| Robs Real News |
| Send donations and comments to Robsrealnews@yahoo.com |
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| Mel Carnahan, democratic senator from Missouri who was assasinated right before the 2000 election on behalf of criminal conservatives mobsters who have taken over our government in order to pass legislation on behalf of criminals in the energy, healthcare and Tobacco industries and force their ideology on the world. Their agenda is to have an income distribution like Latin America. |
| Paul Wellstone, Democratic Senator from Minnesota who was assasinated before the 2002 election by the conservative mobsters that rules this country so they could take control of the senate and ram their agenda down the throats of the american people |
| Click on the links to read a rough draft of a screen play I started to write called "The New Deal" |
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| Wanted Dead- AIPAC, The American Enterprise Institute and the above slime-ball Jew cohorts in crime, murder and genocide. AIPAC is the force behind the neocons. I hold them more responsible than anyone for pushing the US into Iraq, costing the US tax payers trillions, ruining the lives of millions in Iraq, the destruction of the Iraqi economy. They should be executed like the Nazi leaders. Jews Like Rove and the Neocons should not be above ground. |
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| Click here to watch an excerpt from the film The Trials of Henry Kissinger and understand that the US is The Evil Empire, AVI File |
| Those above and those who allowed FOX News (CIA News) to get on the air, those behind Cerberus Capital, those responsible for the oil companies price gouging, those who allowed Exelon to buy Com-ed in Chicago, those opposed to regulation or nationalization of oil, water, utilities, energy, defense contractors, transportation, steel, other natural resources, banks, healthcare, mail delivery, and many big businesses. |
| The Ignorant, the Evil and the Corrupt.They deserve to be locked up in the Gitmo prison and tortured for the rest of their lives.Scott Peck defines the conservative mind in his book, "The People of the Lie." Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Bill OReilly are the epitomie of this personality described by Peck. |
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| The country needs the progressive tax rates it had post WW2 when the top tax rate was over 80% and the capital gains rate should be what it was before Reagan took office which I believe was 40%. I'd eliminate all taxes for people earning less than $20,000. Corporate rates should return to the post WW2 rates. Robert Eisner would recognize all capital gains when acrued. The proceeds should be used to eliminate poverty, provide free education and healthcare and nationalize the industries mentioned below to take the profits out of them and have them serve the interests of the people. |
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| Round up and hang everyone behind Jewish criminal (Fox) News. FOX News was created with Jewish money (with CIA support) to defend the interests of Jewish criminals intent on Jewish global domination and exploitation |
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| Click here to get your copy of "The Money and the Power" the making of Las Vegas and its hold on America |
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Speeches by Michael
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Speeches by Chomsky
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| Conservative thought is not thought but propaganda on behalf of the criminals. For that reason it should be removed from public discourse. The two links above concern the mafias attempt to rid the media of any real news. FOX, DowJones (everything owned by Murdock) Headline News and CNBC are devoted to conservative propaganda. |
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| Whacked by the demented mob |
Memorable quotes-"They're
not fit to lead" Their
objective is to comfort the
comfortable and afflict the
afflicted" by Noem Chomsky
not fit to lead" Their
objective is to comfort the
comfortable and afflict the
afflicted" by Noem Chomsky
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My favorite sites
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Not Whacked
by the mob
by the mob
In memerial to Walter Cronkite who
was before my time I post a picture
of my favorite news anchor the likes
of which we will never see again
since the mobsters have decided to
pollute the peoples mind with FOX
News, Beck and Limbaugh.
was before my time I post a picture
of my favorite news anchor the likes
of which we will never see again
since the mobsters have decided to
pollute the peoples mind with FOX
News, Beck and Limbaugh.
"The money powers prey upon
the nation in times of peace,
and conspire against it in
times of adversity. The
banking powers are more
despotic than a monarchy,
more insolent than autocracy,
more selfish than
bureaucracy. They denounce
as public enemies, all who
question their methods or
throw light upon their
crimes.” – Abraham Lincoln
the nation in times of peace,
and conspire against it in
times of adversity. The
banking powers are more
despotic than a monarchy,
more insolent than autocracy,
more selfish than
bureaucracy. They denounce
as public enemies, all who
question their methods or
throw light upon their
crimes.” – Abraham Lincoln
Now they are pretending the investment in Newcorp is from Arabs when Fox News used
to have a page that listed all the Jew neocons that bankrolled the network. When I
discovered that fact they took the page off the web site. Now Murdock wants the Arab
nations to open up their media for him to take over and indoctrinate the masses with Jew
neo-con disinformation. http://www.lobelog.com/ used to publish the truth on this issue
and was the only web site that the Jews didn't prevent from telling the truth about the
Jew neocons.
The gangsters have had their puppet dictator running Greece for years and then its a
surprise when it defaults.
Walmart went into Germany and the german people refused to buy products made with
low wage Chinese slave labor. Walmart had to close their doors and pull out of Germany.
Now mob controlled Newscorp wants to buy up stations in the middle east to indictrinate
those people to be subservient to Israeli domination. If Glen beck and Rush Limbaugh
were on the air in Germany or Sweden or France they would go out of business because
no one would listen to their lies and distortion. That's why the mobsters want to close the
internet in France. Every time the gangsters try to pass trickle down policies there are
riots costing the country billions. The gangsters got their Jew Sarkosy in power but he
hasn't been able to redistrubute the wealth to the gangsters favored few and enslave the
masses. In Sweden socialism was so entrenched the mobsters shot dead the Swedish
finance minister right on the street and bought their big companies. I was in Germany in
the 80s when the mobsters used a car bomb on the head of the German central bank.
Such is the nature of democracy. After i mentioned Deutche Bank the gangsters took it
over. What was the CEOs name-Ackerman-he worked for the mob. Then they had
Vodaphone go in and take over the cell phone so they can tap all the German phones. Such
is the nature of the imperial mafias empire. God forbid any social welfare in the interests
of the people. Everything for the criminal class.
I'm watching the pelican brief. It says its illegal for the CIA to operate in the US but the
gangsters are everywhere. And they owe me ten billion dollars.
The gangsters are putting a new leader in charge of mob controlled Columbia. Figure that
one out. Since Salinas they got their little dictator in charge of Mexico and half the
people live in poverty now. The standard of living was cut in half after NAFTA. They
don't give a fuck. They impoverished a billion is SE Asia and made South Africans poorer
under Mandela. They pretended he had power but the gangsters just made the economy
worse-its in the "Shock Doctrine".
Want me to share a thought. I'm watching the movie "Casino". It describes the skim of
cash the casinos would make disapear from their books. (It is described in depth in the
book "The money and the Power" It was delivered to Kansas City because it said that was
as far east they were allowed to fly. Who resides there? Warren Buffet and Birkshire
Hathaway. Now the gangsters have Birkshire make strategic investments to maintain
economic control of other nations. So they have Birkshire invest in insurance companies in
Germany and Japan (which it has done twice in the last month) to control those companies
and then they have those insurance companies make strategic investments in various
companies in those nations so they control the institutions that control those institutions
and on top of that they have Birkshire make a strategic investment in Goldman sacks
which makes strategic investments in governments of countries like Greece and Turkey
etc. So the gangsters empire revolves around the investments of companies like AIG,
Birkshire Hathaway, Goldman Sacks and Carlyle and the companies at the top of this page
and the business round table has as its leader a gangster by the name of John Castelano.
But when they talk of the US empire this isn't discussed. They forced Germany and
Japan to get rid of interlocking directorates so the US could control those companies
instead and impliment supply side trickle down policies. Such is the nature of sham
democracy. Chomsky said about the mobsters, "they aren't fit to lead" This financial
crisis has proven his case.
Here is matt Damon speaking on Iraq,""Our idea was to have a character who was a good
solider who went there thinking he was going to find something," Damon, a longtime
outspoken liberal, told the Huffington Post at a recent press day. "He got there and didn't
find it, and then asked the question why, which I think is kind of what happened for all of
us. We were told something was going to happen and it didn't, and then we went, 'How did
we get here? Oh yeah, the weapons. Where were they?'"
I was teaching social studies before the invasion and I told my department head there
were no weapons of mass destruction it was just AIPAC wanting the US to take over the
middle-east. She thought I was crazy. The Jews get pretty much what they want.
Lieberman didn't want the public option for the Jew doctors and it was taken out (he
thought it might constrict the ability of Jewish criminals in the health care industry). In
California Carly Forina the mobsters candidate is accusing her opponent of not wanting to
give enough tax dollars to Israel. McKinney's carreer was destroyed by AIPAC when she
opposed the invasion of Iraq.
I wouldn't mind a Jew for president-Elliot Spitzer, or a Jew for head of the Fed-Joseph
Stiglitz, or a Jew for head of treasury-Paul Krugman. But the mobsters only put jew
criminals in charge such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.
David Letterman is senile and so are his mob handlers. Linsey Lohan and her mob
handlers are out of their mind. If you want to go after real criminals look at american
doctors and insurance companies.
Utah is up the road from Vegas. Its pretty much controlled by the gangsters and Orin
Hatch is their chosen senator. He's an idiot and needs to go. He is not representative of
the mormon population and neither is Mitt Romney.
What needs to be done is to get FOX News, Glen Beck CNBC, and Rush out there
convincing the america people that the best candidate to lead the Republican party is
Elliot Spitzer. Conservatives are so dumb they won't know his background. They believe
anything FOX News tells them. Karl Rove can devise his campaign strategy.
OK heres a question. If the fed buys treasuries from itself and creates money or
basically prints money, is that real money? If they print 100 billion of currency and the
value of the dollar doesn’t go down then its real money that the taxpayer doesn’t have to
pay for and that creates real jobs and purchasing power in the economy. It was
interesting that the value of the dollar went up relative to the Euro even after the fed
spent 12 trillion or whatever. I havn't read anything on the value of the currency after
the fed printed all this money.
In 1979 I think a semester of tuition at the University of Illinois was 600. Now its like
8000. It was the gangsters who drove up the cost of higher education all the while
singing the praises of equal opportunity. They say one thing but the real agenda is always
tax cuts for the wealthy, maximum exploitation of labor and no social justice.
The gangsters put Elliot Spitzer under surveillance after he went after Merrill Lynch and
AIG and destroyed maybe americas most able politician. Thats why I hope he runs for
president. Mitt Romney is a brain dead sleeze-bag gangster who received two billion from
an El Salvadoran mobster to start Bain Capital. The GOP does not have a candidate.
Spitzer should run as a Republican.
Economy Looks Grim? Pass Healthcare Reform
Why the continuing bad job numbers make it harder (but even more important) to push
through a health care bill.
March 6, 2010 |
The loss of 36,000 jobs in February is better than expected but it’s still miserable.
26,000 were lost in January, according to the government’s revised figures. And the
“underemployment” rate — including jobless workers who have given up looking for work
and part-time workers who want full time jobs — rose from 16.5% in January to 16.8% in
February, offsetting some of January’s gains.
(And don’t blame it mostly on the weather. Although the surveys on which the report is
based were done in mid-February during winter snowstorms in the east, the major impact
of bad weather was on hours worked, not the numbers of jobs. If you had a job in
February but were snowed in, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported you as having a
job.)
This complicates the President’s final push for health care reform. With employers still
shedding jobs and consumer confidence down, Americans are worried first and foremost
about paying their bills. Because most people aren’t aware how much of their paychecks
are being eaten up by rising health care costs but can easily be persuaded they’ll be
paying more to cover those who don’t have health insurance under any new health plan,
the continuing bad news on the jobs front makes it harder for the President to make his
health-care sale.
The bad news on jobs also allows economic illiterates (and scoundrels who know better) to
continue to claim the stimulus is failing and what’s needed is less government rather than
more, including not only a smaller “jobs bill” but less or no health care reform.
In politics as in economics and love, timing is everything. Obama can’t wait much longer if
he wants to convince waivering and worried conservative Dems to join him in a last ditch
51-vote reconciliation measure to get health care through the Senate. We’re already in
the gravititational pull of November’s mid-term elections. But the economy is taking a
longer time to turn around than anyone expected, and telling Americans the jobs numbers
are getting worse more slowly isn’t exactly reassuring.
One small political consolation is the worst job numbers continue to be on the coasts and
the old rust belt where Dems are relatively safer, and the best numbers in the midwest
and mountain states and south where Dems are weakest. So at least blue-dog Dems who
are under the most pressure from their conservative constituents on health care aren’t
grappling with the biggest job losses.
Another is that all across the nation, the people being hit worst by this continuing jobs
recession/depression are poor and the lower-middle class who Republicans are trying to
court. They’re in greatest danger of losing health care coverage if they haven’t lost it
already, and in greatest need for subsidies to allow them and their families to afford it.
Waivering and worried congressional Dems should be reaching out to them.
Americans desperately need health care reform. They also desperately need jobs. Even if
it’s difficult for many to make the connection, it’s still possible for the nation to try to do
two important things at the same time. We need a big jobs bill — including especially
extended unemployment insurance, aid to hard-hit states and cities — and we need health
care reform. The sooner we do the former and get the economy moving into positive job
numbers again, the more quickly and easily we can afford the latter. The big question is
whether the President can make the case.
Mar 06, 2010
"The Dangers of Deficit Reduction"
Joseph Stiglitz picks up where Jamie Galbraith left off:
The Dangers of Deficit Reduction, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Commentary, NY Times: A wave
of fiscal austerity is rushing over Europe and America. ...
Most economists ... agree that it is a mistake to look at only one side of a balance sheet
(whether for the public or private sector). One has to look not only at what a country or
firm owes, but also at its assets. This should help answer those financial sector hawks
who are raising alarms about government spending. ... Spending, especially on investments
in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits.
...
Faster growth and returns on public investment yield higher tax revenues, and a 5 to 6%
return is more than enough to offset temporary increases in the national debt. A social
cost-benefit analysis (taking into account impacts other than on the budget) makes such
expenditures, even when debt-financed, even more attractive.
Finally, most economists agree that ... a ... weaker economy calls for a larger deficit, and
the appropriate size of the deficit in the face of a recession depends on the precise
circumstances. ... Yet, even with large deficits, economic growth in the US and Europe is
anemic, and forecasts of private-sector growth suggest that in the absence of continued
government support, there is risk of continued stagnation...
As the global economy returns to growth, governments should, of course, have plans on
the drawing board to raise taxes and cut expenditures. The right balance will inevitably
be a subject of dispute. ...
The financial sector has imposed huge externalities on the rest of society. America’s
financial industry polluted the world with toxic mortgages, and, in line with the well
established “polluter pays” principle, taxes should be imposed on it. Besides, well-
designed taxes on the financial sector might help alleviate problems caused by excessive
leverage and banks that are too big to fail. Taxes on speculative activity might encourage
banks to focus greater attention on performing their key societal role of providing credit.
Over the longer term, most economists agree that governments, especially in advanced
industrial countries with aging populations, should be concerned about the sustainability
of their policies. But we must be wary of deficit fetishism. Deficits to finance wars or
give-aways to the financial sector ... lead to liabilities without corresponding assets,
imposing a burden on future generations. But high-return public investments that more
than pay for themselves can actually improve the well-being of future generations, and it
would be doubly foolish to burden them with debts from unproductive spending and then
cut back on productive investments.
These are questions for a later day..., prospects of a robust recovery are, at best, a year
or two away. For now, the economics is clear: reducing government spending is a risk not
worth taking.
I'm republishing this article by Spitzer because it is salient at this time.
Tax FraudDebunking the claim that higher income-tax
rates reduce GDP.
By Eliot SpitzerPosted Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, at 3:39 PM ET
The American debate over taxes is ferocious and highly partisan. Some, mostly Republicans,
reflexively oppose all taxes. Others, mostly Democrats, decry the lack of progressivity and
fairness in the tax system and favor higher tax rates for the wealthy.
This debate isn't new. The same arguments have been repeated, with the same passion, since
our income tax system was created—first during the Civil War and then—after its initial
rejection by the Supreme Court—following the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913. A
wonderful book by Steven Weisman, The Great Tax Wars, brings this history to life.
But as Weisman makes clear, one thing has changed in a spectacular manner, and that is the
American public's—and American politicians'—willingness to defend high marginal income-tax
rates as an essential and proper way to pay for the cost of government. Until a generation
ago, many Americans and their representatives argued vehemently that the wealthy ought to
pay more in taxes, but that position has drastically declined in popularity. Weisman sets the
debate in the context of the battle between those who invoke justice—progressive taxes
create equity and hence justice—and those who invoke virtue—the belief that hard work
should be rewarded and taxing higher income at an elevated level creates a disincentive to
the hard work we should promote.
Leaders of a century ago invoked justice in remarkable language that is unimaginable today.
President Woodrow Wilson called paying taxes "a glorious privilege." Supreme Court Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society." In
1942, President Franklin Roosevelt said, "In this time of grave national danger, when all
excess income should go to win the war; no American citizen ought to have a net income,
after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000." That $25,000 is the equivalent of
$323,208 in today's dollars. Can you conceive of a modern president suggesting that no
American should earn more than $323,000 after taxes? (President George W. Bush went to
war twice without once calling for such a common sacrifice to pay for it.) And President
Harry Truman in 1948 vetoed a broad-based tax cut, even in the face of an expected and
eventual congressional override, and then asked for a tax increase following his upset victory.
But President Ronald Reagan transformed our conversation about government and turned taxes
into the enemy of progress. It is commonly thought that President George H.W. Bush's
violation of his "read my lips" pledge cost him re-election and President Bill Clinton's 1993
tax increases cost him control of Congress.
Central to the intellectual debate about marginal tax rates has been the question of whether
higher rates discourage people from working. President Reagan is famously reported to have
observed that, as an actor, once he hit the top marginal rate—then 91 percent—he stopped
making movies for the rest of the year. The result of sky-high marginal rates, this anecdote
was supposed to prove, was declining productivity and economic growth.
Is this true? Let's look at a graph of the nominal top marginal tax rate in any given year and
GDP growth in that year.
A caveat—obvious but critical—is in order. Simultaneity does not equal causation. Annual
growth rates are a consequence of many factors, macro and micro, and the isolated impact of
marginal tax rates on growth is hard, if not impossible, to discern from these numbers alone.
That said, it's obvious that there is no correlation between higher marginal tax rates and
slowing economic activity. During the period 1951-63, when marginal rates were at their
peak—91 percent or 92 percent—the American economy boomed, growing at an average annual
rate of 3.71 percent. The fact that the marginal rates were what would today be viewed as
essentially confiscatory did not cause economic cataclysm—just the opposite. And during the
past seven years, during which we reduced the top marginal rate to 35 percent, average
growth was a more meager 1.71 percent.
More sophisticated efforts to analyze this relationship also produce decidedly murky results.
An excellent review of this in the Yale Law Journal, "Why Tax the Rich? Efficiency, Equity,
and Progressive Taxation," concludes that there is scant, if any, legitimate academic support
for the proposition that moderate, as opposed to dramatic, increases in marginal rates have
any impact on the willingness of the wealthy to participate in the economy.
So where does this leave us? Probably with Weisman's conclusion—that the debate between
justice and virtue will continue for years to come. But this debate may be little more than a
Rorschach test—an inkblot into which we read our underlying values about income distribution
and social welfare. Those who see taxes as the bane of progress will still claim that higher
marginal rates are the enemy of economic growth. Those who favor greater progressivity will
say there is no evidence of such a claim. They will conclude—and they will be right—that the
wealthier can afford to pay more, with no harm to the nation's economic growth.
Financial Regulatory Reform
The problem, not too surprisingly, lies in the Senate, and mainly, though not
entirely, with Republicans. The House has already passed a fairly strong reform
bill, more or less along the lines proposed by the Obama administration, and the
Senate could probably do the same if it operated on the principle of majority rule.
But it doesn’t — and when you combine near-universal Republican opposition to
serious reform with the wavering of some Democrats, prospects look bleak.
How did we get to this point? And should reform advocates accept the
compromises that might yet produce some kind of bill?
Many opponents of the House version of banking reform present their position as
one of principle. House Republicans, offering their alternative proposal, claimed
that they would end banking excesses by introducing “market discipline” —
basically, by promising not to rescue banks in the future.
But that’s a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to
shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly,
relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to
disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-
market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire
codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending,
the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again
and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today.
I suspect that even Republicans, in their hearts, understand the need for real
reform. But their strategy of opposing anything the Obama administration
proposes, coupled with the lure of financial-industry dollars — back in December
top Republican leaders huddled with bank lobbyists to coordinate their campaigns
against reform — has trumped all other considerations.
That said, some Republicans might, just possibly, be persuaded to sign on to a
much-weakened version of reform — in particular, one that eliminates a key plank
of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent
agency protecting consumers. Should Democrats accept such a watered-down
reform?
I say no.
There are times when even a highly imperfect reform is much better than nothing;
this is very much the case for health care. But financial reform is different. An
imperfect health care bill can be revised in the light of experience, and if
Democrats pass the current plan there will be steady pressure to make it better. A
weak financial reform, by contrast, wouldn’t be tested until the next big crisis. All
it would do is create a false sense of security and a fig leaf for politicians opposed
to any serious action — then fail in the clinch.
Better, then, to take a stand, and put the enemies of reform on the spot. And by
all means let’s highlight the dispute over a proposed Consumer Financial Protection
Agency.
There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward
Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to
act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why
are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The
question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped
into taking these products.”
Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must
be, or lobbyists wouldn’t be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency’s creation.
And it’s not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting
consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or — as in one compromise
that at this point seems unlikely — by a unit within the Treasury Department. But
remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was
Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under
future antiregulation administrations — and believe me, given the power of the
financial lobby, there will be such administrations — is if there’s an agency whose
whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.
In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a
campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic
reform that just covers up failure to act.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Opinion (1 of 29) » A version of this article
appeared in print on March 1, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.
The Deficit Hawks' Road to Ruin
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 03/02/2010 @ 1:
47pm
This piece is cross-posted from the WashingtonPost.
com, where Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly
column.
In the face of this Great Recession, the Senate's
recently passed $15 billion jobs bill is more like a sick
joke than a serious legislative initiative.
We have lost more than 8.4 million jobs since
December 2007. One out of five Americans is now
unemployed or underemployed. More than six people are
seeking jobs for every one that's available. In low-
income communities the jobless rates are not those of
a recession but of another depression, and the
Economic Policy Institute estimates that child poverty
will rise to 27 percent overall, and to over 50 percent
for African American children, in the next year or two.
As economist Lawrence Mishel, president of EPI, told
me, "In the midst of the worst jobs crisis in over 70
years, passing a $15 billion bill -- comprising mostly of
a tax credit of questionable efficacy -- is like trying
to extinguish a 10-alarm fire with a leaky garden hose."
In contrast, bold plans that match the scale of the
crisis aren't getting enough attention. For example,
EPI calls for: a one-year extension of unemployment
compensation and COBRA health benefits; fiscal relief
for states that will otherwise lay off more teachers,
firefighters, police officers and other workers; a New
Deal-like public service employment program;
investments in transportation and school modernization;
and a carefully crafted job-creation tax credit. It
would cost $400 billion in the first year to create 4.6
million jobs, and the entire cost could be recouped
within 10 years by enacting a financial transactions
tax. Also, in a recent cover story in The Nation,
economist Robert Pollin laid out an ambitious yet
realistic plan to create 18 million jobs over the next
three years through leveraging private-public
partnerships.
But don't expect any of this to have an easy time in
Congress, where the deficit hysteria now sweeping the
political and pundit class constrains the possibility for
bold public policy. ad_icon
A recent New York Times headline screams, "Huge
Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power." The
Wall Street Journal offers this grim warning: "Deficit
Balloons into National-Security Threat." The Washington Post describes "a
budget hole that is driving accumulated debt to dangerous levels."
Behind these sorts of warnings are many of the people who were so fixated on
deficits that they missed the housing and credit bubble -- not to mention the Wall
Street chicanery that made them possible. Now they are peddling the idea that we
risk a major debt crisis if government spending continues to fill the gap left by the
decline of private-sector demand and investment.
The deficit hawks are unable to distinguish bad deficits from good ones. Bad
deficits result from collapsing revenue -- whether due to wasteful tax cuts or
sluggish economic activity -- or unnecessary wars of occupation and other wasteful
military spending. Good ones stem from spending to create jobs and spur growth
through investments in infrastructure, science and technology, new energy sources,
education and worker training.
Instead of giving into the deficit hype with discretionary domestic spending
freezes and bipartisan deficit-reduction commissions, President Obama would be
wise to directly challenge the conservative narrative that a responsible government
cannot drive economic activity.
The president could note that the federal debt held by the public is well within our
historical experience. As of the end of 2009, it was 53 percent of GDP -- a level
that is only slightly higher than in 1993. By 2019, the Congressional Budget Office
projects the debt will increase to 68 percent of GDP, still below the level of debt
in the 1940s, which reached a peak of about 121 percent in 1946. And even with
massive deficits, debt-servicing burdens are projected to remain low, according to
an analysis from the New America Foundation.
The president could explain that by virtue of the dollar's role as the world's
principal reserve currency, America can accumulate more debt than other
economies. Without dollar-denominated debt, the world economy would come to a
screeching halt. And that the reality isn't likely to change in the short- or medium-
term, given the problems with the euro and the yen and China's resistance to
financial liberalization.
And Obama could argue that, as our experience after World War II amply
demonstrates, by investing in a productive economy we can comfortably reduce our
debt while expanding the shared prosperity of the American people.
The Democrats should give Americans a clear choice. Push for a bold jobs bill --
let Republicans stand up and filibuster it, just as Democrats forced Kentucky Sen.
Jim Bunning (R) to do in his indefensible effort to block an extension of
unemployment benefits. Then, come November, take a pro-jobs record to the
American people, having exposed the GOP for the obstructionist party that it is.
Published on Thursday, March 4, 2010 by FireDogLake.com
Health Insurance Industry’s $300 Billion Victory Over
the Public Option
by Jon Walker
When Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NE),
Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and the
entire Republican Senate caucus stepped up to kill the
public option in the Senate, it is important to remember
that the health insurance industry won a victory-a
victory worth $300 billion. As Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)
and Tom Harkin (D-IA) now try to crush attempts to
revive the public option inside a reconciliation measure,
they are battling to protect that extra $300 billion
that will flow to AHIP as a result. The public option
was never just a "sliver" as Obama tried to claim. It
was about a fundamental moral right and the role of
government. But what it was also about was a huge
amount of money.
The CBO projects that the relatively weak public option-
the one limited just to the exchange in the House
health care bill-would secure roughly one-fifth of that
market, equal to around 6 million people (PDF). The
CBO concluded that, as a result of those 6 million
customers, the public option will take in $298 billion
(PDF) in direct premiums, exchange subsidies, and risk
adjustment payments from 2013-2019. However, with
the public option removed, but the individual mandate
remaining, that $300 billion will instead go straight to
the private insurance corporations' books. If, like I
personally suspect, the CBO slightly underestimated the
popularity of the public option, and it manages to
secure instead roughly a third of the customers on the
exchange, that would be roughly $500 billion that the
public option would take from the private insurance
companies.
I often hear the argument that the public option was
not important because only 2% of Americans would be
using it. That's true, but it is important to remember
that roughly a third are currently insured by public
programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare. Of
course, of the roughly half of Americans with private
insurance, the bulk of them get there coverage through
employer-provided, self-funded plans. Plans in which
the employer bears the risk and holds the premiums.
The insurance companies are only subcontracted to provide
administrative functions. That 6 million people the public option was projected to
cover would be a significant share of the potential market for private insurance
companies to actually cover and noticeably expand the amount of money they would
have earning float revenue.
It is important to remember the sheer scope of the private insurance companies
victory if they stop health care reform from having even a relatively weak public
option. It will be a victory that will provide them with an extra $300 billion of our
money. No doubt some of that same money will be used in the future to fight
efforts to enact real health care reform.
© 2010 FireDogLake.com
Jon Walker is political writer and blogger for FireDogLake. He is an expert on
health care policy and the politics of health care reform.
Paul Krugman: Afflicting the Afflicted
Getting the last laugh is good for health:
Afflicting the Afflicted, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: If we’re lucky,
Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health
reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-
making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering
moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans
responding with slander and misdirection. ...
Republicans ... didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-
checking. It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican
speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander,... right off the bat ... delivered a whopper,
asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will
go up.”
Wow. I guess ... he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office
analysis ... does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But ... this
would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price
of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost
to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.
His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats ... plan
to use a ... process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that
reconciliation has “never been used for something like this”..., but reconciliation
has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms — and was used to push
through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill
for health reform.
What really struck me..., however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how
they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of
much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing
medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care
whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited
genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic
violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.
One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end
to this.. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely
inarticulate on the matter... He offered no ... ideas...
House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical
histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition
across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the
weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny
coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the
nation... The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of
Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the
House G.O.P. plan. ... While some people would gain insurance, the people losing
insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the
American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.
So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that
the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in
Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly
make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and
pay no price. And they may well be right.
But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the
power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.
A Five-Step Guide To Real Financial Reform
— Flickr/f-l-e-x (Creative Commons)
What Barack Obama can do to prevent a second meltdown.
— By Reid Cramer
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Tue Mar. 2, 2010 2:30 AM PST
The next big battle in Washington—one that will heat up fast if the health care
tussle is ever resolved—will be fought over reform of the financial sector. In
recent weeks, President Barack Obama has gone on the offensive, calling for new
restraints on Wall Street wheeling and dealing and vowing to veto weak legislation.
In December, the House passed a robust package of reforms. The action has now
shifted to the Senate Banking Committee, and chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)
has pledged to push a comprehensive package over the finish line before he retires
at the end of the year. But it won’t be easy. The big banks and their lobbyists
are vigorously resisting a rewrite of their operating rules and working hard to
insert loopholes and exclusions that would gut the legislation. Obama can prevent
that from happening by spelling out the benchmarks the legislators must meet to
avoid his veto pen. The details of financial reform can be complicated. But it’s not
hard to come up with the must-have provisions. Here are five that the White
House should insist upon to make sure we get financial reform that works, not just
window dressing.
1) Fix the big picture, not just individual firms.
We learned the hard way that the possibility of failure is an essential pillar of a
stable financial system. When firms become "too big to fail," they take excessive
risks, crowd out smaller firms, and are costly to bail out—and the failure of one
can threaten the whole economy. Successful financial reform would include a
mechanism to survey the balance sheets of particular firms according to the risks
they pose to others, not just to their shareholders or depositors. Currently, no
single entity is assigned to ensure system-wide stability and detect excessive risk
taking. There must be an agency with the authority to monitor threats to the
marketplace and prevent the failure of any individual firm from having a cascading
effect. Europe is on a path to create a Systemic Risk Board, comprised of the
national central banks, to perform this function, and the United States ought to
follow suit.
The House bill sought to create a Financial Oversight Council, which would include
members of the Federal Reserve and the existing bank regulators. Senate
negotiations are considering establishing this new authority within the Treasury
Department, but with a role for the Fed and others. More important than the
bureaucratic location is the precise nature of this new authority. It won’t mean
much if it ends up as a flag-waving exercise. Instead, the regulators awarded this
authority must have preeminence over the existing bank regulators and the power
to quarantine contagion. They must be able to require specific firms to increase
their capital holdings and alter their risk-management practices. These regulators
even have to be empowered to break up companies whose size and interconnections
with other firms endanger the entire economy.
2) Separate retail banking from the casinos.
Before the meltdown, banks and other financial institutions made bets with other
people's money that ultimately soured their balance sheets when the wagers didn't
work out. For each firm, there has to be stronger oversight, along with higher
capital requirements and other rules that increase transparency and accountability.
These rules can protect both bankers (from themselves) and the depositors who
rely on these firms to protect their assets and provide credit. After excessive
risk-taking brought on the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933
required banks to spin off or shut down their brokerage and investment activities.
For almost 70 years, this law drew a line between banks that the government could
backstop and those that behave like casinos and hedge funds. The act was repealed
in 1999, and many have been calling for its resurrection. But the sideline
businesses of today are different. Back in the 1920s, if banks were underwriting a
stock that had trouble selling, they would buy it with money from their depositors'
accounts. Now, a bigger problem is proprietary trading: when securities are bought
and sold with a firm's own money to generate a profit for itself. Consequently, the
White House has called for a new rule, named for its most vocal proponent, former
Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, to ban proprietary trading. The Volcker rule is a must
for financial reform because, like the original Glass-Steagall Act, it would separate
(and protect) retail banking from other riskier endeavors and also cause firms to
become smaller. Dodd has indicated he may think it's wise to postpone this reform
in order to get a deal done, but the White House should insist on its inclusion in
the final bill.
3) It's the consumer, stupid.
The next regulatory regime should be designed with the consumer, not just the
banks, in mind. There needs to be a new set of consumer protections—such as
preventing banks from changing overdraft fees to cash in on the increased use of
debit cards. (This practice created a $26 billion windfall for the banks almost
overnight.) These protections should be set and policed by a new Consumer Financial
Protection Agency. For this CFPA to work, it would need teeth and latitude to
fight all sorts of predatory behavior engaged in by banks and nonbanks, such as
subprime mortgages and payday lending. The House approved the creation of an
independent agency, which would possess the authority to treat consumer issues on
par with the “safety and soundness” standards employed by other bank regulators.
To attract support of Republicans who have balked at establishing an autonomous
agency, Dodd is looking for a compromise. One idea, recently floated, is to create
a Bureau of Financial Protection within the Treasury Department. This bureau would
be charged with promoting consumer protection, but would be required to consult
with existing bank regulators before new rules are issued. And if there is a
conflict, these regulators would be allowed to appeal up the chain. To be
successful, a new authority has to have both rule-making authority and strong
enforcement mechanisms. Without these tools, it will get endlessly rolled by the
existing regulators.
4) Keep it simple.
Current rules allow firms peddling deceptive financial products to bury their scams
in the fine print. Credit card companies charge hidden fees when a card holder
pays over the phone, inquires about a new loan, or transfers an account balance
from another card. Similarly, the mortgage industry makes money by steering
borrowers away from standard 30-year fixed loans and toward higher-priced,
subprime loans. These are unfair practices, even if they are covered by contracts
signed by consumers. Profits should not be made by tricking people into products
they don’t need or understand. Instead, rules that govern the market for financial
services should be written to take into account how consumers behave. As the
burgeoning field of behavioral economics has shown, too much information can
easily overwhelm. If we can streamline information disclosure, we can make the
financial services marketplace more competitive by price. Providers must be clear
about the costs of their products and offer standard low-risk products. Future
market rules should be governed by a new set of standards and encourage
transparency, simplicity, and fairness in products offerings. The House bill made
sure that promoting these principles would be a centerpiece of the reform effort
when they defined the mission of a new CFPA in precisely these terms. The White
House must ensure that the Senate does the same.
5) And for heaven's sake, limit executive pay.
Wall Street’s plan to return to the outlandish compensation packages that pervaded
the industry prior to the meltdown may be grounds for making tone deafness a
crime. A successful financial reform package must do what the firms cannot:
impose restraint. Specifically, the bill should mandate a “say on pay” rule that
would grant shareholders a strong role in approving (or disapproving) executive pay
packages. Also, the SEC should be required to step in to make sure firms create
truly independent compensation committees to set appropriate pay levels. And a new
set of shareholder rights rules should be implemented that would allow
shareholders to nominate individuals to a firm’s board of directors, to examine a
clear description of executive compensation, and to claw back unearned
performance-based pay. These rules are in the House bill, but the Senate is being
lobbied heavily to do nothing on this front.
There are plenty of details to work out—and debate—while rewriting the complex
rules for the financial industry. But the public will be able to evaluate what
emerges from the messy legislative process—and to judge whether or not Obama
should accept the measure—by looking to see if these five standards have been
met. And here’s a final tip that will tell you whether a final bill contains the right
tools to produce real reform: The big bankers won’t sign on.
Financial Reform Endgame
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 28, 2010
So here’s the situation. We’ve been through
the second-worst financial crisis in the
history of the world, and we’ve barely begun
to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t
find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all
momentum for serious banking reform has
been lost. The question now seems to be
whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no
bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the
second option is starting to look preferable.
The problem, not too surprisingly, lies in the
Senate, and mainly, though not entirely, with
Republicans. The House has already passed a
fairly strong reform bill, more or less along
the lines proposed by the Obama
administration, and the Senate could probably
do the same if it operated on the principle of
majority rule. But it doesn’t — and when you
combine near-universal Republican opposition
to serious reform with the wavering of some
Democrats, prospects look bleak.
How did we get to this point? And should
reform advocates accept the compromises
that might yet produce some kind of bill?
Many opponents of the House version of
banking reform present their position as one
of principle. House Republicans, offering their
alternative proposal, claimed that they would
end banking excesses by introducing “market
discipline” — basically, by promising not to
rescue banks in the future.
But that’s a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to
shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly,
relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to
disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-
market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire
codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending,
the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again
and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today.
I suspect that even Republicans, in their hearts, understand the need for real
reform. But their strategy of opposing anything the Obama administration
proposes, coupled with the lure of financial-industry dollars — back in December
top Republican leaders huddled with bank lobbyists to coordinate their campaigns
against reform — has trumped all other considerations.
That said, some Republicans might, just possibly, be persuaded to sign on to a
much-weakened version of reform — in particular, one that eliminates a key plank
of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent
agency protecting consumers. Should Democrats accept such a watered-down
reform?
I say no.
There are times when even a highly imperfect reform is much better than nothing;
this is very much the case for health care. But financial reform is different. An
imperfect health care bill can be revised in the light of experience, and if
Democrats pass the current plan there will be steady pressure to make it better. A
weak financial reform, by contrast, wouldn’t be tested until the next big crisis. All
it would do is create a false sense of security and a fig leaf for politicians opposed
to any serious action — then fail in the clinch.
Better, then, to take a stand, and put the enemies of reform on the spot. And by
all means let’s highlight the dispute over a proposed Consumer Financial Protection
Agency.
There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward
Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to
act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why
are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The
question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped
into taking these products.”
Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must
be, or lobbyists wouldn’t be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency’s creation.
And it’s not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting
consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or — as in one compromise
that at this point seems unlikely — by a unit within the Treasury Department. But
remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was
Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under
future antiregulation administrations — and believe me, given the power of the
financial lobby, there will be such administrations — is if there’s an agency whose
whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.
In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a
campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic
reform that just covers up failure to act.
Going Non-Union
GM's Northern Strategy
By AL BENCHICH
The “reinvention” of the “New GM” has begun
with the opening of a lithium-ion battery
plant in Brownstown, Michigan, near Detroit.
The event was remarkable not only because
the Brownstown plant signals GM’s return to
the production of an electric vehicle but also
because, for the first time in about 30
years, GM has opened a non-union plant in
the U.S.
The new plant is funded in part by taxpayer
dollars, and GM is not rehiring any of the
thousands of UAW members who were laid
off when their plants closed—despite union
promises that workers’ concessions on pay,
benefits, and speed of work would save GM
and were their only chance for job security.
The plant, a wholly owned subsidiary of
General Motors, opened on January 7 and
currently employs 25 hourly workers. Last
year former GM CEO Fritz Henderson said
GM planned to hire new workers to fill 100
hourly jobs at second-tier wages of about
$14 an hour. (Henderson, who was fired by
GM, is now being paid $60,000 a month as a
“consultant” to work 20 hours a
month—$3,000 an hour.)
Speaking at the battery plant’s opening, new GM Chairman Ed Whitacre spoke of
the company’s opportunities in the transformation to “green” products and jobs.
Apparently, GM’s transformation doesn’t include UAW representation, as Ed
Niedermeyer points out in his blog thetruthaboutcars.com: “If GM can get away
with using non-union workers at a crucial plant that’s supposed to represent the
firm’s future, things aren’t looking so good for our friends in organized labor.”
GM appears to have a strategy to bust our seriously weakened union—a move in
which the UAW leadership has been knowingly or unknowingly complicit. It’s not
hard to understand GM’s objective. The company appears to be emulating the move
by Delphi to create a low wage, non-union workforce.
What’s the UAW’s response? At this point it’s hard to determine because the
silence from Solidarity House has been deafening. Sources at the UAW
International say an organizing drive is taking place at the Brownstown plant.
The hiring at the battery plant is one indication of GM’s strategy and the UAW’s
lack of one. Why couldn’t the UAW negotiate the right of laid-off UAW/GM
members in the area to transfer to the Brownstown plant?
The same thing is happening at the Powertrain plant in Baltimore, where new work
coming in is considered a “stand-alone” operation and new workers are being hired,
while laid-off members wait for work. In Baltimore, however, the new workers will
be part of the Baltimore local, Local 239.
More Non-Union Work
A second indication of the UAW’s complicity in its own downfall is its agreement to
allow GM to outsource work that isn’t directly related to the assembly of the
vehicle. GM is not only outsourcing such “non-core” work, but also trying to ensure
that non-union workers perform the work.
First, GM joined with Chrysler and Toyota to outsource Teamster car haulers’ work
to non-union trucking firms. They have replaced the Teamster drivers at Ryder
Truck with a non-union company.
Second, GM appears to be giving the green light to outside contractors to fight
union organizing drives. In the past, suppliers were at least told they should be
“union-friendly.”
When the UAW agreed to allow GM to outsource sanitation work several years ago,
local unions (such as my local, Local 909 in Warren, Michigan) organized new in-
plant sanitation workers and negotiated a contract for them—all with little or no
interference from the new employer.
Now GM is changing its tune. The UAW allowed skilled trades jobs to be
outsourced last year, and according to companies currently bidding on this work,
GM has “no opinion” if they should be “union friendly.” This is a sure signal to
outside contractors to fight union organizing drives for contractor employees
working at GM facilities.
Southern Strategy
History serves as a stern reminder that, indeed, the past is prologue. In the early
1970s the power of the UAW was at its zenith. With 1.5 million members and the
power to bring auto production to a halt, the union won remarkable gains for its
members. The UAW’s historic 68-day strike in 1970 and the 1973 negotiations
with GM resulted in a 13 percent wage increase, improved health care, and
retirement after 30 hard years of work.
In response, General Motors instituted its “Southern Strategy” in the mid-1970s.
The strategy was designed to reduce the union’s power by duplicating GM’s
operations in non-union Southern states, thus allowing GM to continue production in
the Southern plants if the UAW struck in the North.
Several UAW organizing efforts in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Southern
plants failed. It was not until the UAW agreed to national contract concessions in
early 1982 that GM agreed to card check in the South. Concessions paved the way
for union recognition at the Southern plants—but they also led to the loss of most
of the major gains made in the 1970s and the continued downsizing of jobs at GM.
Despite every concession by the UAW to save jobs, despite every effort by the
UAW to improve quality and productivity, it must now be apparent that concessions
will not solve this dilemma. There is no more to give.
Some are fighting back. The Teamsters have taken to the streets to protest the
replacement of union car haulers.
But as GM pursues a new “Northern Strategy” to open new high-tech, non-union
“green” plants in the UAW’s backyard, where’s the UAW’s strategy?
There has been a vacuum in leadership at the UAW. At no time has anyone in the
leadership come forward and advocated a plan to change the downward slide.
There has been no Walter Reuther to step forward to demand a 12-point plan to
re-industrialize the country through investment in closed plants to build mass
transit, high speed and light rail, wind turbines, and all the things we need. There
has been only silence.
A new leadership will be elected in June at the UAW Convention. The membership
deserves leadership that will lead, by building solidarity within the UAW and the
broader labor movement. That is the challenge for our union. We have no choice
but to fight back or bid farewell to organized labor in this country. So the
question is, Will there be real discussion and debate about the way forward at the
convention, or will the leadership continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the
Titanic?
Al Benchich retired from GM’s Powertrain plant in Warren, Michigan, after 12
years as president of UAW Local 909 and is actively involved in the Autoworker
Caravan group.
Auto workers will be discussing these issues, including the upcoming UAW
Convention and conversion to green production, at the Labor Notes Conference April
23-25 in Detroit.
This article was originally published by Labor Notes.
Hillary Clinton's War Whoop
By MARC WEISBROT
In a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Hillary Clinton
recently said that Iran “is moving toward a military
dictatorship” and continued the Administration’s
campaign for tougher sanctions against that country.
What could America’s top diplomat hope to accomplish
with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric? It seems
unlikely that the goal was to support human rights in
Iran. Because of the United States’ history in Iran and
in the region, it tends to give legitimacy to repression.
The more that any opposition can be linked to the
United States’ actions, words or support, the harder
time they will have.
Second, it is tough for anyone – especially in the region
– to believe that the United States is really concerned
about human rights abuses. In addition to supporting
Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in
Gaza, Washington has been remarkably quiet as the most
important opposition leaders in Egypt were arrested as part of the government’s
preparations for October elections. Amnesty International stated that the
arrestees were "prisoners of conscience, detained solely for their peaceful political
activities."
So what is the purpose of a speech like this? The most obvious conclusion is that
it is to promote conflict and to convince Americans that Iran is an actual threat to
their security. Americans generally have to be prepared and persuaded for years if
they are to accept that they must go to war. The groundwork for the Iraq war
was laid during the Clinton presidency. President Clinton imposed sanctions on the
country that devastated the civilian population, carried out bombings and publicly
declared that Washington’s intention was to overthrow the government. Although,
as we now know, Iraq never posed any significant security threat to the United
States, President Clinton spent years trying to convince Americans that it did.
President Bush picked up where President Clinton left off; and President Clinton
publicly supported his campaign for the war. So did Hillary, and she defended her
decision in 2008 even as it looked like it might cost her the presidency.
President Obama is unlikely to start a war with Iran – which would likely begin as
an air war, not a ground war – not least because he already has two wars to deal
with. But, as in the case of the Iraq war, his Secretary of State is preparing the
ground for the next president that may have a stronger desire or better
opportunity to do so. There is a strong faction of our foreign policy establishment
that believes it has the right and obligation to bomb Iran in order to curtail its
nuclear program, and they have a long-term strategy.
The public relations campaign is working. A new Gallup poll finds that 61 percent of
Americans see Iran as “as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests,” with an
additional 29 percent believing that it is “an important threat.” It is not clear why
anyone would believe this; even if Iran did obtain a nuclear weapon, which is still a
ways off, they would not have the capacity to deliver it as far as the United
States. Nor is it likely that they would want to commit national suicide, any more
than a number of other countries that currently have nuclear weapons.
The Obama team’s messaging is not nearly so successful with regard to the issues
that the vast majority of the electorate will base their votes on in this year's
elections: the most recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll (Feb. 4-8) finds that 53
percent disapprove of his handling of the economy.
For the immediate future, foreign policy concerns will likely rank low, far behind
the economy, for the electorate. But the Obama team’s foreign policy will hurt
Democrats in the future. If I believed what Hillary Clinton and the Democratic
leadership are telling me, I would have to consider voting Republican. If it’s really
true that all these people just want to kill us for no reason; that it has nothing to
do with our foreign policy or wars; that we can effectively reduce terrorism by
bombing and occupying Muslim countries; and that terrorism is the country’s most
urgent security threat – then why not vote for the party that looks tougher? This
will inevitably come back to haunt the Democratic Party, as it did in the 2002 and
2004 elections.
Meanwhile, U.S. military spending - by the Congressional Budget Office’s relatively
narrow definition of the Department of Defense budget – reached 5.6 percent of
GDP in 2009. Just before September 11, 2001, the Congressional Budget Office
projected this spending for 2009 at 2.4 percent of GDP.
The difference, over 10 years, is more than four times the ten-year cost of
proposed health care reform.
Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and
Policy Research.
This article originally appeared in the Guardian.
Carly Forina who ran HP for the mob is running for Senator of California on the
platform that her opponent is an anti semite. Feinstein works for the mob.
How Imperial San Franciscans Loot the Planet
DiFi and Blum: a Marriage Marinated in Money
By WILL PARRISH and DARWIN BOND-
GRAHAM
On April 17, 2009, with the edifice of the
global economy rotting under an architecture
of monumental greed, war deficits, and
official hubris, the University of California,
Berkeley conducted a groundbreaking
ceremony for its Richard C. Blum Center for
Developing Economies. Before a throng of
students, faculty, staff, and PR specialists
affiliated with the Center’s new multi-UC
campus “Global Poverty & Practice” program,
the Blum Center's namesake was joined on
stage by one of the many political
heavyweights he counts among his business
partners, Al Gore. The former Vice
President praised Blum as a long-time friend
and cited the new institute as a key to
solving the interlocking problems of global
poverty and global climate change, two of the
many vexing boogeymen threatening to
destabilize the profit-making order.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, who published a book on the general subject in
1923, some of the greatest sociopaths in this country's history have affixed their
names to university buildings in an effort to burnish their reputations.
Richard Blum is a San Francisco-based finance capitalist presiding over a business empire
that is, to say the least, expansive. Hedge funds? Blum owns one outright and wields a
significant share of various others. Real estate? His primary investment vehicle, the
$7.8 billion Blum Capital Partners, owns the largest real estate brokerage firm on the
planet, CB Richard Ellis, of which Blum is chairman of the board. Construction? Until
public scandal prompted him to sell off his holdings, Blum was a majority partner in a
construction and engineering company that did billions in business with the US military,
among other government clients. Education? Try being the resident Alpha Regent of the
largest public university system in the world, the University of California, while also being
a primary owner of the world's second-largest for-profit education firm, Career
Education Corporation.
Large land-holding firms? Digital media company of which Al Gore serves as frontman?
Health industry corporation fighting to undermine the expansion of public health care?
Border-town maquiladora that build weapons components for the Department of Defense?
Check, check, check, and check.
The greatest investment of Blum’s career was undoubtedly his marriage, roughly 30 years
ago, to the politically Joe Lieberman-esque US Senate Democrat, Dianne Feinstein. At the
time of this meshing of Blum’s financial interests with Feinstein’s formidable political
ambitions, Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco and Blum -- already one of her main
financial backers -- had much of his fortune staked to various development projects in
the City.
Blum’s preferred means of personal enrichment rely on strong nation-state interventions
in markets and societies to promote unfettered corporate dominance of national
economies and distant lands. It should come as no surprise, then, that he and "DiFi" are
among the leading proponents of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank/US
Treasury nexus’ notion of how economies ought best be developed. This form of
economic “improvement” (deriving from the Anglo-French “emprouwer,” meaning “to clear
for profit”) involves burying Third World economies under mountains of debt backed by
usurious interest rates, facilitating the greatest level of investment possible by rapacious
multi-national corporate entities, privatizing government functions, and gutting social
services. Ironically, this agenda of neoliberal “structural adjustment” has decimated and
impoverished communities across the planet, causing suffering among the hundreds of
millions of people Blum’s heart now bleeds for: poor folks.
The economic and political policies promoted by Richard C. Blum and associates, including
Senator Feinstein and other leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, have
locked nations and peoples across the planet into a system of de facto colonial bondage
whereby their lands and destines are controlled by distant, debt-holding banks and hedge
funds – among them, Blum Capital Partners, LLC, and Newbridge Capital, LLC, of which
Blum was chairman of the Asia investment division for five years. The result has been
what author and UC Irvine sociologist Mike Davis calls a “planet of slums,” where .23
percent of the world population privately owns more than 50 percent of the land, and 85
percent of urban dwellers in the Third World are consigned to living on illegal squats in
hellish shanty towns under conditions of grinding poverty.
Just ask the people of Haiti, whose capital city now greatly resembles a war zone reduced
to rubble ala Fallujah, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, not by virtue of a natural disaster per
se, but because the IMF-WTO-US Treasury specialists in immiseration have forced them
off their land into desperately sub-standard slum housing, often perched tenuously on the
side of deforested hills and ravines. This “urban geography of mass vulnerability,” as the
academic field of disaster sociology refers to it, was created by the destruction of the
country’s rural agrarian economy that provided for subsistence, in an economic
transformation imposed by international creditors with the constant backing of the US
military.
Yet, at UC Berkeley, we have Dick Blum hoisting up “sustainable solutions to the toughest
poverty challenges” as his new line of work.
Blum’s name is a familiar one to those acquainted with the details of the corporate
plundering of California north coast forests and communities throughout the ‘80s and
‘90s. The year was 1995, and Texas corporate raider Charles Hurwitz — whose company,
Maxxam, had laid waste to as much ancient forestland as possible, as quickly as possible,
for nearly a decade — was looking to cash out of his ownership of the Headwaters forest
in central Humboldt County. Headwaters was the flashpoint of the largest direct action
protests in the history of the earth defense movement, as well as lawsuits and legislative
initiatives aimed at preserving what little was left of old-growth redwood ecosystems in
the Pacific Northwest. It so happened Hurwitz was an investment partner of Blum from
way back. Blum also happened to be a major donor, fundraiser, and political booster of
US President Bill Clinton.
Clinton and the State of California dutifully discharged their duties as proxies of the
super-wealthy in general – and, in this case, Blum in particular -- by appointing the
inviolable “DiFi” to chair a legislative team to negotiate the purchase of Headwaters from
Hurwitz. Feinstein and Hurwitz agreed on a final deal in 1996, hailed by Feinstein’s web
site as one of her 10 greatest career accomplishments. Hurwitz gave up very little of real
economic value — Maxxam had clear-cut most of the forest in question — in exchange for
a $380 million taxpayer-funded payout, or more than four times the market value of the
trees at the time. Much of the money went directly into Hurwitz's personal bank
accounts. That’s in spite of the fact that all the government really needed to do to
protect the acreage in question was enforce the Endangered Species Act. Regardless of
the fact that Headwaters became officially “protected,” the vast majority of California's
remaining old growth and other mature stands of redwood were pillaged by the end of
the decade. Hurwitz's empire cashed out, like other timber conglomerates, by liquidating
the forests and the livelihoods of the North Coast.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair later revealed that Blum and another Hurwitz
pal, the Houston-based Continental Airlines chairman David Bonderman, had personally
met with Clinton at the White House in a “coffee klatsch” fundraiser on December 15,
1995, likely to discuss the details of
the Headwaters buy-out, which occurred six months later. Bonderman and Blum were
both directors of the Wilderness Society, the only national environmental organization
that praised the buy-out.
For all the fanfare that emerged in the Clinton era about how corporate globalization had
rendered the nation-state a bit player in the larger drama of the new, “free trade”-
dominated corporate economic order, the nation-state’s role in propping up the global
capitalist system has never been more central. That role is being laid bare as never
before with each multi-billion dollar subsidy the federal government passes onto the
financial industry -- an estimated $5 trillion in total taxpayer money since the bail-out
program commenced in fall 2008 (an exact figure is hard to determine). What is known in
academic-speak as “neo-liberalism” represents little more than the sophisticated apex of
a governing system refined and perfected over the course of several decades (nay,
centuries), which is principally designed to socialize the risks of rapacious capitalism
while privatizing public goods to create unprecedented levels of profit for the super-
wealthy.
Blum is not only a representative of this system, but one of its most skillful promoters
and practitioners. Throughout his career, and particularly in recent years, he has
siphoned off taxpayer money into the coffers of his various personal holdings with a
calculated brazenness that would make the most swaggering Costra Nostra blush. The
Headwaters Forest scam was indicative of exactly how these people have done business
for nigh on three decades. To pull only a handful of examples from the very recent past:
• In early-2007, investigative reporter Peter Byrne published a groundbreaking
series in the North Bay Bohemian, the “Feinstein Files.” Byrne revealed that as
chairperson of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee from
2001 through 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of more than $1.5 billion for
two defense contractors, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation, in which Blum owned a
controlling interest. In the series’ smoking gun, long-time Blum business partner Michael
R. Klein told Byrne he regularly took the highly unusual step of supplying Feinstein’s office
with lists of Perini’s current and upcoming contractual interests in federal legislation,
ostensibly so the senator would abstain from voting on these matters for ethical reasons
(which she never did). “Earmarks, you know, set asides, you name it, there was a system
in place which on a regular basis I got notified, I notified her office, and her office
notified her,” said Klein, Perini’s vice chairman at the time. Blum later sold his holdings in
URS to the tune of more than $100 million in personal profit.
• In January 2009, Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in federal
funding to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) program designed to forestall
home foreclosures by expediting loan workouts and expanding federal loan guarantees.
On the surface, Feinstein’s legislation was a straightforward intervention on behalf of
troubled homeowners nationwide. But less than two months prior, the FDIC had also
awarded Blum’s real estate company, CB Richard Ellis, a multimillion dollar contract to sell
homes the agency had inherited from failed banks. This move was also highly unusual,
since Feinstein is not a member of the Senate committee that oversees the FDIC.
• This past November, the University of California Board of Regents imposed an
“emergency” 32 percent fee increase on undergraduate students, effective in the 2009-
10 academic year. The increase stems not only from severe state-mandated budget cuts,
but also a series of decisions by the university’s board of regents – of which Richard
Blum is the resident alpha member (although no longer chair of the board), having been
appointed to that post by Gray Davis – that have effectively pledged student fee
increases to the capital bond market, thereby creating a financial incentive for the
Regents to continually raise fees, in a pyramid scheme that raises money for campus
construction projects. Itshould come as no surprise that URS Corporation, the same
company that made $1.5 billion on contracts awarded by Feinstein's Senate military
construction committee, has been the main contractor for the largest university capital
projects in recent years: UCLA’s $150 million reconstruction of Santa Monica Hospital,
UC Berkeley’s $48 million nanotechnology laboratory, and Berkeley’s $200 million
Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial
Stadium and an expansion of the Haas School of Business -- home of the Blum Center for
Developing Economies. More on this in next week’s AVA.
Blum-Feinstein, Inc. has accomplished these immense transfers of public wealth absent of
almost any serious media scrutiny. But in recent years, the media deep freeze has slowly
begun to thaw, beginning with a pair of front-page stories in the San Francisco Chronicle
in May 2005. Chronicle science writer Keay Davidson’s fine reporting was spurred on by
a public outing at a UC Regents meeting when students revealed Blum’s conflict of interest
as a member of the committee overseeing the two nuclear weapons labs the UC runs on
behalf of the US government. Blum’s URS Corporation had a $125 million, five-year
construction and engineering services contract with the UC’s Los Alamos, NM nuclear
weapons development compound at the time. Less than two years later, Peter Byrne’s
series regarding Blum's war profiteering appeared in the North Bay Bohemian.
This past semester, UC Berkeley Visiting Scholar of Geography Gray Brechin co-taught a
course on investigative journalism. Brechin is best known as the author of a superb
historical work on Northern California’s ruling elite, Imperial San Francisco. He has been
an observer of Blum-DiFi, Inc. for years.
“I'm very impressed by the reluctance of most journalists to follow a story that has been
screaming to be done for years while they have been covering their ears and eyes,”
Brechin told us. “You guys and Peter [Byrne] are about the only ones who understand that
behind the billowing smoke appears to be a roaring bonfire.”
Blum-Feinstein’s concentration of power is greatest in their home state, of course, and it
stands to reason in any case that Blum’s CB Richard Ellis would be making a killing off the
ongoing fire sale of Sate of California assets. In October, CBRE secured a contract from
the California Department of General Services to broker over $2 billion in office
buildings the state intends to privatize.
Blum’s fortunes aren't entirely a function of Feinstein’s legislative exploits. Nor are
Feinstein's political powers entirely a result of her Daddy Warbucks. And the State of
California’s economic plight stems not only from the avarice of a small handful of
individuals, but from an economic system that is inherently self-destructive and crisis-
prone. Blum and Feinstein, however, have worked hand-in-glove with other members of
the state's banking, real estate, agribusiness, and military-industrial interests to buffer
regressive tax and spending policies, helping to devise the very austerity measures
currently being hoisted upon the people of California across all public sectors, not just
within the University of California.
Therein lies much of the reason Blum is now so quick to tout his anti-poverty bona fides.
Blum, you see, has a public relations problem. It’s built into the way he does business.
It's built into the political economy he straddles as one of the US empire's most
connected and wealthy power elites.
Gray Brechin notes that Blum seems to have hired a public relations firm to bolster his
personal brand. “Blum has gotten an extraordinary amount of fawning publicity in a very
short time, including a front page feature in the Haas Business School magazine about
what a whiz he is. I believe that this coincided with the black tie event at the Palace
Hotel where Haas celebrated him as Global Citizen of the Year and I joined others from
Cal to protest his actions as Alpha Regent.”
“Then there were the two treacly profiles of him in the San Francisco Chronicle recently.
I can't believe this is all coincidental.”
It isn't. Nor is it coincidental that, as Peter Byrne revealed, longtime Blum business
partner Michael Klein has founded a nonprofit foundation that makes grants to media
organizations that watchdog the federal government. The organization started after
Wikipedia instituted a policy blocking congressional staffers from editing Wiki entries
pertaining to their bosses. Employees from Dianne Feinstein’s office had just been
caught editing entries in the online encyclopedia that cast Blum and Feinstein in an
unfavorable light. Thus does one of Blum's closest business associates now control a
significant portion of the budgets of several ostensibly independent organizations that
monitor political
corruption.
Blum is also now strongly affiliated with a multi-campus academic program at the UC,
centered on an institute at UC Berkeley that Blum founded with $15 million in seed money,
designed to put band-aids on the symptoms of global poverty he and his wife have had an
instrumental role in creating. Beyond this exercise in mystifying the causes of poverty in
distant lands, the state's economic elite -- with Blum and Feinstein helping to lead the
charge -- have long been in the process of turning their philosophy of neoliberal
privatization, fiscal austerity, and personal enrichment on the State of California itself.
Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, indeed.
Blum is a self-professed Buddhist and friend of the XVIth Dalai Lama. Many of his anti-
poverty efforts are geared toward slum dwellers in Tibet and Nepal. “Would an actual
Buddhist provide the bulk of the funding for a multi-million dollar institute, only to attach
his own name to it?” Brechin mused.
The populist anger seething below the surface of the American body politic has not yet
boiled over into any sort of coherent rebellion against the elites who have wrought the
greatest economic catastrophe since the 1930s. There is little indication that it will any
time soon. Blum’s own financial empire, however, is now quietly under assault by the
hundreds of University of California students who have learned to loathe the man who
has done more than any other to structurally adjust their university and price many of the
state's youth out of higher education. These cognizant students, supported by campus
workers paid poverty wages by university leaders like Blum, are now organizing building
take-overs and some of the largest student protests on those campuses of the past four
decades.
In the next part of this series, we will focus on Blum’s role in gutting the University of
California, where the tuition increases extracted in the last four years from Mendocino
County residents alone would be large enough to close roughly half the county's $7 million
budget gap.
Readers can contact Will Parrish at wparrish(a)riseup.net and Darwin
Bond-Graham at darwin(a)riseup.net. They originally prepared this series for the
Anderson Valley Advertiser (http://theava.com/), one of the very few real newspapers in
America and probably soon the last one left standing.
Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect
Posted: February 28, 2010 10:21 PM
The Cure That Dares Not Speak Its Name
Read More: Health Care Public Option ,
Obama Public Option , Public Option ,
Universal Health Care , Universal Healthcare
, Politics News
In all of the debates about health care
reform, one of the stubborn realities is that
neither the Obama plan, nor any of the
Republican alternatives, will seriously alter
the trajectory of relentless cost-escalation in
health care. If you look at the
Administration's own projections of federal
deficits in the next decade and after 2020,
virtually all of the alarming growth in deficit
spending is Medicare and Medicaid.
And that's only the public part of the health
care bill. In 2009, total health care costs
increased to 17.3 percent of GDP, with
escalating premiums eating into both
corporate profits and worker take home pay.
The consensus among the usual policy experts
is that there is no good solution. The march
of technology and demography will just
continue to raise health costs.
But you can reach that conclusion only by ignoring how the rest of the club of
affluent countries manages to insure everyone for 9 or 10 percent of GDP, and have a
healthier and longer-lived population, to boot. They do it, of course, through universal,
socialized insurance.
There is no single formula. The Canadians do it with a single payer system for the
insurance part, but physicians are private. The Brits have an integrated National Health
Service. The Germans achieve near-universal coverage through a system of nonprofit
health insurance plans.
What every other nation has in common is that they have taken the commercialism out of
their health systems. As a consequence, they can direct health spending to areas of
medical need rather than letting the market direct health dollars to areas of greatest
profit. And with everyone covered, they can use highly cost-effective strategies for
prevention, wellness, and public health. That's how you cover everyone for ten percent of
GDP.
Our one island of single-payer medicine, Medicare, is phenomenally popular -- so popular
that the Republicans' most effective attack on the Obama plan is that it would divert
some money from Medicare. The Republicans, on the one hand, fiercely attack
"government-run health insurance," while on the other they defend Medicare (which they
would just as soon privatize).
But most Democratic politicians and policy wonks behave as if the option of a national
health plan simply did not exist. These blinders are the result of the immense power of
the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex combined with a failure of political
leadership. Sooner or later, mainstream politicians will stumble their way to some form of
single payer because there are no good alternatives unless we want to spend half of our
GDP on health care.
In that regard, the best things about the still inconclusive end-game of Obama's efforts
to enact his plan are that (1) the administration finally broke with the insurance industry,
and (2) Obama is starting to get over the delusion of bipartisanship. So if we don't need
either Harry and Louise, or John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, as part of the health-
reform coalition, we might as well do it right.
With Obama's health summit behind us, there will now be a mad scramble for Democratic
votes in the House and Senate to pursue the strategy that Obama should have used all
along -- a Democrats-only bill relying on 51 votes in the Senate via the reconciliation
procedure.
The problem is that Obama may have missed the moment. The prolonged, enervating
battle for health reform, using a badly flawed bill, has scared off both conservative and
liberal Democrats in both houses. The bill is politically toxic to legislators facing re-
election, for good reason. The original formula, designed to enlist insurance industry
allies, required a mandate to purchase insurance, diversion of Medicare funds, and
unpopular taxes. Now that Obama has broken with the industry, an entirely different
formula should be possible.
Alas, we are too far down the present road to advance single-payer in this legislative
session. The president has done nothing to move public opinion in that direction, and has
backed away even from the truncated version of it, the so-called public option.
I would put the odds at about one in three of Obama succeeding. Several Democrats who
voted for the House-passed bill in November by the narrow margin of 220-215 have now
defected, and several more are increasingly gun-shy. I don't much like this bill, but I still
hope it passes so that the Republicans don't get rewarded for their relentless
obstructionism.
Win or lose, the next great push should be for single-payer, assuming Democrats have a
working majority again in foreseeable future. Given the collateral damage of Obama's
strategy, that could be a long time coming.
Robert Kuttner is the author of the forthcoming book A Presidency in Peril (Chelsea-
Green, March 2010). He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at
Demos.
Is Taxpayer Money Being Funneled Through
The Chamber Of Commerce To Kill Health
Reform?
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an umbrella
lobbying organization for international
corporations and big business, is one of the
driving forces fighting to kill health reform.
In 2009, the Chamber dropped $123 million in
lobbying, much of it against health reform,
and organized an attack ad campaign against
health reform, spending another $100 million.
Now, as health reform enters its final
stages, the Chamber is gearing up to blanket
critical districts across the country with a
new series of attack ads.
While the Chamber refuses to publicly list its
membership, several confirmed Chamber
members are banks which were bailed out by
taxpayers and still have not repaid the TARP
funds. For instance, New York Private Bank &
Trust received TARP funds and still owes
$254,892,509 back to the government. Diana
Cantor, the bank’s managing director, is a
board member of the Chamber Foundation and
wife of Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA),
two leading opponents of reform. How can
taxpayers be reassured that Cantor’s bank, and
other bailed out Chamber banks, are not using taxpayer dollars to fund the
Chamber’s anti-reform activities? Here are the bailed out banks we know are
funding the Chamber and have not paid back TARP:
– Citigroup, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout money.
Citigroup still owes taxpayers over $22 billion in TARP funds.
– Marshall & Ilsley Bank, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout
money. M&I Bank still owes taxpayers over $1.6 billion in TARP funds.
– New York Private Bank & Trust, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received
bailout money. Diana Cantor, the bank’s managing director, sits on the Chamber Foundation’
s board. New York Private Bank & Trust still owes taxpayers over $250 million in TARP
funds.
To preserve brand identity and maintain secrecy, many businesses use groups like the
Chamber to launder money for political means. For instance, health insurance companies
lied and told the public all last year that they were supportive of reform — while
simultaneously funneling up to $20 million dollars for attack ads through the Chamber
(the other $80 million spent on Chamber attack ads against health reform is still
unaccounted for).
Although reform would benefit the business community at large by controlling insurance
costs and improving worker health, the Chamber is taking a rigid, ideological approach.
Indeed, the Chamber is known to have become increasingly partisan under the leadership
of Tom Donohue; an analysis by the Wonk Room found that the Chamber’s board is
dominated by Republican donors. The Chamber seeks to kill large progressive reforms in
order to kill progressive policies in general. Chamber officials have even gone on record
noting they hoped to block health reform as a tactical measure to kill clean energy
reform, a priority of many Chamber member companies.
As Matt Yglesias has observed, American trade associations like the Chamber “behave in
a highly ideological, highly solidaristic manner rather than as narrow interest groups.” By
promoting gridlock and the status quo, the Chamber hopes to stall other key progressive
agenda items banks oppose, like labor and financial reform.
Liberian leader urges MPs to back action against
vulture funds
Thursday, February 25, 2010
An investigation for BBC's Newsnight has
uncovered allegations that speculators
subverted the international debt relief process.
By Greg Palast and Heather Stewart for The
Guardian
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia,
is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds
from using British courts to prey on poor
countries when it comes to a vote on Friday.
Liberia lost a $20m (£13m) case in London last
year against two so-called vultures. Such funds
buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for
them to win from the international community,
and then use courts to pursue the countries for
assets.
Sirleaf said: "We've been waiting for a
parliament or an assembly to take this kind of
hard decision. I hope the US Congress and
maybe some others in Europe will pick up this
gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain."
An investigation for BBC's Newsnight, to be
broadcast tonight, has uncovered allegations that
speculators subverted the international debt relief process for Liberia, in an attempt to
gain more money from its government and international donors than 97% of its other
creditors accepted.
Liberia received debt relief worth $4bn from the international community in 2007 under
the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, including $2bn from private-sector
bondholders. Insiders to negotiations allege that two US financiers, Eric Hermann and
Michael Straus, allowed other creditors to accept a low payout from Liberia, then quietly
transferred their holdings to two other firms, which then sued in Britain for the debt in
full.
BBC cameraman Rick Rowley in Liberia, reporting with Greg Palast from the village of
Demeh, Liberia.
One of Liberia's biggest creditors, Hans Humes, owner of New York's Greylock Capital,
criticised the behaviour of speculators in the negotiations over the country's debts.
"[They were] just sitting there and saying: 'OK, we're the last guys and we're going to
hold up any process by which the country can grow unless somebody takes care of us.'
It's extortion," he said.
Two others who were involved in the negotiations confirmed that Humes's criticisms
must refer to Hermann and Straus.
The private member's bill, which will receive its second reading on Friday, would prevent
vultures from pursuing any of the 40 countries that have qualified as heavily indebted
poor countries. Sponsored by Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, it would prevent assets being
seized, even in cases that have already been brought – so campaigners say it should help
Liberia.
When a Newsnight crew went to Hermann's New York office to question the financier,
the company's nameplate had been unbolted from the wall, the suite number removed and
the firm's staff locked inside the office. A security guard said he had been ordered to
look out for the BBC crew and keep it out of the building.
In 1998, a US judge found lawyer Straus guilty of "champerty" – buying poor nations'
debts just for the purpose of suing them. An appeals court later reversed the finding.
In February 2002, Straus and Hermann sued Liberia for $18m for debts they had
obtained for a fraction of that sum. They filed the suit in the US, the week Liberia's
capital was under siege from rebels, without electricity, water or a functioning
government. Straus and Hermann won a judgment for the $18m by default.
*********
Greg Palast, investigative reporter for BBC Newsnight.
Sign up for Palast's investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com and subscribe to Palast's
podcast.
Many American progressives don’t want to recognize how bad the U.S. mainstream news
media has become. It’s easier to praise a few exceptions to the rule and to hope that
some pendulum will swing than to undertake the challenging task of building a new and
honest media infrastructure.
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But the hard reality is that the U.S. news media is getting worse, with now both premier
national newspapers – the New York Times and the Washington Post – decidedly sliding
into the neocon camp, where the likes of the Wall Street Journal have long resided.
For the Post, this may already be an old story, given its enthusiastic cheerleading for the
Iraq War. The Times, however, was a somewhat different story. Yes, it did let Judith
Miller and other staff writers promote the fictions about Iraq’s WMD, but it hadn’t sunk
to the depths of the Post.
That is now changing as the Times – behind executive editor Bill Keller and editorial page
editor Andrew Rosenthal – tosses aside all pretense of objectivity in the cause of seeking
“regime change” in Iran, today’s top priority for the neoconservatives.
At Consortiumnews.com, we have noted this trend for some months, not only in the New
York Times opinion section but in its news columns where Iran’s alleged interest in
acquiring a nuclear weapon is trumpeted incessantly (despite its denial of such a desire),
while rogue nuclear states in the region (such as Israel, Pakistan and India) are given a
pass. [See, for example, “US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco in Iran.”]
This Sunday, the Times’ bias was on display again in the lead editorial entitled, “New
Think and Old Weapons,” which purported to examine the state of nuclear weapons in the
world.
Fitting with the Times’ deepening neocon tendencies, Iran’s nuclear weapons (even though
they don’t exist) were a major topic, while the rogue nuclear states of Israel, Pakistan
and India (which have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) weren’t
mentioned.
So, you had formulations like this: “Iran, North Korea and others have seemingly
unquenchable nuclear appetites” and the need to “bolster American credibility … to rein in
Iran, North Korea and other proliferators.” In all, there were four such references to
North Korea and Iran, but no specific references to Israel, Pakistan and India.
The Times also observed that China was “the only major nuclear power adding to its
arsenal [which] is estimated to have 100 to 200 warheads.” There was no mention of
Israel, which is believed to possess one of the most sophisticated nuclear arsenals in the
world, totaling some 200 or more devices.
Ironically, the Times editorial also cited problems of “hypocrisy and double standards”
and noted that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was “battered.”
The Times did not seem at all embarrassed by its own hypocrisy and double standards.
Nor did it bother to note that one of the key reasons this “bedrock” treaty is in trouble
is that non-signatories – like Israel, Pakistan and India – have built nukes, often with a
wink and a nod from Washington.
As neocon propagandists pursue their goal of riling up the American public against some
new foreign threat, that effort requires highlighting certain facts (and even fictions). But
the propagandists equally must make sure that many inconvenient truths are conveniently
forgotten. Otherwise the alleged threat might not seem all that unusual or threatening.
So, in the world of neocon propaganda, Iran – a treaty signatory that has no nuclear
weapons and insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes – must be endlessly
badgered, but Israel – an undeclared rogue nuclear state with a vast arsenal – must be
shielded from similar criticism and pressure.
That the New York Times has now embraced these neocon biases, almost with the ardor
of the Washington Post, is a serious development for the U.S. news media and for the
nation.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George
W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at
neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project
Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
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Rev. Jesse Jackson
Civil rights activist
Posted: March 2, 2010 12:22 PM
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With Justice for All: Human Rights and Civil Rights at
Home and Abroad
The following was originally given as a speech on March
1, 2010 at the Cambridge Union Society.
I want to thank Cambridge University for inviting me to
speak to you this evening. It is always a joy and
privilege for me to come to the United Kingdom.
I have treasured memories of my earliest visits
marching with Bishop Huddleston and Bernie Grant and
Diane Abbott against apartheid in Trafalgar Square in
the early 1980's. Later I met with Prime Minister
Thatcher when I was on my way to South Africa to
witness Mandela gaining his freedom from prison.
On February 15, 2003, I was proud to march with former Mayor Ken Livingstone and two
million opponents of launching an illegal, unnecessary war on Iraq, and imploring Tony Blair
from the stage in Hyde Park not to ruin his legacy by blindly backing George W. Bush.
More recently, I joined with Equanomics UK, an organization that measures societal
inequality and advocates for closing the gaps, as we went on a nine-city tour throughout
the UK to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of Britain's Slave Trade
Act. We visited the Liverpool Slavery Museum, and talked at every stop about the legacy
of Wilberforce and the abolitionists.
Some of you may remember my visit a year ago, when the Rt. Honorable Keith Vaz and his
staff skillfully reunited me with a now-grown-up Stuart Lockwood, a former child hostage
who had refused to sit on Saddam Hussein's knee, and whom I had rescued and brought
back to London.
I've recently had the honor of receiving honorary fellowships at Regents Park College at
Oxford and Edge Hill University, and to meet last year with Prime Minister Brown.
Now it is a distinct privilege to be able to engage and share with you scholars tonight--
students, faculty, staff--at this prestigious, world-renowned educational institution,
whose alumni have played such a huge role in the way the modern world sees itself.
I am very honored to be here. I grew up in the segregated South in Greenville, South
Carolina, behind what I call the "Cotton Curtain." Some how, some way, thanks be to the
Grace of God, I was able to emerge from behind those walls and barriers, to make the
long journey to Cambridge to be with you this evening.
A New UK
I was recently in the Netherlands, Germany and Brussels, and the past few days in
London. What struck me is we live today--especially you young people--in an emerging new
Europe, a new Britain. It's far different from the one of your parents and the Churchill
generation. That Europe related to Jamaica and the Caribbean, India, China, Bangladesh,
Nigeria or South Africa, as "colonies and colonized people," living under the sting of
apartheid.
These former colonized people became Britain's newest immigrants, and now its newest
citizens, with their cultures, languages--and brought their hopes, dreams, energies and
interests to the UK.
Your generation now relates to Britain's newest residents as neighbors, classmates,
business partners, MP's, voting partners.
There are three million Blacks and Ethnic Minorities in the UK today, growing to some
eight million in the next decade. 22% are living in poverty. In large degree, they are
marginalized and, like in the U.S., face structural inequalities in criminal justice,
education, employment, health care - nearly every social, economic, political and
educational category in the life of our two great nations.
These structural disparities are well documented by Equanomics UK:
1. 25% of white children live in Poverty in England, but 56% African, 60% Pakistani, 72%
Bangladeshi children, far too high a percentage for any of our communities.
2. Compared to a White British Christian man with the same qualifications, age and
occupation, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim men and Black African Christian men have
pay 13-21 per cent lower.
3. Pakistani and Bangladeshi households have a median equivalent net income of only £238
a week compared to the national median of £393. Nearly half are below the poverty line.1
It is not enough to observe these structural inequality gaps; we must close them through
recommendations formulated in the Racial Justice Manifesto produced by a coalition of
the UK's leading other policy organizations.
As the Black and ethnic minority population grows, so too will their voting and political
power, and their demand for equality and a level playing field. Taken together, this vote,
as it has in the U.S., can determine the margin of victory for the UK's upcoming elections.
So forging a new UK--one that is inclusive and sets a level playing field for all of its
people--brings forth new challenges and opportunities. As the UK and Europe seek to re-
emerge and restore their economies shattered by the global banking crisis, it should not
be at the expense of Britain's Black and ethnic minority population.
In the past we learned a bad lesson well: how to survive apart, with "us and them"
polarization. We must now unlearn that bad lesson, and learn a new lesson well: to live
together, to choose co-existence over co-annihilation.
It is in England's national interest to lift up those who are locked out - to tear down walls
of separation and exclusion and build new bridges. Britain's new leaders, the emerging
leaders of your generation, are challenged to move away from living in isolation, governing
in isolation - and to commit to forging a multi-cultural, multi-racial, inclusive society, a one-
big-tent Britain and a one-big-tent Europe.
Tears of Joy & History
When I came to Britain one year ago, people asked me about our then-brand-new
president, Barack Obama. The 2008 election marked a maturing of America. We had
taken a big step towards overcoming America's original sin, a nation founded largely on
slavery by slave owners, bearing the mark of 400 years of slavery and segregation and
apartheid.
In President Obama, we chose a leader of vision, keen intellect, a new president with a
high moral compass. He sees the world through a door, not through a keyhole. Barack
Obama ran a brilliant campaign, the fast last lap of a long, long relay.
In that great moment in history, many forces converged in my consciousness, in my
memory bank--and my lifetime of experiences. And I wept as I wished just for one
moment the countless, nameless marchers and martyrs who sacrificed so much could
share this victory, their victory.
I just wished for one fleeting moment that my mentor, my teacher Dr. King could have
been in Chicago that night, if only for a moment to share the joy. I thought of the
martyrs who gave their lives trying to register Blacks to vote in the South, Jimmie Lee
Jackson, Medgar Evers, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, Voila Liuzzo. Their struggles,
their martyrdom, made Barack Obama's victory possible. When I thought of them, the
tears rolled down my face. Tears of joy. Tears of history.
50 Years of Struggle
It's a long journey from the segregated South to the Cambridge Union Society. Tonight I
think back on my own first arrest for nonviolent civil disobedience, fifty years ago this
summer, trying to use a public library in my home town of Greenville, South Carolina.
Just a few weekends ago I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, to dedicate a new museum
dedicated to the four students who sat down to integrate a lunch counter on February 1,
1960--fifty years ago--in an act that electrified the young people of America.
This weekend we commemorate Bloody Sunday 45 years ago, where attack dogs and fire
hoses were unleashed on people marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama.
The historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery that followed led to the
enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Voting Rights Act is commonly seen "for Blacks"--but the changes it inspired helped
heal the whole society. White women could not serve on juries in much of the South;
farmers couldn't vote unless they paid poll taxes. 18-year olds couldn't vote yet--that
came five years later.
Bilingual voting came five years after that. College students won the right to vote where
they went to school, which allowed the Obama campaign to organize dormitories as
precincts.
When we ran for president in 1984 and 1988, we changed the Democratic Party rules
from winner-take-all to proportional representation, which later made Barack Obama's
2008 victory possible.
These changes were for everybody in America, not for Blacks only. So those who would
try to eliminate Black history are off base.
The United Kingdom's history is the slave trade--as well as leading the way in the
abolishment of the slave trade. The U.K.'s history is the colonization of India, as well as
the liberation led by Gandhi.
Britain's history is apartheid in South Africa, as well as the long road to freedom of
Nelson Mandela. British history is Black history is inextricably bound with Britain's
history.
Mature Whites in Britain must rebel against others trying to limit your history and
heritage. Especially for those of you who are young, an expanded, inclusive history will be
a big factor in your own destiny.
Free but Not Equal--Globalizing Human Rights
Today we are free, but not equal. Today we are caught in a global economic crisis. We
have globalized capital, but we have not globalized human rights. We have not globalized
workers rights. We have not globalized rights for women, rights for children,
environmental protections.
Freedom was not the only goal of our struggle; it was a prerequisite to equality. Yet today
our technological wizardry has outstripped our morality. We need to mesh new technology
with timeless moral values. We need to build bridges, and close the gaps.
Let me give you an example--why do African-Americans do so well in athletics? We excel
in basketball, football, baseball, golf, tennis, track. Well, the playing field in athletics is
level for everyone. The rules are clear, and published. The referees are unbiased and fair.
So when we went to the Olympics in Beijing, we won our fair share of medals. The
winners won with grace, the losers lost with dignity. There were no aftershocks of racism.
But in the economic realm, the referees are missing, the rules are not clear, the playing
field is tilted. So when African-Americans try to compete in finance, to work on Wall
Street, to trade with China, suddenly the results are biased.
Capital can move quickly, seek out poverty wages and slave labor, leave behind devastated
communities and unfathomable pain. Finance circles the globe at the click of a button, and
trillions in wealth can disappear or move offshore in moments.
Monopoly capital has solidified its global control of media, banks, telecommunications--
and it uses its monetary clout to dominate our politics, trying to overwhelm one-person,
one-vote democracy with corporate power. We see this in the U.K., with billionaires
quietly investing big money to target marginal districts.
We saw it recently in the U.S., where a small cadre on the Supreme Court, by one vote
overturned a century of precedents, freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums
targeting their opponents in elections, and undermining the spirit of American democracy.
The Lockean principles of checks and balances, separation of powers, are undermined.
The financial crisis was global, pushing the U.S., UK and Europe, Asia, the world banks to
the brink of collapse. Jobs vanished at the whims of a small elite of corporate
"banksters;" unions were devastated; nations were played off against weaker nations.
Financial services companies merged and purged. A classic consumer run to withdraw
deposits led to Northern Rock's collapse. Abbey National took over the Bank of Scotland.
Barclays moved to gobble up the Woolwich.
But greed never resolves its own contradictions. A globalized capitalist system is not
magically self-correcting.
The modern day system of finance capital collapsed. That system failed. And it put in peril
millions upon millions of every day working people in the U.S., Great Britain, and around
the world.
But the American and European governments bailed out failing banks with massive capital
infusions. They said, "Banks are too big too fail." The UK government injected upwards of
£850 billion of taxpayers cash into the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and
HBOS.
And now corporations on both sides of the ocean are issuing billions of dollars in bonuses
to their executives who led their companies into fiscal ruin and nearly bankrupted whole
nations.
Our systems are so intertwined that whether we are in England or France, the
Netherlands, or the US, the same systems of top-down exploitation required the same
massive bailouts.
The big banking system was re-fortified, reinforced; now it needs to be restructured.
The democratic principles of checks and balances, separation of powers, oversight and
regulation must be applied.
We don't want to diminish the creativity of capital; but we must not diminish the
significance of regulations and a fair referee; nor of a strong public infrastructure.
Remember the Marshall Plan, with its reconstruction bank, 50-year loans at 2%,
government-secured. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe's roads, rails, bridges, ports--and
set the stage for a renewed prosperity, and for peace.
This is a change moment, a time to remake the world's financial systems. When creditors
become predators, it's time for a new global economic agenda. We must democratize
capital, and globalize participation. The freedom struggle was not just for freedom; it
was a prerequisite to equality and justice.
Now is our time to pass a "Robin Hood" tax on financial speculation. Now is our chance to
globalize human rights and workers rights, protect women and children, save the global
environment. Now is our chance to democratize capital and media, to pass the structural
economic changes that were untouched by the freedom struggle's political reforms.
Too few people control too much capital and media, leveraging too much political influence
for a healthy democratic outcome. Yet new wine--your generation, more diverse, more
global, more tolerant--will not fit into old wineskins.
Mid-Day in Our Politics, Midnight in Our Economy
President Obama took office with the nation and world mired in the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression -- the global markets were on the brink of collapse. By
December 2008, the end of the Bush Era, 800,000 Americans per month were losing
their jobs -- nearly eight million were left unemployed these past few years.
Roots of the crisis:
1. Banks overturned regulations in place since the 1930's, and used "deregulation" to post
record profits.
2. Arrogance and unbridled greed and quest for profits by any means necessary.
3. Congress and federal regulators, fueled by financial contributions from Wall Street (or
seeking private Wall Street jobs after they left office), aided and abetted the crisis, and
fell asleep at the wheel while the crisis overwhelmed the US and world like an economic
tsunami.
4. Our Department of Justice failed to enforce fair lending and civil rights laws--
cornerstone legal victories won by Dr. King and the civil rights movement in the 1960s--
and allowed discriminatory, predatory lending practices to victimized Blacks and other
people of color.
5. Fundamentally, the crisis is rooted in an unprecedented era of unchecked, modern day
finance capitalism--free market philosophy, absent any government intervention and
regulation--which drove the global economy to the brink of collapse. Globalized banking
and technology were not coupled with integrity and honest values.
Government must play a stronger role, not a lesser one--we've seen the disastrous
economic crisis resulting from that philosophy. It must intervene to regulate, and enforce
needed checks and balances to curb unmitigated greed. It must intervene to protect the
majority from the tyranny of the ruling minority.
People want government policies that preserve economic security and equity in our homes
and pensions. They want government to protect jobs; provide health care; promote
democratic and just values; protect our environment thru prompt attention to curbing
global warming;
A government and economic system that bridges gap between rich and poor; a government
that defends and protects civil and human rights at home and abroad.
President Obama's financial bailout staved off global economic collapse--it was the right
thing to do. But its weakness was that the bailout was not linked to loans; it was top-down,
not bottom-up.
The banks were "trusted" to extend credit; they should have been "mandated" to do so.
The banks need to not just be reinforced, but to be restructured, as Franklin Roosevelt
did.
Equanomics: I have mentioned the term "Equanomics" - coined by our British affiliate
Equanomics UK - which is a fusion of equality and economics. Equanomics measures the
economic consumer power of Black and ethnic minorities; it measures equality and the
economic costs of inequality.
What we have found is the same systems, with the same results, in both the U.S. & the U.
K. For example:
The current costs of tackling educational underachievement, unemployment and their over-
representation in school exclusions and in the Criminal Justice System were calculated to
be about £808 million a year (PWC research for the REACH report 2007)
£100 million per year costs in London alone for the overrepresentation of Blacks in
mental health units (Sainsbury Centre)
Yet by 2011 the economic worth of Black, Asian and minority communities will be as much
as £300 billion. Black and Asian consumers are also estimated to earn up to £156 billion
after tax income, with young men being the bigger consumers and spending £32 billion
every year.
We need to democratize our political and economic systems. Time will tell if the solutions
pursued by the UK and European governments pass the "equity" test, and hold true to the
universal value that the "mark of a good democracy is how well it treats the least of these
in society."
Where Do We Go From Here?
When President Obama spoke in Egypt, he argued correctly that we must find ecumenical
common ground, and not allow anyone to misuse the name of any religion as a cover for
terrorism. All religions have "characters" who go too far; but the "character" of each
religion should not be maligned because of individual abuses.
We must help the President in his fight for health care for all. Health care reform is
morally right; it will be cost-efficient; it will ease the lives of many of the 50 million
Americans without health care and 50 million more without catastrophic health care.
But it is a challenge to the powerful status quo, so President Obama is meeting stiff
headwinds of resistance. The health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries have
blocked reform--so far.
But President Obama is meeting stiff headwinds of resistance. We elected him, in a
magnificent, multi-racial grassroots victory, but the fight is far from over.
And as we confront the global economic calamity, I'm always reminded that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. authored the essay, "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?"
An ascendant civil rights movement organized the1963 March on Washington, the historic
1965 march from Selma to Montgomery--a movement that led to passage of the Civil
Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But by January 1967 when he wrote the "Where Do We Go
from Here?" essay, the civil rights struggle was on its heels, searching for direction and
strategy.
His query is especially appropriate right now, with the dialectics of crisis and opportunity
so prevalent in our world.
Just one year ago, people in the U.S. voted for change and a new direction, breaking down
old barriers of cynicism, doubt and disbelief.
Now stiff winds of resistance are blowing from all directions. It's been some time since
we've witnessed such a sustained, ideologically inspired campaign to smear and vilify a
president, to drown out rational public debate and discourse, and circumvent the people's
desire for progressive change--even going so far as to question the president's
citizenship!
Wall Street got bailed out, but unemployment is rising. Foreclosures are rising. Student
loan debt is rising. Hope is up, too, but unfortunately so is poverty.
Yes, it's mid-day in our politics, but midnight in our economy. We must have the clear
vision and strong will to ride out the storms of the long night until the sun rises and we
reach the dawn of a new day.
Perhaps we should go to our Biblical mission statement:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the
poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for
the blind, to release the oppressed...
Bring good news to the needy...
We stopped the bleeding at the top; now we need a bottom-up reconstruction plan.
Smaller, targeted reconstruction for banks that can live within regulation, oversight,
consumer protection and lending laws.
We need to create economic recovery that targets the zones of pain. The original
stimulus focused on the zones of gain. They've watered the leaves at the top, but not the
roots at the bottom. We need direct, targeted jobs programs, and the expansion of
lending to spur small business development. It is time to focus on helping those who are
the victims of, not the cause of, the crisis.
Care for the Sick...
By enacting comprehensive, accessible and affordable health care for all Americans.
Republicans have taken a stand to crush the health care bill. Blue Dog conservatives and
powerful corporate interests have taken a stand to circumvent and undermine it. So now
progressives must stand up and fight for inclusion of the public option and create the
public support the President and Congress need to pass a comprehensive health care bill
before year's end.
As we learn from each other and share, your national health care insurance model has
great appeal. It provides access to quality health care for your people--we could learn
much from you.
In our Rainbow campaigns of 1984 and 1988, I campaigned from coast to coast for
comprehensive health care for all at a time when "only" 37 million Americans were without
health insurance. Twenty years later, that number has risen to a totally unacceptable 45
million. We must do better, and now is the time.
House the Homeless...
By confronting the home foreclosure crisis threatening to tear the heart and soul of
America's communities. A record high four million families will face foreclosure this year
alone, but another 15 million homeowners will face foreclosure in the next few years.
We need a comprehensive, effective foreclosure prevention/save our homes program to
reduce the principal owed on loans, not just reduce monthly payments--to protect not just
the most distressed families in their time of need, but also to protect their
neighborhoods, the community tax base, the public services which depend on having a
healthy housing infrastructure.
We see this crisis in some measure in all of the Western countries. Your moratorium on
home foreclosures was a positive step forward.
Where do we go from here?
A New War on Poverty to Set the Oppressed Free...
We have similar systems in the U.S. & the U.K., and they have produced similar results on
the inequality front. Let me just give a couple of examples from my own country, the
richest nation on earth:
• eight million families and 40 million Americans, or 13%, live in poverty.
• fourteen million children under 18 are in poverty.
• in 2008, 49 million people didn't have enough to eat, including 17 million children.
Wars Kill Reform Movements
Dr. King understood that the Vietnam War was not just killing people overseas, but was
killing people in our barrios and ghettoes back home. The war on Vietnam killed the War
on Poverty, and ruined President Johnson's Great Society legacy.
The president's new policy of escalating and expanding the war in Afghanistan is risky
and expensive, and, despite a projected date to begin troop withdrawal, there is no end in
sight. The war on terror a real one, but it's a 21st century problem that cannot be "won"
by using 20th century strategies of military conquest. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech, Dr. King made these time-tested remarks:
...Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time--the
need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and
oppression.
We hope the president's plan is successful, and pray for the earliest return home of the
100,000 troops who will be sent to war in Afghanistan... but doubts abound.
Increasingly Western powers are investing more and more in military, with fewer and
fewer returns. It is as if we were trying to kill the mosquitoes without draining the
swamp of poverty and pain and fear and rejection.
We react to the manifestation of terrorism, but ignore the conditions that breed it.
Haiti Is the Creditor, Not the Debtor
We owe a great debt to the Haitian people who now deserve aid for to rebuild and
reconstruct their nation.
I visited Haiti last month just after the earthquake. The devastation was unimaginable.
The institutions of Haiti were in rubble. But the world has been generous, the people are
patient, enduring, tough in the face of this monstrous disaster, and hope is alive that
Haiti can rebuild, renew, and revive.
Part of Haiti's plight is that it remains on the poor end of the world's economic inequality
scale. Global capital has created a few massive winners, while millions and even billions of
people have been left behind by the world economy.
Now is a time to re-visit Haiti's history--because Haitians fought to help America in its
Revolution. And it was Haiti that struck the first big blow against Napoleon's plan for
world domination. Not only that, but Haiti's successful slave uprising, led by Touissant
L'Overture, the first such successful rebellion in world history, forced Napoleon to
conclude that he could not keep France's Western colonies under control.
The result was that he sold the Louisiana Purchase to President Thomas Jefferson, which
eventually led to the creation of all or part of 14 new states in America. Then, Jefferson
imposed a trade embargo on Haiti.
Haiti helped defeat Napoleon. The U.S. and the U.K. both owe much to Haiti's slave
uprising two centuries ago. That makes Haiti the creditor, not the debtor.
Yet France never forgave Haiti, and the United States never rewarded it. Instead, they
forced Haiti to pay billions in reparations, not fully paid off until 1947. Think of that--the
enslaved paid reparations to the colonizer.
Because Haiti was the only free Black republic in the world in the early 1800s, the
imperial nations of the world conspired to try to kill off the idea of a free Haiti.
France even shamefully kidnapped L'Overture, and he died in a French jail. Later, the U.
S. helped to kidnap President Aristide, forcing him onto a plane in the middle of the night
that secretly landed him in the Central African Republic.
Haiti is the creditor, not the debtor.
And remember this--San Francisco had an earthquake at 7.6, where 63 died. Chile just
had a horrible earthquake, at 8.8, less than a thousand have died so far. Yet when Haiti
had an earthquake at 7.0, more than 200,000 died.
The difference was not the size of the earthquake--it was the depth of the poverty. We
need to keep up our generosity, but push our nations not just to relieve and rescue Haiti,
but to allow it to reconstruct from the bottom up.
Africa Is a Creditor Continent
This is even truer for Africa, which, like Haiti, is the creditor, not the debtor. Much of
the wealth of America and Europe came from the slave trade and slave labor. Wealth
inequality persists today that stems directly from the immorality and unfairness of
colonialism and slavery. Africa is the creditor continent, not the debtor.
Even worse, it is Africa that will apparently pay the most immediate and highest price for
the global warming caused by the industrial world. Along with many former enslaved
colonies in the Caribbean, rising waters and changing weather patterns will devastate
poor countries, hitting them hard while too much of the developed world continues to
debate whether climate change is even a reality.
This is unacceptable. It is stupid and immoral. I applaud Gordon Brown for his leadership
on this issue, and I encourage him to push harder, to hold America and China's feet to
the global fire. Help us save ourselves, and everyone else. As James Baldwin warned us,
it's the fire next time.
We need debt relief and AIDS assistance and debt cancellation for the world's poorest
nations. We need clean water and vaccinations for Africa, inexpensive changes that would
vastly improve the lives of billions of our poorest neighbors.
We need fair trade, under a newly regulated economic system open to all nations. The
developed world needs to get serious about stopping global warming, because too much of
Africa and too many small island nations are beginning to pay the price for a problem they
did not cause.
Europe, you can help America do better. When you invest more and give more to Africa, it
makes it harder for my nation not to do the same. When you express reasonable
disagreement about Afghanistan, and reasonable doubt about the prospects for success,
you give us more room to maneuver at home.
When you invest more in alternative energies and green technologies, to fight global
warming, it makes it much more difficult for America to pretend we are doing all we can
to stave off disaster.
While the US and others continue to see Africa with slave-tinted lenses, China is now its
most substantial economic investor, creating alliances destined to be a factor in the
emergence of Africa as a world power.
A Rainbow World
The world is a rainbow of people. The U.S. and the UK are becoming more diverse with
each passing year. Our younger generation in America is more tolerant, more diverse,
more exposed to the larger world than their elders. That's a good thing, and it showed in
our last elections, where young people led the way in a change election.
Remember: When President Bush and Prime Minister Blair got together a few years ago
to decide to invade Iraq, that was a minority meeting.
When the big financial institution heads get together in New York or London, that's a
minority meeting, too.
The U.S. & the U.K. together represent only 5% of the world, one out of every 20 people.
Yet as all of you know, half the world lives in Asia, with almost half of them in China.
A billion people live in India, next door to their foe, Pakistan--and both are armed with
weapons of mass destruction.
One-eighth of the world lives in Africa, and a quarter of those people live in Nigeria,
where AIDS, hunger, disease, and now global warming are devastating the continent.
My country is not even a majority in our own hemisphere, where more people speak
Spanish than English, and almost as many people speak Portuguese.
Too many Americans do not realize--and perhaps too many Europeans as well do not yet
realize--that most people in the world are black, brown, yellow, young, female, non-
Christian, and don't speak English.
The formerly colonized peoples are now moving into the once-all-one-ethnic-group
societies. This is Europe's big challenge for the future, and the U.K.'s big challenge, to
build a new nation, to choose inclusion.
We must unlearn an earlier lesson we learned to well--how to survive apart. We must learn
a new lesson--how to live and prosper together, choosing inclusion and growth. A
comprehensive policy of inclusion is the roadmap to a new England, to serve the emerging,
diverse world.
If we do not begin to live in peace, develop from the bottom up, and take seriously the
limiting capacities of our fragile globe, we will not make it as a species to the end of this
century.
We must find common ground. Common ground leads to coalition, to cooperation, to
reconciliation and redemption, to higher ground. The challenge of this new world, so
connected by technology, is yours to bear, yours to share.
Dream Beyond Your Circumstances
The prophet Isaiah speaks of beauty from the ashes--where ashes abound beauty must
abound even more. Where hatred abounds, love must abound even more. Where fear
abounds, love and hope must abound even more. Fear limits us--hope unleashes creative
genius.
I want to say to you young people especially--keep reaching beyond your grasp, keep
dreaming beyond your circumstances, keep dreaming of a new Europe. When young people
move, the world changes.
Dream beyond your age. Dr. King was only 26 when he took on the leadership of the
Montgomery bus boycott. Jesus was only 33 when he died. Dream beyond your age.
Dream beyond your race and ethnicity. Build coalitions. Without an active and vocal
worldwide movement for change, we cannot make our hopes for a new world a lasting and
concrete reality.
When twelve abolitionists met together two-and-a-quarter centuries ago in London to
fight back against the profitable slave trade, few thought they would succeed. But they
persisted, Wilberforce prevailed, and the slave trade was soon ended. Dream a new world.
When the suffragists chained themselves to the fences of the powerful a century ago,
few thought that women would soon win the right to vote. But they did, putting their
bodies on the line for justice--and now women's rights fuel change in all parts of the
globe. Dream a new freedom.
When Rosa Parks sat down on that Montgomery bus in 1955, when those four students in
Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at that lunch counter in 1960, when Dr. King
marched across that bridge in Selma, Alabama, few believed that they would succeed.
But morality triumphed, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed, and
America got better, not bitter. Dream a new justice.
As Dr. King taught us:
Vanity asks: Is it popular?
Politics asks: Will it win?
Morality and conscience ask: Is it right?
So dream of a new day.
Dream of a new way.
Dream of a new Britain, an emerging Europe.
Go forward by hope and never backward by fear. Keep faith--in the end, faith will not
disappoint.
Keep Hope Alive!
Single-Payer Healthcare Coming to Missouri
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2010-03-01 19:49.
By David Swanson
Canada did not create a civilized healthcare system nationally until its provinces led the
way. Clearly Congress is dragging behind the states in our country, and it is through state
successes that we will eventually compel the U.S. government to provide our people with
this basic human right.
Hawaii has a single-payer healthcare system.California's legislature has passed a single-
payer bill three times but not yet found a governor to sign it into law. Single-payer
healthcare bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and a
growing list of states, including New Mexico, where State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a
long-time supporter of single-payer healthcare, is running for Lieutenant Governor. In
Minnesota, single-payer champion John Marty is running for Governor.
I recently wrote about North Carolina house candidate Marcus Brandon, who has pledged
to introduce a bill to create single-payer healthcare in that state as his first act in
office. Now a formidable candidate for state representative in Missouri has made a
similar commitment.
Byron DeLear, whom I have known and learned from for years, said on Monday: "If
elected, I will sponsor the 'Melanie-Care for All Act', providing a simple plan to get all of
our Missourian families the coverage, protection and care we deserve." DeLear, is a state
rep. candidate in the 79th District of Missouri. (See http://www.ByronDeLear.org ) and
who is Melanie?
DeLear explains: "A dear friend of mine, Melanie Shouse, recently passed away from
breast cancer. She found a lump in her breast but couldn't afford to see a doctor.
Through the course of her disease she tirelessly continued to advocate for healthcare
for all as a moral imperative. I met her through our shared work as concerned citizens
and like many of her friends and colleagues was inspired by her unbridled energy and
enthusiasm to effect positive change. Even in the midst of great personal suffering,
Melanie selflessly put it all on the line and did the best she could to help us all. Her story
was propelled to the national stage with President Obama mentioning her in a speech and
culminating with 'Melanie's March' from Philadelphia to Washington DC, ending with a
rally attended by Senate leader Harry Reid and other members of Congress."
DeLear is proposing to accomplish something, however, that neither Obama nor Reid will
even entertain any discussion of: taking the profit-motive out of healthcare coverage. "If
Melanie had access to affordable healthcare," DeLear says, "her untimely death might
have been prevented. Seeing a doctor was simply too expensive, just as it is for tens of
thousands of Missourians, whose fear of skyrocketing healthcare costs are justified.
Health insurance premiums in Missouri have risen 82.5% in the last decade, consequently,
the vast majority of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical costs, for both the
insured and uninsured alike. This creates a specter of fear for families all across our
state. Melanie's death is one of thousands of needless lives lost due to our current
broken and inhumane healthcare insurance system."
DeLear provides the statistics for the nation and his state: "According to a recent
Harvard Study, 45,000 Americans perish each year due to lack of preventive or primary
healthcare. This equals approximately 800 Missourians like Melanie. 800 Missourians die
each year due to our broken healthcare system. This is a moral crisis, and suggests that
we should all take a step back from the raging debate to ask ourselves, in a perfect
world, what would our ideal system be? What do we want for the family of Missouri? And
then takes steps to make that ideal a reality, or get as close to it as possible."
DeLear proposes something that has never been mentioned in over a year of endless,
tireless, and tiresome healthcare debating in Washington, namely looking for a minute at
all the nations that have already solved this problem and asking how they have done so:
"Many nations have struggled with the health-care debate before us. What's the best
way to adopt complete healthcare coverage for all? The world is full of examples of
different solutions to this question. But the trends over time are very specific. What
they show is that . . . universal coverage, regardless of class distinctions, is the desirable
end result. This goes to the heart of what insurance is and mathematically what 'risk
pools' are all about. Pooling risk makes a community, state, and nation stronger. It
protects us all against personal catastrophe. Currently, in the United States, health
insurance corporations cherry pick through the populace to determine who's worthy of
coverage, or how to deny care once you become sick. This is at odds with the healing
mandate of the medical profession, and has to be turned around."
DeLear makes an unequivocal commitment, saying "The right thing to do, is to cover all our
citizens with healthcare. Medicare covers and protects more than 800,000 Missourians.
The first bill I will support will be a Medicare-for-All type plan for Missouri. In honor of
our local heroine, Melanie Shouse, if elected, I will sponsor the 'Melanie Care for All
Act', providing a simple plan to get all of our Missourian families the coverage,
protection and care we deserve."
Byron DeLear's website is at
http://www.ByronDeLear.org
He needs all the help he can get, and there is a little button on his site reading "Make
Donation". Those who want a real healthcare system in this country would be wise to pour
money into his campaign and those of other state leaders across the country.
Alternatively we could keep putting all our eggs in the basket of fantasies about the
United States Senate getting its act together and fixing bills after they're passed.
March 4, 2010 4:00 AM PST
Feds weigh expansion of Internet monitoring
by Declan McCullagh
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano,
who said that Einstein 3 could only be discussed
in a classified setting, speaks at the RSA
conference on Wednesday.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
SAN FRANCISCO--Homeland Security and the
National Security Agency may be taking a closer
look at Internet communications in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security's top
cybersecurity official told CNET on Wednesday
that the department may eventually extend its
Einstein technology, which is designed to detect
and prevent electronic attacks, to networks
operated by the private sector. The technology
was created for federal networks.
Greg Schaffer, assistant secretary for
cybersecurity and communications, said in an
interview that the department is evaluating
whether Einstein "makes sense for expansion to
critical infrastructure spaces" over time.
Not much is known about how Einstein works, and
the House Intelligence Committee once charged that
descriptions were overly "vague" because of "excessive classification." The White House
did confirm this week that the latest version, called Einstein 3, involves attempting to
thwart in-progress cyberattacks by sharing information with the National Security
Agency.
Greater federal involvement in privately operated networks may spark privacy or
surveillance concerns, not least because of the NSA's central involvement in the Bush
administration's warrantless wiretapping scandal. Earlier reports have said that Einstein
3 has the ability to read the content of emails and other messages, and that AT&T has
been asked to test the system. (The Obama administration says the "contents" of
communications are not shared with the NSA.)
"I don't think you have to be Big Brother in order to provide a level of protection either
for federal government systems or otherwise," Schaffer said. "As a practical matter,
you're looking at data that's relevant to malicious activity, and that's the data that you're
focused on. It's not necessary to go into a space where someone will say you're acting
like Big Brother. It can be done without crossing over into a space that's problematic
from a privacy perspective."
If Einstein 3 does perform as well as Homeland Security hopes, it could help less-
prepared companies fend off cyberattacks, including worms sent through e-mail, phishing
attempts, and even denial of service attacks.
On the other hand, civil libertarians are sure to raise questions about privacy, access, and
how Einstein could be used in the future. If it can perform deep packet inspection to
prevent botnets from accessing certain Web pages, for instance, could it also be used to
prevent a human from accessing illegal pornography, copyright-infringing music, or
offshore gambling sites?
"It's one thing for the government to monitor its own systems for malicious code and
intrusions," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and
Technology. "It's quite another for the government to monitor private networks for
those intrusions. We'd be concerned about any notion that a governmental monitoring
system like Einstein would be extended to private networks."
AT&T did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
At the RSA Conference here on Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano stressed the need for more cooperation between the government and the
private sector on cybersecurity, saying that "we need to have a system that works
together."
During a House appropriations hearing on February 26, Napolitano refused to discuss
Einstein 3 unless the hearing were closed to the public. "I don't want to comment publicly
on Einstein 3, per se, here in an unclassified setting," she said. "What I would suggest,
perhaps, is a classified briefing for members of the subcommittee who are interested."
Some privacy concerns about Einstein have popped up before. An American Bar
Association panel said this about Einstein 3 in a September 2009 report: "Because
government communications are commingled with the private communications of non-
governmental actors who use the same system, great caution will be necessary to insure
that privacy and civil liberties concerns are adequately considered."
Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and programmer for the Tor anonymity project,
said that expanding Einstein 3 to the private sector would amount to a partial outsourcing
of security. "It's clearly a win for people without the security know-how to protect their
own networks," Appelbaum said. "It's also a clear loss of control. And anyone with access
to that monitoring system, legitimate or otherwise, would be able to monitor amazing
amounts of traffic."
Einstein grew out of a still-classified executive order, called National Security
Presidential Directive 54, that President Bush signed in 2008.
While little information is available, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff once likened it to a new "Manhattan Project," and the Washington Post reported
that the accompanying cybersecurity initiative represented the "single largest request for
funds" in last year's classified intelligence budget. The Electronic Privacy Information
Center has filed a lawsuit (PDF) to obtain the text of the order.
Homeland Security has published (PDF) a privacy impact assessment for a less capable
system called Einstein 2--which aimed to do intrusion detection and not prevention--but
has not done so for Einstein 3.
The department did, however, prepare a general set of guidelines (PDF) for privacy and
civil liberties in June 2009. In addition, the Bush Justice Department wrote a memo (PDF)
saying Einstein 2 "complies with" the U.S. Constitution and federal wiretap laws.
That justification for Einstein 2 "turned on the consent of employees in the government
that are being communicated with, and on the notion that a person who communicates with
the government can't then complain that the government read the communication," said
CDT's Nojeim. "How does that legal justification work should Einstein be extended to the
private sector?"
Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a correspondent for CBSNews.com
who has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan
writes a regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and economic
rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties site, or subscribe to the RSS
feed. You can e-mail Declan at declan@cbsnews.com.
Mum's the Word on “Free Trade”: Money Controls
by Ernest F. Hollings on February 26, 2010 - 1:00pm
Bio: Former
Senator (D-SC)
“Free trade” means different things to different people. To economists in the United
States, “free trade” means an open market where goods are unfettered or unprotected
by tariffs, quotas or subsidies. To one of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, Henry
Clay, “free trade” was pure fantasy. Clay thought “free trade” was an oxymoron. In 1832,
he cried: “Free trade, free trade … It never existed … It never will.” Teddy Roosevelt
thought “free trade” was dumb economics. He exclaimed in a letter: “Thank God I’m not a
free trader."
After World War II, Japan took our Marshall Plan money and started globalization or a
trade war for market share by closing its domestic market, subsidizing its manufacturing,
selling its exports at near cost, and making up the profit in its closed market. It took over
market share in textiles and then globalized by seeking a country cheaper to produce,
moving its textile manufacturing to Malaysia and changing its trade war from textiles to
watches, to cameras, to electronics, to radios, to TVs, to computers, to communications,
to automobiles.
Hence, “free trade” in the U. S. means an open market for profit; and “free trade” in
Japan means a closed market for market share resulting in Toyota being #1 as Ford, GM,
and Chrysler struggle. To China “free trade” means that the U. S. continues its open
market while China with authoritarian rule closes its market and controls its labor and
currency, but fails to control its air and water so as to have the cheapest production in
globalization. Thus, globalization is nothing more than a trade war with production looking
for a country cheaper to produce. Today, “free trade” to Corporate America, Wall
Street, and the big banks, means the U. S. should not compete in globalization. It means
the United States should not trade. “Free trade” means Corporate America should
continue, unfettered by Congress, offshoring its investment, research, technology,
development, production, jobs – literally, the U. S. economy. Today, “free trade” means to
Corporate America that it be permitted to continue offshoring our economy while it
builds the economies of Mexico, China and India. In short, “free trade” means for
Corporate America to ruin the economy of the United States as it begs for bailouts and
bonuses from the taxpayers.
It never used to be this way. Henry Ford doubled the minimum wage and instituted health
and retirement benefits, developing the middle class in America. The Ford Foundation
developed research and strong communities all over the country. I worked for fifty years
in government with Corporate America seeking the government’s protection of Corporate
America’s investment and production in the United States. We passed protectionist
measures time and again through both Houses of Congress only to have them vetoed by
Presidents of both political parties. At the time, the Presidents were concerned that
capitalism would defeat communism in the Cold War. While the U. S. sought “free trade”
and open markets, it allowed Japan, Korea and China to close their markets and violate
“free trade.” Now, Corporate America, Wall Street, and the big banks seek protection
for their offshored production, calling for “free trade.” Their pundits in the press, Tom
Friedman, Charles Krauthhammer and Fareed Zakaria call for “free trade,”
“protectionism,” “Don’t start a trade war.”
Money has taken over politics. In my last race for the United States Senate ten years ago
I had to raise $8 ½ million to win. This amounts to raising $30,000 a week each and every
week for six years. Today it would be substantially more. Russell Long started the check-
off on your income tax return to build a fund so that “every mother’s son could ‘run for
President.” Obama, with the internet, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, means that
“every mother’s son” has to buy the office. It means members of Congress interested in
reelection must spend all of their waking moments raising money. I said on leaving the
Senate after thirty-eight years service that there were no longer drunks in the Senate.
They don’t have time to get drunk. United States Senators are the hardest working
crowd, save Congressmen, in the United States. Early morning there are three breakfasts
to raise or arrange for money, lunch at fundraisers, cancel policy meetings to fundraise,
“window” breaks in the evening to go out and attend fundraisers and come back to vote,
midnight sessions on Thursday so that you can catch the early morning flight to California
and New York for fundraisers, no work on Mondays and Fridays, and ten-day breaks each
month to fundraise. We don’t honor Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday any
more. We just use their birthdays to be merged into ten days to fundraise. In short,
there is no time for the country, only time for the campaign. “Free trade, free trade.” We
Senators know better. But Wall Street, Corporate America, and the financial community is
the crowd with the money. So “free trade” to members of Congress means: “Let
somebody else solve that problem. I can keep my mouth shut, get the money, and get
reelected.”
This is why all the candidates in the Presidential election had solutions for every problem
but offshoring the economy. Even the New York Times days before the Iowa primary,
after the candidates had been campaigning for at least a year, had a double-page spread,
one for the Democratic candidates and one for the Republican candidates for President,
listing six issues on either page and no mention of the economy. You can’t get an
offshoring op-ed into the Washington Post or the New York Times. Mum’s the word;
money controls.
Now President Barack Obama has become the leader for “free trade.” In the campaign,
he had his economists tell the Canadians: “Don’t worry. He wasn’t serious about jobs.”
Again, when “Buy America” appeared in the stimulus, he opposed it. And when he found
out he couldn’t get the votes, he had “Buy America” watered down even though he had
given out “Buy America/Obama” buttons in the Pennsylvania campaign. He was determined
to get the money and constantly campaign, ignoring the loss of jobs and the economy,
which has been going on for fifty years.
On the economy, President Obama addresses only the recent recession with a stimulus. If
there is one thing that we should have learned in the last eight years it is that stimulation
was not working. It took this nation over two hundred years of history paying for all the
wars – World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and even LBJ’s Great Society and we
didn’t reach a national debt of $1 trillion until 1982. But in the eight Bush years, we have
borrowed, spent, added to the debt and stimulated $5 trillion dollars. And we were losing
jobs at the end of last year like gangbusters. Two years ago, Allen Blinder, the Princeton
economist, estimated in ten years the United States would lose thirty to forty million jobs
to offshoring. The President’s stimulation continues for the nation to lose more jobs than
are stimulated. President Obama gives full attention to the Wall Street bankers’ problem
trying to stimulate consumption, when he ought to be addressing the offshoring problem
with stimulating production.
Our troubles couldn’t happen at a worse time. We have been losing jobs, production and
the economy for over fifty years, stimulating the economies of Mexico, China, India,
Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, etc. Now we need to rebuild our economy. We sure can’t afford
“free trade.” We’ve got to compete in globalization by canceling the subsidies to
offshoring, instituting a value added tax, and, at least, start producing those items
necessary to our national security. Boeing can’t produce a fighter plane without importing
parts from India. Our rolling stock in World War II, with Ford producing the tanks and
General Motors producing the B24 bombers, is now in jeopardy.
In last weeks TV news conference, President Obama concluded: “What I am confident
about is that we’re moving in the right direction.” The President is right on health, energy
and climate change. But he has the country headed in the wrong direction by continuing to
get rid of our economy with “free trade.”
To complete the mobsters tale over of the media
Bain Capital, Founded by Romney, Buys Clear
Channel
By: Jane Hamsher Thursday December 13, 2007
4:11 pm Tweet Share
Mitt Romney founded Bain & Co. in 1984, and
today its spinoff — Bain Capital — is the third
largest private equity firm in the country. Today
they bought ClearChannel, a company that owns
over 1100 radio stations and 30 TV stations.
J-Ro:
This is why media consolidation issues are so
important. One rich guy who wants to be
president can buy a media empire overnight. Now
of course, Romney will argue that he didn’t buy
Clear Channel, his private equity company Bain
Capital did. And of course, there is no conflict of
interest because Romney doesn’t tell Bain Capital
what to do as he’s no longer officially with the
company.
Still, seeing as how Clear Channel hosts Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity and
controls over 1,000 TV and radio stations
nationwide, does anyone here really think
Romney won’t use this newfound pedestal to
promote his candidacy, however subtly?
Sounds kind of like Romney’s relationship to Bain
is like Dick Cheney’s to Halliburton. There certainly was
never any problem there.
Tim Karr has more on the dangers of media consolidation, and the deal that FCC Chairman
Kevin Martin is trying to push through allowing one company to own broadcast station and
a major daily newspaper in the same market.
Is a voting machine merger too big to stand?
The largest voting machine company in the country bought its biggest competitor six
months ago without advance fanfare. Now the Justice Department is investigating
whether to unwind the merger that put a privately held Nebraska company in control of
the voting machines in nearly 70 percent of the nation's precincts.
By PETE YOST
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON —
The largest voting machine company in the country bought its biggest competitor six
months ago without advance fanfare. Now the Justice Department is investigating
whether to unwind the merger that put a privately held Nebraska company in control of
the voting machines in nearly 70 percent of the nation's precincts.
With midterm elections looming and a battle for control of Congress under way, a
coalition of election officials from several states and voter advocate groups is pressing
the Justice Department to unscramble the combination of two companies. Critics say the
merger could cause foul-ups at the polls on Election Day, and some even characterize it as
a national security risk.
The emergence of one megaplayer in the electronic voting machine industry may be an
unintended consequence of reforms enacted after the presidential election debacle in
Florida a decade ago. Few companies can afford to get into the business due to the
expense of developing the electronic voting safeguards that reformers insisted on.
Senate Rules Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has raised concerns about the
purchase, in which Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., bought the voting
machine subsidiary of Diebold Inc. of North Canton, Ohio.
The Justice Department's antitrust division is doing a post-merger review that could
result in the government's trying to persuade ES&S to sell off some of its assets or face
a court suit to force a sell-off. An announcement could come soon.
ES&S said it has been cooperating with the division's review. "We are committed to
exploring potential resolutions that will address any concerns about this transaction, while
ensuring that the election services needs of the jurisdictions we serve will be met," a
company statement said.
Separate from Justice's review, competing voting machine firm Hart InterCivic Inc. has
sued ES&S, alleging that the company will now supply voting machines in 68.2 percent of
the nation's voting precincts. The New York State Board of Elections urged the Justice
Department and the New York attorney general to intervene in the lawsuit challenging the
acquisition.
Another competitor is in court alleging violation of procurement laws in the award of a
$50 million contract to ES&S in recent weeks by New York City's elections board. And
elections board commissioners are cooperating with a probe of that contract by the U.S.
attorney's office, the board's spokeswoman, Valerie Vazquez, said this week.
As a privately held company, ES&S issues no financial reports. It didn't tell the Justice
Department about the Diebold deal because the transaction wasn't big enough to trigger
the federal law that requires the government to be informed of big mergers before they
are completed.
But the government can always come in after a merger to try to alter any deal it thinks
harm competition.
"If you end up with 70 percent of the voting machines and the people rely on them, and if
entry into the market is difficult or impossible, it would certainly seem to be a legitimate
target for antitrust enforcement," said Charles "Rick" Rule, a longtime Washington
attorney who ran the Justice Department's antitrust division from 1986-89 during the
merger-friendly Reagan administration.
On Capitol Hill, Schumer's committee has collected information from opponents and a few
proponents of the merger and commissioned an analysis by the Congressional Research
Service. CRS's conclusion: The merger means ES&S has a presence in 90 percent of the
states, is the sole source for at least 20 and has a market share three or more times that
of its closest competitor.
"In the voting systems industry, perhaps more than any other, the failure of the market
can affect the public interest in a way that goes to the heart of our democracy," Schumer
said in a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder to take a close look at ES&S.
In an industry plagued by equipment malfunctions, wrongly recorded votes and a lack of
transparency, the need for increased quality competition - not less competition - is
essential, John Bonifaz, legal director of the voter advocacy group Voter Action, wrote
Schumer.
Election failure on a large scale has the potential to destabilize the nation, so ES&S must
divest some of its assets, reduce the scope of election jurisdictions subject to its
software and take other steps to offset the increased threat to national security, a
coalition of 19 election experts and groups including Common Cause said in a Feb. 12 letter
to Justice's antitrust division.
ES&S voting machines counted approximately 50 percent of the votes in the last four
major U.S. elections, says the company's Web site, and ES&S boasts "one-stop-shop full-
service election coordination from start to finish."
On Wednesday, ES&S defended its performance, saying that since the acquisition last
September, the company has supported successful elections in many jurisdictions that
previously were customers of the Diebold subsidiary.
Changes enacted by Congress after the Bush v. Gore vote in Florida in 2000 require a
certification process for voting machine companies that is so time-consuming and costly it
discourages companies from plunging into the business to compete with ES&S, some state
and local election officials say.
"I'm surprised and strongly believe the elections community is lucky to still have as many
voting equipment vendors in existence as we do today," Iowa Secretary of State Michael
Mauro, a Democrat, said in a letter to Schumer.
The secretaries of state in California and Connecticut expressed concern about the
merger, as did some local election officials in Florida, California and New Mexico.
30! Five More Democrats--Including Durbin--Say They Support a Public Option Through
Reconciliation
Brian Beutler | March 1, 2010, 10:08AM
75Share
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Five leading Democrats--including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin--have publicly
announced that they will vote for a public option if it's offered up during the budget
reconciliation process, where legislation can pass with a majority vote.
"Sen. Durbin has long been a supporter of the public option," reads a statement from
Durbin spokesman Joe Shoemaker to the progressive groups Progressive Change
Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and Credo. "I don't know whether the
votes exist in the Senate right now, but if the House version of the public option came up
for a vote in reconciliation Sen. Durbin would vote yes."
Similar statements were also issued from four other senators: Patty Murray (D-WA), Ben
Cardin (D-MD), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
To be clear, these are not signatories to a letter--circulated by the three groups--
advocating the public-option-through-reconciliation strategy. PCCC co-founder Adam
Green put it this way: "We're accepting clear statements that if the public option comes
up for a vote, they would vote yes. We're debunking what [White House Press Secretary
Robert] Gibbs said last week, that the votes don't exist -- they do...we'll prove it."
So far, 24 members have signed the letter, and five have issued statements indicating
their support for passing a public option through reconciliation. Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid also stands behind the idea in principle. That means Green et al. have 20
members to go.
Fight For The CFPA Is 'A Dispute Between Families And Banks,' Says Elizabeth Warren
First Posted: 03- 3-10 09:16 AM | Updated: 03- 3-10 11:48 AM
While members of the Senate Banking Committee debate proposals to fix the nation's
broken financial system and ineffective approach to protecting consumers, Elizabeth
Warren has one message: Pass a strong bill or nothing at all.
"My first choice is a strong consumer agency," the Harvard Law professor and federal
bailout watchdog said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "My second choice is no
agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor."
There's been a steady leak of Senate proposals to fix the dysfunctional way federal
regulators protect consumers from abusive lenders. One was an independent unit housed
within the Treasury Department; another was a new entity, housed in the Federal
Reserve, with little independence or power.
The Senate shouldn't waste its time, asserts Warren, explaining that current proposals
fail to address some of her key priorities such as arming the proposed agency with
independent rule-making authority, without interference by bank regulators.
"My 99th choice is some mouthful of mush that doesn't get the job done," Warren said.
The Fed proposal, attributed to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), was leaked earlier this week.
Corker is working with Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) on
Dodd's update to his November bill to reform the nation's financial system.
Warren spent Tuesday on the phone with reform groups, members of Congress and
administration officials, rallying support for a new independent agency tasked solely with
protecting consumers. Many of them were skeptical that Corker is willing to agree to let
the entity have real independence, an aide to Warren said.
Story continues below
But "there's a lot of enthusiasm for a strong bill," Warren said. "The senators really get
the main point -- either vote on something that's strong or don't do it."
The dispute, after all, is a simple one, Warren said: "It's between families and banks."
"The lobbyists would like nothing better than for the story to be the [proposed] agency
has died and everyone has given up," Warren said. "The lobbyists' closest friends in the
Senate would like nothing better than passing an agency that has a good name but no real
impact so they have something good to say to the voters -- and something even better to
say to the lobbyists."
Warren said the new agency should have four simple attributes:
• A chief appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate;
• Independent budget authority, so it won't be subject to the whims of Congress or
an anti-consumer administration;
• Independent rule-making authority, without interference by bank regulators or
others who may focus on bank profitability before focusing on consumers;
• And independent enforcement powers, so the agency's investigators can go after
abusive lenders.
"Those are the basic elements of an independent agency," Warren said. "It's not as if
there's some fifth thing that was left off that list -- that is the list."
The House passed a bill in December calling for the creation of such an agency.
"It's a muscular agency, and that's what really matters," Warren said. House Financial
Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) led the fight.
"It's not perfect -- there's no excuse for excluding used car dealers -- but it's strong,"
she said. "The agency that passed the House will get the job done."
Dodd, who has been under fire for the level of his commitment to a muscular new agency,
reiterated his support during a Tuesday evening interview on "Hardball with Chris
Matthews" on MSNBC.
"What`s really important are four points that I have been insisting upon from the very
beginning," Dodd said according to a transcript of his remarks. "One, I want a
presidentially- appointed director of this operation. I want it confirmed by the Senate. I
want a separate funding source. And I want it to have rule-making authority and
enforcement authority.
"I'm going to insist upon those four points, wherever this is located," he said.
Warren agreed with those points.
"I read his Hardball transcript and I thought: I could entirely envision Elizabeth Warren
sitting there saying the same thing," Warren said.
However, much of the reporting lately has focused on where the proposed agency will be
housed -- its "address," as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put it this week.
Warren said the focus is misplaced.
"It's the wrong place to look," Warren said. "The question is functional independence.
Where the agency sits on an organization chart is less important than its functional
independence."
"The key are the elements Sen. Dodd put his thumb on," Warren said.
Warren hasn't met with Dodd since last July, four months before Dodd publicly released
the first version of his financial reform bill.
She does, however, regularly check in with other members of Dodd's committee,
including Democratic Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
Warren spoke with Merkley on Tuesday regarding the Fed proposal, which severely limits
the kind of power Warren wants the new agency to have.
After all, Warren said, until a new agency is created, banks are going to continue bullying
families into poor loans, mortgages and credit cards.
As Warren put it:
"No cop on the beat works for the biggest bullies in town."
Feb 28, 2010
Reich: The Enthusiasm Gap
Robert Reich is worried about the midterm elections:
The Enthusiasm Gap, by Robert Reich ...Dems are heading toward next fall’s mid-term
elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Dem base is
packing up.
The Dem base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on
everything the Dem base cares about. For a year now it’s been nothing but compromises,
watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health
care went from what the Dem base wanted — single payer — to a public option, to no
public option, to a bunch of ideas that the President tried to explain last week, and it now
hangs by a string... The jobs bill went from what the base wanted — a second stimulus —
to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to
$15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went
from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivate trading, a consumer
protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act – all popular with the Dem
base — to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the
Treasury Department..., and it’s now looking like even less. The environment went from the
base’s desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade
with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Dems
are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.
These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. “Why
should I care?” are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who
worked their hearts out in the last election. The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a
rampage. It’s more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers,
libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the
economic anxieties of millions of Americans against “big government.”
Technically, the Dems have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms.
But conservative, “blue-dog” Dems won’t go along. They say the public has grown wary of
government. ...
Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective
countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs
and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money,
and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against
WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of
the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that
are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the
wages of millions of more... Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and
rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.
If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the
singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House
and the congressional Dem’s ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has
created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed
by the right, blames our problems on “big government.”
Much of the reason for the Democrats’ astonishing reluctance to place blame where it
belongs rests with big business’s and Wall Street’s generous flows of campaign donations
to Dems, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic
officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. ...
But our President is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger
narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this
dangerous juncture, and the private sector’s corruption of the democratic process. ... He
can be indignant– as when he lashed out at the “fat cats” on Wall Street – but his
indignance is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignance of the right that blames
government for all that ails us.
There are two ways to gain votes, one is to move the center in your direction, the other
is to fire up the base and increase turnout. On many issues, these two goals work against
each other -- satisfying the middle loses the base and vice versa -- but not always. There
are issues that both the center and the base agree upon, and pursuing those issues is a
win-win in terms of gaining the support of both constituencies. I think there was quite a
bit of common ground between the middle and the base on health care, financial reform,
and responding to the crisis, but for some reason the administration has not pursued
these kinds of policies. Whenever push has come to shove, it appears to be the base that
has been pushed out of the way. That would be fine, I suppose, if it was actually
satisfying the middle and gaining more votes than are given up by ignoring the base, and
pushing good policy forward, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
Maybe this is the answer:
American presidents with the greatest record of bipartisan legislative achievement,
notably Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, got their way by
intimidating opponents, not by splitting the difference. As Machiavelli famously observed,
it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. For all his intelligence, nobody fears Mr
Obama...
I understand the argument that political realities forced the administration's hand, that
his was all it could possibly do due to Blue Dogs, etc. But the political reality the
administration faces is not exogenously determined, it is not something that must be
taken as given when formulating policy. The political reality can be changed with effort.
The administration's willingness to simply take the political constraints as a given rather
than fighting through them is a big part of the problem.
Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama
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Posted on Mar 1, 2010
AP / Chris Carlson
By Chris Hedges
We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack
Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their
convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and
progressives.
Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the
transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and
lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however,
admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a
senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that
retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens
without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he
would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo,
end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of
this has happened.
He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of
taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and
force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies
would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the
seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt
the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful
environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil.
He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by
sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of
victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.
The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American
history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise
only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals,
unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party
protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath
Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of
disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now,
were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to
speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the
protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his
Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker
and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage.
“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and
in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy
train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of
the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not
hours?” Stack wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical
system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of
people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s
leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the
political ‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate)
have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the ‘terrible
health care problem’. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in
the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”
Reform Déjà Vu: Democrats Follow Failed Health Care Strategy and Preemptively
Surrender on Consumer Financial Protection Agency
A "doom loop." That's what Andy Haldane, executive director of financial stability for the
Bank of England, warned last fall would happen if serious financial reform wasn't enacted.
Well, we appear to be a step closer to that "doom loop" with the leak this weekend of
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd's plan for a seriously watered-down
consumer financial protection agency.
Back in June, President Obama released a proposal calling for the creation of a Consumer
Financial Protection Agency that would be "independent," with "broad authority" and the
power to "combat the worst abuses in mortgage markets." The agency, Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner said, would "have an independent seat at the table in our financial
regulatory system."
Well, that was before the banking lobby went into action. A couple of hundred million
dollars later, and we're left with this punch-to-the-gut of reform, from the top-line
summary of Dodd's plan: "the independent agency proposal would be dropped." Seven
words dirtier than George Carlin ever uttered.
Instead, according to the Dodd plan, the agency would be housed within the Treasury
Department and called the Bureau of Financial Protection. And that's not the only
compromise. Here's how the eviscerated entity would work, as laid out by HuffPost's
Ryan Grim:
Each time the agency wanted to write a rule, it would have to consult with bank regulators.
The agency would then have to respond to the objections of each and every bank
regulator in the Federal Register. If the bank regulator was still unsatisfied, it could
appeal to the 'systemic regulator,' whose mission is to protect the safety and soundness
of the banking industry.
Anytime a new rule is proposed, bank lobbyists argue that it will be burdensome and make
the system less safe and sound. If the systemic regulator agreed with the banks -- as
they often do -- then the consumer protection rule would be voided.
Notably, the consumer protection agency has no veto power over any rules issued by bank
regulators, which demonstrates which regulator will be superior. The first concern is the
banks.
So much for "independence" and "broad authority."
The proposal will no doubt be very popular with the banks that, as Sen. Dick Durbin put it,
"own the place." But it's already been met with criticism from consumer groups.
"Effective reform is once again being blocked by opposition from the big banks that
caused the current financial crisis, " said Heather Booth, director of Americans for
Financial Reform. "The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect
American families or the financial system as a whole."
This view was seconded by Nancy Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil and
Human Rights: "Big banks and abusive lenders fought responsible regulation before the
crisis, and we are all paying the price. It is unacceptable for Congress to allow them to
succeed again," she said.
But, then, we seem to be living in a time when the unacceptable is routinely accepted --
and written off as unavoidable.
On Saturday, Dodd told Bloomberg Television's Al Hunt that he prefers an independent
agency, but said it might not be possible to reach the 60 votes needed to break the
inevitable Republican filibuster.
Maybe so. But how about at least trying before waving the white flag? Instead, Dodd, in
the hope of attracting Republican votes, appears to have preemptively surrendered. But
there's no evidence that Dodd's concession has achieved anything other than
kneecapping the bill. Democrats have mastered the art of negotiating against themselves.
It's hard to believe that even the messaging-challenged Democrats could fail to frame to
their advantage a bill that would prevent banks from abusing the public and engaging in
the same practices that brought on the financial catastrophe taxpayers have paid so high
a price for. Instead, the attitude seems to be, why even try?
That's assuming, of course, that a powerful consumer protection agency is something
Democrats -- including those in the White House -- think is important enough to fight for.
"Here lies the crux of the problem," write Simon Johnson and Peter Boone. "The Obama
administration lacks an inner core of smart, well-informed advisers who are deeply
skeptical of big banks and eager to do whatever it takes to break a cycle that points to
financial and fiscal doom."
So how likely is another ride on the doom loop of financial crises? Johnson and Boone lay
out some sobering statistics: Fifteen years ago, the combined assets of our six biggest
banks totaled 17 percent of our GDP. By 2006, that number was 55 percent. Right now, it
stands at 63 percent.
In the Bloomberg interview, Dodd claimed to still support the so-called Volcker Rules
banning proprietary trading and capping the size of banks, as does, we're told, Obama.
But Johnson and Boone argue that even the Volcker Rules wouldn't make much of a
difference -- and that something much bolder is needed.
"It is still possible that the White House could go all-in against the distorted incentives at
large banks and the corrupted regulatory structures that have created our 'doom loop,'
and make this the central campaign issue for November," they write. "Branding opponents
as supporters of too big to fail could get traction, at least if led by an articulate and
impassioned president."
Well, we know he'll be articulate, but his passion for reigning in the banks remains to be
proven.
The Senate Banking Committee is expected to take up Dodd's proposal this week. Some
strong leadership from an "impassioned" Obama could shoot down this deflated trial
balloon and ensure that what the committee sends to the full Senate to vote on is actually
closer to what Obama called for last year -- and, indeed, closer to the stronger package,
including a stand-alone consumer financial protection agency, that passed the House in
December.
During last week's health care summit, President Obama very cogently explained why
piecemeal health reform won't work -- connecting the dots between the need to prevent
insurers from denying coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and the need for
universal coverage.
How about doing the same for an issue that is even more sellable to the public? Of
course, reforming our broken health care system would have been sellable, too -- if the
White House had not ceded the messaging playing field to the Republicans for most of
the last year.
The good news is, there's still plenty of time to do for financial reform what Obama
should have done for health care -- go out and sell a clear and specific package. And he
needs to make the point that, much like health care, doing it incrementally won't work.
Leaving too-big-to-fail banks to continue doing business as they have been is like
operating on a cancer patient and taking out only half the tumor -- the disease is
guaranteed to come back. And eventually prove fatal.
The president can take a page from the How to Win Bipartisan Support By Playing
Hardball With Your Opponents playbook used so effectively by FDR, LBJ, and Ronald
Reagan. Or he can go along with the preemptive surrender strategy favored by Senate
Democrats: negotiate against yourself, water down what you know is right, earn your
bipartisanship merit badge... and get absolutely nothing in return.
Published on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Chile's Socialist Rebar
by Naomi Klein
Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September '08 and
everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn't been easy to be a fanatical fan of the late
economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market
fundamentalism that his followers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological
victories, however far-fetched.
A particularly distasteful case in point. Just two days after Chile was struck by a
devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his
readers that Milton Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile"
because, "thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would
have been an apocalypse.... It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick
-- and Haitians in houses of straw -- when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down."
According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous "Chicago Boys" are the reason
Chile is a prosperous nation with "some of the world's strictest building codes."
There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile's modern seismic building code,
drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant
because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup. That
means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but
Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected socialist President. (In truth many
Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the
first law was adopted in the 1930s).
It does seem significant, however, that the law was enacted even in the midst of a
crippling economic embargo ("make the economy scream" Richard Nixon famously growled
after Allende won the 1970 elections). The code was later updated in the nineties, well
after Pinochet and the Chicago Boys were finally out of power and democracy was
restored.
Little wonder: As Paul Krugman points out, Friedman was ambivalent about building codes,
seeing them as yet another infringement on capitalist freedom. As for the argument that
Friedmanite policies are the reason Chileans live in "houses of brick" instead of "straw,"
it's clear that Stephens knows nothing of pre-coup Chile. The Chile of the 1960s had the
best health and education systems on the continent, as well as a vibrant industrial sector
and rapidly expanding middle class. Chileans believed in their state, which is why they
elected Allende to take the project even further.
After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to
dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and
trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by
the early eighties, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-
industrialization, a ten-fold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly
unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in
1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisors and nationalize several of
the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)
Fortunately, the Chicago Boys did not manage to undo everything Allende accomplished.
The National copper company, Codelco, remained in state hands, pumping wealth into
public coffers and preventing the Chicago Boys from tanking Chile's economy completely.
They also never got around to trashing Allende's tough building code, an ideological
oversight for which we should all be grateful.
Thanks to CEPR for tracking down the origins of Chile's building code.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the
international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller,
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special
10th Anniversary Edition); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.
naomiklein.org
Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq
By Robert Parry
March 5, 2010
George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove claims “one of the biggest mistakes” of that
presidency was not aggressively challenging critics who charged that Bush “lied” to the
American people about the reasons for the Iraq War, an accusation that Rove insists was
false and unfair.
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In his forthcoming book, Courage and Consequence, Rove calls the “lie” charge “a poison-
tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency” and blames himself for “a weak
response” that underestimated “how damaging this assault was.”
But the problem with Rove’s account is that not only did Bush oversee the twisting of
intelligence to justify invading Iraq in March 2003 but he subsequently lied – and lied
repeatedly – about how Iraq had responded to United Nations inspection demands.
So, while it may be impossible to say for certain what Bush believed about Iraq
possessing weapons of mass destruction, it can’t be argued that Bush didn’t know that
Iraq declared that it had destroyed its WMD stockpiles and let U.N. inspectors in to see
for themselves in the months before the invasion.
Nevertheless, Bush followed up his false pre-war claims about Iraq’s WMD with a post-
invasion insistence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had barred U.N. inspectors from his
country, a decision that Bush said left him no choice but to invade. Bush began reciting
this faux history just months after the invasion and continued the tall tale until the end of
his presidency more than five years later.
Tellingly, throughout that period, as Bush blithely lied about the Iraq War history, he
was never challenged to his face by the mainstream U.S. journalists who politely listened
to the lies. Indeed, some big-name journalists even adopted Bush’s false narrative as
their own.
Now, it appears Rove is intent on rehabilitating Bush’s record by insisting that the ex-
President never lied at all. The historical record, however, is clear: Hussein and other
Iraqi officials did say they no longer possessed WMD and they did let UN arms
inspectors into Iraq in the fall of 2002 to search any site of their choosing.
The inspectors in their white vans drove around Iraq for months, with their excursions
covered daily by the international news media. In trip after trip, guided by the best
available U.S. intelligence, the inspectors came up empty.
Hussein and his government also backed up their claims to be WMD-free by providing the
United Nations a 12,000-page declaration on Dec. 7, 2002, explaining how Iraq’s stocks of
chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed in the 1990s.
Though the Bush administration mocked these Iraqi disclosures, U.S. intelligence had its
own independent facts supporting the Iraqi statements, including information from
Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel al-Majid who defected and described his work
destroying the stockpiles after the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s. [When he
returned to Iraq, he was killed.]
Top-Level Intelligence
With the help of French intelligence, the CIA also had “turned” Hussein’s foreign
minister, Naji Sabri, who conveyed real-time intelligence to the U.S. government, passing
along information in September 2002 about the absence of Iraqi WMD. Here is how
author Ron Suskind described that intelligence in his 2008 book, The Way of the World:
“The upshot of Sabri’s account was that Saddam neither possessed WMD nor was trying
very hard to procure or develop them. If Saddam was eager for a nuclear weapon, he was
as far as ever from having one and was making no progress on that front; any vestige of a
bio-weapons program was negligible; and if any chemical weapons remained in Iraq, they
were no longer in the hands of either Saddam Hussein or his military.
“[CIA Paris station chief Bill] Murray flew down to Washington to deliver the news and
briefed John McLaughlin, CIA’s deputy director. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the
intelligence but pointed out that it was contradicted by information from Curveball, the
best source on Iraqi WMD to that point. Sabri’s account was relayed to [CIA Director
George] Tenet, who delivered it personally to Bush the following day.
“But the administration quickly lost interest in Sabri when it heard what he had to say.
Bush dismissed the intelligence as disinformation, and the White House said it would be
interested in Sabri only if he chose to defect.”
Though the CIA found additional information to corroborate Sabri’s story and regarded
Curveball as a highly unreliable source, Bush pressed forward on his course to war.
Suskind further reported that the written report on Sabri’s intelligence was distorted to
lend greater credence to the WMD suspicions, “almost certainly altered under pressure
from Washington.”
Yet, it may never be fully known whether Bush didn’t care about the truth or simply chose
to believe the “stove-piped” intelligence that was coming from neoconservatives salted
throughout the national security bureaucracy – and who were determined to go to war
with Iraq.
What can’t be doubted is what happened next. Set on invading, Bush forced the U.N.
inspectors to wrap up their work and to leave Iraq in March 2003, a departure that was
followed within days by his “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, beginning March 19.
Reinventing History
Several months later, with Hussein’s government ousted and with the U.S. military coming
up empty in its search for WMD caches, Bush began his historical revisionism by insisting
publicly that he had no choice but to invade because Hussein supposedly had barred U.N.
inspectors.
On July 14, 2003, Bush told reporters:
“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let
them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from
power.”
Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this
lie again and again in varied forms.
On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course,
and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam,
you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world
felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not
let us in.”
As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the
color of truth.
At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance
of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.
“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said,
‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam
Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors,
when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him.
And we did.”
At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version of the made-
up tale, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.
“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441
was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious
consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has
subsequently caused him to lose his life.”
In one of his White House exit interviews – on Dec. 1, 2008 – Bush again revived his
convenient version of history, that Hussein was responsible for the invasion because he
wouldn’t let the U.N. inspectors in.
ABC News anchor Charles Gibson asked Bush, “If the [U.S.] intelligence had been right
[and revealed no Iraq WMD], would there have been an Iraq War?”
Bush answered, “Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to
determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.”
In his frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledged the fact that Hussein
did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD
stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing.
Media Complicity
And never did mainstream reporters contradict Bush’s false history to his face. Indeed,
some prominent Washington journalists even adopted Bush’s lie as their own. For instance,
in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he –
Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.
“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated
once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control
over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,”
Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”
In the real history, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But faux reality
had become the trademark of the Bush presidency – and of its many supporters in the
press corps.
Washington’s conventional wisdom eventually embraced another fake belief, that Hussein
provoked the war by misleading people into believing that he still possessed WMD. The
fact that Hussein and his government had declared they didn’t possess WMD was
forgotten.
In line with the bogus version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley asked
FBI interrogator George Piro, who had debriefed Hussein in prison, why the dictator
kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a
simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.
“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never
knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the
interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles, which aired Jan. 27, 2008. “Why did
he choose war with the United States?”
This “60 Minutes” segment never mentioned the fact that Hussein and his government did
disclose that the WMD had been eliminated. Instead Pelley pressed Piro on the mystery
of why Hussein supposedly was hiding that fact:
“Why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to
maintain this charade?”
After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was
close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the
perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”
But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation.
Pelley asked: “As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his
border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass
destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”
Now, with the publication of Karl Rove’s memoir, the American public can expect a reprise
of the argument that it was unfair for anyone to accuse President Bush of lying about
Iraq, that he simply believed mistaken intelligence and did what he thought was best for
America. In other words, Bush was the victim of mean critics, not a dishonest warmonger.
One also can expect that the mainstream U.S. news media will continue to forget its own
role in perpetuating the lie that George W. Bush would never lie.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George
W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at
neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project
Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other
stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a
Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue
reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
To much democracy in France. The mobsters puppet government sarkosi seek to restrict
the internet
France Moves Closer to Unprecedented Internet Regulation
By Stefan Simons in Paris
AP
New draft laws look set to give the French government unprecendented control of the
Internet.
The lower house of the French parliament has approved a draft bill that will allow the
state unprecedented control over the Internet. Although the government says it will
improve security for ordinary citizens, civil rights activists are warning of a "new level"
of censorship and surveillance.
For members of the French administration, it is a law against digital crime. For civil
rights activists and politicians from opposition parties, it is a plan for censorship that
excites fear and loathing -- and even conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the
surveillance state.
The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, passed the first draft
of the bill, known as "Loppsi 2," on Tuesday. It will now go on for a second reading in the
Senate, where it seems likely to pass, thanks to the government's majority. If the Senate
approves the bill, the new law could come into force as early as this summer. The
legislation could have far-reaching consequences: Loppsi 2 contains rules that would make
France the European country where the Internet is subject to the most censorship,
regulation, control and surveillance.
The new legislation could in the future force Internet service providers (ISPs) to shut
off access to criminal sites, should they be officially instructed to do so. According to
the draft legislation, the law "makes it the responsibility of each Internet service
provider to ensure that users don't have access to unsuitable content."
French Government to Employ Malware
The list of banned Web sites would be provided by the Interior Ministry. The approach
is very similar to a proposed German Internet law aimed at fighting child pornography,
which also foresaw limiting access to certain sites. That legislation was signed into law by
German President Horst Köhler on Wednesday -- even though the German government
had recently decided it no longer wanted to apply the law in its existing form, after
massive protests by Internet users.
Under the new French legislation, police and security forces would be able to use
clandestinely installed software, known in the jargon as a "Trojan horse," to spy on
private computers. Remote access to private computers would be made possible under the
supervision of a judge.
The draft law indicates that President Nicolas Sarkozy is sticking to his hard line on
Internet issues. Last year his administration pushed through the HADOPI law which gives
ISPs the power to block or restrict Internet access to users of illegal file-sharing sites
who refuse to desist under a "three strikes" system. The new legislation is simply the
next step in regulating Internet use in France.
Political Motivations
The French government's hard line should not surprise anyone. In a few weeks' time,
regional elections will take place in France. In the 2004 regional elections, Sarkozy's UMP
party did particularly badly. By showing himself to be a tough leader, Sarkozy hopes to
avoid history repeating itself and shore up support for his policies. Polls indicate there is
disappointment with his leadership and his government has low approval ratings. That is
the reason why, in the face of a rampant economic crisis, growing unemployment, a
devastatingly large budget deficit and various political scandals, Sarkozy is pulling out a
presidential trump card. He is hoping that fear of criminals will convince voters to come
to the polling booths.
In that respect, there is no more suitable issue than child pornography on the Internet
and the hunt for pedophile criminals whose only desire is to seduce innocents via their
home computers. According to that argument, it is necessary to impose controls on the
digital world and introduce state surveillance, so that a pro-active Big Brother can fight
the cyber world's sexual deviants who are, in all likelihood, lurking on Facebook or
Twitter.
More Than Just Controlling Cyberspace
In fact, Internet controls are only part of the bundle of legislation that is included in
Loppsi 2. The various articles include a colorful batch of security measures developed by
Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, a close ally of Sarkozy's, who pushed through the
first version of the security laws in 2002.
The new package has been in the works since October 2007 and has, according to
Hortefeux, been beefed up by 13 provisions "like in bodybuilding." It is a hodgepodge of
different measures, governing issues as disparate as courtroom procedures, traffic laws,
defense, sport, integration and even questions regarding burial ordnances in the French
territory of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. The French daily Le Monde wrote of a
"chest with many drawers."
In addition to law enforcement tools for municipal police and private security companies,
there is also a provision calling for a tripling of surveillance cameras in France -- from
20,000 to 60,000 -- by 2011. The provision has been described harmlessly as "video
protection."
The package also contains harsher penalties for break-ins, assault and drunk driving.
Curfews for minors are also to be allowed.
'Serious Threat' to Internet Neutrality
Civil rights activists are outraged, as is the opposition. "We are seeing a whole series of
lapses and rights limitations," says Jean-Pierre Dubois, president of the French League
of Human Rights. Sandrine Béllier, a member of the European Parliament for the Green
Party, says the bill represents "a serious threat" to the neutrality of the Internet.
"The filtering and blocking of the Web has become a standard weapon in the legislative
arsenal of a government which has been shameless in its handling of personal freedoms,"
Béllier said in an interview with the online edition of the magazine Marianne. She
complained that policing responsibility was being handed to Web providers, despite the
lack of a legal basis for doing so. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that the similar
draft law in Germany will likely never come into force.
"Loppsi has brought us to a new level," Béllier says, adding that "when it comes to
restrictions, this text is preparing us for hell."
Loppsi 2 contains a number of other gifts to French security authorities as well, including
improved integration between police files and personal data kept by, for example, banks.
The goal, Hortefeux explains innocently, is that of "improving the daily security of
French citizens." He says the laws will help to "maintain the level and quality of service
provided by domestic security forces."
Simon Johnson
MIT Professor and co-author of 13 Bankers
Posted: March 2, 2010 12:16 PM
Why No International Financial Regulation?
Read More: Consumer Protection , Dodd Corker ,
Dodd-Corker Compromise , Financial Crisis ,
Financial Reform , Goldman Sachs , Imf , Simon
Johnson , Wto , Business News
As we fast approach the unveiling of the Dodd-
Corker financial reform proposals for the
Senate, it is only fair and reasonable to ask:
Does any of this really matter? To be sure, some
parts of what the Senate Banking committee
(and likely the full Senate) will consider are not
inconsequential for relatively small players in the
US market. For example, putting consumer
protection inside the Fed -- which has an awful
and embarrassing reputation in terms of protecting users of
financial products -- would tell you a lot about where we are going.
But our big banks are global and nothing in the current legislation would really rein them
in -- no wonder they and their allies sneer, in a nasty fashion, at Senator Dodd as a lame
duck who "does not matter."
For example, the resolution authority/modified bankruptcy procedure under discussion
would do nothing to make it easier to manage the failure of a financial institution with
large cross-border assets and liabilities. For this, you would need a "cross-border
resolution authority," determining who is in charge of winding up what -- and using which
cash -- when a global bank fails.
To be sure, such a cross-border authority could be developed under the auspices of the
G20, but there are not even baby steps in that direction. Why?
Part of the answer, of course, is that big cross-border banks know how to play
governments off against each other -- dropping heavy hints that "international
competitiveness" is at stake. These are empty threats -- if the US, the UK, and the
eurozone cooperated on a resolution regime, this would get serious attention. If they
went further and truly integrated their regulations -- including communications and
practices (and inspections) across regulators/supervisors -- this could have major impact.
But national governments like to run their banks in their own way. In part, this may be
sensible public policy -- who, after all, really wants the US to be in charge of deciding
how a bank failure (in another country) is handled? (The US and the UK had a major row
in the weeks after Lehman failed.) Even within the eurozone, there is a long standing
refusal to specify in advance who is responsible for saving what part of which bank --
motivated in part by the desire to protect the bureaucratic turf of national central banks,
which ceded power over monetary policy to the European Central Bank.
In part, no doubt, this also reflects varying degrees of "capture" in different places --
sometimes by bankers, but sometimes it's the politicians who do the capturing. As
examples, see the work of Asim Khwaja and Atif Mian or Mara Faccio on how political
connections really work in and around financial systems.
In any case, hoping that we can constrain banks through some form of international
governmental cooperation is a complete illusion. The IMF and the WTO have no mandate
on this issue. The Financial Stability Board is a paper tiger -- really just a talking shop
between regulators (and the same goes for the Bank for International Settlements more
generally).
The big global banks know all this -- and have known it for years. When Jerry Corrigan,
former head of the NY Fed, no less, says Goldman did "nothing inappropriate" in
arranging Greek debt swaps, he is in effect saying "catch us if you can".
You will never stop the international banks at the international level. You need to curtail
them at the national level. And you can't afford to wait for other countries; you have to
do it for your own country as a matter of pressing national priority.
Unfortunately, the Dodd-Corker proposals seem most unlikely to move us forward along
this dimension.
An Interview with Criminologist Bill Black
The Top Ten Ways to Crack Down on Corporate
Financial Crime
By RUSSELLL MOKHIBER
Ninety-five percent of criminologists study blue collar
crime.
Five percent study white collar crime.
Of the tiny minority who study white collar crime,
ninety five percent focus on the individuals who rip off
the corporation.
We are left with a small handful of criminologists –
think Edwin Sutherland, John Braithwaite, Gil Geis –
who have studied or are studying – corporate crime.
That would be crime by the corporation.
Bill Black is one of the most prominent of those living corporate criminologists.
His specialty – control fraud.
Control fraud is when the CEO of a company uses the corporation as a weapon to commit
fraud.
Bill Black is a lawyer and former federal bank regulator.
He’s the author of the corporate crime classic – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own
One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry (University of
Texas Press, 2005.)
Black says there are steps we can take as a society to control corporate crime – in
particular financial crime.
In an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter last week, Black laid out his top ten.
Number ten: Hire 1,000 FBI agents.
Pass legislation (HR 3995) introduced by Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur that would fund
the hiring of 1,000 FBI agents to investigate white collar crime.
Number nine: Appoint a chief criminologist at each of the financial regulatory agencies.
“Each agency needs someone who understands white collar crime,” Black said. “If you don’
t understand fraud schemes, if you don’t understand how accounting is used to run these
scams, you will always have a disaster in the making.”
Number eight: Fix executive compensation.
Black would tie executive bonuses to long term corporate performance.
Number seven: Target the top 100 corporate criminals.
“We need to do a top 100 priority list – the way it was done in the savings and loan crisis,”
Black said. “The FBI, the Justice Department and the regulatory agencies got together
and put together a list of top 100 companies to target. There was a recognition that these
were control frauds. The top executives were using seemingly legitimate savings and loans
as their weapons of fraud. And that is why any serious look will tell you the same thing
about this most recent crisis as well. The criminal justice referral process has collapsed
at the agencies.”
Number six: Regulate first.
“When you desupervise or deregulate an industry, in fact you are decriminalizing control
fraud. The regulators are the ones who make the bulk of these cases. I’m not saying they
can do it alone. In the current crisis, the FBI had no meaningful support from the
regulators. You have regulators denying they were regulators and saying that there could
be no fraud because the rating agencies were handing out high ratings. That kind of
naivete is ideologically driven. You will not have effective prosecution with that kind of
regulatory regime.”
Number five: Bust up the FBI partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association.
“Now we have the FBI standing with what it calls its partners – the Mortgage Bankers
Association,” Black said. “But the Mortgage Bankers Association – that’s the trade
association of the perps. So, the FBI is partnering with the perps.”
“The result is – we have seen zero prosecutions of the specialty non-prime lenders that
caused the crisis,” Black said. “The mortgage bankers are going to position themselves as
the victims. This has been so successful that the FBI now has a mantra. They are saying
there are two kinds of mortgage fraud. Fraud for profit and fraud for housing. And
neither of them is control fraud. They have effectively said – control fraud is impossible.
Even though it was the entire story behind the savings and loan crisis, the Enron wave,
and the creation of the most recent housing bubble.”
Number four: Get rid of Ben Bernanke as chair of the Fed. Replace him with Nobel prize
winner Joseph Stiglitz.
“Ben Bernanke should not have been reappointed as head of the Fed,” Black said. “He was
the most senior regulator. And he was an utter failure. Under President Bush, he was
President of the Council of Economic Advisors. So, he was a failure as a regulator. And he
was a failure as an economist.”
Number three: Get rid of too big to fail.
There are about 20 banks that have assets of $100 billion or more. They are considered
too big to fail. “You do three things,” Black says. “First, you stop them from growing.
Second, you shrink them (to below $20 billion in assets.) You create the tax and
regulatory incentives where they have to shrink below the level where they pose a
systemic risk. And third, you regulate them much more intensively while they are in the
process of moving from a systemically dangerous institution to a more leaner, smaller,
more efficient, less dangerous institution.”
Number two: Create a consumer financial protection agency headed by Harvard Law
School professor Elizabeth Warren.
“The sine qua non for success as a regulator is independence,” Black says. “So, it’s a very
bad sign that Congress is moving away from an independent regulator.”
“As we speak, news is breaking that they are moving away from housing the regulator at
the Treasury Department. Now they are talking about putting it at the Federal Reserve.
The Fed is an independent regulator. Unfortunately, it’s an independent anti-regulator. I
called putting it at the Treasury a sick joke. Putting it at the Fed is also a sick joke. They
are both recipes for failure.”
Number one: Fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Office of Thrift Supervision
chief John Bowman, Fed chief regulator Patrick Parkinson, and Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency Chief John Dugan.
“Tim Geithner was testifying before Congress a couple of years ago,” Black said. “And in
response to a question from Ron Paul (R-Texas), Geithner said – ‘I have to stop you right
there – I’ve never been a regulator.’ Well, that’s true. But you are not supposed to admit
it.”
“Can you imagine. This is the President of the New York Fed, testifying about the
greatest failure in banking in the history of the nation. And he is so completely out of it –
the mindset of capture is so complete, that he says – I’ve never been a regulator. This is
the ultimate capture. You don’t even think of yourself as a regulator.”
“Ben Bernanke in October 2009 appointed Patrick Parkinson as the top supervisor at the
Fed,” Black said. “He’s the guy who, under Alan Greenspan, led the Fed charge against
Brooksley Born when she wanted to regulate credit default swaps.”
“Patrick Parkinson, on behalf of the Fed, testified that credit default swaps should be
left completely deregulated.”
“The reasons? If we regulate them, they will flee to the city of London. We should be so
lucky, of course.”
“And two, fraud can’t happen in credit default swaps, because the participants are so
sophisticated. This is the most astonishingly naive model of white collar crime by people
who know nothing about white collar crime and don’t study it at all.”
“John Dugan’s sole priority and all of his passion as OCC director has been pre-empting
state efforts to protect us from predatory lenders,” Black said.
“And John Bowman should be fired,” Black said. “The OTS got in bed with the industry
most openly.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Bill Black, see 24 Corporate Crime
Reporter 10(12), March 8, 2010, print edition only.]
Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.
Beating the estate tax to death
With estate tax set to end this year, retroactive lawmaking in 2010 is likely
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By Eva Rosenberg, MarketWatch
LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- It's OK to take good old gramps off life support now --
there will be an estate tax in 2010, even if current law has it expiring on Jan. 1.
Ever since the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 passed, there
have been jokes flying around about killing off the wealthy in 2010 when, under that law,
the estate tax is repealed for one year. But after nearly 10 years, the jokes are getting
stale.
Filing tax returns on your own
MarketWatch Personal Finance Editor Andrea Coombes shares tips for self-help tax
filers, including saving money while avoiding mistakes.
More tax advice, IRS news and filing help
• Estate taxes will rise from the dead yet
• Retroactive estate-tax fix no easy task
• Higher tax rates will cost you in 2011
• The tax benefits of refinancing your mortgage
• Are heavily taxed people happier?
• Avoid identity theft -- file your tax return smartly
• Unemployed? Here are 4 costly tax-filing errors
• Defaulted loans? Cancelled debt? A Tax Guide
• Five reasons not to itemize your deductions
• Avoiding IRS audit triggers and red flags
• Overpaid taxes? How to get your money back
• How to find the right tax professional
• Need free tax help? Here it is
• The top 5 online tax-filing services
See the complete MarketWatch Guide to Taxes
/conga/personal-finance/taxes_seo.html 61893
While the House recently passed a bill to reinstate the estate tax in 2010, this week the
Senate rejected a measure to temporarily extend it. But the EGTRRA legislation will not
be allowed to stand, says Larry Richman, chair of Chicago-based Neal, Gerber &
Eisenberg's Private Wealth Services Practice Group.
Look for retroactive action
Richman is right. On Dec. 3, the House of Representatives voted to permanently extend
the present 45% estate tax rate, and the $3.5 million, per person, exclusion from estate
taxes. While everyone was expecting a one-year extension, no one was expecting any
permanent legislation while Capitol Hill is embroiled in the health-care debate.
For a married couple, this means that up to $7 million worth of assets would be excluded
from estate taxes. That excludes nearly 60% of all estates. Based on 2008 filings, 22,642
estates out of a total filed of 38,373 are under $3.5 million, according to IRS data.
This did not sit well with the Senate. Democrats and Republicans are at odds over the tax
rate and the exclusion amount. Democrats in general are ready to approve the House
version, while some Republicans prefer a lower tax rate of 35% and a higher exclusion of
$5 million. The end result: The Senate did not pass an estate-tax extension.
Still, there is little doubt the Senate will tackle this in the beginning of 2010. Generally,
when a law is passed, it becomes effective on the date of passage. However, this law will
be an exception. In order to avoid a complete repeal of the estate tax in 2010, this law is
expected to contain a provision making it retroactive to Jan. 1, 2010, according to Wayne
Otchis, a certified public accountant in San Diego. Otchis spoke at a Spidell Publishing
Inc. (www.caltax.com) tax update seminar in Woodland Hills, Calif. on Wednesday.
The end of the estate tax?
What if Congress does nothing and estate taxes really are repealed?
As we all know, nothing is certain except death and taxes. There is a chance that the
Senate will debate this issue to death and no action will be taken at all. What then?
Bruno Graziano, a senior writer and analyst in the estate planning group of CCH, a
Wolters Kluwer business, explains the implications for estates originating in 2010. In
other words, for folks who die in the coming year.
The good news is, if Congress doesn't act, there will be no federal estate taxes at all.
Businesses, stocks, and other assets can be passed on to heirs without being hit with tax
rates as high as 45%.
The bad news?
• There are still state estate taxes to consider.
• There will be only a limited step-up in basis. Under current federal estate tax laws,
the assets of the deceased get a step-up in basis to the fair market value at date of
death (or 6 months later). This eliminates capital gains taxes when heirs sell assets. In
2010, if the estate tax is repealed, the step-up in basis is limited to $1.3 million for the
overall estate, plus $3 million for assets transferred to a surviving spouse.
• If Congress doesn't take any action at all, in 2011, the pre-EGTRRA levels return --
estate taxes on all estates over $1 million, with federal tax rates up to 55%.
What not to do this year
Since there is still confusion about the state of the estate tax, MarketWatch asked
Graziano for some guidance on how to avoid foolish actions in 2009. He said:
• Don't believe that the estate tax is going away permanently -- all indications are
that it will remain in some form after 2009. Even if Congress does nothing before year-
end and allows the repeal to occur, they could reinstate the tax retroactively during 2010
or just wait for the EGTRRA sunset to occur and let the pre-2001 law come back in 2011.
• Don't abandon existing gifting plans for family and charity on the assumption that
the estate tax is going away.
• Even without an estate tax, don't forget about estate planning. Other issues such as
asset protection, dysfunctional family situations, disposition of retirements assets, and
business succession issues can be just as important, if not more so, than the traditional
transfer tax issues.
What can you do in the meantime?
Larry Richman suggests this may be a good time to do some last-minute planning to lock in
the $3.5 million exclusion while it's still available. Since there are only a few days left
this year, if you're really concerned, bully your way into your estate tax professional's
office and start asking about Q-TIP trusts (qualified terminable interest property),
generation-skipping trusts, reverse Q-TIP elections, and so forth. You can find some
pretty useful information, as a starting point, in an "Introduction to Estate Planning" by
attorney Robert L. Sommers. See the article on FindLaw.com.Also, see this useful page on
the New York State Society of CPAs site, about EGTRRA.
Or you could have faith, and believe that the Senate will hammer out permanent estate
tax legislation that will be retroactive to Jan. 1, 2010. Do you believe?
Eva Rosenberg is the founder of TaxMama.com and an enrolled agent licensed to
represent taxpayers before the IRS. She is the author of the new e-book, "The 100%
Home-Based Business Tax Solution." Reach her at taxwatch@gmail.com .
President Obama, Replace Rahm With Me: An Open Letter From Michael Moore
Dear President Obama,
I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff.
I would like to humbly offer myself, yours truly, as his replacement.
I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that's been created around you. I will work for
$1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how
to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp.
And I will help you get done what the American people sent you there to do. I don't need
much, just a cot in the White House basement will do.
Now, don't get too giddy with excitement over my offer, because you and I are going to
be up at 5 in the morning, seven days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for
battle every single day (see photo). Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and
you will repeat after me:
"THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE
COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY
WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T LIKE WHAT I'M DOING THEY CAN THROW
MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF!
NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!"
Then we will put on our jogging sweats and run up to Capitol Hill. We will take names, kick
butts, and then take some more names. If we have to give a few noogies or half-nelson's,
then so be it. In our pockets we will have a piece of paper to show the pansy Dems just
how much they won by in 2008 -- and the poll results that show the majority of Americans
oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want the bankers punished. Like drill
sergeants, we will get right up in their faces and ask them, "WHAT PART OF THE
PUBLIC MANDATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND, SOLDIER?!! DROP AND GIVE ME 50!"
I know this is the job Rahm Emanuel was supposed to be doing.
Now, don't get me wrong. I have always admired Rahm Emanuel (if you don't count his
getting NAFTA pushed through Congress in the '90s which destroyed towns like Flint,
Michigan. I know, picky-picky.). He is what we needed for a long time -- a no-apologies,
take-no-prisoners fighting machine. Someone who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and
pound the right wing into submission. Far from being the foul-mouthed bully he has been
portrayed as, Rahm is the one who BEAT UP the bullies to protect us from them.
That's certainly what he did in 2006. After six long, miserable years of the middle-class
getting slaughtered and the poor being flushed down the toilet, Rahm Emanuel took on the
job of returning Congress to the Democrats. No one believed it could be done.
But he did it. Big time. He put the fear of God into the party of Rush and Newt. They had
never been so scared. More importantly, though, he instilled a sense of hope in the
Democrats that they could actually score the mother of all hat tricks in 2008 -- and with
you, an African American no less, in the pole position!
It worked. The Darkness ended. The vast majority of the nation wept with joy on the
night of the election (those who weren't weepin
to have a page that listed all the Jew neocons that bankrolled the network. When I
discovered that fact they took the page off the web site. Now Murdock wants the Arab
nations to open up their media for him to take over and indoctrinate the masses with Jew
neo-con disinformation. http://www.lobelog.com/ used to publish the truth on this issue
and was the only web site that the Jews didn't prevent from telling the truth about the
Jew neocons.
The gangsters have had their puppet dictator running Greece for years and then its a
surprise when it defaults.
Walmart went into Germany and the german people refused to buy products made with
low wage Chinese slave labor. Walmart had to close their doors and pull out of Germany.
Now mob controlled Newscorp wants to buy up stations in the middle east to indictrinate
those people to be subservient to Israeli domination. If Glen beck and Rush Limbaugh
were on the air in Germany or Sweden or France they would go out of business because
no one would listen to their lies and distortion. That's why the mobsters want to close the
internet in France. Every time the gangsters try to pass trickle down policies there are
riots costing the country billions. The gangsters got their Jew Sarkosy in power but he
hasn't been able to redistrubute the wealth to the gangsters favored few and enslave the
masses. In Sweden socialism was so entrenched the mobsters shot dead the Swedish
finance minister right on the street and bought their big companies. I was in Germany in
the 80s when the mobsters used a car bomb on the head of the German central bank.
Such is the nature of democracy. After i mentioned Deutche Bank the gangsters took it
over. What was the CEOs name-Ackerman-he worked for the mob. Then they had
Vodaphone go in and take over the cell phone so they can tap all the German phones. Such
is the nature of the imperial mafias empire. God forbid any social welfare in the interests
of the people. Everything for the criminal class.
I'm watching the pelican brief. It says its illegal for the CIA to operate in the US but the
gangsters are everywhere. And they owe me ten billion dollars.
The gangsters are putting a new leader in charge of mob controlled Columbia. Figure that
one out. Since Salinas they got their little dictator in charge of Mexico and half the
people live in poverty now. The standard of living was cut in half after NAFTA. They
don't give a fuck. They impoverished a billion is SE Asia and made South Africans poorer
under Mandela. They pretended he had power but the gangsters just made the economy
worse-its in the "Shock Doctrine".
Want me to share a thought. I'm watching the movie "Casino". It describes the skim of
cash the casinos would make disapear from their books. (It is described in depth in the
book "The money and the Power" It was delivered to Kansas City because it said that was
as far east they were allowed to fly. Who resides there? Warren Buffet and Birkshire
Hathaway. Now the gangsters have Birkshire make strategic investments to maintain
economic control of other nations. So they have Birkshire invest in insurance companies in
Germany and Japan (which it has done twice in the last month) to control those companies
and then they have those insurance companies make strategic investments in various
companies in those nations so they control the institutions that control those institutions
and on top of that they have Birkshire make a strategic investment in Goldman sacks
which makes strategic investments in governments of countries like Greece and Turkey
etc. So the gangsters empire revolves around the investments of companies like AIG,
Birkshire Hathaway, Goldman Sacks and Carlyle and the companies at the top of this page
and the business round table has as its leader a gangster by the name of John Castelano.
But when they talk of the US empire this isn't discussed. They forced Germany and
Japan to get rid of interlocking directorates so the US could control those companies
instead and impliment supply side trickle down policies. Such is the nature of sham
democracy. Chomsky said about the mobsters, "they aren't fit to lead" This financial
crisis has proven his case.
Here is matt Damon speaking on Iraq,""Our idea was to have a character who was a good
solider who went there thinking he was going to find something," Damon, a longtime
outspoken liberal, told the Huffington Post at a recent press day. "He got there and didn't
find it, and then asked the question why, which I think is kind of what happened for all of
us. We were told something was going to happen and it didn't, and then we went, 'How did
we get here? Oh yeah, the weapons. Where were they?'"
I was teaching social studies before the invasion and I told my department head there
were no weapons of mass destruction it was just AIPAC wanting the US to take over the
middle-east. She thought I was crazy. The Jews get pretty much what they want.
Lieberman didn't want the public option for the Jew doctors and it was taken out (he
thought it might constrict the ability of Jewish criminals in the health care industry). In
California Carly Forina the mobsters candidate is accusing her opponent of not wanting to
give enough tax dollars to Israel. McKinney's carreer was destroyed by AIPAC when she
opposed the invasion of Iraq.
I wouldn't mind a Jew for president-Elliot Spitzer, or a Jew for head of the Fed-Joseph
Stiglitz, or a Jew for head of treasury-Paul Krugman. But the mobsters only put jew
criminals in charge such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.
David Letterman is senile and so are his mob handlers. Linsey Lohan and her mob
handlers are out of their mind. If you want to go after real criminals look at american
doctors and insurance companies.
Utah is up the road from Vegas. Its pretty much controlled by the gangsters and Orin
Hatch is their chosen senator. He's an idiot and needs to go. He is not representative of
the mormon population and neither is Mitt Romney.
What needs to be done is to get FOX News, Glen Beck CNBC, and Rush out there
convincing the america people that the best candidate to lead the Republican party is
Elliot Spitzer. Conservatives are so dumb they won't know his background. They believe
anything FOX News tells them. Karl Rove can devise his campaign strategy.
OK heres a question. If the fed buys treasuries from itself and creates money or
basically prints money, is that real money? If they print 100 billion of currency and the
value of the dollar doesn’t go down then its real money that the taxpayer doesn’t have to
pay for and that creates real jobs and purchasing power in the economy. It was
interesting that the value of the dollar went up relative to the Euro even after the fed
spent 12 trillion or whatever. I havn't read anything on the value of the currency after
the fed printed all this money.
In 1979 I think a semester of tuition at the University of Illinois was 600. Now its like
8000. It was the gangsters who drove up the cost of higher education all the while
singing the praises of equal opportunity. They say one thing but the real agenda is always
tax cuts for the wealthy, maximum exploitation of labor and no social justice.
The gangsters put Elliot Spitzer under surveillance after he went after Merrill Lynch and
AIG and destroyed maybe americas most able politician. Thats why I hope he runs for
president. Mitt Romney is a brain dead sleeze-bag gangster who received two billion from
an El Salvadoran mobster to start Bain Capital. The GOP does not have a candidate.
Spitzer should run as a Republican.
Economy Looks Grim? Pass Healthcare Reform
Why the continuing bad job numbers make it harder (but even more important) to push
through a health care bill.
March 6, 2010 |
The loss of 36,000 jobs in February is better than expected but it’s still miserable.
26,000 were lost in January, according to the government’s revised figures. And the
“underemployment” rate — including jobless workers who have given up looking for work
and part-time workers who want full time jobs — rose from 16.5% in January to 16.8% in
February, offsetting some of January’s gains.
(And don’t blame it mostly on the weather. Although the surveys on which the report is
based were done in mid-February during winter snowstorms in the east, the major impact
of bad weather was on hours worked, not the numbers of jobs. If you had a job in
February but were snowed in, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported you as having a
job.)
This complicates the President’s final push for health care reform. With employers still
shedding jobs and consumer confidence down, Americans are worried first and foremost
about paying their bills. Because most people aren’t aware how much of their paychecks
are being eaten up by rising health care costs but can easily be persuaded they’ll be
paying more to cover those who don’t have health insurance under any new health plan,
the continuing bad news on the jobs front makes it harder for the President to make his
health-care sale.
The bad news on jobs also allows economic illiterates (and scoundrels who know better) to
continue to claim the stimulus is failing and what’s needed is less government rather than
more, including not only a smaller “jobs bill” but less or no health care reform.
In politics as in economics and love, timing is everything. Obama can’t wait much longer if
he wants to convince waivering and worried conservative Dems to join him in a last ditch
51-vote reconciliation measure to get health care through the Senate. We’re already in
the gravititational pull of November’s mid-term elections. But the economy is taking a
longer time to turn around than anyone expected, and telling Americans the jobs numbers
are getting worse more slowly isn’t exactly reassuring.
One small political consolation is the worst job numbers continue to be on the coasts and
the old rust belt where Dems are relatively safer, and the best numbers in the midwest
and mountain states and south where Dems are weakest. So at least blue-dog Dems who
are under the most pressure from their conservative constituents on health care aren’t
grappling with the biggest job losses.
Another is that all across the nation, the people being hit worst by this continuing jobs
recession/depression are poor and the lower-middle class who Republicans are trying to
court. They’re in greatest danger of losing health care coverage if they haven’t lost it
already, and in greatest need for subsidies to allow them and their families to afford it.
Waivering and worried congressional Dems should be reaching out to them.
Americans desperately need health care reform. They also desperately need jobs. Even if
it’s difficult for many to make the connection, it’s still possible for the nation to try to do
two important things at the same time. We need a big jobs bill — including especially
extended unemployment insurance, aid to hard-hit states and cities — and we need health
care reform. The sooner we do the former and get the economy moving into positive job
numbers again, the more quickly and easily we can afford the latter. The big question is
whether the President can make the case.
Mar 06, 2010
"The Dangers of Deficit Reduction"
Joseph Stiglitz picks up where Jamie Galbraith left off:
The Dangers of Deficit Reduction, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Commentary, NY Times: A wave
of fiscal austerity is rushing over Europe and America. ...
Most economists ... agree that it is a mistake to look at only one side of a balance sheet
(whether for the public or private sector). One has to look not only at what a country or
firm owes, but also at its assets. This should help answer those financial sector hawks
who are raising alarms about government spending. ... Spending, especially on investments
in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits.
...
Faster growth and returns on public investment yield higher tax revenues, and a 5 to 6%
return is more than enough to offset temporary increases in the national debt. A social
cost-benefit analysis (taking into account impacts other than on the budget) makes such
expenditures, even when debt-financed, even more attractive.
Finally, most economists agree that ... a ... weaker economy calls for a larger deficit, and
the appropriate size of the deficit in the face of a recession depends on the precise
circumstances. ... Yet, even with large deficits, economic growth in the US and Europe is
anemic, and forecasts of private-sector growth suggest that in the absence of continued
government support, there is risk of continued stagnation...
As the global economy returns to growth, governments should, of course, have plans on
the drawing board to raise taxes and cut expenditures. The right balance will inevitably
be a subject of dispute. ...
The financial sector has imposed huge externalities on the rest of society. America’s
financial industry polluted the world with toxic mortgages, and, in line with the well
established “polluter pays” principle, taxes should be imposed on it. Besides, well-
designed taxes on the financial sector might help alleviate problems caused by excessive
leverage and banks that are too big to fail. Taxes on speculative activity might encourage
banks to focus greater attention on performing their key societal role of providing credit.
Over the longer term, most economists agree that governments, especially in advanced
industrial countries with aging populations, should be concerned about the sustainability
of their policies. But we must be wary of deficit fetishism. Deficits to finance wars or
give-aways to the financial sector ... lead to liabilities without corresponding assets,
imposing a burden on future generations. But high-return public investments that more
than pay for themselves can actually improve the well-being of future generations, and it
would be doubly foolish to burden them with debts from unproductive spending and then
cut back on productive investments.
These are questions for a later day..., prospects of a robust recovery are, at best, a year
or two away. For now, the economics is clear: reducing government spending is a risk not
worth taking.
I'm republishing this article by Spitzer because it is salient at this time.
Tax FraudDebunking the claim that higher income-tax
rates reduce GDP.
By Eliot SpitzerPosted Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, at 3:39 PM ET
The American debate over taxes is ferocious and highly partisan. Some, mostly Republicans,
reflexively oppose all taxes. Others, mostly Democrats, decry the lack of progressivity and
fairness in the tax system and favor higher tax rates for the wealthy.
This debate isn't new. The same arguments have been repeated, with the same passion, since
our income tax system was created—first during the Civil War and then—after its initial
rejection by the Supreme Court—following the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913. A
wonderful book by Steven Weisman, The Great Tax Wars, brings this history to life.
But as Weisman makes clear, one thing has changed in a spectacular manner, and that is the
American public's—and American politicians'—willingness to defend high marginal income-tax
rates as an essential and proper way to pay for the cost of government. Until a generation
ago, many Americans and their representatives argued vehemently that the wealthy ought to
pay more in taxes, but that position has drastically declined in popularity. Weisman sets the
debate in the context of the battle between those who invoke justice—progressive taxes
create equity and hence justice—and those who invoke virtue—the belief that hard work
should be rewarded and taxing higher income at an elevated level creates a disincentive to
the hard work we should promote.
Leaders of a century ago invoked justice in remarkable language that is unimaginable today.
President Woodrow Wilson called paying taxes "a glorious privilege." Supreme Court Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society." In
1942, President Franklin Roosevelt said, "In this time of grave national danger, when all
excess income should go to win the war; no American citizen ought to have a net income,
after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000." That $25,000 is the equivalent of
$323,208 in today's dollars. Can you conceive of a modern president suggesting that no
American should earn more than $323,000 after taxes? (President George W. Bush went to
war twice without once calling for such a common sacrifice to pay for it.) And President
Harry Truman in 1948 vetoed a broad-based tax cut, even in the face of an expected and
eventual congressional override, and then asked for a tax increase following his upset victory.
But President Ronald Reagan transformed our conversation about government and turned taxes
into the enemy of progress. It is commonly thought that President George H.W. Bush's
violation of his "read my lips" pledge cost him re-election and President Bill Clinton's 1993
tax increases cost him control of Congress.
Central to the intellectual debate about marginal tax rates has been the question of whether
higher rates discourage people from working. President Reagan is famously reported to have
observed that, as an actor, once he hit the top marginal rate—then 91 percent—he stopped
making movies for the rest of the year. The result of sky-high marginal rates, this anecdote
was supposed to prove, was declining productivity and economic growth.
Is this true? Let's look at a graph of the nominal top marginal tax rate in any given year and
GDP growth in that year.
A caveat—obvious but critical—is in order. Simultaneity does not equal causation. Annual
growth rates are a consequence of many factors, macro and micro, and the isolated impact of
marginal tax rates on growth is hard, if not impossible, to discern from these numbers alone.
That said, it's obvious that there is no correlation between higher marginal tax rates and
slowing economic activity. During the period 1951-63, when marginal rates were at their
peak—91 percent or 92 percent—the American economy boomed, growing at an average annual
rate of 3.71 percent. The fact that the marginal rates were what would today be viewed as
essentially confiscatory did not cause economic cataclysm—just the opposite. And during the
past seven years, during which we reduced the top marginal rate to 35 percent, average
growth was a more meager 1.71 percent.
More sophisticated efforts to analyze this relationship also produce decidedly murky results.
An excellent review of this in the Yale Law Journal, "Why Tax the Rich? Efficiency, Equity,
and Progressive Taxation," concludes that there is scant, if any, legitimate academic support
for the proposition that moderate, as opposed to dramatic, increases in marginal rates have
any impact on the willingness of the wealthy to participate in the economy.
So where does this leave us? Probably with Weisman's conclusion—that the debate between
justice and virtue will continue for years to come. But this debate may be little more than a
Rorschach test—an inkblot into which we read our underlying values about income distribution
and social welfare. Those who see taxes as the bane of progress will still claim that higher
marginal rates are the enemy of economic growth. Those who favor greater progressivity will
say there is no evidence of such a claim. They will conclude—and they will be right—that the
wealthier can afford to pay more, with no harm to the nation's economic growth.
Financial Regulatory Reform
The problem, not too surprisingly, lies in the Senate, and mainly, though not
entirely, with Republicans. The House has already passed a fairly strong reform
bill, more or less along the lines proposed by the Obama administration, and the
Senate could probably do the same if it operated on the principle of majority rule.
But it doesn’t — and when you combine near-universal Republican opposition to
serious reform with the wavering of some Democrats, prospects look bleak.
How did we get to this point? And should reform advocates accept the
compromises that might yet produce some kind of bill?
Many opponents of the House version of banking reform present their position as
one of principle. House Republicans, offering their alternative proposal, claimed
that they would end banking excesses by introducing “market discipline” —
basically, by promising not to rescue banks in the future.
But that’s a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to
shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly,
relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to
disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-
market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire
codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending,
the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again
and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today.
I suspect that even Republicans, in their hearts, understand the need for real
reform. But their strategy of opposing anything the Obama administration
proposes, coupled with the lure of financial-industry dollars — back in December
top Republican leaders huddled with bank lobbyists to coordinate their campaigns
against reform — has trumped all other considerations.
That said, some Republicans might, just possibly, be persuaded to sign on to a
much-weakened version of reform — in particular, one that eliminates a key plank
of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent
agency protecting consumers. Should Democrats accept such a watered-down
reform?
I say no.
There are times when even a highly imperfect reform is much better than nothing;
this is very much the case for health care. But financial reform is different. An
imperfect health care bill can be revised in the light of experience, and if
Democrats pass the current plan there will be steady pressure to make it better. A
weak financial reform, by contrast, wouldn’t be tested until the next big crisis. All
it would do is create a false sense of security and a fig leaf for politicians opposed
to any serious action — then fail in the clinch.
Better, then, to take a stand, and put the enemies of reform on the spot. And by
all means let’s highlight the dispute over a proposed Consumer Financial Protection
Agency.
There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward
Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to
act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why
are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The
question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped
into taking these products.”
Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must
be, or lobbyists wouldn’t be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency’s creation.
And it’s not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting
consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or — as in one compromise
that at this point seems unlikely — by a unit within the Treasury Department. But
remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was
Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under
future antiregulation administrations — and believe me, given the power of the
financial lobby, there will be such administrations — is if there’s an agency whose
whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.
In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a
campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic
reform that just covers up failure to act.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Opinion (1 of 29) » A version of this article
appeared in print on March 1, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.
The Deficit Hawks' Road to Ruin
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 03/02/2010 @ 1:
47pm
This piece is cross-posted from the WashingtonPost.
com, where Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly
column.
In the face of this Great Recession, the Senate's
recently passed $15 billion jobs bill is more like a sick
joke than a serious legislative initiative.
We have lost more than 8.4 million jobs since
December 2007. One out of five Americans is now
unemployed or underemployed. More than six people are
seeking jobs for every one that's available. In low-
income communities the jobless rates are not those of
a recession but of another depression, and the
Economic Policy Institute estimates that child poverty
will rise to 27 percent overall, and to over 50 percent
for African American children, in the next year or two.
As economist Lawrence Mishel, president of EPI, told
me, "In the midst of the worst jobs crisis in over 70
years, passing a $15 billion bill -- comprising mostly of
a tax credit of questionable efficacy -- is like trying
to extinguish a 10-alarm fire with a leaky garden hose."
In contrast, bold plans that match the scale of the
crisis aren't getting enough attention. For example,
EPI calls for: a one-year extension of unemployment
compensation and COBRA health benefits; fiscal relief
for states that will otherwise lay off more teachers,
firefighters, police officers and other workers; a New
Deal-like public service employment program;
investments in transportation and school modernization;
and a carefully crafted job-creation tax credit. It
would cost $400 billion in the first year to create 4.6
million jobs, and the entire cost could be recouped
within 10 years by enacting a financial transactions
tax. Also, in a recent cover story in The Nation,
economist Robert Pollin laid out an ambitious yet
realistic plan to create 18 million jobs over the next
three years through leveraging private-public
partnerships.
But don't expect any of this to have an easy time in
Congress, where the deficit hysteria now sweeping the
political and pundit class constrains the possibility for
bold public policy. ad_icon
A recent New York Times headline screams, "Huge
Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power." The
Wall Street Journal offers this grim warning: "Deficit
Balloons into National-Security Threat." The Washington Post describes "a
budget hole that is driving accumulated debt to dangerous levels."
Behind these sorts of warnings are many of the people who were so fixated on
deficits that they missed the housing and credit bubble -- not to mention the Wall
Street chicanery that made them possible. Now they are peddling the idea that we
risk a major debt crisis if government spending continues to fill the gap left by the
decline of private-sector demand and investment.
The deficit hawks are unable to distinguish bad deficits from good ones. Bad
deficits result from collapsing revenue -- whether due to wasteful tax cuts or
sluggish economic activity -- or unnecessary wars of occupation and other wasteful
military spending. Good ones stem from spending to create jobs and spur growth
through investments in infrastructure, science and technology, new energy sources,
education and worker training.
Instead of giving into the deficit hype with discretionary domestic spending
freezes and bipartisan deficit-reduction commissions, President Obama would be
wise to directly challenge the conservative narrative that a responsible government
cannot drive economic activity.
The president could note that the federal debt held by the public is well within our
historical experience. As of the end of 2009, it was 53 percent of GDP -- a level
that is only slightly higher than in 1993. By 2019, the Congressional Budget Office
projects the debt will increase to 68 percent of GDP, still below the level of debt
in the 1940s, which reached a peak of about 121 percent in 1946. And even with
massive deficits, debt-servicing burdens are projected to remain low, according to
an analysis from the New America Foundation.
The president could explain that by virtue of the dollar's role as the world's
principal reserve currency, America can accumulate more debt than other
economies. Without dollar-denominated debt, the world economy would come to a
screeching halt. And that the reality isn't likely to change in the short- or medium-
term, given the problems with the euro and the yen and China's resistance to
financial liberalization.
And Obama could argue that, as our experience after World War II amply
demonstrates, by investing in a productive economy we can comfortably reduce our
debt while expanding the shared prosperity of the American people.
The Democrats should give Americans a clear choice. Push for a bold jobs bill --
let Republicans stand up and filibuster it, just as Democrats forced Kentucky Sen.
Jim Bunning (R) to do in his indefensible effort to block an extension of
unemployment benefits. Then, come November, take a pro-jobs record to the
American people, having exposed the GOP for the obstructionist party that it is.
Published on Thursday, March 4, 2010 by FireDogLake.com
Health Insurance Industry’s $300 Billion Victory Over
the Public Option
by Jon Walker
When Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NE),
Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and the
entire Republican Senate caucus stepped up to kill the
public option in the Senate, it is important to remember
that the health insurance industry won a victory-a
victory worth $300 billion. As Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)
and Tom Harkin (D-IA) now try to crush attempts to
revive the public option inside a reconciliation measure,
they are battling to protect that extra $300 billion
that will flow to AHIP as a result. The public option
was never just a "sliver" as Obama tried to claim. It
was about a fundamental moral right and the role of
government. But what it was also about was a huge
amount of money.
The CBO projects that the relatively weak public option-
the one limited just to the exchange in the House
health care bill-would secure roughly one-fifth of that
market, equal to around 6 million people (PDF). The
CBO concluded that, as a result of those 6 million
customers, the public option will take in $298 billion
(PDF) in direct premiums, exchange subsidies, and risk
adjustment payments from 2013-2019. However, with
the public option removed, but the individual mandate
remaining, that $300 billion will instead go straight to
the private insurance corporations' books. If, like I
personally suspect, the CBO slightly underestimated the
popularity of the public option, and it manages to
secure instead roughly a third of the customers on the
exchange, that would be roughly $500 billion that the
public option would take from the private insurance
companies.
I often hear the argument that the public option was
not important because only 2% of Americans would be
using it. That's true, but it is important to remember
that roughly a third are currently insured by public
programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare. Of
course, of the roughly half of Americans with private
insurance, the bulk of them get there coverage through
employer-provided, self-funded plans. Plans in which
the employer bears the risk and holds the premiums.
The insurance companies are only subcontracted to provide
administrative functions. That 6 million people the public option was projected to
cover would be a significant share of the potential market for private insurance
companies to actually cover and noticeably expand the amount of money they would
have earning float revenue.
It is important to remember the sheer scope of the private insurance companies
victory if they stop health care reform from having even a relatively weak public
option. It will be a victory that will provide them with an extra $300 billion of our
money. No doubt some of that same money will be used in the future to fight
efforts to enact real health care reform.
© 2010 FireDogLake.com
Jon Walker is political writer and blogger for FireDogLake. He is an expert on
health care policy and the politics of health care reform.
Paul Krugman: Afflicting the Afflicted
Getting the last laugh is good for health:
Afflicting the Afflicted, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: If we’re lucky,
Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health
reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-
making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering
moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans
responding with slander and misdirection. ...
Republicans ... didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-
checking. It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican
speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander,... right off the bat ... delivered a whopper,
asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will
go up.”
Wow. I guess ... he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office
analysis ... does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But ... this
would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price
of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost
to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.
His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats ... plan
to use a ... process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that
reconciliation has “never been used for something like this”..., but reconciliation
has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms — and was used to push
through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill
for health reform.
What really struck me..., however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how
they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of
much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing
medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care
whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited
genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic
violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.
One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end
to this.. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely
inarticulate on the matter... He offered no ... ideas...
House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical
histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition
across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the
weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny
coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the
nation... The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of
Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the
House G.O.P. plan. ... While some people would gain insurance, the people losing
insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the
American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.
So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that
the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in
Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly
make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and
pay no price. And they may well be right.
But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the
power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.
A Five-Step Guide To Real Financial Reform
— Flickr/f-l-e-x (Creative Commons)
What Barack Obama can do to prevent a second meltdown.
— By Reid Cramer
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The next big battle in Washington—one that will heat up fast if the health care
tussle is ever resolved—will be fought over reform of the financial sector. In
recent weeks, President Barack Obama has gone on the offensive, calling for new
restraints on Wall Street wheeling and dealing and vowing to veto weak legislation.
In December, the House passed a robust package of reforms. The action has now
shifted to the Senate Banking Committee, and chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)
has pledged to push a comprehensive package over the finish line before he retires
at the end of the year. But it won’t be easy. The big banks and their lobbyists
are vigorously resisting a rewrite of their operating rules and working hard to
insert loopholes and exclusions that would gut the legislation. Obama can prevent
that from happening by spelling out the benchmarks the legislators must meet to
avoid his veto pen. The details of financial reform can be complicated. But it’s not
hard to come up with the must-have provisions. Here are five that the White
House should insist upon to make sure we get financial reform that works, not just
window dressing.
1) Fix the big picture, not just individual firms.
We learned the hard way that the possibility of failure is an essential pillar of a
stable financial system. When firms become "too big to fail," they take excessive
risks, crowd out smaller firms, and are costly to bail out—and the failure of one
can threaten the whole economy. Successful financial reform would include a
mechanism to survey the balance sheets of particular firms according to the risks
they pose to others, not just to their shareholders or depositors. Currently, no
single entity is assigned to ensure system-wide stability and detect excessive risk
taking. There must be an agency with the authority to monitor threats to the
marketplace and prevent the failure of any individual firm from having a cascading
effect. Europe is on a path to create a Systemic Risk Board, comprised of the
national central banks, to perform this function, and the United States ought to
follow suit.
The House bill sought to create a Financial Oversight Council, which would include
members of the Federal Reserve and the existing bank regulators. Senate
negotiations are considering establishing this new authority within the Treasury
Department, but with a role for the Fed and others. More important than the
bureaucratic location is the precise nature of this new authority. It won’t mean
much if it ends up as a flag-waving exercise. Instead, the regulators awarded this
authority must have preeminence over the existing bank regulators and the power
to quarantine contagion. They must be able to require specific firms to increase
their capital holdings and alter their risk-management practices. These regulators
even have to be empowered to break up companies whose size and interconnections
with other firms endanger the entire economy.
2) Separate retail banking from the casinos.
Before the meltdown, banks and other financial institutions made bets with other
people's money that ultimately soured their balance sheets when the wagers didn't
work out. For each firm, there has to be stronger oversight, along with higher
capital requirements and other rules that increase transparency and accountability.
These rules can protect both bankers (from themselves) and the depositors who
rely on these firms to protect their assets and provide credit. After excessive
risk-taking brought on the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933
required banks to spin off or shut down their brokerage and investment activities.
For almost 70 years, this law drew a line between banks that the government could
backstop and those that behave like casinos and hedge funds. The act was repealed
in 1999, and many have been calling for its resurrection. But the sideline
businesses of today are different. Back in the 1920s, if banks were underwriting a
stock that had trouble selling, they would buy it with money from their depositors'
accounts. Now, a bigger problem is proprietary trading: when securities are bought
and sold with a firm's own money to generate a profit for itself. Consequently, the
White House has called for a new rule, named for its most vocal proponent, former
Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, to ban proprietary trading. The Volcker rule is a must
for financial reform because, like the original Glass-Steagall Act, it would separate
(and protect) retail banking from other riskier endeavors and also cause firms to
become smaller. Dodd has indicated he may think it's wise to postpone this reform
in order to get a deal done, but the White House should insist on its inclusion in
the final bill.
3) It's the consumer, stupid.
The next regulatory regime should be designed with the consumer, not just the
banks, in mind. There needs to be a new set of consumer protections—such as
preventing banks from changing overdraft fees to cash in on the increased use of
debit cards. (This practice created a $26 billion windfall for the banks almost
overnight.) These protections should be set and policed by a new Consumer Financial
Protection Agency. For this CFPA to work, it would need teeth and latitude to
fight all sorts of predatory behavior engaged in by banks and nonbanks, such as
subprime mortgages and payday lending. The House approved the creation of an
independent agency, which would possess the authority to treat consumer issues on
par with the “safety and soundness” standards employed by other bank regulators.
To attract support of Republicans who have balked at establishing an autonomous
agency, Dodd is looking for a compromise. One idea, recently floated, is to create
a Bureau of Financial Protection within the Treasury Department. This bureau would
be charged with promoting consumer protection, but would be required to consult
with existing bank regulators before new rules are issued. And if there is a
conflict, these regulators would be allowed to appeal up the chain. To be
successful, a new authority has to have both rule-making authority and strong
enforcement mechanisms. Without these tools, it will get endlessly rolled by the
existing regulators.
4) Keep it simple.
Current rules allow firms peddling deceptive financial products to bury their scams
in the fine print. Credit card companies charge hidden fees when a card holder
pays over the phone, inquires about a new loan, or transfers an account balance
from another card. Similarly, the mortgage industry makes money by steering
borrowers away from standard 30-year fixed loans and toward higher-priced,
subprime loans. These are unfair practices, even if they are covered by contracts
signed by consumers. Profits should not be made by tricking people into products
they don’t need or understand. Instead, rules that govern the market for financial
services should be written to take into account how consumers behave. As the
burgeoning field of behavioral economics has shown, too much information can
easily overwhelm. If we can streamline information disclosure, we can make the
financial services marketplace more competitive by price. Providers must be clear
about the costs of their products and offer standard low-risk products. Future
market rules should be governed by a new set of standards and encourage
transparency, simplicity, and fairness in products offerings. The House bill made
sure that promoting these principles would be a centerpiece of the reform effort
when they defined the mission of a new CFPA in precisely these terms. The White
House must ensure that the Senate does the same.
5) And for heaven's sake, limit executive pay.
Wall Street’s plan to return to the outlandish compensation packages that pervaded
the industry prior to the meltdown may be grounds for making tone deafness a
crime. A successful financial reform package must do what the firms cannot:
impose restraint. Specifically, the bill should mandate a “say on pay” rule that
would grant shareholders a strong role in approving (or disapproving) executive pay
packages. Also, the SEC should be required to step in to make sure firms create
truly independent compensation committees to set appropriate pay levels. And a new
set of shareholder rights rules should be implemented that would allow
shareholders to nominate individuals to a firm’s board of directors, to examine a
clear description of executive compensation, and to claw back unearned
performance-based pay. These rules are in the House bill, but the Senate is being
lobbied heavily to do nothing on this front.
There are plenty of details to work out—and debate—while rewriting the complex
rules for the financial industry. But the public will be able to evaluate what
emerges from the messy legislative process—and to judge whether or not Obama
should accept the measure—by looking to see if these five standards have been
met. And here’s a final tip that will tell you whether a final bill contains the right
tools to produce real reform: The big bankers won’t sign on.
Financial Reform Endgame
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 28, 2010
So here’s the situation. We’ve been through
the second-worst financial crisis in the
history of the world, and we’ve barely begun
to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t
find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all
momentum for serious banking reform has
been lost. The question now seems to be
whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no
bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the
second option is starting to look preferable.
The problem, not too surprisingly, lies in the
Senate, and mainly, though not entirely, with
Republicans. The House has already passed a
fairly strong reform bill, more or less along
the lines proposed by the Obama
administration, and the Senate could probably
do the same if it operated on the principle of
majority rule. But it doesn’t — and when you
combine near-universal Republican opposition
to serious reform with the wavering of some
Democrats, prospects look bleak.
How did we get to this point? And should
reform advocates accept the compromises
that might yet produce some kind of bill?
Many opponents of the House version of
banking reform present their position as one
of principle. House Republicans, offering their
alternative proposal, claimed that they would
end banking excesses by introducing “market
discipline” — basically, by promising not to
rescue banks in the future.
But that’s a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to
shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly,
relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to
disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-
market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire
codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending,
the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again
and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today.
I suspect that even Republicans, in their hearts, understand the need for real
reform. But their strategy of opposing anything the Obama administration
proposes, coupled with the lure of financial-industry dollars — back in December
top Republican leaders huddled with bank lobbyists to coordinate their campaigns
against reform — has trumped all other considerations.
That said, some Republicans might, just possibly, be persuaded to sign on to a
much-weakened version of reform — in particular, one that eliminates a key plank
of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent
agency protecting consumers. Should Democrats accept such a watered-down
reform?
I say no.
There are times when even a highly imperfect reform is much better than nothing;
this is very much the case for health care. But financial reform is different. An
imperfect health care bill can be revised in the light of experience, and if
Democrats pass the current plan there will be steady pressure to make it better. A
weak financial reform, by contrast, wouldn’t be tested until the next big crisis. All
it would do is create a false sense of security and a fig leaf for politicians opposed
to any serious action — then fail in the clinch.
Better, then, to take a stand, and put the enemies of reform on the spot. And by
all means let’s highlight the dispute over a proposed Consumer Financial Protection
Agency.
There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward
Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to
act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why
are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The
question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped
into taking these products.”
Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must
be, or lobbyists wouldn’t be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency’s creation.
And it’s not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting
consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or — as in one compromise
that at this point seems unlikely — by a unit within the Treasury Department. But
remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was
Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under
future antiregulation administrations — and believe me, given the power of the
financial lobby, there will be such administrations — is if there’s an agency whose
whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.
In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a
campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic
reform that just covers up failure to act.
Going Non-Union
GM's Northern Strategy
By AL BENCHICH
The “reinvention” of the “New GM” has begun
with the opening of a lithium-ion battery
plant in Brownstown, Michigan, near Detroit.
The event was remarkable not only because
the Brownstown plant signals GM’s return to
the production of an electric vehicle but also
because, for the first time in about 30
years, GM has opened a non-union plant in
the U.S.
The new plant is funded in part by taxpayer
dollars, and GM is not rehiring any of the
thousands of UAW members who were laid
off when their plants closed—despite union
promises that workers’ concessions on pay,
benefits, and speed of work would save GM
and were their only chance for job security.
The plant, a wholly owned subsidiary of
General Motors, opened on January 7 and
currently employs 25 hourly workers. Last
year former GM CEO Fritz Henderson said
GM planned to hire new workers to fill 100
hourly jobs at second-tier wages of about
$14 an hour. (Henderson, who was fired by
GM, is now being paid $60,000 a month as a
“consultant” to work 20 hours a
month—$3,000 an hour.)
Speaking at the battery plant’s opening, new GM Chairman Ed Whitacre spoke of
the company’s opportunities in the transformation to “green” products and jobs.
Apparently, GM’s transformation doesn’t include UAW representation, as Ed
Niedermeyer points out in his blog thetruthaboutcars.com: “If GM can get away
with using non-union workers at a crucial plant that’s supposed to represent the
firm’s future, things aren’t looking so good for our friends in organized labor.”
GM appears to have a strategy to bust our seriously weakened union—a move in
which the UAW leadership has been knowingly or unknowingly complicit. It’s not
hard to understand GM’s objective. The company appears to be emulating the move
by Delphi to create a low wage, non-union workforce.
What’s the UAW’s response? At this point it’s hard to determine because the
silence from Solidarity House has been deafening. Sources at the UAW
International say an organizing drive is taking place at the Brownstown plant.
The hiring at the battery plant is one indication of GM’s strategy and the UAW’s
lack of one. Why couldn’t the UAW negotiate the right of laid-off UAW/GM
members in the area to transfer to the Brownstown plant?
The same thing is happening at the Powertrain plant in Baltimore, where new work
coming in is considered a “stand-alone” operation and new workers are being hired,
while laid-off members wait for work. In Baltimore, however, the new workers will
be part of the Baltimore local, Local 239.
More Non-Union Work
A second indication of the UAW’s complicity in its own downfall is its agreement to
allow GM to outsource work that isn’t directly related to the assembly of the
vehicle. GM is not only outsourcing such “non-core” work, but also trying to ensure
that non-union workers perform the work.
First, GM joined with Chrysler and Toyota to outsource Teamster car haulers’ work
to non-union trucking firms. They have replaced the Teamster drivers at Ryder
Truck with a non-union company.
Second, GM appears to be giving the green light to outside contractors to fight
union organizing drives. In the past, suppliers were at least told they should be
“union-friendly.”
When the UAW agreed to allow GM to outsource sanitation work several years ago,
local unions (such as my local, Local 909 in Warren, Michigan) organized new in-
plant sanitation workers and negotiated a contract for them—all with little or no
interference from the new employer.
Now GM is changing its tune. The UAW allowed skilled trades jobs to be
outsourced last year, and according to companies currently bidding on this work,
GM has “no opinion” if they should be “union friendly.” This is a sure signal to
outside contractors to fight union organizing drives for contractor employees
working at GM facilities.
Southern Strategy
History serves as a stern reminder that, indeed, the past is prologue. In the early
1970s the power of the UAW was at its zenith. With 1.5 million members and the
power to bring auto production to a halt, the union won remarkable gains for its
members. The UAW’s historic 68-day strike in 1970 and the 1973 negotiations
with GM resulted in a 13 percent wage increase, improved health care, and
retirement after 30 hard years of work.
In response, General Motors instituted its “Southern Strategy” in the mid-1970s.
The strategy was designed to reduce the union’s power by duplicating GM’s
operations in non-union Southern states, thus allowing GM to continue production in
the Southern plants if the UAW struck in the North.
Several UAW organizing efforts in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Southern
plants failed. It was not until the UAW agreed to national contract concessions in
early 1982 that GM agreed to card check in the South. Concessions paved the way
for union recognition at the Southern plants—but they also led to the loss of most
of the major gains made in the 1970s and the continued downsizing of jobs at GM.
Despite every concession by the UAW to save jobs, despite every effort by the
UAW to improve quality and productivity, it must now be apparent that concessions
will not solve this dilemma. There is no more to give.
Some are fighting back. The Teamsters have taken to the streets to protest the
replacement of union car haulers.
But as GM pursues a new “Northern Strategy” to open new high-tech, non-union
“green” plants in the UAW’s backyard, where’s the UAW’s strategy?
There has been a vacuum in leadership at the UAW. At no time has anyone in the
leadership come forward and advocated a plan to change the downward slide.
There has been no Walter Reuther to step forward to demand a 12-point plan to
re-industrialize the country through investment in closed plants to build mass
transit, high speed and light rail, wind turbines, and all the things we need. There
has been only silence.
A new leadership will be elected in June at the UAW Convention. The membership
deserves leadership that will lead, by building solidarity within the UAW and the
broader labor movement. That is the challenge for our union. We have no choice
but to fight back or bid farewell to organized labor in this country. So the
question is, Will there be real discussion and debate about the way forward at the
convention, or will the leadership continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the
Titanic?
Al Benchich retired from GM’s Powertrain plant in Warren, Michigan, after 12
years as president of UAW Local 909 and is actively involved in the Autoworker
Caravan group.
Auto workers will be discussing these issues, including the upcoming UAW
Convention and conversion to green production, at the Labor Notes Conference April
23-25 in Detroit.
This article was originally published by Labor Notes.
Hillary Clinton's War Whoop
By MARC WEISBROT
In a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Hillary Clinton
recently said that Iran “is moving toward a military
dictatorship” and continued the Administration’s
campaign for tougher sanctions against that country.
What could America’s top diplomat hope to accomplish
with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric? It seems
unlikely that the goal was to support human rights in
Iran. Because of the United States’ history in Iran and
in the region, it tends to give legitimacy to repression.
The more that any opposition can be linked to the
United States’ actions, words or support, the harder
time they will have.
Second, it is tough for anyone – especially in the region
– to believe that the United States is really concerned
about human rights abuses. In addition to supporting
Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in
Gaza, Washington has been remarkably quiet as the most
important opposition leaders in Egypt were arrested as part of the government’s
preparations for October elections. Amnesty International stated that the
arrestees were "prisoners of conscience, detained solely for their peaceful political
activities."
So what is the purpose of a speech like this? The most obvious conclusion is that
it is to promote conflict and to convince Americans that Iran is an actual threat to
their security. Americans generally have to be prepared and persuaded for years if
they are to accept that they must go to war. The groundwork for the Iraq war
was laid during the Clinton presidency. President Clinton imposed sanctions on the
country that devastated the civilian population, carried out bombings and publicly
declared that Washington’s intention was to overthrow the government. Although,
as we now know, Iraq never posed any significant security threat to the United
States, President Clinton spent years trying to convince Americans that it did.
President Bush picked up where President Clinton left off; and President Clinton
publicly supported his campaign for the war. So did Hillary, and she defended her
decision in 2008 even as it looked like it might cost her the presidency.
President Obama is unlikely to start a war with Iran – which would likely begin as
an air war, not a ground war – not least because he already has two wars to deal
with. But, as in the case of the Iraq war, his Secretary of State is preparing the
ground for the next president that may have a stronger desire or better
opportunity to do so. There is a strong faction of our foreign policy establishment
that believes it has the right and obligation to bomb Iran in order to curtail its
nuclear program, and they have a long-term strategy.
The public relations campaign is working. A new Gallup poll finds that 61 percent of
Americans see Iran as “as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests,” with an
additional 29 percent believing that it is “an important threat.” It is not clear why
anyone would believe this; even if Iran did obtain a nuclear weapon, which is still a
ways off, they would not have the capacity to deliver it as far as the United
States. Nor is it likely that they would want to commit national suicide, any more
than a number of other countries that currently have nuclear weapons.
The Obama team’s messaging is not nearly so successful with regard to the issues
that the vast majority of the electorate will base their votes on in this year's
elections: the most recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll (Feb. 4-8) finds that 53
percent disapprove of his handling of the economy.
For the immediate future, foreign policy concerns will likely rank low, far behind
the economy, for the electorate. But the Obama team’s foreign policy will hurt
Democrats in the future. If I believed what Hillary Clinton and the Democratic
leadership are telling me, I would have to consider voting Republican. If it’s really
true that all these people just want to kill us for no reason; that it has nothing to
do with our foreign policy or wars; that we can effectively reduce terrorism by
bombing and occupying Muslim countries; and that terrorism is the country’s most
urgent security threat – then why not vote for the party that looks tougher? This
will inevitably come back to haunt the Democratic Party, as it did in the 2002 and
2004 elections.
Meanwhile, U.S. military spending - by the Congressional Budget Office’s relatively
narrow definition of the Department of Defense budget – reached 5.6 percent of
GDP in 2009. Just before September 11, 2001, the Congressional Budget Office
projected this spending for 2009 at 2.4 percent of GDP.
The difference, over 10 years, is more than four times the ten-year cost of
proposed health care reform.
Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and
Policy Research.
This article originally appeared in the Guardian.
Carly Forina who ran HP for the mob is running for Senator of California on the
platform that her opponent is an anti semite. Feinstein works for the mob.
How Imperial San Franciscans Loot the Planet
DiFi and Blum: a Marriage Marinated in Money
By WILL PARRISH and DARWIN BOND-
GRAHAM
On April 17, 2009, with the edifice of the
global economy rotting under an architecture
of monumental greed, war deficits, and
official hubris, the University of California,
Berkeley conducted a groundbreaking
ceremony for its Richard C. Blum Center for
Developing Economies. Before a throng of
students, faculty, staff, and PR specialists
affiliated with the Center’s new multi-UC
campus “Global Poverty & Practice” program,
the Blum Center's namesake was joined on
stage by one of the many political
heavyweights he counts among his business
partners, Al Gore. The former Vice
President praised Blum as a long-time friend
and cited the new institute as a key to
solving the interlocking problems of global
poverty and global climate change, two of the
many vexing boogeymen threatening to
destabilize the profit-making order.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, who published a book on the general subject in
1923, some of the greatest sociopaths in this country's history have affixed their
names to university buildings in an effort to burnish their reputations.
Richard Blum is a San Francisco-based finance capitalist presiding over a business empire
that is, to say the least, expansive. Hedge funds? Blum owns one outright and wields a
significant share of various others. Real estate? His primary investment vehicle, the
$7.8 billion Blum Capital Partners, owns the largest real estate brokerage firm on the
planet, CB Richard Ellis, of which Blum is chairman of the board. Construction? Until
public scandal prompted him to sell off his holdings, Blum was a majority partner in a
construction and engineering company that did billions in business with the US military,
among other government clients. Education? Try being the resident Alpha Regent of the
largest public university system in the world, the University of California, while also being
a primary owner of the world's second-largest for-profit education firm, Career
Education Corporation.
Large land-holding firms? Digital media company of which Al Gore serves as frontman?
Health industry corporation fighting to undermine the expansion of public health care?
Border-town maquiladora that build weapons components for the Department of Defense?
Check, check, check, and check.
The greatest investment of Blum’s career was undoubtedly his marriage, roughly 30 years
ago, to the politically Joe Lieberman-esque US Senate Democrat, Dianne Feinstein. At the
time of this meshing of Blum’s financial interests with Feinstein’s formidable political
ambitions, Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco and Blum -- already one of her main
financial backers -- had much of his fortune staked to various development projects in
the City.
Blum’s preferred means of personal enrichment rely on strong nation-state interventions
in markets and societies to promote unfettered corporate dominance of national
economies and distant lands. It should come as no surprise, then, that he and "DiFi" are
among the leading proponents of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank/US
Treasury nexus’ notion of how economies ought best be developed. This form of
economic “improvement” (deriving from the Anglo-French “emprouwer,” meaning “to clear
for profit”) involves burying Third World economies under mountains of debt backed by
usurious interest rates, facilitating the greatest level of investment possible by rapacious
multi-national corporate entities, privatizing government functions, and gutting social
services. Ironically, this agenda of neoliberal “structural adjustment” has decimated and
impoverished communities across the planet, causing suffering among the hundreds of
millions of people Blum’s heart now bleeds for: poor folks.
The economic and political policies promoted by Richard C. Blum and associates, including
Senator Feinstein and other leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, have
locked nations and peoples across the planet into a system of de facto colonial bondage
whereby their lands and destines are controlled by distant, debt-holding banks and hedge
funds – among them, Blum Capital Partners, LLC, and Newbridge Capital, LLC, of which
Blum was chairman of the Asia investment division for five years. The result has been
what author and UC Irvine sociologist Mike Davis calls a “planet of slums,” where .23
percent of the world population privately owns more than 50 percent of the land, and 85
percent of urban dwellers in the Third World are consigned to living on illegal squats in
hellish shanty towns under conditions of grinding poverty.
Just ask the people of Haiti, whose capital city now greatly resembles a war zone reduced
to rubble ala Fallujah, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, not by virtue of a natural disaster per
se, but because the IMF-WTO-US Treasury specialists in immiseration have forced them
off their land into desperately sub-standard slum housing, often perched tenuously on the
side of deforested hills and ravines. This “urban geography of mass vulnerability,” as the
academic field of disaster sociology refers to it, was created by the destruction of the
country’s rural agrarian economy that provided for subsistence, in an economic
transformation imposed by international creditors with the constant backing of the US
military.
Yet, at UC Berkeley, we have Dick Blum hoisting up “sustainable solutions to the toughest
poverty challenges” as his new line of work.
Blum’s name is a familiar one to those acquainted with the details of the corporate
plundering of California north coast forests and communities throughout the ‘80s and
‘90s. The year was 1995, and Texas corporate raider Charles Hurwitz — whose company,
Maxxam, had laid waste to as much ancient forestland as possible, as quickly as possible,
for nearly a decade — was looking to cash out of his ownership of the Headwaters forest
in central Humboldt County. Headwaters was the flashpoint of the largest direct action
protests in the history of the earth defense movement, as well as lawsuits and legislative
initiatives aimed at preserving what little was left of old-growth redwood ecosystems in
the Pacific Northwest. It so happened Hurwitz was an investment partner of Blum from
way back. Blum also happened to be a major donor, fundraiser, and political booster of
US President Bill Clinton.
Clinton and the State of California dutifully discharged their duties as proxies of the
super-wealthy in general – and, in this case, Blum in particular -- by appointing the
inviolable “DiFi” to chair a legislative team to negotiate the purchase of Headwaters from
Hurwitz. Feinstein and Hurwitz agreed on a final deal in 1996, hailed by Feinstein’s web
site as one of her 10 greatest career accomplishments. Hurwitz gave up very little of real
economic value — Maxxam had clear-cut most of the forest in question — in exchange for
a $380 million taxpayer-funded payout, or more than four times the market value of the
trees at the time. Much of the money went directly into Hurwitz's personal bank
accounts. That’s in spite of the fact that all the government really needed to do to
protect the acreage in question was enforce the Endangered Species Act. Regardless of
the fact that Headwaters became officially “protected,” the vast majority of California's
remaining old growth and other mature stands of redwood were pillaged by the end of
the decade. Hurwitz's empire cashed out, like other timber conglomerates, by liquidating
the forests and the livelihoods of the North Coast.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair later revealed that Blum and another Hurwitz
pal, the Houston-based Continental Airlines chairman David Bonderman, had personally
met with Clinton at the White House in a “coffee klatsch” fundraiser on December 15,
1995, likely to discuss the details of
the Headwaters buy-out, which occurred six months later. Bonderman and Blum were
both directors of the Wilderness Society, the only national environmental organization
that praised the buy-out.
For all the fanfare that emerged in the Clinton era about how corporate globalization had
rendered the nation-state a bit player in the larger drama of the new, “free trade”-
dominated corporate economic order, the nation-state’s role in propping up the global
capitalist system has never been more central. That role is being laid bare as never
before with each multi-billion dollar subsidy the federal government passes onto the
financial industry -- an estimated $5 trillion in total taxpayer money since the bail-out
program commenced in fall 2008 (an exact figure is hard to determine). What is known in
academic-speak as “neo-liberalism” represents little more than the sophisticated apex of
a governing system refined and perfected over the course of several decades (nay,
centuries), which is principally designed to socialize the risks of rapacious capitalism
while privatizing public goods to create unprecedented levels of profit for the super-
wealthy.
Blum is not only a representative of this system, but one of its most skillful promoters
and practitioners. Throughout his career, and particularly in recent years, he has
siphoned off taxpayer money into the coffers of his various personal holdings with a
calculated brazenness that would make the most swaggering Costra Nostra blush. The
Headwaters Forest scam was indicative of exactly how these people have done business
for nigh on three decades. To pull only a handful of examples from the very recent past:
• In early-2007, investigative reporter Peter Byrne published a groundbreaking
series in the North Bay Bohemian, the “Feinstein Files.” Byrne revealed that as
chairperson of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee from
2001 through 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of more than $1.5 billion for
two defense contractors, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation, in which Blum owned a
controlling interest. In the series’ smoking gun, long-time Blum business partner Michael
R. Klein told Byrne he regularly took the highly unusual step of supplying Feinstein’s office
with lists of Perini’s current and upcoming contractual interests in federal legislation,
ostensibly so the senator would abstain from voting on these matters for ethical reasons
(which she never did). “Earmarks, you know, set asides, you name it, there was a system
in place which on a regular basis I got notified, I notified her office, and her office
notified her,” said Klein, Perini’s vice chairman at the time. Blum later sold his holdings in
URS to the tune of more than $100 million in personal profit.
• In January 2009, Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in federal
funding to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) program designed to forestall
home foreclosures by expediting loan workouts and expanding federal loan guarantees.
On the surface, Feinstein’s legislation was a straightforward intervention on behalf of
troubled homeowners nationwide. But less than two months prior, the FDIC had also
awarded Blum’s real estate company, CB Richard Ellis, a multimillion dollar contract to sell
homes the agency had inherited from failed banks. This move was also highly unusual,
since Feinstein is not a member of the Senate committee that oversees the FDIC.
• This past November, the University of California Board of Regents imposed an
“emergency” 32 percent fee increase on undergraduate students, effective in the 2009-
10 academic year. The increase stems not only from severe state-mandated budget cuts,
but also a series of decisions by the university’s board of regents – of which Richard
Blum is the resident alpha member (although no longer chair of the board), having been
appointed to that post by Gray Davis – that have effectively pledged student fee
increases to the capital bond market, thereby creating a financial incentive for the
Regents to continually raise fees, in a pyramid scheme that raises money for campus
construction projects. Itshould come as no surprise that URS Corporation, the same
company that made $1.5 billion on contracts awarded by Feinstein's Senate military
construction committee, has been the main contractor for the largest university capital
projects in recent years: UCLA’s $150 million reconstruction of Santa Monica Hospital,
UC Berkeley’s $48 million nanotechnology laboratory, and Berkeley’s $200 million
Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial
Stadium and an expansion of the Haas School of Business -- home of the Blum Center for
Developing Economies. More on this in next week’s AVA.
Blum-Feinstein, Inc. has accomplished these immense transfers of public wealth absent of
almost any serious media scrutiny. But in recent years, the media deep freeze has slowly
begun to thaw, beginning with a pair of front-page stories in the San Francisco Chronicle
in May 2005. Chronicle science writer Keay Davidson’s fine reporting was spurred on by
a public outing at a UC Regents meeting when students revealed Blum’s conflict of interest
as a member of the committee overseeing the two nuclear weapons labs the UC runs on
behalf of the US government. Blum’s URS Corporation had a $125 million, five-year
construction and engineering services contract with the UC’s Los Alamos, NM nuclear
weapons development compound at the time. Less than two years later, Peter Byrne’s
series regarding Blum's war profiteering appeared in the North Bay Bohemian.
This past semester, UC Berkeley Visiting Scholar of Geography Gray Brechin co-taught a
course on investigative journalism. Brechin is best known as the author of a superb
historical work on Northern California’s ruling elite, Imperial San Francisco. He has been
an observer of Blum-DiFi, Inc. for years.
“I'm very impressed by the reluctance of most journalists to follow a story that has been
screaming to be done for years while they have been covering their ears and eyes,”
Brechin told us. “You guys and Peter [Byrne] are about the only ones who understand that
behind the billowing smoke appears to be a roaring bonfire.”
Blum-Feinstein’s concentration of power is greatest in their home state, of course, and it
stands to reason in any case that Blum’s CB Richard Ellis would be making a killing off the
ongoing fire sale of Sate of California assets. In October, CBRE secured a contract from
the California Department of General Services to broker over $2 billion in office
buildings the state intends to privatize.
Blum’s fortunes aren't entirely a function of Feinstein’s legislative exploits. Nor are
Feinstein's political powers entirely a result of her Daddy Warbucks. And the State of
California’s economic plight stems not only from the avarice of a small handful of
individuals, but from an economic system that is inherently self-destructive and crisis-
prone. Blum and Feinstein, however, have worked hand-in-glove with other members of
the state's banking, real estate, agribusiness, and military-industrial interests to buffer
regressive tax and spending policies, helping to devise the very austerity measures
currently being hoisted upon the people of California across all public sectors, not just
within the University of California.
Therein lies much of the reason Blum is now so quick to tout his anti-poverty bona fides.
Blum, you see, has a public relations problem. It’s built into the way he does business.
It's built into the political economy he straddles as one of the US empire's most
connected and wealthy power elites.
Gray Brechin notes that Blum seems to have hired a public relations firm to bolster his
personal brand. “Blum has gotten an extraordinary amount of fawning publicity in a very
short time, including a front page feature in the Haas Business School magazine about
what a whiz he is. I believe that this coincided with the black tie event at the Palace
Hotel where Haas celebrated him as Global Citizen of the Year and I joined others from
Cal to protest his actions as Alpha Regent.”
“Then there were the two treacly profiles of him in the San Francisco Chronicle recently.
I can't believe this is all coincidental.”
It isn't. Nor is it coincidental that, as Peter Byrne revealed, longtime Blum business
partner Michael Klein has founded a nonprofit foundation that makes grants to media
organizations that watchdog the federal government. The organization started after
Wikipedia instituted a policy blocking congressional staffers from editing Wiki entries
pertaining to their bosses. Employees from Dianne Feinstein’s office had just been
caught editing entries in the online encyclopedia that cast Blum and Feinstein in an
unfavorable light. Thus does one of Blum's closest business associates now control a
significant portion of the budgets of several ostensibly independent organizations that
monitor political
corruption.
Blum is also now strongly affiliated with a multi-campus academic program at the UC,
centered on an institute at UC Berkeley that Blum founded with $15 million in seed money,
designed to put band-aids on the symptoms of global poverty he and his wife have had an
instrumental role in creating. Beyond this exercise in mystifying the causes of poverty in
distant lands, the state's economic elite -- with Blum and Feinstein helping to lead the
charge -- have long been in the process of turning their philosophy of neoliberal
privatization, fiscal austerity, and personal enrichment on the State of California itself.
Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, indeed.
Blum is a self-professed Buddhist and friend of the XVIth Dalai Lama. Many of his anti-
poverty efforts are geared toward slum dwellers in Tibet and Nepal. “Would an actual
Buddhist provide the bulk of the funding for a multi-million dollar institute, only to attach
his own name to it?” Brechin mused.
The populist anger seething below the surface of the American body politic has not yet
boiled over into any sort of coherent rebellion against the elites who have wrought the
greatest economic catastrophe since the 1930s. There is little indication that it will any
time soon. Blum’s own financial empire, however, is now quietly under assault by the
hundreds of University of California students who have learned to loathe the man who
has done more than any other to structurally adjust their university and price many of the
state's youth out of higher education. These cognizant students, supported by campus
workers paid poverty wages by university leaders like Blum, are now organizing building
take-overs and some of the largest student protests on those campuses of the past four
decades.
In the next part of this series, we will focus on Blum’s role in gutting the University of
California, where the tuition increases extracted in the last four years from Mendocino
County residents alone would be large enough to close roughly half the county's $7 million
budget gap.
Readers can contact Will Parrish at wparrish(a)riseup.net and Darwin
Bond-Graham at darwin(a)riseup.net. They originally prepared this series for the
Anderson Valley Advertiser (http://theava.com/), one of the very few real newspapers in
America and probably soon the last one left standing.
Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect
Posted: February 28, 2010 10:21 PM
The Cure That Dares Not Speak Its Name
Read More: Health Care Public Option ,
Obama Public Option , Public Option ,
Universal Health Care , Universal Healthcare
, Politics News
In all of the debates about health care
reform, one of the stubborn realities is that
neither the Obama plan, nor any of the
Republican alternatives, will seriously alter
the trajectory of relentless cost-escalation in
health care. If you look at the
Administration's own projections of federal
deficits in the next decade and after 2020,
virtually all of the alarming growth in deficit
spending is Medicare and Medicaid.
And that's only the public part of the health
care bill. In 2009, total health care costs
increased to 17.3 percent of GDP, with
escalating premiums eating into both
corporate profits and worker take home pay.
The consensus among the usual policy experts
is that there is no good solution. The march
of technology and demography will just
continue to raise health costs.
But you can reach that conclusion only by ignoring how the rest of the club of
affluent countries manages to insure everyone for 9 or 10 percent of GDP, and have a
healthier and longer-lived population, to boot. They do it, of course, through universal,
socialized insurance.
There is no single formula. The Canadians do it with a single payer system for the
insurance part, but physicians are private. The Brits have an integrated National Health
Service. The Germans achieve near-universal coverage through a system of nonprofit
health insurance plans.
What every other nation has in common is that they have taken the commercialism out of
their health systems. As a consequence, they can direct health spending to areas of
medical need rather than letting the market direct health dollars to areas of greatest
profit. And with everyone covered, they can use highly cost-effective strategies for
prevention, wellness, and public health. That's how you cover everyone for ten percent of
GDP.
Our one island of single-payer medicine, Medicare, is phenomenally popular -- so popular
that the Republicans' most effective attack on the Obama plan is that it would divert
some money from Medicare. The Republicans, on the one hand, fiercely attack
"government-run health insurance," while on the other they defend Medicare (which they
would just as soon privatize).
But most Democratic politicians and policy wonks behave as if the option of a national
health plan simply did not exist. These blinders are the result of the immense power of
the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex combined with a failure of political
leadership. Sooner or later, mainstream politicians will stumble their way to some form of
single payer because there are no good alternatives unless we want to spend half of our
GDP on health care.
In that regard, the best things about the still inconclusive end-game of Obama's efforts
to enact his plan are that (1) the administration finally broke with the insurance industry,
and (2) Obama is starting to get over the delusion of bipartisanship. So if we don't need
either Harry and Louise, or John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, as part of the health-
reform coalition, we might as well do it right.
With Obama's health summit behind us, there will now be a mad scramble for Democratic
votes in the House and Senate to pursue the strategy that Obama should have used all
along -- a Democrats-only bill relying on 51 votes in the Senate via the reconciliation
procedure.
The problem is that Obama may have missed the moment. The prolonged, enervating
battle for health reform, using a badly flawed bill, has scared off both conservative and
liberal Democrats in both houses. The bill is politically toxic to legislators facing re-
election, for good reason. The original formula, designed to enlist insurance industry
allies, required a mandate to purchase insurance, diversion of Medicare funds, and
unpopular taxes. Now that Obama has broken with the industry, an entirely different
formula should be possible.
Alas, we are too far down the present road to advance single-payer in this legislative
session. The president has done nothing to move public opinion in that direction, and has
backed away even from the truncated version of it, the so-called public option.
I would put the odds at about one in three of Obama succeeding. Several Democrats who
voted for the House-passed bill in November by the narrow margin of 220-215 have now
defected, and several more are increasingly gun-shy. I don't much like this bill, but I still
hope it passes so that the Republicans don't get rewarded for their relentless
obstructionism.
Win or lose, the next great push should be for single-payer, assuming Democrats have a
working majority again in foreseeable future. Given the collateral damage of Obama's
strategy, that could be a long time coming.
Robert Kuttner is the author of the forthcoming book A Presidency in Peril (Chelsea-
Green, March 2010). He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at
Demos.
Is Taxpayer Money Being Funneled Through
The Chamber Of Commerce To Kill Health
Reform?
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an umbrella
lobbying organization for international
corporations and big business, is one of the
driving forces fighting to kill health reform.
In 2009, the Chamber dropped $123 million in
lobbying, much of it against health reform,
and organized an attack ad campaign against
health reform, spending another $100 million.
Now, as health reform enters its final
stages, the Chamber is gearing up to blanket
critical districts across the country with a
new series of attack ads.
While the Chamber refuses to publicly list its
membership, several confirmed Chamber
members are banks which were bailed out by
taxpayers and still have not repaid the TARP
funds. For instance, New York Private Bank &
Trust received TARP funds and still owes
$254,892,509 back to the government. Diana
Cantor, the bank’s managing director, is a
board member of the Chamber Foundation and
wife of Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA),
two leading opponents of reform. How can
taxpayers be reassured that Cantor’s bank, and
other bailed out Chamber banks, are not using taxpayer dollars to fund the
Chamber’s anti-reform activities? Here are the bailed out banks we know are
funding the Chamber and have not paid back TARP:
– Citigroup, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout money.
Citigroup still owes taxpayers over $22 billion in TARP funds.
– Marshall & Ilsley Bank, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout
money. M&I Bank still owes taxpayers over $1.6 billion in TARP funds.
– New York Private Bank & Trust, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received
bailout money. Diana Cantor, the bank’s managing director, sits on the Chamber Foundation’
s board. New York Private Bank & Trust still owes taxpayers over $250 million in TARP
funds.
To preserve brand identity and maintain secrecy, many businesses use groups like the
Chamber to launder money for political means. For instance, health insurance companies
lied and told the public all last year that they were supportive of reform — while
simultaneously funneling up to $20 million dollars for attack ads through the Chamber
(the other $80 million spent on Chamber attack ads against health reform is still
unaccounted for).
Although reform would benefit the business community at large by controlling insurance
costs and improving worker health, the Chamber is taking a rigid, ideological approach.
Indeed, the Chamber is known to have become increasingly partisan under the leadership
of Tom Donohue; an analysis by the Wonk Room found that the Chamber’s board is
dominated by Republican donors. The Chamber seeks to kill large progressive reforms in
order to kill progressive policies in general. Chamber officials have even gone on record
noting they hoped to block health reform as a tactical measure to kill clean energy
reform, a priority of many Chamber member companies.
As Matt Yglesias has observed, American trade associations like the Chamber “behave in
a highly ideological, highly solidaristic manner rather than as narrow interest groups.” By
promoting gridlock and the status quo, the Chamber hopes to stall other key progressive
agenda items banks oppose, like labor and financial reform.
Liberian leader urges MPs to back action against
vulture funds
Thursday, February 25, 2010
An investigation for BBC's Newsnight has
uncovered allegations that speculators
subverted the international debt relief process.
By Greg Palast and Heather Stewart for The
Guardian
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia,
is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds
from using British courts to prey on poor
countries when it comes to a vote on Friday.
Liberia lost a $20m (£13m) case in London last
year against two so-called vultures. Such funds
buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for
them to win from the international community,
and then use courts to pursue the countries for
assets.
Sirleaf said: "We've been waiting for a
parliament or an assembly to take this kind of
hard decision. I hope the US Congress and
maybe some others in Europe will pick up this
gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain."
An investigation for BBC's Newsnight, to be
broadcast tonight, has uncovered allegations that
speculators subverted the international debt relief process for Liberia, in an attempt to
gain more money from its government and international donors than 97% of its other
creditors accepted.
Liberia received debt relief worth $4bn from the international community in 2007 under
the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, including $2bn from private-sector
bondholders. Insiders to negotiations allege that two US financiers, Eric Hermann and
Michael Straus, allowed other creditors to accept a low payout from Liberia, then quietly
transferred their holdings to two other firms, which then sued in Britain for the debt in
full.
BBC cameraman Rick Rowley in Liberia, reporting with Greg Palast from the village of
Demeh, Liberia.
One of Liberia's biggest creditors, Hans Humes, owner of New York's Greylock Capital,
criticised the behaviour of speculators in the negotiations over the country's debts.
"[They were] just sitting there and saying: 'OK, we're the last guys and we're going to
hold up any process by which the country can grow unless somebody takes care of us.'
It's extortion," he said.
Two others who were involved in the negotiations confirmed that Humes's criticisms
must refer to Hermann and Straus.
The private member's bill, which will receive its second reading on Friday, would prevent
vultures from pursuing any of the 40 countries that have qualified as heavily indebted
poor countries. Sponsored by Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, it would prevent assets being
seized, even in cases that have already been brought – so campaigners say it should help
Liberia.
When a Newsnight crew went to Hermann's New York office to question the financier,
the company's nameplate had been unbolted from the wall, the suite number removed and
the firm's staff locked inside the office. A security guard said he had been ordered to
look out for the BBC crew and keep it out of the building.
In 1998, a US judge found lawyer Straus guilty of "champerty" – buying poor nations'
debts just for the purpose of suing them. An appeals court later reversed the finding.
In February 2002, Straus and Hermann sued Liberia for $18m for debts they had
obtained for a fraction of that sum. They filed the suit in the US, the week Liberia's
capital was under siege from rebels, without electricity, water or a functioning
government. Straus and Hermann won a judgment for the $18m by default.
*********
Greg Palast, investigative reporter for BBC Newsnight.
Sign up for Palast's investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com and subscribe to Palast's
podcast.
Many American progressives don’t want to recognize how bad the U.S. mainstream news
media has become. It’s easier to praise a few exceptions to the rule and to hope that
some pendulum will swing than to undertake the challenging task of building a new and
honest media infrastructure.
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But the hard reality is that the U.S. news media is getting worse, with now both premier
national newspapers – the New York Times and the Washington Post – decidedly sliding
into the neocon camp, where the likes of the Wall Street Journal have long resided.
For the Post, this may already be an old story, given its enthusiastic cheerleading for the
Iraq War. The Times, however, was a somewhat different story. Yes, it did let Judith
Miller and other staff writers promote the fictions about Iraq’s WMD, but it hadn’t sunk
to the depths of the Post.
That is now changing as the Times – behind executive editor Bill Keller and editorial page
editor Andrew Rosenthal – tosses aside all pretense of objectivity in the cause of seeking
“regime change” in Iran, today’s top priority for the neoconservatives.
At Consortiumnews.com, we have noted this trend for some months, not only in the New
York Times opinion section but in its news columns where Iran’s alleged interest in
acquiring a nuclear weapon is trumpeted incessantly (despite its denial of such a desire),
while rogue nuclear states in the region (such as Israel, Pakistan and India) are given a
pass. [See, for example, “US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco in Iran.”]
This Sunday, the Times’ bias was on display again in the lead editorial entitled, “New
Think and Old Weapons,” which purported to examine the state of nuclear weapons in the
world.
Fitting with the Times’ deepening neocon tendencies, Iran’s nuclear weapons (even though
they don’t exist) were a major topic, while the rogue nuclear states of Israel, Pakistan
and India (which have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) weren’t
mentioned.
So, you had formulations like this: “Iran, North Korea and others have seemingly
unquenchable nuclear appetites” and the need to “bolster American credibility … to rein in
Iran, North Korea and other proliferators.” In all, there were four such references to
North Korea and Iran, but no specific references to Israel, Pakistan and India.
The Times also observed that China was “the only major nuclear power adding to its
arsenal [which] is estimated to have 100 to 200 warheads.” There was no mention of
Israel, which is believed to possess one of the most sophisticated nuclear arsenals in the
world, totaling some 200 or more devices.
Ironically, the Times editorial also cited problems of “hypocrisy and double standards”
and noted that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was “battered.”
The Times did not seem at all embarrassed by its own hypocrisy and double standards.
Nor did it bother to note that one of the key reasons this “bedrock” treaty is in trouble
is that non-signatories – like Israel, Pakistan and India – have built nukes, often with a
wink and a nod from Washington.
As neocon propagandists pursue their goal of riling up the American public against some
new foreign threat, that effort requires highlighting certain facts (and even fictions). But
the propagandists equally must make sure that many inconvenient truths are conveniently
forgotten. Otherwise the alleged threat might not seem all that unusual or threatening.
So, in the world of neocon propaganda, Iran – a treaty signatory that has no nuclear
weapons and insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes – must be endlessly
badgered, but Israel – an undeclared rogue nuclear state with a vast arsenal – must be
shielded from similar criticism and pressure.
That the New York Times has now embraced these neocon biases, almost with the ardor
of the Washington Post, is a serious development for the U.S. news media and for the
nation.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George
W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at
neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project
Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other
stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a
Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue
reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
Rev. Jesse Jackson
Civil rights activist
Posted: March 2, 2010 12:22 PM
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With Justice for All: Human Rights and Civil Rights at
Home and Abroad
The following was originally given as a speech on March
1, 2010 at the Cambridge Union Society.
I want to thank Cambridge University for inviting me to
speak to you this evening. It is always a joy and
privilege for me to come to the United Kingdom.
I have treasured memories of my earliest visits
marching with Bishop Huddleston and Bernie Grant and
Diane Abbott against apartheid in Trafalgar Square in
the early 1980's. Later I met with Prime Minister
Thatcher when I was on my way to South Africa to
witness Mandela gaining his freedom from prison.
On February 15, 2003, I was proud to march with former Mayor Ken Livingstone and two
million opponents of launching an illegal, unnecessary war on Iraq, and imploring Tony Blair
from the stage in Hyde Park not to ruin his legacy by blindly backing George W. Bush.
More recently, I joined with Equanomics UK, an organization that measures societal
inequality and advocates for closing the gaps, as we went on a nine-city tour throughout
the UK to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of Britain's Slave Trade
Act. We visited the Liverpool Slavery Museum, and talked at every stop about the legacy
of Wilberforce and the abolitionists.
Some of you may remember my visit a year ago, when the Rt. Honorable Keith Vaz and his
staff skillfully reunited me with a now-grown-up Stuart Lockwood, a former child hostage
who had refused to sit on Saddam Hussein's knee, and whom I had rescued and brought
back to London.
I've recently had the honor of receiving honorary fellowships at Regents Park College at
Oxford and Edge Hill University, and to meet last year with Prime Minister Brown.
Now it is a distinct privilege to be able to engage and share with you scholars tonight--
students, faculty, staff--at this prestigious, world-renowned educational institution,
whose alumni have played such a huge role in the way the modern world sees itself.
I am very honored to be here. I grew up in the segregated South in Greenville, South
Carolina, behind what I call the "Cotton Curtain." Some how, some way, thanks be to the
Grace of God, I was able to emerge from behind those walls and barriers, to make the
long journey to Cambridge to be with you this evening.
A New UK
I was recently in the Netherlands, Germany and Brussels, and the past few days in
London. What struck me is we live today--especially you young people--in an emerging new
Europe, a new Britain. It's far different from the one of your parents and the Churchill
generation. That Europe related to Jamaica and the Caribbean, India, China, Bangladesh,
Nigeria or South Africa, as "colonies and colonized people," living under the sting of
apartheid.
These former colonized people became Britain's newest immigrants, and now its newest
citizens, with their cultures, languages--and brought their hopes, dreams, energies and
interests to the UK.
Your generation now relates to Britain's newest residents as neighbors, classmates,
business partners, MP's, voting partners.
There are three million Blacks and Ethnic Minorities in the UK today, growing to some
eight million in the next decade. 22% are living in poverty. In large degree, they are
marginalized and, like in the U.S., face structural inequalities in criminal justice,
education, employment, health care - nearly every social, economic, political and
educational category in the life of our two great nations.
These structural disparities are well documented by Equanomics UK:
1. 25% of white children live in Poverty in England, but 56% African, 60% Pakistani, 72%
Bangladeshi children, far too high a percentage for any of our communities.
2. Compared to a White British Christian man with the same qualifications, age and
occupation, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim men and Black African Christian men have
pay 13-21 per cent lower.
3. Pakistani and Bangladeshi households have a median equivalent net income of only £238
a week compared to the national median of £393. Nearly half are below the poverty line.1
It is not enough to observe these structural inequality gaps; we must close them through
recommendations formulated in the Racial Justice Manifesto produced by a coalition of
the UK's leading other policy organizations.
As the Black and ethnic minority population grows, so too will their voting and political
power, and their demand for equality and a level playing field. Taken together, this vote,
as it has in the U.S., can determine the margin of victory for the UK's upcoming elections.
So forging a new UK--one that is inclusive and sets a level playing field for all of its
people--brings forth new challenges and opportunities. As the UK and Europe seek to re-
emerge and restore their economies shattered by the global banking crisis, it should not
be at the expense of Britain's Black and ethnic minority population.
In the past we learned a bad lesson well: how to survive apart, with "us and them"
polarization. We must now unlearn that bad lesson, and learn a new lesson well: to live
together, to choose co-existence over co-annihilation.
It is in England's national interest to lift up those who are locked out - to tear down walls
of separation and exclusion and build new bridges. Britain's new leaders, the emerging
leaders of your generation, are challenged to move away from living in isolation, governing
in isolation - and to commit to forging a multi-cultural, multi-racial, inclusive society, a one-
big-tent Britain and a one-big-tent Europe.
Tears of Joy & History
When I came to Britain one year ago, people asked me about our then-brand-new
president, Barack Obama. The 2008 election marked a maturing of America. We had
taken a big step towards overcoming America's original sin, a nation founded largely on
slavery by slave owners, bearing the mark of 400 years of slavery and segregation and
apartheid.
In President Obama, we chose a leader of vision, keen intellect, a new president with a
high moral compass. He sees the world through a door, not through a keyhole. Barack
Obama ran a brilliant campaign, the fast last lap of a long, long relay.
In that great moment in history, many forces converged in my consciousness, in my
memory bank--and my lifetime of experiences. And I wept as I wished just for one
moment the countless, nameless marchers and martyrs who sacrificed so much could
share this victory, their victory.
I just wished for one fleeting moment that my mentor, my teacher Dr. King could have
been in Chicago that night, if only for a moment to share the joy. I thought of the
martyrs who gave their lives trying to register Blacks to vote in the South, Jimmie Lee
Jackson, Medgar Evers, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, Voila Liuzzo. Their struggles,
their martyrdom, made Barack Obama's victory possible. When I thought of them, the
tears rolled down my face. Tears of joy. Tears of history.
50 Years of Struggle
It's a long journey from the segregated South to the Cambridge Union Society. Tonight I
think back on my own first arrest for nonviolent civil disobedience, fifty years ago this
summer, trying to use a public library in my home town of Greenville, South Carolina.
Just a few weekends ago I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, to dedicate a new museum
dedicated to the four students who sat down to integrate a lunch counter on February 1,
1960--fifty years ago--in an act that electrified the young people of America.
This weekend we commemorate Bloody Sunday 45 years ago, where attack dogs and fire
hoses were unleashed on people marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama.
The historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery that followed led to the
enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Voting Rights Act is commonly seen "for Blacks"--but the changes it inspired helped
heal the whole society. White women could not serve on juries in much of the South;
farmers couldn't vote unless they paid poll taxes. 18-year olds couldn't vote yet--that
came five years later.
Bilingual voting came five years after that. College students won the right to vote where
they went to school, which allowed the Obama campaign to organize dormitories as
precincts.
When we ran for president in 1984 and 1988, we changed the Democratic Party rules
from winner-take-all to proportional representation, which later made Barack Obama's
2008 victory possible.
These changes were for everybody in America, not for Blacks only. So those who would
try to eliminate Black history are off base.
The United Kingdom's history is the slave trade--as well as leading the way in the
abolishment of the slave trade. The U.K.'s history is the colonization of India, as well as
the liberation led by Gandhi.
Britain's history is apartheid in South Africa, as well as the long road to freedom of
Nelson Mandela. British history is Black history is inextricably bound with Britain's
history.
Mature Whites in Britain must rebel against others trying to limit your history and
heritage. Especially for those of you who are young, an expanded, inclusive history will be
a big factor in your own destiny.
Free but Not Equal--Globalizing Human Rights
Today we are free, but not equal. Today we are caught in a global economic crisis. We
have globalized capital, but we have not globalized human rights. We have not globalized
workers rights. We have not globalized rights for women, rights for children,
environmental protections.
Freedom was not the only goal of our struggle; it was a prerequisite to equality. Yet today
our technological wizardry has outstripped our morality. We need to mesh new technology
with timeless moral values. We need to build bridges, and close the gaps.
Let me give you an example--why do African-Americans do so well in athletics? We excel
in basketball, football, baseball, golf, tennis, track. Well, the playing field in athletics is
level for everyone. The rules are clear, and published. The referees are unbiased and fair.
So when we went to the Olympics in Beijing, we won our fair share of medals. The
winners won with grace, the losers lost with dignity. There were no aftershocks of racism.
But in the economic realm, the referees are missing, the rules are not clear, the playing
field is tilted. So when African-Americans try to compete in finance, to work on Wall
Street, to trade with China, suddenly the results are biased.
Capital can move quickly, seek out poverty wages and slave labor, leave behind devastated
communities and unfathomable pain. Finance circles the globe at the click of a button, and
trillions in wealth can disappear or move offshore in moments.
Monopoly capital has solidified its global control of media, banks, telecommunications--
and it uses its monetary clout to dominate our politics, trying to overwhelm one-person,
one-vote democracy with corporate power. We see this in the U.K., with billionaires
quietly investing big money to target marginal districts.
We saw it recently in the U.S., where a small cadre on the Supreme Court, by one vote
overturned a century of precedents, freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums
targeting their opponents in elections, and undermining the spirit of American democracy.
The Lockean principles of checks and balances, separation of powers, are undermined.
The financial crisis was global, pushing the U.S., UK and Europe, Asia, the world banks to
the brink of collapse. Jobs vanished at the whims of a small elite of corporate
"banksters;" unions were devastated; nations were played off against weaker nations.
Financial services companies merged and purged. A classic consumer run to withdraw
deposits led to Northern Rock's collapse. Abbey National took over the Bank of Scotland.
Barclays moved to gobble up the Woolwich.
But greed never resolves its own contradictions. A globalized capitalist system is not
magically self-correcting.
The modern day system of finance capital collapsed. That system failed. And it put in peril
millions upon millions of every day working people in the U.S., Great Britain, and around
the world.
But the American and European governments bailed out failing banks with massive capital
infusions. They said, "Banks are too big too fail." The UK government injected upwards of
£850 billion of taxpayers cash into the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and
HBOS.
And now corporations on both sides of the ocean are issuing billions of dollars in bonuses
to their executives who led their companies into fiscal ruin and nearly bankrupted whole
nations.
Our systems are so intertwined that whether we are in England or France, the
Netherlands, or the US, the same systems of top-down exploitation required the same
massive bailouts.
The big banking system was re-fortified, reinforced; now it needs to be restructured.
The democratic principles of checks and balances, separation of powers, oversight and
regulation must be applied.
We don't want to diminish the creativity of capital; but we must not diminish the
significance of regulations and a fair referee; nor of a strong public infrastructure.
Remember the Marshall Plan, with its reconstruction bank, 50-year loans at 2%,
government-secured. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe's roads, rails, bridges, ports--and
set the stage for a renewed prosperity, and for peace.
This is a change moment, a time to remake the world's financial systems. When creditors
become predators, it's time for a new global economic agenda. We must democratize
capital, and globalize participation. The freedom struggle was not just for freedom; it
was a prerequisite to equality and justice.
Now is our time to pass a "Robin Hood" tax on financial speculation. Now is our chance to
globalize human rights and workers rights, protect women and children, save the global
environment. Now is our chance to democratize capital and media, to pass the structural
economic changes that were untouched by the freedom struggle's political reforms.
Too few people control too much capital and media, leveraging too much political influence
for a healthy democratic outcome. Yet new wine--your generation, more diverse, more
global, more tolerant--will not fit into old wineskins.
Mid-Day in Our Politics, Midnight in Our Economy
President Obama took office with the nation and world mired in the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression -- the global markets were on the brink of collapse. By
December 2008, the end of the Bush Era, 800,000 Americans per month were losing
their jobs -- nearly eight million were left unemployed these past few years.
Roots of the crisis:
1. Banks overturned regulations in place since the 1930's, and used "deregulation" to post
record profits.
2. Arrogance and unbridled greed and quest for profits by any means necessary.
3. Congress and federal regulators, fueled by financial contributions from Wall Street (or
seeking private Wall Street jobs after they left office), aided and abetted the crisis, and
fell asleep at the wheel while the crisis overwhelmed the US and world like an economic
tsunami.
4. Our Department of Justice failed to enforce fair lending and civil rights laws--
cornerstone legal victories won by Dr. King and the civil rights movement in the 1960s--
and allowed discriminatory, predatory lending practices to victimized Blacks and other
people of color.
5. Fundamentally, the crisis is rooted in an unprecedented era of unchecked, modern day
finance capitalism--free market philosophy, absent any government intervention and
regulation--which drove the global economy to the brink of collapse. Globalized banking
and technology were not coupled with integrity and honest values.
Government must play a stronger role, not a lesser one--we've seen the disastrous
economic crisis resulting from that philosophy. It must intervene to regulate, and enforce
needed checks and balances to curb unmitigated greed. It must intervene to protect the
majority from the tyranny of the ruling minority.
People want government policies that preserve economic security and equity in our homes
and pensions. They want government to protect jobs; provide health care; promote
democratic and just values; protect our environment thru prompt attention to curbing
global warming;
A government and economic system that bridges gap between rich and poor; a government
that defends and protects civil and human rights at home and abroad.
President Obama's financial bailout staved off global economic collapse--it was the right
thing to do. But its weakness was that the bailout was not linked to loans; it was top-down,
not bottom-up.
The banks were "trusted" to extend credit; they should have been "mandated" to do so.
The banks need to not just be reinforced, but to be restructured, as Franklin Roosevelt
did.
Equanomics: I have mentioned the term "Equanomics" - coined by our British affiliate
Equanomics UK - which is a fusion of equality and economics. Equanomics measures the
economic consumer power of Black and ethnic minorities; it measures equality and the
economic costs of inequality.
What we have found is the same systems, with the same results, in both the U.S. & the U.
K. For example:
The current costs of tackling educational underachievement, unemployment and their over-
representation in school exclusions and in the Criminal Justice System were calculated to
be about £808 million a year (PWC research for the REACH report 2007)
£100 million per year costs in London alone for the overrepresentation of Blacks in
mental health units (Sainsbury Centre)
Yet by 2011 the economic worth of Black, Asian and minority communities will be as much
as £300 billion. Black and Asian consumers are also estimated to earn up to £156 billion
after tax income, with young men being the bigger consumers and spending £32 billion
every year.
We need to democratize our political and economic systems. Time will tell if the solutions
pursued by the UK and European governments pass the "equity" test, and hold true to the
universal value that the "mark of a good democracy is how well it treats the least of these
in society."
Where Do We Go From Here?
When President Obama spoke in Egypt, he argued correctly that we must find ecumenical
common ground, and not allow anyone to misuse the name of any religion as a cover for
terrorism. All religions have "characters" who go too far; but the "character" of each
religion should not be maligned because of individual abuses.
We must help the President in his fight for health care for all. Health care reform is
morally right; it will be cost-efficient; it will ease the lives of many of the 50 million
Americans without health care and 50 million more without catastrophic health care.
But it is a challenge to the powerful status quo, so President Obama is meeting stiff
headwinds of resistance. The health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries have
blocked reform--so far.
But President Obama is meeting stiff headwinds of resistance. We elected him, in a
magnificent, multi-racial grassroots victory, but the fight is far from over.
And as we confront the global economic calamity, I'm always reminded that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. authored the essay, "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?"
An ascendant civil rights movement organized the1963 March on Washington, the historic
1965 march from Selma to Montgomery--a movement that led to passage of the Civil
Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But by January 1967 when he wrote the "Where Do We Go
from Here?" essay, the civil rights struggle was on its heels, searching for direction and
strategy.
His query is especially appropriate right now, with the dialectics of crisis and opportunity
so prevalent in our world.
Just one year ago, people in the U.S. voted for change and a new direction, breaking down
old barriers of cynicism, doubt and disbelief.
Now stiff winds of resistance are blowing from all directions. It's been some time since
we've witnessed such a sustained, ideologically inspired campaign to smear and vilify a
president, to drown out rational public debate and discourse, and circumvent the people's
desire for progressive change--even going so far as to question the president's
citizenship!
Wall Street got bailed out, but unemployment is rising. Foreclosures are rising. Student
loan debt is rising. Hope is up, too, but unfortunately so is poverty.
Yes, it's mid-day in our politics, but midnight in our economy. We must have the clear
vision and strong will to ride out the storms of the long night until the sun rises and we
reach the dawn of a new day.
Perhaps we should go to our Biblical mission statement:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the
poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for
the blind, to release the oppressed...
Bring good news to the needy...
We stopped the bleeding at the top; now we need a bottom-up reconstruction plan.
Smaller, targeted reconstruction for banks that can live within regulation, oversight,
consumer protection and lending laws.
We need to create economic recovery that targets the zones of pain. The original
stimulus focused on the zones of gain. They've watered the leaves at the top, but not the
roots at the bottom. We need direct, targeted jobs programs, and the expansion of
lending to spur small business development. It is time to focus on helping those who are
the victims of, not the cause of, the crisis.
Care for the Sick...
By enacting comprehensive, accessible and affordable health care for all Americans.
Republicans have taken a stand to crush the health care bill. Blue Dog conservatives and
powerful corporate interests have taken a stand to circumvent and undermine it. So now
progressives must stand up and fight for inclusion of the public option and create the
public support the President and Congress need to pass a comprehensive health care bill
before year's end.
As we learn from each other and share, your national health care insurance model has
great appeal. It provides access to quality health care for your people--we could learn
much from you.
In our Rainbow campaigns of 1984 and 1988, I campaigned from coast to coast for
comprehensive health care for all at a time when "only" 37 million Americans were without
health insurance. Twenty years later, that number has risen to a totally unacceptable 45
million. We must do better, and now is the time.
House the Homeless...
By confronting the home foreclosure crisis threatening to tear the heart and soul of
America's communities. A record high four million families will face foreclosure this year
alone, but another 15 million homeowners will face foreclosure in the next few years.
We need a comprehensive, effective foreclosure prevention/save our homes program to
reduce the principal owed on loans, not just reduce monthly payments--to protect not just
the most distressed families in their time of need, but also to protect their
neighborhoods, the community tax base, the public services which depend on having a
healthy housing infrastructure.
We see this crisis in some measure in all of the Western countries. Your moratorium on
home foreclosures was a positive step forward.
Where do we go from here?
A New War on Poverty to Set the Oppressed Free...
We have similar systems in the U.S. & the U.K., and they have produced similar results on
the inequality front. Let me just give a couple of examples from my own country, the
richest nation on earth:
• eight million families and 40 million Americans, or 13%, live in poverty.
• fourteen million children under 18 are in poverty.
• in 2008, 49 million people didn't have enough to eat, including 17 million children.
Wars Kill Reform Movements
Dr. King understood that the Vietnam War was not just killing people overseas, but was
killing people in our barrios and ghettoes back home. The war on Vietnam killed the War
on Poverty, and ruined President Johnson's Great Society legacy.
The president's new policy of escalating and expanding the war in Afghanistan is risky
and expensive, and, despite a projected date to begin troop withdrawal, there is no end in
sight. The war on terror a real one, but it's a 21st century problem that cannot be "won"
by using 20th century strategies of military conquest. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech, Dr. King made these time-tested remarks:
...Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time--the
need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and
oppression.
We hope the president's plan is successful, and pray for the earliest return home of the
100,000 troops who will be sent to war in Afghanistan... but doubts abound.
Increasingly Western powers are investing more and more in military, with fewer and
fewer returns. It is as if we were trying to kill the mosquitoes without draining the
swamp of poverty and pain and fear and rejection.
We react to the manifestation of terrorism, but ignore the conditions that breed it.
Haiti Is the Creditor, Not the Debtor
We owe a great debt to the Haitian people who now deserve aid for to rebuild and
reconstruct their nation.
I visited Haiti last month just after the earthquake. The devastation was unimaginable.
The institutions of Haiti were in rubble. But the world has been generous, the people are
patient, enduring, tough in the face of this monstrous disaster, and hope is alive that
Haiti can rebuild, renew, and revive.
Part of Haiti's plight is that it remains on the poor end of the world's economic inequality
scale. Global capital has created a few massive winners, while millions and even billions of
people have been left behind by the world economy.
Now is a time to re-visit Haiti's history--because Haitians fought to help America in its
Revolution. And it was Haiti that struck the first big blow against Napoleon's plan for
world domination. Not only that, but Haiti's successful slave uprising, led by Touissant
L'Overture, the first such successful rebellion in world history, forced Napoleon to
conclude that he could not keep France's Western colonies under control.
The result was that he sold the Louisiana Purchase to President Thomas Jefferson, which
eventually led to the creation of all or part of 14 new states in America. Then, Jefferson
imposed a trade embargo on Haiti.
Haiti helped defeat Napoleon. The U.S. and the U.K. both owe much to Haiti's slave
uprising two centuries ago. That makes Haiti the creditor, not the debtor.
Yet France never forgave Haiti, and the United States never rewarded it. Instead, they
forced Haiti to pay billions in reparations, not fully paid off until 1947. Think of that--the
enslaved paid reparations to the colonizer.
Because Haiti was the only free Black republic in the world in the early 1800s, the
imperial nations of the world conspired to try to kill off the idea of a free Haiti.
France even shamefully kidnapped L'Overture, and he died in a French jail. Later, the U.
S. helped to kidnap President Aristide, forcing him onto a plane in the middle of the night
that secretly landed him in the Central African Republic.
Haiti is the creditor, not the debtor.
And remember this--San Francisco had an earthquake at 7.6, where 63 died. Chile just
had a horrible earthquake, at 8.8, less than a thousand have died so far. Yet when Haiti
had an earthquake at 7.0, more than 200,000 died.
The difference was not the size of the earthquake--it was the depth of the poverty. We
need to keep up our generosity, but push our nations not just to relieve and rescue Haiti,
but to allow it to reconstruct from the bottom up.
Africa Is a Creditor Continent
This is even truer for Africa, which, like Haiti, is the creditor, not the debtor. Much of
the wealth of America and Europe came from the slave trade and slave labor. Wealth
inequality persists today that stems directly from the immorality and unfairness of
colonialism and slavery. Africa is the creditor continent, not the debtor.
Even worse, it is Africa that will apparently pay the most immediate and highest price for
the global warming caused by the industrial world. Along with many former enslaved
colonies in the Caribbean, rising waters and changing weather patterns will devastate
poor countries, hitting them hard while too much of the developed world continues to
debate whether climate change is even a reality.
This is unacceptable. It is stupid and immoral. I applaud Gordon Brown for his leadership
on this issue, and I encourage him to push harder, to hold America and China's feet to
the global fire. Help us save ourselves, and everyone else. As James Baldwin warned us,
it's the fire next time.
We need debt relief and AIDS assistance and debt cancellation for the world's poorest
nations. We need clean water and vaccinations for Africa, inexpensive changes that would
vastly improve the lives of billions of our poorest neighbors.
We need fair trade, under a newly regulated economic system open to all nations. The
developed world needs to get serious about stopping global warming, because too much of
Africa and too many small island nations are beginning to pay the price for a problem they
did not cause.
Europe, you can help America do better. When you invest more and give more to Africa, it
makes it harder for my nation not to do the same. When you express reasonable
disagreement about Afghanistan, and reasonable doubt about the prospects for success,
you give us more room to maneuver at home.
When you invest more in alternative energies and green technologies, to fight global
warming, it makes it much more difficult for America to pretend we are doing all we can
to stave off disaster.
While the US and others continue to see Africa with slave-tinted lenses, China is now its
most substantial economic investor, creating alliances destined to be a factor in the
emergence of Africa as a world power.
A Rainbow World
The world is a rainbow of people. The U.S. and the UK are becoming more diverse with
each passing year. Our younger generation in America is more tolerant, more diverse,
more exposed to the larger world than their elders. That's a good thing, and it showed in
our last elections, where young people led the way in a change election.
Remember: When President Bush and Prime Minister Blair got together a few years ago
to decide to invade Iraq, that was a minority meeting.
When the big financial institution heads get together in New York or London, that's a
minority meeting, too.
The U.S. & the U.K. together represent only 5% of the world, one out of every 20 people.
Yet as all of you know, half the world lives in Asia, with almost half of them in China.
A billion people live in India, next door to their foe, Pakistan--and both are armed with
weapons of mass destruction.
One-eighth of the world lives in Africa, and a quarter of those people live in Nigeria,
where AIDS, hunger, disease, and now global warming are devastating the continent.
My country is not even a majority in our own hemisphere, where more people speak
Spanish than English, and almost as many people speak Portuguese.
Too many Americans do not realize--and perhaps too many Europeans as well do not yet
realize--that most people in the world are black, brown, yellow, young, female, non-
Christian, and don't speak English.
The formerly colonized peoples are now moving into the once-all-one-ethnic-group
societies. This is Europe's big challenge for the future, and the U.K.'s big challenge, to
build a new nation, to choose inclusion.
We must unlearn an earlier lesson we learned to well--how to survive apart. We must learn
a new lesson--how to live and prosper together, choosing inclusion and growth. A
comprehensive policy of inclusion is the roadmap to a new England, to serve the emerging,
diverse world.
If we do not begin to live in peace, develop from the bottom up, and take seriously the
limiting capacities of our fragile globe, we will not make it as a species to the end of this
century.
We must find common ground. Common ground leads to coalition, to cooperation, to
reconciliation and redemption, to higher ground. The challenge of this new world, so
connected by technology, is yours to bear, yours to share.
Dream Beyond Your Circumstances
The prophet Isaiah speaks of beauty from the ashes--where ashes abound beauty must
abound even more. Where hatred abounds, love must abound even more. Where fear
abounds, love and hope must abound even more. Fear limits us--hope unleashes creative
genius.
I want to say to you young people especially--keep reaching beyond your grasp, keep
dreaming beyond your circumstances, keep dreaming of a new Europe. When young people
move, the world changes.
Dream beyond your age. Dr. King was only 26 when he took on the leadership of the
Montgomery bus boycott. Jesus was only 33 when he died. Dream beyond your age.
Dream beyond your race and ethnicity. Build coalitions. Without an active and vocal
worldwide movement for change, we cannot make our hopes for a new world a lasting and
concrete reality.
When twelve abolitionists met together two-and-a-quarter centuries ago in London to
fight back against the profitable slave trade, few thought they would succeed. But they
persisted, Wilberforce prevailed, and the slave trade was soon ended. Dream a new world.
When the suffragists chained themselves to the fences of the powerful a century ago,
few thought that women would soon win the right to vote. But they did, putting their
bodies on the line for justice--and now women's rights fuel change in all parts of the
globe. Dream a new freedom.
When Rosa Parks sat down on that Montgomery bus in 1955, when those four students in
Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at that lunch counter in 1960, when Dr. King
marched across that bridge in Selma, Alabama, few believed that they would succeed.
But morality triumphed, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed, and
America got better, not bitter. Dream a new justice.
As Dr. King taught us:
Vanity asks: Is it popular?
Politics asks: Will it win?
Morality and conscience ask: Is it right?
So dream of a new day.
Dream of a new way.
Dream of a new Britain, an emerging Europe.
Go forward by hope and never backward by fear. Keep faith--in the end, faith will not
disappoint.
Keep Hope Alive!
Single-Payer Healthcare Coming to Missouri
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2010-03-01 19:49.
By David Swanson
Canada did not create a civilized healthcare system nationally until its provinces led the
way. Clearly Congress is dragging behind the states in our country, and it is through state
successes that we will eventually compel the U.S. government to provide our people with
this basic human right.
Hawaii has a single-payer healthcare system.California's legislature has passed a single-
payer bill three times but not yet found a governor to sign it into law. Single-payer
healthcare bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and a
growing list of states, including New Mexico, where State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a
long-time supporter of single-payer healthcare, is running for Lieutenant Governor. In
Minnesota, single-payer champion John Marty is running for Governor.
I recently wrote about North Carolina house candidate Marcus Brandon, who has pledged
to introduce a bill to create single-payer healthcare in that state as his first act in
office. Now a formidable candidate for state representative in Missouri has made a
similar commitment.
Byron DeLear, whom I have known and learned from for years, said on Monday: "If
elected, I will sponsor the 'Melanie-Care for All Act', providing a simple plan to get all of
our Missourian families the coverage, protection and care we deserve." DeLear, is a state
rep. candidate in the 79th District of Missouri. (See http://www.ByronDeLear.org ) and
who is Melanie?
DeLear explains: "A dear friend of mine, Melanie Shouse, recently passed away from
breast cancer. She found a lump in her breast but couldn't afford to see a doctor.
Through the course of her disease she tirelessly continued to advocate for healthcare
for all as a moral imperative. I met her through our shared work as concerned citizens
and like many of her friends and colleagues was inspired by her unbridled energy and
enthusiasm to effect positive change. Even in the midst of great personal suffering,
Melanie selflessly put it all on the line and did the best she could to help us all. Her story
was propelled to the national stage with President Obama mentioning her in a speech and
culminating with 'Melanie's March' from Philadelphia to Washington DC, ending with a
rally attended by Senate leader Harry Reid and other members of Congress."
DeLear is proposing to accomplish something, however, that neither Obama nor Reid will
even entertain any discussion of: taking the profit-motive out of healthcare coverage. "If
Melanie had access to affordable healthcare," DeLear says, "her untimely death might
have been prevented. Seeing a doctor was simply too expensive, just as it is for tens of
thousands of Missourians, whose fear of skyrocketing healthcare costs are justified.
Health insurance premiums in Missouri have risen 82.5% in the last decade, consequently,
the vast majority of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical costs, for both the
insured and uninsured alike. This creates a specter of fear for families all across our
state. Melanie's death is one of thousands of needless lives lost due to our current
broken and inhumane healthcare insurance system."
DeLear provides the statistics for the nation and his state: "According to a recent
Harvard Study, 45,000 Americans perish each year due to lack of preventive or primary
healthcare. This equals approximately 800 Missourians like Melanie. 800 Missourians die
each year due to our broken healthcare system. This is a moral crisis, and suggests that
we should all take a step back from the raging debate to ask ourselves, in a perfect
world, what would our ideal system be? What do we want for the family of Missouri? And
then takes steps to make that ideal a reality, or get as close to it as possible."
DeLear proposes something that has never been mentioned in over a year of endless,
tireless, and tiresome healthcare debating in Washington, namely looking for a minute at
all the nations that have already solved this problem and asking how they have done so:
"Many nations have struggled with the health-care debate before us. What's the best
way to adopt complete healthcare coverage for all? The world is full of examples of
different solutions to this question. But the trends over time are very specific. What
they show is that . . . universal coverage, regardless of class distinctions, is the desirable
end result. This goes to the heart of what insurance is and mathematically what 'risk
pools' are all about. Pooling risk makes a community, state, and nation stronger. It
protects us all against personal catastrophe. Currently, in the United States, health
insurance corporations cherry pick through the populace to determine who's worthy of
coverage, or how to deny care once you become sick. This is at odds with the healing
mandate of the medical profession, and has to be turned around."
DeLear makes an unequivocal commitment, saying "The right thing to do, is to cover all our
citizens with healthcare. Medicare covers and protects more than 800,000 Missourians.
The first bill I will support will be a Medicare-for-All type plan for Missouri. In honor of
our local heroine, Melanie Shouse, if elected, I will sponsor the 'Melanie Care for All
Act', providing a simple plan to get all of our Missourian families the coverage,
protection and care we deserve."
Byron DeLear's website is at
http://www.ByronDeLear.org
He needs all the help he can get, and there is a little button on his site reading "Make
Donation". Those who want a real healthcare system in this country would be wise to pour
money into his campaign and those of other state leaders across the country.
Alternatively we could keep putting all our eggs in the basket of fantasies about the
United States Senate getting its act together and fixing bills after they're passed.
March 4, 2010 4:00 AM PST
Feds weigh expansion of Internet monitoring
by Declan McCullagh
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano,
who said that Einstein 3 could only be discussed
in a classified setting, speaks at the RSA
conference on Wednesday.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
SAN FRANCISCO--Homeland Security and the
National Security Agency may be taking a closer
look at Internet communications in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security's top
cybersecurity official told CNET on Wednesday
that the department may eventually extend its
Einstein technology, which is designed to detect
and prevent electronic attacks, to networks
operated by the private sector. The technology
was created for federal networks.
Greg Schaffer, assistant secretary for
cybersecurity and communications, said in an
interview that the department is evaluating
whether Einstein "makes sense for expansion to
critical infrastructure spaces" over time.
Not much is known about how Einstein works, and
the House Intelligence Committee once charged that
descriptions were overly "vague" because of "excessive classification." The White House
did confirm this week that the latest version, called Einstein 3, involves attempting to
thwart in-progress cyberattacks by sharing information with the National Security
Agency.
Greater federal involvement in privately operated networks may spark privacy or
surveillance concerns, not least because of the NSA's central involvement in the Bush
administration's warrantless wiretapping scandal. Earlier reports have said that Einstein
3 has the ability to read the content of emails and other messages, and that AT&T has
been asked to test the system. (The Obama administration says the "contents" of
communications are not shared with the NSA.)
"I don't think you have to be Big Brother in order to provide a level of protection either
for federal government systems or otherwise," Schaffer said. "As a practical matter,
you're looking at data that's relevant to malicious activity, and that's the data that you're
focused on. It's not necessary to go into a space where someone will say you're acting
like Big Brother. It can be done without crossing over into a space that's problematic
from a privacy perspective."
If Einstein 3 does perform as well as Homeland Security hopes, it could help less-
prepared companies fend off cyberattacks, including worms sent through e-mail, phishing
attempts, and even denial of service attacks.
On the other hand, civil libertarians are sure to raise questions about privacy, access, and
how Einstein could be used in the future. If it can perform deep packet inspection to
prevent botnets from accessing certain Web pages, for instance, could it also be used to
prevent a human from accessing illegal pornography, copyright-infringing music, or
offshore gambling sites?
"It's one thing for the government to monitor its own systems for malicious code and
intrusions," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and
Technology. "It's quite another for the government to monitor private networks for
those intrusions. We'd be concerned about any notion that a governmental monitoring
system like Einstein would be extended to private networks."
AT&T did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
At the RSA Conference here on Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano stressed the need for more cooperation between the government and the
private sector on cybersecurity, saying that "we need to have a system that works
together."
During a House appropriations hearing on February 26, Napolitano refused to discuss
Einstein 3 unless the hearing were closed to the public. "I don't want to comment publicly
on Einstein 3, per se, here in an unclassified setting," she said. "What I would suggest,
perhaps, is a classified briefing for members of the subcommittee who are interested."
Some privacy concerns about Einstein have popped up before. An American Bar
Association panel said this about Einstein 3 in a September 2009 report: "Because
government communications are commingled with the private communications of non-
governmental actors who use the same system, great caution will be necessary to insure
that privacy and civil liberties concerns are adequately considered."
Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and programmer for the Tor anonymity project,
said that expanding Einstein 3 to the private sector would amount to a partial outsourcing
of security. "It's clearly a win for people without the security know-how to protect their
own networks," Appelbaum said. "It's also a clear loss of control. And anyone with access
to that monitoring system, legitimate or otherwise, would be able to monitor amazing
amounts of traffic."
Einstein grew out of a still-classified executive order, called National Security
Presidential Directive 54, that President Bush signed in 2008.
While little information is available, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff once likened it to a new "Manhattan Project," and the Washington Post reported
that the accompanying cybersecurity initiative represented the "single largest request for
funds" in last year's classified intelligence budget. The Electronic Privacy Information
Center has filed a lawsuit (PDF) to obtain the text of the order.
Homeland Security has published (PDF) a privacy impact assessment for a less capable
system called Einstein 2--which aimed to do intrusion detection and not prevention--but
has not done so for Einstein 3.
The department did, however, prepare a general set of guidelines (PDF) for privacy and
civil liberties in June 2009. In addition, the Bush Justice Department wrote a memo (PDF)
saying Einstein 2 "complies with" the U.S. Constitution and federal wiretap laws.
That justification for Einstein 2 "turned on the consent of employees in the government
that are being communicated with, and on the notion that a person who communicates with
the government can't then complain that the government read the communication," said
CDT's Nojeim. "How does that legal justification work should Einstein be extended to the
private sector?"
Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a correspondent for CBSNews.com
who has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan
writes a regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and economic
rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties site, or subscribe to the RSS
feed. You can e-mail Declan at declan@cbsnews.com.
Mum's the Word on “Free Trade”: Money Controls
by Ernest F. Hollings on February 26, 2010 - 1:00pm
Bio: Former
Senator (D-SC)
“Free trade” means different things to different people. To economists in the United
States, “free trade” means an open market where goods are unfettered or unprotected
by tariffs, quotas or subsidies. To one of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, Henry
Clay, “free trade” was pure fantasy. Clay thought “free trade” was an oxymoron. In 1832,
he cried: “Free trade, free trade … It never existed … It never will.” Teddy Roosevelt
thought “free trade” was dumb economics. He exclaimed in a letter: “Thank God I’m not a
free trader."
After World War II, Japan took our Marshall Plan money and started globalization or a
trade war for market share by closing its domestic market, subsidizing its manufacturing,
selling its exports at near cost, and making up the profit in its closed market. It took over
market share in textiles and then globalized by seeking a country cheaper to produce,
moving its textile manufacturing to Malaysia and changing its trade war from textiles to
watches, to cameras, to electronics, to radios, to TVs, to computers, to communications,
to automobiles.
Hence, “free trade” in the U. S. means an open market for profit; and “free trade” in
Japan means a closed market for market share resulting in Toyota being #1 as Ford, GM,
and Chrysler struggle. To China “free trade” means that the U. S. continues its open
market while China with authoritarian rule closes its market and controls its labor and
currency, but fails to control its air and water so as to have the cheapest production in
globalization. Thus, globalization is nothing more than a trade war with production looking
for a country cheaper to produce. Today, “free trade” to Corporate America, Wall
Street, and the big banks, means the U. S. should not compete in globalization. It means
the United States should not trade. “Free trade” means Corporate America should
continue, unfettered by Congress, offshoring its investment, research, technology,
development, production, jobs – literally, the U. S. economy. Today, “free trade” means to
Corporate America that it be permitted to continue offshoring our economy while it
builds the economies of Mexico, China and India. In short, “free trade” means for
Corporate America to ruin the economy of the United States as it begs for bailouts and
bonuses from the taxpayers.
It never used to be this way. Henry Ford doubled the minimum wage and instituted health
and retirement benefits, developing the middle class in America. The Ford Foundation
developed research and strong communities all over the country. I worked for fifty years
in government with Corporate America seeking the government’s protection of Corporate
America’s investment and production in the United States. We passed protectionist
measures time and again through both Houses of Congress only to have them vetoed by
Presidents of both political parties. At the time, the Presidents were concerned that
capitalism would defeat communism in the Cold War. While the U. S. sought “free trade”
and open markets, it allowed Japan, Korea and China to close their markets and violate
“free trade.” Now, Corporate America, Wall Street, and the big banks seek protection
for their offshored production, calling for “free trade.” Their pundits in the press, Tom
Friedman, Charles Krauthhammer and Fareed Zakaria call for “free trade,”
“protectionism,” “Don’t start a trade war.”
Money has taken over politics. In my last race for the United States Senate ten years ago
I had to raise $8 ½ million to win. This amounts to raising $30,000 a week each and every
week for six years. Today it would be substantially more. Russell Long started the check-
off on your income tax return to build a fund so that “every mother’s son could ‘run for
President.” Obama, with the internet, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, means that
“every mother’s son” has to buy the office. It means members of Congress interested in
reelection must spend all of their waking moments raising money. I said on leaving the
Senate after thirty-eight years service that there were no longer drunks in the Senate.
They don’t have time to get drunk. United States Senators are the hardest working
crowd, save Congressmen, in the United States. Early morning there are three breakfasts
to raise or arrange for money, lunch at fundraisers, cancel policy meetings to fundraise,
“window” breaks in the evening to go out and attend fundraisers and come back to vote,
midnight sessions on Thursday so that you can catch the early morning flight to California
and New York for fundraisers, no work on Mondays and Fridays, and ten-day breaks each
month to fundraise. We don’t honor Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday any
more. We just use their birthdays to be merged into ten days to fundraise. In short,
there is no time for the country, only time for the campaign. “Free trade, free trade.” We
Senators know better. But Wall Street, Corporate America, and the financial community is
the crowd with the money. So “free trade” to members of Congress means: “Let
somebody else solve that problem. I can keep my mouth shut, get the money, and get
reelected.”
This is why all the candidates in the Presidential election had solutions for every problem
but offshoring the economy. Even the New York Times days before the Iowa primary,
after the candidates had been campaigning for at least a year, had a double-page spread,
one for the Democratic candidates and one for the Republican candidates for President,
listing six issues on either page and no mention of the economy. You can’t get an
offshoring op-ed into the Washington Post or the New York Times. Mum’s the word;
money controls.
Now President Barack Obama has become the leader for “free trade.” In the campaign,
he had his economists tell the Canadians: “Don’t worry. He wasn’t serious about jobs.”
Again, when “Buy America” appeared in the stimulus, he opposed it. And when he found
out he couldn’t get the votes, he had “Buy America” watered down even though he had
given out “Buy America/Obama” buttons in the Pennsylvania campaign. He was determined
to get the money and constantly campaign, ignoring the loss of jobs and the economy,
which has been going on for fifty years.
On the economy, President Obama addresses only the recent recession with a stimulus. If
there is one thing that we should have learned in the last eight years it is that stimulation
was not working. It took this nation over two hundred years of history paying for all the
wars – World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and even LBJ’s Great Society and we
didn’t reach a national debt of $1 trillion until 1982. But in the eight Bush years, we have
borrowed, spent, added to the debt and stimulated $5 trillion dollars. And we were losing
jobs at the end of last year like gangbusters. Two years ago, Allen Blinder, the Princeton
economist, estimated in ten years the United States would lose thirty to forty million jobs
to offshoring. The President’s stimulation continues for the nation to lose more jobs than
are stimulated. President Obama gives full attention to the Wall Street bankers’ problem
trying to stimulate consumption, when he ought to be addressing the offshoring problem
with stimulating production.
Our troubles couldn’t happen at a worse time. We have been losing jobs, production and
the economy for over fifty years, stimulating the economies of Mexico, China, India,
Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, etc. Now we need to rebuild our economy. We sure can’t afford
“free trade.” We’ve got to compete in globalization by canceling the subsidies to
offshoring, instituting a value added tax, and, at least, start producing those items
necessary to our national security. Boeing can’t produce a fighter plane without importing
parts from India. Our rolling stock in World War II, with Ford producing the tanks and
General Motors producing the B24 bombers, is now in jeopardy.
In last weeks TV news conference, President Obama concluded: “What I am confident
about is that we’re moving in the right direction.” The President is right on health, energy
and climate change. But he has the country headed in the wrong direction by continuing to
get rid of our economy with “free trade.”
To complete the mobsters tale over of the media
Bain Capital, Founded by Romney, Buys Clear
Channel
By: Jane Hamsher Thursday December 13, 2007
4:11 pm Tweet Share
Mitt Romney founded Bain & Co. in 1984, and
today its spinoff — Bain Capital — is the third
largest private equity firm in the country. Today
they bought ClearChannel, a company that owns
over 1100 radio stations and 30 TV stations.
J-Ro:
This is why media consolidation issues are so
important. One rich guy who wants to be
president can buy a media empire overnight. Now
of course, Romney will argue that he didn’t buy
Clear Channel, his private equity company Bain
Capital did. And of course, there is no conflict of
interest because Romney doesn’t tell Bain Capital
what to do as he’s no longer officially with the
company.
Still, seeing as how Clear Channel hosts Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity and
controls over 1,000 TV and radio stations
nationwide, does anyone here really think
Romney won’t use this newfound pedestal to
promote his candidacy, however subtly?
Sounds kind of like Romney’s relationship to Bain
is like Dick Cheney’s to Halliburton. There certainly was
never any problem there.
Tim Karr has more on the dangers of media consolidation, and the deal that FCC Chairman
Kevin Martin is trying to push through allowing one company to own broadcast station and
a major daily newspaper in the same market.
Is a voting machine merger too big to stand?
The largest voting machine company in the country bought its biggest competitor six
months ago without advance fanfare. Now the Justice Department is investigating
whether to unwind the merger that put a privately held Nebraska company in control of
the voting machines in nearly 70 percent of the nation's precincts.
By PETE YOST
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON —
The largest voting machine company in the country bought its biggest competitor six
months ago without advance fanfare. Now the Justice Department is investigating
whether to unwind the merger that put a privately held Nebraska company in control of
the voting machines in nearly 70 percent of the nation's precincts.
With midterm elections looming and a battle for control of Congress under way, a
coalition of election officials from several states and voter advocate groups is pressing
the Justice Department to unscramble the combination of two companies. Critics say the
merger could cause foul-ups at the polls on Election Day, and some even characterize it as
a national security risk.
The emergence of one megaplayer in the electronic voting machine industry may be an
unintended consequence of reforms enacted after the presidential election debacle in
Florida a decade ago. Few companies can afford to get into the business due to the
expense of developing the electronic voting safeguards that reformers insisted on.
Senate Rules Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has raised concerns about the
purchase, in which Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., bought the voting
machine subsidiary of Diebold Inc. of North Canton, Ohio.
The Justice Department's antitrust division is doing a post-merger review that could
result in the government's trying to persuade ES&S to sell off some of its assets or face
a court suit to force a sell-off. An announcement could come soon.
ES&S said it has been cooperating with the division's review. "We are committed to
exploring potential resolutions that will address any concerns about this transaction, while
ensuring that the election services needs of the jurisdictions we serve will be met," a
company statement said.
Separate from Justice's review, competing voting machine firm Hart InterCivic Inc. has
sued ES&S, alleging that the company will now supply voting machines in 68.2 percent of
the nation's voting precincts. The New York State Board of Elections urged the Justice
Department and the New York attorney general to intervene in the lawsuit challenging the
acquisition.
Another competitor is in court alleging violation of procurement laws in the award of a
$50 million contract to ES&S in recent weeks by New York City's elections board. And
elections board commissioners are cooperating with a probe of that contract by the U.S.
attorney's office, the board's spokeswoman, Valerie Vazquez, said this week.
As a privately held company, ES&S issues no financial reports. It didn't tell the Justice
Department about the Diebold deal because the transaction wasn't big enough to trigger
the federal law that requires the government to be informed of big mergers before they
are completed.
But the government can always come in after a merger to try to alter any deal it thinks
harm competition.
"If you end up with 70 percent of the voting machines and the people rely on them, and if
entry into the market is difficult or impossible, it would certainly seem to be a legitimate
target for antitrust enforcement," said Charles "Rick" Rule, a longtime Washington
attorney who ran the Justice Department's antitrust division from 1986-89 during the
merger-friendly Reagan administration.
On Capitol Hill, Schumer's committee has collected information from opponents and a few
proponents of the merger and commissioned an analysis by the Congressional Research
Service. CRS's conclusion: The merger means ES&S has a presence in 90 percent of the
states, is the sole source for at least 20 and has a market share three or more times that
of its closest competitor.
"In the voting systems industry, perhaps more than any other, the failure of the market
can affect the public interest in a way that goes to the heart of our democracy," Schumer
said in a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder to take a close look at ES&S.
In an industry plagued by equipment malfunctions, wrongly recorded votes and a lack of
transparency, the need for increased quality competition - not less competition - is
essential, John Bonifaz, legal director of the voter advocacy group Voter Action, wrote
Schumer.
Election failure on a large scale has the potential to destabilize the nation, so ES&S must
divest some of its assets, reduce the scope of election jurisdictions subject to its
software and take other steps to offset the increased threat to national security, a
coalition of 19 election experts and groups including Common Cause said in a Feb. 12 letter
to Justice's antitrust division.
ES&S voting machines counted approximately 50 percent of the votes in the last four
major U.S. elections, says the company's Web site, and ES&S boasts "one-stop-shop full-
service election coordination from start to finish."
On Wednesday, ES&S defended its performance, saying that since the acquisition last
September, the company has supported successful elections in many jurisdictions that
previously were customers of the Diebold subsidiary.
Changes enacted by Congress after the Bush v. Gore vote in Florida in 2000 require a
certification process for voting machine companies that is so time-consuming and costly it
discourages companies from plunging into the business to compete with ES&S, some state
and local election officials say.
"I'm surprised and strongly believe the elections community is lucky to still have as many
voting equipment vendors in existence as we do today," Iowa Secretary of State Michael
Mauro, a Democrat, said in a letter to Schumer.
The secretaries of state in California and Connecticut expressed concern about the
merger, as did some local election officials in Florida, California and New Mexico.
30! Five More Democrats--Including Durbin--Say They Support a Public Option Through
Reconciliation
Brian Beutler | March 1, 2010, 10:08AM
75Share
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Five leading Democrats--including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin--have publicly
announced that they will vote for a public option if it's offered up during the budget
reconciliation process, where legislation can pass with a majority vote.
"Sen. Durbin has long been a supporter of the public option," reads a statement from
Durbin spokesman Joe Shoemaker to the progressive groups Progressive Change
Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and Credo. "I don't know whether the
votes exist in the Senate right now, but if the House version of the public option came up
for a vote in reconciliation Sen. Durbin would vote yes."
Similar statements were also issued from four other senators: Patty Murray (D-WA), Ben
Cardin (D-MD), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
To be clear, these are not signatories to a letter--circulated by the three groups--
advocating the public-option-through-reconciliation strategy. PCCC co-founder Adam
Green put it this way: "We're accepting clear statements that if the public option comes
up for a vote, they would vote yes. We're debunking what [White House Press Secretary
Robert] Gibbs said last week, that the votes don't exist -- they do...we'll prove it."
So far, 24 members have signed the letter, and five have issued statements indicating
their support for passing a public option through reconciliation. Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid also stands behind the idea in principle. That means Green et al. have 20
members to go.
Fight For The CFPA Is 'A Dispute Between Families And Banks,' Says Elizabeth Warren
First Posted: 03- 3-10 09:16 AM | Updated: 03- 3-10 11:48 AM
While members of the Senate Banking Committee debate proposals to fix the nation's
broken financial system and ineffective approach to protecting consumers, Elizabeth
Warren has one message: Pass a strong bill or nothing at all.
"My first choice is a strong consumer agency," the Harvard Law professor and federal
bailout watchdog said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "My second choice is no
agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor."
There's been a steady leak of Senate proposals to fix the dysfunctional way federal
regulators protect consumers from abusive lenders. One was an independent unit housed
within the Treasury Department; another was a new entity, housed in the Federal
Reserve, with little independence or power.
The Senate shouldn't waste its time, asserts Warren, explaining that current proposals
fail to address some of her key priorities such as arming the proposed agency with
independent rule-making authority, without interference by bank regulators.
"My 99th choice is some mouthful of mush that doesn't get the job done," Warren said.
The Fed proposal, attributed to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), was leaked earlier this week.
Corker is working with Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) on
Dodd's update to his November bill to reform the nation's financial system.
Warren spent Tuesday on the phone with reform groups, members of Congress and
administration officials, rallying support for a new independent agency tasked solely with
protecting consumers. Many of them were skeptical that Corker is willing to agree to let
the entity have real independence, an aide to Warren said.
Story continues below
But "there's a lot of enthusiasm for a strong bill," Warren said. "The senators really get
the main point -- either vote on something that's strong or don't do it."
The dispute, after all, is a simple one, Warren said: "It's between families and banks."
"The lobbyists would like nothing better than for the story to be the [proposed] agency
has died and everyone has given up," Warren said. "The lobbyists' closest friends in the
Senate would like nothing better than passing an agency that has a good name but no real
impact so they have something good to say to the voters -- and something even better to
say to the lobbyists."
Warren said the new agency should have four simple attributes:
• A chief appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate;
• Independent budget authority, so it won't be subject to the whims of Congress or
an anti-consumer administration;
• Independent rule-making authority, without interference by bank regulators or
others who may focus on bank profitability before focusing on consumers;
• And independent enforcement powers, so the agency's investigators can go after
abusive lenders.
"Those are the basic elements of an independent agency," Warren said. "It's not as if
there's some fifth thing that was left off that list -- that is the list."
The House passed a bill in December calling for the creation of such an agency.
"It's a muscular agency, and that's what really matters," Warren said. House Financial
Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) led the fight.
"It's not perfect -- there's no excuse for excluding used car dealers -- but it's strong,"
she said. "The agency that passed the House will get the job done."
Dodd, who has been under fire for the level of his commitment to a muscular new agency,
reiterated his support during a Tuesday evening interview on "Hardball with Chris
Matthews" on MSNBC.
"What`s really important are four points that I have been insisting upon from the very
beginning," Dodd said according to a transcript of his remarks. "One, I want a
presidentially- appointed director of this operation. I want it confirmed by the Senate. I
want a separate funding source. And I want it to have rule-making authority and
enforcement authority.
"I'm going to insist upon those four points, wherever this is located," he said.
Warren agreed with those points.
"I read his Hardball transcript and I thought: I could entirely envision Elizabeth Warren
sitting there saying the same thing," Warren said.
However, much of the reporting lately has focused on where the proposed agency will be
housed -- its "address," as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put it this week.
Warren said the focus is misplaced.
"It's the wrong place to look," Warren said. "The question is functional independence.
Where the agency sits on an organization chart is less important than its functional
independence."
"The key are the elements Sen. Dodd put his thumb on," Warren said.
Warren hasn't met with Dodd since last July, four months before Dodd publicly released
the first version of his financial reform bill.
She does, however, regularly check in with other members of Dodd's committee,
including Democratic Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
Warren spoke with Merkley on Tuesday regarding the Fed proposal, which severely limits
the kind of power Warren wants the new agency to have.
After all, Warren said, until a new agency is created, banks are going to continue bullying
families into poor loans, mortgages and credit cards.
As Warren put it:
"No cop on the beat works for the biggest bullies in town."
Feb 28, 2010
Reich: The Enthusiasm Gap
Robert Reich is worried about the midterm elections:
The Enthusiasm Gap, by Robert Reich ...Dems are heading toward next fall’s mid-term
elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Dem base is
packing up.
The Dem base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on
everything the Dem base cares about. For a year now it’s been nothing but compromises,
watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health
care went from what the Dem base wanted — single payer — to a public option, to no
public option, to a bunch of ideas that the President tried to explain last week, and it now
hangs by a string... The jobs bill went from what the base wanted — a second stimulus —
to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to
$15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went
from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivate trading, a consumer
protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act – all popular with the Dem
base — to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the
Treasury Department..., and it’s now looking like even less. The environment went from the
base’s desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade
with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Dems
are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.
These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. “Why
should I care?” are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who
worked their hearts out in the last election. The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a
rampage. It’s more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers,
libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the
economic anxieties of millions of Americans against “big government.”
Technically, the Dems have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms.
But conservative, “blue-dog” Dems won’t go along. They say the public has grown wary of
government. ...
Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective
countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs
and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money,
and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against
WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of
the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that
are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the
wages of millions of more... Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and
rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.
If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the
singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House
and the congressional Dem’s ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has
created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed
by the right, blames our problems on “big government.”
Much of the reason for the Democrats’ astonishing reluctance to place blame where it
belongs rests with big business’s and Wall Street’s generous flows of campaign donations
to Dems, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic
officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. ...
But our President is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger
narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this
dangerous juncture, and the private sector’s corruption of the democratic process. ... He
can be indignant– as when he lashed out at the “fat cats” on Wall Street – but his
indignance is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignance of the right that blames
government for all that ails us.
There are two ways to gain votes, one is to move the center in your direction, the other
is to fire up the base and increase turnout. On many issues, these two goals work against
each other -- satisfying the middle loses the base and vice versa -- but not always. There
are issues that both the center and the base agree upon, and pursuing those issues is a
win-win in terms of gaining the support of both constituencies. I think there was quite a
bit of common ground between the middle and the base on health care, financial reform,
and responding to the crisis, but for some reason the administration has not pursued
these kinds of policies. Whenever push has come to shove, it appears to be the base that
has been pushed out of the way. That would be fine, I suppose, if it was actually
satisfying the middle and gaining more votes than are given up by ignoring the base, and
pushing good policy forward, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
Maybe this is the answer:
American presidents with the greatest record of bipartisan legislative achievement,
notably Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, got their way by
intimidating opponents, not by splitting the difference. As Machiavelli famously observed,
it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. For all his intelligence, nobody fears Mr
Obama...
I understand the argument that political realities forced the administration's hand, that
his was all it could possibly do due to Blue Dogs, etc. But the political reality the
administration faces is not exogenously determined, it is not something that must be
taken as given when formulating policy. The political reality can be changed with effort.
The administration's willingness to simply take the political constraints as a given rather
than fighting through them is a big part of the problem.
Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama
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Posted on Mar 1, 2010
AP / Chris Carlson
By Chris Hedges
We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack
Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their
convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and
progressives.
Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the
transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and
lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however,
admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a
senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that
retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens
without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he
would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo,
end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of
this has happened.
He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of
taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and
force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies
would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the
seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt
the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful
environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil.
He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by
sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of
victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.
The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American
history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise
only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals,
unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party
protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath
Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of
disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now,
were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to
speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the
protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his
Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker
and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage.
“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and
in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy
train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of
the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not
hours?” Stack wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical
system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of
people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s
leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the
political ‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate)
have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the ‘terrible
health care problem’. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in
the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”
Reform Déjà Vu: Democrats Follow Failed Health Care Strategy and Preemptively
Surrender on Consumer Financial Protection Agency
A "doom loop." That's what Andy Haldane, executive director of financial stability for the
Bank of England, warned last fall would happen if serious financial reform wasn't enacted.
Well, we appear to be a step closer to that "doom loop" with the leak this weekend of
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd's plan for a seriously watered-down
consumer financial protection agency.
Back in June, President Obama released a proposal calling for the creation of a Consumer
Financial Protection Agency that would be "independent," with "broad authority" and the
power to "combat the worst abuses in mortgage markets." The agency, Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner said, would "have an independent seat at the table in our financial
regulatory system."
Well, that was before the banking lobby went into action. A couple of hundred million
dollars later, and we're left with this punch-to-the-gut of reform, from the top-line
summary of Dodd's plan: "the independent agency proposal would be dropped." Seven
words dirtier than George Carlin ever uttered.
Instead, according to the Dodd plan, the agency would be housed within the Treasury
Department and called the Bureau of Financial Protection. And that's not the only
compromise. Here's how the eviscerated entity would work, as laid out by HuffPost's
Ryan Grim:
Each time the agency wanted to write a rule, it would have to consult with bank regulators.
The agency would then have to respond to the objections of each and every bank
regulator in the Federal Register. If the bank regulator was still unsatisfied, it could
appeal to the 'systemic regulator,' whose mission is to protect the safety and soundness
of the banking industry.
Anytime a new rule is proposed, bank lobbyists argue that it will be burdensome and make
the system less safe and sound. If the systemic regulator agreed with the banks -- as
they often do -- then the consumer protection rule would be voided.
Notably, the consumer protection agency has no veto power over any rules issued by bank
regulators, which demonstrates which regulator will be superior. The first concern is the
banks.
So much for "independence" and "broad authority."
The proposal will no doubt be very popular with the banks that, as Sen. Dick Durbin put it,
"own the place." But it's already been met with criticism from consumer groups.
"Effective reform is once again being blocked by opposition from the big banks that
caused the current financial crisis, " said Heather Booth, director of Americans for
Financial Reform. "The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect
American families or the financial system as a whole."
This view was seconded by Nancy Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil and
Human Rights: "Big banks and abusive lenders fought responsible regulation before the
crisis, and we are all paying the price. It is unacceptable for Congress to allow them to
succeed again," she said.
But, then, we seem to be living in a time when the unacceptable is routinely accepted --
and written off as unavoidable.
On Saturday, Dodd told Bloomberg Television's Al Hunt that he prefers an independent
agency, but said it might not be possible to reach the 60 votes needed to break the
inevitable Republican filibuster.
Maybe so. But how about at least trying before waving the white flag? Instead, Dodd, in
the hope of attracting Republican votes, appears to have preemptively surrendered. But
there's no evidence that Dodd's concession has achieved anything other than
kneecapping the bill. Democrats have mastered the art of negotiating against themselves.
It's hard to believe that even the messaging-challenged Democrats could fail to frame to
their advantage a bill that would prevent banks from abusing the public and engaging in
the same practices that brought on the financial catastrophe taxpayers have paid so high
a price for. Instead, the attitude seems to be, why even try?
That's assuming, of course, that a powerful consumer protection agency is something
Democrats -- including those in the White House -- think is important enough to fight for.
"Here lies the crux of the problem," write Simon Johnson and Peter Boone. "The Obama
administration lacks an inner core of smart, well-informed advisers who are deeply
skeptical of big banks and eager to do whatever it takes to break a cycle that points to
financial and fiscal doom."
So how likely is another ride on the doom loop of financial crises? Johnson and Boone lay
out some sobering statistics: Fifteen years ago, the combined assets of our six biggest
banks totaled 17 percent of our GDP. By 2006, that number was 55 percent. Right now, it
stands at 63 percent.
In the Bloomberg interview, Dodd claimed to still support the so-called Volcker Rules
banning proprietary trading and capping the size of banks, as does, we're told, Obama.
But Johnson and Boone argue that even the Volcker Rules wouldn't make much of a
difference -- and that something much bolder is needed.
"It is still possible that the White House could go all-in against the distorted incentives at
large banks and the corrupted regulatory structures that have created our 'doom loop,'
and make this the central campaign issue for November," they write. "Branding opponents
as supporters of too big to fail could get traction, at least if led by an articulate and
impassioned president."
Well, we know he'll be articulate, but his passion for reigning in the banks remains to be
proven.
The Senate Banking Committee is expected to take up Dodd's proposal this week. Some
strong leadership from an "impassioned" Obama could shoot down this deflated trial
balloon and ensure that what the committee sends to the full Senate to vote on is actually
closer to what Obama called for last year -- and, indeed, closer to the stronger package,
including a stand-alone consumer financial protection agency, that passed the House in
December.
During last week's health care summit, President Obama very cogently explained why
piecemeal health reform won't work -- connecting the dots between the need to prevent
insurers from denying coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and the need for
universal coverage.
How about doing the same for an issue that is even more sellable to the public? Of
course, reforming our broken health care system would have been sellable, too -- if the
White House had not ceded the messaging playing field to the Republicans for most of
the last year.
The good news is, there's still plenty of time to do for financial reform what Obama
should have done for health care -- go out and sell a clear and specific package. And he
needs to make the point that, much like health care, doing it incrementally won't work.
Leaving too-big-to-fail banks to continue doing business as they have been is like
operating on a cancer patient and taking out only half the tumor -- the disease is
guaranteed to come back. And eventually prove fatal.
The president can take a page from the How to Win Bipartisan Support By Playing
Hardball With Your Opponents playbook used so effectively by FDR, LBJ, and Ronald
Reagan. Or he can go along with the preemptive surrender strategy favored by Senate
Democrats: negotiate against yourself, water down what you know is right, earn your
bipartisanship merit badge... and get absolutely nothing in return.
Published on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Chile's Socialist Rebar
by Naomi Klein
Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September '08 and
everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn't been easy to be a fanatical fan of the late
economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market
fundamentalism that his followers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological
victories, however far-fetched.
A particularly distasteful case in point. Just two days after Chile was struck by a
devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his
readers that Milton Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile"
because, "thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would
have been an apocalypse.... It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick
-- and Haitians in houses of straw -- when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down."
According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous "Chicago Boys" are the reason
Chile is a prosperous nation with "some of the world's strictest building codes."
There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile's modern seismic building code,
drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant
because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup. That
means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but
Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected socialist President. (In truth many
Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the
first law was adopted in the 1930s).
It does seem significant, however, that the law was enacted even in the midst of a
crippling economic embargo ("make the economy scream" Richard Nixon famously growled
after Allende won the 1970 elections). The code was later updated in the nineties, well
after Pinochet and the Chicago Boys were finally out of power and democracy was
restored.
Little wonder: As Paul Krugman points out, Friedman was ambivalent about building codes,
seeing them as yet another infringement on capitalist freedom. As for the argument that
Friedmanite policies are the reason Chileans live in "houses of brick" instead of "straw,"
it's clear that Stephens knows nothing of pre-coup Chile. The Chile of the 1960s had the
best health and education systems on the continent, as well as a vibrant industrial sector
and rapidly expanding middle class. Chileans believed in their state, which is why they
elected Allende to take the project even further.
After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to
dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and
trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by
the early eighties, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-
industrialization, a ten-fold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly
unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in
1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisors and nationalize several of
the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)
Fortunately, the Chicago Boys did not manage to undo everything Allende accomplished.
The National copper company, Codelco, remained in state hands, pumping wealth into
public coffers and preventing the Chicago Boys from tanking Chile's economy completely.
They also never got around to trashing Allende's tough building code, an ideological
oversight for which we should all be grateful.
Thanks to CEPR for tracking down the origins of Chile's building code.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the
international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller,
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special
10th Anniversary Edition); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.
naomiklein.org
Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq
By Robert Parry
March 5, 2010
George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove claims “one of the biggest mistakes” of that
presidency was not aggressively challenging critics who charged that Bush “lied” to the
American people about the reasons for the Iraq War, an accusation that Rove insists was
false and unfair.
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In his forthcoming book, Courage and Consequence, Rove calls the “lie” charge “a poison-
tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency” and blames himself for “a weak
response” that underestimated “how damaging this assault was.”
But the problem with Rove’s account is that not only did Bush oversee the twisting of
intelligence to justify invading Iraq in March 2003 but he subsequently lied – and lied
repeatedly – about how Iraq had responded to United Nations inspection demands.
So, while it may be impossible to say for certain what Bush believed about Iraq
possessing weapons of mass destruction, it can’t be argued that Bush didn’t know that
Iraq declared that it had destroyed its WMD stockpiles and let U.N. inspectors in to see
for themselves in the months before the invasion.
Nevertheless, Bush followed up his false pre-war claims about Iraq’s WMD with a post-
invasion insistence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had barred U.N. inspectors from his
country, a decision that Bush said left him no choice but to invade. Bush began reciting
this faux history just months after the invasion and continued the tall tale until the end of
his presidency more than five years later.
Tellingly, throughout that period, as Bush blithely lied about the Iraq War history, he
was never challenged to his face by the mainstream U.S. journalists who politely listened
to the lies. Indeed, some big-name journalists even adopted Bush’s false narrative as
their own.
Now, it appears Rove is intent on rehabilitating Bush’s record by insisting that the ex-
President never lied at all. The historical record, however, is clear: Hussein and other
Iraqi officials did say they no longer possessed WMD and they did let UN arms
inspectors into Iraq in the fall of 2002 to search any site of their choosing.
The inspectors in their white vans drove around Iraq for months, with their excursions
covered daily by the international news media. In trip after trip, guided by the best
available U.S. intelligence, the inspectors came up empty.
Hussein and his government also backed up their claims to be WMD-free by providing the
United Nations a 12,000-page declaration on Dec. 7, 2002, explaining how Iraq’s stocks of
chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed in the 1990s.
Though the Bush administration mocked these Iraqi disclosures, U.S. intelligence had its
own independent facts supporting the Iraqi statements, including information from
Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel al-Majid who defected and described his work
destroying the stockpiles after the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s. [When he
returned to Iraq, he was killed.]
Top-Level Intelligence
With the help of French intelligence, the CIA also had “turned” Hussein’s foreign
minister, Naji Sabri, who conveyed real-time intelligence to the U.S. government, passing
along information in September 2002 about the absence of Iraqi WMD. Here is how
author Ron Suskind described that intelligence in his 2008 book, The Way of the World:
“The upshot of Sabri’s account was that Saddam neither possessed WMD nor was trying
very hard to procure or develop them. If Saddam was eager for a nuclear weapon, he was
as far as ever from having one and was making no progress on that front; any vestige of a
bio-weapons program was negligible; and if any chemical weapons remained in Iraq, they
were no longer in the hands of either Saddam Hussein or his military.
“[CIA Paris station chief Bill] Murray flew down to Washington to deliver the news and
briefed John McLaughlin, CIA’s deputy director. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the
intelligence but pointed out that it was contradicted by information from Curveball, the
best source on Iraqi WMD to that point. Sabri’s account was relayed to [CIA Director
George] Tenet, who delivered it personally to Bush the following day.
“But the administration quickly lost interest in Sabri when it heard what he had to say.
Bush dismissed the intelligence as disinformation, and the White House said it would be
interested in Sabri only if he chose to defect.”
Though the CIA found additional information to corroborate Sabri’s story and regarded
Curveball as a highly unreliable source, Bush pressed forward on his course to war.
Suskind further reported that the written report on Sabri’s intelligence was distorted to
lend greater credence to the WMD suspicions, “almost certainly altered under pressure
from Washington.”
Yet, it may never be fully known whether Bush didn’t care about the truth or simply chose
to believe the “stove-piped” intelligence that was coming from neoconservatives salted
throughout the national security bureaucracy – and who were determined to go to war
with Iraq.
What can’t be doubted is what happened next. Set on invading, Bush forced the U.N.
inspectors to wrap up their work and to leave Iraq in March 2003, a departure that was
followed within days by his “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, beginning March 19.
Reinventing History
Several months later, with Hussein’s government ousted and with the U.S. military coming
up empty in its search for WMD caches, Bush began his historical revisionism by insisting
publicly that he had no choice but to invade because Hussein supposedly had barred U.N.
inspectors.
On July 14, 2003, Bush told reporters:
“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let
them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from
power.”
Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this
lie again and again in varied forms.
On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course,
and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam,
you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world
felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not
let us in.”
As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the
color of truth.
At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance
of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.
“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said,
‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam
Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors,
when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him.
And we did.”
At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version of the made-
up tale, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.
“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441
was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious
consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has
subsequently caused him to lose his life.”
In one of his White House exit interviews – on Dec. 1, 2008 – Bush again revived his
convenient version of history, that Hussein was responsible for the invasion because he
wouldn’t let the U.N. inspectors in.
ABC News anchor Charles Gibson asked Bush, “If the [U.S.] intelligence had been right
[and revealed no Iraq WMD], would there have been an Iraq War?”
Bush answered, “Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to
determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.”
In his frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledged the fact that Hussein
did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD
stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing.
Media Complicity
And never did mainstream reporters contradict Bush’s false history to his face. Indeed,
some prominent Washington journalists even adopted Bush’s lie as their own. For instance,
in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he –
Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.
“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated
once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control
over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,”
Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”
In the real history, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But faux reality
had become the trademark of the Bush presidency – and of its many supporters in the
press corps.
Washington’s conventional wisdom eventually embraced another fake belief, that Hussein
provoked the war by misleading people into believing that he still possessed WMD. The
fact that Hussein and his government had declared they didn’t possess WMD was
forgotten.
In line with the bogus version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley asked
FBI interrogator George Piro, who had debriefed Hussein in prison, why the dictator
kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a
simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.
“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never
knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the
interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles, which aired Jan. 27, 2008. “Why did
he choose war with the United States?”
This “60 Minutes” segment never mentioned the fact that Hussein and his government did
disclose that the WMD had been eliminated. Instead Pelley pressed Piro on the mystery
of why Hussein supposedly was hiding that fact:
“Why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to
maintain this charade?”
After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was
close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the
perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”
But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation.
Pelley asked: “As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his
border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass
destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”
Now, with the publication of Karl Rove’s memoir, the American public can expect a reprise
of the argument that it was unfair for anyone to accuse President Bush of lying about
Iraq, that he simply believed mistaken intelligence and did what he thought was best for
America. In other words, Bush was the victim of mean critics, not a dishonest warmonger.
One also can expect that the mainstream U.S. news media will continue to forget its own
role in perpetuating the lie that George W. Bush would never lie.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George
W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at
neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project
Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
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To much democracy in France. The mobsters puppet government sarkosi seek to restrict
the internet
France Moves Closer to Unprecedented Internet Regulation
By Stefan Simons in Paris
AP
New draft laws look set to give the French government unprecendented control of the
Internet.
The lower house of the French parliament has approved a draft bill that will allow the
state unprecedented control over the Internet. Although the government says it will
improve security for ordinary citizens, civil rights activists are warning of a "new level"
of censorship and surveillance.
For members of the French administration, it is a law against digital crime. For civil
rights activists and politicians from opposition parties, it is a plan for censorship that
excites fear and loathing -- and even conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the
surveillance state.
The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, passed the first draft
of the bill, known as "Loppsi 2," on Tuesday. It will now go on for a second reading in the
Senate, where it seems likely to pass, thanks to the government's majority. If the Senate
approves the bill, the new law could come into force as early as this summer. The
legislation could have far-reaching consequences: Loppsi 2 contains rules that would make
France the European country where the Internet is subject to the most censorship,
regulation, control and surveillance.
The new legislation could in the future force Internet service providers (ISPs) to shut
off access to criminal sites, should they be officially instructed to do so. According to
the draft legislation, the law "makes it the responsibility of each Internet service
provider to ensure that users don't have access to unsuitable content."
French Government to Employ Malware
The list of banned Web sites would be provided by the Interior Ministry. The approach
is very similar to a proposed German Internet law aimed at fighting child pornography,
which also foresaw limiting access to certain sites. That legislation was signed into law by
German President Horst Köhler on Wednesday -- even though the German government
had recently decided it no longer wanted to apply the law in its existing form, after
massive protests by Internet users.
Under the new French legislation, police and security forces would be able to use
clandestinely installed software, known in the jargon as a "Trojan horse," to spy on
private computers. Remote access to private computers would be made possible under the
supervision of a judge.
The draft law indicates that President Nicolas Sarkozy is sticking to his hard line on
Internet issues. Last year his administration pushed through the HADOPI law which gives
ISPs the power to block or restrict Internet access to users of illegal file-sharing sites
who refuse to desist under a "three strikes" system. The new legislation is simply the
next step in regulating Internet use in France.
Political Motivations
The French government's hard line should not surprise anyone. In a few weeks' time,
regional elections will take place in France. In the 2004 regional elections, Sarkozy's UMP
party did particularly badly. By showing himself to be a tough leader, Sarkozy hopes to
avoid history repeating itself and shore up support for his policies. Polls indicate there is
disappointment with his leadership and his government has low approval ratings. That is
the reason why, in the face of a rampant economic crisis, growing unemployment, a
devastatingly large budget deficit and various political scandals, Sarkozy is pulling out a
presidential trump card. He is hoping that fear of criminals will convince voters to come
to the polling booths.
In that respect, there is no more suitable issue than child pornography on the Internet
and the hunt for pedophile criminals whose only desire is to seduce innocents via their
home computers. According to that argument, it is necessary to impose controls on the
digital world and introduce state surveillance, so that a pro-active Big Brother can fight
the cyber world's sexual deviants who are, in all likelihood, lurking on Facebook or
Twitter.
More Than Just Controlling Cyberspace
In fact, Internet controls are only part of the bundle of legislation that is included in
Loppsi 2. The various articles include a colorful batch of security measures developed by
Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, a close ally of Sarkozy's, who pushed through the
first version of the security laws in 2002.
The new package has been in the works since October 2007 and has, according to
Hortefeux, been beefed up by 13 provisions "like in bodybuilding." It is a hodgepodge of
different measures, governing issues as disparate as courtroom procedures, traffic laws,
defense, sport, integration and even questions regarding burial ordnances in the French
territory of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. The French daily Le Monde wrote of a
"chest with many drawers."
In addition to law enforcement tools for municipal police and private security companies,
there is also a provision calling for a tripling of surveillance cameras in France -- from
20,000 to 60,000 -- by 2011. The provision has been described harmlessly as "video
protection."
The package also contains harsher penalties for break-ins, assault and drunk driving.
Curfews for minors are also to be allowed.
'Serious Threat' to Internet Neutrality
Civil rights activists are outraged, as is the opposition. "We are seeing a whole series of
lapses and rights limitations," says Jean-Pierre Dubois, president of the French League
of Human Rights. Sandrine Béllier, a member of the European Parliament for the Green
Party, says the bill represents "a serious threat" to the neutrality of the Internet.
"The filtering and blocking of the Web has become a standard weapon in the legislative
arsenal of a government which has been shameless in its handling of personal freedoms,"
Béllier said in an interview with the online edition of the magazine Marianne. She
complained that policing responsibility was being handed to Web providers, despite the
lack of a legal basis for doing so. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that the similar
draft law in Germany will likely never come into force.
"Loppsi has brought us to a new level," Béllier says, adding that "when it comes to
restrictions, this text is preparing us for hell."
Loppsi 2 contains a number of other gifts to French security authorities as well, including
improved integration between police files and personal data kept by, for example, banks.
The goal, Hortefeux explains innocently, is that of "improving the daily security of
French citizens." He says the laws will help to "maintain the level and quality of service
provided by domestic security forces."
Simon Johnson
MIT Professor and co-author of 13 Bankers
Posted: March 2, 2010 12:16 PM
Why No International Financial Regulation?
Read More: Consumer Protection , Dodd Corker ,
Dodd-Corker Compromise , Financial Crisis ,
Financial Reform , Goldman Sachs , Imf , Simon
Johnson , Wto , Business News
As we fast approach the unveiling of the Dodd-
Corker financial reform proposals for the
Senate, it is only fair and reasonable to ask:
Does any of this really matter? To be sure, some
parts of what the Senate Banking committee
(and likely the full Senate) will consider are not
inconsequential for relatively small players in the
US market. For example, putting consumer
protection inside the Fed -- which has an awful
and embarrassing reputation in terms of protecting users of
financial products -- would tell you a lot about where we are going.
But our big banks are global and nothing in the current legislation would really rein them
in -- no wonder they and their allies sneer, in a nasty fashion, at Senator Dodd as a lame
duck who "does not matter."
For example, the resolution authority/modified bankruptcy procedure under discussion
would do nothing to make it easier to manage the failure of a financial institution with
large cross-border assets and liabilities. For this, you would need a "cross-border
resolution authority," determining who is in charge of winding up what -- and using which
cash -- when a global bank fails.
To be sure, such a cross-border authority could be developed under the auspices of the
G20, but there are not even baby steps in that direction. Why?
Part of the answer, of course, is that big cross-border banks know how to play
governments off against each other -- dropping heavy hints that "international
competitiveness" is at stake. These are empty threats -- if the US, the UK, and the
eurozone cooperated on a resolution regime, this would get serious attention. If they
went further and truly integrated their regulations -- including communications and
practices (and inspections) across regulators/supervisors -- this could have major impact.
But national governments like to run their banks in their own way. In part, this may be
sensible public policy -- who, after all, really wants the US to be in charge of deciding
how a bank failure (in another country) is handled? (The US and the UK had a major row
in the weeks after Lehman failed.) Even within the eurozone, there is a long standing
refusal to specify in advance who is responsible for saving what part of which bank --
motivated in part by the desire to protect the bureaucratic turf of national central banks,
which ceded power over monetary policy to the European Central Bank.
In part, no doubt, this also reflects varying degrees of "capture" in different places --
sometimes by bankers, but sometimes it's the politicians who do the capturing. As
examples, see the work of Asim Khwaja and Atif Mian or Mara Faccio on how political
connections really work in and around financial systems.
In any case, hoping that we can constrain banks through some form of international
governmental cooperation is a complete illusion. The IMF and the WTO have no mandate
on this issue. The Financial Stability Board is a paper tiger -- really just a talking shop
between regulators (and the same goes for the Bank for International Settlements more
generally).
The big global banks know all this -- and have known it for years. When Jerry Corrigan,
former head of the NY Fed, no less, says Goldman did "nothing inappropriate" in
arranging Greek debt swaps, he is in effect saying "catch us if you can".
You will never stop the international banks at the international level. You need to curtail
them at the national level. And you can't afford to wait for other countries; you have to
do it for your own country as a matter of pressing national priority.
Unfortunately, the Dodd-Corker proposals seem most unlikely to move us forward along
this dimension.
An Interview with Criminologist Bill Black
The Top Ten Ways to Crack Down on Corporate
Financial Crime
By RUSSELLL MOKHIBER
Ninety-five percent of criminologists study blue collar
crime.
Five percent study white collar crime.
Of the tiny minority who study white collar crime,
ninety five percent focus on the individuals who rip off
the corporation.
We are left with a small handful of criminologists –
think Edwin Sutherland, John Braithwaite, Gil Geis –
who have studied or are studying – corporate crime.
That would be crime by the corporation.
Bill Black is one of the most prominent of those living corporate criminologists.
His specialty – control fraud.
Control fraud is when the CEO of a company uses the corporation as a weapon to commit
fraud.
Bill Black is a lawyer and former federal bank regulator.
He’s the author of the corporate crime classic – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own
One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry (University of
Texas Press, 2005.)
Black says there are steps we can take as a society to control corporate crime – in
particular financial crime.
In an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter last week, Black laid out his top ten.
Number ten: Hire 1,000 FBI agents.
Pass legislation (HR 3995) introduced by Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur that would fund
the hiring of 1,000 FBI agents to investigate white collar crime.
Number nine: Appoint a chief criminologist at each of the financial regulatory agencies.
“Each agency needs someone who understands white collar crime,” Black said. “If you don’
t understand fraud schemes, if you don’t understand how accounting is used to run these
scams, you will always have a disaster in the making.”
Number eight: Fix executive compensation.
Black would tie executive bonuses to long term corporate performance.
Number seven: Target the top 100 corporate criminals.
“We need to do a top 100 priority list – the way it was done in the savings and loan crisis,”
Black said. “The FBI, the Justice Department and the regulatory agencies got together
and put together a list of top 100 companies to target. There was a recognition that these
were control frauds. The top executives were using seemingly legitimate savings and loans
as their weapons of fraud. And that is why any serious look will tell you the same thing
about this most recent crisis as well. The criminal justice referral process has collapsed
at the agencies.”
Number six: Regulate first.
“When you desupervise or deregulate an industry, in fact you are decriminalizing control
fraud. The regulators are the ones who make the bulk of these cases. I’m not saying they
can do it alone. In the current crisis, the FBI had no meaningful support from the
regulators. You have regulators denying they were regulators and saying that there could
be no fraud because the rating agencies were handing out high ratings. That kind of
naivete is ideologically driven. You will not have effective prosecution with that kind of
regulatory regime.”
Number five: Bust up the FBI partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association.
“Now we have the FBI standing with what it calls its partners – the Mortgage Bankers
Association,” Black said. “But the Mortgage Bankers Association – that’s the trade
association of the perps. So, the FBI is partnering with the perps.”
“The result is – we have seen zero prosecutions of the specialty non-prime lenders that
caused the crisis,” Black said. “The mortgage bankers are going to position themselves as
the victims. This has been so successful that the FBI now has a mantra. They are saying
there are two kinds of mortgage fraud. Fraud for profit and fraud for housing. And
neither of them is control fraud. They have effectively said – control fraud is impossible.
Even though it was the entire story behind the savings and loan crisis, the Enron wave,
and the creation of the most recent housing bubble.”
Number four: Get rid of Ben Bernanke as chair of the Fed. Replace him with Nobel prize
winner Joseph Stiglitz.
“Ben Bernanke should not have been reappointed as head of the Fed,” Black said. “He was
the most senior regulator. And he was an utter failure. Under President Bush, he was
President of the Council of Economic Advisors. So, he was a failure as a regulator. And he
was a failure as an economist.”
Number three: Get rid of too big to fail.
There are about 20 banks that have assets of $100 billion or more. They are considered
too big to fail. “You do three things,” Black says. “First, you stop them from growing.
Second, you shrink them (to below $20 billion in assets.) You create the tax and
regulatory incentives where they have to shrink below the level where they pose a
systemic risk. And third, you regulate them much more intensively while they are in the
process of moving from a systemically dangerous institution to a more leaner, smaller,
more efficient, less dangerous institution.”
Number two: Create a consumer financial protection agency headed by Harvard Law
School professor Elizabeth Warren.
“The sine qua non for success as a regulator is independence,” Black says. “So, it’s a very
bad sign that Congress is moving away from an independent regulator.”
“As we speak, news is breaking that they are moving away from housing the regulator at
the Treasury Department. Now they are talking about putting it at the Federal Reserve.
The Fed is an independent regulator. Unfortunately, it’s an independent anti-regulator. I
called putting it at the Treasury a sick joke. Putting it at the Fed is also a sick joke. They
are both recipes for failure.”
Number one: Fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Office of Thrift Supervision
chief John Bowman, Fed chief regulator Patrick Parkinson, and Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency Chief John Dugan.
“Tim Geithner was testifying before Congress a couple of years ago,” Black said. “And in
response to a question from Ron Paul (R-Texas), Geithner said – ‘I have to stop you right
there – I’ve never been a regulator.’ Well, that’s true. But you are not supposed to admit
it.”
“Can you imagine. This is the President of the New York Fed, testifying about the
greatest failure in banking in the history of the nation. And he is so completely out of it –
the mindset of capture is so complete, that he says – I’ve never been a regulator. This is
the ultimate capture. You don’t even think of yourself as a regulator.”
“Ben Bernanke in October 2009 appointed Patrick Parkinson as the top supervisor at the
Fed,” Black said. “He’s the guy who, under Alan Greenspan, led the Fed charge against
Brooksley Born when she wanted to regulate credit default swaps.”
“Patrick Parkinson, on behalf of the Fed, testified that credit default swaps should be
left completely deregulated.”
“The reasons? If we regulate them, they will flee to the city of London. We should be so
lucky, of course.”
“And two, fraud can’t happen in credit default swaps, because the participants are so
sophisticated. This is the most astonishingly naive model of white collar crime by people
who know nothing about white collar crime and don’t study it at all.”
“John Dugan’s sole priority and all of his passion as OCC director has been pre-empting
state efforts to protect us from predatory lenders,” Black said.
“And John Bowman should be fired,” Black said. “The OTS got in bed with the industry
most openly.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Bill Black, see 24 Corporate Crime
Reporter 10(12), March 8, 2010, print edition only.]
Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.
Beating the estate tax to death
With estate tax set to end this year, retroactive lawmaking in 2010 is likely
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By Eva Rosenberg, MarketWatch
LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- It's OK to take good old gramps off life support now --
there will be an estate tax in 2010, even if current law has it expiring on Jan. 1.
Ever since the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 passed, there
have been jokes flying around about killing off the wealthy in 2010 when, under that law,
the estate tax is repealed for one year. But after nearly 10 years, the jokes are getting
stale.
Filing tax returns on your own
MarketWatch Personal Finance Editor Andrea Coombes shares tips for self-help tax
filers, including saving money while avoiding mistakes.
More tax advice, IRS news and filing help
• Estate taxes will rise from the dead yet
• Retroactive estate-tax fix no easy task
• Higher tax rates will cost you in 2011
• The tax benefits of refinancing your mortgage
• Are heavily taxed people happier?
• Avoid identity theft -- file your tax return smartly
• Unemployed? Here are 4 costly tax-filing errors
• Defaulted loans? Cancelled debt? A Tax Guide
• Five reasons not to itemize your deductions
• Avoiding IRS audit triggers and red flags
• Overpaid taxes? How to get your money back
• How to find the right tax professional
• Need free tax help? Here it is
• The top 5 online tax-filing services
See the complete MarketWatch Guide to Taxes
/conga/personal-finance/taxes_seo.html 61893
While the House recently passed a bill to reinstate the estate tax in 2010, this week the
Senate rejected a measure to temporarily extend it. But the EGTRRA legislation will not
be allowed to stand, says Larry Richman, chair of Chicago-based Neal, Gerber &
Eisenberg's Private Wealth Services Practice Group.
Look for retroactive action
Richman is right. On Dec. 3, the House of Representatives voted to permanently extend
the present 45% estate tax rate, and the $3.5 million, per person, exclusion from estate
taxes. While everyone was expecting a one-year extension, no one was expecting any
permanent legislation while Capitol Hill is embroiled in the health-care debate.
For a married couple, this means that up to $7 million worth of assets would be excluded
from estate taxes. That excludes nearly 60% of all estates. Based on 2008 filings, 22,642
estates out of a total filed of 38,373 are under $3.5 million, according to IRS data.
This did not sit well with the Senate. Democrats and Republicans are at odds over the tax
rate and the exclusion amount. Democrats in general are ready to approve the House
version, while some Republicans prefer a lower tax rate of 35% and a higher exclusion of
$5 million. The end result: The Senate did not pass an estate-tax extension.
Still, there is little doubt the Senate will tackle this in the beginning of 2010. Generally,
when a law is passed, it becomes effective on the date of passage. However, this law will
be an exception. In order to avoid a complete repeal of the estate tax in 2010, this law is
expected to contain a provision making it retroactive to Jan. 1, 2010, according to Wayne
Otchis, a certified public accountant in San Diego. Otchis spoke at a Spidell Publishing
Inc. (www.caltax.com) tax update seminar in Woodland Hills, Calif. on Wednesday.
The end of the estate tax?
What if Congress does nothing and estate taxes really are repealed?
As we all know, nothing is certain except death and taxes. There is a chance that the
Senate will debate this issue to death and no action will be taken at all. What then?
Bruno Graziano, a senior writer and analyst in the estate planning group of CCH, a
Wolters Kluwer business, explains the implications for estates originating in 2010. In
other words, for folks who die in the coming year.
The good news is, if Congress doesn't act, there will be no federal estate taxes at all.
Businesses, stocks, and other assets can be passed on to heirs without being hit with tax
rates as high as 45%.
The bad news?
• There are still state estate taxes to consider.
• There will be only a limited step-up in basis. Under current federal estate tax laws,
the assets of the deceased get a step-up in basis to the fair market value at date of
death (or 6 months later). This eliminates capital gains taxes when heirs sell assets. In
2010, if the estate tax is repealed, the step-up in basis is limited to $1.3 million for the
overall estate, plus $3 million for assets transferred to a surviving spouse.
• If Congress doesn't take any action at all, in 2011, the pre-EGTRRA levels return --
estate taxes on all estates over $1 million, with federal tax rates up to 55%.
What not to do this year
Since there is still confusion about the state of the estate tax, MarketWatch asked
Graziano for some guidance on how to avoid foolish actions in 2009. He said:
• Don't believe that the estate tax is going away permanently -- all indications are
that it will remain in some form after 2009. Even if Congress does nothing before year-
end and allows the repeal to occur, they could reinstate the tax retroactively during 2010
or just wait for the EGTRRA sunset to occur and let the pre-2001 law come back in 2011.
• Don't abandon existing gifting plans for family and charity on the assumption that
the estate tax is going away.
• Even without an estate tax, don't forget about estate planning. Other issues such as
asset protection, dysfunctional family situations, disposition of retirements assets, and
business succession issues can be just as important, if not more so, than the traditional
transfer tax issues.
What can you do in the meantime?
Larry Richman suggests this may be a good time to do some last-minute planning to lock in
the $3.5 million exclusion while it's still available. Since there are only a few days left
this year, if you're really concerned, bully your way into your estate tax professional's
office and start asking about Q-TIP trusts (qualified terminable interest property),
generation-skipping trusts, reverse Q-TIP elections, and so forth. You can find some
pretty useful information, as a starting point, in an "Introduction to Estate Planning" by
attorney Robert L. Sommers. See the article on FindLaw.com.Also, see this useful page on
the New York State Society of CPAs site, about EGTRRA.
Or you could have faith, and believe that the Senate will hammer out permanent estate
tax legislation that will be retroactive to Jan. 1, 2010. Do you believe?
Eva Rosenberg is the founder of TaxMama.com and an enrolled agent licensed to
represent taxpayers before the IRS. She is the author of the new e-book, "The 100%
Home-Based Business Tax Solution." Reach her at taxwatch@gmail.com .
President Obama, Replace Rahm With Me: An Open Letter From Michael Moore
Dear President Obama,
I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff.
I would like to humbly offer myself, yours truly, as his replacement.
I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that's been created around you. I will work for
$1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how
to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp.
And I will help you get done what the American people sent you there to do. I don't need
much, just a cot in the White House basement will do.
Now, don't get too giddy with excitement over my offer, because you and I are going to
be up at 5 in the morning, seven days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for
battle every single day (see photo). Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and
you will repeat after me:
"THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE
COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY
WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T LIKE WHAT I'M DOING THEY CAN THROW
MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF!
NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!"
Then we will put on our jogging sweats and run up to Capitol Hill. We will take names, kick
butts, and then take some more names. If we have to give a few noogies or half-nelson's,
then so be it. In our pockets we will have a piece of paper to show the pansy Dems just
how much they won by in 2008 -- and the poll results that show the majority of Americans
oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want the bankers punished. Like drill
sergeants, we will get right up in their faces and ask them, "WHAT PART OF THE
PUBLIC MANDATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND, SOLDIER?!! DROP AND GIVE ME 50!"
I know this is the job Rahm Emanuel was supposed to be doing.
Now, don't get me wrong. I have always admired Rahm Emanuel (if you don't count his
getting NAFTA pushed through Congress in the '90s which destroyed towns like Flint,
Michigan. I know, picky-picky.). He is what we needed for a long time -- a no-apologies,
take-no-prisoners fighting machine. Someone who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and
pound the right wing into submission. Far from being the foul-mouthed bully he has been
portrayed as, Rahm is the one who BEAT UP the bullies to protect us from them.
That's certainly what he did in 2006. After six long, miserable years of the middle-class
getting slaughtered and the poor being flushed down the toilet, Rahm Emanuel took on the
job of returning Congress to the Democrats. No one believed it could be done.
But he did it. Big time. He put the fear of God into the party of Rush and Newt. They had
never been so scared. More importantly, though, he instilled a sense of hope in the
Democrats that they could actually score the mother of all hat tricks in 2008 -- and with
you, an African American no less, in the pole position!
It worked. The Darkness ended. The vast majority of the nation wept with joy on the
night of the election (those who weren't weepin