It is time for government officials to stop using Wall Street as a Model for government
October 1, 2011 in 2012 Elections, Social Security, Wall Street
And it is time for Wall Street CEOs to stop acting like they were elected by the voters
Examples Abound!
1) From Wall Street:
Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric told share holders at the December 2010 annual stockholders meeting that because the employee pension plan was such as “drag” on the corporation that they would not be extending pension plans to new employees beginning in 2011–after all, he claimed, the employee pension plans would mean that GE stock would be a whole 13 cents share lower in 2011 if they continued to offer employee pension plans to new employees.
Immelt’s statement of the connection between employee pension plans and the “drag on GE investors” is about as difficult to conceptualize as the Virgin Birth–unless of course you are willing to take some enormous leap of faith. You see, the fact are that GE has not contributed a cent to the workers’ pension plans for over 20 years! Not since 1987 and that the funds still had enough money to cover all the current and future retirees.
Someone should make Mr. Immelt explain himself–but don’t count on President Obama. After all Jeffery Immelt is advising the President.
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2) From the Millionaires in Washington D. C.:
From the Obama Administration and Millionaire Members of Congress along with many Obama Republican appointees, we hear similar dire predictions about Social Security.
Boehner and his crew are busting their balls to try to get Social Security cuts built into the negotiations for balancing the budget. This is ludicrous–as ludicrous as if was for Jeffrey Immelt to suggest that the GE employee pension funds are a “drag on the share holders”. The “government” (just like GE) does not set aside a damn cent for social security. Social Security has NOTHING to do with the national budget. It is a program that is totally funded by workers. Those who can be trusted tell us that Social Security can continue to fund at 100% until 2035 and after that–even if Congress did nothing, Social Security could still fund at 75% indefinitely. To improve Social Security and perhaps increase the payouts for recipients to a living income, all Congress needs to do is to make the rich (those earning over $107,000 a year) to start paying Social Security tax on all their income–not just amounts under $107,000.
Furthermore, we have asses like Alan Simpson, one of the co-chairs of Obama’s deficit commission telling the seniors that Social Security is a cow with 250 million teats that they suckle. And what was the President’s response? Did he stand up for seniors? Hell no. He just chuckled and said something to the effect that we all know that Alan Simpson is a crusty old man.
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So what do these two groups: the millionaires in Washington and the Millionaires on Wall Street have in common–Besides the obvious such as their personal wealth and Wall Street investments and belonging to the same clubs?
They both want to rob the piggy banks of the majority–money that WE, not they, have put there by the sweat of our brows!
Just ask Rick Perry. He knows how to do it. Like Jeffrey Immelt, he has already done it. Frankly, it looks to me like Barack Obama, with his Deficit commission, has taken a page out of Perry’s playbook. Perry has been hand selecting committees to “study” political action and the empowering them to take it for several years now. Obama’s “deficit commission” looks a lot like some of the commissions that Perry has established over the years. For example, there is Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund.
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3) Rick Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund
Perry took $600 million from the Texas workers unemployment fund and gave it to corporations to create jobs. Bank of America was one of the recipients. Problem is that many of the jobs never materialized, but that didn’t stop these Wall Street corporations from forking over huge wads of cash to Perry’s campaign.
Perry’s Back-Scratching for Bank of America must have felt really good to them as they netted $13 million in hard-earned Texas taxpayer dollars even though they failed to create a single job:
In January of 2008, Burnt Orange [another great site for Texas news] reported a comment from a watchful reader of the Houston Chronicle: ”According to a business brief on Jan. 17, “Bank of America mum on job plan,” our governor and Legislature loaned/gave California-based Countrywide Financial $20 million of taxpayer money to “create” 7,500 new jobs (about $2,700 per job) in Texas by 2010. The default provision of this loan/gift from the Governor’s Texas Enterprise Fund calls for a repayment to the state of $854 for each job not “created” by a specific date.”
Doing the math, it appears that Countrywide – or Bank of America – nets $13 million in hard-earned taxpayer dollars even if it fails to “create” a single job.
Hewlett Packard, was a recipient of $3 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund to open four data centers around Texas. They never materialized. HP later repaid its grant, but not before contributing $20,000 to Perry’s campaign (not even near the interest they would have been charged by a bank on this loan to them by the people of the state of Texas. HP also contributed $518,767 to the RGA.
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I hope that more Americans are beginning to understand why the Americans participating in Occupy Wall Street are mad as hell at Wall Street.
Perhaps they will wake up the majority here in the USA in time to make a clean sweep for democracy in 2012 by removing every single member from the House of Representatives and replacing them with a member of the majority.
Let’s make a clean sweep in 2012. For more information.
Remove the entire House of Representatives from Office. Replace them with Independents–Americans from the majority (those who earn less than $100,000 a year; who own no wall street; and don’t take a penny from Wall Street Corporations.)
