Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Sometimes we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we are not sleepwalking in a Dickensian dream. Earlier this week we heard Senator Elizabeth Warren tell a Senate Banking session how JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, got a $8.5 million raise after craftily negotiating away all of the bank’s crimes with the payment of billions in shareholders’ money. (Two of those crimes, by the way, were felony counts for aiding and abetting Bernie Madoff in his Ponzi scheme – also craftily settled under a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, which effectively puts the bank on probation for two years.)
Last night, the Wall Street Journal informed the public that, apparently, none of this criminal activity at JPMorgan has dulled President Obama’s fondness for its CEO Jamie Dimon, who has recently been undergoing treatments for throat cancer. The Journal reported: “During one of his earliest treatments, Mr. Dimon received a call on his cellphone from President Barack Obama, who wished him a healthy recovery, the bank confirmed.”
A President with a kind heart toward those experiencing health issues is, of course, a virtue. But it is more than likely that the President hasn’t similarly dialed up the victims of JPMorgan’s various and sundry wealth transfer assaults when they fall ill.
One day before the news of the President’s phone call to Dimon emerged, we learned from the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Aging and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that some senior citizens are having their Social Security payments garnished over unpaid student loan debt, forcing them below the poverty threshold.
The GAO’s study, derived from the Survey of Consumer Finances, found that 706,000 households headed by those 65 or older still carry student loan debt. Stunningly, the outstanding federal student debt for this age group grew from approximately $2.8 billion in 2005 to an estimated $18.2 billion in 2013. For persons of all ages, Federal student loan debt has risen from $400 billion to more than $1 trillion during the same period.
That’s more than a six-fold increase for seniors and only 2.5 times for persons of all ages. What’s going on here? We strongly suspect that seniors who were just getting by on the interest income they earned on their 4 and 5 percent certificates of deposit together with their Social Security payments have experienced an impossible task of paying bills over the past half decade as interest rates have plunged to 1 or 2 percent on CDs. When seniors let their student loans go into default, the amount of debt interest begins to compound, dramatically increasing the amount of principal due.
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