Obama JOBS Act Helped Big Companies Avoid Transparency
By Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky| AllGov | December 16, 2012
Legislation that was supposed to help smaller companies go public has aided larger firms to keep financial data out of the hands of investors.
The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (or JOBS Act) was promoted by President Barack Obama as a way to assist small businesses in their efforts to raise money through IPOs (stock market launches).
The same legislation, though, made it possible for larger companies (those earning less than $1 billion a year) to dodge reporting details about executive compensation and financial histories to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Companies also can delay disclosing their plans to go public until just before the big day, under the JOBS Act.
“In effect, it means the press and potential investors have less time to comb through financial information, as well as less information to examine,” wrote James Temple in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The abuse of the law should not come as a surprise. At the time that the JOBS Act passed through Congress, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan warned, “We are about to embark upon the most sweeping deregulatory effort and assault on investor protection in decades.… It will allow vast new opportunities for fraud and abuse in capital markets.”
Meanwhile, the new law, which was adopted in April, hasn’t done much to boost the numbers for IPOs, according to Ernst & Young. This year, 130 companies raised $45 billion on U.S. exchanges, compared to 124 businesses and $40 billion in 2011.
The JOBS Act was the “brainchild” of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is headed by General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and, at the time the JOBS Act was proposed, consisted of 18 corporate CEOs and investment executives, two academics and two labor leaders.
Study: CEO pay now 200 times more than a worker
Press TV – May 3, 2012
Compensation for chief executives at American companies grew 15 percent in 2011 after a 28 percent rise in 2010, part of a larger trend that has seen CEO pay skyrocket over the last three decades. Workers, on the other hand, have been left behind.
Since 1978, CEO pay at American firms has risen 725 percent, more than 127 times faster than worker pay over the same time period, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute:
From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.
In 1978, CEOs took home 26.5 times more than the average worker. They now make roughly 206 times more than workers, EPI found. The pay isn’t always tied to the performance of their businesses – as ThinkProgress has noted, CEOs at companies like Bank of America often pocket huge pay increases even as the company’s stock price plummets and jobs are cut.
As a result, American income inequality has skyrocketed, growing worse than it is in countries like Pakistan and Ivory Coast. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even in Ancient Rome. And, as pay skyrockets and tax rates fall for the richest Americans, the rising inequality has left the bottom 95 percent of Americans saddled with more debt than ever before. – thinkprogress.org
Workers’ wages aren’t tied to productivity either. Despite substantial gains in productivity since the 1970s, worker pay has remained flat. According to Labor Department data cited by the Huffington Post, inflation-adjusted wages fell 2 percent in 2011. – thinkprogress.org
Working and middle-class Americans have seen their debt balloon since the 1980s. Today, Americans owe some $704 billion in credit card debt, and more than that in both auto loans and student borrowing. CNN
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Revisionist History Books Banned by Amazon
By Michael Hoffman • Unz Review • August 25, 2018
On August 13, 2018 Amazon banned Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, which was published in 2011 and sold by Amazon for the past seven years. Along with the much larger study, Judaism Discovered, (sold by Amazon since 2008), it has had an international impact both as a softcover volume as well as a digital book circulating on the Amazon Kindle.
Sales to India, Japan and the Middle East were rapidly growing. The digital Kindle format is particularly important for the free circulation of books because it bypasses borders and customs and hurdles over the prohibitive cost of shipping which the US Postal Service imposed on mail to overseas destinations several years ago (eliminating economical surface mail).
Amazon has also banned The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic (sold by Amazon since 2010).
These volumes maintain a high standard of scholarly excellence, had a majority of favorable reviews by Amazon customers, are free of hatred and bigotry and have sold thousands of copies on Amazon. Out of the blue we were told that suddenly “Amazon KDP” discovered that the books are in violation of Amazon’s “content guidelines.” Asking for documentation of the charge results in no response. It is enough that the accusation has been tendered. The accused are guilty until proved innocent, although how proof of innocence is presented is anyone’s guess. There is no appeals process. This is what is known as “Tech Tyranny.”
There is a nationwide purge underway that amounts to a new McCarthyism — blacklisting and banning politically incorrect speech and history books under the rubric of “hate speech” accusations, initiated in part by two Zionist thought police organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It’s a flimsy pretext for censoring controversial scholarly books that can’t be refuted.
In addition to our books being hate-free, we note that there are hundreds of hate-filled Zionist and rabbinic books brimming with ferocious bigotry for Palestinians, Germans and goyim in general, which are sold by Amazon. … continue
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