Are the barons of high finance ever called to account for their avarice, or for the billions squandered by their schemes?
I own a San Francisco real estate firm with more than two hundred million in assets. But had I made dumb choices that destroyed my equity in my properties, I would have lost them or gone bankrupt. The financial elite, it seems, plays by a different set of rules. And that's what has people shaking their heads today.
Three years after Wall Street collapsed in a greed fueled conflagration, people from all classes, all ethnicities, and all generations are camped out at Liberty Square in New York City to protest the continued fleecing of America by big banks and corporate chieftains.
Other demonstrations built on the same highly-organized model have sprung up in 70 other American cities, including San Francisco, Portland, Memphis, Louisville, Miami, Sacramento and Boston.
The protesters bill themselves as the "Other 99 percent," in contrast to the 1 percent of Americans who account for 25 percent of all income earned in the United States and 40 percent of the country's wealth.
Yesterday, I was able to hear the protest from my office at the Merchants Exchange, just down California Street from the Bank of America building, where people across the socioeconomic, ethnic, occupational and ideological spectrum had gathered in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York.
They are protesting a culture which concentrates money and power in the hands of a tiny elite, all while allowing corporate executives of public companies to achieve monumental pay packages without investing a dime of their own money.
I recently talked to the 45-year-old retired CFO of a famous Silicon Valley company who justified his $250 million stock package by saying that he had worked six days a week for five years. I thought of my father, who worked six- and seven-day weeks for 40 years as a deliveryman for Berkeley Farms and Dreyer's Ice Cream.
The astonishing thing is that you don't even have to succeed at the upper echelons of corporate management to "earn" dramatic cash windfalls. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported on the return of the "golden goodbye," outsized severance packages for failed corporate executives.
Want to make a cool $10 million? Get fired! For a failed 11-month run at the top of Hewlett Packard, Léo Apotheker last week took home $13.2 million in severance (on top of his $10 million signing bonus). Still, it's not as good as former Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O'Neal's $161.5 million parting package in 2007, the year the firm's net losses totaled $7.8 billion. $161.5 million. That's 3,244 times the median annual household income in the United States.
Who knew that getting fired could be so lucrative?
Business leaders, portrayed as omnipotent gurus, are usually quick to blame social ills on a recalcitrant government bureaucracy and a self-dealing political class. The myth of the meritocracy of financial genius is perpetuated by horserace coverage of wealth, such as the Forbes 400 list.
Here the accumulation of money is more than lauded; it is mythologized. Success has become so equated with money that critical professions such as teaching, journalism, medicine, public health and government service, which require a spirit of sacrifice, are made to seem less important than pure capitalistic endeavors.
It is a wonder that this paradigm remains intact after the humiliating corporate downfalls of 2008, but here we are again, listening to yet another field of Republican presidential candidates demagoguing onstage about the evils of government and the wholesome judgment of corporate "job creators."
Have we forgotten the catastrophic banking losses that drove the world economy to the brink of ruin? Do we fail to see the irony in disgraced former Merrill Lynch chairman John Thain being interviewed once again by an obsequious Maria Bartiromo on CNBC? Are we consciously averting our eyes from the continued housing crisis, where underwater homes and hopeless "For Sale" signs dot the landscape?
Make no mistake; little has been done since the 2008 financial firebombing of America to change the underlying fundamentals of an economy rent asunder. Americans who pinned their hopes on an artificially bullish stock market to repair the damage to their retirement funds are now plummeting back to earth. The country is wracked by staggering unemployment and more than one in four American homes is deeply underwater.
But this is only a problem for the bottom 99 percent of the country. If you're a high-ranking corporate executive of a failing company, you might get fired, but you can still look forward to a severance package in the tens of millions.
It would do us well to remember the rebukes to business elites delivered by two great Democratic Presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. When he assumed the presidency in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt condemned the sordid results of capitalism without values:
The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure and have abdicated... they have no vision and where there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Thirty years later, President John F. Kennedy slammed the country's steel barons who violated a public agreement not to raise prices:
The American people will find it hard as I do to accept a situation where a tiny handful of steel executives -- whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility -- can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.
Unlike the breathless national media coverage of the incipient Tea Party protests in 2009, the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters in New York and across the country have so far been relegated to sidebar status. But that shouldn't diminish the importance of their cause.
In the wake of a continued corporate sycophancy from the country's hard right, it is encouraging to see an organized counter movement brave enough to address the problem of American inequality and pragmatic enough to include all those who suffer as a result -- the other 99 percent.
Robert Kuttner: Wall Street: From Protest to Politics
Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for American Revolution
Occupy Wall Street | The New York Observer
Wall Street protesters target NY cops next - TODAY News - TODAY ...
Ocupy Wall Street (AnonOps Communications) | News, Video and ...
Occupy Wall Street! - Adbusters
15 Facts About U.S. Income Inequality That Everyone Should Know ...
A small business owner is more likely to invest his or her own money into his or her company, than a CEO is to invest money into the public company he or she runs.
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Tax the rich and corporations
End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending
Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all
End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests
Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation
Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages
Get money out of politics
The government, dominated by elite economic interests, is going in the opposite direction from what the people want. The American people’s agenda is our agenda. For more see: The American People Could Rule Better than the Political and Economic Elites.
The broad agenda for Stop the Machine: Create a New World is to end corporatism and militarism and shift power to the people, so necessities can be met. In addition to stopping the machine we also want to show the “new world†we want to see. The seven issues above are part of our agenda, each of these issues are discussed below, primarily in relation to showing that according to polls, large majorities of Americans support each issue and in many cases have done so for years.
....................CAN U COME....AND......BRING A FRIEND................................
Oct 6th Wash DC Freedom field: http://october2011.org/standwiththemajority
Why? Because, as an agency staff study recently found, delaying entry of generic drugs costs consumers billions of dollars a year, and one method in particular – pay-for-deÂlay patent litigation settlementÂs – costs consumers approximatÂely $3.5 billion per year.
but of consumer choice. By using drug approval and Hatch-WaxmÂan Act processes to keep generic alternativÂes off market or delay their entry, companies not only hurt competitioÂn, but deny consumers right to choose cheaper alternativÂe form of medicationÂ. In addition, these anticompetÂitive “sweethearÂt†deals in which payment is made to the generic competitor keep the generic drug off the market, on average, 17 months longer than deals that don’t include such a payment. ConsiderinÂg that generic entry can reduce price of a branded drug by up to 90 percent, it’s easy to understand why branded firms are willing to pay generics not to come to market – and then share their illegally obtained monopoly revenues.â€
, tag along awhile you maybe surprised.MR
The times they are a changin'...
Warning-your charities will be the next scam to fall.
Like you we want to prosper and like you we want to have a future and like you we want to participate in the economy as consumers, business owners with a sense of security.
Unlike you we are not sitting on trillions of dollars that you could, if you cared about Americans, put those millions of people back into the workforce and back into a economy with a future.
Please reinvest into the country that gave you so much or face the country's disrespect and criminal accusations by your victims.
Thanks to an extraordinÂary investigatÂive effort by a Senate subcommittÂee that unilateralÂly decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executivesÂ, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrappÂed and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutorÂs, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
The SHORT LIST as to who should be wearing an orange jump suit soon:
Lloyd Blankfien, Jaime Dimon, Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Immelt, Geightner, Bernanke..Âand the 4 Supreme Court judges that voted for Campaign Finance by the CorporatioÂns thats just for startersâ€
The Corporate CEO's and Corporate culture don't have to go out and campaign, they don't go out to meet Americans or shake their hands, they don't see the American people so we are nothing to them but a means to an end.
"We the people" have become less than human to the Corporate culture because they have no occasion to see us, interact with us, or come the realization that is "we the people" who are the 99% percent who Occupy This Country, not just Occupy Wall Street.
Until we are humanized and until Corporations open their eyes to the realization that the American people aren't going to sell our country out so that Corporations can slap a banner over our flag and Constitution just like we were a sports arena.
Get out of our politics, get out of our government, get out of our elections and create some jobs why don't you Corporate America???
Ended the Vietnam War.
Little People.
Changed America.
Think about this as a solution to our economic ills.
Big Banks have no problem selling my mortgage at a discount to a hedge fund. But they wont sell it at that same discount to me. Read my post (link below).
Since Mark to Market (M2M) was revised not repealed in the Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 it is still alive and well. How about allowing homeowners the ability to refinance at M2M value and create a trillion dollar tax free stimulus for the American Homeowner.
Please read and think about this solution and pass it on. Everyone wins under this policy proposal.
http://theaccidentalhumanist.blogspot.com/2011/09/simple-fix-to-our-economic-woes.html
End the home mortgage-interest deduction.
There are a lot of societies in the world, and a uniform truth is that in the societies with LOTS of rich people and corporations, the standard of living is better for everyone. There are also plenty of societies with NO rich people or corporations. Go take a look at one some time. The nearest one is 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
Nice 'either or' proposition, so the current grossly inadequate concentration of wealth is acceptable to you but is NOT acceptable to us.