Her Husband Works with Him at UBS

[Octafish]

They're in the "Weath Management" department.



Before UBS, they all worked together in Washington, where Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) shepherded financial deregulation of the banks through Congress and President Bill Clinton (D-USA) signed it into law, the repeal of New Deal protections that kept Wall Street from using the taxpayers for their tab at the casino. President Bush was there, too, making sure the Banksters got away in 2008.

Forensic economist and former Fed regulator William K. Black wrote it reminds him of what happened during the Savings and Loans Crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. At the time, that was the greatest heist in history.

[Skwmom]

1. UBS has been good to the Clintons

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

[Octafish]

2. And the Clintons have been good to UBS.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

-- http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

pretzeldent George W Bush and President Barack Obama, also have been very, very good to UBS, who made sure that $287 billion in 2008 bank bailout money went to the SWISS bank.

-- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/2/20/1188374/-The-true-cost-of-the-Bank-Bailout

[Skwmom]

3. They seem to have these kinds of arrangements with a lot of businesses and foreign governments.

[Octafish]

4. Take Walmart, the Love is Buy Partisan.

Important history from 1992 campaign:

Bush Ventures to Clinton Turf, Honors Sam Walton

Republicans: The trip to Arkansas is billed as nonpolitical. The gravely ill Wal-Mart founder is given the Medal of Freedom.

by Douglas Jehl
Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1992

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — On the day Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton emerged as the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, President Bush visited the governor's home state on a trip he insisted had nothing to do with politics.

Bush made the journey to present the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to one of its richest men, Sam Walton, the gravely ill 73-year-old founder of Wal-Mart Stores.

SNIP...

Walton, who built the Wal-Mart empire from one store to a $9-billion fortune, now is confined to a wheelchair, and Bush choked up during the ceremony at the company's headquarters in Bentonville as he praised the entrepreneur as an emblem of "America's success."

"I think it's important that all Americans understand that some things are going very, very well in the United States of America," Bush said. "And one of those things is Wal-Mart."

SNIP...

Wal-Mart has retained its Arkansas roots even as it has grown beyond the region. The chain also has links to the Clintons--the governor's wife, Hillary, has a substantial financial stake in the company and serves on its board of directors.

Walton's family has generously supported many of Clinton's past campaigns. This year, Walton has contributed the legal maximum of $1,000 to both Clinton and Bush.

CONTINUED...

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-03-18/news/mn-3841_1_sam-walton

Walmart continued to grow since then, making the heirs of Sam Walton very wealthy. Of course, losing the middle class and all means that most everone else in the USA has not done so well. But, hey! Can't win 'em all. Heh heh heh.

[Skwmom]

5. And we've help the Walmart Family get rich by subsidizing their labor costs for decades.

I was so happy to FINALLY see someone point that out.

[Octafish]

6. No unions. No pensions. Good thing there's Social Security. Oh, wait...

Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

The Dark Age of Money

by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012

EXCERPT...

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

SNIP...

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as ‘free market capitalism’ and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.

SNIP...

[font color="green"]Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.[/font color]

SNIP...

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/

Where the New Democrat Thing comes in:

President Clinton and the Chilean Model.

By José Piñera

Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.

That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.

Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:

Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.

Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).

I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.

“The mother of all reforms”

While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.

So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”

But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.

[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm

These economic policies are for the rich and richer. Their cost transformed the middle class into the new poor.

[Skwmom]

7. I think running up the national debt is the plan for busting medicare and social security.

[Octafish]

8. Former Sen. Don Riegle (D-Michigan) tried to warn us that they'd already stolen the money from SS.

I mean "borrow." Legalese, I know.

Pay Back the Money Borrowed From Social Security

Sen. Don Riegle and
Lori Hansen Riegle
Apr 05, 2011 04:02 PM EDT

Throughout its 75 year history, Social Security has provided critical economic security to millions of retirees, families, children and the disabled. Social Security is paid for by the dedicated contributioans of workers and their employers, has administrative costs of less than one percent, and since it cannot borrow to fund its operations, Social Security does not contribute to the deficit. No wonder that Americans from all walks of life consistently and overwhelmingly support our nation's most successful social insurance program -- a level of support that is not achieved by other governmental programs.

Social Security currently has a $2.6 trillion surplus which has been building up since the 1983 amendments and is intended to help absorb the retirement of the baby boomers. This surplus is invested in US Treasury securities that are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. According to the Social Security Trustees 2010 report, Social Security can pay full benefits until 2037, at which time, if nothing were done to strengthen its financing, Social Security would still be able to pay about 78 percent of benefits. This quarter of a century means there is time to strengthen its financing without cutting benefits for future beneficiaries. The American people will insist that Congress do what is needed for the program to pay full benefits and protect these benefits they were promised and have earned.

Social Security Opponents Use Fear to Manipulate Debate

Opponents of Social Security have been working for many years to tell a much different story about Social Security in order to influence how the media and Washington decision makers view it. One example of this is Wall Street insider Pete Peterson who has dedicated $1 billion of his Wall Street fortune to the destruction of Social Security as we know it. Peterson is joined in his efforts by other wealthy special interests that have much to gain if Social Security is cut or eliminated.

Despite the overwhelming public support for Social Security and the critical retirement, survivors and disability insurance it provides to millions of Americans, Peterson and his Wall Street friends want to reduce Social Security's protections and force average working Americans to put their future retirement, life and disability security in the hands of Wall Street -- the same crowd that nearly caused a collapse of our economy and pushed the country into the Great Recession.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/sen-don-riegle/post_1901_b_845106.html

When a Republican brought up the subject, all heck broke loose and they stopped. Then, one day...

Obama Finally Lays His Cards on the Table

Eric Zuesse
Huffington Post Posted: 04/05/2013 10:53 pm

EXCERPT...

On 16 January 2009, four days before Obama was inaugurated, Michael D. Shear headlined in the Washington Post, "Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform," and he reported about "a wide-ranging 70 minute interview with Washington Post reporters and editors," in which Obama endorsed efforts by Republicans and conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats in the Senate to cut Social Security and Medicare. Progressives were already disturbed at what their friends in Congress were leaking to them about Obama's strong commitment to doing this, and so a few blog posts were issued to ring alarm bells publicly about it. Paul Rosenberg at openleft.com headlined on January 17th (three days before Obama's Inauguration), regarding "Obama's 'Mandate' To Slash Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security," and he presented polls showing that the public not only didn't want to cut any of these programs, but that 74% wanted Medicare and Medicare spending increased, and 62% wanted SS spending increased. Even 65% of self-declared "conservative" Americans wanted the medical programs increased, and 62% of them wanted SS spending increased. To Obama, his plan to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, was an act of political courage. It was his long-term plan, even though the polls showed widespread opposition to it by the public.

Obama has long socialized with top Wall Street and hedge fund executives. He likes their company, and personally identifies with them. He truly respects them. He cannot stand the idea that they would be sent to prison for any crimes. To him, they are good people.

On 3 April 2009, Politico bannered innocuously (and deceptively, given the shocking core that was buried here - Obama's statement), "Inside Obama's Bank CEOs Meeting." Eamon Javers reported Obama telling Wall Street's CEOs, inside the White House, [font color="green"]"My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."[/font color] (This essentially secret meeting, and the comment itself, had occurred on 27 March 2009, but Javers failed to cite the date, which was indicated only under the accompanying AP wire photo of the CEOs coming out of this publicly unannounced event.) Obama's remark was implicitly analogizing here: he implied that he was protecting these people not from prosecutions for crimes (which he actually was), but instead from angry irrational mobs outside, who were driven by blind hatred (like the lynch mobs were in the Old South). Obama was metaphorically siding here with the plantation owners, not with the slaves; with the KKK, not with their victims. This elite Black was telling them that he would protect them from prosecution. He wasn't going to protect the public - which he here analogized to simply a hate-obsessed mob of bigots.

The crimes that these elite men had committed had, indeed, crashed the U.S. economy. Shahien Nasiripour, at huffingtonpost, bannered, on 16 May 2011, "Confidential Federal Audits Accuse Five Biggest Mortgage Firms Of Defrauding Taxpayers," and he reported that the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had carried out audits of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Ally Financial, and found, in each case, that they had swindled the Federal Government. "The internal watchdog office at HUD referred its findings to the Department of Justice, which must now decide whether to file charges" under "the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government." All of "the audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes ... using defective and faulty documents." Yet again - as with Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein, and with Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo, and with the Republican former Senator John Ensign - the Obama "Justice" Department was being challenged to prosecute banksters and conservative politicians. Nearly three years into his Presidency, Obama hadn't pursued even a single one of them.

The men who were in the White House at that secret meeting had made billions by deceiving mortgage-borrowers at one end, and by defrauding investors in mortgage backed securities (MBS) at the other end, taking enormous sales commissions and bonuses for themselves along the way, while they bankrupted their banks, which U.S. taxpayers then bailed out. Obama was telling these people that he would let them get away with it, and that they would keep their loot.

SNIP...

Obama has refused to prosecute even a single one of these "control fraudsters," as criminologist William K. Black calls them. In fact, the prosecutions of all white-collar crimes under the Obama Administration are at a record low, lower even than they were under George W. Bush, who was the previous record-holder for this coddling of the corrupt.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/obama-finally-lays-his-ca_b_3025743.html

And the Banksters and their good friends in Wall Street-on-the-Potomac lived happily and most comfortably ever after.

[amborin]

9. K&R

[Octafish]

10. Rahm Emanuel likes UBS.

$86,200 reasons to smile: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&cid=N00024813



The financial sector brings really big smiles for a lucky few, thanks to Rahm and our nation's civil servants.

The Hedge Fund That Ate Chicago

A political fight in Chicago could determine the future of pensions and public services.

By Les Leopold / AlterNet April 23, 2014

EXCERPT...

Wall Street buys a Mayor?

When Rahm Emanuel worked as a presidential assistant in the Clinton administration, he earned $118,000 a year. After he left his White House job in 1998, he got a raise, making over $18 millionin the next two and a half years working for the "boutique" investment banking firm of Wasserstein Perella. Emanuel had no previous banking experience.

Ken Griffin, the CEO of the Chicago-based Citadel hedge fund and "his wife Anne Dias Griffin, donated more than $200,000 to Mayor Emanuel’s campaign for Mayor in 2011," report David Sirota and Ben Joravsky in Pandodaily. "Griffin describes the mayor as his 'good friend'. Other Citadel employees have donated about $178,000 to Emanuel’s campaign."

SNIP...

Why Does a Millionaire Mayor and a Billionaire Hedge Fund CEO Team Up to Attack Public Pensions?

Because that's where the money is, and lots of it. Mayors and governors want to reduce pension fund contributions so that they can continue to lavish tax breaks and subsidies on their corporate patrons and still balance their budgets. In Chicago, the yearly cost of those corporate tax subsidies is already higher than the yearly costs of Chicago's pension fund outlays, according to an analysis by Goods Jobs First.

SNIP...

Why Are the Financialists Getting Away With It?

Rahm Emanuel, Chris Christie and hundreds of other politicians are able to attack public pension funds with impunity because defined benefit pensions in the private sector are an endangered species. One demagogic question is all they need to ask and they ask it again and again:

"Why should you pay taxes for public employee benefits that you don't have?"

Such an attack only works because Wall Street already has systematically destroyed private sector defined benefit pension funds—which are funds that provide retirees with a set payment for life (and sometimes beyond for spouses). Employers can reduce their costs by switching from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution 401ks. Better yet they might be able to eliminate the employer contributions altogether. Employees usually benefit more from defined benefit pensions and are very reluctant to see them altered. (For more about defined pension funds see here.)

As the chart below demonstrates less than 15 percent of private sector employees now have defined benefit pension programs, down from nearly 40% in 1979. Meanwhile, 401ks have grown from 16% to over 42%. This didn't happen by accident.

Wall Street Strip-Mines Private Pension Funds

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/economy/meet-hedge-fund-ate-chicago

Perhaps to dream.

[felix_numinous]

11. I guess the whole 'Right wing conspiracy' meme

was a total projection. I knew HRC had a lot of baggage but I am truly amazed. She would literally be investigated the whole time in the WH if she got in, and nothing else would get done.

[Octafish]

13. It hurts to write about...

...my niece and her husband are constantly amazed at what they learn on DU. Some days, though, he puts his hands up to his ears and says, "Stop! TMT!"

That stands for "Too Much Truth."

For example:



http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1404612

Wish it weren't so, felix_numinous. However, our nation and our future are at stake.

[Uncle Joe]

12. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Octafish]

14. Their association in ''Wealth Management at UBS'' has not been uttered on network television.

So, we must bring it up online and hope enough people learn what is going on to make a difference.

The people who got the United States into the present situation are the same class of people who benefit from the situation being what it is. Time to rethink strategy, including who runs the Democratic Party, and the rest of Washington. Like you, Uncle Joe, I side with Democracy.

Here are a pair of historic figures from historic families. Both also were into finance in a big way, coincidentally, of course.

Baron DeRothschild and Sen. Prescott Bush enjoy a moment and an official photograph together, ca. 1954.

How a Concentration of Wealth and Political Power Undermines Democracy

Who Rules the World?

by BENJAMIN DANGL
CounterPunch, Nov. 20, 2014

EXCERPT...

Just as most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a few people, according to a recent article in the academic journal Climatic Change, two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions were produced by just 90 companies, with Chevron, Exxon and BP leading the list as the biggest polluters. Half of these emissions were from the past 25 years.

“There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world,” Richard Heede, the author of the journal article, told the Guardian. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”

Confronting climate change requires a systemic transformation of how our economies are run and who runs them. Part of this radical change will involve disempowering the global 1% and the disaster-producing industries they profit from.

Across the US, we are living in a dream state; crisis is the new normal. In the face of global catastrophe, the leading political parties of the country typically offer more business as usual, meaning more corporate power to fuel democracy, more capitalism to fight inequality, more war to fight for peace, and more pollution to fight climate change.

We cannot depend on the 1% of the world to lead us away from disaster – they caused our global crises in the first place, continue to profit from them, and cannot bring about solutions from the top-down. It has to be the people’s movements leading the way from below, deconstructing capitalism and building a better world from the bottom-up.

SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/20/who-rules-the-world/

From FDR through LBJ's Great Society, life got better and the Middle Class grew in size and power. The rest of the time, it's pretty much a steady state of the Rich getting Richer and the Poor getting Poorer -- which is where the Middle Class is going in the wealthiest times in human history.

You are most welcome, Uncle Joe. Thank you for grokking.