Pity the 1%! Billionaires Bemoan Criticism by ‘Imbeciles’
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It’s tough these days being a member of the top 1 percent, what with all the complaints about the widening income gap and tax breaks for billionaires, not to mention the demands of the 99 percent for a little accountability. “It feels lonely…,” said John A. Allison IV, former CEO of BB&T, one of the nation’s top 10 banks, to Bloomberg News.
Or, as billionaire Tom Golisano, founder of Paychex Inc., so delicately put it, according to Bloomberg:
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Even Jamie Dimond, the J.P. Morgan Chase CEO who took home a cool $23 million last year, and John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager, have publicly bemoaned their targeting by Occupy Wall Street and other detractors.
So what’s a lonely, nauseous billionaire to do? Organize!
Enter the so-called Job Creators Alliance (JCA), a sort of one-stop messaging operation, complete with a speakers bureau and media booking operation for those underappreciated fat cats. The group’s 17 featured business leaders say they aim to “shape the national agenda,” according to the JCA website. Read the rest of this entry »
Occupy Oakland, Unions March Together
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More than 7,000 Occupy Oakland protesters, union members and community and faith activists peacefully rallied against Wall Street greed, bank foreclosures and for good jobs yesterday in one of the largest demonstrations since the Occupy Wall Street movement began last month.
The Alameda County Labor Council endorsed the Day of Action and encouraged local unions and union members to take part. Many of the union members who joined in the action took unpaid time off work to make their voices heard. Unions also worked with the city government, the Oakland school system and other employers to make leave arrangements.
Oakland Education Association Secretary Steve Neat told The Associated Press:
All of these different problems—foreclosures, schools closing, attacks on labor unions—they all basically stem from the fact that the top 1 percent and corporations are never satisfied to just make profit. Their profits need to go up and up every year. It’s sort of a realization that a lot of people are having that we’ve all been fighting our own issues, but really, it’s all related, it’s all the same issue.
How Rich Are the Richest? Here’s How
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been proven correct about the wealthiest 1 percent getting vastly richer while the rest of us 99 percent-ers are falling further behind.
Now, United for a Fair Economy parses out just what that wealth really means. The nonprofit economic justice organization notes that the 400 wealthiest families in the United States collectively own $1.37 trillion dollars—a figure that’s nearly incomprehensible. So United for a Fair Economy made that figure real with a list of showing 11 things that $1.37 trillion can buy.
- The richest 400 could pay the mortgages of every house in the whole country for 14 full months.
- The richest 400 can pay off all credit card debt for every single person in the entire United States. Imagine that! No more credit card debt looming over your shoulders!
- The richest 400 can pay for three and a half years worth of gas for every driver in the country.
- The richest 400 households can afford to triple the number of teachers in the United States, then give every single one a $30,000 raise. Teachers are being laid off everywhere, their salaries are being cut, and they are suffering. Teacher-to-student ratios in schools are abysmal. But what can we do about it when so much wealth is in the pockets of so few families?
For the full list, click here.
Housing Bust Caused Deficits, Not Public-Sector Contracts, Study Finds
When housing prices began to take a dive, revenues to state and local governments plummeted. Housing construction shuddered to a halt, creating ranks of unemployed workers who began drawing unemployment benefits rather than paying local taxes on their previously middle-class salaries. The businesses of suppliers and service-providers to contractors were forced into downturn. And many states continued to cut taxes, causing a perfect storm of budget woes for the states.
Yet who got the blame for this economic morass? Public-sector employees and their unions, who have been made the scapegoats for a budget crisis that had nothing to do with them—convenient targets for the right-wing forces that seek an end to unionization in all sectors.
“The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State Budget Deficits,” a new study released today by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California,Berkeley, makes clear the real causes of the state- and local-government budget crisis. Using data compiled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, authors Sylvia Allegretto, Ken Jacobs and Laurel Lucia show that when the impact of the housing bust is added into tables that purport to link public-sector labor contracts with state-level budget crises, public workers’ compensation becomes statistically insignificant. (Study is available here in PDF format.)
Make the Banks Pay Their Fair Share!
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The foreclosure crisis just keeps getting worse. More than 12 percent of residential mortgage loans are in foreclosure or at least one payment past due. Millions of homes have been needlessly foreclosed on because banks have not modified homeowners’ mortgages to affordable levels. On top of this misery, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) funding for counseling to prevent foreclosures has been cut to zero.
Government efforts to hold banks accountable for the “robo-signing” scandal continue. Last month, federal regulators ordered banks to clean up their mortgage-servicing processes to prevent wrongful foreclosures. Federal and state officials also have proposed that the banks pay $20 billion in penalties. The banks have offered $5 billion, but they object to using the money to reduce mortgage principal amounts.
There may be more news to come on improper foreclosure practices by the banks. A new report shows the HUD Inspector General has found more evidence of wrongdoing:
The audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes that sold for less than the outstanding loan balance using defective and faulty documents.
U.S. Income Gap Bad, Wealth Gap Even Worse
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The richest 5 percent in the United States now own 65 percent of the nation’s wealth—making the wealth gap even more unequal here than the already gaping income gap. A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) cites foreclosures and falling housing values as contributing to the devastation of the net worth—the wealth—of millions of U.S. households.
Wealth, or net worth, refers to an individual’s or a family’s total assets, such as bank account balances, savings and real estate, minus total liabilities, such as mortgages, debt and outstanding medical bills. As EPI points out, “along with wages and income, wealth is another key measure of economic security and well-being since it strengthens a family’s ability to withstand job loss or other economic distress.”
As Les Leopold points out, recent debates over workers’ wages have missed the big picture.
Do public-sector workers earn more than private-sector workers? Who cares? This boneheaded question has us fighting over the crumbs. (And the answer is no—all credible studies show that when you account for educational levels, the total compensation packages are about the same.)
The real question is: Why have most workers seen their standard of living stall over the last generation?
Protestors Demand Chase Respect Workers, Homeowners
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Across the country late last week, hundreds of union members, religious leaders, community activists, farm workers and victims of bank home foreclosures protested at 200 JPMorgan Chase branches to demand the bank respect the basic human rights of people to have decent places to live and work.
Large banks such as Chase are flush with cash and protestors demanded the bank declare a one-year moratorium on home foreclosures. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chase has $19.5 billion worth of home loans in foreclosure—nearly 7.5 percent of its mortgage portfolio and more than any other big bank.
“Foreclosures are a plague on families and communities,” said the Rev. Charles Williams, a leader in Detroit’s anti-foreclosure coalition, People Before Banks.
It cannot be in any bank’s best interest to pursue a policy that leaves so many people and communities in ruins—and for a bank like Chase that professes to be a good citizen, tearing families and communities apart is morally indefensible.
AFL-CIO’s Holt Baker: Banks Must Modify Mortgages to Staunch Foreclosures
Brandon Rees, deputy director of the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, is traveling with Holt Baker today and sends us this report.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker is meeting today with two of the Big Banks to discuss the foreclosure crisis and the “robo-signing” of foreclosure documents by bank executives. The AFL-CIO has urged the banks to declare a moratorium on foreclosures and to modify mortgages of struggling homeowners as an alternative to foreclosure. Says Holt Baker:
Foreclosures harm working families who have suffered due to the economic recession, foreclosures harm our communities by reducing property values and foreclosures harm the investors in mortgage-backed securities. For these reasons, banks must do everything in their power to modify mortgages as an alternative to foreclosure.
Banks Foreclosed on a Million Homes Last Year
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Rather than helping working people to save their homes, banks foreclosed on more than 1 million properties last year, which will slow the economic recovery and obstruct job growth, especially in construction.
As NPR’s Jacob Goldstein reports:
…repossessed houses tend to sell at a discount, and this backlog is likely to keep housing prices down.
It’s also likely to mean that home construction crews will largely remain idle. Who would want to build new houses that will have to compete with all those foreclosures coming to market?
Human Rights Day: Workers Ask, ‘What’s Gone Wrong at Chase?’
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Today is International Human Rights Day and hundreds of union members, religious leaders, activists, farm workers and victims of bank home foreclosures are protesting at 100 JPMorgan Chase Bank branches across the country to demand the bank respect the basic human rights of people to have decent places to live and work.
Large banks such as Chase are flush with cash and protestors handed out fliers asking, “What’s Gone Wrong at Chase?” and demanded the bank declare a one-year moratorium on home foreclosures. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chase has $19.5 billion worth of home loans in foreclosure, more than any other bank.
