Breaking Up with BofA

Chances are that no matter how small your home town is, it contains a Bank of America branch. This heartless financial behemoth has blotted the landscape from sea to shining sea. Your friendly neighborhood bank was there one day, gone the next, in a stealth takeover by one insatiably greedy and lecherous corporate crime family.


Bank of America has a long list of dubious distinctions:

#1 forecloser of homes in the US,

#1 funder of the US coal industry,

Job killer by letting go of nearly 100,000 workers over the past several years,

Bonus Buster paying its top five executives over $500 million in bonuses,

Saddling students with a lifetime of debt, and

Financing the war machine.

But there is hope on the horizon. In its never-ending quest to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, the Occupy movement will be converging on corporate HQ in Charlotte, NC tomorrow for the bank's annual shareholder meeting. Smaller protests are being held at branches throughout the country. For an anti-BofA event near you, check out this site.


It's painfully obvious that the Obama Administration is never, ever going to clamp down on this monstrosity of a financial institution. The president will even be rubbing our noses in it by giving his DNC acceptance speech at Bank of America stadium this September. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has assigned a measly 55 investigators to pretend to look into the malfeasance of BofA and the other too big to exist financial crime cabals.


If you have not yet read the seminal takedown of BofA by Matt Taibbi, you can find it here. An excerpt:

So what does the government do about a rogue firm like this, one that inflates market-wrecking bubbles, commits mass fraud and generally treats the law like its own personal urinal cake? Well, it goes without saying that you rescue that "admitted felon" at all costs – even if you have to spend billions in taxpayer money to do it.


In fact, the real bailouts of Bank of America didn't even begin until well after TARP. In the years since the crash, the bank has issued more than $44 billion in FDIC-insured debt through a little-known Federal Reserve plan called the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. The plan essentially allows companies whose credit ratings are fucked to borrow against the government's good name – and if the loans aren't paid back, the government is on the hook for all of it. Bank of America has also stayed afloat by constantly borrowing billions in low-­interest emergency loans from the Fed – part of $7.7 trillion in "secret" loans that were not disclosed by the central bank until last year. When the data was finally released, we found out that, on just one day in 2008, Bank of America owed the Fed a staggering $86 billion.

(snip) 

That means that when you take out a credit card or a mortgage or a refinancing from Bank of America, you're essentially borrowing from the state; the "private" bank is simply taking a cut as a middleman. "For banks, the cost of capital is the key to success," says former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. "So by lowering their cost of capital to almost zero, the Fed has almost guaranteed that the banks will make big profits."

European governments are actually starting to fall because of the austerity measures imposed on the victims of  global banking rapacity. The Profits over People meme is universal and is being rejected on a worldwide scale. We have, it seems, reached the tipping point.


Meanwhile, while Bank of America has been the cause of a whole series of unfortunate events, the City of Charlotte has declared its Shareholder Meeting an "extraordinary event" -- meaning that the cabal-coddling government is making sure that bank execs don't get their feelings hurt by irate protesters. Writes Allison Kilkenny of The Nation:

 ....the city plans to restrict free speech and expand the ability of police and security forces to target and profile the homeowners, worker, community members, students and immigrants who plan to demand justice from one of the largest banks in the country.

The label tightens restrictions on what protesters are allowed to do at such events and gives police more power to search people's property (backpacks, coolers, etc.) in the vicinity. Certain items, such as scarves, are now banned from the event, and the possession of items like markers, hammers and spray paint is now grounds for arrest.

The extraordinary event tag's origins date back to a city ordinance enacted in January in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Charlotte in September.

Thus far, it seems like the unprecedented measure adopted by the City Manager has done little to ebb the tide of protester enthusiasm.

Bank of America obviously thinks it is impervious. Right in the middle of the national uproar over its corrupt practices, it just started sending out letters to homeowners offering financial relief on properties it probably doesn't even own. This is to game the recent terms of the financial settlement with the Attorneys General, reducing the amount of the paltry fine it agreed to pay in lieu of prosecution of its rampant foreclosure fraud. Dave Dayen of Firedoglake has the whole tawdry tale.

Occupy "The Scream"

The huge turnouts for Occupy May Day seem to have stunned the corporate media, which had assumed the movement was dead because they had stopped paying attention to it. Now, they are trying to marginalize OWS even further by calling the day's events a one-off piece of national street theater. Nothing to see here, move along, let's get back to the Rombama Death Match and the Osama Assassination retrospective.

Well, not so fast! Occupy is alive and well and living in the rarefied world of obscenely overpriced art and the obscenely wealthy oligarchs who have nothing else to do with their money than invest it in priceless masterworks, only to hide them away from public view. Today is "Shut Down Sotheby's" Day in New York City to protest against the auction of one of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" paintings. (he painted more than one version.) From the OWS website:




Tonight, at an exclusive 7pm auction, Sotheby's is expected to sell Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream" for $80 million dollars*. Outside, Occupy and labor allies will protest the Upper East Side art auction house in solidarity with 43 locked-out art handlers who have been replaced by Sotheby's with low wage temporary workers with no benefits.
Catering exclusively to the mega-rich (by providing a service that makes them richer and more exclusive,) Sotheby's is perhaps the most quintessentially 1% institution there is. Founded before the industrial era, it was the first company ever listed on the NY Stock Exchange, and today (despite the current "recession") is more profitable than at any other time in its 260-year history. Meanwhile, the Sotheby's workers who make those profits possible are given the shaft. Enough is enough. The 99% will not stand silent as union-busting companies like Sotheby's wage class war against us.
Making it even more interesting is the fact that Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg's girlfriend, former NY Banking Commissioner Diana Taylor, is on the board of Sotheby's. She has actually threatened to quit should Sotheby's CEO accede to the demands of the shut-out Teamsters. "MiDi" has got to be a match made in heaven, given Bloomberg's own disdain for the working class and poor. With a net worth of almost $20 billion, he is adamantly against raising the minimum wage, and insists that food stamp applicants in his fair city get fingerprinted lest they steal crumbs from the maws of the plutocrats. And when it comes to the unemployed and underemployed Occupiers, he is Marie Antoinette in smirky billionaire drag: instead of eating cake, says Hizzoner, they should just go out and become entrepreneurs.

You can see video here of locked-out Sotheby's workers asking Diana Taylor to stand up for them and their families. Her response has all the passion of a bored, pre-guillotine Louis XVI in drag.

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Odd Couples, Then and Now 

And it's not just the Teamsters giving Diana Taylor some righteous indignation. Investors are planning to demand that she and others resign from the Board at the annual shareholder meeting on May 8, for "gross mismanagement" in wasting money to punish middle class workers, and also for the mishandling of James Murdoch's embarrassing position on the Sotheby's board. The auction company has had its share of scandals over the years, and if there's one thing fabulously wealthy oligarchs don't want now, it's even more bad press and class resentment. This is one thin-skinned crowd. They have not had an equal opportunity to develop life's little calluses.

Even the Ivy League has had it with Taylor and her cadre of plutocrats. Dartmouth students have teamed up with the Teamsters, and are demanding their own college board of trustees cut all ties with the auction house, given its blatant class warfare against working families:




Despite grossing over $700 million in 2010, Sotheby's hired the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis to attack its workers. More than seven months ago, Sotheby's locked the art handlers out of their jobs, depriving them of their paychecks. On Jan. 1, the art handlers and their families were stripped of their health care coverage. Sotheby's continues to demand that all union positions be phased out and replaced with low wage non-union temporary positions with no benefits.
"Taylor's open hostility to the bargaining process, and refusal to end this awful lockout is an affront to my College's values," said Janet Kim, a Dartmouth junior who participated in Saturday's action. "Dartmouth has always been committed to being a socially responsible institution, but Taylor's actions totally fly in the face of that."
Sotheby's reckless behavior has harmed its shareholders. In a recent filing with financial regulators, the auction house disclosed that it had spent $2.4 million in "extra expenses" associated with the first three months of the lockout. (The entire cost of the art handler's contract is $3.2 million.) The lockout has also caused several organizations, including a group affiliated with Oberlin College, to cancel events originally scheduled to be held at Sotheby's.

"Diana Taylor's refusal to publicly use her influence to try to end this lockout not only speaks volumes about how she feels about America's working families, but it should raise serious questions about her stewardship as a board member," said Jason Ide, President of Teamsters Local 814, the union that represents the workers.
I guess it is also no coincidence that Diana Taylor lounges on the board of Brookfield Properties, the quasi-owners of Zuccotti Park, original camp of the Occupy movement. This is another one of those neo-liberal public private partnerships in which taxpayers foot the bills of the ruling class.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that Sotheby's will profit mightily from the sale of "The Scream", an iconic painting that captured the angst and despair and outrage of people buffeted by a cruel authoritarian system over which they have no control.

Munch and other painters in the Expressionist movement wanted to express a new internal, psychological form of reality. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson says the image touches on something primitive within all of us, because we were all once young and helpless like the hairless creature in the picture, wordless and afraid. She says Munch managed to convey something all human beings have felt at some time: "I am overwhelmed. I am helpless. There is nothing I can do and when I try to convey it, in some way, whether I am screaming or expressing some of what nature is screaming at me, other people ignore it."

Why would some master of the universe even want to own this painting, given that it symbolizes the pain of the downtrodden?  Hmm.... Sadism. Control. Evokes fond memories of crashing an entire economy and the hopes and dreams of  an entire generation. Or, alternately: wealthy new owner identifies with the painting because it symbolizes the fact that he is only a multimillionaire and not yet a member of the Forbes 400. It is so unfair that the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 160 million combined. It's enough to make one Scream.

Update: The Scream has sold for a record-breaking $120 million, the highest ever price paid for a work of art at auction. The bid was done privately, by telephone. No word on the identity of the new owner, who may be in the Forbes 400, after all.