Spanish coalminers angered by huge cuts in government subsidies for their industry have converged on Madrid for protest rallies after walking for nearly three weeks under a blazing sun from their pits.
Two columns of miners met up in a Madrid suburb on Tuesday evening and marched to the Puerta del Sol, the Spanish capital’s most emblematic square, where young demonstrators opposed to austerity cuts prompted by the financial crisis in Spain and Europe camped out last year in defiance of a government ban.
The miners, wearing hard hats with lights turned on, were joined by thousands of sympathisers. Some lit flares above highway overpasses and erected banners comparing the miners’ plight to that of Spain’s increasingly pressured working class – hit by higher taxes, new regulations making it cheaper to fire workers and funding cuts for education and national healthcare.
One group of about 160 miners walked all the way from the northern Asturias and Leon regions, 250 miles from Madrid, and about 40 made an almost equally long trek from the north-east Aragon region. A much larger rally of miners and their supporters travelling to Madrid aboard hundreds of chartered buses is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday.
Are you sure you want to talk about “free stuff” Mitt?
by digby
Susie makes a great point about Mitt’s repulsive “free lunch” comments after the NAACP speech. Of course it was disgusting for its race baiting. That goes without saying. But I think most of us missed the humongous irony in what this privileged jerk was saying. Susie caught it:
As far as free lunches go, we of course just witnessed the biggest government handout in history, one that Romney himself endorsed. Four and a half trillion dollars in bailout money already disbursed, trillions more still at risk in guarantees and loans, sixteen trillion dollars in emergency lending from the Federal Reserve, two trillion in quantitative easing, etc. etc. All of this money went to Romney’s pals in the Wall Street banks that for years helped Romney take over companies with mountains of borrowed cash. Now, after these banks crashed, executives at those same firms used those public funds to pay themselves massive salaries, which is exactly the opposite of “helping those who need help,” if you’re keeping score.
You’d think old Mitt would be a little bit cautious about condemning people for taking “free money” but, as usual, it’s only the average Joe in a bind who needs to be taught a lesson in personal responsibility. The Big Money Boyz are just “playing the game”, as Huckleberry Graham likes to say, and we’d all think less of them if they voluntarily left that money on the table when it could go into their pockets, wouldn’t we? That would be a loser move, and these guys aren’t losers like those parasites who need food stamps or unemployment insurance in a moribund economy.
In case you are still wondering, here’s an informative discussion of the LIBOR scandal from Eliot Spitzer:
According to Media Matters,with the exception of Spitzer and Chris Hayes, TV news has pretty much avoided even mentioning this scandal, much less trying to explain it.
New York Fed Knew of False Barclays Reports on Rates
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED and BEN PROTESS
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York learned in April 2008, as the financial crisis was brewing, that at least one bank was reporting false interest rates.
At the time, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed official that “we know that we’re not posting um, an honest” rate, according to documents released by the regulator on Friday. The employee indicated that other big banks made similarly bogus reports, saying that the British institution wanted to “fit in with the rest of the crowd.”
Although the New York Fed conferred with Britain and American regulators about the problems and recommended reforms, it failed to stop the illegal activity, which persisted through 2009.
British regulators have said that they did not have explicit proof then of wrongdoing by banks. But the Fed’s documents, which were released at the request of lawmakers, appear to undermine those claims.
The revelations fuel concerns that regulators are ill-equipped to police big banks and that financial institutions can game the system for their own purposes.
Dave Johnson gives us a timely reminder of a previous personal financial “scandal” that absorbed the nation for years and which was considered by the entire Village evidence of disgusting greed and corruption. Those of you who are old enough surely remember this?
Hillary Clinton Futures Trades Detailed
By Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 27, 1994; Page A01
Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In about 10 months of trading, she made nearly $100,000, relying heavily on advice from her friend James B. Blair, an experienced futures trader.
The new records also raise the possibility that some of her profits — as much as $40,000 – came from larger trades ordered by someone else and then shifted to her account, Leo Melamed, a former chairman of the Merc who reviewed the records for the White House, said in an interview. He said the discrepancies in Clinton’s records also could have been caused by human error.
Even allocated trades would not necessarily have benefited Clinton, Melamed added. “I have no reason to change my original assessment. Mrs. Clinton violated no rules in the course of her transactions,” he said.
Lisa Caputo, Clinton’s spokeswoman, said the documents were released yesterday “to give as complete a picture as possible” of her trades. She said Clinton had never before seen them.
Dave writes:
Take a look at the 350,000-or-so web references to cattle futures trades made by Hillary Clinton way back in the 1970s. This might give you an idea of how big a deal it was back in the mid-90’s that Hillary Clinton had made $100,000 (!!!) on speculative investments back in the 1970s. (The number of stories located online is possibly reduced by the fact that the media swarm happened in the mid-1990s — largely before the Internet.)
Look at the outlets that assigned teams of reporters to investigate: All the TV networks, the Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, and all of the rest of the jouranilmalism crowd were all over what was considered to be a major story.
This story was investigated, written about, investigated, written about, and investigated. No evidence of any wrongdoing was ever found — which many in the media took as clear proof that there had been a massive cover-up.
And he makes a comparison:
Compare the magnitude of Hillary’s $100,000 profit to the recent disclosure of as much as $100,000,000 — one hundred million dollars — turning up in Mitt Romney’s IRA which is a personal retirement investment vehicle that is limited to a few thousand in contributions each year. (Remember, the gains made in an IRA are not taxed.) Romney is already retired, and the one completed tax return he has disclosed shows that he currently has an income of approx. $450,000 per week.
So how did $100 million end up an an IRA that is limited to deposits of a maximum $6,000 a year (after you reach a certain age)? How many reporters has each major news organization assigned to find out why he has up to $100 million in an IRA?
This is the one that gets me too. It’s all horrific, the off-shore accounts, the refusal to release his tax returns, all of it. But this one — the hundred million dollar IRA — just slays me.
Dave’s got a point about the media double standards. When the futures trades scandal broke the press corps went nuts. But I think there are some other factors at work here as well.
The first is that what made the Clinton cattle futures trade so exciting was the fact that it was a mere woman who had been dabbling in high finance and it was ridiculous to believe that she could have done it herself. Moreover, it was a woman the Villagers all considered to be a bitch, so they were happy to see her her alleged intelligence assailed as phony. It’s taken for granted that Mitt, on the other hand, is considered to be some sort of financial genius so it’s to be expected that he’d make zillions even in the most ludicrous situations. He’s a Master of the Universe after all.
Second, the numbers are so big that nobody can wrap their mind around them. Hillary’s little venture into trading was something everyone could relate to and presented a simple scenario. Mitt’s shenanigans are complicated and, frankly, kind of awe-inspiring to the Villagers. These are not gothic, southern small town intrigues — it’s the Big Time featuring the Very Important Rich People. They are impressed by the grandeur of it all.
Finally, the country has changed. Over the course of the last two decades we’ve seen a rather dramatic degradation of political norms, generally. We’ve had partisan impeachments, stolen elections, bogus wars and massive financial failure. People are a lot more cynical. There was a time when it would have been a reckless act of chutzpah to nominate a Vulture capitalist in the wake of the 2008 meltdown, but now it’s just par for the course.
Still, it’s an interesting contrast. The Whitewater scandals were all parochial, small bore plotlines that served to reinforce the notion that the president and his wife were backwoods operators out of their depth in the glittering world of the big city.The Villagers relished it (as did a good part of the nation.) This is different. Mitt’s a certified member of the .001%, the ultimate winners circle, the Big Club. While I’m sure they may a tiny element of fear involved in going after him, there’s also the sense that he’s entitled to game the system. That’s what one in his position does in this era. Why, we couldn’t really respect him if he didn’t, could we?
It’s much different for the lower orders who must be restrained lest they start thinking they are better than they ought to be. A penny-ante land deal, some cattle futures trades showed a couple who had no money, attempting to run with people who did. In the movies that might be considered plucky American ambition. In the Village, one simply doesn’t let those seams show.
While it’s true that every villager thinks he or she is someone right out of a Frank Capra movie, they certainly don’t want anyone to see them as people who benefited by having the skids greased by wealthy benefactors. Like all elites, they are convinced they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they were born into vast wealth or privileged to attend all the best schools and mingle with the upper classes.
“He came in here and he trashed the place and it’s not his place.”
There was a time when DC might not have been Mitt Romney’s place either, but that time is in the past. Having his kind of money in this day and age, no matter how vulgar his ways of obtaining it, makes him a most welcome member of the club.
Republicans aren’t just in favor of lowering taxes; now they’re applauding wildly complex efforts by the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying billions in taxes by shipping capital to other countries.
“It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on Tuesday.[Emphasis added] He was defending Mitt Romney, who, as this morning’s editorial in The Times notes, appears to have the most elaborate history of tax avoidance – offshore tax havens, disputed sheltering mechanisms, complex trusts – of any major presidential candidate in history.
Invest in the Cayman Islands, Mr. Graham seems to be saying. It’s the patriotic thing to do.
That peculiar vision of the American way doesn’t go back very far. Mr. Romney’s financial practices aren’t unusual just because he is one of the wealthiest candidates ever to run; it’s because previous well-to-do candidates would have been embarrassed to admit they had gone so far to enrich themselves at the public treasury’s expense.
As Steve Rattner, the financier who has helped manage Mayor Bloomberg’s money, put it on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, “I actually was with a very prominent private equity guy last night who said he’d never heard of some of the things Mitt Romney has done in terms of putting money offshore, in terms of having a $100 million I.R.A., basically getting an interest-free loan from Uncle Sam on the taxes, on all that money, until he brings it home…”
The $5 trillion in assets held by offshore tax havens costs the federal government $100 billion a year, according to the I.R.S. But when tax-writing committees try to end such practices, they are often shut down by powerful financial lobbyists.
If Mr. Romney were to be elected, it would be his Treasury Department that would be hurt by such tax-avoidance practices, and his I.R.S. that would have to crack down on them. Based on even the little we know about his financial practices, it’s hard to see how he could look his I.R.S. commissioner in the eye.
Digby brought up earlier the fact that it wasn’t so long ago that doing everything in one’s power to avoid paying for civilization and one’s country was deemed unpatriotic. Krugman reinforces the point:
The first thing you need to know is that America wasn’t always like this. When John F. Kennedy was elected president, the top 0.01 percent was only about a quarter as rich compared with the typical family as it is now — and members of that class paid much higher taxes than they do today. Yet somehow we managed to have a dynamic, innovative economy that was the envy of the world. The superrich may imagine that their wealth makes the world go round, but history says otherwise.
To this historical observation we should add another note: quite a few of today’s superrich, Mr. Romney included, make or made their money in the financial sector, buying and selling assets rather than building businesses in the old-fashioned sense. Indeed, the soaring share of the wealthy in national income went hand in hand with the explosive growth of Wall Street.
Not long ago, we were told that all this wheeling and dealing was good for everyone, that it was making the economy both more efficient and more stable. Instead, it turned out that modern finance was laying the foundation for a severe economic crisis whose fallout continues to afflict millions of Americans, and that taxpayers had to bail out many of those supposedly brilliant bankers to prevent an even worse crisis. So at least some members of the top 0.01 percent are best viewed as job destroyers rather than job creators.
Did I mention that those bailed-out bankers are now overwhelmingly backing Mr. Romney, who promises to reverse the mild financial reforms introduced after the crisis?
To be sure, many and probably most of the rich do, in fact, contribute positively to the economy. However, they also receive large monetary rewards. Yet somehow $20 million-plus in annual income isn’t enough. They want to be revered, too, and given special treatment in the form of low taxes. And that is more than they deserve. After all, the “common person” also makes a positive contribution to the economy. Why single out the rich for extra praise and perks?
What about the argument that we must keep taxes on the rich low lest we remove their incentive to create wealth? The answer is that we have a lot of historical evidence, going all the way back to the 1920s, on the effects of tax increases on the rich, and none of it supports the view that the kinds of tax-rate changes for the rich currently on the table — President Obama’s proposal for a modest rise, Mr. Romney’s call for further cuts — would have any major effect on incentives. Remember when all the usual suspects claimed that the economy would crash when Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993?
Republicans have defined blind jingoism as patriotism for so long that they’ve forgotten what patriotism actually means. Someone should remind Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney that this is what patriotism used to look like, particularly during wartime:
That’s still the true face of wartime patriotism. Back in the 1940s, a super-rich vulture capitalist who hid all his money from Uncle Sam in offshore island accounts without actually producing anything of value wouldn’t be considered a candidate for President. He’d be a candidate for a punch in the nose from a World World II vet and his/her family.
Blue America took off after 8 GOP dirtbags right after Boehner’s 31st pointless House vote to repeal health care reform. We launched a Facebook campaign targeting 18-26 year olds who live in districts represented by Paul Ryan (WI-1), Tom Reed (NY-23), Frank Guinta (NH-1) Charlie Bass (NH-2), Sandy Adams and John Mica (both in FL-7), Buck McKeon (CA-25) and nasty little Patrick McHenry (NC-10).
All 8 of them voted (again) to repeal– with no plans whatsoever to replace– the Affordable Care Act. That would immediately throw every 18-26 year old off their parents’ health insurance plan, something that the vast majority of Democrats, independents and even Republicans think is a grave mistake. But all 8 of these congressmembers are blind ideologues who walk in lockstep with the GOP’s obstructionist and ruthlessly partisan leadership, Boehner and Cantor.
All 8 also have progressive opponents who want to help fix what’s wrong with the ACA– while keeping all the good stuff (like students getting to stay on their parents’ plans and like Big Insurance not being allowed to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions.) Wednesday we talk about a plan by McKeon’s opponent, Dr. Lee Rogers, who has come up with some simple, straightforward fixes to the ACA that should be able to get support from both parties.
The ad campaign is simple too. All Facebook users in the offending Republicans’ districts will have an opportunity to click on a button that takes them to a Facebook page that urges them to register to vote (and makes it easy to do) and to flunk out their congressman on November 6th.
Click over to Howie’s site for more info. And as he says:
Here’s a blockbuster that pretty much closes the book on the Romney Bain story:
[I]s there anything other than the SEC filings to suggest a hands-on Romney role at Bain post-February 1999?No is the word from four sources who communicated with CNN on Thursday — all of whom have firsthand knowledge of Bain’s operations at the time in question. Three of the four are Democrats, and two of the four are active Obama supporters in Campaign 2012.
Only one, Bain Managing Director Steve Pagliuca, would talk on the record. The others spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing either Bain’s low-key culture or the desire not to anger friends in the Obama campaign.
Pagliuca, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2010, told CNN: “Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to run the Olympics and has had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure.”
Well that tears it. Four Democrats and Obama supporter have spoken. Why on earth would they step forward if it weren’t true?
Yeah, right.
In fairness, John King (who wrote this piece) does admit in paragraph 17:
To be clear, all four of the sources voiced professional loyalty and personal respect for Romney. And all four have a vested interest in defending the work of Bain. But they were consistent in describing Romney’s departure as abrupt and in saying they could not recall him around the office in the months that followed.
Call me crazy but I don’t think the “consistency” of their accounts is all that meaningful in this case. There has been a teensy bit of discussion about all this in the news. I’d guess there might be some whispers at the Bain water cooler too.
Look, there’s good reason to wonder about this. Mitt filed reports with the SEC as sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president long after he had supposedly “retired” or “taken a leave of absence” or whatever it was. Whether he showed up at the office every day doesn’t really matter, the company was still legally his. And therefore, whatever happened at that company he was still legally responsible for.
Look at it this way, guys like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling also tried to say they didn’t know what was going on and Enron and couldn’t be held responsible for details. The law disagreed. That’s not to say that Bain did anything illegal during that period, but the underlying principle is the same. If your name is on the legal paperwork, you’re responsible.
It would be interesting to know what job title Mitt put on this income tax returns those years but he won’t release them. Maybe that’s part of the reason why.
Rasmussen: taxing the wealthy remains popular as always
by David Atkins
Not that it’s any surprise, but the confirmation from even a laughably biased conservative pollster is nice:
Most voters favor temporarily extending the so-called Bush tax cuts for those who earn less than $250,000 a year but are less enthusiastic about continuing those tax cuts permanently for all Americans.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with President Obama’s plan to extend the tax cuts for a year for those who make less than $250,000 annually. Just 20% oppose this temporary extension, and 13% are undecided.
Without a subscription, the House of Ras won’t say publicly won’t say publicly what the numbers are like for keeping the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. Something tells me that’s not an accident, particularly in light of this:
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 55% of Adults nationwide believe most wealthy people in this country pay less than their fair share in taxes. One in four (25%) believe wealthy Americans generally do pay their fair share, while 13% think they pay more than their fair share.
Again, that’s Rasmussen, whose polling has a heavy GOP skew.
Liberals often decry the American public as too ill-informed to make good choices, and the establishment left as too incompetent at framing issues. But oftentimes it’s not that we’re losing the argument. On this subject, we’ve won the argument. It’s simply that the government for a variety of reasons isn’t responsive to the wishes of the public.
Like Atrios, I find this column by Jeffrey Sachs to pretty much be condescending gibberish about pony building. It would seem that nobody, especially Paul Krugman, is being properly serious about the economy because he’s relying on musty old Keynesianism when what we need are Big New … somethings. It goes like this:
Blah, blah, blah, we are in the age of the Anthropocene blah, blah …we need a long-term financial outlook and new approaches to pensions and healthcare delivery blah blah blah …well-designed public investments (eg in infrastructure) can unlock significant private investments as well blah, blah …new economic strategies to overhaul broken systems of finance, labour markets, taxation, ecological management, budget management and investment incentives blah, blah …long-term, structural, sensitive to inequalities of skills and education blah, blah blah…
Nothing controversial there, of course (although there’s quite a bit about the debt, so not altogether true) but none of it addresses the current crisis, which is what the allegedly “crude” and simple-minded Keynesians are trying to do.
As Atrios says:
Keynesian demand management really just says there are times when things won’t right themselves automatically in a timely fashion, that government should step in to boost demand. It isn’t about stealing from the rich to buy Cadillacs for strapping young bucks, or just how many SUPERTRAINS should be built, it just says there are times when the government, using fiscal and/or monetary policy, can actually improve the economy by boosting demand. That this is even controversial is mindboggling.
But I think Sachs is really saying that we should throw out all those old ideas because everything’s different now! Why, back in the 30s they didn’t even have cell phones!
In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that–the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.
I’ve never been sure what he thought he was babbling about but whatever it was, I think the problem was fixed by offering direct deposit.
This idea that because the world is different today means that we have to reinvent the wheel is daft. Yes, there are new problems to be solved. But old problems often reassert themselves and if we have the answer it’s “crude and simplistic” to pretend that it won’t work just because it was discovered long ago. Lord help us if all the other sciences decide to follow this route.
