JP-Morgan Mic-Check Speech: Footnoted

Mike check!

Princeton’s motto is:
In the nation’s service and service of all nations
JP Morgan, your actions violate our motto
Your predatory lending practices(1) helped crash our economy
We bailed out your executives’ bonuses(2)
You evict struggling homeowners(3)(4) while taking their tax money(5)
You support mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia(6)
Which destroys our ecological future.(7)
In light of these actions,
we protest the campus culture
that whitewashes the crooked dealings of Wall Street
as a prestigious career path.(8)
We are here today
as a voice for the 99%
shut out by a system that punishes them
just for being born without privilege.
What we need is not a university for the 1%,
but a university “In the Nation’s Service,
and in the Service of All Nations.”

(1) “One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans. These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/kristof-a-banker-speaks-with-regret.html?src=tp&smid=fb-share

(2) “The figures from JP Morgan showed that the bonus pool from which staff would be paid was being hugely inflated by revenues from the bond markets, spurred by the need of governments to pay for bank bailouts.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/14/jp-morgan-beats-profit-forecast

(3) “An employee in GMAC’s “document execution” department (dubbed a “robo signer” by critics) had admitted to mass-signing tens of thousands of legal filings without knowing what they said, a violation of federal rules of civil procedure and casting doubt on the validity of thousands of foreclosures. Moreover, numerous other mortgage servicers used robo signers like GMAC’s, bringing into question the validity of yet more foreclosures throughout the country.” http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/10/foreclosure-pelosi-investigation-gmac

(4) List of local foreclosures in Mercer County: http://nj.gov/counties/mercer/pdfs/sheriff_foreclosuresales_list.pdf

(5) “Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year. “TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html

(6) “Chase is the single largest remaining player in this game,” says Scott Edwards, advocacy director for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group comprised of lawyers, scientists, and activists, among others. “They just absolutely refuse to take responsibility for their role in this absolutely devastating industry.”” http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/jpmorgan-mountaintop-removal-mining

(7) “There is, to date, no evidence to suggest that the extensive chemical and hydrologic alterations of streams by MTVF can be offset or reversed by currently required reclamation and mitigation practices.” http://palmerlab.umd.edu/Bernhard_and_Palmer_2011.pdf

(8) “The ‘culture of smartness’ is central to understanding Wall Street’s financial agency, how investment bankers are personally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change. On Wall Street, ‘smartness’ means much more than individual intelligence, it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of ‘impressiveness,’ of elite, pinnacle status and expertise, which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers’ worthiness as advisors to corporate America and leaders of the global financial markets.” Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 40