Government of Honeywell, By Honeywell, For Honeywell

 

Of all the corporate big shots offering the rest of us stern lectures about the sacrifices we’re going to have to make, is there any more infuriating than Honeywell’s CEO’s, David Cote?

Cote, who was paid $20 million last year, has been a particularly outspoken member of President Obama’s deficit commission, with a special kind of shameless gall to be able, with a straight face, to warn the rest of us that we will have to get by with less retirement and health care if the country is going to deal with its deficit.

I’d like to propose a new rule: before the president hands somebody like Cote [pronounced Ko-tay] a billion-dollar megaphone, that person and his company should demonstrate that they are following generally accepted rules of good citizenship.

In the case of Honeywell, the company makes the rules it has to live by. And why shouldn’t it? One of the largest contractors to the federal contractors, it’s also one of the heaviest hitters when it comes to lobbying, spending $6.5 million last year. Among manufacturing firms, only General Electric spent more.

But when it comes to political contributions, Honeywell far outstrips GE, with $2.3 million spent in the 2009-2010 election cycle compared to GE’s $1.4 million.

And Honeywell doesn’t just rely on high-paid lobbyists, when the bailout faced a skeptical public in 2008, Cote (who sits on the board of J.P. Morgan Chase) wrote to his employees to suggest they get out and support the bailout.

But in every set of rules that the government sets  related to Honeywell, those millions spent influencing the government turn out to be very solid investments.

For example, taxes. Cote’s Honeywell doesn’t pay any, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice.

It’s all perfectly legal in the rigged world of the U.S. tax code, where corporations like Honeywell use the political access that only money can buy to write the rules they have to live by.

How rigged is the U.S. tax code?

Well, for example, look at the plight of homeowners who lose their home to foreclosure. Even after those poor saps lose their homes, if the lender forgives some of the mortgage debt because the house sells for less than the homeowner owed, the IRS could still come after them.

I know, I know, those homeowners should have had the foresight to hire more lobbyists and increase their contributions to political campaigns.

Taxes are hardly the only place where Honeywell falls short on the standards of good citizenship.

Honeywell has major contracts in Iran, and despite U.S. sanctions against that country, the company has taken a somewhat relaxed view toward compliance, agreeing that it wouldn’t take on any new work in Iran while it closes out its current work.

Because you wouldn’t want sanctions to be too disruptive to Honeywell’s ability to make profits.

Back home in the U.S., Cotes’ Honeywell has been especially good at squeezing sacrifices from other people, like its workers and the communities who live near its facilities.

Dirt Diggers Digest has compiled a useful summary of Honeywell’s actions at the Illinois plant that is the sole facility in the country where uranium ore is converted into the uranium hexafluoride gas used in the production of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons, a risky process using highly toxic materials.

Last year workers at the plant balked when the company sought to eliminate retiree health benefits, reduce pensions for new hires, cap severance pay and contract out maintenance. So Honeywell locked them out and brought in replacement workers.

After an explosion at the plant, Honeywell was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for improperly coaching replacement workers during investigations by federal inspectors, while the Environmental Protection Agency fined the company $11.8 million for illegally storing hazardous waste – only the latest in more than $650 million in fines for misconduct, according to the Project on Government Oversight.

But the federal contracts keep pouring in, because in Honeywell’s world, misconduct is just part of doing business, and doesn’t have real world consequences. And apparently that misconduct doesn’t give David Cote any qualms about telling the rest of us what we need to do.

Do you have candidates for most infuriating corporate bigwig? Let WheresOurMoney.org know.

 

 

 

 

 

Executive Pay / Financial Crisis / Martin Column / Outrage / Social Security / TARP - 04/16/2011

Top 4 Lesson Big Bankers Can Teach Us

America’s bankers have been extraordinarily effective in responding to a financial crisis that they created. They’ve worked hard to make sure that the response to the crisis didn’t threaten their fat bonuses or their awesome political power.

They succeeded in gutting the toughest aspects of financial reform. Then they started lobbying the regulators who will have the enforcement power.

Now they’re toiling to undermine a proposed settlement with authorities over widespread abuses in the foreclosure process, and demonizing consumer champion Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency in the process.

Of course they’re getting plenty of help from their government enablers. As Gretchen Morgenstern reported in the New York Times, the 50 state attorney generals who are supposed to be spearheading the investigation into the foreclosures aren’t doing any actual investigating.

This puts them at a definite disadvantage when they sit down to negotiate with the banks.

Those of us who aren’t bankers and would like to see a different outcome could learn a few things from the bankers.

How do the bankers do it?

  1. They’re relentless. They don’t take no for an answer and they don’t know the meaning of defeat. They have lots of money and they’re not afraid to spend it on campaign contributions and lobbying. While we may not be able to match their cash, there’s no reason we can’t be as relentless as the big bankers. They wouldn’t still be in business, let alone raking in billions in bonuses, if we hadn’t bailed them out.
  2. They have no illusions about loyalty. They spent big to elect President Obama. But when it looked like they could get more from the Republicans, they switched sides. Nobody can take their support for granted.
  3. They have no shame. They never apologized for all the risk and fraud that created the collapse. They never offered to tighten their belts or pick up part of the tab. They just kept fighting for their selfish interests.
  4. They maintained their sense of humor. How else do you explain their carping about how anti-business the president is, while Obama’s team does whatever it can to prop up the “too big to fail banks” while wringing its hands that it just can’t do any more to help the unemployed or distressed homeowners?

 

Financial Crisis / Financial Reform Legislation / Foreclosure / Martin Column / Outrage - 03/19/2011

From Prosecutions to Peanuts

It was only last December that the head of a 50-state attorney general investigation into foreclosure fraud boldly told homeowner advocates, “We will put people in jail.”

That was Tom Miller, Iowa attorney general, who added, “One of the main tools needs to be principal reductions, just like in the farm crisis in the 1980s…there should be some kind of compensation system for people who have been harmed…And the foreclosure process should stop while loan modifications begin.  To have a race between foreclosures and modifications to see which happens first is insane.”

That was then. Now Miller is backing off his tough talk, replacing it with a strategy of negotiating with the big banks and a bunch of federal agencies to come up with a settlement.

The amount of the potential settlement is $20 billion, according to press reports.

Gone is any notion of prosecutions.

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether this amount is too high or too low. The banks contend that they might have been sloppy about their paperwork but they foreclosed on only a few people who hadn’t been making their mortgage payments. No harm, no foul.

But homeowner advocates and critics are outraged, arguing that the banks are guilty of more than slovenliness, they violated laws intended to protect consumers. You can’t pass laws that require banks to follow certain procedures and then allow the banks to flout them. That reinforces one of the most corrosive aspects of the bailout and its aftermath – that the system is rigged so that the banks don’t have to follow the law.

Not to mention that $20 billion is pocket change to the big banks and won’t go far in modifying the mortgages that they refused to touch so far.

In addition, any fund that is controlled by the banks rather than a responsible government agency is a recipe for continued inaction by the banks.  See the disastrous Obama Administration HAMP program, which is somewhere between an abject failure and an actual scam that rips off homeowners.

Miller’s retreat is not the only distressing signal coming from the foreclosure front. Here in California the new state attorney general, Kamala Harris, made the strong protection of homeowners in foreclosure a key plank of her campaign. Yet her office recently signed off on a feeble $6.8 million settlement of a lawsuit against Angelo Mozilo and another top official of Countrywide Financial who presided over that company’s orgy of subprime lending before the financial collapse.

$5.2 million of the money goes into a restitution fund for victims. Mozilo and his president, David Sambol, admitted no wrongdoing. They’re not on the hook for the money- Bank of America, which bought Countrywide will pay it for them.
As David Dayen points out on Firedoglake, the settlement was probably inherited from her predecessor, the present governor, Jerry Brown. But that doesn’t mean she has to tout such a pittance as some great victory for the state.

It’s just a very small drop in a bucket with a very big leak in it.

If you live in California, you can call Harris’ office and suggest she stop caving into predatory lenders and start living up to her campaign promises.

Wherever you live, please contact your attorney general and remind them they are, after all, not the bankers’ buddies, but the people’s prosecutors.

Here are numbers where you can reach your state attorney general.

 

Around the Web / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage - 03/04/2011

Will Afghan Bailout Trump U.S. Homeowners?

At least you know where the Tea Party stands. If it’s a government program, they want to end it.

The Democrats are murkier. They propose tepid solutions to serious problems like the foreclosure crisis, then when their programs don’t work it, ends up reinforcing the Tea Party’s arguments that government doesn’t work.

So the Tea Party-driven Republicans come along and want to whack the Obama administration’s failed foreclosure prevention scheme known as the Home Affordable Modification program. They would probably want to whack it even if it was working, but that’s another subject.

The Tea Party doesn’t offer anything in its place. Homeowners are pretty much on their own at the mercy of the banks.

So much for the American Dream.

Many people have pointed out that the HAMP program is something between an abject failure and a scam that rips off already beleaguered homeowners.

The Obama administration doesn’t offer so much of an argument in its defense as a hapless shrug. In this video, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledges that the foreclosure prevention program amounts to a “tragic, terrible mess.”

But hey, the administration says, it’s better than nothing.

Meanwhile, the foreclosures continue while authorities investigate massive fraud by the banks in the foreclosure process.

This is not a debate calculated to offer much confidence that our public officials can deal effectively with the problems that afflict those of us who live in the reality-based community.

I was reflecting on this tawdry spectacle while reading about the latest developments in the latest “too big to fail” bank bailout to strike at U.S. taxpayers – this one in Kabul, Afghanistan. My colleague Harvey Rosenfield warned about this brewing fiasco several weeks ago.

Apparently the wildly corrupt officials and their cronies used the bank as their private piggy bank, and the bank’s imminent collapse is now a greater threat to Afghanistan’s security than the Taliban.

As recently as last September, officials were offering assurances that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay for a bailout. Now apparently if we don’t cough up $1 billion the war and the country will be lost and all the previous billions we’ve squandered there will have been wasted.

So we can’t afford a dime to help homeowners in this country but we must spend $1 billion to bail out the Afghans.

I don’t expect the Democrats to put up much of a fight against such an outrage.

I hope the Tea Party stands strong on this one.

 

 

 

Around the Web / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / Too Big To Fail - 03/02/2011

Going Without Heat For Goldman-Sachs

With all the trillions tossed around in the government’s efforts to prop up the big banks, a $2.9 billion taxpayer-funded windfall to Goldman-Sachs might not sound like that big a deal.

But imagine if we still had that $2.9 billion, if it was still in the federal coffers and not in the pockets of Goldman bankers.

Maybe President Obama wouldn’t feel the need to cut off aid for poor people to help pay for heating oil through the cold winter – that $2.9 billion would more than pay for the proposed cuts.

Maybe you’re not in favor of helping poor people stay warm in the winter.

How about space travel?

That $2.9 billion could pay for nearly a year’s worth of research on manned space travel, which is also under threat.

But what did we taxpayers get from this generosity to Goldman Sachs?

Absolutely nothing. Worse than that, we rewarded extremely bad behavior.

The $2.9 billion payment was arranged by federal authorities as part of what they have described as their emergency efforts to salvage the financial system in the wake of the financial collapse brought on by the bankers’ greed, recklessness and fraud, enabled by regulators’ laxity.

The Federal Reserve, which was supposed to be overseeing this massive giveaway to the banks, contends it didn’t intend to give the windfall to Goldman-Sachs bankers. It was just $2.9 billion that got away from them in their hurry to fill the bankers’ pockets with our cash- I mean- save the economy. McClatchy News Service, using bland journalism-speak, calls it a “potentially huge regulatory omission.”

Goldman hit the jackpot on our bailout of AIG, in which taxpayers compensated the firm 100 cents on the dollar for bad proprietary trades. That means Goldman gambled with its own money, which it is entirely entitled to do.

But when they lose their money, as the old blues song says, they should “learn to lose.”

Lucky for Goldman, we’re there to pick them up, dust them off and wish them well, no questions asked.

Just how much longer are we going to allow our public officials, Republican and Democrat, to use our money to foot the bill for these deadbeats’ bad gambling debts?

Just how many people are going to have to go cold before we cut Goldman off?

AIG / Around the Web / Federal Reserve / Financial Crisis / Goldman-Sachs / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 02/18/2011

Obama Visits the Nasty Neighbor

President Obama paid a call on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a few days ago. No organization has done more to obstruct and derail the president's policy agenda: on behalf of the massive industries that fund its $200 million budget, the Chamber fiercely opposed health care reform, financial reform, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, environmental protection, and consumer access to the courts, often at the expense of small businesses.  Last year, it killed a bill in the Senate that would have stripped big business of tax breaks when they outsource American jobs to other countries. Its litigation shop, lavishly supported by a who's who of corporate defendants in civil and criminal matters, has been remarkably successful in protecting big business in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.  The U.S. Chamber is a highly partisan operation that will never cede an inch of ground to the President or his party.

Still, it wasn’t so much that Obama went to Chamber, or what he said when he got there, that bothered me. It was that he walked there from the White House.

The Chamber's headquarters is only three tenths of a mile from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a five minute stroll across Lafayette Park. Most Americans would never consider taking the car (except maybe Angelenos).

But when the President rolls, dozens of vehicles, from ambulances and TV trucks to communications and heavily armed Secret Service vans, go with him. It's spectacle, but, as President Reagan understood, the motorcade is a potent symbol of the power and majesty of the presidency.

Going on foot to the headquarters of corporate America, Obama surrendered not merely the trappings of power but, inescapably, a measure of the dignity of his office.

A year ago, Obama hoofed it back to the White House from a speech at the Chamber. That was right after his annual physical, and Obama joked that he needed to walk off some of his cholesterol. More importantly, that was before the mid-term elections, when the President’s party got walloped, thanks in no small part to the $31.7 million the Chamber spent around the nation, 93% of which went to elect Republicans.

His latest visit wasn't exactly "hat in hand," but by the President's own reckoning it was pretty close: “I'm here in the interest of being more neighborly," Obama told his hosts. "Maybe if we had brought over a fruitcake when I first moved in, we would have gotten off to a better start.”

"I'm going to make up for it," the President promised. Some of us think he's already done plenty for big business, and not quite so much for average Americans, most of whom are struggling to survive the aftermath of the debacle on Wall Street.

Mr. Obama was careful not to completely prostrate himself before the Chamber's bigwigs. But every remark that could be considered a point of disagreement was tempered with a nod to the Chamber’s ideology. The President defended health care reform, but instead of discussing the human toll of the private insurance mess, explained that it “made our entire economy less competitive.” He warned that “the perils of too much regulation are matched by the dangers of too little,” referring to the financial crisis, but did not discuss lost jobs or homes. Instead he said, “the absence of sound rules of the road was hardly good for business.” Invoking one of John F. Kennedy’s most memorable speeches, Obama said, “as we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America.” But the man who appeared before the Chamber conceived of his job far differently than he did when he asked Americans for it in 2008:  “the final responsibility of government,” President Obama told the Chamber audience, is “breaking down barriers that stand in the way of your success.”

This week’s stroll was part of the President’s Chamber charm campaign, which began in earnest with the State of the Union speech in January, when the President seemed to declare the recession over because  “the stock market has come roaring back” and “corporate profits are up.”

For one in five Americans still out of work, for the one in four homeowners whose homes are worth less than the amount they owe on their mortgages, that was a painful moment reminiscent of George Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech back in 2003 about the Iraq War. Obama spent the rest of the State of the Union on a combination of platitudes and pandering to his opponents, pledging among other things to get rid of unnecessary government regulations - one of the Chamber's perennial priorities.

There are plenty of other places the president could have gone if he was in the mood for an outing. The national headquarters of the AFL-CIO is only a few steps away from the Chamber, but he has never made that trip, as the California Nurses Association pointed out. Sadly, that would not be as controversial a venue as the President might fear: the AFL issued a joint press release with the Chamber praising the president’s State of the Union speech. Still, a visit from the president would have made a statement to the nation about the role working women and men play in what is known as the "real" economy (as opposed to Wall Street and the Money Industry). A fairly straightforward jog down Pennsylvania Avenue would have taken Mr. Obama to Consumer Watchdog's office on Capitol Hill.

We'll be watching where the President wanders to next. If you know what you are doing, and are clear about where you want to go, navigating the nation's capital isn't hard. But for newcomers who don't, it's very easy to get lost in D.C.

Harvey Column / Outrage / Uncategorized - 02/11/2011

Big Bank Launches Attack on Military Families

America’s least-hated banker hasn’t had much to say about how his institution, JPMorgan Chase, wrongfully foreclosed on 14 military families and overcharged thousands of others.

That banker would be Jaime Dimon, the subject of a flattering profile in the New York Times magazine last month, in which he was portrayed as an astute and careful risk manager and staunch defender of the benefits of large banks. Dimon admitted that he wasn’t careful enough before the financial collapse – he missed the problems posed by the securitized pools of investments stocked with bad mortgages that nearly sank the economy.

In the wake of disclosures last year about massive problems in the foreclosure process, Dimon led the charge in dismissing them. He appeared to be less concerned with evidence of bankers’ extreme carelessness than he was that the efforts of 50 states' attorneys general to investigate might slow down the housing recovery.

As Fortune reported, “He (Dimon) strode into the foreclosure fiasco last fall with guns blazing, as usual, claiming Chase wouldn't be tarnished by the banking industry's mortgage misbehavior.”

Dimon has repeatedly insisted his bank hadn’t wrongly foreclosed on anyone.

Whoops.

Over the last several weeks, the news media has reported that JPMorgan Chase had wrongfully foreclosed on 14 active-duty military families and overcharged thousands more on their mortgages.

Bank officials said they discovered mistakes and were in the process of reversing the foreclosures and about $2 million in fees to 4,000 families that the bank overcharged.

The bank may have discovered those ‘mistakes’ in the process of preparing their response to a lawsuit filed by a South Carolina Marine captain whose house they foreclosed on, in violation of the protections provided by the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act.

Under that law, banks aren’t supposed to charge active-duty members of the military more than 6 percent interest on the mortgages.  In addition, members of the military are supposed to be exempt from the delinquency process – including foreclosure.

The Marine captain, Jonathan Rowles, is serving in South Korea. His wife, Julia Rowles, told National Public Radio that she and her husband have been fighting with Chase ever since Rowles was commissioned as an officer five years ago.

They got harassing collection calls, sometimes in the middle of the night, Julia Rowles said. "They would say, 'we will take your house. We will report you to the credit agency. This is a bad situation that you don't want to be getting into. Pay us today.' ”

The bank was charging them 9 to 10 percent interest and nearly $2,000 a month, when they should have been paying $1,400."

JPMorgan’s Dimon has sent his PR spokesmen to deal with the mess. Back in November, Dimon has insisted that his bank is especially friendly toward those who serve their country. On Veterans’ Day, he was touting JPMorgan’s increased efforts to recruit veterans because “it is, quite simply, the right thing to do.”

In the wake of JPMorgan’s disclosures, other big banks, including Citibank, Ally Bank and Goldman Sach’s Litton Loans are reviewing their policies concerning home lending to military families.

Unfortunately, the JPMorgan fiasco is only the latest in a long, tawdry history of financial institutions targeting members of the military for predatory lending. During the recent fight over financial reform, the nation’s military leaders had fought to have the nation’s car dealers covered by the new financial consumer protection agency. But they were no match for the clout of the car dealers, who won the exemption they lobbied for.

According to Army Times, Chase has advertised itself as a military-friendly bank since at least 2005, when it began touting its Home Finance Military Mortgage program, which offers a discount on closing costs in home purchases or refinancing for military members and retirees. Mobilized National Guard and reserve members who had a Chase mortgage in good standing could defer entire mortgage payments for up to 18 months during call-ups. Both those initiatives go beyond the requirements of the SCRA. A bank spokesman couldn’t say if any of the 4,000 service members receiving checks, or Rowles, for that matter, participated in those initiatives.

In November, Dimon celebrated Veterans’ Day by touting his banks’ efforts to recruit those who served their country to work at JPMorgan because “it’s the right thing to do.”

This week Dimon is off to the meeting of the global elite at Davos, Switzerland, where he was complaining about the unjustified hostility toward his profession. “I just think this constant refrain [of] ‘bankers, bankers, bankers,’ - it’s just a really unproductive and unfair way of treating people,” Dimon said. “People should just stop doing that.”

Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage - 01/27/2011

Night on Fantasy Island

As a snapshot of the wildly dysfunctional state of our political union, last night’s festivities were a smashing success. All sides were serving up plenty of mom, apple pie and platitudes while ignoring what’s actually left on plates of millions of Americans –nothing.

I did find at least something to agree with in what each of the speakers said. Who can quarrel with President Obama when he calls on us to “win the future?” And I want my government as lean and mean as Paul Ryan and the Republicans do, without any wasteful subsidies that boost corporate tycoons and their overseas expansion rather than creating decent-paying jobs here at home.

It’s true that the tea party’s spokeswoman, Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota, looked like aliens had captured her brain and were speaking through her. Maybe we would have been better off if the aliens had captured Obama and Ryan too. At least Bachman briefly took note of the high unemployment rate before she went off to into her own rhetorical fantasyland.

That’s more than you can say for President Obama, who was pitching us his hallucination that his new pals from the Chamber of Commerce are going to beat their corporate profits into ploughshares in partnership with government, in an effort to foster new technologies and growth that we all share. Forgive me if I can’t get too worked up about this. Didn’t we try this government-corporate partnership recently? Wasn’t that what the bailout was?

Back here on Planet Earth, that didn’t work out so well for a lot of us, though it does seem to have worked well for the president’s friends at General Electric and JPMorgan Chase.

Both Ryan and Bachman aren’t interested in any partnerships; they want to dismantle government altogether so that GE, JPMorgan and the rest of the corporatariat can run the show without any interference at all. The only difference is that Bachman would like to do it faster, with less nice talk, than Ryan.

Neither the president, Ryan, or Bachman could focus on reality long enough to mention the long, steep decline of the middle class or the on-going foreclosure crisis, or offer any specific ideas on addressing those very real issues.

Back here on Planet Earth, we’re going to have to harness all of our ingenuity, strength and diversity just to wrestle our political system back from these leaders and their corporate backers before they plunder what’s left of it.

Congress / Financial Crisis / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 01/26/2011

Rearranging the Deck Chairs Tonight

U.S. Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, thinks Republican and Democratic members of Congress should sit with each other, rather than separately by party, when President Obama makes his State of the Union speech tonight in the Capitol. In a letter to the leadership of the House and the Senate that has gotten a lot of attention in D.C., Udall said that “partisan seating arrangements at State of the Union addresses serve to symbolize division instead of the common challenges we face in securing a strong future for the United States…. The choreographed standing and clapping of one side of the room – while the other side sits – is unbecoming of a serious institution.  And the message that it sends is that even on a night when the President is addressing the entire nation, we in Congress cannot sit as one, but must be divided as two.”

Udall is right about the symbolism of the tradition, which dates back two centuries, but his proposal is just more symbolism.

This isn’t one of those dinner parties where the hosts break up the married couples to inspire more lively conversation. Sitting next to each other isn’t going to stop the Democrats from applauding, or the Republicans from sitting on their hands or worse, like when a congressman from South Carolina screamed “you lie” during a health care speech by Obama to a joint session of Congress in 2009, or when at last year's State of the Union, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito visibly disagreed when the President criticized one of the Roberts court’s more extreme examples of judicial activism. With differences so deep, putting congresspeople within reach of each other may not be a good idea at all.

So what exactly is the attraction of Udall’s proposal? As in every mass tragedy in recent years – from JFK’s assassination to 9/11 to the carnage in Arizona – there is a brief period in which people want to reach out, beyond politics, for reassurance that we are all, or at least most of us, still human beings. We’re still within that gauzy penumbra. Speaking in Tucson, Professor Obama got high marks from the opinionators and the public for pointing out that incivility cannot explain insanity – and thus smothering the debate over the name-calling and extreme partisan politics of our era. But is that really the problem in America today?

True, the majority of Americans probably are uncomfortable with the current decibel level. We remember wistfully an America when things were better all around – or perhaps merely seemed so. But there is, without any question, plenty of reason to be angry right now. Not since the Depression have so many people suffered while so few prosper. Our American spirit has been shaken, maybe shattered. We have been betrayed by those we entrusted to protect us.

I don’t agree with many of the loudest, angriest people, but I don’t blame them for being loud or angry.

Sometimes that’s the only way you get things done.

Addressing another exercise in symbolism – a new non-profit political organization called “No Labels” dedicated to “bipartisanship” – New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently made the point: “The notion that civility and nominal bipartisanship would accomplish any of the heavy lifting required to rebuild America is childish magical thinking, and, worse, a mindless distraction from the real work before the nation.”

When you look at what has happened to this country, the dire conditions at home and the dangers we face abroad, and what we have to do to make sure our kids have some measure of the security and prosperity we enjoyed, talking about where members of Congress sit is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Congress / Harvey Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 01/25/2011

What Have You Done For General Electric Lately?

With your help, the company founded by Thomas Edison, the genius inventor, survived the nation’s worst recession in 80 years.

But billions in taxpayer-funded bailout relief and subsidies and paying zero federal taxes was not enough for General Electric.

The company wants more from you.

They want more subsidies, more dubious government contracts and more political power.

Business was terrible for a while, and GE’s credit division dragged the whole company down.

As result, 19,000 of the GE employees who had a job at the beginning of 2009 didn’t have one when the year ended. They joined the 4,000 GE employees who lost jobs the year before. For workers that still had jobs, the average salary was about $32,000 a year.

Things were tough at the top too.

CEO Jeffrey Immelt had to give up his bonus for the second year in a row, and was forced to limp along just on his annual compensation of nearly $10 million.

In 2008, Forbes magazine named Immelt one the U.S.’ 5 most overpaid bosses. For the past 6 years he’d been averaging $15 million a year.

Of course, before the economy crashed, CEO pay was through the roof in general. Getting on that most overpaid list wasn’t easy. Competition was stiff. Two of the other guys on the Forbes list made millions running their financial firms, Countrywide and Indymac, into the ground.

Taxpayers’ generosity helped ease the GE titans’ pain, allowing the company to take advantage of billions in subsidized loans and loan guarantees at such favorable interest rates that they amount to a massive government subsidy.

The company managed to eke out $11 billion in profits on $157 billion in revenue.

That’s when the Internal Revenue Service stepped in to ease GE’s burden. By the time the lawyers and accountants were done, you probably paid more taxes than GE did – unless you also happen to be Exxon.

GE didn’t issue a press release about most of those subsidies. Neither did the federal government. In fact, the Federal Reserve has fought to keep its subsidies of GE and other major corporations confidential. But they were forced to disclose the subsidies under the terms of the financial reform passed earlier this year.

It might have been made the Federal Reserve and GE uncomfortable if the public had known that GE’s CEO was sitting on the Fed’s board of governors while they were doling out low-interest loans to his company, an apparent and outrageous conflict of interest.

But your generosity to GE doesn’t stop with bailout and tax giveaways. As part of the 2009 stimulus package, the company got $24.9 million toward retooling an appliance factory in Kentucky, one of four plants GE is retooling in the government’s green technology initiative.

Like Immelt, the workers will have to adjust to lower pay. They’ll no longer make $20 an hour. Now they’ll be paid $13 an hour.

The company is returning to its roots in making appliances.

But the retooling comes too late for GE’s light bulb business, which was once a source of good jobs in Ohio. While it was borrowing taxpayers’ money in 2009, it was closing one such plant in Niles, Ohio – the fifteenth to close in the state since 1980. The new more energy efficient bulbs will be made in China.

As GE and others American firms were busy chasing short-term profits from the fancy financial products that eventually blew up the economy, they neglected the kinds of innovation that might have saved those jobs.

But General Electric has moved on, staking a big chunk of its future on a costly jet engine that the Defense Department says is wasteful and that it doesn’t want. So General Electric has been lobbying Congress to override the Defense Department. Maybe those that worked in the light bulb factories of Ohio could move to Washington and get jobs as lobbyists.  GE’s spending on lobbying has skyrocketed: from $4.54 million in the first quarter a year ago to $7.14 million in the first quarter of this year.

Meanwhile, while GE dukes it out in D.C., the company has informed the state of Massachusetts that if it  expects GE to limit layoffs of those working at an aircraft factory there, the state’s taxpayers are going to pay.

At the same time the state is facing a series of devastating budget cuts, GE is seeking a $25 million tax credit to help with the retooling of it plant in Lynn, which employs 3,000 people. The company’s already cut 600 jobs at the plant, without the tax credit, GE says, it will cut more. Usually states give tax credits for companies to create new jobs, not as a payoff to keep them from cutting existing jobs.

So here’s the latest innovation from GE. It has nothing to do with creating better, more energy-efficient products. GE has come up with a new way to put the squeeze on taxpayers.

Executive Pay / Federal Reserve / Martin Column / Outrage - 12/19/2010