Posts tagged with 'Nick Baumann'
Weekly Audit: Wall Street Goes to the Movies
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by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a plan that would have broken up the nation’s six largest banks firms into firms that could fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. Even though the defeat reinforces Wall Street’s political dominance, there is still room for a handful of other useful reforms, like banning banks from gambling with taxpayer money and protecting consumers from banker abuses. After looting our houses, banks are now pushing for the ability to bet on movie box-office receipts, and will keep trying to financialize anything they can unless Congress acts.
Wall Street calls the shots
Writing for The Nation, John Nichols details last week’s Capitol Hill damage. Today’s financial oligarchy, in which a handful of bigwig bankers and their lobbyists are able to write regulations and evade rules they don’t like, will still be in place after the Wall Street reform bill is passed. The lesson is clear, as Nichols notes:
Whatever the final form of federal financial services reform legislation, one thing is now certain: The biggest of the big banks will still be calling the shots.
Still worth fighting for
As I emphasize for AlterNet, Congress has made a terrible mistake here, but there is still room for reform. It took President Franklin Delano Roosevelt seven years to enact his New Deal banking laws. It took even longer to reshape public opinion of monopolies when President Theodore Roosevelt took on Corporate America in the early 1900s.
What’s still worth fighting for? We have to curb the derivatives market—the multi-trillion-dollar casino that destroyed AIG. We have to impose a strong version of the Volcker Rule, which would ban banks from engaging in speculative trading for their own accounts. We have to change the way the Federal Reserve does business and force the government’s most secretive bailout engine to operate in the open. And we have to establish a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency to ensure that the horrific subprime mortgage abuses are not repeated.
As Nomi Prins details for The American Prospect, the current reform bill will not effectively deal with the dangers posed by hedge funds and private equity firms—companies that partnered with banks to blow up the economy through investments in subprime mortgages. That means that whatever happens with the current bill, Congress must again take action next year to rein in other financial sector excesses.
The derivatives casino at the movies
As Nick Baumann demonstrates for Mother Jones, banks are doing everything they can to gobble up other productive elements of the economy. The economy crashed in 2008 in large part because banks had used the derivatives market to place trillions of dollars in speculative bets on the housing market. This wasn’t lending, it was pure gambling: Instead of using poker chips, bankers placed their bets with derivatives. But, as Baumann emphasizes, banks are now looking to expand the sort of thing they can make derivatives gambles with. The latest proposal is to allow banks to bet on the box office success of movies. That’s right, banks would be gambling on movies.
Hollywood may be shallow, but it isn’t stupid. It doesn’t want to see the banking industry repeat its destructive looting of the housing industry on the movie business, and is pushing hard to ban banks from betting on movies. But we can’t count on every industry having a powerful lobby group to counter every assault from the banking system.
Taking stock in schools
Consider the unsettling report by Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now!. Gonzales details how big banks gamed the charter school system to score huge profits while simultaneously saddling taxpayers with massive debts that make teaching kids supremely difficult. By exploiting multiple federal tax credits, banks that invest in charter schools have been able to double their money in seven years—no small feat in the investing world—while schools have seen their rents skyrocket. One school in Albany, N.Y. saw its rent jump from $170,000 to $500,000 in a single year.
About that unemployment rate…
It’s not like public schools are flush with cash right now. The $330,000 increase in rent could pay the salaries of more than a few teachers. As the recession sparked by big bank excess grinds on, even the good news is pretty hard to swallow. As David Moberg emphasizes for Working In These Times, the economy added 290,000 jobs in April, but the unemployment rate actually climbed from 9.7 percent to 9.9 percent in March. That’s because the unemployment rate only counts workers who are actively seeking a job—if you want a job but haven’t found one for so long that you give up, you’re not technically “unemployed.” All of those “new” workers are driving the official figures up.
In other words, it’s still rough out there. And likely to stay rough as state governments try to deal with the lost tax revenue from plunging home values and mass layoffs. Nearly half of all unemployed people in the U.S. have been out of a job for six months or more. And while we’d be much worse off without Obama’s economic stimulus package, that percentage is likely to grow this year, Moberg notes.
This is what unrestrained banking behemoths do. They book big profits and bonuses for themselves, regardless of the consequences for the rest of the economy. Congress absolutely must impose serious financial reform this year. After the November election, breaking up the banks must once again be on the agenda when Congress considers the future fate of hedge funds, private equity firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If we don’t rein in Wall Street, banks will continue to wreak havoc on our homes, our jobs and even our schools. Congress must act.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: How Deregulation Fueled Goldman Sachs’ Scam
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and underscored what most Americans have believed for some time: Wall Street has rigged the economy in its own favor, and will stop at nothing—not even outright theft—to boost its profits. What’s worse, Goldman’s scam could have been completely prevented by better regulations and law enforcement.
Goldman’s heist
Let’s be clear. “Financial fraud” means “theft.” Goldman Sachs sold investors securities that were stocked with subprime mortgages and had been cherry-picked by a hedge fund manager named John Paulson. Paulson believed these mortgages were about to go bust, so he helped Goldman Sachs concoct the securities so that he could bet against them himself.
Goldman Sachs, like Paulson, also bet against the securities. But when Goldman sold the securities to investors, it didn’t tell them that Paulson had devised the securities, or that he was betting on their failure. By withholding crucial information from investors, Goldman directly profited from the scam at the expense of its own clients. If ordinary citizens did what the SEC’s alleges Goldman did, we’d call it stealing. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Massey Energy coal costs the environment
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Coal consumption has costs — this week’s explosion at a West Virginia mine, which killed 25, made that clear. Those costs aren’t 
limited to human lives, either. Massey Energy Co., the owner of the West Virginia mine, has not just racked up safety violations but also consistently disregarded the environmental effects of its work.
Black marks on Massey’s record
This week’s explosion is far from the first debacle associated with a Massey project, and past incidents have had disastrous impacts on the environment. In 2000, a break in a Massey-owned reservoir, filled with coal waste, caused more damage than the Exxon Valdez spill, Steve Benen writes at The Washington Monthly. Clara Bingham described the flood of sludge for the magazine in 2005:
“The gooey mixture of black water and coal tailings traveled downstream through Coldwater and Wolf creeks, and later through the river’s main stem, Tug Fork. Ten days later, an inky plume appeared in the Ohio River. On its 75-mile path of destruction, the sludge obliterated wildlife, killed 1.6 million fish, ransacked property, washed away roads and bridges, and contaminated the water systems of 27,623 people.”
A year later, another 30,000 gallons of sludge poured into a river in Madison, WV, “with nary a peep from Massey,” Kevin Connor points out at AlterNet.
Weekly Pulse: WV Mine Had Over 1300 Health and Safety Violations
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Massey Energy’s Disregard for Safety
A massive explosion ripped through the Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia on Monday, killing 25 miners and leaving 6 others missing and presumed dead. The mine had an egregious record of health and safety violations. Peter Rothberg of The Nation writes:
The US Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the mine for 1,342 safety violations from 2005 through Monday for a total of $1.89 million in proposed fines, according to federal records. The company has contested 422 of those violations, totaling $742,830 in proposed penalties, according to federal officials. Massey Energy is actively contesting millions of dollars of fines for safety violations at its West Virginia coal mine where disaster struck yesterday afternoon.
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reports that company that owns the mine, Massey Energy, has been fined over $400,000 this year for allowing flammable gas and coal dust to build up inside the mine. Investigators suspect that just such a buildup caused the blast. Aaron Weiner of the Washington Independent observed that Massey’s website was trumpeting 2009 as “another record setting year for safety.”
This week’s blast was a tragic illustration a longstanding problem. Jeff Biggers, himself a coal miner’s grandson, writes in AlterNet that all mine safety laws are “written in in the blood of coal miners.” Over 104,000 workers have died in America’s coal mines over the industry’s history. Furthermore:
Three coal miners still die daily from black lung disease–one of the most flagrant safety issues and scandals overlooked in our nation.
Weekly Pulse: Pelosi Makes Her Move; Republican Rep. Calls for Coup
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has laid out a strategy to pass health care reform in the next couple of days by allowing the House to vote on the details of the reconciliation package instead of the Senate bill itself. As usual, progressives are fretting that winning will make them look bad. On the other hand, conservatives are baying for blood and calling for revolution.
‘Deem and pass’
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones discusses the parliamentary tactic known as “deem and pass” (D&P), which House Democrats plan to use to avoid voting for the Senate bill before the Senate fixes the bill through reconciliation. The House doesn’t want to sign a blank check. If the health care bill passes the House first, there’s no guarantee that the Senate will make the fixes as promised. (more…)
Weekly Audit: House Bank Bill Fatally Flawed
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Last week, the House of Representatives finally approved a financial regulatory overhaul and President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to address the unemployment crisis. Both are a step in the right direction, but neither offer effective solutions to problems that still plague the U.S. economy.
The House bill doesn’t do away with too-big-to-fail banks and that’s a big problem. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, “the big banks aren’t going to get sidelined—let alone broken up—anytime soon.” Instead of splitting large, risky banks into smaller firms that could fail without wreaking economic havoc, the House bill gives regulators more power, including the ability to bail out a faltering bank with billions of taxpayer dollars. When push comes to shove, regulators are not going to risk letting a major bank fail. They’ll just bail the company out. We all saw what happened when Lehman Brothers collapsed last year.
By imposing a tougher set of rules on banks, it’s conceivable that regulators could prevent some future failures. But as Mary Kane notes for The Washington Independent, Congress carved so many loopholes in the new laws that banks will have little trouble skirting them.
Obama had hoped to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to crack down on predatory lending, but a coalition of bank-friendly Democrats pushed through amendments that significantly weaken it. Obama wanted states to have the power to enforce stronger rules on predatory lending. Under a loophole that Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) pressed into the House bill, states are prevented from writing or enforcing rules that limit interest rates charged by credit card companies and payday lenders. That’s a really destructive move, Kane notes, since it was state regulators, not federal regulators, who cracked down on abusive lending over the past decade.
Obama also hoped to require that risky derivatives transactions would be conducted via exchange like ordinary stock trades. Derivatives are the type of trades that brought down AIG. But the House bill exempts a huge portion of transactions from this requirement and changes the definition of “exchange” to include private, unregulated derivatives trades, as Nick Baumann explains for Mother Jones. This is a fatal flaw in the regulatory overhaul. Derivatives are the primary technique that banks use to make themselves too-big-to-fail. Over 95% of the $290 trillion derivatives market is housed at just five banks. These derivatives tie the bank to other financial firms in a complicated web of risk that is impossible for regulators to navigate. If one of those five banks goes down, there’s no way a regulator can predict the consequences.
The only hope for meaningful reform right now rests in the Senate, which is considering a much tougher bill than what the House approved. But the Senate has yet to even conduct mark-up hearings on its legislation and the pressure from the banking lobby is going to be enormous. Progressives have to keep pushing for a better bill if we want to protect our economy from the abuses that brought on the current recession.
And while huge federal bailouts for banking giants like Citigroup and Bank of America have helped the financial sector recover, the broader economy is battling the highest unemployment levels since the early Reagan era. Things are poised to get a lot worse. As Daniela Perdomo emphasizes for AlterNet, a full 3.2 million workers will lose their unemployment benefits by the end of March 2010. Even if the unemployment rate stays where it is—and Perdomo notes that a vast majority of experts think its going to go higher—the impact on ordinary people is going to be even more severe than today’s nightmare.
In a blog post for Working In These Times, Roger Bybee highlights a piece by Harvard University Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, who emphasizes the hardships faced by ordinary families. The statistics are grim—one-eighth of Americans are on food stamps, one-eighth cannot pay their mortgages and 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.
We need to take serious steps to get people back to work. Mass unemployment means that consumers don’t spend money, which means that companies don’t sell as much, which makes companies lay off more workers to cut costs. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. The market can’t fix unemployment without help.
So Obama’s Dec. 8 speech announcing a new job-creation plan was a welcome event. But the concrete aspects of Obama’s plan are not effective. All the tax cuts in the world won’t necessarily put people back to work. Obama did endorse a public jobs plan which involved the government hiring people to improve the nation’s infrastructure and clean up communities ravaged by the economic crisis, but he shied away from any specific numbers.
As David Roberts explains for Grist, Obama’s willingness to sign off on a $23 billion program for environmentally friendly home renovations is a step in the right direction. The plan is being referred to as “cash-for-caulkers” and is modeled on the very successful cash-for-clunkers program. The government will pay people to increase the energy efficiency of their homes, helping people cut down on utility bills and increasing the demand for construction labor and products like new windows and doors. It’s a good idea. But if all we get are tax cuts and $23 billion for greener homes, the jobs bill is not going to assuage the unemployment crisis.
There is no reason to be concerned about the cost of a thorough jobs program. Taxpayers committed trillions of dollars to help the financial sector weather the economic storm. Anybody who is worked up about the prospect of spending money on jobs should read Amitabh Pal’s piece for The Progressive. A modest tax on speculative trades of stock and derivatives could easily raise $150 billion a year to finance a robust jobs program.
At this point in the economic downturn, the government needs to take much stronger steps to rein in Wall Street and create jobs. We know what needs to be done to protect the economy from risky banking and we can afford to fix the unemployment crisis. All we need is the political will.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.