LaSalle Bank Corp. said Friday that exhaustive research had uncovered ties to the slave era by some predecessors to its Dutch corporate parent, ABN Amro Bank NV.

Although it said its own predecessors were not found to have any connections to slavery, LaSalle deplored the era of slavery and released full results of the study it commissioned.

The company commissioned the independent study by History Associates Inc. in connection with a Chicago ordinance requiring firms that do business with the city to disclose all historic profits from or investments in African slavery.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. last year became the first companies to acknowledge that their predecessor banks had specific links to the slave trade.

LaSalle said that ABN Amro predecessors in the Netherlands and France traded in securities and goods with slaveholding areas of the U.S. and that its predecessors in the Netherlands, France and Germany had historical connections to African slavery elsewhere in the Americas.

“The era of slavery is a deplorable period in the world’s history,” said LaSalle Chief Executive Norman Bobins. “While predecessors of LaSalle Bank Corp. do not have any historical ties to slavery, it is prudent that we share the full results of the study that we commissioned.”

Chicago Tribune  

DEER PARK, N.Y., April 28 (UPI) — A New York couple appears finally to have lost the house they lived in throughout their married life, victims of a fraudulent mortgage deal.

When they were in financial trouble three years ago, Carol and Anthony Calvagno turned to Southern Star Mortgage, a company they thought would refinance their house in Deer Park and buy them some time. Instead, Mitchell Sim, who told them he was a branch manager, arranged a complicated arrangement in which the company would take title to the house and the Calvagnos could buy it back, Newsday reported.

Sims kept their money for himself and never paid the mortgage. He pleaded guilty to larceny, but the bank holding the mortgage at the time put the house into foreclosure.

A local woman bought the house as an investment and eventually sent the Calvagnos an eviction notice. Now, they are waiting for someone to knock on their door and tell them they must leave.

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PRESIDENT George Bush announced after his re-election in November 2004 that he had “earned political capital” and was determined to spend it. With a new mandate and majorities in both houses of Congress, he soon proposed several domestic reforms, in particular to social security, the public pensions programme of the United States. He proclaimed his desire to use these reforms to consolidate what he called the ownership society.

In the world’s anti-Bush zones it is fashionable to regard him as an imperialist redneck of limited intellectual capacities. But beyond that view (1), the idea of an ownership society is the core of a sophisticated neoconservative vision for radically reconfiguring US domestic politics that is markedly different from ordinary neoliberalism. It has important international ramifications.

The US built a three-tier pension system around the Social Security Act of 1935, the triumph of the welfare system established by President Franklin D Roosevelt after the great depression of the 1930s. It was a public pension programme, inspired by Bismarck’s 19th-century reforms in Germany, providing retirement income to those employed long enough to qualify. Social security (which represents more than a quarter of federal taxation) is a mutual system: what comes in annually from payroll tax contributions (currently 6.2% of wages each from employee and employer, with a cap on taxable income at $90,000) goes out immediately to pensioners. Over the years reforms have reduced the mutual element in the system as a whole, to the advantage of pension funds.

The replacement rate is low - 25%-30% of pre-retirement wages - with extra provision for widows and the disabled (2). But since the 1930s social security has significantly reduced poverty among the elderly, once a desperate problem: between 1959 and 1979 it halved. For two-thirds of the retired population, it now represents more than half their income.

Founded on principles of general solidarity and publicly shared risk, social security is the most important part of what remains of the US social protection system (3). As in Europe, it now faces problems of finance. With people living longer, the ratio of working contributors to retired beneficiaries is rapidly worsening. The postwar baby-boomer generations, born between 1945 and 1967, are beginning to retire while the working age population shrinks steadily. Some forecasts indicate that payouts will exceed contributions in 2018 and that bankruptcy could threaten by 2042.

Bush has manufactured a crisis around these projections (4) to promote changes in social security inspired by neoconservative ideas. Bush’s plan proposes that younger workers invest 4% of their payroll taxes, with an initial maximum of $1,000 annually, in private personal retirement accounts (5). There is no compulsion, but the fear that the current system will collapse and benefits are certain to be cut is a strong incentive.

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