Campaign News

Jamie Dimon picked one hell of a week to lean in to Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, the day after the Washington Post revealed the president had shared highly classified information with Russian diplomats and a week after he fired James Comey, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan Chase told investors at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting that he wouldn’t step down from his perch on Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, an advisory council of powerful American executives. “He is the president of the United States. I believe he is the pilot flying our airplane,” Dimon said. “I would try to help any president of the United States, because I’m a patriot.” Dimon surely wishes he’d said something different. Only hours later came the news that according to a memo by Comey, Trump had asked the FBI director to end his agency’s inquiry into former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—a revelation that has brought Trump’s presidency to its lowest, most tumultuous point yet.

Read the full article here.

New Zealand's decision to change its central bank's inflation-targeting mandate, which has served as a model for the rest of the world, partly reflects a global shift on the role of monetary policy since the 2008-09 financial crisis, according to Finance Minister Grant Robertson.

Read the full article here.

Concord Patch - March 13, 2015, by Tony Schinella - About 40 people gathered at the Statehouse this week to protest a political system rigged on behalf of big corporations and the wealthy, according to a press statement.

The rally was part of a “Day of Action” involving thousands of protesters in 16 states across the country.

In Concord, the event drew activists from NH Citizens Action, the NH Rebellion, American Friends Service Committee, Open Democracy, Granite State Progress, People For the American Way, Every Child Matters and other New Hampshire organizations.

“Congress needs to stop acting like a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational corporations,” said Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and Head Stamper of StampStampede.org told the protesters. “When billions of dollars are being poured into our elections, government stops serving the people and serves the corporations instead.”

Cohen cited a Sunlight Foundation study showing that politically-active corporations get back $760 in government benefits for every dollar they spend influencing politics. “People watch this stuff happening, and they’re angry about it. People in both parties are angry about it. Our elected officials are supposed to be serving us, their constituents, and instead they’re spending our tax dollars subsidizing corporations.”

“It’s time to take our government back,” Cohen said. “If ‘We the People’ can’t out-spend the corporations, we can at least out-shout them. That’s why StampStampede.org is turning US currency into millions of miniature political billboards, by legally stamping it with messages like ‘Not to Be Used for Bribing Politicians.’ Every stamped dollar bill is seen by about 875 people. That means if one person stamps three bill a day for a year, the message will reach almost 1 million people. It’s a petition on steroids,” said Cohen.

There are over 30,000 stampers across the country and hundreds in New Hampshire. StampStampede.org has also recruited over 50 small businesses in the state to set up small point-of-purchase stamping stations where customers can stamp their dollars, buy a stamp and learn more about the influence of money in politics.

“Our goal is to stamp 3.4 million bills – that’s 10% of the currency in New Hampshire – before next February’s presidential primary,” said Cohen, “It’s monetary jiu-jitsu – we’re using money to get money out of politics”

The nationwide “Day of Action” was sponsored by National People’s Action, Center for Popular Democracy, and USAction. “All across the country, families are taking to the streets, parks and state capitols to send a clear message: ‘Our statehouses and our cities belong to us. It’s time for legislators to enact our bold agenda to put people and planet first.’”

Source

The narrative emerging from the aftermath of the 2016 election is that Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency on the back of populist economic insecurity, elected by voters who felt left behind by a globalized economy. While the official unemployment rate continued its descent below 5 percent, Trump claimed a 'real' unemployment rate of 40 percent was driving the frustration.

That rate is drawn from Trump's overactive imagination - like many of Trump's ravings. But the fact that workers so readily believed him while responding so eagerly to his economic message reflects the reality that wages have been stagnant for decades and that we are nowhere near a galloping economy. You'd be hard-pressed to find many Americans who believe the economy is so strong that it needs to be slowed down by higher interest rates right now.

The economic discontent is grounded in data. New research from economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that the bottom half of the population in the United States has experienced zero growth since the 1970s.

Even though average national income per adult grew by 61 percent from 1980 to 2014, the average pre-tax income of the bottom 50 percent of individual income earners stagnated at about $16,000 per adult after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, income more than doubled for the top 10 percent, more than tripled for the top 1 percent, and for those in the top 0.001 percent, grew more than seven times.

This week, the Federal Reserve is nearly certain to hike interest rates for the second time in a decade, following last December's quarter-point increase in the federal-funds rate. This tightening of monetary policy is intended to slow down economic growth, reduce job creation, and prevent wages from rising.

In the wake of the 2016 election, do Fed officials really think that the American people want a slower, weaker economy than the one we have now?

"The Fed is one of the few institutions that remains largely independent from presidential interference and it must step up to the leadership that these times demand."

The Fed is now more important than ever. We are entering an era in which President-elect Donald Trump will control the Treasury Department and Republicans will control both houses of Congress. Federal public policy will be aimed at further enriching the 1 percent and leaving American workers out in the cold.

The Fed is one of the few institutions that remains largely independent from presidential interference and it must step up to the leadership that these times demand. The Fed needs to be an ally for working families during a period when they are otherwise under assault from every other part of government.

This week, Fed policy-makers will point to the November jobs report, showing a decline in unemployment to 4.6 percent from 4.9 percent the previous month, to justify a rate increase. Much of this decline can be attributed to people who've simply given up looking for work -- or, in economic parlance, a decline in labor force participation.

A far more accurate indicator of a full-employment economy is wage growth, which was weaker in November than it was in preceding months. Wage growth grew 2.5 percent in November on an annual basis, slower than October's 2.8 percent increase and September's 2.7 percent rise.

Wage growth is far from the 3.5 percent or higher we would expect in a full-employment economy.

Inflation, too, has hovered around 1 percent for most of the year, well below the Fed's already-low 2 percent stated inflation target. Tentative rises in September and October, to 1.5 percent and 1.6 percent respectively, hardly call for a pre-emptive interest rise.

If the Fed were to raise rates this week, it would be out of line with rates in Japan and Europe, which are at 0 or in negative territory, and above the U.K.'s rate of 0.25 percent. The central banks in these other countries realize that inflation is not a real threat and that tighter labor markets are a far more important goal.

The Fed should not only take into account the global context but also listen to the anguished cry of working and middle class voters. If the election has taught the Fed nothing else, it should be that we cannot afford to ignore the economic reality of working people.

By Ady Barkan

Source