Sunday, October 16, 2016
Varoufakis - Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKaPeWoS7PQ
Behind Closed Doors, Hillary Clinton Sympathized With Goldman Sachs Over Financial Reform
October 11 2016
EXCERPTS OF HILLARY CLINTON’S previously
secret speeches to big banks and trade groups in 2013 and 2014 show her
exalting the work of her hosts, hardly a surprise when these groups paid her up
to $225,000 an hour to chat them up.
Far from chiding Goldman Sachs
for obstructing Democratic proposals for financial reform, Clinton appeared to
sympathize with the giant investment bank. At a Goldman Sachs Alternative
Investments Symposium in October 2013, Clinton almost apologized for the
Dodd-Frank reform bill, explaining that it had to pass “for political reasons,”
because “if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your
constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the
press is saying it’s all the fault of Wall Street, you can’t sit idly by and do
nothing.”
Clinton added, “And I think
the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort
through it all.”
Clinton praised Deutsche Bank
in a 2014 speech for “the work that the Bank has done in New York City on
affordable housing.”
While Deutsche Bank has given
to anti-homelessness campaigns in the past, it was also cited in
a New York State Senate report in January for refusing to maintain foreclosed
properties in New York City neighborhoods and costing those communities
millions in unpaid fines. Deutsche is also about to face amulti-billion-dollar
penalty from the Justice Department for defrauding investors with
low-quality mortgage securities, leading to the housing meltdown.
Those excerpts were among many
listed in an 80-page document prepared
by the Clinton campaign, listing potentially damaging quotes from the
Democratic nominee’s paid but at that point still secret speeches. The report
landed in campaign chairman John Podesta’s email, which was hacked, and then posted by WikiLeaks
last week.
In a November 2013 speech to
the National Association of Realtors (NAR), Clinton pronounced herself proud to
work with the trade group as a U.S. senator to “look for ways to help families
facing foreclosure with concrete steps.”
NAR represents real estate
agents, who had no authority to assist distressed homeowners. An April 2007 document lists
NAR’s priorities in foreclosure mitigation, and they were able to get an
amendment exempting mortgage debt forgiveness from being treated as earned
income. But the rest amount to “urging” and “supporting” efforts to help
homeowners that never happened.
Clinton has historically been
far less critical of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington than
many other Democrats, and as secretary of state allowed two of her top aides —
Tom Nides and Robert Hormats — to receive big payouts from their big-bank
employers before entering public service.
“Thank you for lending me Tom
Nides for the past two years,” Clinton said to a crowd at Morgan Stanley on
April 18, 2013.
As The
Intercept reported in July 2015, Nides moved from chief operating
officer at Morgan Stanley into Clinton’s State Department, and when Clinton
left Foggy Bottom, Nideswent
right back to Morgan Stanley as a vice chairman.
Clinton joked about the
“culture shock” for Nides, working a government job. “You should have seen his
face when he learned there were no stock options at the State Department.
But he soon not only settled
in very nicely, he became positively enthusiastic when I told him we did have
our own plane.”
Clinton also gushed about
Hormats, who joined her at State after a career at Goldman Sachs, in a 2014
speech at JPMorgan Chase.
In excerpts that got
some attention last week, Clinton told bankers that financial reform
“really has to come from the industry itself,” that “the people that know the
industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” and that
blaming banks for the crisis was “an oversimplification.”
Her former Democratic
presidential rival, Bernie Sanders responded
in a statement, “Whatever Secretary Clinton may or may not have said behind
closed doors on Wall Street, I am determined to implement the agenda of the
Democratic Party platform which was agreed upon by her campaign,” and which
“calls for breaking up the largest financial institutions in this country,
re-establishing Glass-Steagall and prosecuting those many Wall Street CEOs who
engaged in illegal behavior.”
The excerpts reveal that
Clinton, when speaking to the financial industry, adopted their mindset and
privileged their arguments. The question that arises is whether members of a possible
Clinton administration will reflect this worldview, or whether the long primary
with Sanders has made that untenable. Some aggressive advocates for progressive
appointments believe the latter.
“At State and on the speaking
circuit, Clinton was in an environment that encouraged her to view Wall Street
bankers as fonts of economic wisdom,” said Jeff Hauser, Director of the
Revolving Door Project. “But after 15 months running against a progressive
populist like Sanders, Clinton knows that government conducted a by rotating
stream of bankers is politically unacceptable.”
Hillary Clinton Privately Pitched Corporations on “Really Low” Tax Rate for Money Stashed Abroad
October 10 2016
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/hillary-clinton-privately-pitched-corporations-on-really-low-tax-rate-for-money-stashed-abroad/
IN PUBLIC, TOP Hillary
Clinton surrogate
Neera Tanden said at
the Democratic convention in Philadelphia that there’s no need to
cut the federal corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent.
But in
private, Clinton says something quite different
to corporations and trade groups.
An 80-page
report compiled by Clinton’s own campaign of potentially damaging
remarks she made behind closed doors was published by Wikileaks on Friday. It
includes extensive comments on tax policy.
During an October 13, 2014,
speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, Clinton told the
audience that “A number of business leaders have been talking to my
husband and me about an idea that would allow the repatriation of the couple trillion
dollars that are out there. And you would get a lower rate — a really low rate
— if you were willing to invest a percentage in an infrastructure bank.”
Clinton has repeatedly called
for increased spending on U.S. infrastructure, but has never specified where
the needed revenue would come from.
In a speech the previous month
to the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, Clinton also said that a lower
rate for all corporate profits regardless of where they are earned “certainly
could be on the table” as long as that was “part of a broader package.”
However, she specified that “if all you do is lower the rates” that
“there’s a price to pay” in terms of lower tax revenue.
American
multinational corporations are currently stashing a staggering
$2.4 trillion in profits — about 14 percent of the size of the entire
U.S. economy — overseas. Multinationals are required by U.S. law to pay
the statutory 35 percent tax on profits they earn anywhere on
earth, but the tax is not assessed until the profits are brought back to the
U.S.
This has allowed Corporate
America to essentially hold U.S. tax revenue hostage, refusing to pay its taxes
until Americans become so desperate that they will cut a deal giving
multinationals a special new tax rate.
This strategy has already paid
off once, in 2004, when multinationals got Congress to let them bring
back $312 billion in profits at a one-time rate of
about 5 percent. The legislation required that the cash be used to hire
Americans or conduct research and development. Corporations ignored these
provisions and instead used the money to enrich their executives and
stockholders, while cutting U.S. jobs.
Both Hillary and Bill Clinton
clearly envision cutting a similar deal during a Hillary Clinton presidency,
although presumably they intend for the corporations to keep their part of the
bargain this time.
Just last month, Bill Clinton told
the audience at a Clinton Foundation Event that the corporate tax rate
“should be lowered” with “X percent of [repatriated profits], whatever percent,
[going] into buying investments in the national infrastructure program.”
Clinton added, “This is just me now, I’m not speaking for …” and then
trailed off.
Hillary Clinton said the same
thing during a private August 2014 speech to the software storage
company Nexenta: “I would like to find a way to repatriate the overseas
earnings and I’ve read a really interesting proposal. … John Chambers and
others … basically have said they would be willing to invest a
percentage of their repatriated profits in an infrastructure bank … I
thought that was a really intriguing idea.”
Chambers was the CEO of Cisco
at the time, and a vociferous
proponent of corporations refusing to bring their profits home until
they receive such a sweetheart deal.
Donald Trump has a similar
plan to slash corporate tax rates to 15 percent (with a special rate for
repatriated profits of 10 percent) although without requirements for
corporations to participate in funding an infrastructure bank.
Hillary Clinton Touted Her Record of Spreading Fracking in Secret, Paid Speeches
October 10 2016
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS on
the paid speaking circuit, Hillary Clinton was far more candid than she has
been in public about her prominent role as Secretary of State in exporting
American-style hydraulic fracturing — the controversial, environmentally
damaging technique best known as fracking — to countries all over the world.
“I’ve promoted fracking in
other places around the world,” she declared during a 2013 paid talk
to Deutsche Bank, adding that she launched a new wing of the State
Department devoted to the initiative.
During a paid speech in Canada
the following year, Clinton touted her role in “accelerating” natural gas
development in Europe, calling attention to Poland’s embrace of fracking as a
positive step.
The contrast with the
rhetoric Clinton has used on the campaign trail is striking. Clinton has rarely
spoken in public of her role selling fracking abroad, and at times positioned
herself as a skeptic of the controversial drilling technique. In the
lead-up to the New York Democratic primary, Clinton’s campaign released a
television advertisement that gave the impression that she has worked to discourage
fracking.
The remarks were quoted in an
attachment to one of the hacked emails belonging
to campaign chairman John Podesta that were posted by WikiLeaks on
Friday. Two
days after we asked Clinton in Manchester, N.H., in January to release
her Goldman Sachs transcripts, Clinton campaign deputy research director Carter
Hutchinson reviewed all her paid speech transcripts in an 80-page
report highlighting potential political fallout. It was sent to
Podesta and other top campaign aides by Tony Carrk, Clinton’s research
director. Carrk did not respond to a request for comment.
Clinton’s decision to use
fracking as a diplomatic tool has been chronicled by Mother
Jones and The
Intercept.
Earlier this year, we obtained
emails from Clinton aides discussing plans to make Poland a “laboratory for
testing whether U.S. success in developing shale gas can be repeated in a different
country.” The emails also revealedefforts
to partner with energy companies such as Chevron and Marathon Oil.
Starting early in her tenure
as Secretary of State, Clinton traveled the globe encouraging foreign countries
to adopt fracking technology.
Clinton has both publicly and
privately explained that she views fracking, under the right circumstances, as
the most environmentally sound method of transitioning away from other fossil
fuels such as oil and coal. She has also said that fracking can make the U.S.
and other nations energy independent, a foreign policy goal that may weaken gas
exporting countries such as Russia.
But in private, Clinton also
asserted that there is a conspiracy of Russian-funded groups attempting to
suppress fracking development.
During a speech to a group in
Canada called tinePublic, Clinton claimed that there are “phony
environmental groups” that are “funded by the Russians to stand against”
fracking.
It wasn’t clear which groups
Clinton was referring to during those remarks. The Clinton campaign has not
responded to a request for comment.
The Coming Megadrought in the American Southwest
Posted on October
15, 2016 by Yves
Smith
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Originally published at at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.
Originally published at DownWithTyranny
I’ve written in the past about
two of the most climate-vulnerable regions of the U.S., Florida and the
American Southwest. (A third region, the Pacific Northwest, is vulnerable, but
to a non-climate event, a magnitude 9.0 mega-earthquake.) Here I want to look again
to the problems of California and the Southwest.
Much of the water that
sustains California, southern Nevada, Arizona, and surrounding areas comes from
the ever-drying Colorado River.
Just as it’s now clear that
we’ve passed the tipping point for extreme weather, we’re also
very likely passed the tipping point for the long-term habitability of the
American Southwest.
The report is from NASA;
the write-up is from EcoWatch (my emphasis):
NASA: Megadrought Lasting
Decades Is 99% Certain in American Southwest
A study released in Science
Advances Wednesday finds strong evidence for severe, long-term droughts afflicting the American Southwest, driven
by climate
change. A megadrought lasting decades is 99 percent certain to
hit the region this century, said scientists from Cornell University, the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies.
“Historically, megadroughts
were extremely rare phenomena occurring only once or twice per millennium,” the
report states.
“According to our analysis of
modeled responses to increased GHGs, these events could become commonplace if
climate change goes unabated.”
Rising temperatures will combine with decreased
rainfall in the Southwest to create droughts that will be worse than the
historic “Dust
Bowl” of the 20th century and last far longer. The Dust Bowl lasted no
longer than eight years, and affected 100 million acres around the Texas
and Oklahoma panhandles and adjacent lands in Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
Dust storms swept through large swaths of former farmland, depositing dust as
far east as Chicago, New York and Washington. It is estimated that more
than half a million people were made homeless, and some 3.5 million Dust Bowl
refugees migrated west, in hopes of finding work.
Just a few thoughts.
First, a megadrought lasting
decades is a once- or twice-in-a-millennium event. That’s once every 500 to
1000 years. The American Southeast had two “once in 500 year” storms in the last two years, and that
following “Superstorm Sandy” in 2012. Obviously the frequency is
changing, perhaps exponentially.
In the Southwest that
megadrought could last for the next few decades. I did a major piece here — “California Drought, the “Bigger Water Crisis” & the
Consumer Economy” — with a breakdown of elements that went into the current
multi-year drought, and a look at the Colorado River basin and its condition.
Some of the bottom lines include these:
The social
contract will break in California and the rest of the Southwest (and don’t
forget Mexico, which also has water rights from the Colorado and a reason to
contest them). This will occur even if the fastest, man-on-the-moon–style
conversion to renewables is attempted starting tomorrow.
This means, the very very
rich will take the best for themselves and leave the rest of us to
marinate in the consequences — to hang, in other words. (For a French-Saudi
example of that, read this. Typical “the rich are always entitled”
behavior.) This means war between the industries, regions, classes. The rich
didn’t get where they are, don’t stay where they are, by surrender.
Government will
have to decide between the wealthy and the citizenry. How do you expect that to
go?
Government
dithering and the increase in social conflict will delay real solutions
until a wake-up moment. Then the real market will kick in — the market for
agricultural land and the market for urban property. Both will start to decline
in absolute value.
If there’s a mass awareness
moment when all of a sudden people in and out of the Southwest “get it,”
those markets will collapse. Hedge funds will sell their interests in
California agriculture as bad investments; urban populations will level, then
shrink; the fountains in Las Vegas and the golf courses in Scottsdale will go
brown and dry, collapsing those populations and economies as well.
Second, about the time frame,
obviously there’s a possibility of a once-in-500-year multi-seasonal rainfall,
but that’s not expected, to say the least. Will the region recover from this
drought? If it lasts two decades, I think its livability, its habitability is finished.
And when people figure that out, they’ll move, perhaps in droves, depending on
whether something triggers panic-selling.
That is, the area will be
livable, but by a lifestyle without modern infrastructure, since it takes a
certain critical mass of population and wealth (economic activity) to keep
modern infrastructure going. Think of the infrastructure in small towns, where
people are leaving and populations are declining, versus the more viable
lifestyle available to vigorous larger towns and cities, where there are jobs.
Now add multi-decade drought to those small-town lives.
Where will the jobs be if Los
Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas have no water? Where will California
agriculture be if farms go dry? And finally, consider the Dust Bowl again. As
many as 3.5 million refugees migrated west, to California. Where will
those refugees go if they’re forced to leave California, the heart of the dry
zone and pressed against the ocean? Utah? Unlikely. North perhaps, swamping the
Pacific Northwest with people, or given a slower migration, back across the
Rockies.
Civilizations have risen and
died in the American Southwest. During the last megadrought, the Anasazi, or
Pueblo culture, which was extensive in territory, completely disappeared. When
the Mormons arrived in Utah, the Anasazi were identifiable only by their
relics. EcoWatch again:
Megadroughts of 35 years are
currently rare and have led to severe upheaval in the past. There’s evidence
that the Pueblo people of what is now the south-west US were forced to abandon
settlements in the 13th century due to a lengthy drought.
For the U.S. to compress and
recede to a more habitable center while aggressively converting to zero-carbon
is not the worst outcome in the world. Far from it, in fact.
There Is a Solution — A Zero
Carbon Economy
I’ve been writing for a few
years that there is likely a five-to-ten year window, and only that, in which
we could start a crash program toward a zero-carbon economy, what I like to
call the Stop Now plan, and what others call a WWII-style mobilization or “man
on the moon”-style program. That’s actually good news — that there’s still time
— and I still believe it.
If we start in the first term
of the next president, we can mitigate most of the disaster nationally, though
maybe not all of it regionally.
From the Guardian’s report of the same NASA study:
The new report does proffer a
crumb of hope – if greenhouse gas emissions are radically cut then the risk of
megadrought will reduce by half, giving a roughly 50:50 chance that a
multi-decade stretch of below-average rainfall would occur this century.
But the research found that
the emissions cuts would have to be far steeper than those agreed to by nations in Paris last year, where a 2C limit
on warming was pledged.
“We would need a much more
aggressive approach than proposed at Paris, it’s not too late to do this but
the train is leaving the station as we speak,” [Toby Ault, a scientist at
Cornell University and lead author of the study,] said.
And one last point. The next
president will be the last one with a clear chance to turn the ship. It looks
like Hillary Clinton, barring the unforeseen, will be that president. She
recently gave a very aggressive climate speech, with Al Gore at her side.
Can she be brought to see, not just the extremity of the situation, but the
extremity of the actions needed to address it? The jury is out on that, and
that’s also the good news.
As long as there’s time on the
clock, there’s hope. I don’t expect you or I will influence this election; the
country is too far down that road, and perhaps not all the influential wild
cards have been played. But we can influence the winner afterward, so long as
that winner has a modicum of sense and so long as the evidence — megastorms,
megadroughts — is incontrovertibly in front of her.
Friday, October 7, 2016
Mladen Dolar: Between the One and the Two: Body and Alterity, part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEGbQi9nYdE&list=PL6Ma-dhtWIRTI05ofCMhfIvzszFPpPNib
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