Hearings on U.S. Oligarchy

Warren to Testify at Sanders-Led Hearing on Threat of US Oligarchy  Jessica Corbett  February 15, 2022 Common Dreams The Senate Budget Committee will examine Wall Street greed through the case study of Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, where workers have been on strike for nearly a year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on February 23, 2021 in Washington, D.C., Greg Nash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images   US Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders revealed Tuesday that Sen. Elizabeth Warren will testify this week at the panel's hearing on "Wall Street greed and growing oligarchy in America." The Massachusetts Democrat, a former bankruptcy law professor, joins four other previously announcedwitnesses: Cecil Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA); Braxton Wright, a Warrior Met Coal employee and member of UMWA Local 2368; economist Nomi Prins; and University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak. The Thursday morning hearing organized by Sanders (I-Vt.)—titled "Warrior Met and Wall Street Greed: What Corporate Raiders are Doing to Workers and Consumers"—will use the fossil fuel company and its striking workers as a case study. Warrior Met Coal employees affiliated with UMWA have been on strike in Alabama for 11 months, fighting for better benefits, pay, and working conditions. Sanders and Warren joined with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) for November letters to the private equity firms that they said "made off like bandits" after taking over Warrior Met, at the expense of workers. The trio also sent a letter to BlackRock—the world's largest asset manager–last month, calling on the firm to publicly pressure Warrior Met to "negotiate in good faith and agree to a reasonable contract that treats workers with dignity and respect."

Dealing with the over valued dollar

Elizabeth Warren released an “American jobs” plan recently. It includes several trade and manufacturing policies intended to benefit American workers and companies. Wall Street responded with righteous indignation, which suggests she may have hit a nerve.

One element of her plan most likely explains Wall Street’s angry reaction: a call to tackle America’s overvalued dollar.

The novel idea that the United States could achieve greater domestic prosperity by revaluing the dollar sounds obscure and a little risky. Who would want to tinker with our currency?

The reality is that China and about 20 other nations are already doing so. By using public capital to purchase huge quantities of United States government securities over the past two decades, they have driven up the value of the dollar to make their own exports supercompetitive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/opinion/elizabeth-warren-dollar.html

Elizabeth Warren Gets Serious- and Accurate- About Trade

Elizabeth Warrenbuilt her brand for the  2020 presidential primary on wonkery. From childcare to housing to higher ed, Warren has leveraged decades of economic policy expertise and a network of liberal intellectuals ― many of them former students in Warren’s law school classes ― to propose ambitious, meticulously detailed reforms.

The trade platform Warren unveiled Tuesday in Detroit is a little different. It retains Warren’s wonk-flair with a proposal to reorganize the disparate trade regulators currently scattered throughout the Washington bureaucracy inside a single, consolidated agency. But the heart of her proposal is ideological rather than technical. Warren is making a crystal-clear statement of principles, and an equally plain break with the past 30 years of American trade policy ― up to and including the presidency of Donald Trump.

 “America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers,” Warren told a crowd in Detroit Tuesday. “We have encouraged companies to invest abroad, ship jobs overseas, and keep wages low. All in the interest of serving multinational companies and international capital with no particular loyalty to the United States.”

What matters in Warren’s vision is not the specifics of any particular trade tool or enforcement tactic. Warren isn’t pro-tariff or anti-tariff, for instance. It depends on the tariff. She’s in favor of international rules that are designed to achieve actual policy goals other than corporate profit. What we call “free trade,” she emphasizes, isn’t really a system where governments get out of the way. The rules of international commerce determine its outcomes ― and there is no such thing as a trade regime without rules. When governments agreed to grant 20-year monopolies on life-saving medicines under WTO treaties, for instance, they were not simply allowing nature to take its course — they were setting up a system.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elizabeth-warrens-trade-plan-is-the-real-deal

Elizabeth Warren: 'I am not a' Democratic Socialist

CNN News.  See her definitions. 

Elizabeth Warren's Tax Plan

here's something to think about: Right now, an heir with $500 million in yachts and fine art and a public school teacher with no savings can pay the same amount in federal taxes. The reason? Because people pay federal taxes on their income, not on their wealth. So if that heir and that teacher both make $50,000 in a year, the federal government sees no difference between them. This isn’t an oversight,  it’s on purpose. It’s because the rich and powerful run Washington, and they make sure the rules are written to benefit themselves. The top 0.1% of American families – the richest 1 in 1,000 – now have nearly the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90% of American families combined. Meanwhile, for everyone else, opportunity is slipping away. This is bad for our society, bad for our economy, and bad for our democracy. We need structural change to fix it. That’s why today I’m proposing a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans. It will only affect the tippy-top 0.1% of the wealthy, those with a net worth of over $50 million. I’m calling it the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” and we can use the significant revenue it creates to start rebuilding our middle class. A lot of rich and powerful people won’t like it, but I don’t work for them. We’ll only get this done if this grassroots movement demands it. Sign our petition if you agree: It’s time to tax the wealth of the top 0.1%.

Warren Proposes a Second New Deal

Elizabeth Warren Proposes a Second New Deal. When Bernie Sanders offered up his definition of socialism in a speech at Georgetown University in 2015, he basically equated it with the governmental programs created by the New Deal. Sanders cited Social Security, and New Dealer Lyndon Johnson’s three-decades-later follow-up, Medicare, as the primary U.S. examples of publicly funded universal programs that provided older Americans with income and access to health care. That, said Sanders, was a tradition he sought to renew, by creating single-payer health care for all, free public university educations, and a host of other programs.

The historic ground on which Sanders took his stand was the experience of the United States when New Deal programs were most effectual. Before they’d been eroded by the financialization and globalization that commenced in the 1970s, FDR’s New Deal gave the nation its one and only period of broadly shared prosperity.

But it wasn’t just the programs FDR signed into law that did the trick. It was also one further bill that didn’t expand government’s capacities and responsibilities as such, but simply gave workers power: the National Labor Relations Act. By enabling workers to join unions without fear of dismissal, the NLRA facilitated the growth of unionization to the point that just over one-third of the nation’s workers were unionized and thereby wielded sufficient power to affect corporate behavior. In the three decades following World War II—the three decades of unions enforcing worker power—median worker income rose in tandem with productivity, and CEOs made on average 20 times what their average employee made.

That world has long since vanished into the mists of time and financialization. As I noted in my Tuesday email, profit margins (that is, the share of revenue going to profits) reached an all-time high in the last quarter, while wages, when factoring in the rise in the cost of living, actually declined.

Comes now Elizabeth Warren, like Sanders, seeking to re-create the New Deal’s creation of a vibrant middle class—but in this instance, not through an updated version of governmental social provision, as Sanders suggested, but through that other dimension of New Deal success: bolstering worker power. Yesterday, Warren introduced a new bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, which seeks nothing less than the compelled conversion of American corporations from their current creed of maximizing shareholder value to the friendlier confines of benefiting all corporate stakeholders.

To this end, she proposes two fundamental changes. The first is to end corporate chartering by the various states, replacing it through requiring corporations with more than $1 billion in yearly revenues to be federally chartered, and to have those charters redefine the corporations’ mission so that they benefit not just shareholders but their employees and communities as well. The second change she proposes is to require corporations to have 40 percent of their boards of directors elected not by their shareholders but by their employees. In this, she’s following the lead of her colleague Tammy Baldwin, who introduced a bill earlier this year that required corporations to set aside one-third of their board seats to employee representatives. And both senators are following the lead of the Germans, where a 50-50 split of board membership between owner and worker representatives has long been required by law.

As Warren noted in an op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, over the past 35 years the financialization of the American corporation has meant that shareholders now extract more funds from corporations than those businesses devote either to investment in their own enterprise or wage increases for their workers. (University of Massachusetts economist William Lazonick, the doyen of share-buyback scholars, documented these developments in a piece he wrote for the summer issue of the Prospect.)

Warren, then, is seeking to reinvent the “corporate conduct” side of the New Deal, much as Sanders wants to reinvent its social-rights dimension. This is not to say either is opposed to the other’s endeavors: Warren, for instance, supports Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, among other similar proposals. Both also support the next iteration of labor law reform, which would renew the promise of the NLRA by restoring workers’ rights to associate and bargain.

21st Century Glass-Steagall Act

In 1999, when Congress repealed core provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act, it provided an opportunity for traditional banks to engage in an array of high-risk activities. And that is exactly what they did—growing in size and adding activities to their portfolio that threaten our country’s financial security.

A 21st century Glass–Steagall—which has been introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and has bipartisan support—would separate traditional banking activities such as savings and checking accounts from riskier financial services such as hedge fund and private equity activities, investment banking, and more.

Please stand with the EPI Policy Center and our partners in calling on Congress to pass Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 21st Century Glass–Steagall Act and begin to rein in Wall Street’s greedy and reckless behavior.

Elizabeth Warren: Donald Trump can NEVER be the President

Failure to Punish Corporate leaders for Fraud and Abuse

WASHINGTON — WHILE presidential candidates from both parties feverishly pitch their legislative agendas, voters should also consider what presidents can do without Congress. Agency rules, executive actions and decisions about how vigorously to enforce certain laws will have an impact on every American, without a single new bill introduced in Congress.

The Obama administration has a substantial track record on agency rules and executive actions. It has used these tools to protect retirement savings, expand overtime pay, prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T. employees who work for the government and federal contractors, and rein in carbon pollution. These accomplishments matter.

Whether the next president will build on them, or reverse them, is a central issue in the 2016 election. But the administration’s record on enforcement falls short — and federal enforcement of laws that already exist has received far too little attention on the campaign trail.

I just released a report examining 20 of the worst federal enforcement failures in 2015. Its conclusion: “Corporate criminals routinely escape meaningful prosecution for their misconduct.”

Republicans seek to stop CFPB- Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren

You'll never guess who's going around Washington, trolling the halls of Congress, talking about the importance of protecting the long-term health of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The banking industry.

That's right: After years of trying to kill, then delay, and then defang the agency, the banking industry and their Republican friends in Congress have launched a new effort to attract Democratic support for their latest attack by claiming that they just want to help the agency and the consumers it protects. Surely Democrats will not be taken in by yet another attempt to weaken the CFPB. 

The latest industry-sponsored bill would fundamentally change the structure of the CFPB by replacing the agency's single, independent director with a commission of political appointees. 

The banks can't point to any difficulties with the agency's operations. In fact, the CFPB has been operating for only four years, but the success of the single-director structure is already apparent. Under the leadership of Director Richard Cordray, the CFPB already has:

• returned more than $11 billion to over 25 million consumers who were cheatedon their credit cards, checking accounts or other financial products; 
• built a complaint hotline that has exceeded all expectations, handling more than 700,000 complaints and building an information database that is beginning to level the playing field for consumers; and 

New Glass-Steagal Act

Seven years ago, Wall Street’s high-risk bets brought our economy to its knees.

We’ve made progress since then. The Dodd-Frank Act was the strongest financial reform law in three generations, and it gave regulators a number of common-sense tools to prevent future crises.

But let’s get real: Dodd-Frank did not end the “too big to fail” problem – the problem posed by financial institutions that are so large that their failure would threaten the whole economy. Last summer, both the Fed and FDIC reported publicly that eleven of the big banks were still so risky that if any one of them started to fail, they would need a government bailout or they would risk taking down the American economy – again.

That’s not a statistic that should make anyone sleep well tonight.

That’s why I’ve partnered with Senators John McCain, Maria Cantwell, and Angus King to reintroduce the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, a bill to reduce taxpayers’ risk in the financial system and decrease the likelihood of future financial crises. Sign up now to show your support.

Four years after the 1929 Wall Street crash, Congress passed the original Glass-Steagall Act to build a wall between boring, commercial banking – savings and checking accounts – and riskier investment banking.

Elizabeth Warren at the New Populism Conference (FULL)

Elizabeth Warren ridicules Idiot Host on CNBC About Glass Steagell on CNBC