Dimon, Jamie j p m

primary 5/18 TARGET 1 26

somewhat neglected? see JPM tag and node

capt 319

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AN 2 26

JPMorgan Chase took issue with Donald Trump's attempt to name its CEO, Jamie Dimon, in a major lawsuit against the bank, alleging in a new court filing that his inclusion was done "fraudulently."

In January, Trump filed suit against the banking giant, accusing it of putting himself and his businesses on a "blacklist" following his first term, effectively "debanking" him. The suit further alleges that this decision was directed by Dimon and is seeking $5 billion in damages.

It was that detail that the company went after in a court filing submitted on Thursday, per a report from Bloomberg. In it, JPMorgan Chase claimed that Trump's inclusion of Dimon as a defendant in the lawsuit was done "fraudulently," in order to get the case filed in Florida state court, where Trump has tended to land sympathetic judges, and avoid going to federal court.

The company explained that Dimon cannot be included in the suit under the Florida unfair trade practices law cited by the president, because he is "closely and comprehensively regulated by the federal banking agencies. The filing seeks to have the case moved to a federal court in Miami, with plans to move it again to a state court in New York somewhere down the line.

The bank's ultimate goal is to have the "threadbare" lawsuit dismissed. Lawyers for the bank accused the suit of being "unclear" on key points of its argument, particularly about the "blacklist" at the core of its argument.

“They do not explain what this ‘blacklist’ entails, when it was created, to whom it was supposedly circulated, or any other detail describing it,” the bank's lawyers said. “Nor is it plausible that JPMorgan could create such a list consistent with the complex federal regulatory scheme to which it is subject.”

In a statement to Bloomberg, Trump's legal team stood by the claims in the lawsuit, though it did not provide evidence to counter JPMorgan's assertions. The team also claimed, as they have often done, that Trump is suing the company in the name of the little guy, as he "is standing up for all those wrongly debanked by JPMorgan Chase and their cohorts."

"By their own admission, JPMorgan Chase, at the direction of CEO Jamie Dimon, unlawfully debanked and blacklisted President Trump, his family, and several of his businesses, causing overwhelming financial and reputational harm," the statement read.

The same day that this filing was submitted, the Financial Times reported that JPMorgan Chase has been in talks to provide banking services for Trump's "Board of Peace" initiative. It is unclear how this deal might impact the lawsuit, and vice versa. Though not known as an outspoken Trump opponent, Dimon recently called out Trump's demand to have all credit card interest capped at 10 percent, calling the idea an "economic disaster."

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AN 1 26

Today, as more than 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents — possibly joined by 1,500 active duty military, as Trump threatened yesterday — patrol Minneapolis, hundreds of global CEOs and titans of finance and more than 60 prime ministers and presidents are gathering in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual confab of the world’s powerful and wealthy, called the World Economic Forum.

This year’s Davos meeting occurs at a time when Trump is not just unleashing his brown shirts on Minneapolis but also dismantling the international order that’s largely been in place since the end of World War II — threatening NATO, withdrawing from international organizations including the UN climate treaty, violating the United Nations Charter by invading Venezuela and abducting Nicolas Maduro, upending established trade rules, and demanding that the U.S. annex Greenland.

He’s even hiked tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland — fellow NATO members that have expressed solidarity with Denmark in its refusal to yield to Trump’s demand to annex Greenland.

I hope the leaders now assembling at Davos speak out against Trump’s tyrannous assault on international laws and rules. Their collective repudiation of Trump would give other CEOs and world leaders cover to express their opposition as well. It could be a tipping point.

Will they? Trump is trying to stop them from doing so.

For example, he announced Saturday that he’s suing JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, headed by one of the most prominent CEOs in the world — Jamie Dimon — who is now in Davos.

Trump said he’s suing JPMorgan “for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting – The Election was RIGGED!”

Rubbish. There’s no evidence that Chase “debanked” Trump. (And obviously no evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged.”) Besides, if Trump thought the bank acted improperly, why would he be suing it now, five years later?

In reality, Trump’s lawsuit has nothing to do with any so-called “debanking.” Trump is suing JPMorgan Chase because last week Dimon came out publicly against Trump’s criminal probe of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and apparently Trump worries about what Dimon might say at Davos.

Dimon’s opposition to the criminal investigation was couched in the mildest of terms: “Anything that chips away at [the Fed’s independence] is not a good idea. And in my view, will have the reverse consequences. It’ll increase inflation expectations and probably increase rates over time.”

Yet Dimon’s comment infuriated Trump.

Presumably, the reason Trump says he’ll sue JPMorgan “over the next two weeks” rather than immediately is because Trump wants to maximize the pressure on Dimon.

Dimon has a major speaking role at Davos. If Dimon uses it as an opportunity to blast Trump for taking a wrecking ball to the world economy as well as democracy, he gives cover to every other CEO and many heads of state to criticize Trump, too.

But if Trump can intimidate Dimon into silence, it’s unlikely any other CEO will risk it.

Hence, Trump’s shot across JPMorgan’s bow — aimed not so much at winning a lawsuit against the bank as silencing Dimon and others.

Does Dimon have enough integrity to put the bank’s profits and his own compensation ($770 million for 2025) at risk by speaking the truth — that Trump must be opposed by anyone still possessing power and integrity?

We will see, but I’m not betting on it. Dimon has shown time and again that he has more loyalty to JPMorgan than to the United States. His mild criticism of Trump for undermining the independence of the Fed could reflect no more than concern for his bank’s bottom line.

But who knows? Dimon will soon be retiring. This is his opportunity to be on the right side of history.

To ensure that the assembled CEOs and heads of state are cowed, Trump is traveling to Davos himself and taking with him the largest U.S. delegation ever to attend the meeting, including five Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials.

Will any prime minister or other head of state attending Davos dare repudiate Trump, when Trump is showing no qualms about raising tariffs on, or otherwise punishing, countries that oppose him?

Perhaps, but at most meekly and indirectly. Who wants to taunt the bear?

Yet Dimon and others at Davos must speak out against what is occurring. If there were ever a time for world leadership, it is now.

Davos’s excuse for existing is supposed to be world leadership — although its attendees have not exactly distinguished themselves in the past by their fealty to democracy, social justice, or the rules of international law. Some are directly benefiting from Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Many occupy their positions precisely because of their reluctance to rock any big boats or cause any trouble.

Yet if there were ever a time for them to speak out, it is now. This is their opportunity. It is also their duty. The world needs to hear from world leaders a clear and firm denunciation of the havoc Trump is wreaking.

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https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/conflicted-new-report-exposes-trump-s-crypto-connections-243308613599

trump fam made more money on crypto than in whole hist of co in real estate?!

memecoin 2 bit players www hustlers, got hacked; liberty financial 500m$ 400m real money in trump pocket; had no product

1/2 hse paid 4B$ fine money launder

stablecoin USD1 world lib fin; backed 1:1 with real US dollars, used by drug traffic; bill does nothing on laundering; anon wallet

jamie dimond JPM 20k empl on compliance; tether has 150 ppl TOTAL

140m$ war chest sherrod b 40m$ , num 1 more than oil/gas see politico

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trump listened to no one else, and only when he was on fox?!

an 4 25

President Donald Trump is known for being a voracious consumer of Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business, keeping the right-wing cable news outlets on constantly whether he's inside the White House or at Mar-a-Lago. And according to according to Mediaite's David Gilmour, that habit may have inspired a major decision on a key economic policy.

As the stock market continued to plummet, Trump made a major announcement on Wednesday afternoon, April 9: He is pausing most non-China tariffs for 90 days. Stocks increased in value following the announcement, although a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety remains on Wall Street.

Earlier in the day, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon appeared on Fox Business and told host Maria Bartiromo that the United States would "probably" or "likely" go into a recession thanks to Trump's steep new tariffs. And according to Mediaite's David Gilmour, that interview "may have been the nudge" that Trump "needed to take the leap on his stunning tariffs pause."

Gilmour explains, "One source noted to the Wall Street Journal that while Dimon's appearance on 'Mornings With Maria' had been scheduled some time ago, the banker 'knew that Trump and his inner circle often watched Fox' and that his message would likely get through to them…. The point certainly registered with one viewer, the president, who apparently took note and directly cited Dimon’s interview with Bartiromo during a press gaggle at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, after announcing the tariffs pause."

IFrame Content

Gilmour adds, "When a reporter asked whether it was changes in the bond markets that had persuaded him to 'reverse course,' Trump replied that he had noted on Tuesday that 'people were getting a little queasy.'"

The Mediaite journalist notes that another reporter asked Trump, "Mr. President, did anyone influence your decision? Did you speak with anyone you know? Jamie Dimon? Did you speak with anyone?'"

Trump responded, "I watched Jamie Dimon and Maria Bartiromo’s show this morning, and he was very good." And the "Dimon message," according to Gilmour, "may have nudged Trump to take the leap on a pause he claims he'd been considering for some days."

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an 4 25

'Considerable turbulence': Jamie Dimon 'backtracks' on Trump plan and issues red flag warning

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mma

### Fox follows Jamie Dimon in endorsing higher inflation from Trump’s planned tariffs: “So be it”

01/24/25

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AN 1 25

Big Wall Street banks are hoping that President-elect Donald Trump will kill several major regulations imposed on the financial industry — including one set of rules aimed at preventing another 2008-style financial crash.

That's according to a Saturday article in the Guardian, which reported that banks are optimistic about the incoming administration's regulatory agenda. Some bankers are particularly eager about the possibility of Trump taking an axe to the Basel III rules, which were put in place in response to the global banking crisis that preceded the Great Recession of the late aughts.

In a 2024 article, Investopedia described **Basel III as an international set of guidelines developed by 28 countries that established "minimum capital, leverage and liquidity requirements to ensure major banks could survive another upheaval." This was a response to the forced bailouts of banks deemed "too big to fail," requiring an infusion of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to keep financial institutions afloat.

In addition to Basel III, Trump could undo some of the anti-too-big-to-fail provisions in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. This includes a mandatory "stress test" from the Federal Reserve imposed on all financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets. Dodd-Frank also requires banks to put forth a "living will" that serves as a plan in the event a bank should fail.

A.J. Bell investment analyst Dan Coatsworth told the Guardian that big banks are optimistic about their treatment under Trump's second term given his promises to roll back corporate regulations. He said banks' surging stock prices in the wake of the election symbolizes Wall Street's bullish attitude toward the incoming administration, but emphasized that the industry didn't want so much deregulation that it would risk future instability.

“Trump wants to make things easier for banks, but he won’t want to risk any damage to the financial system,” Coatsworth told the Guardian. “That means being more lenient with rules but not having them too loose."

Financial institutions are also excited about Trump's stated opposition to the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement in which investors are encouraged to hold their wealth in industries deemed to be more sustainable. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has already suggested he would roll back the company's previous commitments to address climate change, and "use the word ‘commitment’ much more reservedly in the future" in regard to pro-environment pledges.

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an 10 24

This is the time for political courage.

Instead, America’s highest-profile business leaders — Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft; and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway — are displaying political cowardice. They are afraid to publicly support Kamala Harris and speak openly of the dangers posed by Donald Trump.

According to The New York Times, Dimon has privately told associates he backs Harris. But in public he’s praising Donald Trump and leaving the door open to endorsing Trump.

Gates gave $50 million to the main outside fundraising group supporting Harris, but he won’t come out publicly for her.

Buffett, a longtime Democrat, wrote on Berkshire Hathaway’s website that he wouldn’t “endorse and support political candidates.”

Why are these business leaders so reluctant to come out for Harris?

Dimon has never been known for pulling his punches. He has held forth in public on everything from Ukraine to banking regulations. His widely read annual letter in April covers public issues in detail. “I’ve always been an American patriot, and my country is more important to me than my company,” he told analysts on a call this month.

Buffett, too, has in the past been open about his political views; he endorsed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and has publicly criticized Trump in previous election cycles.

Gates relishes his role as a public figure.

So why the timidity now?

It’s not as if we’re approaching a typical election in which it doesn’t much matter which side wins. This isn’t John McCain versus Barack Obama.

It’s fascism versus democracy. Trump has promised to take over the civil service, wreak vengeance on his enemies, and unleash the military on political opponents and on immigrants, even those here legally.

Even John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, says Trump meets the definition of a fascist.

Last time he occupied the Oval Office, Trump brought America closer to a civil war than we’ve been since the actual Civil War. When he lost the 2020 election, he attempted a coup against the United States government. He was stopped only because several people around him were more loyal to America than to him.

But Trump has learned his lesson. If he gets another chance to sit in the Oval Office, he will surround himself with people who will do his bidding.

So why won’t Dimon, Gates, and Buffett speak out now?

Dimon has told associates he’s worried about Trump retaliating against perceived enemies.

That’s a real cause for worry. Trump has increasingly spoken of retribution. He says he’ll punish companies for taking actions he doesn’t like. (He threatened tariffs on John Deere, the farm equipment maker, if it went ahead with plans to move some jobs to Mexico.)

But doesn’t Trump’s thirst for vengeance and his attempt to intimidate critics even before he has the formal power to do so demand that America’s top business leaders summon the courage nowto let their voices be heard against him?

Shouldn’t they use their status to sound the alarm about Trump?

What’s the meaning of leadership if not having the courage to tell the public the truth, even at the cost of possible retribution?

The silence of Dimon, Gates, and Buffett cannot be justified by any notion of fiduciary duty to protect the value of the shares of investors in JPMorgan, Microsoft, or Berkshire Hathaway, respectively.

Quite the opposite. If American democracy is seriously jeopardized because Donald Trump is in the White House — as seems likely — the shareholders of these and every other American corporation will take it on the chin.

Political instability and uncertainty, attacks on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and rejection of the rule of law will impose huge costs on the American economy. As David Firestone, deputy editor of theTimes editorial board, says, Dimon would be doing his shareholders “a better service by doing everything possible to prevent Trump’s election.”

Elon Musk has no qualms about endorsing Trump, creating a pro-Trump superPAC to which he donates hundreds of millions of dollars, turning his X platform into a cesspool of disinformation in favor of Trump and against Harris, and giving away a million dollars a day in raffles in battleground states on Trump’s behalf. So why on earth should Dimon, Gates, and Buffett feel that their hands are tied?

The silence of Dimon, Gates, and Buffett is indefensible. By remaining silent, they relinquish whatever claim they ever had to leadership in America. By saying nothing about the catastrophe that could befall us if Trump is elected, they can no longer pretend to speak for the common good.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at[https://robertreich.substack.com/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/mark-zuckerberg/

The sudden lurch from Trump to Biden is generating vertigo all over Washington, including the so-called fourth branch of government – CEOs and their army of lobbyists.

Notwithstanding Biden's ambitious agenda, dozens of giant corporations have said they will not donate to the 147 members of Congress who objected to the certification of Biden electors on the basis of Trump's lies about widespread fraud, which rules out most Republicans on the Hill.

After locking down Trump's account, social media giants like Twitter and Facebook are policing against instigators of violence and hate, which hobbles Republican lawmakers trying to appeal to Trump voters.

As a result of moves like these, CEOs are being hailed – and hailing themselves – as guardians of democracy. The New York Times praises business leaders for seeking "stability and national unity." Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Airlines, says "our voice is seen as more important than ever." A recent study by **Edelman** finds the public now trusts business more than nonprofit organizations, the government or the media.

Give me a break. For years, big corporations have been assaulting democracy with big money, drowning out the voices and needs of ordinary Americans and fueling much of the anger and cynicism that opened the door to Trump in the first place.

Their assault hasn't been as dramatic as the Trump thugs who stormed the Capitol, and it's entirely legal – although more damaging over the long term.

A study published a few years ago by two of America's most respected political scientists, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, concluded that the preferences of the average American "have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy." Instead, lawmakers respond almost exclusively to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

The capture of government by big business over the last several decades has infuriated average Americans whose paychecks have gone nowhere even as the stock market has soared.

The populist movements that fueled both Bernie Sanders and Trump began in the 2008 financial crisis when Wall Street got bailed out and no major bank executive went to jail, although millions of ordinary people lost their jobs, savings and homes.

So now, in wake of Trump's calamitous exit and Biden's ascension, we're to believe CEOs care about democracy?

"No one thought they were giving money to people who supported sedition," explained Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase and chairman of the Business Roundtable, referring to the disgraced Republicans.

Yet Dimon has been a leader of the more insidious form of sedition. He piloted the corporate lobbying campaign for the Trump tax cut, deploying a vast war chest of corporate donations.

For more than a decade Dimon has driven Wall Street's charge against stricter bank regulation, opening bipartisan doors in the Capitol with generous gifts from the Street. (Dimon calls himself a Democrat.)

When Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg shut Trump's Facebook account, he declared "you just can't have a functioning democracy without a peaceful transition of power."

Where was Zuckerberg's concern for a "functioning democracy" when he amplified Trump's lies for four years?

After taking down Trump's Twitter account, CEO Jack Dorsey expressed discomfort about "the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation."

Spare me. Dorsey has fought off all attempts to limit Twitter's power over the "global conversation." He shuttered Trump only after Democrats secured the presidency and control of the Senate.

Look, I'm glad CEOs are penalizing the 147 Republican seditionists and that Big Tech is starting to police social media content.

But don't confuse the avowed concerns of these CEOs about democracy with democracy itself. They aren't answerable to democracy. At most, they're accountable to big shareholders and institutional investors who don't give a fig as long as profits keep rolling in.

If they were committed to democracy, CEOs of big corporations would permanently cease corporate donations to all candidates, close their PACs, stop giving to secretive "dark money" groups, and discourage donations by their executives.

They'd stop placing ads in media that have weaponized disinformation – including Fox News, Infowars, Newsmax and websites affiliated with right-wing pundits. Social media giants would start acting like publishers and take responsibility for what they promulgate.

If corporate America were serious about democracy it would throw its weight behind the "For the People Act," the first bills of the new Congress, offering public financing of elections among other reforms.

Don't hold your breath.

Joe Biden intends to raise corporate taxes, increase the minimum wage, break up Big Tech, and strengthen labor unions.

The fourth branch is already amassing a war chest for the fight.

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LAT

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-11/jpmorgan-board-climate-activists

no lnx

feb 2020

Few people are in a position to influence Jamie Dimon, the chief executive who turned JPMorgan Chase & Co. into the biggest U.S. bank. The longtime climate skeptic who turned Exxon Mobil Corp. into the biggest U.S. oil company is one of them.

Lee R. Raymond, 81, holds the top position on JPMorgan’s 11-member board after Dimon. He has occupied his seat for 33 years, making him both the longest-serving and oldest director among Wall Street’s biggest banks. He helped guide JPMorgan through mega-mergers after mastering them at Exxon, backed Dimon during his rise and has stood by him. Even as the bank draws fire for lending billions to the fossil fuel industry, the former oil executive’s power inside the $2.7-trillion financial firm has gone little noticed.

That’s about to change.

A nonprofit group called Majority Action is beginning a fight this week to use shareholder voting to remove Raymond from JPMorgan.The group argues that Raymond’s role as the lead independent director and his coziness with Big Oil compromises JPMorgan’s capacity to react to the climate crisis.

“This is really going to be an important moment,” said Eli Kasargod-Staub, executive director of Majority Action. “The gap between what is needed and JPMorgan’s behavior is egregious.”

The oil veteran’s relationship with Dimon gives him special status inside the bank, and makes the campaign against him a long shot. Raymond is described in public filings as the chief executive’s sounding board, advisor on long-term strategy and guide for annual performance reviews, as well as a key voice in who will one day succeed him. He oversees the board’s agenda, has the discretion to call members together whenever he wants, and runs meetings in Dimon’s absence.

Raymond has a reputation among colleagues for being brilliant, logical and gruff, an old-school businessman. “After everyone had his say or her say, Lee’s point of view was heavily influential with everyone else,” said former Hearst boss Frank A. Bennack Jr., who served on JPMorgan’s board until 2004. “I would describe him as eminently able to influence.”

A spokesman for the bank said Raymond “contributes to the success of the company in countless ways.” In his leadership, the spokesman added, he ensures “that the board represents a wide range of views and perspectives and hears from them as well.”

Majority Action, which works with investors to hold corporations accountable, has managed to win attention from shareholders. The group failed to topple Facebook Inc. boss Mark Zuckerberg but helped pressure gun maker Sturm Ruger & Co. into engaging with investors over safety concerns.It’s now trying to persuade JPMorgan not to re-nominate Raymond or else persuade investors to vote against him at the annual board election in May. Even though he left the top job at Exxon Mobil in 2005, the group sees him as intertwined with the fossil fuel industry.

The length of Raymond’s tenure may help the effort to end it. He should have aged out almost a decade ago, but he has received special approval to stay on past the board’s own retirement age of 72. His 33-year run is three times longer than what JPMorgan’s own asset-management arm considers appropriate for independent directors across most of the world.

Dimon is the only top executive to remain at the helm after leading a big U.S. bank through the financial crisis, and he’s the one who ultimately decides how JPMorgan navigates global warming. It had $44 billion of loans out to the oil and gas industry as of the end of September 2019, the most after Citigroup Inc. Those loans accounted for just 4.7% of JPMorgan’s corporate total, a slight decline from a year earlier.

Climate change is already changing Wall Street. JPMorgan’s environmental policy now “recognizes that climate change poses global challenges and risks,” and the firm is expected to discuss environmental issues at its investor day later this month, according to a person briefed on its plans. Joe Evangelisti, a spokesman, said JPMorgan supports the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change and is more than halfway to a goal of facilitating $200 billion of clean-energy financing through 2025. “We continually strengthen our practices and policies around environmental issues, with more to come,” he said.

Last year, in another example of climate concern reaching into high finance, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. pledged to turn down financing that supports new coal mines and upstream Arctic oil exploration. The European Investment Bank, the lending arm of the European Union and the biggest multilateral financial institution in the world, recently adopted an unprecedented strategy to end funding for fossil fuel energy projects.

Things were different when Raymond was a master of the oil industry. He joined Exxon Corp. in 1963 and rose to the top job three decades later. During his time at the helm he cut investment in renewable fuels, pushed countries to unite against emission limitations, and in 1997 said the planet was cooling. The head of Greenpeace’s climate campaign once called him “the Darth Vader of global warming.”

JPMorgan has been a top banker to Exxon for decades and advised on two of its biggest takeovers, including the merger that created Exxon Mobil in 1999 by reuniting two old pieces of the Standard Oil monopoly. Only a few months later, as a board member of what was then J.P. Morgan & Co., Raymond encouraged the merger with Chase Manhattan Corp., according to a person who worked with him. The two corporate giants Raymond helped put together are among the few public U.S. companies to have ever made more than $35 billion in annual profit.

JPMorgan has relationships with other members of Raymond’s family. It has extended credit to an energy investment firm run by one of Raymond’s triplet sons, according to public disclosures, and companies connected to Energy & Minerals Group, a private equity firm run by a second. The third son runs a drilling company in which the four men have owned stakes, according to a 2018 filing. (JPMorgan said it doesn’t comment on specific clients.)

Wall Street’s profits from the oil industry are under more scrutiny than ever. Dimon said at the World Economic Forum in January that climate change would be solved by government policy, not “beating up on fossil fuel companies and banks.” A few weeks later, environmental activists disrupted a talk he gave in Florida.

They’ve criticized his rivals, too. Climate protesters with whistles and drums stopped traffic outside Goldman’s London office in April, and others kept Wells Fargo & Co. employees from entering its San Francisco headquarters in September.

Majority Action’s new effort against Raymond, backed by environmental group Rainforest Action Network, shows there are more targets at big banks than chief executives. “He should be out,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the finance and environment committees, wrote Monday on Twitter. “He lied about climate for years.”

Environmental activist Bill McKibben called JPMorgan’s annual vote “a big slap in the face to anyone who cares about the future.” He was arrested at a branch of the bank in Washington last month while protesting against oil investments.

“There’s a big campaign against Chase,” he said, “and it’s going to get bigger.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/robert-reich-breaks-down-how-oligarchs-are-cashing-in-on-the-pandemic/

no lnx

Robert Reich breaks down how oligarchs are ‘cashing in’ on the pandemic

Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon April 19, 2020

dimon key in

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/robert-reich-heres-how-ceos-are-ruining-america/

no lnx

Robert Reich: Here’s how CEOs are ruining America

Written by Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog April 13, 2020

Today, America’s wealthiest business moguls – like Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase – claim that they are “patriots before CEOs” because they employ large numbers of workers or engage in corporate philanthropy.

Rubbish.

CEOs are in business to make a profit and maximize their share prices, not to serve America. And yet these CEOs dominate American politics and essentially run the system.

Therein lies the problem: They cannot be advocates for their corporations and simultaneously national leaders responsible for the wellbeing of the country. This is the biggest contradiction at the core of our broken system.

A frequent argument made by CEOs is that so-called “American competitiveness” should not be hobbled by regulations and taxes.Jamie Dimon often warns that tight banking regulations will cause Wall Street to lose financial business to banks in nations with weaker regulations. Under Dimon’s convenient logic, JPMorgan is America.

Dimon used the same faulty logic about American competitiveness to support the Trump tax cut. “We don’t have a competitive tax system here,” he warned.

But when Dimon talks about “competitiveness” he’s really talking about the competitiveness of JPMorgan, its shareholders, and billionaire executives like himself.

The concept of “American competitiveness” is meaningless when it comes to a giant financial enterprise like JPMorgan that moves money all over the world. JPMorgan doesn’t care where it makes money. Its profits don’t directly depend on the wellbeing of Americans.

“American competitiveness” is just as meaningless when it comes to big American-based corporations that make and buy things all over the world.

Consider a mainstay of corporate America, General Electric. Two decades ago, most GE workers were American. Today the majority are non-American. In 2017, GE announced it was increasing its investments in advanced manufacturing and robotics in China, which it termed “an important and critical market for GE.” In 2018, over half of GE’s revenue came from abroad. Its once core allegiance to American workers and consumers is gone.

Google has opened an Artificial Intelligence lab in Beijing. Until its employees forced the company to stop, Google was even building China a prototype search engine designed to be compatible with China’s censors.

Apple employs 90,000 people in the United States but contracts with roughly a million workers abroad. An Apple executive told The New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible” – and showing profits big enough to continually increase Apple’s share price.

American corporations will do and make things wherever around the world they can boost their profits the most, and invest in research and development wherever it will deliver the largest returns.

The truth is that America’s real competitiveness doesn’t depend on profit-seeking shareholders or increasingly global corporations. The real competitiveness of the United States depends on only one thing: the productivity of Americans.

That in turn depends on our education, our health, and the infrastructure that connects us. Yet today, American workers are hobbled by deteriorating schools, unaffordable college tuition, decaying infrastructure, and soaring health-care costs.

And truth be told, big American corporations and the CEOs that head them – wielding outsized political influence – couldn’t care less. They want tax cuts and rollbacks of regulations so they can make even fatter profits. All of which is putting Americans on a glide path toward lousier jobs and lower wages. How’s that for patriotism?

The first step toward fixing this broken system is to stop buying CEOs’ lies. How can we believe that Jamie Dimon’s initiatives on corporate philanthropy are anything other than public relations? Why should we think that he or his fellow CEOs seek any goal other than making more money for themselves and their firms? We can’t and we shouldn’t. They don’t have America’s best interests at heart — they’re making millions to be CEOs, not patriots.

Big American corporations aren’t organized to promote the wellbeing of Americans, and Americans cannot thrive within a system run largely by corporations. Fundamental reform will be led only by concerned and active citizens.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-why-the-coronavirus-crisis-is-an-opportunity-to-overcome-oligarchy-robert-reich/

no lnx

Here’s why the coronavirus crisis is an opportunity to overcome oligarchy: Robert Reich

Written by Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog March 29, 2020

The coronavirus has starkly revealed what most of us already knew: The concentration of wealth in America has created a a health care system in which the wealthy can buy care others can’t.

It’s also created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate indifference, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

The system is rigged. But we can fix it.

Today, the great divide in American politics isn’t between right and left. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none.

Forget politics as you’ve come to see it — as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy.

The market has been organized to serve the wealthy. Since 1980, the percentage of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent.

The three wealthiest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population. Big corporations, CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have vastly more influence on public policy than the average American. Wealth and power have become one and the same.

As the oligarchs tighten their hold over our system, they have lambasted efforts to rein in their greed as “socialism”, which, to them, means getting something for doing nothing.

But “getting something for doing nothing” seems to better describe the handouts being given to large corporations and their CEOs.

General Motors, for example, has received $600 million in federal contracts and $500 million in tax breaks since Donald Trump took office. Much of this “corporate welfare” has gone to executives, including CEO Mary Barra, who raked in almost $22 million in compensation in 2018 alone. GM employees, on the other hand, have faced over 14,000 layoffs and the closing of three assembly plants and two component factories.

And now, in the midst of a pandemic, big corporations are getting $500 billion from taxpayers.

Our system, it turns out, does practice one form of socialism — socialism for the rich. Everyone else is subject to harsh capitalism.

Socialism for the rich means people at the top are not held accountable. Harsh capitalism for the many, means most Americans are at risk for events over which they have no control, and have no safety nets to catch them if they fall.

Among those who are particularly complicit in rigging the system are the CEOs of America’s corporate behemoths.

Take Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whose net worth is $1.4 billion. He comes as close as anyone to embodying the American system as it functions today.

Dimon describes himself as “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan.”

He brags about the corporate philanthropy of his bank, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to his company’s net income, which in 2018 was $30.7 billion — roughly one hundred times the size of his company’s investment program for America’s poor cities.

Much of JP Morgan’s income gain in 2018 came from savings from the giant Republican tax cut enacted at the end of 2017 — a tax cut that Dimon intensively lobbied Congress for.

Dimon doesn’t acknowledge the inconsistencies between his self-image as “patriot first” and his role as CEO of America’s largest bank. He doesn’t understand how he has hijacked the system.

Perhaps he should read my new book.

To understand how the system has been hijacked, we must understand how it went from being accountable to all stakeholders — not just stockholders but also workers, consumers, and citizens in the communities where companies are headquartered and do business — to intensely shareholder-focused capitalism.

In the post-WWII era, American capitalism assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. CEOs of that era saw themselves as “corporate statesmen” responsible for the common good.

But by the 1980s, shareholder capitalism (which focuses on maximizing profits) replaced stakeholder capitalism. That was largely due to the corporate raiders — ultra-rich investors who hollowed-out once-thriving companies and left workers to fend for themselves.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, for example, targeted major companies like Texaco and Nabisco by acquiring enough shares of their stock to force major changes that increased their stock value — such as suppressing wages, fighting unions, laying off workers, abandoning communities for cheaper labor elsewhere, and taking on debt — and then selling his shares for a fat profit. In 1985, after winning control of Trans World Airlines, he loaded the airline with more than $500 million in debt, stripped it of its assets, and pocketed nearly $500 million in profits.

As a result of the hostile takeovers mounted by Icahn and other raiders, a wholly different understanding about the purpose of the corporation emerged.

Even the threat of hostile takeovers forced CEOs to fall in line by maximizing shareholder profits over all else. The corporate statesmen of previous decades became the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was to “cut out the fat” and make their companies “lean and mean.”

As power increased for the wealthy and large corporations at the top, it shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.4 percent of them are.

The wave of hostile takeovers pushed employers to raise profits and share prices by cutting payroll costs and crushing unions, which led to a redistribution of income and wealth from workers to the richest 1 percent. Corporations have fired workers who try to organize and have mounted campaigns against union votes. All the while, corporations have been relocating to states with few labor protections and so-called “right-to-work” laws that weaken workers’ ability to join unions.

Power is a zero-sum game. People gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.

The oligarchy has triumphed because no one has paid attention to the system as a whole — to the shifts from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from strong unions to giant corporations with few labor protections, and from regulated to unchecked finance.

As power has shifted to large corporations, workers have been left to fend for themselves. Most Americans developed 3 key coping mechanisms to keep afloat.

The first mechanism was women entering the paid workforce. Starting in the late 1970s, women went into paid work in record numbers, in large part to prop up family incomes, as the wages of male workers stagnated or declined.

Then, by the late 1990s, even two incomes wasn’t enough to keep many families above water, causing them to turn to the next coping mechanism: working longer hours. By the mid-2000s a growing number of people took on two or three jobs, often demanding 50 hours or more per week.

Once the second coping mechanism was exhausted, workers turned to their last option: drawing down savings and borrowing to the hilt. The only way Americans could keep consuming was to go deeper into debt. By 2007, household debt had exploded, with the typical American household owing 138 percent of its after-tax income. Home mortgage debt soared as housing values continued to rise. Consumers refinanced their homes with even larger mortgages and used their homes as collateral for additional loans.

This last coping mechanism came to an abrupt end in 2008 when the debt bubbles burst, causing the financial crisis. Only then did Americans begin to realize what had happened to them, and to the system as a whole. That’s when our politics began to turn ugly.

So what do we do about it? The answer is found in politics and rooted in power.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and form a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything America must do.

The oligarchy understands that a “divide-and-conquer” strategy gives them more room to get what they want without opposition. Lucky for them, Trump is a pro at pitting native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, white people against people of color. His goal is cynicism, disruption, and division. Trump and the oligarchy behind him have been able to rig the system and then whip around to complain loudly that the system is rigged.

But history shows that oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever. They are inherently unstable. When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable.

As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again.

In order for real change to occur — in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves — the locus of power in the system will have to change.

The challenge we face is large and complex, but we are well suited for the fight ahead. Together, we will dismantle the oligarchy. Together, we will fix the system.

jamie Dimon is a (highly selective) socialist

Jamie Dimon (previously) is the Jpmorganchase CEO who committed a $13b mortgage fraud and whose company received $25B in TARP bailout money, $500B in low-cost federal loans, and billions more through the bailout of their insurer, AIG. Read the rest

private prisons, child detention facility & weapons profiteers

As we reported in our last newsletter, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan announced they would stop financing private prisons, in a big win for the #FamiliesBelongTogether coalition and #BackersOfHate campaign. But we’re not stopping the work to expose and hold to account private prison profiteers. In April, along with our friends In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy, we published a new report “The Wall Street Banks Still Financing Private Prisons.” We also participated in a Twitter Chat hosted by our coalition partners Moms Rising to explain the research on private prisons and the banks financing them.

Read the report, "The Wall Street Banks Still Financing Private Prisons"

In our last newsletter, we noted that PAI director Kevin Connor was featured on NPR’s *Morning Edition* discussing the financial profiteers behind the Homestead detention center, a South Florida facility that is holding migrant children. (For more information, read our post on it)

Here’s a new May 27 *Miami Herald*article - also citing PAI - on resistance to the detention center and the power and financing behind it. Because of the growing scrutiny of its role in the Homestead child detention center, Caliburn, the detention center’s parent company, canceled its plans to go public.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/robert-reich-calls-out-jp-morgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-for-dismissing-socialism-while-accepting-government-bailouts-and-championing-trumps-tax-cuts/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/watch-rep-katie-porter-uses-basic-budget-math-expose-jamie-dimon-starvation-wages

During a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Katie Porter used the financial struggles of one of her constituents to grill JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon over the vast worker-executive pay gap and low wages at his bank.

"What I'd like you to do is provide a way for families to make ends meet, so that little kids who are six years old living in a one-bedroom apartment with their mother aren't going hungry at night because they're $567 short."

—Rep. Katie Porter

Porter, a Democrat from California, outlined the monthly expenses of her constituent, a single-mother working full-time as a JPMorgan Chase teller for $16.50 an hour.

After paying for rent on her one-bedroom apartment, food, utilities, child care for her daughter, and other basic needs, Porter estimated that her constituent has a $567 budget shortfall each month.

When Porter asked Dimon—who earns $31 million a year—how his employee should manage this shortfall while working 40 hours a week at his bank, the Wall Street CEO had no answer.

"I don't know, I'd have to think about that," Dimon said three times after Porter asked whether her constituent should take out a JPMorgan Case credit card and run a deficit or overdraft at the bank.

After Dimon said he would like to be "helpful," Porter responded, "What I'd like you to do is provide a way for families to make ends meet, so that little kids who are six years old living in a one-bedroom apartment with their mother aren't going hungry at night because they're $567 short."

"Mr. Dimon, you know how to spend $31 million a year in salary, and you can't figure out how to make up a $567 a month shortfall," Porter said. "This is is a budget problem you cannot solve."

In response to Dimon's suggestion that her math may not be correct, Porter hit back on Twitter.

"Jamie Dimon said he didn't know if all my numbers were accurate," the California Democrat wrote. "Here's the math so he can check."

...

https://thinkprogress.org/stunning-hypocrisy-of-jp-morgan-jamie-dimon-on-climate-change-a3fd2ecfbbbd/

JPMorgan Chase and its chief executive Jamie Dimon claim to be strong supporters of climate action and the Paris climate accord. But in reality, they are “the world’s worst banker of climate change” according to a major new analysis.

Just this week, the company launched a wildly misleading attack on the Green New Deal, asserting that its goals of rapidly decarbonizing the U.S. economy “are not in the realm of the possible.”

According to a report by the Sierra Club and other leading environmental groups, however, JPMorgan Chase has provided a staggering $196 billion dollars in financing for fossil fuels and fossil fuel expansion since the December 2015 Paris Agreement, in which 200 nations unanimously agreed to leave most fossil fuels in the ground.

In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels

Just before the Paris deal, JPMorgan Chase signed a statement with Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and other big financial companies embracing the need for strong action. “Our institutions are committing significant resources toward financing climate solutions,” the statement read.

But since the Paris Agreement, those institutions have devoted $700 billion in financing to fossil fuel expansion, including coal mining, coal power, the tar sands, and oil drilling in remote locations like the Arctic — the very things that are destroying our livable climate the fastest.

In 2017, Dimon also said he “absolutely” disagrees with President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the historic climate deal. However, this week’s report shows that JPMorgan Chase has since become the leading banker of fossil fuels and fossil fuel expansion.

Indeed, the banking report finds that the company is responsible for $1 out of every $10 of fossil fuel financing provided by the 33 major global banks it tracked. JPMorgan Chase’s funding of the top companies expanding fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure ranks in 68 percent higher than second place Citibank.

Both Dimon and JPMorgan Chase have spent this week trashing the Green New Deal, a non-binding resolution aimed at developing a plan consistent with the dire nature of current climate science.

Scientists say Ocasio-Cortez’s dire climate warning is spot on

On Monday, Michael Cembalest, chief investment officer at JP Morgan Asset Management, published the company’s annual energy paper, titled, “Mountains and Molehills: Achievements and Distractions on the Road to Decarbonization.”

The paper criticizes the Green New Deal, claiming it “mandates zero net emissions for the US by 2030 for the entire energy sector (not just from electricity generation), and does so while phasing out nuclear power and relying heavily on carbon sequestration by forests.”

In fact, the Green New Deal is a “nonbinding” resolution, as its leading proponent, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), tweeted Wednesday.

The resolution calls for full decarbonization of the electricity sector alone by 2030, while calling for decarbonization of other sectors like transportation over the next decade “as much as is technologically feasible.”

Meanwhile, the resolution is completely silent on nuclear power, and carbon sequestration is one of many strategies offered.

Despite this, Cembalest concluded this week that the deal’s goals were “not a useful foundation for a serious policy discussion.”

Beto O’Rourke is right on climate, and the AP ‘fact-check’ is wrong

Given JPMorgan Chase’s vast financing of fossil fuels, the world’s worst banker of climate change appears poorly positioned to criticize any resolution that takes seriously the Paris goal of keeping total warming “well below 2°C” (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

In an interview with CNN Tuesday, Dimon was dismissive of the Green New Deal, saying “I don’t spend much time worrying about things I can’t effectuate.” He also questioned the approach, “Can you focus on climate change in an intelligent way that doesn’t damage the economy?”

As an alternative, he offered up a carbon tax.

Dimon, of course, can’t “effectuate” a carbon tax. And the one thing the JPMorgan Chase executive could effectuate — stopping his bank from financing the destruction of the climate — he has chosen not to do.

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/06/hit-me.html

sadly guillotine only artists conception

Jamie Dimon is CEO of Jpmorgan Chase, the massive bank that settled a $13 billion mortgage fraud case with the DoJ in 2013 by committing more mortgage frauds to raise the cash; he has since taken the bank into some of the dirtiest business on Earth, from the loans that keep the Keystone XL pipeline viable to funding the private border prisons where Trump's Kids in Cages are being held, terrified and separated from their families.

Dimon is an infamous money-over-people crook: when Elizabeth Warren caught his bank failing to comply with rules put in place after the 2008 crisis, he smirked at her and told her to "hit him" with fines because the bank could easily afford them, having after the massive profit-taking from their massive frauds.

He's even floated the idea of a presidential run in 2020.

Now, Dimon's smirk is turning to rage, as he finds himself dogged by protesters everywhere he goes: speeches, shareholder meetings, when he comes and goes from work. The activists call on him to divest from the bank's unethical business, which will not happen while Dimon is in command. But in the meantime, they are keeping these issues alive, afflicting the comfortable and ensuring that he does not have a moment's peace while he is profiting from others' misery and the destruction of the planet.

Protesters have targeted Wall Street for years, but criticism at the annual conclave has shifted from the traditional corporate complaints about pay and risk-taking. The CEO is annoyed by the activism that now overshadows the event. “The shareholder meeting has become a farce,” Dimon told clients and employees in Washington in October. “I’m not against social groups,” he said, but the meetings “get hijacked.” A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment.

In September, Breech and climate activists disrupted Dimon’s talk at a hotel in Philadelphia with shouts about fossil fuels. JPMorgan lends to TransCanada Corp., whose controversial Keystone XL pipeline got approval from Trump to carry fuel from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf. Before that, eight people were arrested when immigration activists blocked the streets outside his co-op on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At one point, protesters at the gates to his building halted their chants, called for silence, and played the audio of Central American children sobbing in a detention center after being separated from their parents by U.S. authorities at the border. JPMorgan lends to GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc., which run facilities that hold immigrant families in Texas.

Some protesters don’t just want Dimon’s help, they want atonement. At this May’s meeting outside Dallas, Juleon Robinson of the New Economy Project asked Dimon if Chase would provide reparations for giving less banking access and fewer loans to black and Latino customers in New York. “You seem like a bright young man who is highly misinformed,” Dimon said, before ticking through some of the bank’s philanthropic initiatives.

Occupy Jamie Dimon: Activists Are Chasing the Billionaire Across the U.S.[Michelle Davis and Max Abelson/Bloomberg]

(via Naked Capitalism)

https://www.alternet.org/environment/jpmorgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-needs-climate-change-education

Wall Street's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, just posted record earnings. Its quarterly profit surged 35 percent to an all-time high. CEO Jamie Dimon's take-home pay soared to a stunning $141 million. But while Chase's shareholders and top executives make hay, the climate is reeling from increasing emissions from burning fossil fuels—a trend that Mr. Dimon seems happy to finance.

In one of his precious few public comments on climate change, Dimon condemned President Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris Agreement last June. One year later, however, he seems fully on board with Trump's agenda to "unleash" fossil fuels and resurrect coal. Since Trump's election, Chase has poured more money than any other U.S. or European bank into the most planet-harming fossil fuels. From 2016 to 2017, Chase quadrupled its financing for tar sands and increased its coal mining funding by 2,100 percent.

Chase has publicly committed to supporting clean energy and has a policy to reduce its lending for coal mining (contradicted by its huge spike in financing for the sector last year). Yet when shareholders submitted a resolution for this year's annual general meeting calling on the company to disclose the risks associated with financing tar sands—one of the most carbon-intensive forms of oil—Chase rejected it by saying it would be like asking for a report on whether the bank offices had "carpeted floors."

This rejection is consistent with Dimon's apparent lack of concern over climate change.His recent 47-page letter to shareholders is filled with commentary on current hot-button political issues—spurring Andrew Ross Sorkin to speculate in the New York Times whether Dimon was contemplating a run for president in 2020. But on climate change—one of the most momentous public policy issues of our era—Dimon is almost completely silent, with just one mention in passing buried deep on page 44 of the shareholders' letter.

He made no mention that 2017 was the world's most expensive year on record for devastation from extreme weather events. No mention that last year, Chase's European competitors BNP Paribas and ING adopted policies that sharply restrict their lending to the worst fossil fuels. No mention that if we are to meet the Paris goals—which Dimon supposedly supports—we need to quickly stop expansion and start a rapid phaseout of these dangerous energy sources.

But at least climate change got to play a cameo this year: Dimon's previous ten letters to shareholders did not mention the phrase a single time. (The only allusion to climate change we can find in these letters—supposedly the second-most anticipated by investors after Warren Buffett's—is a reference in 2009 to Chase making money from trading carbon credits.)

Jamie Dimon is a strong CEO. He's famous for having a firm hand on Chase's tiller. So given that its great helmsman appears to be mostly ignorant of—or perhaps just doesn't care about—global warming, it's not surprising that Chase is the worst Wall Street funder of extreme fossil fuels. (Another relevant and deeply alarming aspect of Chase's executive leadership is that its longest-serving board member is none other than Lee R. Raymond, former CEO of ExxonMobil and one of the world's most notorious corporate climate denialists.)

...

no link

former CEO of Citigroup just admitted to a huge mistake.

In an op-ed published in the Financial Times, John Reed says large banks like the one he used to run are now "inherently unstable and unworkable."

The man who was one of the chief architects of the "Big Bank" model now says the United States never should have repealed the Glass-Steagall banking act in 1999.

That's exactly what Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have been arguing on the campaign trail. They want the law reinstated. Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates do not.

As CEO of Citi (C)from 1984 to 2000, Reed was one of the main lobbyists advocating Congress and President Bill Clinton to get rid of the Glass-Steagall Act. It had been in place since the Great Depression, and it prohibited banks from doing both investment banking (Wall Street activities like selling stocks and bonds) and retail banking (checking and savings accounts targeted at Main Street).

But Reed wanted Citi to merge with Travelers Group, an insurance company. For that, he needed the law repealed.

"We were wrong about some things, and others we failed to anticipate," Reed wrote Thursday, the 16th anniversary of the end of Glass-Steagall.

Related: What the heck is the controversial Glass-Steagall Act?

He spells out the two biggest flaws:

Big banks aren't more efficient.

His exact wording is: "One was the belief that combining all types of finance into one institution would drive costs down — and the larger the institution the more efficient it would be. We now know that there are very few cost efficiencies that come from the merger of functions — indeed, there may be none at all."

Big banks have bad cultures.

"The second thing we were wrong about has to do with culture — and this turns out to be very serious. Mixing incompatible cultures is a problem all by itself. It makes the entire finance industry morefragile," he wrote.

Related: The No. 1 'too big to fail' bank is...

Dimon is not afraid of Bernie [vid]

Reed's U-turn on Glass-Steagall comes after another former Citigroup CEO and chairman Sandy Weill did the same in 2012.

Weill suggested that big banks be broken up "so that the taxpayer will never be at risk," in an interview with CNBC.

But many -- including Bill and Hillary Clinton -- are pushing back against the notion that the repeal of Glass-Steagall caused the crisis or made the financial system worse.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM)is now America's largest bank. CEO Jamie Dimonpoints to all the services the bank provides to businesses and countries around the world.

"You need [big banks]," Dimon told CNNMoney's Cristina Alesci. "If you break them up, someone else is going to do it and they will be Chinese. If you think that's going to be good for the future of America, I beg to differ."

CNNMoney (New York)

ref RU solani

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-24-2017/ JP morgan sold bad morts, but said did not when make $, deneid when cost $, then forgave loans that led to zombie foreclosure sometimes years after. jamie dimond timed 100M$ to detroit so not conflict with zombie morts.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-jp-morgan-chase-cashing-private-prisons

JPMorgan Chase, like so many corporations, is trying to have its cake and eat it under the Trump administration. In the last few weeks, it has invested time, public relations' efforts and money in presenting itself as a defender of human rights. But the$2 million Chase pledged to fight racism is a drop in the ocean compared to the potential yield from its massive investment in the private prison system: one of the starkest manifestations of racial injustice in the U.S. today, profiting primarily from the detention of immigrants seeking a new life in the U.S. The DACA cancellation last week will only further boost the huge profit to be made from keeping yet more people under lock and key.

Now Trump has canceled DACA, JPMorgan Chase must decide how serious it really is about this newly discovered sense of social consciousness. For its stance on human rights to have real meaning, the corporation must divest from the private prison system. Taking a real public position might hurt profits, but may help convince critics that the company means business when it comes to standing up for racial justice.

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is increasingly vocal in public about his newfound ethical concerns. He made a very public statement distancing himself from President Trump over Trump’s failure to condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has also described himself as “pro-immigrant”: an opinion that is hard to square away against his roles as a financier, underwriter and bond-holder of private prison corporations like GEO Group and Core Civic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America). Both corporations oversee Immigrant Detention Centers throughout the U.S., many of which house undocumented migrants.

JPMorgan Chase’s investments in private prisons certainly make economic sense: the private prison industry is worth about $5 billion, and the election of Donald Trump has caused the profits of the sector to balloon further. Almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice rescinded the Obama administration’s order to phase out federal private prisons from the criminal justice system.

In fact, the day after Trump won the election, the stock price of Core Civic, one of the largest private detention centers in the U.S., jumped 43 percent as investors clamored to capitalize on the sector’s reversal of fortune after the Obama administration’s sustained attempts to stifle the private prison industry. Perhaps JPMorgan Chase was wringing its hands in the face of such a clear backwards step on human rights in private, but its investments in the sector suggest otherwise.

It’s also important to note that investors like JPMorgan Chase are not simply passive beneficiaries of a grossly unjust immigration system. Their financing actively encourages the private prison sector to grow. Private prison corporations rely on debt financing from banks like JPMorgan Chase to expand their control of the criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems. In turn, the banks generate revenue from collecting interest and fees on CCA’s and GEO Group’s debts.

Not unusual for one of Trump’s corporate cronies, Jamie Dimon is considerably bolder with his words than his actions. Despite being "pro immigrant" and his recent attempts to distance himself from Trump, Dimon served on Trump’s business advisory council, even after Trump’s disparaging statements about immigrants throughout his presidential campaign. Dimon will certainly have been aware of the egregiously offensive rhetoric President Trump used on the campaign trail, and since taking office, the president has been overtly hostile to immigration in almost every form, leading to increases in immigrant detention throughout the U.S.

His reversal of DACA takes this attitude to new heights of inhumanity, as thousands of young undocumented Americans face deportation from the country where they were raised and in which they belong. JPMorgan Chase’s $2 million donation to charity seems a rather anemic response to millions of lives disrupted and families fragmented as a result of a campaign promise made in the spirit of venal self-promotion and self-interest.

Dimon’s behavior suggests that he believes the public and the press can be distracted from his profiteering from human rights abuses through large donations that are frankly minuscule compared to the personal wealth of most JPMorgan Chase senior employees, let alone the corporation itself.

SumOfUs members are working together to demonstrate that Dimon is mistaken. Earlier this year, the former CEO of Uber and the CEOs of Tesla and Disney were forced to step down from Trump’s Business Advisory Council after immense public pressure, including a 100,000 signature SumOfUs petition. Chase is the largest consumer bank in the United States, which means it is particularly susceptible to consumer pressure. If people make their voices heard through public pressure, including shareholder advocacy and grassroots organizing, Dimon will be forced to address these issues in public.

The private prisons industry is a horrifying manifestation of some of the worst injustices in the U.S., and in the rest of the world; it destroys lives, shatters families and sacrifices fundamental principles of human dignity in deference to favorable entries on a balance sheet. It is an often-repeated tenet of human rights theory and practice that when the rights of one person or group of people are diminished, ultimately we are all diminished. Perhaps it is this insight that has inspired JPMorgan Chase’s toe-dip into the water of human rights advocacy. Until it really puts its money where its mouth is, we will have no way of knowing.

Hannah Lownsbrough is the executive director at SumOfUs, an international consumer watchdog.

CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic rebuke of Donald Trump — came within 48 hours of the incendiary August 15 press conference where the President praised some of the participants of last week’s white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But many of the CEOs on these councils had been under heavy pressure to disavow Trump’s agenda of hate and racism even before Charlottesville. That pressure came from grassroots activists.

The Center for Popular Democracy, Make The Road New York, New York Communities for Change, and several other immigrant and worker advocates had led that activist campaign, targeting the leaders of nine major corporations affiliated with the Trump administration. The campaign, working through a web site called Corporate Backers of Hate, detailed the connections between the nine companies and the Trump administration and encouraged people to send emails to both the CEOs involved and members of their corporate boards.

Throughout the spring and summer, the campaign also held protests against the companies, including a civil disobedience action at the JPMorgan Chase headquarters on May Day, where 12 were arrested, and a march to JPMorgan’s annual shareholder meeting, where protestors confronted CEO Jamie Dimon for his company’s financing of private immigrant detention and mass incarceration.

The campaign also worked with a broad network of groups, including CREDO, Color of Change, SumOfUs, and Ultraviolet, to gather petitions calling for CEOs to step down from the Business Council. On August 16, they delivered more than 400,000 petitions collected from across the country to New York City offices of JPMorgan and the Blackstone private equity group, demanding that their CEOs withdraw from Trump’s advisory bodies.

Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman chaired Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum and had personally recruited the group’s 16 members, a cohort of execs that included current and past CEOs from some of the country’s largest firms, among them Walmart, General Electric, IBM, and General Motors. Schwarzman’s firm has become one of the country’s largest owners of real estate, and Schwarzman himself has reportedly developed a very close personal relationship with President Trump, sometimes speaking to him several times a week.

The news earlier this week that the CEO councils had been disbanded brought a quick reaction from Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. The choice that executives made to quit the Business Council, Archila noted, “should have been clear long ago – and because of the tireless and courageous advocacy of those who are affected most by Trump’s agenda, they finally made that choice today.”

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon also issued a personal statement after the councils disbanded.

“There is no room for equivocation here: the evil on display by these perpetrators of hate should be condemned,” Dimon noted, “and has no place in a country that draws strength from our diversity and humanity.”

Archila and other activists are demanding that the CEOs like Dimon go further to reject Trump’s agenda. These execs, she stresses, need “to make clear that white supremacy has no place in this country – and neither do the private prisons and immigrant detention centers that they help finance.”

Daniel Cortés, a member of Make the Road New York who lives in Queens and was part of the group delivering the petitions, says he couldn’t believe the leaders of JPMorgan Chase and Blackstone agreed to join Trump’s business council in the first place.

“I’m glad to hear they’re gone,” adds Cortés. “But they still need to stand up against his hateful agenda that targets people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and women. If they don’t, they will remain backers of hate and they will continue to feel our outrage.”

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is the author of the new report Off the Deep End: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low-Wage Workers.

What exactly does it mean for a big Wall Street bank to plead guilty to a serious crime? Right now, practically nothing.

But it will if California’s Santa Cruz County has any say.

First, some background.

Five giant banks – including Wall Street behemoths JPMorgan Chase and Citicorp – recently pleaded guilty to criminal felony charges that they rigged the world’s foreign-currency market for their own profit.

This wasn’t a small heist. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions every day.

The banks altered currency prices long enough for the banks to make winning bets before the prices snapped back to what they should have been.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch called it a “brazen display of collusion” that harmed “countless consumers, investors and institutions around the globe — from pension funds to major corporations, and including the banks’ own customers.”

The penalty? The banks have agreed to pay $5.5 billion. That may sound like a big chunk of change, but for a giant bank it’s the cost of doing business. In fact, the banks are likely to deduct the fines from their taxes as business costs.

The banks sound contrite. After all, they can’t have the public believe they’re outright crooks.

It’s “an embarrassment to our firm, and stands in stark contrast to Citi’s values,“ says Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat.

Values? Citigroup’s main value is to make as much money as possible. Corbat himself raked in $13 million last year.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon calls it "a great disappointment to us,” and says “we demand and expect better of our people.”

Expect better? If recent history is any guide – think of the bank’s notorious “London Whale” a few years ago, and, before that, the wild bets leading to the 2008 bailout – JPMorgan expects exactly this kind of behavior from its people.

Which helped Dimon rake in $20 million last year, as well as a $7.4 million cash bonus.

When real people plead guilty to felonies, they go to jail. But big banks aren’t people despite what the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court say.

The executives who run these banks aren’t going to jail, either. Apologists say it’s not fair to jail bank executives because they don’t know what their rogue traders are up to.

Yet ex-convicts often suffer consequences beyond jail terms.

In many states they lose their right to vote. They can’t run for office or otherwise participate in the political process.

So why not take away the right of these convicted banks to participate in the political process, at least for some years? That would stop JPMorgan’s Dimon from lobbying Congress to roll back the Dodd-Frank act, as he’s been doing almost non-stop.

Why not also take away their right to pour money into politics? Wall Street banks have been among the biggest contributors to political campaigns. If they’re convicted of a felony, they should be barred from making any political contributions for at least ten years.

Real ex-convicts also have difficulty finding jobs. That’s because, rightly or wrongly, many people don’t want to hire them.

A strong case can be made that employers shouldn’t pay attention to criminal convictions of real people who need a fresh start, especially a job.

But giant banks that have committed felonies are something different. Why shouldn’t depositors and investors consider their past convictions?

Which brings us to Santa Cruz County.

The county’s board of supervisors just voted not to do business for five years with any of the five banks felons.

The county won’t use the banks’ investment services or buy their commercial paper, and will pull its money out of the banks to the extent it can.

“We have a sacred obligation to protect the public’s tax dollars and these banks can’t be trusted. Santa Cruz County should not be involved with those who rigged the world’s biggest financial markets,” says supervisor Ryan Coonerty.

The banks will hardly notice. Santa Cruz County’s portfolio is valued at about $650 million.

But what if every county, city, and state in America followed Santa Cruz County’s example, and held the big banks accountable for their felonies?

What if all of us taxpayers said, in effect, we’re not going to hire these convicted felons to handle our public finances? We don’t trust them.

That would hit these banks directly. They’d lose our business. Which might even cause them to clean up their acts.

There’s hope. Supervisor Coonerty says he’ll be contacting other local jurisdictions across the country, urging them to do what Santa Cruz County is doing.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/california-county-thats-leading-way-cutting-banks-out-its-economy

http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/why-the-shareholder-rescue-never-comes

So far in 2012, Dimon has personally donated to committee members Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Mark Warner, D-Va. In 2008, he gave $2,000 each to Johnson and Shelby.

===

2. Jamie Dimon at Syracuse, 2010

Just two years after the Wall Street-driven crisis left many Americans itching to grab the nearest pitchfork, the JPMorgan Chase honcho was invited to speak [4] to Syracuse students, despite a wave of protests. His speech pretty much alternates between insisting that he’s not like the rest of those banker a-holes and finding new ways to praise himself. He also makes a stab at humor:

“Graduating today means you are through with…the cold sweat of sleepless nights preparing to answer seemingly impossible questions. Well, that’s a feeling we banking executives know pretty well these days – we call it ‘testifying before Congress.’”

Haha! LOL! In 2012, Dimon demonstrated his coolness under pressure bycalmly lying to Congress when questioned about the infamous London Whale fiasco in which billions of dollars went missing from his bank.

Which is interesting when you consider how much lip service he gave to the subject of honesty in his speech, including this gem: “One must be honest with one’s self to be accountable. Shakespeare said it best: ‘To thine own self be true.’” (Dimon evidently skipped English 101 in college, or he would have known that Shakespeare was being sarcastic.) It must be said that Dimon honestly likes being really rich, so in that sense he has remained remarkably true to himself.

JP Morgan chairman and chief executive Jamie Dimon will keep both jobs after shareholders voted in his favour.

US investors meeting in Florida were voting on whether he stay as chairman alongside his position in the other top seat as chief executive.

Shareholders were 32.2% in favour of creating a new chairman, lower than last year when the vote was 40.1%.

Good corporate governance practice in the US and the UK suggests the two key jobs be done by different people.

Last year JP Morgan Chase suffered a $6.2bn (£4bn) loss after trades made by the so-called London Whale turned out to be bad.

A group ofshareholderswere demanding an independent chairman to help protect the bank from future trading fiascos.

Disgruntled shareholders expressed their displeasure at the bank's management however by re-electing three JPMorgan directors to the board with an unusually slim majority.

The three directors were on the board's risk management committee.

hodad:

Jamie Dimon comes to town

Arizona “fusion center” as corporate eyes and ears

On, or about, October 17, 2011 Phoenix Police Department Homeland Defense Bureau (PPDHDB) and Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC) Threat Mitigation Unit (TMU) Detective Jennifer O’Neill was contacted by J.P. Morgan Chase Regional Security Manager Dan Grady (Appendix, p. 2).

According to an email sent by O’Neill to several of her PPDHDB superiors and colleagues, Grady had informed her that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jamie Dimon would be visiting Phoenix on October 18 through 19. Dimon, Grady informed O’Neill, would be addressing approximately 2,000 J.P. Morgan Chase employees at a “town hall” event at Chase Field-- home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, located in downtown Phoenix.

As such, Grady and O’Neill expressed concern over recent events involving “Occupy Phoenix,” an offshoot of the nationwide OWS movement which had officially launched only three days prior, though a series of protests and events that took place October 14 and 15. The launch of Occupy Phoenix coincided with the OWS movement’s “Global Day of Action,” October 15, 2011.

OWS had been launched on September 17, 2011-- largely as a result of public outrage over the perceived undue influence of private financial/corporate interests in public government. J.P. Morgan Chase, for one, was something of a poster boy for financial institutions run amok in the eyes of the OWS movement; the financial group had received $94.7 billion in a publicly-funded “bailout” by the U.S. government during the economic collapse of 2008-2009.

[Note: OWS launched on September 17, 2011, largely as a result of calls to protest corporate greed/influence in government issued by U.S. Day of Rage and Adbusters. The Constitution of the United States was signed by delegates to the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787.

The use of the term “day of rage” is interesting in that protests leading to regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as other major protests throughout the Arab world, throughout 2010 and 2011 (a period popularly dubbed the “Arab Spring”) were said to have occurred on “day[s] of rage.” While it is not clear what the origins of the application of this term to major Arab protests are, “Days of Rage” were first conducted as a series of protests against the Vietnam War, organized by the Weathermen faction of Students for Democratic Society, in October of 1969.]

Aside from this bailout, J.P. Morgan Chase’s true sin in the eyes of many involved in OWS was the fact that the financial service corporation was one of the primary contributors to the subprime mortgage/derivatives crisis that precipitated the economic collapse of 2008-2009. During the years leading up to the collapse, J.P. Morgan Chase had funded a number of leading sub-prime lenders, such as Countrywide Financial Corporation (financed by J.P. Morgan Chase) and Ameriquest Mortgage Company (also financed by J.P. Morgan Chase, in that the bank, according to a 2011 federal district court complaint filed against a number of subprime lenders by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was the lead underwriter of more than $700 million in Ameriquest securities offerings in 2006). As such, while J.P. Morgan Chase was cashing its nearly $100 billion bailout check from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Department of the Treasury, millions...

of Americans were facing foreclosure as a result of sub-prime lending practices perpetrated and J.P. Morgan Chase and other financial groups (such as Bank of America and Citigroup, who also

financed subprime lenders such as Countrywide) which had reaped tremendous profits from the trading of financial instruments derived from

these bunk loans.

In her October 17 PPDHDB email regarding the Dimon visit, O’Neill stated that Grady had given her a detailed itinerary of Dimon’s expected movements during his time in Phoenix (including events at two of the city’s premier luxury hotel/resorts, the Westin Phoenix and The Phoenician). As such, O’Neill stated that both she and then-PPDHDB Critical Infrastructure/Key Resources Security Specialist Geoff Ballentine had examined known online “social networking” outlets utilized by Occupy Phoenix for evidence of planned Occupy Phoenix protests related to the Dimon visit. As stated by O’Neill, “we have not seen anything on social networking that leads us to believe protestors are aware of this event.”

Blog for Our Future [1] / By Richard (R.J.) Eskow [2]

The 147 People Destroying the World

March 25, 2013 |

Can 147 people perpetuate economic injustice – and make it even worse? Can they subvert the workings of democracy, both abroad and here in the United States? Can 147 people hijack the global economy, plunder the environment, build a world for themselves that serves the few and deprives the many?

There must be some explanation for last week’s economic madness. Take a look:

Cyprus: The European Union acted destructively – and self-destructively – when it tried to seize a portion of the insured savings accounts of the citizens of Cyprus. They were telling anyone with a savings account in the financially troubled nations of the Eurozone: Forget your guaranteed deposits. If we need your money in order to bail out the big banks – banks which have already gambled recklessly with it – we’ll take it.

That didn’t just create a political firestorm in Cyprus. It threatened the European Union’s banking system, and perhaps the Union itself. The fact that the tax on deposits has been partially retracted doesn’t change the basic question: What were they thinking?

The Grand Bargain: The President and Congressional Republicans reportedly moved closer to a deal that would cut Social Security and Medicare while raising taxes – mostly on the middle class – without doing more to create jobs. A “Grand Bargain” like that would run counter to both public opinion and informed economic judgement.

Who would impose more economy-killing austerity when there’s so much evidence of the harm it does? Why would the White House want to become the face of a deal to cut Social Security, killing its own party’s political prospects for a generation?

There’s more:

Him again: Washington reporters once again sought the opinion of Ex-Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, a vitriolic blowhard with no discernible knowledge of either economics or social insurance, and then wrote up his opinions on those topics in flattering pieces like this one [3].

Derivatives, the Sequel: Four short years after too-big-to-fail banks nearly destroyed the world economy, as the nation continues to suffer the after-effects of the crisis they created, a Congressional committee moved to undo the already-insufficient safeguards in the Dodd/Frank law.

Within days of a Senate Report which outlined the mendacity, extreme risk, and potentiality criminality surrounding JPMorgan Chase’s “London Whale” fiasco, theHouse Agriculture Committee [4] approved new bills that would legalize trades like the “London Whale.”

Above the Law: The Attorney General of the United States remained silent as the controversy continued over his recent admission [5] that banks like Dimon’s were too big to face prosecution. And yet there were no moves to change either Holder’s policy or the size of these institutions. Politico, the Washington insiders’ tip sheet, ran a piece entitled “Why Washington won’t break up the big banks [6].”

Dimon Unbound: The Senate report also provided evidence that JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, failed to manage his bank’s risk and**concealed** [7]information about its losses from regulators. We learned last week that regulators lowered their rating of Dimon’s bank after chastising the bank’s leadership for management failures that included inadequate safeguards against money-laundering, poor risk management, and failure to separate the banks’ own investments from those of its customers.

Illegalities during Dimon’s tenure as CEO have cost his shareholders billions in settlements and fines. Poor risk management (and additional potential illegalities) cost it another $6.2 billion in Whale-related losses. And yet last week Dimon’s own Board “strongly endorsed [8]” his dual role as CEO and Board Chair, an unusual concentration of power at what is (by some measurements) the world’s largest bank, and commended itself in aproxy filing [9] for the “strength and independence” of its oversight, adding: “The Firm has had strong performance through the cycle since Mr. Dimon became Chairman and CEO.”

All this, in just seven days. Has the world gone insane? What is everybody thinking?

That’s where the number “147″ comes in.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar tried to find out how many people the typical person “really knows.” He compared primate brains to social groups and published his findings in papers with titles like “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.”

Dunbar concluded that the optimum number for a network of human acquaintances was 147.5, a figure which was then rounded up to 150 and became known as “Dunbar’s Number.” He found groups of 150-200 in all sorts of places: Hutterite settlements. Roman army units. Academic sub-specialties. Dunbar concluded that “there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.”

Around 150 or 200 people form a human being’s social universe. They shape his or her world view, his or her world.

That means that 147 people can change the course of history. Not necessarily the same147 people, of course. But the small social groups which surround our world’s leaders have extraordinary power.

Economist Simon Johnson mentioned Dunbar’s Number last week in a column [10] about incoming Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and the new SEC chair, Mary Jo White. “The issue is not so much their track record,” Johnson wrote, “because neither has worked directly on financial-sector policy issues; it is much more about whom they know.”

“If most financial experts you know work at, for example, Citigroup,” added Johnson, “then you are more likely to see the financial world through their eyes.”

Lew is a former Citigroup executive. That mismanaged megabank is also the former corporate home of ex-Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and the current home of Peter Orszag, formerly President Obama’s OMB Director. For her part, White went from prosecuting criminals to defending Wall Street bankers. That was also Attorney General Eric Holder’s profession before he was appointed to his current position.

These are the people who surround our President, our Senators, our Representatives. They talk to them every day. They say, This is how the world works. They say, Everybodyknows these things.

Their European counterparts saw the effects of austerity on the economies of their Union: Unemployment up. Gross domestic product down. Even the deficits, which austerity was meant to reduce, have been rising as the result of these unwise cuts.

But, they say, we know Angela Merkel. We know George Osborne and Christine Lagarde. We trust their judgement. How did the predictably disastrous plan to tax guaranteed savings accounts in Cyprus get approved? It’s not hard to imagine: “Everybody we know” thought it was a great idea.

That’s how it works here in the US, too. Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin were spectacularly wrong about everything: deregulation, the housing bubble, government spending, everything. But we know them.

Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz keep explaining why more stimulus spending is needed. But we don’t know them – not the way we know Larry, Alan, and Bob. Same for Simon Johnson, or William K. Black Jr., or Robert Johnson, or any of the other economists we don’t know very well.

And when we don’t know someone very well, their criticisms make us uncomfortable.

Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” triangulation led to welfare “reform” that’s proven disastrous. His Wall Street deregulation ruined the economy, and his brand of old-fashioned pseudo-centrism is out of touch with today’s political and economic realities. But weknow him.

Bill Clinton doesn’t make us uncomfortable at all.

Investigate Jamie Dimon, or Lloyd Blankfein, or Robert Rubin? But they were our clients, and will be again once we leave government. Investigate them? We know them.

Dimon’s Board of Directors [9] is a case study in Dunbar’s Number. It includes Honeywell CEO David Cote, who was a member of the Simpson Bowles Commission. There’s a retired senior executive with another big defense contractor, Boeing. Together with Dimon, that makes three CEOs who earn their money from government largesse.

The CEO of Comcast is on Dimon’s Board, too. (The media’s leaders are always among the 147.) One seat belongs to the head of one of the accounting groups that overlooked massive bank fraud when signing off on their annual statements. Another belongs to the former CEO of Exxon Mobil.

The “147″ run companies. They also hold fundraisers for politicians – in both parties.

When Senator Obama became President Obama, during the gravest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, one of his first acts was to create a “Deficit Commission” instead of a “Jobs Commission.” Why? Because “147 people” thought that was the right priority. Then he appointed the dyspeptic, unlikable, and uninformed Sen. Simpson to co-chair it.

You see, the “147 people” in Washington’s political and media circles like Alan Simpson. To them he’s not an embarrassment to his President, a paid pitchman for billionaire Pete Peterson’s anti-Social Security jihad. (We know Pete!) To them Simpson’s not an ill-informed and misogynistic bully who taunts women with comments about “310 million tits.” To them he’s Al. They know him. They say he’s a lot of fun when you get to know him.

They really say that.

Then there are the news anchors and journalists who say things like this: Everybodyknows that we need to cut Social Security. Everybody knows the deficit is our most urgent problem.

Everybody knew that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, too.

Everybody understands that the right-wing, anti-government Simpson Bowles plan represents the “political center,” although it’s far to the right of public opinion – even ofRepublican or Tea Party voters’ opinion – on issues that range from job creation to increasing Social Security benefits.

You can’t fit millions of frustrated voters into a social group of 147 people.

When Teddy Roosevelt became President, J.P. Morgan (the person, not the bank) suggested he “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” He was shocked that the new President chose instead to operate outside the Circle in order to create real change. And when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President he brought in new faces, new voices, new ideas. He broke the social circle that had paralyzed government and the economy.

But the circle of right-wing Republicans and corporatist Clintonite Democrats is still intact. That means Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders will keep on promoting the right-wing agenda known as Simpson Bowles until their party loses all its political power at the polls.

It also means that Republican extremism will still be reported with straight-faced gravity.Congressional committees will keep deregulating big banks, the Justice Department will avoid prosecuting them, and their Boards of Directors will keep rewarding their executives. They’ll all keep doing exactly what they’re doing – until the economy blows up again, perhaps with far worse consequences than the last time.

And when the next crisis comes, “147 people” will react to it exactly the same way they reacted to the last one. You can almost hear them now, can’t you? You can’t blame us, they’ll say. Nobody could’ve seen this coming. How do we know that?

Because we asked everybody we know.

See more stories tagged with:

injustice [11],

economic [12],

jamie dimon [13]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/147-people-destroying-world

Links:

[1] http://www.ourfuture.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-rj-eskow-0

[3] http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/lobbyist-profiles/288871-gadfly-amid-the-gridlock

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/wall-street-deregulation-_n_2916795.html?1363804456

[5] http://www.alternet.org/economy/outrage-some-banks-are-too-big-prosecute

[6] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/why-washington-wont-break-up-the-banks-yet-89199.html?hp=t1_3

[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/jpmorganchase-ceo-jamie-dimon-is-accused-of-hiding-data-about-big-losses/2013/03/14/d95d6394-8ce7-11e2-9838-d62f083ba93f_story.html

[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/22/jpmorgan-jamie-dimon_n_2935401.html?1363985622

[9] http://apps.shareholder.com/sec/viewerContent.aspx?companyid=ONE&docid=9180171

[10] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/jacob-lew-mary-jo-white-and-dunbars-number/

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/injustice

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economic-0

[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/jamie-dimon-0

[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/spectacular-rise-and-fall-jamie-dimon-wall-streets-golden-boy

3. Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co. At a recent gathering of the Council on Foreign Relations, Jamie Dimon vented his feelings [11] about a number of things that peeve him, from a federal lawsuit brought against JPMorgan Chase to Obama’s failure to adopt the harmful and misguided Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which, among other things, recommended reducing the tax rate for top earners. Dimon has claimed that his bank did not need the TARP funds bestowed on it by the federal government, but there is no question that today his bank borrows funds more cheaply than smaller banks because of the federal government’s implicit too-big-too-fail guarantee.

Dimon is deploying a familiar scare tactic[12]on the topic of the so-called fiscal cliff. He’s claiming that his company will be forced to cut down on hiring and so on if a budget plan is not tailored to enrich the wealthy. During a recent visit to India [13], he issued warnings to CNBC-TV18:

"I've spoken to CEOs who say, you know, absolutely, we are making decisions to protect ourselves from the ‘fiscal cliff’ and those are like investment decisions and hiring decisions.”

Maybe Dimon’s company would be better served figuring out what happened to the $6 billion that recently went up in smoke in the “London Whale” derivatives fiasco [14].