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Walmart, for Victory!
WHY CLINTON AND (JEBTHRO) BUSH ARE NOW IN THE POCKETS OF WALMART, CHEVRON AND GOLDMAN SACHS
FRI, 7/17/2015 - BY PAUL LEWIS AND WILL TUCKER
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE GUARDIAN (Link below)
EXCERPT...
Disclosures to the Federal Election Commission reveal how lobbyists for Walmart, Chevron, Facebook and Goldman Sachs have been acting as fundraising captains for Clinton and Bush, bundling donations to channel to the two frontrunners.
CONTINUED...
Clinton and Bush campaign war chests filled with help of corporate lobbyists
Analysis of FEC documents reveal scale of donations from lobbyists including Walmart and Goldman Sachs, which could pay dividends after the election
FTNTTC: Walmart is where Big Money is. Its example precisely shows the concentration of capital over the past 36 years. While Walmart isn't the only corporation in the article and links, its example tells the story of government since Reagan and Trickle Down Voodoo Economics, where policies in Washington benefit the rich over everyone else, including the capital created by the labor of the many flooding into the pockets of the few at the top. They use small fractions of pennies on the dollar to buy the influence needed to keep it that way.
62 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
What I hope you'd take away:
What is the only business named in the entire Constitution?
After all, it's just Walmart workers. I'll bet they don't even belong to the Club!
Here's more Old News:
Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us
Wealthiest 20 people own more wealth than half the American population
BY CHUCK COLLINS AND JOSH HOXIE
Institute for Policy Studies-IPS, DECEMBER 1, 2015.
This report exposes the extreme wealth concentrated within the fortunes of the 400 wealthiest Americans and compares this wealth to the much more meager assets of several different segments of American society.
The report proposes several solutions to close the growing gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of the country. These policies include closing offshore tax havens and billionaire loopholes in the tax code that the wealthy exploit to hide their wealth.
The report also proposes a direct tax on wealth to break up the concentration of wealth and generate trillions of dollars in new revenue to invest in wealth building opportunities for working families.
SNIP...
KEY FINDINGS:
* America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet – now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households.
* The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population – plus more than a third of the Latino population – combined.
* The wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States. Among the Forbes 400, just 2 individuals are African American – Oprah Winfrey and Robert Smith.
* The wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino population. Just five members of the Forbes 400 are Latino including Jorge Perez, Arturo Moreno, and three members of the Santo Domingo family.
* With a combined worth of $2.34 trillion, the Forbes 400 own more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the country combined, a staggering 194 million people.
* The median American family has a net worth of $81,000. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 36 million of these typical American families. That’s as many households in the United States that own cats.
We believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration. The growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza/
Honestly, how many people know the Waltons were enriched by the policies of the first Bush, the first Clinton, the second Bush and now the Obama administrations? Not many, from what I can tell.
It didn't work so well. 
Let's ask Phil Gramm and his employees Bill Clinton and George W Bush over at UBS.
After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm immediately found a job at Swiss bank UBS as its Vice Chairman. Gramm today works in the Wealth Management department, where he brought on, among others, former President Bill Clinton, former pretzeldent George W Bush and one James Carville. They work in Wealth Management:
See for you'self.
It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool
SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool
SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
Who would have thought President Clinton and Sen. Gramm -- the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagall -- would work together in Wealth Management at a Swiss bank?
Since the New Deal, Glass-Steagall had protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino by law. After its repeal, the US taxpayer got put on the hook for, among other things, the most recent $16 trillion Wall Street bailout.
In September 2008 on DU2 I described the situation: Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.
Those interested may also enjoy what Robert Scheer thinks about Phil Gramm.
https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html
Until the Panama Papers, this information wasn't much interest to the USA's "news media." They don't like to disturb their owners and operators any more than they have to.
The majority of voters do not buy your arguments. We had an election; you lost.
Time to move on. The Hillary-bashing will be coming to a close on the DU in a very short while.
The Republic, Justice and Democracy depend on Truth. Something you should know about the effects of money thereupon:
$5 BILLION IN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BOUGHT WALL STREET FREEDOM FROM REGULATION, RESTRAINT, REPORT FINDS
Steps to Financial Cataclysm Paved with Industry Dollars
March 4 - The financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report issued today by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation.
The report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," shows that, from 1998-2008, Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.725 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, a financial juggernaut aimed at undercutting federal regulation. Nearly 3,000 officially registered federal lobbyists worked for the industry in 2007 alone. The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory subprime lending.
"The report details, step-by-step, how Washington systematically sold out to Wall Street," says Harvey Rosenfield, president of the Consumer Education Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization. "Depression-era programs that would have prevented the financial meltdown that began last year were dismantled, and the warnings of those who foresaw disaster were drowned in an ocean of political money. Americans were betrayed, and we are paying a high price -- trillions of dollars -- for that betrayal."
"Congress and the Executive Branch," says Robert Weissman of Essential Information and the lead author of the report, "responded to the legal bribes from the financial sector, rolling back common-sense standards, barring honest regulators from issuing rules to address emerging problems and trashing enforcement efforts. The progressive erosion of regulatory restraining walls led to a flood of bad loans, and a tsunami of bad bets based on those bad loans. Now, there is wreckage across the financial landscape."
12 Key Policy Decisions Led to Cataclysm
Financial deregulation led directly to the current economic meltdown. For the last three decades, government regulators, Congress and the executive branch, on a bipartisan basis, steadily eroded the regulatory system that restrained the financial sector from acting on its own worst tendencies. "Sold Out" details a dozen key steps to financial meltdown, revealing how industry pressure led to these deregulatory moves and their consequences:
Financial Sector Political Money and 3000 Lobbyists Dictated Washington Policy
During the period 1998-2008:
The betrayal was bipartisan: about 55 percent of the political donations went to Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats, primarily reflecting the balance of power over the decade. Democrats took just more than half of the financial sector's 2008 election cycle contributions.
The financial sector buttressed its political strength by placing Wall Street expatriates in top regulatory positions, including the post of Treasury Secretary held by two former Goldman Sachs chairs, Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson.
Financial firms employed a legion of lobbyists, maintaining nearly 3,000 separate lobbyists in 2007 alone.
These companies drew heavily from government in choosing their lobbyists. Surveying 20 leading financial firms, "Sold Out" finds 142 of the lobbyists they employed from 1998-2008 were previously high-ranking officials or employees in the Executive Branch or Congress.
* * *
Essential Information is a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that seeks to curb excessive corporate power. The Consumer Education Foundation is a California-based nonprofit that supports measures to prevent losses to consumers.
SOURCE: http://www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm
Steps to Financial Cataclysm Paved with Industry Dollars
March 4 - The financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report issued today by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation.
The report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," shows that, from 1998-2008, Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.725 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, a financial juggernaut aimed at undercutting federal regulation. Nearly 3,000 officially registered federal lobbyists worked for the industry in 2007 alone. The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory subprime lending.
"The report details, step-by-step, how Washington systematically sold out to Wall Street," says Harvey Rosenfield, president of the Consumer Education Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization. "Depression-era programs that would have prevented the financial meltdown that began last year were dismantled, and the warnings of those who foresaw disaster were drowned in an ocean of political money. Americans were betrayed, and we are paying a high price -- trillions of dollars -- for that betrayal."
"Congress and the Executive Branch," says Robert Weissman of Essential Information and the lead author of the report, "responded to the legal bribes from the financial sector, rolling back common-sense standards, barring honest regulators from issuing rules to address emerging problems and trashing enforcement efforts. The progressive erosion of regulatory restraining walls led to a flood of bad loans, and a tsunami of bad bets based on those bad loans. Now, there is wreckage across the financial landscape."
12 Key Policy Decisions Led to Cataclysm
Financial deregulation led directly to the current economic meltdown. For the last three decades, government regulators, Congress and the executive branch, on a bipartisan basis, steadily eroded the regulatory system that restrained the financial sector from acting on its own worst tendencies. "Sold Out" details a dozen key steps to financial meltdown, revealing how industry pressure led to these deregulatory moves and their consequences:
1. In 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited the merger of commercial banking and investment banking.
2. Regulatory rules permitted off-balance sheet accounting -- tricks that enabled banks to hide their liabilities.
3. The Clinton administration blocked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating financial derivatives -- which became the basis for massive speculation.
4. Congress in 2000 prohibited regulation of financial derivatives when it passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
5. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 adopted a voluntary regulation scheme for investment banks that enabled them to incur much higher levels of debt.
6. Rules adopted by global regulators at the behest of the financial industry would enable commercial banks to determine their own capital reserve requirements, based on their internal "risk-assessment models."
7. Federal regulators refused to block widespread predatory lending practices earlier in this decade, failing to either issue appropriate regulations or even enforce existing ones.
8. Federal bank regulators claimed the power to supersede state consumer protection laws that could have diminished predatory lending and other abusive practices.
9. Federal rules prevent victims of abusive loans from suing firms that bought their loans from the banks that issued the original loan.
10. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expanded beyond their traditional scope of business and entered the subprime market, ultimately costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
11. The abandonment of antitrust and related regulatory principles enabled the creation of too-big-to-fail megabanks, which engaged in much riskier practices than smaller banks.
12. Beset by conflicts of interest, private credit rating companies incorrectly assessed the quality of mortgage-backed securities; a 2006 law handcuffed the SEC from properly regulating the firms.
Financial Sector Political Money and 3000 Lobbyists Dictated Washington Policy
During the period 1998-2008:
* Commercial banks spent more than $154 million on campaign contributions, while investing $363 million in officially registered lobbying:
* Accounting firms spent $68 million on campaign contributions and $115 million on lobbying;
* Insurance companies donated more than $218 million and spent more than $1.1 billion on lobbying;
* Securities firms invested more than $504 million in campaign contributions, and an additional $576 million in lobbying. Included in this total: private equity firms contributed $56 million to federal candidates and spent $33 million on lobbying; and hedge funds spent $32 million on campaign contributions (about half in the 2008 election cycle).
The betrayal was bipartisan: about 55 percent of the political donations went to Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats, primarily reflecting the balance of power over the decade. Democrats took just more than half of the financial sector's 2008 election cycle contributions.
The financial sector buttressed its political strength by placing Wall Street expatriates in top regulatory positions, including the post of Treasury Secretary held by two former Goldman Sachs chairs, Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson.
Financial firms employed a legion of lobbyists, maintaining nearly 3,000 separate lobbyists in 2007 alone.
These companies drew heavily from government in choosing their lobbyists. Surveying 20 leading financial firms, "Sold Out" finds 142 of the lobbyists they employed from 1998-2008 were previously high-ranking officials or employees in the Executive Branch or Congress.
* * *
Essential Information is a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that seeks to curb excessive corporate power. The Consumer Education Foundation is a California-based nonprofit that supports measures to prevent losses to consumers.
SOURCE: http://www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm
Rather than paying their corrupt arses billions in bonuses, We the People should put them behind bars. Bill Black knows who and how.
PS: Thomas Frank is a sage. Thank you for also bringing up Gilens and Page in PDF, Agony. For some reason, the talking heads either miss or ignore that report. DU stands among the few places around that bring up information essential to Democracy.
"Populist rhetoric, many say, is good politics-but doesn't portend an assault on the rich" (Politico April 15, 2015)
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clintons-wall-street-backers-we-get-it-117017
