in its own sleazy “pay to play” scandal.

CalPERS’ Bank of America’s vote leaves unanswered questions about the pension fund’s claims to increased activism. Did CalPERS single out Citibank because that was the only too-big-to-fail bank to fail its latest government stress test, as U.S News and World Report suggested?

Or could the vote have something to do with the confidential settlement last November of a lawsuit CalPERS and 15 other institutional investors filed against Bank of America? Could CalPERS officials have agreed to back off their previous hard line against the Bank of America board as part of a secret deal the public will never see?

Of course, we don’t know details – the settlement is sealed.

Was Citibank a publicity-grabbing one-off, or did the pension fund give Bank of America a bye? We’ll have to wait and see just exactly what CalPERS means by activism when it comes to challenging the pampered, powerful titans of the nation’s too big to fail banks.

For now, all we can do is paraphrase the classic film portraying of the lack of accountability of corrupt power, `Chinatown’:

“Forget it Jake, it’s Wall Street.”

 

 

 

 

Bank of America (BoA) / CalPERS / Citibank / Executive Pay / Martin Column - 05/11/2012

`Bloodbath' in Taxbreakistan

Welcome to Taxbreakistan, where the same guys who profited from the financial crisis have launched a treacherous two-fisted propaganda campaign: attacking the benefits of the increasingly fragile middle class while protecting the gains the wealthiest accumulated from the bubble economy and the bailout.

The propaganda war is couched in terms of paternal sobriety and facing up to financial realities, making tough choices and sharing sacrifices.

According to the propaganda, the only thing preventing the anemic economy from taking off is that the wealthiest Americans who have an ever-increasing share of the nation’s wealth don’t have enough money yet. Aside from the wealthy not having their permanent tax cuts, the main impediment to the economic recovery, according to the propaganda, is continuing to pay unemployment checks to those out of work.

What a load of twaddle.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and right-wing think tanks are leading the propaganda campaign, one of the leading bomb throwers in this war is former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, who President Obama appointed to co-chair a commission to examine options to reduce the federal deficit. A fierce advocate of budget cutting, Simpson, a Republican, said recently that he couldn’t wait for the `bloodbath’ that will ensue when Republicans take a meat cleaver to the federal budget in exchange for raising the federal debt limit.

You may recall Simpson’s earlier colorful quote, in which he compared Social Security to a “milk cow with 310 million teats.”

A couple of weeks ago, Simpson threw down the gauntlet in a draft report he wrote with his co-chair Erskine Bowles, a former Democratic Party honcho and hedge fund partner. They proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare and a host of other sweeteners long sought by big business, such as caps on medical malpractice verdicts, that have little to do with deficit reduction but everything to do with a corporate political agenda. The full commission’s report could be released this week.

Meanwhile, Congress jockeys over how to deliver a sloppy wet kiss to the nation’s wealthiest in the guise of continuing their Bush era tax cuts, supposedly as a means to stimulate the economy, even though the tax cuts themselves add $700 billion to the deficit. While President Obama expresses opposition to extending the tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year, the president hasn’t been much of a force in the propaganda war over our economic future.

For their part, the Republicans have dug in their heels on behalf of the nation’s gajillionaires.

The whole propaganda campaign is based on the fraudulent notion that tax cuts for the rich help the economy. That’s not how they started out, before the second George Bush was elected president. He intended them as a way to “starve the beast” – giving back the government surplus that had built up during the Clinton era boom as a way to shrink government. His advisers argued that if the government kept that money it was likely to spend it.

Only later, as the economy began to soften, did Bush add the economic stimulus argument. But the evidence that the tax cuts did anything to boost the economy has always been slim at best. Deficit hawks like Simpson and Bowles are trying to jack up the public’s fear about the deficit in a slow-motion version of the fear-mongering that preceded the no-questions asked bank bailout of 2008, and subsequent highly secretive Federal Reserve money giveaway to the nation’s big banks. We shouldn’t fall for it.

A coalition of progressive-leaning nonprofits have offered an alternative, which favors stimulating the economy first, then cutting the deficit. You can check it out here.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 11/30/2010