BernieforPres2016
BernieforPres2016's JournalHillary and Jeb: The only real difference is the marketing strategy
Gore Vidal once quipped that there is only one party in the United States, “The Property Party…and it has two right wings.”
Hillary arrogance on display
Hillary on Bernie calling her unqualified. "I've been called many things in my life. That's a first."
Really, Hillary? Nobody has ever called you unqualified for anything?
Did anybody catch that racist bomb Chris Cuomo just dropped on CNN?
He was talking about Ron Brownstein (one of the 6 talking heads around him) being at the Bernie Sanders rally last night, saying he was in a hoodie and "I thought he was there to make a buy!" The whole panel was yucking it up.
How stupid does Erin Burnett think we are?
She was interviewing Tad Devine. She says "we actually looked up how many people the 4 biggest banks in the United States employ" and then put up a graphic showing that the 4 largest banks employ over 700,000 people combined. She asked "Would breaking them up do more harm than good with all those people losing jobs?"
Right Erin, you who worked for CNBC for years don't understand that these banks laid off people as part of every one of the hundreds of mergers it took the 4 biggest banks to get to their size. So now if we break up the biggest banks it means the employees in the banking industry will all lose their jobs.
What idiocy.
The Clintons and "counter-scheduling"
In Thomas Franks' book "Listen, Liberal or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?", he talks about how Bill Clinton was floundering in 1994 after the Republican takeover of Congress. He was thought of as weak and ineffectual and there was a "struggle for the soul of Bill Clinton", according to his aide David Gergen.
Franks writes:
"Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. And the way to do it was by somehow damaging or insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party's tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was genuinely dead."
"This became such a cherished idea among Clinton's campaign team that they had a catchphrase for it: "counter-scheduling." During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party's traditional base in order to assure voters that "interest groups" would have no say in a New Democrat White House. As for those interest groups themselves, Clinton knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centrism."
(Note how we still see that nowhere else to go theme, particularly in the loyalty oath threads aimed at Bernie's supporters at DU.)
Frank gives some examples of Clinton counter-scheduling, including the infamous Sister Souljah moment in front of Jesse Jackson during the 1992 campaign, and notes that NAFTA was the first great test of it in the White House when Bill Clinton took on organized labor and much of his own party.
Hillary understood and promoted this counter-scheduling strategy. Frank writes:
"Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of governance. At a retreat in the administration's early days, Bill's chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a "journey" and that he had a "vision" for what the administration was doing, a "story" that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein's telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.
You show people what you're willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends - by which in this context, she clearly meant when you make them your enemy."
Trevor Noah: Why would you do this Hillary?
Hilarious, particularly when he shows how they should have cut to a black crowd roaring with laughter.
Yet another Hillary SOS/Clinton Foundation scandal
Don't know if anybody has seen or posted on this story from Politico today. I don't see it on the first page.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/teneo-final-221807
<But while serving as Clinton’s special envoy, reaching out to global corporations for those investments, he was also working for two of them as a private consultant — earning about $2.4 million from Dow Chemical, a longtime client of his and one of the firms that participated in Clinton’s Ireland initiative.
It was also during this time period that Kelly and Doug Band, a close aide to former President Bill Clinton, were preparing to launch a global consulting business that would soon become a well-known and controversial success story. Their new venture, Teneo Holdings, would go on to employ numerous Hillary Clinton associates, including her closest confidante, Huma Abedin, and, for a time, Bill Clinton as “honorary chairman,” giving clients rare access to the couple and their network of world leaders.
The fact that Kelly and Band were laying the groundwork for their enterprise while Kelly was working for the State Department, reported here for the first time, represents a fresh illustration of the blurring of the lines between Hillary Clinton’s political network and her State Department that critics have long noted. And it shows how one enterprising fundraiser was able to insinuate himself into Clinton's inner circle and then built a 500-person, multinational consulting firm whose value, at least at first, was greatly enhanced by its founders’ closeness to the Clintons.
Manhattan-based Teneo has been a center of palace intrigue for years because of its proximity to the former first family. And in its early days, Teneo directly benefited the couple themselves, though the company emphasizes that it no longer has those ties.>
Warren Buffett's business partner admits Bernie & Elizabeth Warren are right about finance
Charlie Munger is 92 years old and has been Warren Buffett's business partner at Berkshire Hathaway for over 40 years. Munger is a Republican who is worth billions but has spoken out over the years on what he sees as unconscionable behavior by politicians, business executives and others. Being a Republican, he is not a fan overall of either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but he admitted earlier this year that they are right on their views about the finance industry:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffetts-hand-man-gave-133200819.html
<It is true that these crazy false values and this crazy excess is bad morals and it's bad policy. It's bad for the nation. It’s just bad, bad, bad. And there’s a lot of it. Now of course a lot of it is in American finance.
The truth of the matter is that . . . Elizabeth Warren doesn’t agree with me on many subjects, and I wouldn’t agree with her on many subjects, but she is basically right when she says that American finance is out of control and that it isn’t good for the rest of us. Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are not two of my favorite people on earth, but they are absolutely right [about finance].
You all see what goes on in finance: the craziness, the promotions, the fuzzy accounting, the crazy trading cultures…. It’s very bad for all of us that we have this huge overdevelopment of finance. And yet it’s very hard to do anything about it.>
<So we have a vast gambling culture, and people have made it respectable. Instead of betting on horses or prizefights, we can bet on the price of securities or the price of derivatives relating to securities, and we can bet on athletic contests. We have a huge amount of legalized gambling. And of course the public market, which operates every day with transactions, is an ideal casino. And there are a whole bunch of people who want to own a casino and make a lot of money without losing money on inventories or credit . . . and many other irritating parts of business. Just to sit there every night and go higher and higher. Who doesn’t want to be croupier in a casino? And very respectable people get drawn into it. They see other people getting rich.
There’s way, way too much of that in America. And too much of the new wealth has gone to people who either own a casino or are playing in a casino. And I don’t think the exaltation of that group has been good for life generally, and I am to some extent a member of that group.>
The ongoing squabble between Bernie and Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE
Ten days or so ago, Bernie cited GE as an example of a company that has been outsourcing jobs from the U.S. and paying little or no corporate income taxes in the U.S.
Immelt responded with an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ge-ceo-bernie-sanders-says-were-destroying-the-moral-fabric-of-america-hes-wrong/2016/04/06/8499bc8c-fc23-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html
Bernie responded to Immelt's piece and continued to be critical of GE:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-10/sanders-says-greedy-ge-not-telling-the-truth-on-factory-visit
<“General Electric is a company that is well known for negotiating contracts with its workers which call for concessions, sending jobs outside of this country, and not paying their fair share of taxes,” Sanders said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union program. “That is, I think, a greedy corporation.”>
Here is a link to an article on Jeff Immelt's total compensation package of $37 million in 2014, despite GE continuing to underperform the S&P 500 as it has during Immelt's entire tenure:
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13075964/1/immelts-37-million-pay-package-shows-hes-still-the-boss.html
>The announcement of Immelt's pay package comes as some followers of the company are showing increasing signs of restlessness. GE shares have underperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin since Immelt took over leadership of GE from legendary executive Jack Welch, and last year was no exception. GE shares lost more than 9% as the index gained nearly 12%. Since Immelt took over, GE shareholders who reinvested all their dividends lost 1%, while the S&P 500 posted a total return of 146%.>
Here's a link on GE's recent corporate relocation from Connecticut to the Boston area and how much corporate welfare they received from the taxpayers of Massachusetts (including relocation expenses for GE executives including Immelt). The article also notes that GE is notorious not just for not paying federal income taxes, but for ducking state taxes as well.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/ge-boston-taxpayers/424938/
<Unfortunately, that future comes with a stiff price tag. Together, the city and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts offered up an estimated $145 million in business incentives ($120 million in grants and other programs from the state, and another $25 million in property-tax relief from the city) to secure the deal. By my calculations, that means that the city and state are doling out a whopping $181,250 in public subsidies per job, given GE’s own statement that its new headquarters will employ 800 people (200 corporate staff members and another 600 so-called digital industrial product managers, designers, and developers). And that doesn’t even include additional incentives such as grants for workforce training (another $1 million or so), a new “innovation center” designed to better tie GE to local universities and research institutes ($5 million more), assistance for employees to relocate to Boston, and transportation improvements in the Seaport District.>
<Another reason for the move, hinted at by the company itself, is to allow GE to continue avoiding state corporate income tax. In fact, The Boston Globe reports that GE essentially pays no, or at least minimal, corporate income tax to any state.>
<GE is also one of the largest recipients of incentives in the country, numbering already among the top 20 recipients of corporate welfare subsidies after hauling in a total of $1.5 billion since 1992 (with the majority of that accruing in just the last five years). In 2014 alone, GE received nearly $100 million in subsidies from Cincinnati and the state of Ohio, where its U.S. Global Operations Center is located.>
Somewhere along the way, it seems to have become accepted by most that our government and citizens exist to serve the needs of business, but business has no obligations back to society, only to its executives and shareholders.
Hillary has a love-in with tech company executives, steps in it again
Not that you will hear anything about this on MSNBC, CNN, in the Washington Post or the New York Times. I just stumbled into it via some articles on Yahoo Finance. Hillary, who is out in California for some high dollar fundraising, praised the CEO of Salesforce because he spent a whopping $3 million last year to address gender pay inequity issues.
But it turns out that the CEO has made total compensation of over $73 million by himself in the last 2 years, despite the fact that Salesforce is not profitable. And they love to throw the money around on parties, events, extravagant gifts, etc.
In Hillary Clinton's corporate America, as long as you say the right things and bow to the right causes, you can do pretty much anything you want the rest of the time.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton--salesforce-and-gap-are-doing-equal-pay-right-161557311.html
<At a candid discussion on the state of equal pay for women in America, Hillary Clinton gave kudos to Silicon Valley CEOs for carrying their share of the load.
“If CEOs and board members will actually ask themselves ‘How sure are we we that we are paying people the same?’ the data shows even in the best-intentioned companies that is often not happening,” she said. Clinton spoke at a round table discussion hosted by salary data site Glassdoor.com. She gave a nod to Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff, who spent $3 million last year to close the gender wage gap at his company, and Gap (GPS), the first Fortune 500 company to announce that it pays female and male employees equally in 2014.
“I’m very focused on making sure we don’t lose the impetus behind this conversation and that we get more companies ... to be public [about their gender wage gap],” Clinton said.>
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-freezing-232510619.html
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is freezing his salary after hearing complaints about his $40 million pay
<In a proxy statement filed on Monday, Salesforce disclosed that Benioff's base salary will remain at $1.55 million this year. The change was made in response to hearing "concerns regarding quantum of total CEO pay," it said.
Benioff also took a 16% cut in his total compensation package last year, the filing said. His total package, which includes stock options and bonuses, was down from $39.9 million in fiscal year 2015 to $33.36 million in the fiscal year that ended in January 2016.>
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-spent-100-000-send-202939931.html
<Salesforce is known for throwing extravagant parties. Its smaller events are often punctuated with private concerts from rock stars and its big annual conference, Dreamforce, is like a music festival, self-improvement retreat and giant party with a tech conference sprinkled in on the side.
Out of the $6.7 billion of revenues Salesforce generated in its last fiscal year, it spent almost half, $3.2 billion, on sales and marketing. That's one of the major reasons Salesforce spends more than it makes. It lost $47.4 million in its last fiscal year.
In fact, Salesforce threw one or more mysterious events in which the bill for just three execs came in at around $100,000, according to a recent disclosure made on an SEC form.
Salesforce wouldn't reveal what the event, or events, were when we asked. In the SEC form, it described the event attended by COO and head of sales Keith Block and CFO Mark Hawkins as "a motivational company sales team event.">
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-bought-coo-41-000-165621889.html
<Marc Benioff hired former Oracle sales star Keith Block in 2013 and can't stop heaping praise promotion and gifts on the guy.
In fact, he was so happy with Block, he had Salesforce buy him a $41,000 watch, according to documents filed with the SEC.
To be precise, the watch cost $40,564 and its value was called a "bonus" in Salesforce's proxy form, which discloses how much executives are paid, including perks and gifts. Salesforce explained that the watch was because of Block's performance in just one quarter:
"Represents the value of a watch awarded in recognition of Mr. Block’s leadership of our sales organization in the first quarter of fiscal 2016.">
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