Corporate Greed

This blog has been accused of spending a lot of time attacking industry and big business. Okay! Guilty! But there’s a very good reason for that. You don’t even have to go to big tobacco, oil, coal, gas, pharma or any of the other obvious people killers. You can look to banks, real estate mortgage conglomerates and industries that cheat their customers or flee the country in search of cheap foreign labor. You can look to credit card companies, airlines and any number of other industries that prey on their customers and the pubic in general.

Now we have a new egregious example that entered the fray almost by accident. But once in they ignored those they victimized and looked only to protect the company and their own worthless hides. I‘m speaking, of course, about Equifax. This is a giant information collecting company that deals with people’s credit ratings. Its customers are businesses that want this information so they can take advantage of those on whom the information has been collected. Equifax collects information without permission, so they automatically fall into the category of invading those people’s privacy.

It has now been revealed that Equifax has been hacked and the hackers have obtained information on more than half the adults in the United States, over 145 million people. This information includes birthdates, addresses, driver’s license numbers, credit card numbers and much more.

This happened because Equifax was too greedy to spend the money necessary to protect their arguably illegal collection of information. That information is now exposed to thieves and con men all over the world. But that’s not even close to the depths to which the corporate degenerates that run Equifax are willing to stoop. It has now been revealed that the hack was discovered on July 29. Three days later, before the hack was made public, three company executives dumped over $2 million of their own personal stock. Smell like insider trading, does it?

This column says it’s definitely insider trading, a felony; the kind of felony that people go to jail for. In this case, the kind of felony that brands the sleazy individuals that are involved in it as the lowest scum on earth. These bottom feeders have stolen private information for their personal and corporate gain; allowed it to be stolen from them and then participated in a felony so they didn’t lose any money when their whole scam was revealed.

This particular scam is getting some play right now because it is the latest and one of the most egregious but it isn’t getting nearly the noise it should because of Harvey, Irma and North Korea. That’s unfortunate because the number of innocent people affected far outweighs any of those other stories. We’re talking here, about more than half the adults in this nation having their credit information and much, much more, made pubic. Maybe that doesn’t bother you but it makes me furious. At the very least the crooks that tried to escape the penalty for their invasions of privacy by dumping their stock based on insider information should be tarred and feathered before they’re hung.

Richard Cordray, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is responsible for the prosecution and fining of any number of American corporations that thought it was okay to scam their customers for their own benefit. Based on that fact alone Cordray is an American hero. So far on his watch:

Wells Fargo was fined $185 million for opening accounts without customer’s knowledge.

Citibank was fined $700 million for illegal credit card practices.

Bank of America was fined $772 million for fraudulent credit card practices.

Experion was fined $3 million over misleading credit scores

Regions Bank was fined $7.5 million for unlawful overdraft practices

JPM was fined $4. Million for checking account denials.

And there’s plenty more.

All this was done on behalf of the American public so why do many members of congress have their knives out for Cordray? Why do they say he has way too much power? How about because those members of congress are in the pockets of big banking or all the other businesses that prey on the public? How about because big business has completely lost any sense of ethical or moral conduct by which they carry out their franchises? The above referenced businesses and thousands more just like them are stealing trillions of dollars each year from the American public. The fines listed above don’t even come close to representing the dollar amounts these crooks have stolen. And even more important, none of the goons who run these businesses have spent time in jail. If there is a real American shame that is it.

All the thieves who run and work for these criminal enterprises masquerading as big corporations, are also masquerading as moral upstanding citizens. They go to church n Sunday, they coach Little League, attend parent-teacher meetings and lecture their kids on how to be better people, all while the money they are stealing from their customers is going to pay for mini-mansions, private schools, designer clothes and expensive cars. These rats are not stealing to feed starving kids. These bastards aren’t even honest thieves.

Since CFPB was formed, six years ago by Barak Obama, it has collected nearly $12 Billion in restitution and fines.

Then there’s the view of congressman Jeb Hensarling ® Texas who complains that the bureau’s actions have caused big banks to cut back on loans to small businesses. Sure they have, mostly because CFPB has kept them from the kind of feral loaning and egregious interest grabbing that they had been doing before CFPB. Big banks don’t want to do small business loans when they can make a hell of a lot more money by cheating their own customers. Sure Hensarling doesn’t want to hear that. He’s so busy sucking up to bank lobbyists that he hasn’t the time or intelligence to see what a bunch of crooks they are and how they negatively affect the whole economy.

Hensarling says that bankers are afraid to lend because they are afraid of the CFPB. They better be. If they are, it will benefit all those who have to deal with them. The blatant arrogance of the financial world has long ago outpaced any kind of honest moral doing of business. Now it’s time to make them comply or put them in jail and fine them into bankruptcy.

Hensarling has authored a bill to roll back the powers of CFPB. All consumer protection groups have attacked Hensarling’s bill. These are organizations that favor fair business practices along with professors from all the major universities in the nation. When confronted, an arrogant and intellectually wanting Hensarling tells a reporter that all these groups are wrong. This arrogant little pissant thinks he’s the only one who knows anything. These groups, he says, don’t believe in freedom, they don’t believe in capitalism, they don’t believe in consumer prosperity and they don’t believe in markets.

It’s obvious that Hensarling believes in freedom for the banks that are lining his pockets. We all lived through the financial crisis of 2007 and anyone who did except Hensarling, understands that the failure of federal regulators to protect the public from the vampire tactics of the financial and real estate industries was the root cause of it. No one really expects someone with Hensarling’s limited intelligence to actually understand anything like this, as simple a concept as it is. What we do expect is for him to at least recognize what a dim bulb he is and to sit down and keep his lying mouth shut.

What we saw in 2007 was the most important government failure since the great depression. Seemingly, Hensarling and his corporate benefactor’s, are the only ones who failed to recognize this.

But that’s just one example of one chronically ignorant congressman. What’s really more important is the syndrome, mentioned above. Big business, thinking it’s okay to take advantage of everyday people just because they can’t protect themselves. Of course the biggest lie big business tells is that it will create work if only it makes more money. Reduce our taxes it whines and we will create jobs. That’s not just the big lie, that’s the monumental lie. Let’s take a look at some real figures.

Our official corporate tax rate is 35% and yes, it’s one of the highest in the world but most companies don’t pay anything like that. The Institute for Policy Studies has come up with some real and not really surprising figures. Between 2008 and 2015 of all the companies that were making a profit yet paid less than 20% tax, which means most public corporations, the job creation rate was -1%. That’s right minus 1% or job loss rather than job creation. Now don’t forget these were all companies that were making a profit, often a significant profit. So if they weren’t creating jobs with this profit, what were they doing with it?

We’ll get to that later but first we should deal with one more fact. The companies in this study were all public companies, large companies with stockholders, boards of directors and many employees, exactly the kinds of companies that are always begging for tax breaks and government relief from regulation and labor restrictions, the kinds of companies that are always lying about how they are dying to create more jobs, if only the government will allow them to make more money by lowering taxes and removing workplace safety regulations. Get rid of OSHA, they whine, and then we’ll have more money to create more jobs. Sure but all their workers would be dead or disabled by the lack of safety considerations on the job.

But if all these big businesses had a negative job creation rate in the period under consideration where does job growth come from? In the same period when big public corporations lost 1% of their jobs, mostly small private businesses showed a 6% job growth. And to get back to that question that I left hanging, all those profits that accrued to corporate America that didn’t go into creating jobs went to corporate executives who earned an average of $15 million bucks a year. That’s right; while these companies were slashing jobs and evading taxes they were paying their executives a fortune.

Now, don’t forget, we’re not talking about entrepreneurs here. These aren’t the guys who invented something or started a new way to do something. These are “yes men” who climbed the corporate ladder, being very careful not to step on anyone’s toes or to get the boss mad at them. These are not the guys who started these companies. Those guys all dead now. These are guys who very carefully maneuvered their way through a lot of flack to get to the top. These are not exemplary men, these are corporate connivers and they are getting on average $15 million a year. They are getting it in lieu of more jobs being created because the way you get to be a corporate CEO is to make a profit, often by downsizing and making sure the stockholders get a good profit on their investment, even if the employees have to seek out a second job just to stay above the poverty line.

You want more proof. Okay. In 2004 the government decided to try a new ploy to get corporate money back in this country and hopefully use it to create jobs. Many big corporations had been making money overseas andleaving it there so as not to pay the high corporate taxes on it when they brought it back here. So the government gave these companies a one-year tax exemption, allowing them to bring the profits they were holding overseas back into this country without paying taxes on them, thereby creating a fund of money that would hopefully be used to expand the companies and create new jobs. Yeah, good luck! The reality? The companies that got the money back tax free from overseas, cut jobs, boosted corporate bonuses and paid higher dividends. The only ones who didn’t benefit were their slave wage employees and those who needed jobs.

So if there’s one truth you must take away from this blog, it’s that any time you hear someone talking about creating jobs through tax savings and lowering of regulation, that person is nothing but a lying rat who makes Ted Cruz look like Jesus Christ!

I admitted at the beginning of this piece that I often attack corporate America. This despite the fact that I truly believe in capitalism. But being an avowed capitalist doesn’t prevent me from understanding that capitalism must be firmly regulated or it will crush those that labor under it. Knowledge is power!