Thanks for destroy­ing our elec­toral sys­tem Supremes!

Ok, to be fair, you’ve had help.

****pun alert!!*****

It looks like Mitt might have his mitts on some money from Macau:

TPM­Muck­raker
McCain: Adel­son Bring­ing ‘For­eign Money’ Into U.S. Campaign

Eric Lach June 15, 2012, 10:47 AM

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told PBS’ News Hour that bil­lion­aire con­ser­v­a­tive casino mogul Shel­don Adelson’s big dona­tions are intro­duc­ing “for­eign money” into the pres­i­den­tial race.

Adel­son has been by far the largest pub­lic donor to out­side spend­ing groups this cycle. He helped prop up Newt Gingrich’s pri­mary cam­paign and, just this week, The Wall Street Jour­nal reported that Adel­son had decided to give $10 mil­lion to Restore Our Future, a pro-Mitt Rom­ney super PAC.

“[M]uch of Mr. Adelson’s casino prof­its that go to him come from this casino in Macau,” McCain told Judy Woodruff in an inter­view that aired Thurs­day night. “Which says that, obvi­ously, maybe in a round­about way, for­eign money is com­ing into an Amer­i­can campaign.”

McCain, who once worked with for­mer Sen. Russ Fein­gold (D-WI) on the Bipar­ti­san Cam­paign Reform Act, a.k.a. the McCain-Feingold bill, called the Cit­i­zens United deci­sion the Supreme Court’s “most mis­guided, naive, unin­formed, egre­gious deci­sion” in the 21st century.

...

Uh on, Newt’s Mitt’s sugar-daddy is mak­ing dona­tions from his Macau-based casino pro­ceeds? That cer­tainly sounds like an oppor­tu­nity for for­eign money to flow unde­tected into the US pres­i­den­tial race.

And since this casino is based in a asian-mobster haven, it seems like Mitt might have mob­ster money prob­lem. Oh well, I’m sure he’s Triad-ing to avoid­ing it:

New York Observer
Gin­grich Backer Shel­don Adel­son Faces Ques­tions About Chi­nese Busi­ness Affairs

By Steve Huff 1/29 3:39pm

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Newt Gin­grich is hav­ing a tough enough time with front-runner Mitt Rom­ney surg­ing in the polls prior to the upcom­ing Florida pri­mary. Now he may also have to con­tend with pesky ques­tions about a gov­ern­ment probe into the over­seas busi­ness affairs of Las Vegas bil­lion­aire Shel­don Adel­son, who may be the finan­cial sav­ior of Mr. Gingrich’s campaign.

Mr. Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Cor­po­ra­tion has been under fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tion since early 2011 by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the Secu­ri­ties Exchange Com­mis­sion for pos­si­ble vio­la­tions of the For­eign Cor­rupt Prac­tices Act (FCPA). ABC News reports that cor­po­rate doc­u­ments con­tain alle­ga­tions of brib­ing offi­cials on the Chi­nese island of Macau.

A sep­a­rate civil suit filed in Nevada in 2010 alleges Mr. Adel­son ordered Steven Jacobs, the for­mer C.E.O. of Las Vegas Sands Corp’s Chi­nese affil­i­ate, to stay quiet about alleged entan­gle­ments “with Chi­nese orga­nized crime groups, known as Tri­ads.” Mr. Jacobs’s suit char­ac­ter­ized Adelson’s demands as “repeated and out­ra­geous.” Mr. Jacobs also claimed Mr. Adel­son wanted him to essen­tially manip­u­late Macau offi­cials to assist com­pany busi­ness inter­ests in the region.

...

***the pun alert has been cancelled***

Clearly what we need is more tax cuts for the ‘job cre­ators’:

Rich­est Amer­i­cans’ net worth jumps to $1.7 tril­lion: Forbes

By Dan Burns

NEW YORK | Wed Sep 19, 2012 3:08pm EDT

(Reuters) — The net worth of the rich­est Amer­i­cans grew by 13 per­cent in the past year to $1.7 tril­lion, Forbes mag­a­zine said on Wednes­day, and a famil­iar cast pop­u­lated the top of the annual list, includ­ing Bill Gates, War­ren Buf­fett, Larry Elli­son and the Koch brothers.

The aver­age net worth of the 400 wealth­i­est Amer­i­cans rose to a record $4.2 bil­lion, up more than 10 per­cent from a year ago, while the low­est net worth came in at $1.1 bil­lion ver­sus $1.05 bil­lion last year, the mag­a­zine said. Seven in ten of the list’s mem­bers made their for­tunes from scratch.

It was a bad year, how­ever, for social media moguls, whose net worth fell by a com­bined $11 bil­lion. On the heels of Face­book Inc’s rocky IPO in May, the No. 1 social network’s chief exec­u­tive, Mark Zucker­berg, was the year’s biggest dol­lar loser: his net worth fell by nearly half to $9.4 bil­lion from $17.5 bil­lion. He also slid to the No. 36 slot from No. 14 a year ago, Forbes said.

Face­book shares have fallen 40 per­cent from their IPO price of $38 a share in May.

Dis­mal per­for­mances by other social media stocks dropped some exec­u­tives from the list alto­gether, includ­ing Groupon Inc Chair­man Eric Lefkof­sky, No. 293 on last year’s list, and Zynga Inc Chair­man and CEO Mark Pin­cus, No. 212 on the 2011 list.

“The gap between the very rich and merely rich increased and helped drive up the aver­age net worth of The Forbes 400 mem­bers to an all-time record $4.2 bil­lion,” said Forbes Senior Wealth Edi­tor Luisa Kroll.

Col­lec­tively, this group’s net worth is the equiv­a­lent of one-eighth of the entire U.S. econ­omy, which stood at $13.56 tril­lion in real terms accord­ing to the lat­est gov­ern­ment data. But the 13 per­cent growth in the wealth of the rich­est Amer­i­cans far out­paced that of the econ­omy over­all, help­ing widen the chasm between rich and poor.

Forbes attrib­uted the growth in net worth in part to the per­for­mance of the stock mar­ket and a recov­er­ing real estate market.

But while their wealth grew faster than the econ­omy as a whole, which expanded at an ane­mic 1.7 per­cent annual rate in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2012, the super rich gen­er­ally failed to keep pace with the stock mar­ket. The bench­mark Stan­dard & Poor’s 500 index rose nearly 20 per­cent over the 12 months ended August 24, the last date of mar­ket per­for­mance mea­sured for this year’s list.

...

Ah trickle-down eco­nom­ics, the eco­nomic equiv­a­lent of drink­ing your own urine: It might help you sur­vive for a short period of time in an extreme emer­gency, but it’s really not doc­tor rec­om­mended.

@Pterrafractyl
I claim exclu­sive rights to the term PPoP (pee pee on the poor), which I cre­ated back in the 1980s as a sum­ma­tion of Reagan’s eco­nomic the­ory. You’ve come dan­ger­ous close to infringe­ment in this last comment.

@Dwight: It’s all good. Trickle down eco­nom­ics may have been the appro­pri­ate anal­ogy for the 80’s but explo­sive diar­rhea might actu­ally be a bet­ter anal­ogy for what we’ve expe­ri­enced over the last decade. No one likes to get pissed on but at least it’s some­what ster­ile.

Clearly, it’s because they did 93% of the addi­tional work:

Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened
By Peter Robi­son — Oct 2, 2012 9:01 AM CT

Since 2009, Anita Reyes’ wages have been as frozen as Lake Min­netonka in January.

While the U.S. econ­omy was recov­er­ing from the Great Reces­sion, Reyes, 52, a casino dealer from Min­neapo­lis, was din­ing on $1.67 cans of soup and search­ing for a way to keep her house, which was fore­closed on last October.

“I went back­wards,” Reyes said. “Two years ago, three years ago, I didn’t know I’d be look­ing at being homeless.”

Stephen Hemsley’s salary has been frozen too. His income hasn’t.

The chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Min­netonka, Minnesota-based health insurer Unit­ed­Health Group Inc. (UNH) earned $1.3 mil­lion in salary every year since 2007. Still, as the eco­nomic recov­ery took hold from 2009 to 2011, Hem­s­ley, 60, exer­cised stock options worth more than $170 mil­lion and made at least $51 mil­lion from share sales, mak­ing him the object of an “Occupy Lake Min­netonka” protest on the ice out­side his lake­side home each win­ter.

The diver­gent for­tunes of Reyes and Hem­s­ley show that the U.S. has gone through two recov­er­ies. The 1.2 mil­lion house­holds whose incomes put them in the top 1 per­cent of the U.S. saw their earn­ings increase 5.5 per­cent last year, accord­ing to esti­mates released last month by the U.S. Cen­sus Bureau. Earn­ings fell 1.7 per­cent for the 96 mil­lion house­holds in the bot­tom 80 per­cent — those that made less than $101,583.

The recov­ery that offi­cially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Amer­i­cans’ pay­checks. In 2010, the top 1 per­cent of U.S. fam­i­lies cap­tured as much as 93 per­cent of the nation’s income growth, accord­ing to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley econ­o­mist who stud­ied Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice data.

Polit­i­cal Battleground

The earn­ings gap between rich and poor Amer­i­cans was the widest in more than four decades in 2011, Cen­sus data show, sur­pass­ing income inequal­ity pre­vi­ously reported in Uganda and Kaza­khstan. The notion that each gen­er­a­tion does bet­ter than the last — one aspect of the Amer­i­can Dream — has been chal­lenged by evi­dence that aver­age fam­ily incomes fell last decade for the first time since World War II.

...

The head of Unit­ed­Health made $221 mil­lion in stocks and options? If that seems like far too much for a health insur­ance CEO to be mak­ing you prob­a­bly don’t want to read this other arti­cle about Hem­s­ley(he appar­ently had $744 mil­lion in unex­er­cised stock options as of 2009). Or this arti­cle (he had over $1 bil­lion in options as of 2011). So what on earth could it pos­si­bly be Mr. Hem­s­ley con­tributes to the over­all orga­niz­ing? He’s the CEO, so it’s clearly some sort of “deci­sion mak­ing” that he’s get­ting paid for, but what are those extremely expen­sive deci­sions? Is the guy sit­ting on every sin­gle death panel at Unit­ed­Health? It would be really inter­est­ing to see what it is that the oli­garchs actu­ally do every­day. That ques­tion could be a fun meme.

Arg *&%^@#)_*( .... You haven’t stud­ied the doc­trine, Pter. The oli­garchs CREATE new stuff every day and new WEALTH which enriches human exis­tence right down to the peo­ple earn­ing 27 cents an hour to cut up ship hulls for scrap in Bangladesh. They are obsessed with CREATING WEALTH FOR THE GOOD OF US ALL. They do this directly, not rely­ing on hired exper­tise, because they are supe­rior human beans and gen­er­ally nice guys. Just look at all the tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions and cures for dis­ease that Ben Bernanke or Jamie Dimon have pro­duced. I think I’ve made my case.
I was con­fused for a while over why such obvi­ously supe­rior beings would need inher­ited wealth as a jump start in life, since they claim that they would rise to the top even if start­ing with noth­ing. I think the only solu­tion is to end all inher­ited wealth, then watch them shine. That will shut those bleed­ing heart lib­er­als up for good. God cre­ated the uni­verse so a select few could bathe in glory. If a few bil­lion peo­ple have to live mis­er­ably for that to hap­pen, well, that’s FREEDOM.

@Dwight: LOL. Now, now...I think it should be clear to all of us that those born with a sil­ver spoon in their mouth paid for that spoon with the pro­ceeds from the paper routes they had in the womb(one more rea­son child labor laws are truly stu­pid). Besides, I’m pretty sure heaven doesn’t have access to off­shore tax-haven accounts, so it’s not like these folks are in any sort of spir­i­tual trou­ble. All they want to do is make life bet­ter for their kids and the rest of us pos­si­bly up to 53% of us. Life is hard enough for our bet­ters with­out the ungrate­ful rab­ble going around mak­ing con­tro­ver­sial state­ments:

Bloomberg
JPMor­gan Shouldn’t Cut Dimon’s Pay Over Loss, Har­ri­son Says
By Dawn Kopecki and Erik Schatzker — Oct 4, 2012 10:27 AM CT

JPMor­gan Chase & Co. (JPM) shouldn’t cut Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Jamie Dimon’s pay over the bank’s $5.8 bil­lion loss in its chief invest­ment office, for­mer CEO William Har­ri­son said.

“I wouldn’t penal­ize him,” Har­ri­son, 69, said today in an inter­view on Bloomberg Tele­vi­sion with Stephanie Ruhle and Erik Schatzker. “That might be a con­tro­ver­sial state­ment. I think Jamie is doing a great job.”

...

Dimon, 56, received $23 mil­lion in pay and bonuses in 2011, mak­ing him the highest-paid CEO of a major U.S. bank.

...

It’s good to see some­one finally com­ing to the defense of the defens­less. It’s not like Jamie had any­thing to do with that $5.8 bil­lion loss.

It looks like Shel­don is plan­ning to dou­ble down in 2016:

Shel­don Adel­son Vows To ‘Dou­ble’ Dona­tions To GOP After Huge 2012 Elec­tion Failure

The Huff­in­g­ton Post | By Nick Wing
Posted: 12/05/2012 10:14 am EST Updated: 12/05/2012 3:56 pm EST

Casino mogul Shel­don Adel­son spent nearly $150 mil­lion on Repub­li­cans dur­ing the 2012 elec­tions, almost entirely in sup­port of can­di­dates who did not win. But his cold streak hasn’t left him at all dis­cour­aged, he told the Wall Street Jour­nal in a recent interview.

“I hap­pen to be in a unique busi­ness where win­ning and los­ing is the basis of the entire busi­ness,” Adel­son told the Jour­nal. “So I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand com­ing up.”

In fact, Adel­son, whose per­sonal wealth is esti­mated at $20.5 bil­lion, says he’s ready to lit­er­ally dou­ble down on the GOP when those new cards are dealt.

...

Well sur­prise sur­prise, it appears that small nations that don’t kiss the asses of inter­na­tional preda­tory bankers can do just fine on their own:

Forbes
Iceland’s Sta­bi­lized Econ­omy Is A Sur­pris­ing Suc­cess Story
Tracey Green­stein, Con­trib­u­tor
2/20/2013 @ 12:06PM

You may have heard about Iceland’s top­pling econ­omy back in 2008. As one of the hard­est hit coun­tries at the time, Iceland’s heav­ily crit­i­cized method to escape ver­i­ta­ble eco­nomic demise actu­ally did the trick.

Faced with the pos­si­bil­ity of finan­cial fail­ure, Ice­land had to think on its feet. Instead of bail­ing out banks USA-style, the coun­try for­gave mort­gage debt for the pop­u­la­tion – and com­pletely started over from square one.

A coun­try with a small pop­u­la­tion of roughly 320,000 cit­i­zens, Iceland‘s entire bank­ing struc­ture “sys­tem­at­i­cally failed” in the early days of the 2008 reces­sion. Despite the fact that Ice­land is still on the road to recov­ery, the coun­try ranks high as a polit­i­cally and eco­nom­i­cally sta­ble nation. Their suc­cess over the last few years has been largely under-reported, and the story behind it is quite fascinating.

A Lit­tle Bit of Moral­ity Goes A Long Way

Let’s face it: Ice­landers are tough. They are entirely iso­lated, liv­ing in frozen tun­dra, per­pet­u­ally endur­ing less-than-optimal weather pat­terns. While they are sur­rounded by epic nat­ural beauty, these peo­ple aren’t spoiled; they’re tenacious.

Instead of allow­ing the crim­i­nals respon­si­ble for bank fraud to run free as the years passed by, Ice­land thought it might be wise to actu­ally indict bankers who com­mit­ted seri­ous finan­cial crimes that con­tributed to the col­lapse. By pay­ing off loans for con­sumers, for­giv­ing home­owner debt (up to 110% of the prop­erty value), and throw­ing the offend­ers in prison, Ice­land was able to bounce back. Now, their econ­omy is “recov­ered” and is grow­ing faster than both the US and Euro­pean economies.

When Iceland’s Pres­i­dent Ola­fur Rag­nar Grimm­son was asked whether or not other coun­tries – Europe in par­tic­u­lar – would suc­ceed with Iceland’s “let the banks fail” pol­icy, he stated the following:

“Why are the banks con­sid­ered to be the holy churches of the mod­ern econ­omy? Why are pri­vate banks not like air­lines and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies and allowed to go bank­rupt if they have been run in an irre­spon­si­ble way? The the­ory that you have to bail-out banks is a the­ory that you allow bankers enjoy for their own profit, their suc­cess, and then let ordi­nary peo­ple bear their fail­ure through taxes and aus­ter­ity. ?Peo­ple in enlight­ened democ­ra­cies are not going to accept that in the long run.”

Grimmson’s “famous” reply to the con­tro­ver­sial ques­tion, “What is the rea­son for Iceland’s recov­ery?” is most remarkable.

“We were wise enough not to fol­low the tra­di­tional pre­vail­ing ortho­dox­ies of the West­ern finan­cial world in the last 30 years. We intro­duced cur­rency con­trols, we let the banks fail, we pro­vided sup­port for the poor, and we didn’t intro­duce aus­ter­ity mea­sures like you’re see­ing in Europe.”

...

How­ever unortho­dox in its method, Iceland’s “let it fail” pol­icy resulted in jubi­la­tion. We can’t seek per­fec­tion in the years after a global finan­cial col­lapse, but we can acknowl­edge nations who per­se­vered with integrity.

Let’s hope larger nations learn Iceland’s unortho­dox lessons because big banks have big appetites and the size of today’s banks are, shall we say, unortho­dox:

Bloomberg
U.S. Banks Big­ger Than GDP as Account­ing Rift Masks Risk
By Yal­man Onaran — Feb 19, 2013 6:01 PM CT

Warn­ing: Banks in the U.S. are big­ger than they appear.

That label, like a sim­i­lar one on auto­mo­bile side-view mir­rors, might be required of the four largest U.S. lenders if Thomas Hoenig, vice chair­man of the Fed­eral Deposit Insur­ance Corp., has his way. Apply­ing stricter account­ing stan­dards for deriv­a­tives and off-balance-sheet assets would make the banks twice as big as they say they are — or about the size of the U.S. econ­omy — accord­ing to data com­piled by Bloomberg.

“Deriv­a­tives, like loans, carry risk,” Hoenig said in an inter­view. “To rec­og­nize those bets on the bal­ance sheet would give a bet­ter pic­ture of the risk expo­sures that are there.”

U.S. account­ing rules allow banks to record a smaller por­tion of their deriv­a­tives than Euro­pean peers and keep most mortgage-linked bonds off their books. That can under­es­ti­mate the risks firms face and affect how much cap­i­tal they need.

Using inter­na­tional stan­dards for deriv­a­tives and con­sol­i­dat­ing mort­gage secu­ri­ti­za­tions, JPMor­gan Chase & Co., Bank of Amer­ica Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. would dou­ble in assets, while Cit­i­group Inc. would jump 60 per­cent, third– quar­ter data show. JPMor­gan would swell to $4.5 tril­lion from $2.3 tril­lion, leapfrog­ging London-based HSBC Hold­ings Plc and Deutsche Bank AG, each with about $2.7 trillion.

World’s Largest

JPMor­gan, Bank of Amer­ica and Cit­i­group would become the world’s three largest banks and Wells Fargo the sixth-biggest. Their com­bined assets of $14.7 tril­lion would equal 93 per­cent of U.S. gross domes­tic prod­uct last year, the data show. Total assets of the country’s bank­ing sys­tem would be 170 per­cent of eco­nomic out­put, still lower than 326 per­cent for Germany.

U.S. account­ing rules for net­ting deriv­a­tives allow banks to erase about $4 tril­lion in assets, the data show. The lenders also can remove from their books most mort­gages they pack­age into secu­ri­ties, trim­ming an addi­tional $3 trillion.

Off-balance-sheet assets and deriv­a­tives were at the root of the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis. Mort­gage secu­ri­ti­za­tions kept off the books came back to haunt banks forced to repur­chase home loans sold to spe­cial invest­ment vehi­cles. The gov­ern­ment had to res­cue Amer­i­can Inter­na­tional Group Inc. with a bailout that bal­looned to $182 bil­lion after the insurer couldn’t pay banks on deriv­a­tives tied to those bonds.

...

“Too big to jail” is offi­cial: Accord­ing to Eric Holder, some banks have lit­er­ally become so big that they can’t be pros­e­cuted with­out dam­ag­ing the econ­omy:

The Hill
Holder: Big banks’ size com­pli­cates pros­e­cu­tion efforts
By Peter Schroeder — 03/06/13 02:00 PM ET

Attor­ney Gen­eral Eric Holder sug­gested Wednes­day that some finan­cial insti­tu­tions have become too large and are escap­ing full-fledged pros­e­cu­tion as a result.

Tes­ti­fy­ing before the Sen­ate Judi­ciary Com­mit­tee, Holder told law­mak­ers that he is con­cerned that some insti­tu­tions have become so mas­sive and influ­en­tial that bring­ing crim­i­nal charges against them could imperil the finan­cial sys­tem and the broader econ­omy. His remarks come as a grow­ing num­ber of law­mak­ers have sug­gested that big banks are, effec­tively, “too big to jail.”

“I am con­cerned that the size of some of these insti­tu­tions becomes so large that it does become dif­fi­cult for us to pros­e­cute them when we are hit with indi­ca­tions that if you do pros­e­cute, if you do bring a crim­i­nal charge, it will have a neg­a­tive impact on the national econ­omy, per­haps even the world econ­omy,” he said. “And I think that is a func­tion of the fact that some of these insti­tu­tions have become too large.”

He sug­gested that prior attempts to bring enforce­ment against banks may have been sti­fled by their out­size influ­ence, say­ing it has an “inhibit­ing influ­ence ... on our abil­ity to bring res­o­lu­tions that I think would be more appropriate.”

...

“The con­cern that you have raised is one that I, frankly, share,” he said, adding that ulti­mately the best deter­rent would be if they could bring charges against indi­vid­u­als instead of companies.

...

Now we get to look for­ward to all the “too big to break up” argu­ments. It’s progress!