Warren, Eliz SEN

---see WARREN 2 2/19 prez candlcv 80/94%oddly not that much content here 818 capthttp://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/elizabeth-warren

climate grist

see brown

=<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">=</h4><div>proto-Occupy? [KA also discounts importance of Koch TP?
</div><div><a href="https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses">
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</div><div><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html</a>
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</div><div><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/</a></div><div>
</div><div>laffer w/ hart and later dems cans
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</div><div>...</div><div>Although very few people I knew

voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and

otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the

1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the

rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken

decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent

college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using

the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to

describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth

individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever,

as long as it didn’t involve big new social programs that affluent

people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept

everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of

ideological consistency.When

Gary Hart ran a second time for president, in 1988, one of his

tax-policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s inventor of supply-side

economics. When Jerry Brown ran for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he

too sought Laffer’s help, to devise some kind of tax scheme “that was

clear and easy to articulate,” and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill

Clinton. (He’s now a Trump adviser.) The Democratic Leadership Council,

co-founded by Clinton in 1985, became a think-tankish anchor for

Democrats who didn’t disagree with Republicans that pretty much the only acceptable new solutions to any social problem were market based.<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/#Correx">*</a></div><div>
</div><div>For the remainder of the

century, no candidate from the Democratic left became a plausible

finalist for the nomination. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination,

his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and

Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically

centrist party. There was no organized, viable national economic left

in the vicinity of serious power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and

Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had

the unfortunate effect of making almost any left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.Not

everybody in the 1990s was sanguine about the emerging future, or as

oblivious as I still was to the multi-faceted unfairness that had been

built into the economy, or as complacent as I was about the millions of

Americans losing out in the go-go globalizing digitizing frenzy. Around

this time, a middle-aged law-school professor and bankruptcy expert,

until recently a registered Republican who’d been affiliated in the late

1970s with the conservatives’ hugely influential new Law and Economics

movement, began to see the light. Elizabeth Warren has said that she

realized only in the ’90s that “starting in the ’80s, the cops were

taken off the beat” in financial services. “I was with the GOP for a

while,” she has said, “because I really thought that it was a party that

was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to

markets. I feel like the GOP just left that. They moved to a party that

said, No, it’s not about a level playing field. And they really

stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial

institutions are just hammering middle-class American families.”</div><div>I’m betting that at the end of 1999, Warren didn’t feel complete

solidarity with all the thousands of demonstrators in Seattle outside

the biannual World Trade Organization meeting. Their grievances were

various—from AFL-CIO folks pissed off about U.S. companies manufacturing

more and more things overseas to anarchists smashing store windows and

otherwise acting out their hatred for the System. I know I rolled my

eyes at the Gen-X kids in Seattle chaining themselves together and

getting off on tear gas; at their lack of a feasible agenda or nuance or

even coherence; and at the belief of so many of them in a shadowy,

multi-tentacled conspiracy of the omnipotent elite to tyrannize the

little people and subvert democracy. It took me a few more years to

realize that their caricature of the new economic paradigm was closer to

right than wrong. What that new paradigm ultimately brought us, of

course, is Donald Trump....</div><div>
</div>The obeisance of the rich right

and their consiglieri to Trump for the past four years has exposed more

nakedly than ever their compact—everything about money, anything for

money—and the events of 2020 pushed that along to an even more hideous

crescendo. In early spring, when COVID-19 had killed only dozens of

Americans, Stuart Stevens, a strategist for the four previous Republican

presidential nominees, wrote that “those

of us in the Republican Party

built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response

to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic

fantasies now dear to the Republican Party … Government is bad.

Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is

suspect.”<p id="injected-recirculation-link-7" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_rootv6EBD" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 8" data-gtm-vis-first-on-screen-31117857_217="517452" data-gtm-vis-total-visible-time-31117857_217="100" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-31117857_217="1"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/decline-gop/614983/">Norm Ornstein: I’ve witnessed the decline of the Republican Party</a>Entirely

apart from this administration’s unique incompetence and Orwellian

denial of facts, while its handling of the pandemic may wind up as a political

failure for them, every piece of the crises’ exacerbation came directly

out of the right’s playbook of the past four decades. Stevens could

have also listed Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad, Liberty equals selfishness, and Entitled to our own facts.</div>=<div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/democratic-primary-candidates-targeted-by-sustained-and-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-report/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/democratic-primary-candidates-targeted-by-sustained-and-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-report/</a></div><div>
</div><div>Wednesday, POLITICO <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/20/2020-candidates-social-media-attack-1176018" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a> that several politicians floated as challengers to President Donald Trump are being targeted by a “sustained and ongoing” propaganda campaign on social media designed to divide the Democratic Party — possibly of foreign origin.<div class="p1_9" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The most aggressively targeted figures are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), all of whom are running for president in 2020, as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), who is currently <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/19/politics/beto-orourke-2020-president-or-senate/index.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">deciding</a> between running for president and a second campaign for Senate. All of them are being targeted on Twitter and other platforms, with the apparent goal of damaging their reputations before the primary can begin:<div class="p2_9" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.<div class="p3_9" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.<div class="p4_9" style="font-style: italic; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote>According to information analyzed by Guardians.ai on behalf of POLITICO, much of the activity around these candidates on Twitter is being driven by 200 accounts, both organic and likely automated — during a recent 30 day period, these accounts were responsible for 2 to 15 percent of all mentions of these four politicians on the site.<div class="p5_9" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The most targeted politician seems to have been Harris, who is currently the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/politics/kamala-harris-democratic-frontrunner/index.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">tentative frontrunner</a> in polls of declared candidates. She has been subject to a barrage of sexist attacks on her youthful relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.  If this activity is part of a disinformation campaign by foreign state actors, it would not be the first time. There is strong evidence that Russia <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html" style="text-align: center; font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" transition="transition" color="color" s="s" ease="ease" cursor="cursor" pointer="pointer">created several of the accounts</a> in 2016 that were responsible for spreading rhetoric meant to divide supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who had very similar platforms but ended up in a toxic primary battle that left Clinton wounded ahead of the general election. Moreover, there is a consensus that the stolen Democratic emails distributed through WikiLeaks and propagandized out of context in the 2016 cycle <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-the-russians-hacked-the-dnc-and-passed-its-emails-to-wikileaks/2018/07/13/af19a828-86c3-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html" style="text-align: center; font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" transition="transition" color="color" s="s" ease="ease" cursor="cursor" pointer="pointer">originated with Russian hackers</a>.<div class="p7_9" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But that is not the whole story, because at least some of the energy to poison the primaries appears to be coming from fringe troll sites like 4chan and 8chan, where users have taken up explicit calls to attack Democratic candidates from the left (one user explicitly told fellow posters to spread information about how Warren was a Republican until 1996). It is unclear how many of these users are foreign state actors from places like Russia or Iran, versus organic right-wing activists in the United States, but data experts believe it is a mixture of the two.<div class="p8_9" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It is clear that social media is still a place where toxic attacks and partisan propaganda can spread rapidly — and those who make it a part of their media diet should be on guard.</div><div></div>//AOC 70% tax bracket?<div class="mag-post-box hentry" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; width: 374px; overflow: hidden; display: table; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(236, 236, 236); font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><div class="magcat-thumb" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 20px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; float: left; position: relative; transition: opacity 0.3s ease 0s;"><a class="penci-image-holder penci-lazy small-fix-size" href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/getting-nervous-wall-street-ceos-hold-private-meeting-with-maxine-waters-after-criticism/" title="Getting nervous? Wall Street CEOs hold private meeting with Maxine Waters after criticism" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; position: relative; width: 120px; background: url(" https="https" www.alternet.org="www.alternet.org" wp-content="wp-content" uploads="uploads" c0vhwfnhtjhq2xyh-800x430-1-585x390.jpg="c0VhwFnHtJhq2xyH-800x430-1-585x390.jpg" center="center" cover="cover" no-repeat="no-repeat" rgb="rgb" display="display" inline-block="inline-block" vertical-align="vertical-align" top="top" overflow="overflow" hidden="hidden" /></div></div><div class="mag-post-box hentry" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px 0px 15px; width: 374px; overflow: hidden; display: table; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(236, 236, 236); font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><div class="magcat-detail" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-proposes-ultra-millionaire-tax-for-anyone-with-over-50-million-in-assets/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">Elizabeth Warren proposes ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax’ for anyone with over $50 million in assets</a></h3><div class="grid-post-box-meta mag-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 7px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/julia-conley/" title="Posts by Julia Conley" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Julia Conley</a> / <a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/common-dreams/" title="Posts by Common Dreams" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Common Dreams</a></div></div></div><a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/15/17683022/elizabeth-warren-accountable-capitalism-corporations">https://www.vox.com/2018/8/15/17683022/elizabeth-warren-accountable-capitalism-corporations</a>many linx chart
Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalismShe’s unveiling a bill to make corporate governance great again.By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com  Updated Aug 15, 2018, 11:05am EDT
Elizabeth Warren has a big idea that challenges how the Democratic Party thinks about solving the problem of inequality.
Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime.Warren’s plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.Traditionally, she writes in a companion op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “corporations sought to succeed in the marketplace, but they also recognized their obligations to employees, customers and the community.” In recent decades they stopped, in favor of a singular devotion to enriching shareholders. And that’s what Warren wants to change.The new energy on the left is all about making government bigger and bolder, an ideal driven by a burgeoning movement toward democratic socialism. It’s inspired likely 2020 Democratic contenders to draw battle lines around how far they’d go to change the role of government in American life.Warren supports expanding many of the programs in play, and she’s voted to do so. But the rollout of her bill suggests that as she weighs whether to get into the presidential race, she’ll focus on how to prioritize workers in the American economic system while leaving businesses as the primary driver of it.
Warren wants to eliminate the huge financial incentives that entice CEOs to flush cash out to shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses. She wants to curb corporations’ political activities. And for the biggest corporations, she’s proposing a dramatic step that would ensure workers and not just shareholders get a voice on big strategic decisions.Warren hopes this will spur a return to greater corporate responsibility, and bring back some other aspects of the more egalitarian era of American capitalism post-World War II — more business investment, more meaningful career ladders for workers, more financial stability, and higher pay.As much as Warren’s proposal is about ending inequality, it’s also about saving capitalism.
The Accountable Capitalism Act — real citizenship for corporate personsThe conceit tying together Warren’s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths whose sole obligation is profitability — as is currently conventional in American business thinking.
Warren wants to create an Office of United States Corporations inside the Department of Commerce and require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion — only a few thousand companies, but a large share of overall employment and economic activity — to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship.The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades.Business executives, like everyone else, want to have good reputations and be regarded as good people but, when pressed about topics of social concern, frequently fall back on the idea that their first obligation is to do what’s right for shareholders. A new charter would remove that crutch, and leave executives accountable as human beings for the rights and wrongs of their own decisions.[Warren at the rally against the Republican tax plan in 2017. The rally was organized by Patriotic Millionaires, a left-wing group of wealthy business leaders and investors. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]More concretely, United States Corporations would be required to allow their workers to elect 40 percent of the membership of their board of directors.Warren also tacks on a couple of more modest ideas. One is to limit corporate executives’ ability to sell shares of stock that they receive as pay — requiring that such shares be held for at least five years after they were received, and at least three years after a share buyback. The aim is to disincentivize stock-based compensation in general as well as the use of share buybacks as a tactic for executives to maximize their one pay.
The other proposal is to require corporate political activity to be authorized specifically by both 75 percent of shareholders and 75 percent of board members (many of whom would be worker representatives under the full bill), to ensure that corporate political activity truly represents a consensus among stakeholders, rather than C-suite class solidarity.
It’s easy to imagine the restrictions on corporate political activity and some curbs on stock sales shenanigans becoming broad consensus points for congressional Democrats, and even part of a 2019 legislative agenda if the midterms go well. But the bigger ideas about corporate governance would be a revolution in American business practice to undo about a generation’s worth of shareholder supremacy.
The rise of shareholder capitalismThe conceptual foundations of the current version of American capitalism are found in Milton Friedman’s well-titled 1970 New York Times Magazine article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits.”Friedman meant this provocative thesis quite literally. In his view, which has since become the dominant perspective in American law and finance, corporate shareholders should be understood to own the company and its executives should be seen as their hired help. The shareholders, as individuals, can obviously have a variety of goals they favor in life. But their common goal is to maximize the value of their shares.Therefore, for executives to set aside shareholder profits in pursuit of some other goal like environmental protection, racial justice, community stability, or simple common decency would be a form of theft. If reformulating your product to be more addictive or less healthy increases sales, then it’s not only permissible but actually required to do so. If closing a profitable plant and outsourcing the work to a low-wage country could make your company even more profitable, then it’s the right thing to do.Friedman allows that executives are obligated to follow the law — an important caveat — establishing a conceptual framework in which policy goals should be pursued by the government, while businesses pursue the prime business directive of profitability.One important real-world complication that Friedman’s article largely neglects is that business lobbying does a great deal to determine what the laws are. It’s all well and good, in other words, to say that businesses should follow the rules and leave worrying about environmental externalities up to the regulators. But in reality, polluting companies invest heavily in making sure that regulators underregulate — and it seems to follow from the doctrine of shareholder supremacy that if lobbying to create bad laws is profitable for shareholders, corporate executives are required to do it.On the flip side, an investor-friendly policy regime was supposed to supercharge investment, creating a more prosperous economy for everyone. The question is whether that’s really worked out.
The economics of shareholder supremacyThe shareholder value era has pretty clearly brought about an explosion in inequality in the United States. It succeeded, for starters, in greatly increasing the value of shares of stock in the English-speaking countries where Friedman’s doctrine has been most influential.You can see this in the evolution of a ratio known as Tobin’s Q — the value of all the shares of stock outstanding divided by the book value of everything publicly traded companies own.Historically, this ratio was well below 1, and it remains below 1 in Germany and Japan, where shareholder value does not reign supreme. But in the US, Britain, and Canada, the Q ratio has soared — meaning the financial value of corporate ownership has risen faster than the actual growth of the underlying enterprises — leading to huge increases in wealth for people who own shares of stock. Thomas PikettySince 80 percent of the value of the stock market is owned by about 10 percent of the population and half of Americans own no stock at all, this has been a huge triumph for the rich. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared as executive compensation has been redesigned to incentivize shareholder gains, and the CEOs have delivered. Gains for shareholders and greater inequality in pay has led to a generation of median compensation lagging far behind economy-wide productivity, with higher pay mostly captured by a relatively small number of people rather than being broadly shared.
Investment, however, has not soared. In fact, it’s stagnated.
And a range of scholars believe shareholder capitalism is to blame. Dong Wook Lee, Hyun-Han Shin, and René Stulz find that firms enjoying high Q now invest in share buybacks rather than reinvesting in business. Heitor Almeida, Vyacheslav Kos, and Mathias Kronlund find that companies strategically time buybacks to manage earnings per share metrics in line with Wall Street expectations and that “EPS-motivated repurchases are associated with reductions in employment and investment, and a decrease in cash holdings.”
Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon empirically test seven possible causes of decreased business investment, and find that changes in corporate governance (along with reduced competition and a shift to intangible goods becoming more important) is a major factor.
The heterodox economist William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts puts the thesis very squarely, arguing that “from the end of World War II until the late 1970s, a retain-and-reinvest approach to resource allocation prevailed at major U.S. corporations.” But since the Reagan era, business has followed “a downsize-and-distribute regime of reducing costs and then distributing the freed-up cash to financial interests, particularly shareholders.”
 William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, has made headlines with his research into stock buybacks. Dina Rudick/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThis is, of course, not an uncontested view. Jesse Fried and Charles Wang argued earlier this year that the real amount of buybacks is overstated by politicians who focus on gross share repurchases that are partially offset by new share issuances. Joseph Gruber and Steven Kamin reviewed the issue in a 2017 survey for the Federal Reserve and pronounced the evidence “inconclusive.”
Policymakers, of course, don’t have the time for fully conclusive evidence. And Warren seems to believe Lazonick’s basic observation that “since the mid-1980s net equity issues for non- financial corporations have been generally negative, and since the mid-2000s massively negative.” In the modern era of shareholder supremacy, in other words, owners take more money out of the corporate sector in the form of buybacks and dividends than they put in via new investments.
Whether one sees this as a cause or a consequence of poor growth outcomes is up for debate, but the Warren view is that fundamentally, shareholder supremacy is a cause of poor economic performance by starving the business sector of funds that would otherwise be used to invest in equipment or training or simply to pay people more and increase their purchasing power.
But while on an optimistic view, stakeholder capitalism would produce stronger long-run growth and higher living standards for the vast majority of the population, there’s no getting around the fact that Warren’s proposal would be bad — really bad — for rich people. That’s a fight her team says she welcomes.
Codetermination is a huge transfer of wealthIn conversations with ex-staffers of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign during the winter of 2016-’17, it was repeatedly said that their research showed an extremely high level of public interest in the idea of making corporations share profits with rank-and-file workers, but that they’d never managed to make the media or the public focus on their plan to increase profit sharing.The reasons for this, however, are not that mysterious. The Clinton profit-sharing initiative, though worthy in its way, was designed as a somewhat opaque tax measure that would incentivize companies to adopt profit-sharing plans. It was, in other words, deliberately structured to not seriously alarm business leaders — a good match for an overall campaign strategy that was focused on the idea that decent people from all walks of life should unite to reject Donald Trump.Warren’s plan is not like that. If imposing stakeholder responsibilities on businesses and requiring many of the seats at the biggest firms to be elected by workers pushed the S&P 500’s Q ratio down to German levels (which is probably a high estimate since German codetermination rules are somewhat tougher than her proposal), share prices could fall by 25 percent. For the vast majority of people who earn the majority of their income by working for wages, cheaper stock would be offset by higher pay and more rights at work.But for billionaires with huge stock holdings — and for CEOs with compensation packages tied to share price performance — it would be a disaster. If they thought the idea stood a snowball’s chance in hell of happening, rich people would denounce it to anyone who would listen — and since executives and major investors enjoy privileged access to the media, their denunciations would be heard.Indeed, it seems likely that literally trillions of dollars of paper stock market wealth could be eliminated by weakening shareholder hegemony in this way. But as economist Ed Wolff has shown, that lost wealth is owned overwhelmingly by a small minority of the overall population.In exchange, the laboring majority would make important gains.
Most obviously, the large share of the private sector workforce that is employed by companies with more than $1 billion in revenue would gain a measure of democratic control over the future of their workplace. That wouldn’t make tough business decisions around automation, globalization, scheduling, family responsibilities, etc. go away, but it would ensure that the decisions are made with a balanced set of interests in mind.Studies from Germany’s experience with codetermination indicate that it leads to less short-termism in corporate decision-making and much higher levels of pay equality, while other studies demonstrate positive results on productivity and innovation.One intuitive way of thinking about the proposal is that under the American system of shareholder supremacy, an executive increases his pay by finding ways to squeeze workers as hard as possible — kicking out the surplus to shareholders and then watching his stock-linked compensation soar. That’s brought America to the point where CEOs make more than 300 times as much as rank-and-file workers at big companies.
Under a codetermination system, by contrast, an executive wins a pay increase by convincing shareholders and worker-representatives alike that he deserves it — something you can only do if workers are sharing in the benefits of growth. Consequently, German executives earn only about half as much as their US counterparts, even as major German firms like BMW, Bayer, Siemens, and SAP produce world-class results.
Of course, this kind of huge transfer of economic power from rich shareholders to middle- and working-class employees would provoke fierce resistance. But reform of corporate governance also has some powerful political tailwinds behind it.
Curbing shareholder supremacy is popularThis starts with the fact that proposals to overhaul corporate governance poll well — almost shockingly well, in fact, for an idea that’s had no organized advocacy community or high-profile champions until extremely recently.
Earlier this year, Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm, asked a large sample of Americans about codetermination, complete with an explicit partisan framing:
In many countries, employees at large companies elect representatives to their firm’s board of directors in order to advocate their interests and point of view to management. Democrats say this gives regular workers a greater say over how their companies are run and will increase wages, while Republicans claim that this makes companies less efficient and be bad for the economy. Would you support letting employees at large companies elect representatives to their firm’s board of directors?”
They found broad support for the idea, even with Republican-leaning voters.

Indeed, when the left-wing advocacy organization Data for Progress teamed up with Civis to produce credible polling outlining popular support for a bold progressive reform agenda, they found that reforming corporate governance was the most popular idea of all — outperforming many better-known progressive policy ideas that are themselves popular.
 Combining its large sample with demographic information, Civis is able to model support for these different ideas down to the congressional district level and finds that, astoundingly, codetermination polls well in literally every single House district. Looking state by state, it commands 58 percent support in Wyoming and is more popular than that everywhere else.
It’s likely a big reason for this is cost. Most progressive ideas tend to be either cheap, but therefore small-bore and a little weird, or bold and clear but expensive, in a country that remains averse to taxation. Warren’s corporate accountability initiatives would have huge economic implications but zero budgetary cost. At a time of low levels of public trust in institutions, Warren’s proposals don’t ask anyone to have faith that government officials are going to make good use of resources.
What’s more, while the codetermination aspect of Warren’s proposal does draw inspiration from Germany, fundamentally, the pitch for the overall package is a lot closer to “Make America Great Again” than to “make America like Scandinavia.” The basic notion is that the American private sector used to operate in a better, more inclusive way before the rise of shareholder supremacy and with a couple of firm regulatory kicks we can get it to work that way again.
My late grandfather, who was an old-line communist in his day, used to tell me with mixed admiration and regret that FDR had saved capitalism by entrenching institutions that guaranteed broadly shared prosperity. Those institutions, fundamentally, are what was undone in the shareholder value revolution.
Warren’s bet is that at a time when the political right is increasingly not even bothering to pretend to offer economic solutions anymore, America can pull off the same trick a second time — offering the public not a huge new expansion of government programs, but a revival of the midcentury stakeholder capitalism that once built a middle class so prosperous that the idea of surging mass interest in socialism was unthinkable. <a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/warren-refuses-play-dead-big-banks">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/warren-refuses-play-dead-big-banks</a>Thanks to the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/06/17-democrats-decried-sending-clear-message-i-work-my-bank-donors-not-my-constituents" style="text-decoration-line: none;">help of 16 Senate Democrats and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine)</a>, a Wall Street deregulation measure disguised as a "community banking" bill is barreling toward passage—but Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) vowed Wednesday to not let the bill sail through without forcing votes on a series of amendments aimed at showing Americans whose side their lawmakers are really on."The fight over the Bank Lobbyist Act isn't over yet," Warren wrote on Twitter, unveiling 17 amendments that, if approved, would uphold strict oversight of big banks and shield consumers from Wall Street fraud and abuse. "I'm not going to roll over and play dead for the big banks."<div id="TeadsNative" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">First introduced last November by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the officially named "Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act" (<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2155" style="text-decoration-line: none;">S.2155</a>) could hit the Senate floor for a final vote as soon as Thursday after it <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/06/17-democrats-decried-sending-clear-message-i-work-my-bank-donors-not-my-constituents" style="text-decoration-line: none;">easily cleared</a> a procedural hurdle earlier this week.Far from what its title suggests, progressive lawmakers and independent analysts argue the legislation would <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/opinion/democrats-trump-dodd-frank.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">dismantle many consumer protections</a>, provide <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/03/02/crapo-instead-of-taking-on-gun-control-democrats-are-teaming-with-republicans-for-a-stealth-attack-on-wall-street-reform/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">huge gifts to Wall Street firms</a>, and—<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/06/charade-over-cbo-reveals-democrat-backed-bill-really-just-big-gift-wall-street" style="text-decoration-line: none;">according to</a> the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—significantly increase the likelihood of future taxpayer-funded bank bailouts.In an effort to let the American people know whether their senators are on the side of "<a href="https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/971531927835508736" style="text-decoration-line: none;">working families or the big banks</a>," Warren announced her plan on Wednesday to push for votes on amendments to the bill that, if implemented in its current form, <a href="https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/971412740760899588" style="text-decoration-line: none;">would</a> "turn over the keys to our economy to the same people who crashed it ten years ago.""The Senate is expected to pass the #BankLobbyistAct—with Democratic support. But I'm not going down without a fight," Warren <a href="https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/971526031768281088" style="text-decoration-line: none;">declared</a>.Below is a <a href="https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-releases-17-amendments-filed-to-senate-bank-deregulation-bill" style="text-decoration-line: none;">full list of the amendments</a> accompanied by a short summary of their contents. The full amendments <a href="https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/971526345804124161" style="text-decoration-line: none;">can be viewed on Warren's Twitter page</a>.<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">1. (#2056) BAILOUTS: This amendment ensures that banks that received more than $1 billion in bailout money during the 2008 financial crisis are still subject to tougher federal oversight.2. (#2064) DEFERRED PROSECUTION AGREEMENTS: This amendment ensures that banks that are currently operating under a deferred prosecution agreement or a consent order are not deregulated by the bill. 

3. (#2063) FINES: This amendment ensures that big banks that have been assessed more than $10 million in fines in the last ten years remain subject to stricter federal oversight.

4. (#2061) OUTSOURCING: This amendment ensures that banks that have outsourced more than 50 jobs in any of the last five years remain subject to stricter federal oversight. The Communications Workers of America support this amendment.

5. (#2060) STOCK BUYBACKS: This amendment prohibits any big bank that gets deregulated under the bill from buying back its stock for the next five years.  If the purpose of this bill is to promote lending and economic growth, the banks that benefit from it should not be permitted to funnel any savings into additional stock buybacks.6. (#2058) MERGERS: This amendment prohibits any big bank that gets deregulated under the bill from merging with or acquiring another bank for five years. Supporters of the bill claim it is intended to reduce consolidation in the banking industry, but experts agree that the bill, as currently written, will spark a wave of new mergers.  This amendment will limit that consolidation.

7. (#2067) FREE CREDIT FREEZES: This amendment amends section 301 of the bill to include the full text of Senator Warren's FREE Act. The FREE Act provides for a more consumer-friendly free credit freeze process than the current bill and prohibits credit bureaus from selling data to third parties when a freeze is in effect. 

8. (#2065) MANDATORY PENALTIES FOR CREDIT BUREAU DATA BREACHES: This amendment inserts the Warren-Warner Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act of 2018 into the bill. The bill imposes large, mandatory penalties on credit bureaus that allow personal consumer data to be accessed or stolen. 

9. (#2057) NO CREDIT REPORTS IN JOB APPLICATIONS: This amendment inserts Senator Warren's Equal Opportunity for All Act into the bill. The bill prohibits employers from requesting a job applicant's credit report. 

10. (#2069) GLASS-STEAGALL: This amendment inserts Warren-McCain-Cantwell-King 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act into the bill.  The bill would re-establish the divide between commercial and investment banking. 

11. (#2062) CARD ACT EXPANSION: This amendment expands the CARD Act to include other financial products marketed on college campus, including debit cards and checking accounts.

12. (#2059) STUDENT LOAN ARBITRATION: This amendment bans the use of mandatory arbitration clauses in contracts for private student loans.

13. (#2066) DISCLOSING SEXUAL HARRASSMENT: This amendment inserts Senator Warren's Sunlight in Workplace Harassment Act into the bill, which would require publicly-traded companies to disclose the number and dollar amount of workplace harassment and discrimination settlements.

14. (#2070) STUDENT LOAN SERVICING: This amendment grants student borrowers a private right of action against student loan servicers, lenders, and holders, and adds additional requirements for loan servicers to support borrowers throughout the repayment process.15. (#2068) PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS: This amendment offers consumer protections for private education loan borrowers, including servicing transfer protections, fee prohibitions and protections, and private student loan discharge for borrower death or disability.16. (#2054) LIMITING IMMUNITY: This amendment amends section 303 of the bill to limit the immunity provided to bank personnel so that they do not receive immunity for violations unrelated to the reporting of financial exploitation of seniors. 

17. (#2055) CLOSING WALL STREET LOOPHOLE: Section 165 of Dodd-Frank currently states that the Fed "may" tailor the enhanced prudential standards depending on the size, risk, complexity, and activities of specific banks or categories of banks.  Section 401 of S. 2155 says the Fed "shall" tailor these requirements - which, under the bill, now only apply to banks bigger than $250 billion in assets.  That one word change gives the biggest Wall Street banks a massive legal hook to challenge Fed requirements and systematically weaken the rules. This amendment would strike the "may" to "shall" change.</blockquote>=big win gop:  pence tie break<a id="ORGOV0000134" title="U.S. Senate" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/government/u.s.-senate-ORGOV0000134-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Senate</a> voted Tuesday night to kill a controversial rule that would have allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks instead of being forced in many cases into private arbitration.The move by the Senate followed a similar action by the House in July to rescind the rule. <a id="PEBSL000163" title="Donald Trump" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/donald-trump-PEBSL000163-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">President Trump</a> is expected to sign the repeal legislation, providing a major victory for the financial industry.Vice President <a id="PEPLT005131" title="Mike Pence" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/mike-pence-PEPLT005131-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Mike Pence</a> cast the deciding vote after the Senate tied 50-50. All but two <a id="ORGOV0000004" title="Republican Party" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/republican-party-ORGOV0000004-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Republicans</a> — John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — voted to repeal the rule. No <a id="ORGOV0000005" title="Democratic Party" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/democratic-party-ORGOV0000005-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Democrats</a> or independents supported the move.The White House said Trump “applauds” Congress for voting to repeal the rule, which would have given consumers “fewer options for quickly and efficiently resolving financial disputes.”<aside class="trb_ar_sponsoredmod" data-v-ntidd="1069557" data-adloader-networktype="nativo" data-withinviewport-options="bottomOffset=100" data-load-method="trb.vendor.nativo.init" data-load-type="method" style="margin: 5px 0px 25px; clear: both; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="trb_ar_nt" /></aside>The rule was <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cfpb-arbitration-20170710-story.html" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">unveiled</a> in July by the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/business/u.s.-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-ORGOV00000233-topic.html" id="ORGOV00000233" title="U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Consumer Financial Protection Bureau</a> and praised by Democrats and consumer advocates as giving average people more power to fight industry abuses, such as <a id="ORCRP016609" title="Wells Fargo" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/business/financial-business-services/wells-fargo-ORCRP016609-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Wells Fargo</a> & Co.’s creation of millions of unauthorized accounts.But banking lobbyists argued that the rule would unleash a flood of class-action lawsuits, and that the cost of fighting those suits would be passed on to consumers. Republicans quickly moved to repeal the regulation.“The entire purpose of this rule is to promote class-action litigation and stop arbitration resolution when there is a dispute,” said Sen. <a id="PEPLT001375" title="Mike Crapo" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/government/mike-crapo-PEPLT001375-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Mike Crapo</a> (R-Idaho).The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the repeal vote, saying the rule “would have benefited the class-action trial bar at the expense of American consumers and businesses alike.”<aside class="trb_ar_sponsoredmod" data-adloader-networktype="yieldmo" data-v-ymid="ym_1606464552242100545" data-role="delayload_item" data-withinviewport-options="bottomOffset=100" data-load-method="trb.vendor.yieldmo.init" data-load-type="method" style="margin: 5px 0px 25px; clear: both; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="ym_1606464552242100545" data-id="ym_1" class="ym ym_scroll" /></aside>Set to take effect in March, the rule would not have banned clauses in checking account, credit card and other banking agreements that say disputes between companies and customers must be dealt with privately or in small claims court.Instead, there would have been a ban on provisions that block consumers from banding together to bring class-action cases. The CFPB argued that such cases help hold banks accountable.The determinations of an arbitrator are binding and consumer advocates say most decisions favor the company. The private proceedings also allow banks to deal with individual problems quietly rather than address widespread abuses.Bureau Director <a id="PEPLT00008731" title="Richard Cordray" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/government/richard-cordray-PEPLT00008731-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Richard Cordray</a> called the Senate vote “a giant setback for every consumer in this country” and urged Trump to veto the repeal legislation.“It robs consumers of their most effective legal tool against corporate wrongdoing,” Cordray said. “As a result, companies like Wells Fargo and <a id="ORCRP005319" title="Equifax" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/business/equifax-ORCRP005319-topic.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Equifax</a> remain free to break the law without fear of legal blowback from their customers.”...----<a href="http://www.alternet.org/education/education-victories-democrats-can-rally-around">http://www.alternet.org/education/education-victories-democrats-can-rally-around</a>==<div class="views-field views-field-title"> <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/07/31/following-desmog-s-revelations-spectra-pipeline-ma-senators-demand-more-answers-ferc-alleged-conflict-interest">Following DeSmog’s Revelations on Spectra Pipeline, MA Senators Demand More Answers from FERC on Alleged Conflict of Interest</a> </div>

<div class="views-field views-field-body"> In a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Massachusetts Senators... </div><div class="views-field views-field-view-node"> <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/07/31/following-desmog-s-revelations-spectra-pipeline-ma-senators-demand-more-answers-ferc-alleged-conflict-interest">Read more</a> </div>
<a href="http://insideclimatenews.org/news/29102015/senators-press-Exxon-answers-funding-climate-denial-donors-trust-sheldon-whitehouse-elizabeth-warren">http://insideclimatenews.org/news/29102015/senators-press-Exxon-answers-funding-climate-denial-donors-trust-sheldon-whitehouse-elizabeth-warren</a>http://www.globalpossibilities.org/sen-warren-backs-plan-for-working-families-to-overthrow-corporate-rule/nought on 28th

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Crossroads GPS, which is affiliated with American Crossroads, has also been heavily criticized for ads in several other states, including spots attacking Democratic Senate contenders <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/09/elizabeth-warren-karl-rove_n_1085180.html" target="hplink">Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts</a> and <a href="http://bit.ly/sKf59f" target="hplink">Tim Kaine in Virginia</a>.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post highlighted Friday how the Warren spot <a href="http://wapo.st/rBM4R8" target="hplink">"falsely insinuates"</a> that Warren supports violence by Occupy Wall Street protesters. And PolitiFact rated as <a href="http://bit.ly/sWeB6N" target="hplink">"mostly false"</a> claims made against Kaine. The Kaine spot also accused him of running a deficit as governor of Virginia, but Virginia state law prohibits deficits.

A spokesman for Crossroads GPS could not immediately be reached for comment.

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Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren struck back at former Bush White House senior adviser Karl Rove Thursday, after an ad by the Rove-linked group Crossroads GPS <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/08/one-month-after-depicting_n_1137489.html" target="_hplink">attacked her</a> for overseeing "bailouts that helped pay big bonuses for bank executives while middle-class Americans lost out."

"Congress had Warren oversee how your tax dollars were spent, bailing out the same banks that helped cause the financial meltdown, bailouts that helped pay big bonuses to bank executives while middle-class Americans lost out" says the narrator in the ad, referring to her position as chair of the congressional oversight panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Crossroads GPS attacked Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School who has long advocated for financial reforms, last month for being <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tNxez4ddpa0" target="_hplink">too close</a> to the Occupy Wall Street movement, directly contradicting the group's most recent ad suggesting that she is too close to Wall Street.

"I can't find the right words to describe how wrong that is. Factually wrong and morally wrong," <a href="http://bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/2011_1209warren_slaps_down_rove_latest_attack_ad" target="_hplink">said Warren of the ad to the Boston Herald</a>. "Karl Rove is not telling the truth, and I think anyone who is not telling the truth shouldn't be running ads in this race," she continued.

"Karl Rove was part of the inner circle when President Bush pushed for TARP bailouts," she added. "Now he's using Wall Street money to attack me for being too cozy with Wall Street? I was calling out Wall Street over the TARP bill from the beginning."

Warren's panel wrote scathing reports about how the Treasury Department implemented the program. One report hit the Treasury Department for taking "no steps to use any of [the $700 billion rescue package] to alleviate the foreclosure crisis," and that "raises questions about whether Treasury has complied with Congress' intent that Treasury develop a 'plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners,'" <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=6606296&page=1#.TuIp6HNW5xV" target="_hplink">according to ABC News.</a>

She criticized <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth-warren-bank-bon_n_324293.html" target="_hplink">bank bonuses in March 2010</a>: "I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual," she said. "I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars."

A poll <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2011/12/07/elizabeth-warren-scott-brown-poll_n_1135546.html" target="_hplink">released</a> Wednesday by UMass Lowell and the Herald found Warren leading Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) by a 49-42 margin. The survey suggested that early advertising both by Crossroads and the Warren campaign has mostly helped her -- her name identification has gone up, while Brown's approval rating fell from 53 to 45 percent.

...

<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/09/elizabeth-warren-karl-rove-ad-crossroads_n_1138789.html?view=print&comm_ref=false">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/09/elizabeth-warren-karl-rove-ad-crossroads_n_1138789.html?view=print&comm_ref=false</a>

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