Yesterday we heard press favorite Jamie Dimon sputtering about how swipe-fee regulations, which capped how much big banks could gouge merchants for debit-card transactions, were “a gross miscarriage of justice.”
Today, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business sits down with Dimon and gets some nice quotes out of him on how Obama treats the “fat cats”:
“I’ve disagreed right from the beginning from this blanket blame of all banks are all bad guys I don’t like that. I think that’s a form of discrimination that should be stopped.”
It doesn’t lead to productive conversation. Not everyone was equally bad. Not everyone was in fact bad. I think it denigrates America.
Victim much?
JPMorgan are the good guys, you see. Just ask Jefferson County, or talk to the lawyers in Chase’s mothballed debt-collections department, or the investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars while JPMorgan profited big on a SIV, or the Lutheran nonprofit defrauded on a CDO that JPM built for Magnetar, or illegally foreclosing on and overcharging hundreds of troops while they were abroad, or the homeowners who got trampled in the foreclosure scandal, or the former Chase regional VP who regrets the $2 billion in toxic loans he made in 2007 under “pressure from the top,” or the consumers who get screwed by Vertrue, etc. etc.
— Reuters’s David Cay Johnston wrote this about Mitt Romney’s taxes a few days before the candidate released his returns:
And what about taxes on the $100 million that Romney put into a trust for his five sons. How much Massachusetts and federal income tax, as well as gift tax, was paid on that money?
It turns out, Johnston tells CNN, that Romney and his heirs paid no taxes on that $100 million gift:
I have suspected this and written about it in my column that this is what happened, and last night, Brad Malt, the attorney for the Romneys, confirmed to Reuters that we were correct. They have not paid a penny of gift tax. That’s because Congress allows a very tiny group of people — the Romneys by their income are in the top 1% of the top 1% — to not count as having any value the real souce of their income, something called carried interest, if they give it to their children…
The scandal here is not the Romneys, who have complied with the law in every way, it is the law that requires you and me to be taxed differently and much more heavily than a very small group of people—those who run funds of the kind that Mr. Romney did.
Good catch.
(h/t Kevin Drum)
— Here’s one campaign promise Barack Obama never came close to fulfilling: Raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation.
I had forgotten about that plank until reading this Fortune story on how even Republicans like Mitt Romney actually kinda support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, which is lower in real terms than it was fifty years ago.
Obama said this in his campaign:
As president, Obama will further raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing — things so many people take for granted.
There’s been a nasty recession since that promise, of course. Does that mean the Democratic president thinks raising the minimum wage to late-1960s levels would kill jobs?
Romney's daily income is approximately $57,000. Almost every penny of that is, by Romney's own definition, "unearned." That Romney's totally legal, yet morally indefensible sub-15-percent federal income tax rate is now, finally, an issue in the Presidential campaign is practically a Christmas Miracle.
That even Republicans are asking if, in effect, Romney is too rich for anyone's own good is something I had thought I would not live to see.
That all this somehow (temporarily) renders Newt Gingrich a viable candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination is so clock-meltingly delicious it makes my tongue numb.
Pass the popcorn anyway.
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson jr., CJR on Wed 25 Jan 2012 at 11:09 AM
"There’s been a nasty recession since that promise, of course. Does that mean the Democratic president thinks raising the minimum wage to late-1960s levels would kill jobs?"
Nope, it means Barack Obama appreciates the difference between winning campaigns and funding them. Talk of righting the inequity of the last 30ish years, making labor stronger, investing in America, fixing the corrupt financial system, and other hopes and dreams win elections.
But they'll get no money to spread that message and plenty of money will go to the guys who'd replace you. So we'll talk, during campaign time, and Jamie Dimon will whine, though Obama's chief law enforcer has been putting defense attorneys out of work through prosecutorial avoidance ("On Wednesday, John O'Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O'Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they "show a pattern of fraud," forgery and false notarizations." Holder will sweep this under the table until the statute of limitations runs out and Jamie Dimon will still be upset that he got called a fat cat) and the system will churn on better than it did under republicans, but the product churned out will still be the same.
Because campaigning in America consists of the things we dream about and governing in America consists of making do within the realities of bought politics. Until we deal with this reality, administrations will forever be defined by what they left undone.
So what is this reality and how do we deal with it? MLK once mentioned the reality:
"And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low."
How did they deal with the reality? "Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement...[T]hey began uniting the Negro and white masses (Yeah) into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South."
The only question now is "How long must we wait for change? How long must we fight?" I hope MLK proves right and the answer is "Not long." We've waited long enough.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 25 Jan 2012 at 01:38 PM
Once again, I see Covington and Burling in the news..
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/01/25/the-schneiderman-gambit-financial-fraud-unit-appears-designed-to-fail-and-grease-skids-for-foreclosure-fraud-settlement/
"This is a classic Obama move, putting a threat or a rival inside the tent. It happened with Elizabeth Warren and David Petraeus and Jon Huntsman, and it’s happening again. It divides the coalition against a weak settlement, which will at the least shut down state and federal prosecutions on foreclosure fraud and servicing issues. It puts hopes in yet another investigation, one with little chance for success."
Naw, not Eric Schiederman. Obama didn't get to you too, did he? I has a sad.
And yet Jamie F'in Dimon will still bitch about being called a fat cat and the temerity of bringing up his tax rate. What an asshole.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 25 Jan 2012 at 02:15 PM