After the firefighters withdrew their money from M&I Bank they issued the following statement:
M&I has not taken, and will not take, a position either for or against the budget repair bill. As M&I has publicly stated before:
* M&I has not contributed to any candidate and did not contribute to Governor Walker or Mayor Barrett in the last gubernatorial election.
* M&I has over 6,000 employees in Wisconsin, and, in the great tradition of political freedom in this country, those employees have the right to contribute to the candidate of their choice.
* M&I employees contributed to both Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates in the last election.
What gave them the deniability was our old friend the 527 organization, in this case the Wisconsin Bankers Association. According to Open Secrets on September 9, 2010 the CEO of M&I Bank, Mark Furlong donated $7500 to the Wisconsin Banker's Association. The largest recipient of the 527 by a long shot was the friends of Scott Walker of $41,700. This isn't your normal spread the money around so you have friends in Madison, though.
Note the following from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 28, 2010 which is before the primary, so the money spent is intended to influence the race:
Walker received more than $26,000 from [527s] run by the Wisconsin Hospital Association, nearly 25,000 from the Wisconsin Bankers Association and more than $23,000 from the Wisconsin Dental Association.
But was there a quid pro quo? Note the following from this January:
MADISON — Gov. Scott Walker promised an aggressive agenda to cut taxes and make Wisconsin more business friendly today, even as critics of his initial measures said they don’t do enough to lure jobs to the state.
Walker defended his plans during a speech to hundreds of the state’s economic leaders at the Wisconsin Bankers Association Economic Forecast meeting, which came the same day that the Legislature began public hearings on four of the governor’s proposals.
"We’re going to start sending a message, a slow but steady message, that we’re lowering the tax burden," Walker said to the sold-out crowd.
So, when Walker is talking to his "buddies" the message is lower taxes and not balancing the budget. In fact, in the same article:
The bills also would add about $152 million to the state’s budget shortfall already projected to be about $3 billion by the middle of 2013.
And there's more:
Walker also wants to reorganize the state Commerce Department into a public-private hybrid focused solely on job creation, require a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to raise income or sales taxes, and give the governor more power in the state agency rule-making process.
So Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have the same playbook on the rule-making process. Interesting. Now what's the Commerce Department thing?
Walker said the "vast majority" of the 341 Commerce Department employees would be able to remain with the agency, even though he is proposing that the new entity be staffed with private workers. Union leaders have called for Walker to provide more details about how the transformation would take place and what protections workers would have during the change.
We all know how much "protection" workers will get under this change.
Finally, there's the issue of the exposure of innocents if you take your money out of M&I. This in my opinion is just more "shock doctrine". More after the fold.
You have to understand that for the rich folk their deferred compensation is not in the form of a pension or 401k but stock options. Here's the current compensation package for Mark Furlong:
ANNUAL COMPENSATION*
Salary $875,000
Total Annual Compensation $875,000
STOCK OPTIONS*
Restricted Stock Awards $437,496
All Other Compensation $26,752
Exercisable Options 1,112,704
Unexercisable Options 248,096
Total Number of Options 1,360,800
TOTAL COMPENSATION*
Total Annual Cash Compensation $875,000
Total Short Term Compensation $875,000
Other Long Term Compensation $464,248
Total Calculated Compensation $1,671,982
If the value of the stock goes down then the options go underwater and are useless and the restricted stock issues (which became popular for companies bailed out under TARP like M&I) go down in value. See this 2009 story concerning Furlong's compensation.
M&I said in a filing with regulators Tuesday that modifications made to its 2010 compensation plan "are a prudent step toward the company's objective of retaining the key employees who are leading the company through a difficult economic cycle." It said no bonuses will be paid to top executive officers in 2009.
M&I has posted losses in four consecutive quarters as the housing slump, especially in its Arizona market, continues to take a toll on the bank's loans. Its stock price is down about 60% this year.
M&I received $1.7 billion in TARP capital from the Treasury a year ago.
Here's what happens to the board if the merger with the Bank of Montreal goes through:
Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding share of Marshall & Ilsley Corporation will be exchanged for 0.1257 shares of Bank of Montreal upon closing. Options to purchase shares of Marshall common stock will be converted automatically into options to purchase Bank of Montreal common stock. Harris will remain Harris and M&I will remain M&I. Each will continue to operate under their own names. Mark Furlong, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Marshall & Ilsley Corporation, will become Chief Executive Officer of the combined U.S. Personal and Commercial banking business, based in Chicago.
Our tax money is used to retain failed bankers but we need to not do the same with teachers, cops, nurses, and firefighters? Some people and the union pensions have considered divesting M&I stock. If people decide not to do that they should note that they could vote Mark Furlong and Dennis Kuester off the board of directors and block the sale to BMO Financial Group scheduled for mid-summer. Comment to the Federal Reserve Bank is due by March 22 here:
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (Colette A. Fried, Assistant Vice President) 230 South LaSalle Street, Chicago, Illinois 60690-1414
The date of the annual shareholders meeting should be announced very soon (this week) and is usually in late April in Milwaukee. This what happened in 2009 when the stockholders of the company vented their wrath.
In a standing-room-only annual meeting Tuesday, top executives of Milwaukee's Marshall & Ilsley Corp. felt the wrath of shareholders unhappy about a huge cut in the dividend and decisions made in recent years by management.
When Chairman Dennis Kuester and chief executive Mark Furlong opened the meeting to questions from the audience, shareholders lined up in the aisles at microphones to call for deeper pay cuts for executives and to criticize the bank's leadership. Some asserted that M&I executives, despite salary freezes and no bonuses, don't feel the same financial pain as shareholders from the reduced dividend and battered stock price.
The meeting, which lasted an unusually long two hours, was the first chance for shareholders to vent as a group since last year's weak performance by M&I. In 2008, Wisconsin's biggest bank posted a loss of $568 million, cut the dividend to a penny from 32 cents and saw its stock price drop 48%.
"There's a lot of things to blame, but blame the two people standing up there first," shareholder Edward Thomas of Appleton said of Kuester and Furlong, who conducted the meeting from the stage of the 500-person capacity Weasler Auditorium on the Marquette University campus.
M&I executives have acknowledged in the past - and reiterated at Tuesday's meeting - that they lent to real estate development customers too long into the housing cycle, especially in Arizona. As housing prices have dropped in that market, the bank has taken big losses.
"In no way is this management team telling you we didn't make any errors," Kuester said.
But they noted that the severity of the economic slowdown has been greater than many experts expected, making the situation worse.
Bernie Hlavac, a shareholder from Stevens Point, said he is "terribly disappointed with the financial performance of M&I."
"You've really lost all the credibility you've had as a premier bank," Hlavac said.
M&I is a public corporation and its shareholders are the real owners and not these bastards.