Politics What is happening????

mixedmedia · Dec 26, 2013

Charlatan said: ↑

With Wal*Mart, it's not just the minimum wage. It's also keeping some employees at hours just below full-time to keep from providing benefits and union busting when the employees dain to push for collective bargaining. This is all aside from their predatory business practices that destroy small businesses and leave small towns with gutted high streets in favour of box stores.
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What is really unfortunate is that this particular walmart business tactic has been taken up by many other us corporations. The company i work for, the grocery store that my oldest daughter works for as well as Victoria's Secret when my middle daughter worked there all practice this same sub-full time scheduling tactic to avoid paying benefits to their employees. So when you complain about Walmart it's not as simple as pointing out the ethical flaws in their business model. It's that they open the door for more widespread exploitation of the workforce.

grumpyolddude · Dec 26, 2013

My company is playing things this way. It is one of the major reasons I'm getting frustrated with them. It is making staffing my store very difficult. Applicants walk away from either the hours or the wage. Or, I get someone hired in and trained only to have them leave for more money or hours. Often, it's my customers hiring them away, because they see them as reliable and it doesn't take a whole lot to lure them.

rogue49 · Dec 26, 2013

Many of these companies will regret their tactics as soon as the job market opens up more.
There's going to be a big square dance soon.

The ones that are a commodity will switch to those that pay more and give more benefits.
Those that are productive will follow.
Those that have been lingering will follow them.
Companies will have to scramble to cover.
Then they'll have to adjust to attract workers back.
People won't go to companies with bad reps.

Companies are sitting on a ton of cash, "just in case" ...problem is, just in case is not happening...but business is.
Mgmt is going to stop being cowardly, especially now that there's a federal budget and the economy at least in North America is buzzin'
Stability promotes investment.

rogue49 · Dec 30, 2013

This time, the "what is happening" is more positive.
Some good news within for a change...and yet, not really in the mainstream media. (of course, it's not bleeding...so it's not leading...)

The first two are huge...

Four stories you may have missed in 2013
By Greg Scoblete and Kevin Sullivan

Editor’s note: Greg Scoblete and Kevin Sullivan are the editors of RealClearWorld, which recently named GPS one of the top 5 international news analysis sites of 2013. The views expressed are their own.

There was no shortage of eye-grabbing global headlines in 2013. The Catholic Church chose a new Pope. China and Russia flexed their muscles. The U.S. and Iran, meanwhile, took a step back from the brink of what looked like a potentially explosive confrontation. But while these stories commanded an ample share of media attention, we’ve found four significant stories that may have slipped under your radar.

Global poverty retreats

With Southern Europe still reeling and the anemic U.S. recovery wobbling along, good economic news has been in short supply. But if you widened the lens, 2013 actually delivered some encouraging, indeed historic, news. It came in the form of a study from Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative that concluded that developing countries were enjoying remarkable success in alleviating the worst poverty. They’ve had so much success, in fact, that Oxford predicted that crushing poverty in many of the least developed countries in the world (think Bangladesh, Rwanda, Nepal) is actually on track to be fully eradicated within 20 years.

This optimism was echoed by the United Nations’ 2013 Human Development Report, which noted that “[n]ever in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast.”

How did the worst-of-the-worst manage this economic turnaround? Growth naturally played a huge role. While advanced economies are languishing with a meager 1.2 percent annual economic growth rate, the International Monetary Fund expects the developing world to hum along at 4.5 percent this year. Oxford and the United Nations also found that a combination of a doubling of aid since 2000, an increased participation of poor states in global trade and a strong state focus on health and education have all contributed to this historic transformation.

“Nietonomics”

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has captured the world’s attention with his package of ambitious reforms (dubbed “Abenomics”). Far less attention has been paid to the equally ambitious agenda of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Since being elected in 2012, Pena Nieto has championed arguably the most aggressive Mexican reform program in decades.

Taking on some of Mexico’s most cherished and entrenched interests, Nieto has successfully passed several pieces of groundbreaking legislation this year on education, telecommunications, fiscal reform and – arguably the crown jewel of the president’s agenda – a massive energy sector deregulation that will break apart a 75-year state oil monopoly and potentially flood the country with billions in investment dollars.

The challenge to Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company, Pemex, is an especially ambitious feat with global implications, explains the Hudson Institute’s Jaime Daremblum. “Until now, Mexico has been unable to access a sizable portion of its massive oil and gas reserves because of insufficient investment and inadequate technology,” says Daremblum. “With a surge of private investment and drilling assistance from foreign multinationals, the country can finally reach its full potential as an energy producer.”

Buddhist violence in Myanmar

When the Western world hears about sectarian violence, they can be forgiven if their minds usually flash to the Sunni vs. Shiite carnage in the Middle East or the persecution of minority Christian communities in countries like Egypt. What they’re not likely to think of are murderous, machete-wielding Buddhists setting fire to Muslim villages. But that’s just what happened in Myanmar this year.

This was to be a year when Myanmar’s nascent political reforms would be solidified. Yet rather than usher in a period of peace and economic development, the loosening of authoritarian controls roiled sectarian tensions and unleashed a murderous wave of Buddhist violence that threatens to derail Myanmar’s democratic progress. The violence is being fueled by ultra-nationalists Buddhists (including radical monks) who, according to the International Crisis Group, are now flourishing as state controls on the media are lifted. The situation is so grave that Tom Andrews of United to End Genocide warned in congressional hearings earlier this year that "the building blocks of genocide are in place" if nothing changes.

Worryingly, the violence is leaking out of Myanmar’s borders, argued Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Radical Muslims in Indonesia have responded to Buddhist attacks on their co-religionists by attempting to bomb a prominent Buddhist temple and the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta. Violence has spilled into Malaysia as well, as several Buddhists were murdered there in violence linked to rising tensions in Myanmar. Left to fester, Kurlantzick warned that: “continuing instability also breeds serious, nontraditional security threats, including narcotics production, massive refugee flows, and the possibility of terrorist groups using the country's lawless environment to build networks across Southeast Asia.”

Peace in Eastern Congo

Though the guns officially went silent in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s civil war back in 2003, the uneasy peace administered by several African nations left dozens of rebel groups and violent separatists vying for control of the country’s territory and bountiful resources. Since then, the DRC has been plagued by a variety of regional conflicts and uprisings. Among the region’s more organized – and violent – militias was the March 23 Movement (M23), the armed offshoot of a separatist political party based in the Kivu region of eastern Congo. For over a year, the rebel group terrorized eastern Congo, with its crowning achievement being the 11-day seizure and occupation of the provincial capital of Goma during the fall of 2012.

Yet rather than sink back into a violent abyss, Congo took a hopeful turn in 2013 when several African leaders met alongside U.N. officials in Nairobi to hammer out a framework for addressing the chaos. The plan promised a revamped and more aggressive U.N. peacekeeping force to work alongside the Congolese army in its efforts to root out and rein in separatist groups.

The plan appears to have worked, as a campaign spearheaded in late August by the combined forces repelled and ultimately pushed M23 rebels to the negotiating table. The peace, should it hold, is not only a big victory for the Congolese military, but for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who took a special interest in quelling the carnage in eastern Congo.

Though the defeat of the M23 is an undeniable accomplishment for Kinshasa, many obstacles remain. Among them, says Christoph Vogel, a researcher who monitors DRC militias, are the many other militias operating around the country. To subdue these groups, a more holistic approach – one that addresses longstanding land disputes and distribution – may be necessary. Otherwise, lingering grievances will only lead to later clashes between militants fighting under new flags and acronyms.

“M23 was a very conventional opponent,” explains Vogel. “Other groups will be harder to tackle; their guerilla-like outfit will lead them to tactically disperse instead of facing proper battlefield confrontation.”
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rogue49 · Jan 8, 2014

This is a little bit more than just the economy...this really affects the infrastructure and resources of nations and their citizens,
this affects global political dynamics...even why some go to war...or why some nations rise & fall.

And I hope this upset the current oil monopolies and bubbles.
Because it's been a real pain in the ass for a long time.

This is going to change things in just 5 years...much less in 20...or over decades.

And they're not even talking about the Mexico monopoly opening up...or even other resources diving in with their own exporting.

Unforeseen U.S. Oil Boom Upends Markets as Drilling Spreads
By Asjylyn Loder - Jan 8, 2014

The U.S. oil boom has put European refineries out of business and undercut West African crude suppliers. Now domestic drillers threaten to roil Asian markets and challenge producers in the Middle East and South America.

Fifteen European refineries have closed in the past five years, with a 16th due to shut this year, the International Energy Agency said, as the U.S. went from depending on fuel from Europe to being a major exporter to the region. Nigeria, which used to send the equivalent of a dozen supertankers of crude a month to the U.S., now ships fewer than three, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And cheap oil from the Rocky Mountains, where output has grown 31 percent since 2011, will soon allow West Coast companies to cut back on imports of pricier grades from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela that they process for customers in Asia, the world’s fastest-growing market.

“I don’t really think anyone saw this coming,” said Steve Sawyer, an analyst with FACTS Global Energy in London. “The U.S. shale boom happened much faster than people thought. We’re in the middle of a new game. There’s nothing in the past that predicts what the future will be.”

Advances in extracting oil from shale rock drove a 39 percent jump in U.S. production since 2011, the steepest rise in history, and will boost output to a 28-year high this year, according to the EIA. While drilling in shale is more expensive than other methods and poses environmental challenges, the prospect of a growing supply is encouraging analysts to predict a more energy-independent nation.

Crude Exports

With U.S. exports of gasoline and other refined products hitting a record last month and the country on pace to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2015, five years faster than the IEA’s earlier predictions, industry advocates such as Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are calling for an end to 39-year-old restrictions on U.S. crude exports.

In a measure of just how quickly the oil market has changed, President Barack Obama unveiled in March 2011 a goal considered so outrageous that correspondent Christopher Mims wrote on the environmental news website Grist that it could be accomplished only by “an economic crash bigger than any ever seen in U.S. history, or perhaps an alien race forcing all of us to take to our bicycles.” Obama said that by 2025 the U.S. would cut crude imports by one-third.

It didn’t take 14 years. It took less than three.

End Restrictions

The country is so flush with crude that imports are plunging and drillers are challenging export limits imposed after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, called on Obama yesterday to end restrictions and vowed to introduce legislation if he doesn’t.

Easing controls would have been unthinkable just three years ago, when uprisings in Arab countries such as Libya pushed crude prices over $100, said Philip Verleger, a former director of the office of energy policy at the Treasury Department and founder of the Aspen, Colorado-based consultant PKVerleger LLC.

The boom has been led by drilling in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the oil-rich Bakken shale, which stretches from North Dakota into Montana and Canada.

North Dakota and Texas have more than doubled crude output since Obama’s 2011 speech, with Texas pumping more than Iran, according to the EIA, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department, and a Bloomberg survey of producers, oil companies and analysts.

Bone Springs

Drilling is spreading in emerging oil fields in the Rocky Mountain region such as the Niobrara in Colorado and the Bone Springs in New Mexico and spurring a revival of crude extraction around Wyoming’s Teapot Dome formation, home of the first U.S. reserves and the namesake of a 20th century political scandal. Colorado’s production jumped 17 percent in the first 10 months of 2013, Wyoming rose 16 percent and New Mexico added 10 percent, according to the EIA.

A record amount of crude is already riding the rails from oil fields in North Dakota, Colorado and New Mexico to California’s fuel makers, according to the California Energy Commission. Companies looking to ship even more include Tesoro Corp., Valero Energy Corp. (VLO) and Plains All American Pipeline LP (PAA), which are planning to build train terminals in California and Washington state, according to company statements and regulatory filings. Plans are awaiting permits or in the planning stages to handle capacity roughly equal to the amount of crude sent to the region by Saudi Arabia.

Asia Demand

If the railway networks on the U.S. West Coast are completed, the region’s refiners will be able to use domestic crude supplies to boost exports to meet rising needs in Asia, where demand for new cars, electricity and air conditioning is boosting energy consumption. China, already the world’s largest importer, will rely increasingly on crude from the Middle East and refined fuels from the U.S. to meet its consumers’ growing demand.

An increase in the number of U.S. cargoes to Asia might force Saudi Arabia to cut its output to head off a worldwide glut, Verleger said. As the de facto leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the kingdom is monitoring signs of potential oversupply as Iraq and Libya try to boost output and Iran increases exports as international sanctions are loosened, he said.

“It’s another outlet for North American oil products and means more supply for the rest of the world,” said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC, an energy consultant in Houston. “The West Coast is behind the rest of America as far as getting crude by rail. It will increase supply and help the consumer.”

Hydraulic Fracturing

The U.S. gains were made possible by innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that have unlocked fuel trapped in underground rock. The technology allows producers to bore horizontally, then use explosives and a high-pressure stream of water, sand and chemicals to blast open fractures that free the oil.

The process comes with environmental risks. A 2011 U.S. government report found fracking chemicals in groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming, and in June, 47 people died when an unmanned train carrying Bakken crude derailed and exploded in Lac Megantic, Quebec. Crude from the Bakken may be more flammable and more dangerous to ship than other types of oil, the U.S. Transportation Department said Jan. 2.

Fracking is also more expensive than traditional extraction. Drilling a horizontal shale well in the Bakken can cost 10 to 20 times what a vertical well might cost, according to Austin, Texas-based Drillinginfo Inc. Production from shale wells declines by 60 percent to 70 percent in the first year, while output from traditional wells diminishes by as much as 55 percent in two years before flattening out, according to Drillinginfo.

Import Need

One reason the U.S. still depends so much on imports is that demand continues to outstrip domestic supply. Another reason is the quality of crude its refineries can handle. Many of them performed expensive upgrades in the past decade so they could process oil from overseas that was more difficult to turn into transportation fuel.

Gasoline users and diplomats benefit from the surge in U.S. production. While the 2011 Libyan uprising had U.S. consumers paying almost $4 a gallon for gasoline, pump prices declined 1.3 percent last year and averaged $3.314 a gallon on Jan. 6, according to AAA, the largest U.S. motoring organization. That was even after sanctions cut off more than 1 million barrels a day of Iranian oil exports. Starved of their primary source of cash, the Islamic republic’s leaders in November reached an agreement to curb its nuclear program.

“It took time to realize how significant this transformation was going to be,” said Jason Bordoff, who was an energy adviser to the National Security Council and helped draft Obama’s 2011 speech. “We were able to impose pain on Iran without imposing pain on ourselves.”
Rail Routes

New rail routes and pipelines are carrying increasing supplies of crude from North Dakota, Oklahoma and elsewhere to refiners in New Jersey, Louisiana, Texas and Pennsylvania. They are in turn sending cargoes of diesel to London, Rotterdam and Antwerp, Belgium. U.S. fuel exports to the Netherlands, a major import hub for the region, reached a record in September, according to the EIA.

The one-two punch of declining crude imports followed by rising fuel exports hit the refining industry in Europe and the U.K. particularly hard. That’s because refiners outside North America typically buy oil based on the price of Brent crude, a North Sea grade that last year cost an average of almost $11 a barrel more than West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark.

WTI futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange traded at $93.77 a barrel today, a 13 percent discount to the Brent price of $107.45 on ICE Futures Europe in London. The spread widened to a record $27.88 a barrel in October 2011.

“When historians write this story 10 or 20 years from now, they are going to look at a very different U.S.,” said Verleger, the former Treasury Department official. “Everything has changed.”

®2014 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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rogue49 · Jan 13, 2014

It's about damn time they started enforcing the laws on the books...and making penalty levels a true pain for billions lost.

What happened to the conservative mantra, "Do the crime, do the time."

And should the big banks be broken up?
There seems to be too much conflict of interest...and centralized power.

We are slowly flowing to a dystopian society where the corporations rule.
I don't mind capitalism.
But I don't want an Umbrella Corporation either.

Just because someone/something has big pockets...shouldn't mean the law applies differently.

Why Bankers Have Gotten a Pass
By TERESA TRITCH - JAN. 9, 2014

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that no prominent banker would be prosecuted for fraud in the run-up to the financial crisis. In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan asks why.

The comforting answer — that no fraud was committed — is possible, but implausible. “While officials of the Department of Justice have been more circumspect in describing the roots of the financial crisis than have the various commissions of inquiry and other government agencies,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing to indicate their disagreement with the widespread conclusion that fraud at every level permeated the bubble in mortgage-backed securities.”

So why no high-level prosecutions? According to Judge Rakoff, evidence of fraud without prosecution of fraud indicates prosecutorial weaknesses.

This is not the first time Judge Rakoff has weighed in on the prosecutorial response to the financial crisis. In 2011, he rejected a settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission because it did not require the bank to admit wrongdoing.

His insights on financial-crisis cases also apply to cases that have emerged since then, like JPMorgan Chase’s settlement with the government this week over the bank’s role in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

Under the deal, JPMorgan Chase, which served as Mr. Madoff’s primary bank for more than two decades, must pay a $1.7 billion penalty, essentially for turning a blind eye to Mr. Madoff’s fraud. It must also take steps to improve its anti-money-laundering controls. And it had to acknowledge, among other facts, that shortly before the fraud was revealed, the bank withdrew nearly $300 million of its money from Madoff-related funds.

By adhering to the settlement terms, the bank will avoid criminal indictment on two felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. No individuals were named or charged.

And that is the problem. Until relatively recently, it was rare for corporations to face criminal charges without the simultaneous prosecution of managers or executives. That changed over the past three decades, as prosecutors shifted their focus away from individuals and toward corporations, as if fault resides not in executives, but in corporate culture.

That shift, in Judge Rakoff’s view, largely explains the lack of banker prosecutions from the financial crisis. It also explains the JPMorgan Chase settlement in the Madoff case. A likely consequence of this approach is more wrongdoing, since, as Judge Rakoff argues, imposing compliance measures that are often just window-dressing is far less potent than “the future deterrent value of successfully prosecuting individuals.”

Even worse is the distortion of justice. In the financial crisis, prosecutors not only took a hands-off approach to bankers, but to banks as well for fear that indicting a big bank could harm the economy.

The JPMorgan Chase settlement in the Madoff case also sidesteps justice by relying on “deferred prosecution.” That tactic, wrote Judge Rakoff, makes prosecutors happy because they tell themselves that the threat of prosecution will deter future crime; it makes corporations happy because they avoid indictment; and happiest of all are the executives or former executives responsible for the misconduct who are left untouched.

In addition, he explains, deferred prosecution is “technically suspect” because, under the law, prosecutors should not threaten to indict a company unless they can prove that some company manager committed the alleged crime, and if that can be proved, why not indict the manager? He also finds it “morally suspect” because it punishes innocent shareholders and employees for wrongdoing committed by unprosecuted individuals.

As the myriad cases against JPMorgan Chase and other banks demonstrate, misconduct was not limited to the mortgage bubble. But unless prosecutorial weaknesses are remedied, justice will continue to prove elusive.
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rogue49 · Jan 14, 2014

Oh...and BTW

This pretty much says it all.
JPMorgan Profit Drops 7.3% After Madoff Legal Settlements

And......that's QUARTERLY profit...for a 2.6 billion (with a "B") total for the settlement.

Uh...and that was only an impact of 10 cents a share.

Ya think we can go after the other banks yet??
We can get them used to these "hand slaps"...hell, before this penalties were in the millions...that's not even a paper cut.

rogue49 · Jan 16, 2014

I'm sorry...I just don't see the banks "struggling to make money" like they indicated in the article.
Not with the multi-billion dollar quarterly profits I'm seeing.

Oh...sorry if your stock owners expect you to earn another 10 billion dollars more, just because that matches the percentage gains used for smaller companies.
Sometimes, things just don't grow at that rate.
Kind of the reason true giants couldn't exist because they wouldn't be able to support themselves physically.

How Washington beat Wall Street
By: Ben White - January 16, 2014

NEW YORK — In 2009, Washington went to war against big Wall Street banks hoping to blow up the kind of high-risk, high-reward strategies that helped spark the financial crisis. Five years later, that war is largely over. And Washington won in a blowout.

You might not know it given continued demands from Democrats — and even some Republicans — to further bust up the nation’s largest banks. And the standard media refrain is that Wall Street titans always win, no big bank bosses went to jail and the industry will just find new ways to keep the casino open.

But the truth on the ground — at least at this moment in time — is very different.

Goldman Sachs, the biggest money machine in Wall Street history, is a shell of its former self. Morgan Stanley, Goldman’s one-time bitter rival in the swashbuckling world of high-risk trading, is transforming into a staid money management firm with a side business underwriting stocks and offering merger advice.

Citigroup and Bank of America sold off many of their classic “Wall Street” businesses, including proprietary trading desks and private equity and hedge fund stakes, to comply with the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

Washington’s big victory came via widespread public outrage at the financial industry, which paved the way for a strong reform bill. And after President Barack Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law in 2010, the industry made mistake after mistake — from the interest rate rigging scandal to mortgage-foreclosure “robo-signing” — making it essentially impossible for the industry’s lobbyists to beat back any of the newly imposed regulations.

“The scope of activities that U.S. banks engage in has been dramatically reduced,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of giant bond fund manager Pimco, which itself may face new restrictions as regulators turn their attention to the asset management industry. “Even in a period when markets are performing well, the numbers the banks are pulling in are just nowhere near as strong as they once were.”

Even mighty JPMorgan Chase, once viewed as the only bank to come through the crisis largely unchanged, is now forking over tens of billions of dollars in settlement cash, seemingly on a weekly basis, to pay for its sins before the financial crisis — including allegedly turning a blind eye to the Bernie Madoff fraud and improperly selling risky mortgage securities. JPMorgan this week gave up its coveted title as the nation’s most profitable bank to Wells Fargo, a buttoned down San Francisco-based bank not known as a Wall Street titan.

And JPMorgan’s massive $6 billion loss in the so-called London whale trading scandal in 2012 helped ensure that a very tough version of the ban on proprietary trading by federally backstopped banks — known as the “Volcker rule” — was approved by regulators last month.

The transformation of Wall Street is so complete that even some of the industry’s loudest critics — rarely willing to give an inch — are prepared to declare at least partial victory, albeit with plenty of “time will tell” caveats and complaints about the industry pushing to underfund its regulators in the latest spending bill working its way through Congress.

“There is no question that many of the highest-risk activities, which happened to be the most profitable activities for Wall Street, are now at least reduced and often totally gone,” said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, one of the most vocal pro-regulatory reform groups. “They’ve had to exit hedge funds and private equity funds and they sold off any business with ‘proprietary trading’ on the door.”

Those sales in part benefit smaller boutique investment banks not subject to the new rules as well as pure hedge fund and private equity firms that can snap up assets from the bigger players at low prices. It also means young talent now flows toward higher-paying private equity and hedge funds rather than the now more staid banks. Both Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse in recent months pitched themselves by saying junior staff should no longer come to the office on Saturdays, a hallmark of the old Wall Street.

In fact, perhaps the clearest example of the transformation is Goldman, which on Thursday reported a 15 percent fourth-quarter drop in net revenue in its once dominant fixed income, currency and commodities business to $1.72 billion. For the year, Goldman earned a total of profit of $8.04 billion.

In 2007, at the height of the last Wall Street boom, Goldman’s trading wizards earned $4.89 billion in net revenue in the same business in the third quarter. And for the year in 2007, Goldman reported earnings of nearly $12 billion.

To be sure, some of the drop in trading and other revenue at big Wall Street banks reflects a slower economy and less risk-taking by corporate clients. But it also reflects the fact that under Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rule and new capital requirements instituted by the Federal Reserve and other regulators, Wall Street banks cannot trade for their own accounts the way they once did, must maintain much less risky balance sheets and for the most part can no longer sell exotic and high-return products such as collateralized debt or loan obligations.

The result of all this is that Wall Street is struggling to make money.

“There are only two banks beating their cost of capital right now, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, and neither are beating it by much,” said Brad Hintz, a banking analyst at Sanford Bernstein and a former top executive at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. He was referring to how much it costs a bank to make money for shareholders. “New regulations are pushing down the performance of the banks. At some point they will get restructured, but right now they are in a major period of transition.”

Hintz pointed to Morgan Stanley’s current effort to sell off its commodities business as evidence of the deep transformation of Wall Street. Indeed, Morgan Stanley, under chief executive James Gorman, a veteran of Merrill Lynch’s giant brokerage business, is moving away from high-risk trading toward a much more stable asset management business.

The changes are not limited to Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

Citigroup has been selling off hedge fund and private equity assets to comply with the Volcker rule. Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan said last month that closing trading businesses banned under Volcker cost the bank $500 million in revenue per quarter.

None of these banks are going broke anytime soon, of course.

BofA reported earnings of $3.44 billion in the fourth quarter. JPMorgan earned $5.3 billion. But much of the gains are now coming from cost-cutting, including lowering salaries and bonuses, and from reducing reserves held for soured loans.

Because the economy is improving and consumers are in much better shape than they were five years ago, banks now have to keep less cash on hand to cushion against losses. Around 31 percent of JPMorgan’s profits in 2013, or $5.6 billion, came from reduced loan-loss reserves, according to Bloomberg.

Bank share prices have also done well since the depths of the crisis, but analysts note that much of that stems from reduced expenses as well as a general hope among investors that an improving economy will increase demand for loans and banking services, driving future profits.

Still, no one in the industry expects the kind of eye-popping returns that the largest banks earned in the run-up to the financial crisis. And the industry’s defenders say the public perception — that banks remain too big to fail and have not been reformed — is not at all fair.

“To say nothing has changed is just crazy talk,” said Tony Fratto, partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a D.C. consulting firm working with banks on image repair. “There have been very significant changes. Banks raised lots of new capital, they face a host of new oversight powers and we are stress-testing them to the point that nothing else in the world will survive except these banks.”

Lobbyists for the big banks say they are now fighting just to avoid being broken up as vocal members of Congress, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and David Vitter (R-La.), call for banks to be forced out of the investment banking business entirely.

“They will continue to hammer away at us no matter happens because it’s good politics,” said a top lobbyist for one of the largest banks in the U.S., who asked not to be identified by name so as not to raise the ire of regulators and members of Congress. “You look at all the changes we’ve made and the things we’ve done to reduce risk and improve our balance sheet and get rid of businesses, and you wonder what’s next. What’s the endgame?”

Fratto said there is now a “cottage industry” built up around ripping banks as too big to fail, and that is not likely to change anytime soon. “This is their theme song and they are going to continue to sing it as long as it still resonates with certain audiences,” he said.

For reformers, the test of whether regulatory changes are really working will not come until the next economic boom when banks may find new ways to get around the Volcker rule to trade for their own accounts or create even more exotic financial products not even dreamed of yet by current regulations.

“The greatest challenge for financial reform and the attempts to prevent another crash will be the economic cycle,” Kelleher said. “Memories tend to fade the further away we get from the last crisis.”

Staff writer Jon Prior contributed to this report.

© 2014 POLITICO LLC
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Baraka_Guru · Jan 16, 2014

rogue49 said: ↑

I'm sorry...I just don't see the banks "struggling to make money" like they indicated in the article.
Not with the multi-billion dollar quarterly profits I'm seeing.

Oh...sorry if you stock owners expect you to earn another 10 billion dollars more, just because that matches the percentage gains used for smaller companies.
Sometimes, things just don't grow at that rate.
Kind of the reason true giants couldn't exist because they wouldn't be able to support themselves physically.
Click to expand...

If you don't already know, you might be interested to learn....New Michael Lewis Book on Financial World Will Be Published in March—New York Times

Baraka_Guru · Jan 21, 2014

In case you've never heard the Canadian 1% speak.... Kevin O'Leary says 3.5 billion people living in poverty is 'fantastic news' | the Albatross

If only everyone were born with bootstraps.

rogue49 · Jan 24, 2014

It's not that you can't handle the truth.
Or that you don't want the truth.

It's that you're unaware of the truth...numb to it...can't see the forest through the trees...and so on.
It's just too complicated, too much noise.

The corruption is there, "just because".
And those that know...are drowned out
Or they have their own agenda
Or they can't go after them.

Crime does pay...because it isn't a crime.

Comcast, Corbett, and the perfectly legal corruption we don't even notice anymore
Posted: Thursday, January 23, 2014

The act of fighting political corruption is a little like the bird flu. There's a frenzy of hysteria every 10 years or so, and then there's a vaccine or something and it all goes away. The Watergate-Abscam ("American Hustle") era of the mid-to-late 1970s, New York City's mob and corruption scandals of the mid-1980s, the Clinton fundraising scandals of the mid-1990s, the bug at Philadelphia City Hall in the mid-2000s. Now in 2014, indictments are the new black -- the ex-governor of Virginia, a conservative pundit who made a movie attacking Obama and got nailed by Obama's Justice Department (I'm sure no one will find that suspicious), and now New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez is being investigated for the umpteenth time.

Try to get your arms around Chris Christie. For four years, the New Jersey governor and his aides bullied critics and rewarded their friends and it was not at all a secret...just nobody cared. Until they did something so over-the-top crazy that it was impossible to ignore. Now all those other things that were hiding in plain sight -- the mismanagement of Sandy relief funds, including abusing some of it to help boost his own re-election -- is suddenly the stuff of FBI investigations.

I used to be a huge fan of corruption prosecutions -- that's faded a bit over time as I've watched the way that prosecutors abuse their power almost as much as the sleazy power-drunk pols they're going after. Truth be told, we've been throwing politicians in jail -- during these occasional feeding frenzies, anyway -- since the Middle Ages, and corruption is still with us.

And here's the thing they don't want you to know: Most corruption is 100 percent legal. Rich people make politicians powerful, and powerful politicians reward their rich donors. Most politicians are bought and paid for by private interests who get their phone calls returned, get tax breaks that no one writes about, or get state grants that their wildly profitable companies don't really need.

What if I told you a story about a nationally known Democratic fundraiser and friend to President Obama who surprised some people by raising money and voicing support for a conservative Republican?. A short time later, the GOP politician's administration awards that fundraiser's profitable company millions to help build an massive new office.

Interesting? Apparently not. It happened just the other day. No one cared.

You might have guessed that I'm talking about Comcast's No. 3 executive David L. Cohen, the former top aide to then-mayor Ed Rendell who has hosted megabucks fundraisers for Obama in his home. But just last February, Cohen surprised some by saying that he expected to support Republican Gov. Corbett and hosting an event that raised $200,000 for Corbett's stumbling campaign.

The other day, Corbett came back to help Cohen's cable giant announce that it was going to build a second skyscraper in Philadelphia, the tallest building between New York and Atlanta. (Full disclosure, the development firm on the project is led by one of the owners of this newspaper.) And to help Comcast -- which made more than $12 billion in profits its last full reporting year of 2012 -- get the job done, the governor came bearing gifts -- $30 million in construction grants and $4.5 million for job creation. A cynic might say that a $34.5 million return on a $200,000 investment in Corbett is a pretty good return.

I know, I know...it's complicated. Philadelphians love the prestige that comes with tall buildings (even one that looks like it's giving West Philly a one-fingered salute) , but more importantly we really, really need jobs, and Comcast is creating hundreds of them. If some of them go to the thousands of long-term unemployed Philadelphians who've been desperately seeking work for months if not years, then we should certainly thank Comcast for that. But in a state with so many needs, is corporate welfare for a $12-billion-a-year profit machine really our top funding priority?

A journalist friend who spent years investigating the mob once told me about wiseguys with a roll of hundreds of dollars in their pocket who would put wooden slugs in tollbooths. Why? Because they could.

Is that what just happened here?

Maybe -- but not only is the state throwing so much taxpayer cash at Corbett's new fundraising buddy perfectly legal, but the citizenry is perfectly numb to these dealings of the rich and famous. Comcast undoubtedly has Corbett's ear, but what about the rest of us? The week that Corbett hailed Comcast was the same week he chickened out and abruptly canceled what would have been his first visit to a Philadelphia public school. The schools that are in desperate need of assistance, that did not make $12 billion but had a $300 budget hole, in good measure because of state budget cuts under Corbett.

Is it too late for Schools Superintendent William Hite to arrange a Corbett fundraiser?
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Street Pattern · Jan 24, 2014

It's worth noting that Pennsylvania and New Jersey are both considerably more corrupt than average in the U.S.

Every U.S. state has its own political culture. Cross a state line, and find a whole different world on the other side, when it comes to practical money things, like building permits or health inspections or labor negotiations or waste disposal or workers comp or paving contracts.

It's not just government: in a corrupt state, business tends to be corrupt, too. They're all embedded in the same culture and traditions.

Pennsylvania is an economic backwater today because greed is so ingrained there. Every official expects a bribe. Why start or locate your business in a place like that?

rogue49 · Jan 30, 2014

Class Warfare?? I don't think so...
Just a bit of bitchin' about things being lop-sided.

Off with their heads...Nah, I think we've become a bit more civilized since the 1790's and the Reign of Terror.

If you're so worried about it, how about encouraging your under-management to hire and pay better wages.
You'd be surprise how that would help...much less encourage the economy even more with purchasing.

But no, they'd rather be paranoid...and make Nazi references.
I tell you...people are idiots...even the rich ones.

Why the rich are freaking out
By: Ben White - January 30, 2014

NEW YORK — The co-founder of one the nation’s oldest venture capital firms fears a possible genocide against the wealthy. Residents of Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side say the progressive mayor didn’t plow their streets as a form of frosty revenge. And the co-founder of Home Depot recently warned the Pope to pipe down about economic inequality.

The nation’s wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown.

Economists, advisers to the wealthy and the wealthy themselves describe a deep-seated anxiety that the national — and even global — mood is turning against the super-rich in ways that ultimately could prove dangerous and hard to control.

President Barack Obama and the Democrats have pivoted to income inequality ahead of the midterm elections. Pope Francis has strongly warned against the dangers of wealth concentration. And all of this follows the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011 and a bout of bank-bashing populism in the tea party.

The collective result, according to one member of the 1 percent, is a fear that the rich are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe not today but soon.

“You have a bunch of people who see conspiracies everywhere and believe that this inequality issue will quickly turn into serious class warfare,” said this person, who asked not to be identified by name so as not to anger any wealthy friends. “They don’t believe inequality is bad and believe the only way to deal with it is to allow entrepreneurs to have even fewer shackles.”

And so the rich are lashing out.

In the latest example, Thomas Perkins, co-founder of legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal over the weekend comparing Nazi Germany’s persecution and mass murder of Jews to “the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”

He went on to say he feared a progressive “Kristallnacht,” referring to the 1938 German pogrom in which nearly 100 Jews were killed and more than 30,000 arrested, a dark omen of the murder of 6 million that would follow.

People, to put it mildly, went nuts.

Even Perkins’s old firm disavowed him and his comments and said he no longer has anything to do with the company. Perkins then went on Bloomberg television, ostensibly to apologize for the remark. But instead he doubled down on the analogy, saying “when you start to use hatred against a minority, it can get out of control.”

Perkins was not the first wealthy investor to invoke Nazi Germany as a warning over current attitudes toward the wealthy. In 2010, when Obama suggested raising the tax on “carried interest” earned by private equity executives, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Obama still hasn’t managed to persuade Congress to hike the 20 percent rate on carried interest even though most on Wall Street expect to lose the perk at some point. Schwarzman eventually apologized for his Hitler remark.

More recently, the New York Post dedicated considerable ink to complaints from residents of the Upper East Side that newly elected progressive mayor Bill de Blasio directed plows to avoid the neighborhood as some kind of revenge for their wealth and support of de Blasio’s opponent.

“He is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political,” Upper East Side resident Molly Jong Fast told the Post. “By not plowing the Upper East Side, he is saying, ‘I’m not one of them.’”

The mayor dutifully trundled up to the neighborhood to admit mistakes in plowing but strongly denied any ulterior motive.

It doesn’t end there.

Ken Langone, a wealthy investor and co-founder of Home Depot, recently told CNBC that the Catholic Church in New York might see a decline in donations if Pope Francis did not tone down his comments about the dangers of economic inequality. “You want to be careful about generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country,” Langone said.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman this week wrote that even plutocrats who manage not to invoke Nazi Germany “nonetheless hold, and loudly express, political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania in equal measure.”

The phenomenon is not limited to the U.S. Bankers across the globe who gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week complained publicly and privately that in their view vilification of the rich, particularly in the financial industry, has gone far enough.

“Life is hard enough, and I think this constant lecturing on ethics and on integrity by many stakeholders is probably the most frustrating part of the equation. Because I don’t think there are many people who are perfect,” Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS AG, told The Wall Street Journal. “We are far from being perfect … but it’s not going to be very helpful to be constantly bashing banks.”

But perhaps nowhere is the collective freakout more pronounced than the financial capital of the world. Here in New York, even wealthy donors who tend to favor Democrats are deeply concerned about the current political discourse at the city level in which de Blasio wants to increase taxes on the rich, and the national level, in which Democrats have pledged to make the 2014 midterm elections about addressing economic inequality.

“I think this is going to be disastrous for the city,” one top executive at a large Wall Street bank said on the eve of de Blasio’s election. “The people who pay taxes could move out, the businesses could leave. What’s keeping us here?”

At one level, the reaction seems dramatically out of proportion to anything any politician is actually proposing. And recent comments from the super-wealthy can seem baffling — and infuriating — to the vast majority of Americans who occupy much less rarefied air and now have myriad social media forums to castigate what they view as deeply out-of-touch whining from the plutocrat class.

Nothing Obama proposed in his relatively mild State of the Union address would do much to impact the lives of the nation’s top earners. Raising the minimum wage wouldn’t do it. Nor would extending unemployment benefits or instituting universal pre-kindergarten.

Even the president’s toughest lines on the issue of inequality were hardly the kind of fire-and-brimstone condemnation that Franklin D. Roosevelt heaped on bankers’ heads in the 1930s.

“After four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better,” Obama said. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”

That was pretty much it.

Obama made no call to raise taxes further on the rich, who still enjoy rates dramatically lower than they were through most of the booming 1980s. He did not summon Occupy Wall Street protesters back to the barricades or threaten new actions to bust up big banks.

Meanwhile, de Blasio has no power to raise taxes unilaterally on the rich despite his fiery campaign rhetoric.

On a practical level, the wealthy are jumping at shadows.

“None of the issues currently on the table would have a large effect on the very rich,” said Justin Wolfers, economics professor at the University of Michigan. “If there is anything driving this rise in rhetoric, it’s that the president pivoted to talking about inequality, which some interpret as taking from the 1 percent and giving to the 99 percent.”

People who counsel the wealthy for a living say there is both an unease with growing income disparity and a fear of even greater persecution.

“I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist whose Wealth Legacy Group focuses on counseling the affluent. “There is a worry among our clients that they are being judged and people are making assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.”

Much of the current anxiety is also driven by the precarious nature of the recovery from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The U.S. economy is showing signs of picking up speed with job creation and consumer confidence on the rise. But there is still an enormous sense of national pessimism about the future, as evidenced in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that showed 68 percent of Americans believe the country is stagnant or worse off since the president took office in 2009.

And the recent stock market swoon, the bad December jobs report and gyrations in emerging market currencies could convince some wealthy Americans that their pessimism is well-founded and that another economic downturn is not far off — and might carry even greater risks for the rich.

“People are very anxious about the decline in the stock market and feel that this may be just a hollow shell of a recovery, and we may see in the next few years that things really haven’t changed,” said Louis Hyman, a historian of capitalism at Cornell. “They are afraid the critics are right and that inequality really is a driver of all this, and are afraid of what that means for them.”

© 2014 POLITICO LLC
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Good news is this...from what I've been seeing on the market...the hiring surge is starting. (Just had to wait until the end of the year to be over...and new budgets to start)

That, and I'm also starting to hear about job rates which are significantly higher...even from locations that aren't as well known for higher wages.

So, between the pocket books opening, the hiring, the wages...and the extra competition between recruiting companies...it should finally be a good year for workers.

And then you rich people can stop worrying your pretty little heads.

Street Pattern · Jan 30, 2014

Here's another take on that, from Joshua Micah Marshall:

If you've been in the media slipstream today you know the outrage and mockery directed at Tom Perkins, one of the world's wealthiest and most successful Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for an oped he wrote in the Wall Street Journal comparing the rising critique of income inequality and "the 1%" to Kristallnacht. Just so we're all on the same page, Kristallnacht ("the night of shattered glass") was essentially the opening act of Hitler's Final Solution. It took place on November 9th and 10th, 1938. This claim manages simultaneously to be so logically ridiculous and morally hideous that Perkins deserves every bit of abuse he's already receiving.

But I think we're missing the point if we see this as the gaffe of one aging, coddled jerk. Because it's only a more extreme and preposterous version of beliefs that have become increasingly widespread in the wealthiest sectors of American society, especially since 2008 and the twin events of the global financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama.

Let me state the phenomenon as clearly as possible: The extremely wealthy are objectively far wealthier, far more politically powerful and find a far more indulgent political class than at any time in almost a century - at least. And yet at the same time they palpably feel more isolated, abused and powerless than at any time over the same period and sense some genuine peril to the whole mix of privileges, power and wealth they hold.

There is a disconnect there that is so massive and glaring that it demands some sociocultural explanation. I've written about this before. But I confess not terribly well because I've found it a difficult issue to get my arms fully around and to reorient my focus on day to day events to the longer horizon. But I do think it's one of the core political and economic issues of our time and deserves real explanation.

I first started noticing this when I saw several years ago that many of the wealthiest people in the country, especially people in financial services, not only didn't support Obama (not terribly surprising) but had a real and palpable sense that he was out to get them. This was hard to reconcile with the fact that Obama, along with President Bush, had pushed through a series of very unpopular laws and programs and fixes that had not only stabilized global capitalism, saved Wall Street but saved the personal fortunes (and perhaps even the personal liberty) of the people who were turning so acidly against him. Indeed, through the critical years of 2009, 10 and 11 he was serving as what amounted to Wall Street's personal heat shield, absorbing as political damage the public revulsion at the bailout policies that had kept Wall Street whole.

Let's start by stipulating that no one expects the extremely wealthy to react happily to mounting discussion of wealth and income inequality or left-wing diatribes about "the 1%." But again, the reaction is extreme and excessive and frequently runs into less comical versions of Perkins' screed, with weird fears of persecution and threat from the folks who quite truly rule the roost.

Here's an exchange I had more recently with one of the wealthiest persons in the United States on the issue of perceptions of Obama among the very wealthiest Americans.

Let me start by saying that I am not a fan of rich people complaining they're being mistreated... That said, all the rich people I know think that Obama is trying to whip up anti-1% sentiment. The irony is that Obama's policies have been fine for rich people -- taxes have stayed low, almost nobody got prosecuted coming out of the financial meltdown, etc. But the feeling is real.

So what is it about?

I see three basic roots, though I don't think my list is exhaustive.

One is the simple but massive run up in the concentration of wealth itself over the past two generations. There's a slice of the population, whether it's the top 1% or .01% or whatever, that doesn't just have more stuff and money. The sheer scale of the difference means they live what is simply a qualitatively different kind of existence. That gulf creates estrangement and alienation, and one of a particular sort in a democracy where such a minuscule sliver of the population can't hope to protect itself alone at the ballot box.

Let's call this socioeconomic acrophobia.

A second is tied specifically to the 2008 financial crisis. The last 35 years or so have seen a period in which the celebration of wealth and the wealthy has been near the extreme end of the pendulum swing that has moved back and forth over the course of American history. Let's not distract ourselves, for the moment, with whether this view is right or wrong. It's a pendulum swing as old as America. In this view, the super rich, the founders and most successful entrepreneurs, not only wow us by their genius and success but are also seen as the people driving forward the society and economy and prosperity for everyone.

That's a nice climate to be wealthy in.

That all changed very abruptly at the end of 2008.

Suddenly, there was vast public animus at "Wall Street" and the Big Banks, exacerbated massively by the politics of the bailout. And not just from the left but from the right too, though in a different form. Pretty deserved on many levels: the financial sector, the figurative "Wall Street", had come close to crashing the global economic system by a mix of irresponsible risk taking and gaming the political system to permit this high-risk, wealth-juicing leverage. But if we're to understand the psychology of the individuals involved we must appreciate the whipsaw nature of that experience.

Quite simply, these were and are folks who just weren't used to public criticism. The whole "masters of the universe" mythology was basically, sure we're massively wealthy. But we're also the ones keeping the globe we all live on from spinning off its axis. So let us enjoy our Hamptons estates and our private jets in peace and we'll do our jobs and you do yours. The crossfire hurricane that ripped apart that social contract stung a lot.

And then there's the other really important variable in the equation. We know now that Wall Street came out of the financial crisis pretty nicely. But that was far from clear in the fall of 2008. The titans, under-titans and sub-titans saw the entire financial system spin on the edge of un-self-regulating collapse, something the reining ideology of recent decades said shouldn't have been possible along with the real prospect of whole personal fortunes evaporating in an instant. That kind of scare is not easy to forget. Mix it with the need to run to the political class hat in hand and that ocean of animus from the public at large and you get the makings of a political and psychological toxicity that breeds Perkinsonian nonsense at the extreme end and more pervasively the sense of embattlement and threat verging on persecution complex that I described above.

It is that mix of insecurity, a sense of the brittleness of one's hold on wealth, power, privileges, combined with the reality of great wealth and power, that breeds a mix of aggressiveness and perceived embattlement.

Third there is the simple fact of Obama himself. By various criteria you could argue that before Obama America hadn't had a progressive president in decades. Popular perceptions aside, Carter was actually part of the privatizing trend of the late 70s.

And Clinton, while genuinely a progressive in many ways, served most of his presidency during a period when basically everyone was either getting rich or making at least some progress. And when everybody is getting at least some taste of the good times, these sorts of antagonisms find a way of getting overlooked or passed over. President Obama is far from being a Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman. But he is a progressive and sees the economy and the larger society's claims on the very wealthy differently than a Bush or a Reagan. And again, that was just not something any of these folks had experienced before.

But again, the answer is the confluence of these events, no one of them. It's worth remembering that Bill Clinton pushed through a reasonably substantial tax hike on upper income earners in 1993. President Obama meanwhile largely maintained the tax policies of George W. Bush, the guy who had in essence repealed Clinton's tax increase. These are all facts that are hard to ignore.

Put it all together and you get the climate in which someone like Perkins writes something as ridiculous as he did. As I said up top, his Holocaust analogy is so hyperbolic and ridiculous that he's getting dumped on by almost everyone. But we miss the point if we see this in isolation or just the rant of one out-of-touch douchebag. It is pervasive. The disconnect between perception and reality, among such a powerful segment of the population, is in itself dangerous. And it's led to what I would call a significant radicalization of the politics of extreme wealth. My evidence for this is only anecdotal. But it's come up in conversations I've had with many business reporters who cover these folks on a daily basis.

We take it more or less rightly as a given that people in finance will have generally right-leaning politics - low taxes, tight money, lax regulatory regimes. Basically traditional money Republicanism. But over the last few years (since 2008), I think there's been a pretty dramatic growth in what we'd call Tea Party politics in that set - extreme conservatism that goes beyond hands off fiscal and regulatory policy, the kind of feverish mindset in which you could write with a straight face that progressives might be building toward some sort of mass wealth confiscation or internment or even extermination for the likes of Tom Perkins.

It's a problem. And Perkins is just getting our attention because his self-censor and/or editor failed him so miserably.
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rogue49 · Jan 30, 2014

So let me try to sum it up, @Street Pattern

So basically we've got a whole group that is like douche-bag Justin Bieber,
who are scared we're going to take away their Lamborghini for "jealousy" reasons,
then are surprised that we DO take away their driving privs...when they were street racing...drunk & stoned, (the economy fiasco)
and offended that we're then monitoring them...and put them on probation... (Frank-Dodd and such)
and finally they are thinking we might be on them...because we fear their future driving???

Why am I not shocked??

rogue49 · Jan 31, 2014

Too good to pass up...

hamsterball · Jan 31, 2014

Man ain't that the truth.

Baraka_Guru · Feb 3, 2014

The article is a bit longer, so I'll only post a few points: The End of American Exceptionalism - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic

Conservatives are right: The attitudes they say make America special—religiosity, patriotism, and mobility—are fading. And it has nothing to do with Barack Obama.
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When conservatives say American exceptionalism is imperiled, they're onto something. In fundamental ways, America is becoming less exceptional. Where Gingrich and company go wrong is in claiming that the Obama presidency is the cause of this decline. It's actually the result. Ironically, the people most responsible for eroding American exceptionalism are the very conservatives who most fear its demise.
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As America and Europe have changed over time, so have the attributes that exceptionalists claim distinguish us from them. But for the contemporary right, there are basically three: our belief in organized religion; our belief that America has a special mission to spread freedom in the world; and our belief that we are a classless society where, through limited government and free enterprise, anyone can get ahead. Unfortunately for conservatives, each of these beliefs is declining fast.
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It then goes into detail about each of these aspects...but more in tune with this thread:

When conservatives worry that America is not as economically exceptional anymore, they're right. A raft of studies suggests that upward mobility is nowrarer in the United States than in much of Europe. But if America's exceptional economic mobility is largely a myth, it's a myth in which many older Americans still believe. Among the young, by contrast, attitudes are catching up to reality.
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For more than a century, commentators have chalked up Americans' support for capitalism and lack of economic resentment to America's exceptional upward mobility. It's unclear when exactly American upward mobility began to decline. But it's not surprising that, eventually, that decline would cause class attitudes to harden.
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If you believe, as academics increasingly do, that economic inequality goes hand in hand with calcified class relations, then decades of conservative policy have contributed to America's relative lack of economic mobility.

This, in turn, has soured young Americans on the belief that through the free market they can rise above the circumstances of their birth. Which means that, when it comes to declining faith in the American Dream of upward mobility, as with declining faith in organized religion and declining faith in America's special mission in the world, conservatives have helped foment the very backlash against American exceptionalism that they decry.
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The article then goes into detail about how a backlash in all three areas may actually be a source of hope, but I'll leave it to you to click the above link to fill in the blanks above and to read the rest of the article.

rogue49 · Feb 3, 2014

I don't know if I agree with that fully, @Baraka_Guru.
True, there is quite a bit of inequality in the US...and now, the "empires" built on the Middle Class are fading. (or at least are a bit sickly)

Which I don't know why they'd be shocked...hmm, stop paying people in relative terms to the economy, suck out their savings by crisis or fee'd to death by un-budgeted add-ons to everything,
then when they stop going out...or purchasing un-needed things...surprise, your revenue goes down...
This is noted in the most recent article in the NYTimes. - The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World.
Middle mgmt in the US has demolished the Middle class...their lack of investment, skin-flint ways, no growth. (and just profits and stocks aren't growth...there's much more to it)

But this is not to say that Americans have lost their drive or creativity...nor to say that they are more exceptional than any other.
I do find, from my own direct experience, they tend to be more ambitious or productive than many...but others are too, Germany, Australia and so on.
Also they are given ley-way for thinking outside the box more than some, and it is encouraged and expected more...less class based limitations. but others are too...
It's a combination of subtle factors that has enabled the US to succeed...and this hasn't gone away.

They're just a bit more under the gun than before...but recently, the pendulum may be swinging back.
I'm seeing an upsurge in job recruitment...it's just starting.
I'm also seeing a significant increase in wages being offered, 10-20% more in certain urban areas...and even more so in non-main cities.
There's going to be a big ol' swing dance this spring and summer.

Now, mgmt is going to sweat it...as valued employees move on...and they'll need to retrain and increase wages to get in replacements. (either internal or external)
And many are going to be spending after getting that increase...but it's going to take some time.
The businesses now suffering from the Middle Class lag...are going to have to figure out how to survive until there is the new swing.
But hey...the Middle Class did it...they can too.

And as you see the economy take off again...you'll see even more innovation and R&D invested into.
The "exceptionalism" isn't gone, it's only being repressed, no resources.
But the same can be said for Europe and Japan. (What it's like up in Canada, with your own "exceptionalism"), they're a bit stagnant themselves.
We've all got lags...but this doesn't mean we're dead.

redux · Feb 11, 2014

Conservatives outraged by gay couple and multilingual singing of America the Beautiful in Coke Super Bowl Commercial

Rage Against the Coke Machine - The Daily Beast

Coke Super Bowl Commercial Causes Right-Wing Meltdown | Crooks and Liars

Glen Beck: Coca-Cola Trying to 'Divide People" With Super Bowl Ad
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