Okay, Rihanna, Dimon, and Hillary are truly an odd combination. And I'm not referring to some kind of very strange fundraising event trio, but to a new video inspired by the divide in the Democratic Party, and in our country, over how we should view the titans on Wall Street. It's our light answer to all those politicians and groups who think Wall Street bankers should be coddled: We say that not only should they not be coddled, their arrogance should be poked, parodied, and prosecuted. We are truly delighted that we get to release this video the same day as the Jamie Dimon holiday card, which sent such a profoundly wonderful message about Dimon's unbridled arrogance.
There is a fundamental disagreement over approaches to the Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins of the world, and one approach, exemplified by a recent speech by Hillary Clinton's recent speech to Goldman Sachs' execs helped inspire (if you can call it that) the opposite approach from an organization I chair, American Family Voices. Partly inspired by one settlement after another where Jamie Dimon has sweet-talked prosecutors into no-criminal-prosecution settlements of things which were clearly criminal (the JPM settlements were by far the biggest in history money wise, which is a good thing, but so inadequate in so many ways they still are disappointing), and partly inspired by Hillary's warm and friendly speech about Wall Street, we are putting out a parody of Rihanna's video "Diamonds," turning it into the story of that jewel of a guy Jamie Dimon -- we think it is just the kind of hard-hitting and funny satire he and JP Morgan Chase so desperately deserve.
The more than 220 workers who have been locked out of their jobs at a Kellogg’s® Memphis, Tenn., plant since October are receiving international solidarity from workers around the world, and support and holiday cheer from fellow Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Miller (BCTGM) members.
The BCTGM Local 252G members who make Frosted Flakes®, Froot Loops® and other breakfast favorites were locked out as part of the drive by the $14 billion company to replace steady, middle-class, full-time jobs with casual part-time employees who would make significantly lower wages and substandard benefits.
A just-posted petition by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) says:
The Memphis workers and their union are battling for the future of the next generation of Kellogg's workers and for the defense of negotiated standards against the expansion of disposable jobs.
What would you do if someone called you a whore? What if that person was referring to your co-worker, your wife, your sister or even your daughter?
In Rhode Island, a group of teachers, nurses and other union women know exactly what that feels like. After organizing a protest outside a political event, they were labeled "Hags," "Cockroaches" and "W-H-O-R-E-S" by WPRO radio personality John DePetro.
Carl Davidson
Author and Writer, Beaver County Blue
My home town of Aliquippa once hosted one of the largest steel mills in the world. Now, after the shutdowns and job exporting of the 1980s, it has one of the largest 'brownfields' in the world. That's seven miles of highly polluted empty land along the Ohio, It's hard even for weeds to grow there.
So Aliquippa had the good luck Dec 24, Christmas Eve, to be on the receiving end of a $3 million grant from the state to help clean it up, in order to prepare for new industry. Most people praised our Mayor, Dwan Walker, for helping it along. But not some, such as one letter-writer in our local paper who asserted that retirees of the 'greedy union' should clean it up, since they made the mess and 'profited' from it.
The notion of 'greedy unions' tells us all we need to know about this guy.
The workers at this steel mill and others earned every cent they got, and then produced the profits for the bosses as well. Where do you think wealth comes from? And some paid a heavier price--I had a grandfather and a cousin killed there.
I'm speculating here, but as we approach year's end, I assume that Grover Norquist hasn't been visited by Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future and found spiritual redemption. Nonetheless, I'm betting that Grover Norquist feels pretty good. Just not in a Santa Claus kind of way; more like one of those evil geniuses in bad movies who rubs his hands together and cackles, "At last, my plan is working!"
Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, is infamous for his expressed desire to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." And even though the new budget deal takes a feeble swipe at sequestration and the indiscriminate slashing of government funds, his wish may be coming true.
This thought springs from recent indications that what little power the government still has to regulate campaign finance donations -- already whittled to a minimum by Citizens United and other court decisions -- is being steadily eroded by funding cutbacks, intimidation, bureaucracy and an inability or refusal to enforce the few rules we have left.
In 2012, the Federal Communications Commission announced that commercial TV stations in the top50 US media markets had to make available on line data about who was paying for political advertising and how much was being paid, with the idea that this would become a requirement across the country in 2014.
Three days after Christmas, unemployment benefits end for 1.3 million people who have exhausted their state unemployment benefits, but still can't find a job.
To be eligible for unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for a job. Virtually all of these people would rather work, but can't find a job in today's economy where there are three applicants for every job available.
But when the budget deal was negotiated in Congress over the last several weeks, Republican negotiators refused to agree to continue those unemployment benefits. And at the same time, they demanded the continuation of tax breaks for big oil companies and loopholes for Wall Street billionaires who get their income from hedge funds.
Merry Christmas from the GOP.
Of course this kind of Christmas cheer comes from the same gang that routinely drags out the well-worn charge that progressives and Democrats are engaging in a "war on Christmas." Maybe someone should force Republican Members of Congress to sit through a showing of "A Christmas Carol" and then explain why they think Ebenezer Scrooge is the hero.
I’ll start with a brief bio. I’m newly retired. Social Security leaves me a couple hundred dollars short each month, so I plan to apply for the SNAP program – that is, for food stamps.
The instinct of some to condemn SNAP participants as freeloaders or criminals is troubling. I’m neither. I have a Master’s degree in Computer Information Science. I taught for over 20 years at various institutions of higher education. The lack of a doctorate cost me jobs, though, and now causes me to have to rely on food stamps to supplement my income.
Despite millions of SNAP participants having stories like mine, we’re seeing a trend. When the poor or middle class object to preferential treatment for the rich, it's called class warfare. But when the very-well-to-do refer to food stamp recipients as welfare queens, it’s okay.
Caricatures of food stamp phonies created by conservative media are bogus. Here’s the reality. On average, an individual receives about $133 per month in food stamps. That works out to about $4 per day. As the Baltimore Sun put it, Blow it on a frappuccino, and that's one less day's food.
Any government action that discourages fraud is, of course, worthwhile. But there's no evidence SNAP is out of control. It helps feed more than 40 million Americans at an annual cost of $64 billion, or about $1,600 per person per year. That’s hardly exorbitant. Rather, it emphasizes the hardships created by the worst recession in several decades.
Today’s jobless workers face new discriminatory barriers to finding work in a broken economy. Some employers won’t consider out-of-work applicants for job openings. And more and more employers run credit checks, leaving long-term jobless workers, who have likely fallen far behind in their bills and seen their credit scores tank, on the streets.
Last week Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced a billto stop employers from requiring prospective employees to disclose their credit history or disqualifying applicants based on a poor credit rating. Says Warren:
Families have not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and too many Americans are still searching for jobs. This is about basic fairness—let people compete on the merits, not on whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills.
Bill Moyers
Author, Television Documentary Journalist
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and -- in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular -- the defense of a free press.
Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”
Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.”
Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. You won’t find any of them in this latest annual list of America’s most avaricious. You will find wheelers and dealers and even a candy store heiress.
The headlines haven’t been particularly kind to America’s most relentlessly greedy over the past year. In just the last month alone, the world’s two most visible religious leaders — Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama — have once again dramatically denounced our global concentration of income and wealth. And the world’s most powerful political leader, Barack Obama, has chimed in, too.
The impact on America’s super rich — and super-rich wannabees? Not much. They haven’t even deigned to slow their grabbing.
At Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies weekly on excess and inequality, we’ve been taking names. Lots of them. The greediest of them all? We think we can make a good case for the ten below. We hope you’ll find some useful insights from our choices — and maybe even some fresh new incentive to help make our world a more equal place.
For many of us on the ground, this feels a bit like the people in the ivory towers finally beginning to figure out the obvious thing that’s troubling the ant-like creatures they see far below.
This “duh” moment is an Associated Press survey published today based on interviews with a group of three dozen economists who for the most part agree that, in the words of the AP story the “growing gap between the richest Americans and everyone else isn’t bad just for individuals. It’s hurting the U.S. economy.”
“A key source of the economists’ concern: Higher pay and outsize stock market gains are flowing mainly to affluent Americans,” the story continues. “Yet these households spend less of their money than do low- and middle-income consumers who make up most of the population but whose pay is barely rising.”
Several pro football franchises have chosen chest-pounding team names meant to symbolize how big, powerful, ferocious, and scary they are--names like the Bears, Panthers, Ravens, and Lions. But, come on, such animalistic monikers are no longer intimidating in our modern world, so I suggest that teams upgrade to names that really would spark terror in the hearts of opponents: "Big Oil Frackers," for example, or "Monsanto Genetic Mutators," "Walmart Middle-Class Crushers," "Big Pharma Price Gougers," and "Wall Street Banksters."
Such corporate predators rule today's economic and political jungle, and a hail storm of statistics confirms the vast and long-term damage they're wreaking on the poor and middle class, our environment, democratic rights, and sense of justice.
Behind those stats, though, are living, breathing, striving humans--an entire nation of real people being knocked down and shut out, unable to realize the aspirations they have for themselves, their families, communities, culture, and country. The elites--to their eternal shame-- literally are stifling the enormous possibilities of America's grassroots people. That's why the public's approval rating of today's aloof Powers That Be is now (as a friend recently told me) "two digits lower than poisonous snakes."
At the beginning of November, the poor went over the "hunger cliff" as Food Stamps were cut. Now long-term unemployment assistance will run out at the end of December. Regular people think the government has given up on them. They have been hit by one blow after another, with little or no help in sight. They see shutdowns and budget cuts at the very time the government needs to spend more to help Americans.
This is part of the Republican effort to turn Americans against government, because the public will blame Democrats. Democrats have to stop letting Republicans get away with it, and return to being seen as trying to help the unemployed and poor.
Long-term Unemployment Assistance Running Out
In a few days, long-term unemployment benefits run out in spite of a "budget deal." This cutoff of long-term aid means that in most states aid will end after a person is unemployed for 26 weeks, and in other states even less -- some dramatically less. It occurs at a time when the average length of unemployment is 37 weeks, and there is still only one job for every three people still bothering to look for work.
Please watch Rev. William Barber on All In With Chris Hayes, talking about voting rights.
Voter Fraud?
Republicans have been engaged in a strategy to convince (scare people into believing) people there is something called “voter fraud.” They are doing this so they can follow up with legislation that keeps lots of people (who might vote against them) from being able to vote at all. Along with “voter-ID” laws, they are shutting down early voting, Sunday voting (think Black churches), easy voter registration, and other things that enable more people to vote.
There is no voter fraud, and anyway the kind of fraud Republicans claim is occurring would not be affected by requiring voter-ID. I mean, are thousands and thousands of people showing up at polls claiming to be someone else? Really?
When Senator Elizabeth Warren came out for increasing Social Security last month it set in motion a remarkable turn of events. For over a decade the only discussion of Social Security by the Washington power types was over how much to cut it and when. The extreme left position was that current spending was about right.
Senator Warren changed the debate when she endorsed a bill proposed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin that would index retirees' benefits to an index that more closely tracks the cost-of-living of seniors. The bill also would raise benefits by roughly $70 a month. As a result of Warren's prominence in national politics, and the fact that raising Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, the Washington insider types were forced to take the idea seriously.
As was predictable, she was quickly denounced by the usual suspects, most notably the ostensibly center-left group Third Way. Third Way is one of the many Wall Street funded groups that manage to get credibility in policy circles almost entirely by virtue of their funding. They have no real political following and rarely produce anything resembling original thinking or research. But in Washington, money commands attention.
Third Way is one of a long list of organizations that have received Wall Street funding to go after Social Security and Medicare under the guise of protecting the young from their greedy parents and grandparents. This list includes Lead or Leave, the Concord Coalition, The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, America Speaks, Fix the Debt and the Can Kicks Back.
