End Game: Where Are We Now?

END GAME: WHERE ARE WE NOW?

As you’ve read in the previous blogs, we have a severe crisis on our hands.

Trillions of dollars in equity have been stolen, funneled, and redistributed to the wealthy elite. The cost put average Americans out of their homes and out of their jobs. The entire world economy crashed, affecting workers all around the world. And what’s worst of all, the people who did all of this are still running amuck.

The most insulting portion of the financial disasters we’ve seen is that there has been no retribution to those who screwed the system. The executives who destroyed their companies and the investments of millions were able to gracefully resign from the companies, the governing boards often letting them go with millions of dollars. Though they were clear failures at the game of capitalism they were able to lose AND lose the lesson at the same time.

Angelo Mozello, Franklin Rains, Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, and all the other kingpins are still out there. And they aren't just fighting to stay out of jail. They're fighting legislation that would prevent these gimmicks from ever occurring again.

Even though America thought they had won with the election of Barack Obama, who had long and impassioned speeches about Wall Street reform, we were faced with a collection of government officials who came straight from the financial sector. "Government Goldman" became a common phrase amongst the enlightened few who saw the disturbing trend of Goldman Sachs executives going to work for government. A massive conflict of interest scandal was brewing as more and more political power went to Goldman. It's been said by many that they're not a financial firm, they're a political one.

What's worse, these same people who destroyed the financial world are all winning the hearts and minds of a select pocket of voters through their anti-government rhetoric and "free markets" catch phrases. Though they have bought excessive power in Washington, it isn't enough for them until they own it all. They don't want a government who tells them what to do. They want to keep operating the same way that they have been because it's the only way they know how to get rich. And it is a completely morally bankrupt system. The average citizen would never support it. So they need to abolish the government that would protect its citizens from such practices. They need to convince citizens that government is the enemy and that they are the solution.

Tea Parties will not stop. Talk radio will continue to praise "job creators." And a vast majority will still vote for anyone who says they came to Washington to "stop big government." The sad end to this story is that there is still an overwhelming majority who will vote for the interests of these few rich people and not for their own interest, including breathable air, access to health insurance, a tax system that is more fair to the middle class, and tight regulations for the financial sector.

What's the happy ending?

Well, the rich finally faced their biggest problem: no matter how much money they spent in 2012, the people voted. And they voted overwhelming against them.

Most of the candidates in 2012 that the wealthy elite poured the most money into all lost in the election. Karl Rove, the Republican super-genius, had less than a 1% return on his Super PAC investments in commercials. He had spent roughly $100M on ads against the Democrats, the biggest supporters of Wall Street reform. And in states like California, we voted to make the millionaires pay a little more. No matter how much money they spent to try and buy democracy, the people still had more votes than they did. And that will always be a testament to our country and it's ability to protect the interests of MOST people.

We still have a long way to go. But with people like Elizabeth Warren in the Senate to help regulate the financial sector and Barack Obama's continued disaproval of the way the financial sector has behaved we may very well see a new kind of America. Timothy Gheitner is leaving government, Ben Bernanke plans to retire, and Mitt Romney is sure to disappear into the cracks of history, never to be heard from again. We may actually be smart enough as a democratic society to look out for ourselves after all.

But that's only if we keep paying attention.

That's all for this semester. Thank you truly if you've been reading and I hope you've learned a thing or two here at Corporate Welfare. Just remember, the only way a democracy functions is if you use the voice it gives you. Let's not see the same mistakes repeat themselves again.

-Steve

The Douchebag Awards: Lloyd Blankfein

THE DOUCHEBAG AWARDS: LLOYD BLANKFEIN

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“We need to lower people’s expectations.”

The quote you’ve just read is from Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And it’s in relation to the national debt and what we need to do to reduce it. His proposition and the quote that you’ve just read earned him this week’s “Excellence in Douchebaggery” award. His proposition was to get rid of entitlements and his reasoning was that we have to teach people that they don’t deserve any help from Uncle Sam.

What an ironic statement indeed to come from the lips of a $10B welfare baby. Lloyd Blankfein is the biggest hypocrite in the world, clearly, but he’s taken that title to a new low by blaming Social Security and other entitlements as the reason for the debt. It’s not mortgage securitization ponzi schemes or huge gambles on multiple lines of credit going bad. It’s those pesky senior citizens who think they’re owed things like RETIREMENT just because we said we’d give it to them. And so he points his pointy finger at the retired, the reflection of his index shining bright in his absurdly bald head, and said:

“Social Security isn’t going to be there for a thirty year retirement after a twenty five year career.”

This sentiment oddly resembles the sentiments of another prominent politician who just barely lost the election by a slim margin of over one hundred electorate votes (please note sarcasm.) His name, which rhymes with “twit,” was infamously quoted on hidden camera saying that forty-seven percent of Americans don’t take responsibilityfor their own lives. It’s how these big Wall Street superstars think. They say things like this to other wealthy people, and then wonder why the rest of the world hates their guts with a passion. They’re so confused by our reactions because they really do believe that this preposterous bullshit is all true. It’s not their faults, it’s ours.

What Lloyd Blankfein and other big shot bankers conveniently forget to mention is that they were the recipients of the largest hand-me-out in welfare history. They dress it up and call it a “bailout,” but it’s really just a huge injection of cash straight from the Federal Reserve into the arm of Goldman Sachs. Without it, the company most certainly would have failed. And this sum of money is completely the opposite of the Social Security fund, which is at a $2.7T surplus. Even though Goldman got back on its feet and paid back its loan they continue to insist that government assistance in any form is a horrible idea.

I’ve always been under the impression that Wall Street titans are worse than drug addicts when it comes to the compulsive nature of their denial. You listen to Mr. Blankfein make these statements and you wonder “does this douchebag really not see what it’s like for the rest of us scraping by on Social Security?” The answer is: no. No he doesn’t. The interview in question is all the proof you need that these guys are completely obvious to the hypocrisy of their own rhetoric. When it’s you who needs help, you’re a moocher upon society. And when they ask for a hand-me-out, it’s because they’re “job creators.” The only thing that will knock some sense into these idiots is to arrest the ones who broke the law the worst. That would at least be a start. Then the argument would change from “are they really that bad?” to “what do we do with bad people like this?”

 And so a tip of the hat and a flip of the bird to Lloyd Blankfein, sure to go down in the history books as one of the biggest douches of all time.

Weekly Feature!: Financial Gobblers!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I hope all of you are enjoying your turkey/pumpkin and enjoying having conversations with the one’s you love, or trying to avoid them by having the football game on t.v.  Being that this is weekly feature is dedicated to financial heroes, i’d like to take this opportunity to dedicate this article to this holidays mascot: the turkey.  I could fill up an entire blog on people who have had financial “blunders” in the past, but i’d like to pay special attention to on special individual, one who had no disregard for other people’s money and way of living: former Senator of New Jersey, Jon Corzine.  Now who exactly is Jon Corzine, the man who the daily financial put on top of their financial villains list of 2011?  A University of Chicago grad, Corzine worked at Goldman Sachs (in which he was let go) as well as a brief stint as Governor of New Jersey.  However, what put him on the map of my financial turkey list was his position as chief executive of Man Financial (or better known as MF), a commodities brokerage firm.  However, due to risky bets in Europe due to the recession, MF was forced to file for bankruptcy.  This is were this gets interesting.  MF had to claim bankruptcy because, as written by Forbes magazine they simply weren’t making any money.  The way the ran their business was archaic, as they still took orders over the phone when the rest of the world was doing electronic trading.  However, bad business practices aside, the one thing that turned heads all around Wall Street was how, as they were declaring bankruptcy, 1.2 billion dollars of client and employee money disappeared.  Corzine claimed that he had no idea where the money was but everyone speculated that he used that money to pay off any debts that he may have had in order to save himself from hurting his pockets but emptying everyone else's.  Not only did Corzine steal from his employees, but he gambled with money, with little return and caused people their jobs and most importantly he walked away scott-free.  It’s these kind of people, who show no remorse for anyone but themselves that make me have more praise for people like Elizabeth Warren.  Just in case you don’t know who Elizabeth Warren is, check out this article written by a fellow blogger named Steve Thomsen, in which he rewarded her with a “financial heroes” award.  So there you have it, our “financial gobbler” for this special edition of our weekly feature is Jon Corzine, may this award give you great pleasure and keep you away from anymore awards calling you a “financial gobbler”.

Sports Owners+ Taxpayer dollars = New Stadiums?

Let me start off by saying that i’m a bonafide sports junkie.  I wake up and fall asleep to ESPN’s Sportscenter and listen to podcasts on the way to school.  In fact, I have espn.com on my browser tabs while I write this!  That being said, I cannot tell you how frustrated I get every time I hear that a multi-million dollar sports franchise wants to use taxpayer dollars to build a new stadium.  In this article by thinkprogress.org, Travis Waldron gives us five cities that want to use tax payer dollars to help fund brand new stadiums for their teams.  Their argument for doing so is that by the citizens helping fund the stadium, new jobs will be created, thus the economy will flourish.  Call me crazy but, I do not think that the owners have the best interests of the people in mind.  Take for example this article by Scott Keyes, in which the city of Cincinnati had to sell of local hospitals in order to help fund the building of stadiums for the Cincinnati Reds and the Bangles.  Or the city of Atlanta, home of the Falcons, who want to have restorations done to their stadium while there were cuts being made to the education budget.  These kinds of investments are almost all the time more risk than reward.  The stadiums are never done on time and always cost more than originally quoted.  The idea of a beautiful new attraction to your beloved city is always enticing, and there is a great feeling in knowing that your hard earned money helped pay for a brand new stadium.  But what’s the point in trying to help when once all is set in done, you won’t be able to afford a ticket to the stadium you have financially helped build? Or worse, you could end up like the Miami Marlins.

Copyright Laws: Stifling creative minds in the United States for the past 150 years.

I once saw an episode of South Park, in which Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny were being sued by every single musician for copyright infringement.  This episode was created at around the same time that Napster, the big music sharing company at the time was being sued by the music company, spearheaded by one of my favorite drummers, Lars Ulrich of Metallica.  Now at the time I did not understand why sharing music was so bad, and even now, as my Iphone is full of music that I (gulp) found on music sharing websites.  Ladies and gentlemen they were suing Napster because their work is protected by the constitution and its copyright and patent clause.  Our founding fathers’ primary motivation for creating this clause was... “ to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and works.” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 in our United States Constitution).  In other words, under the copyright laws, your work was protected for 14 years and if you were still alive after the first 14 years passed, your work would continue to be protected for another 14 years.  Ideally, this is a great idea as it fosters creative competition and innovation, and brought us many of our inventions that we use today, and allowed to create better versions of what was originally invented.  However, the days in which these laws were meant to create growth have gone in the days of the VCR.  In this paper written by Derek S. Khanna, A Georgetown law graduate, he writes that “Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets- rather it destroys entire markets”.  Nowadays, it seems that you can’t do anything or share anything because you’re at risk of stepping on someone’s creative shoe.  The way that the copyright laws are interpreted in this generation in which we feel like we have to keep up with the Jones’ is actually hurting creativity and growth.  It’s a special type of corporate welfare (and one of the worst types) because the government protects certain businesses and to quote Khanna, “...it is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value”.  It’s not that people have new, creative ideas that will benefit our culture as a whole, it’s just that the minute they have an idea, they just fear that they might get a lawsuit slapped on to their idea.

I understand that one’s individual work should be protected as they worked hard and invested countless hours of time and dedication to create their respective works, but I do not think that the federal government should have the power to police and decide who’s stealing from whom, let alone use taxpayers dollars to help out a select few that can already help themselves.  

The Tea Party: How The Rich Get Stupid People To Vote Against Their Interests

The Tea Party: A Spontaneous Movement?

By Steve Thomsen

If there was one aspect of the election that shifted the vote more than any other, it’s this angry mob of middle-aged white people who are “taking back the country” and are bringing about “the next American revolution.” The self-righteous conviction that they are the few true Americans left is a testament to the fury of the masses. They organized against Obama’s health care bill. They organized against the Democrat’s “Cap and Trade” bill, a bill that taxed CDCs and other carbon pollutants. And, most widely, they organized against Obama himself.

From their perspective, they are a grassroots movement. Every one of them believes that their anti-government rage is the result of a president who doesn’t care about the country, not the talk radio and news organizations they are presently addicted to. But really, this story of the Tea Party ties more closely with the story of financial corruption than almost any other. Because now that we’ve seen how the markets were manipulated to rip the entire country off, we can now see how these evil geniuses then convinced the masses that it wasn’t the rich’s fault. It was the GOVERNMENT spending your tax dollars on wasteful things! Like POOR PEOPLE! And WELFARE! The good hard working (and mostly white) Americans who just want to work a decent day’s wage are sick of paying for the social parasites’ booze and cigarettes. It’s like “Atlas Shrugged,” but instead of John Galt, we have Rick Santelli.

But is this movement really as spontaneous as it seems? Because when you start to see the causal effects of the movement you can trace it all to a handful of people. And when you find out what those interests ARE, you understand why they would fight hell and high water to prevent carbon and climate legislation, health care reform, and a president who has the power to go against their wishes and regulate their industries in ways that are good for the masses but bad for the individual.

We already know that the financial disaster was the result of insanely stupid use of derivatives on the real estate market. While housing prices skyrocketed for a bit, they eventually plunged into the abyss as more and more securities went bad and people who were suckered into sub-prime mortgages started defaulting on their credit. Many people were evicted from their homes, even if their financial institution couldn’t find the paperwork for their loan. The situation was getting really messy really fast.

So Barack Obama, the newly appointed POTUS, stepped up to the plate and introduced the “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan,” which basically raised taxes on upper incomes to help keep these people in their homes and get them out of debt. Well, obviously Wall Street hit the f%#(ng roof on that one. It was such an insult for them to think that it was the hunger of the market to maximize profits at ALL costs that was the problem, or the consequences it had on the free market. It was OBVIOUSLY all those people who didn’t speak the technical language we like to call “law” that were to blame for buying into the traps they themselves had set. How dare they!

So Rick Santelli, a CNBC contributor, went on the air, pointed his finger at America, and said this:

You understand the subtext? “It’s not us! It’s YOU! YOU with your selfish desire for THINGS! THAT’S YOUR FAULT, NOT MINE!”

And so the call for a tax revolution began. But did that demand come from actually people? No, it came from a major cable news network. Even more disturbing, in a few short hours a staffer from Americans for Prosperity said live on the air that he would e-mail everyone on their list to attend the Tea Party rallies that Rick Santelli proposed. That list contained 500,000 names. And there spawn 50 Tea Parties with 30,000 people in attendance. Needless to say, this was an effective ploy.

But the question remains: did CITIZENS really rise up against Obama? Sure, the citizens didn’t HAVE to show up to the Tea Parties. But through a coordinated effort by several billionaires, they DID show up at those Tea Parties. So what’s the real story here? Is this grassroots, or is it something more sinister? Like ASTRO TURF?

Astro-turfing is an age-old political tool used by the wealthy and powerful to get citizens to side with them on legislation. The reason why they need to give the appearance of a citizen’s uprising is because if most of the country new that these ideas were coming from a small group of selfish scumbags, they would never vote for the things they want you to vote for. Like health care, carbon tax, or even public education.

So they carefully brainwash pawns through use of anti-government rhetoric in order to incite the masses against legislation that would keep them healthy and their planet safe. They organize Tea Parties. They build conservative think tanks to lead normal people to believe that the debate is still out on climate change. And, above all else, they convince everyone that everything bad that has happened to our country’s prosperity is ALL Obama’s fault. Even venereal disease and rape babies. (Okay, maybe not, but you get the idea.)

No other effort to brainwash a group of citizens has been more effect than that of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, two mostly conservative  activist groups with a long history. These two organizations have been infamous in holding corporately sponsored “citizens rallies” to help rally people against government legislation on climate change. Because that’s “regulation.” And we all know that regulation in any form, whether it be weapon possession, pollution, or financial products, is straight from the devil. The success these groups have had in organizing Tea Parties has been astounding. All a tribute to the degree of stigma this country feels in the wake of a near depression.

Americans for Prosperity is the key to this puzzle. Its funding comes almost exclusively from one source: Koch industries. And while I could talk all night about this subject (and probably will in a future post) I’ll just say for now that if you don’t know who David and Charles Koch are, than you need to read everything you can on them. Because they are the evil geniuses behind most of the astro-turfing and political contributions through super PACs in this country. The lengths to which these two have gone to buy elections, politicians, and the minds of voters has been unparalleled in American history.

In closing, I encourage strongly that everyone watch this video. It’s about an hour’s length, but it is one of the most important videos I’ve seen on the formation of the Tea Party and the Koch brother’s use of astro-turfing to try and gain political power and continue to pollute on a massive scale.

Oh, and here’s one more thing to keep in mind: Mitt Romney knows these guys very well. Don’t believe me? Watch this:

That’s all for this week. Tune in next time as we continue down the rabbit hole.

Financial Heroes Awards: Elizabeth Warren.

THE FINANCIAL HEROES AWARD: ELIZABETH WARREN

As we have read, there are some seriously screwed up sleezeballs in the world of high finance. And it seems that no one has the courage to keep them in line. With most politicians willing to look the other way at first glace of a hand-me-out, it seems that there aren’t a lot of people willing to wear the big S on their chest and go fight crime the modern way: through legislation and policy that will protect consumers. And that’s why this week we are recommending none other than newly appointed Massachusettes state senator, Elizabeth Warren, for our bi-weekly feature “The Financial Hero Awards.”

Elizabeth Warren is a bankruptcy law expert, having graduated with a JD from Rutgers School of Law–Newark. She’s been a professor and Harvard law school and has also served on. She’s done countless interviews about the mortgage collapse, served on the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP bailout (trust me, she was one of the good ones in this mess,) and was an adviser to Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her whole life has been dedicated to one main concern: preventing the financial elite from completely screwing folks like you and me.

Her rising star shone even brighter this election cycle when she took down Scott Brown, the Republican incumbent senator of Massachusettes. And right on time, too: her relationship with the Obama administration has been a positive one, and their work together has already proven crucial in the world of financial reform.

Elizabeth Warren has been a rumored candidate for the 2016 presidential election. Obviously, it was far too early to start projecting future candidates. But it could happen. She’s popular in the political world and clearly ambitious enough to fight Wall Street. If she becomes the first woman president, a clear irony will occur: that a woman will be the only person with the balls to take on corrupt financial practices.

That’s why we tip our hat to you, Senator Warren. May your work strike effectively against the elite, and may we never have another crash again with your protective oversight over our economy.