Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jamie Dimon Testifying at Senate Banking Hearing June 13, 2012
If President Obama is trying to make it clear that he reports to the 1 percent, not the average Americans who elected him, he’s earning an A+ on his report card.
At 6:46 p.m. last evening, the White House sent out the President’s schedule for today. One item on the agenda reads as follows: “Later in the morning, the President will meet with members of the Financial Services Forum as part of the organization’s daylong Spring Meeting. This meeting in the Roosevelt Room is closed press.” There is no mention in this press announcement that the President will be meeting with the CEOs of the too-big-to-fail banks – certainly a detail worthy of the public’s attention.
Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal’s link on the front page of its web site to its story on the President’s meet-up with members of the Financial Services Forum tells us the following: “PAGE UNAVAILABLE — The document you requested either no longer exists or is not currently available.” Fortunately, Google has cached the article and from it we learn that Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase (whose firm is under an FBI investigation for losing $6.2 billion of depositors’ money in a derivatives trading scheme) is expected to meet with the President at the White House today as part of the Financial Services Forum. Also expected to attend is Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America.
At the same moment the President is meeting with the CEOs of these firms, an investigative hearing will be playing out in the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, part of the Senate Banking Committee, on whether these same banks and others corrupted the process of a regulatory mandate to review their foreclosure files for evidence of fraud and abuse by directly paying and interacting with the consultants hired to do the work.
The optics of the President meeting with executives from a Wall Street lobby group one day after submitting a budget proposal to Congress that would raise income taxes on the middle class while cutting Social Security benefits on the elderly, veterans and disabled is apparently of no concern to the President, unless his “closed press” blackout doesn’t hold. It could be a fluke that out of a hundred other headline links on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, only this one doesn’t work. Or it could be that the comments were so savage that the article and comments were removed. Also possible is that those ubiquitous invisible hands asked to have the article removed from the front page and someone forgot to take down the headline link.
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