Ritholtz on the rise of the Corporatocracy

Over the past 30-years both Republican and Democratic parties have drifted from their traditional positions towards extreme stances. Throughout this period pro-corporate policies that catered to the balance sheets of multinationals and those with enough cash to pay-to-play, have defined the legislative agendas of both federal and state politicians. Left-wing political activists, like Ralph Nader, have been calling Washington D.C. "corporate occupied territory" for the past two decades. Consider the following:

• The revolving door between corporate officers and government employees has become the norm.
• A study conducted in 2005 by Public Citizen found that from 1998, "43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby."
• Politicians have become indentured servants to special interest groups and major lobbyists in the financial/insurance industries, the military-industrial complex, the energy/ chemicals sector, big-pharma, corporate agricultural, and the communications/ electronics industries.
• Legislation is often written directly by lobbyists and submitted to congressmen and state legislators for direct approval.  Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, told The Atlantic magazine, "The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists... It's shocking how the system actually works."
• "Corruption, in its institutional sense, denotes the degeneration of republican forms of government into despotism, and typically comes about when the private ends of a narrow faction of citizens succeed in capturing the engines of government." (Harper's, Speak, Money, Oct. 2010)
• The Brookings Institute calls "The 5-4 conservative majority decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission that struck many decades of law and precedent [to] likely go down in history as one of the Supreme Court's most egregious exercises of judicial activism."  The Roberts court, "dismissed the legitimacy of laws... equated the free speech protections of individuals and corporations in spite of countless laws and precedents that insisted on meaningful differences."
• A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Dec. 16-18, 2005 found that 49% of American adults say they believe "most members of Congress are corrupt."
• The Republicans K-street project, was a project by now convicted former congressman Tom Delay to coerce lobbying firms to "hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials."
• Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was sentenced in 2006 for conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion related to his lobbying efforts

Barry Ritholtz, CEO of FusionIQ (an investment firm) and primary blogger at The Big Picture tells his readers that:

In 2009 and 2010, I learned that Corporate America took over the political process via their exhaustive lobbying efforts. What was once a Democracy is now a Corporatocracy... Politicians do the bidding not for the people, but for the corporate establishment. Those people who want to blame the barking, snarling government for all the woes of the world do not want you to look further up the leash to see who is giving the commands. These corporate apologists pretend to be philosophers, but in reality they are mere Fellatrix, bought and paid for by their lords and masters.

We've reached a turning point.  When growth was evident, jobs were available, and cheap accessible credit abounded, everyone was happy and willing to keep dancing to the same tune. Now that the bill is past due and we're looking at decade of low growth or worst, investors and everyday persons on both the right and the left are seeing the system for what it is.  Ritholtz acknowledges that we were warned by the founding fathers, Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex, and countless other critics about the perils of what philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as inverted totalitarianism.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation.

The viciousness and lawlessness of the corporatocracy knows no bounds. Like Orwell's 1984, those in control have no interest in the betterment of mankind or pursuing nationalistic agendas, they are solely interested in power for power's sake. And in the polluted materialistic cesspool that is modern existence, that power is obtained through the collection and amassment of wealth and money.

Airport Security: protecting the state's right to abuse you

According to news reports from ABC news' Austin, TX affiliate, a middle aged woman was assaulted by TSA employees, dragged out of Austin airport, and arrested by local police for refusing to allow the state to physically examine her breasts.  Unless I'm your physician or a law enforcement official who has probable cause to believe that you are engaged in a criminal act, groping a woman's breasts in public is considered sexual assault.  Under America's authoritarian regime, the state in the name of national security has the right to sexual assault any woman: your wife, mother, sister, or daughter, in the name of protecting the nation from overheated and dangerous tities.

Claire Hirschkind, fourth amendment rights proponent and the perpetrator of this heinous act of civil disobedience, stated to the press that the basis of her actions was that "she [was] a rape victim [sic] who has a pacemaker-type device implanted in her chest." The news report outlines the events:

Hirschkind was hoping to spend Christmas with friends in California, but she never made it past the security checkpoint.

"I can't go through because I have the equivalent of a pacemaker in me," she said.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.

"I turned to the police officer and said, 'I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'" and they said, 'No, you have to do this,'" she said.

Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" said Hirschkind.

When Hirschkind refused, she says that "the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."

I have been criticising the absolute uselessness of this entire "fear-mongering" and civil liberties denying exercise for sometime. In an earlier blog ("Will this scanner make my penis look bigger?"), I discussed the limited value to subjecting persons to invasive an qualitatively ineffective screening practices. Civil libertarians and consumer advocates have entered lawsuits and issued numerous complaints about the virtual strip-searching of innocent civilians (examples here, here, and here).  The ACLU has also been warning people, for much of the past year, as to the authoritarian over-reach of airport screening procedures:

what was formerly voluntary is now mandatory... this is the classic way that invasive technologies reach us: the authorities make them as palatable as possible to get the public to swallow them (they’ll say it’s "voluntary," or "applied only in certain cases," and tell you it’s chock-full of privacy protections). Then once they’re accepted, they become more and more intrusive in all the ways the ACLU always warns against.

Ralph Nader wrote to President Obama earlier in 2010, to ask him to consider the potential public health risks entailing the exposure of millions of citizens to ionizing radiation through the employment of not fully tested technology at the nation's airports.  He further elaborates on previous mistakes made by the government in pushing unsound technology:

It was wasteful enough for the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to install the “puffer” security devices at U.S. airports and then withdraw them because they were found to be “unreliable” at a cost of $30 million to taxpayers. Now, a far larger amount of taxpayer money is being spent on these scanning devices by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which claims it is not obligated to observe the Administrative Procedures Act.

Prior to the American Thanksgiving holiday season, a national debate proceeded on the absurdity of the entire "junk-touching" process.  Even this limited outcropping of sensibility has been revealed to be little more than political posturing and an attempt by right-wing media to publicly embarrass the Obama administration.  Glenn Greenwald explains:

I have no doubt -- none -- that if there were a Republican President in office now, these very same people would not only be defending the TSA in the name of Staying Safe, but maligning critics as Privacy Fetishists, Civil Liberties Extremists, and Friends of The Terrorists... In the other corner, we have the Democrats, who -- in perfect unison -- would be screaming bloody murder about these methods and waving the Flag of Civil Liberties if George W. Bush were still President, as they would smell partisan advantage from doing so. But since it's Barack Obama who is President, they are -- with a few exceptions -- meekly raising concerns, though more often acquiescent to the TSA when they aren't outright supportive.

Of course, all this is to protect you the feeble minded and easily scared public.  In the original ABC article discussing Ms. Hirschkind, fellow passenger Emily Protine says it all, "It's unfortunate that that happened and she didn't get to fly home, but it makes me feel a little safer."  Safer from what?  Another ABC News story discusses the case of Houston businessman Farid Seif who accidentally brought a loaded gun in his carry on luggage and evaded detection.  Despite assurances that airport safety is better than ever, field research tells a completely different story.

Experts say every year since the September 11 attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert tests of airport security. A person briefed on the latest tests tells ABC News the failure rate approaches 70 percent at some major airports. Two weeks ago, TSA's new director said every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some airports.

How is that nearly ten years after Sept-11, people with firearms are walking aboard airplanes in their hand luggage?  Yet we are told that by radiating large segments of innocent people with ionizing radiation and subjecting people to invasive search practices will make us all safer.

Ralph Nader on the Foreclosure Mess

Ralph Nader, America's pre-eminent consumer advocate, posts an article relating to the current foreclosure mess and the banks wholesale evasion of legal practices arising from the securitization process.

He begins by saying:

This time the big banks and mortgage servicing companies, with their long, one-sided fine print contracts, may have outsmarted themselves. The newspaper headlines and the network television news are blazing news of the erupting fraudulent foreclosure process. This long-overdue coverage is generating public visibility and suddenly hundreds of thousands of foreclosures may be questioned due to what one commentator delicately called “flawed paperwork.”

He then outlines the mortgage-securitization chain through which, "The matrix of interconnected fine print contracts became too routinely robotized."  Meaning, that the banks disregarded specific requirements, such as notarization, to save themselves money and accelerate the repeated sale of these mortgages to investors across the globe.  Nader quotes the Washington Post on this matter:

“mortgages were created, and sold, sliced and diced, packaged and repackaged so quickly that financial firms had neither the time nor the patience to file paperwork in local courthouses as the loans were traded. By using MERS, lenders were able to reassign loans quickly and cheaply but often the chain of ownership was not accompanied by an official paper trail. …These problems contributed to the use of flawed and fraudulent paperwork, including backdated assignments and forged documents.”

The only reason any of this is coming to light is because consumers were willing to challenge the bankers in court and force them to confirm that they were in fact eligible to serve foreclosure upon those persons home.  It is only when people stand up for themselves and challenge institutional corruption and the status quo, will real changes be made to the system.  Voting for these corporate stooges in congress won't help.  Only by hitting the greedheads in their pocket and forcing them to defend themselves in court will the marauding pirates of casino-capitalism be held at bay.

Nader Interviews Judge Andrew Napolitano

I encourage everyone to watch and understand the vast scope of criticisms leveled by conservative legal authority Judge Andrew Napolitano.  Despite his affiliation with Fox News and the less than lucid histrionics of his comrades at Fox, the above interview with Ralph Nader -conducted for CSPAN- consolidated the fact that there are issues that are beyond the false media symmetries of right and left or conservative and liberal.

The interview outlines a vast scope of criminality, violations of the constitution, and historically unprecedented actions committed by the Bush White House against American citizens and in many cases perpetuated by the Obama White House.

Napolitano declares that:

1. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be indicted and prosecuted for torture, domestic spying, and the illegal arrest and confinement of both American citizens and non-American citizens.
2. Questions the legality and morality of the Obama Administration's use of extra-judicial killing of American citizens while outside American territory.
3. Discusses the failure of persons within the Bush WH, such as Jay Bybee, to provide sound legal advice relating to the use of torture.
4. Asks where is this generation's Thurgood Marshall, the venerated Supreme Court Justice who attacked Jim Crow laws as a civil rights litigator.  Despite there being more lawyers than ever in the history of the USA, there remains very few entities (outside the ACLU, CCR, and human rights organizations) or persons willing to challenge the egregious criminality of the American president.

"A Seamless Transition" on the Afghanistan War

Ralph Nader gives an antiwar speech in front of the White House on December 12 2009. In it he succinctly summarizes a number of the inconsistencies and obvious logical fallacies made by president Obama in pursuit of his current Afghan policy.

I would add, it is getting a bit tiresome to hear propagandists, including Mr. Obama in his West Point speech, lecturing us about the necessity of having to contain illiterate Afghan tribesmen, who live in mud huts and reside in a country that has been undergoing civil war for thirty years and which has no air force, navy, or army, because they somehow pose an existential threat to Western civilization. The Taliban are outnumbered 10:1 by NATO troops and Al Qaida abandoned Afghanistan in 2001 for Pakistan, which is the central nexus of Islamist and Jihadi activity. If America was serious about eradicating Islamist terrorism it would have attacked Pakistan and overthrown the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia.

A trillion dollars is spent every year by the American government, more than all other nations combined, to sustain their Imperial ambitions across the planet. Nearly 60% of discretionary spending in the US goes to the Pentagon, intelligence gathering, nuclear weapons development, the Veterans Administration, and other military operations. America has spent more time and money than it did in either Vietnam or the Second World War to date and is still unable to defeat fifth-rate insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism, says the obvious:

The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to understand—make the American military the gravest threat to [America's] anemic democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.

Ralph Nader: "Obama is Conflict Adverse!"

Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and contrarian, still continues with his Cassandra-like march against the imperious forces of crony-corporatism, government incompetence, and inequity. His actions over the decades, through the institution of safer vehicles, consumer protection legislation and regulatory bodies, and his tireless work to expose the gross distortions of avarice masquerading as capitalism, has saved more American lives and a many public dollars than all the past half-dozen US presidents combined. In the above posted video from Yahoo tech ticker, he lays out in his opinion of the Obama administration's first nine months.

It includes such highlights as:

• His early months in office have been "very disappointing."
  
• Obama is "a frightened man," who won't take on corporate power.
  
• Obama is "conflict averse" - and a "harmony ideology type," who's being taken advantage of by the sharks in Congress, of both parties.
  
• He's "Bush-Cheney redux" when it comes to military and foreign policy, "albeit with better speeches" to the Muslim world. Given Obama's handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nader wonders in amazement: "And they gave him the [Nobel] Peace Prize?"

Unlike the teabaggers and those on the right who have Obama derangement syndrome, Nader's criticisms are based on Obama's actual policies, which continue to be substantially less than and in too many cases opposite what he campaigned upon during the Democratic party primaries and full election.

Additional reading on "fact based" criticisms from the left, produced by Mr. Obama's less than awe-inspiring presidency can be found on this blog here and here.

52 Weeks After the Meltdown

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.

- Mark Twain

We have become our own Greek tragedy, blinded by hubris and unwilling to understand that we are but permutations in time; whether it is in our genes or our empires. As a civilization we should realize, if history is to teach us anything, that this is the moment of our great undoing, for it has happened before, and we know it will happen again. Below is a summation of recent articles issued this past month discussing the fall of Lehman Brothers and the pertinacious crisis of capitalism.

The Economist
"Unnatural Selection: Wall Street and the City of London survived thanks to state support. Now they need to be weaned off it"
"The Promised Bland: One year after Lehman Brothers collapsed"
"What If?" an examination of what could have occurred if Lehman's didn't go bankrupt.

The NY Times
Has an entire section dedicated to the financial crisis. Some of the better reads are:
Alex Berenson "A year later, little change in Wall St."
Robert Frank "Flaw in free markets: Humans"
Paul Krugman "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"

The Financial Times
FT also has an extensive coverage section that details the crisis at different levels.
Niall Ferguson does his best imitation of an contrarian in,"Why a Lehman's Deal would not have saved us"
Martin Wolf "Do not learn wrong lessons from Lehman’s fall"

The Globe and Mail
A timeline of the events is described in "Lehman Brothers: one year later"
Sinclair Stewart "The day everything - and nothing - changed." The story remains the same, as it is a story of men empty of decency, moral strength, and even humanity.

Business Week
BW also has a reasonable section discussing the financial crisis one year later. Unfortunately those who need to learn most, will not be interested.

Der Spiegel (International edition) has a solid set of articles on the failures and return of American inspired Casino-Capitalism. Those who know about defeat that arises from hubris should be listened to.

Ralph Nader, who predicted this entire fiasco more than a decade ago has a commentary on the return of casino capitalism in, "Rolling the Dice Again" Ignore at your own peril.

Robert Reich, former Sectatary of Labor in the first Clinton Admin. and constant critic of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism counters in his blog, "The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later."

Ralph Nader: The Democrats have 'Punked' You!

Since the election of Barack Obama, liberal supporters have become extremely frustrated with him and the Democratic Party. Many have said that the Democrats and Mr. Obama's deference to the corporations and former Bush administration policies that led America to this economic precipice cannot continue. Bill Maher made it clear to America on his HBO show, "This is not what I voted for." Arianna Huffington who was one of Obama's greatest Internet promoters said, "He is demonstrating a preference for compromise and reconciliation even before the fight has been fought." Paul Krugman, makes the point that, "progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of [the] line." While Frank Rich of the NY Times, does not pull his punches and states clearly that he believes that Mr. Obama has "punked" him and liberal America with his bait n' switch policies.

The global economy lies broken and the once imperious financial intuitions that once towered over Battery Park in New York and in London’s Financial District have been reduced to eunuch’s beggaring for public welfare. Corporate criminality has never been more apparent, with the investments of workers and pensioners stolen to feed the addiction of casino-capitalism. And despite the obvious fact that there has hardly been a more auspicious time for transforming the relationship between corporations and the government in the public interest, the Democratic Party and their leader seem paralyzed to confront these Brooks Brothers wearing pirates.

Ralph Nader succinctly describes the current situation in America:

In short, the global corporations want Washington, D.C.; to continue being their massive deregulator and cash cow perpetuating the abandoning of American workers, the pillaging of the American taxpayer and the defrauding of the American consumer.

Forget about corporate law and order to restrain the corporate crime wave. The harmony, bipartisan President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, have outsmarted themselves. What worked to defeat Hillary Clinton last year has succeeded in splitting the Congressional Democrats into progressives, corporate liberals and Blue Dog Conservatives. Republicans can scarcely believe their luck and are busy exploiting these schisms.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat, undermines his Speaker, Nancy Pelosi’s “public option” plan for health insurance. Senator Max Baucus—a closet Republican masquerading as the Democratic Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is working hand-in-glove with right-wing Republicans and the White House to craft a weak “bi-partisan” bill that keeps getting weaker as the corporatist Republicans sniff increasing weakness in the White House.

President Obama, instead of merely fighting Republicans and entrenched corporate interests, has by alienating his base, now forced to manage a two prong internecine conflict within his own ranks. His heralded election machine that dispatched the poorly managed Clinton campaign in the primaries and John McCain in the November finals appears fractured, confused, and slipping erratically into paralysis. Unless he jettisons these useless and spineless corporate Democrats and follows through with his campaign promises for transparent and effective governance, the demise of the American experiment in democratic governance will be finalized.

Nader's Criticisms of the Democrats are Validated

Unlike the kid-glove treatment received by George W. Bush by the Democratic Party in 2004, the vitriol and contempt that was leveled against Ralph Nader was unprecedented. Liberal buffoons like Michael Moore, an erstwhile supporter of Nader during the 2000 election, pleaded with Americans to vote for John Kerry and ignore Nader's "egomaniac and Quixotic" candidacy. "Outside of Jerry Falwell, I can't think of anybody I have greater contempt for than Ralph Nader," said long-time Clinton acolyte James Carville on CNN's Crossfire. Legal teams from the Democratic Party were dispatched across the country to overturn and prevent Nader from being placed on ballots. Given how closely aligned the Democrats were to the same corporate interests that the Republican party were beholden to, it is quite understandable why the Democrats fought the presidential candidacy of Ralph Nader more vigorously than any of the Republicans in the past three presidential elections cycles.

It is my opinion, if Nader had been allowed into the election debates of 2008, his contrarian arguments as observed above, would have turned the tidal waves of young and naive evangelical "Yes we can!" voters into "What are we doing!" with these corporate/democratic party transvestites.

Chris Hedges, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and former war correspondent, in his posting "Nader Was Right: Liberals are Going Nowhere with Obama" states the following:

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

What Democratic voters should have done instead of belittling Ralph Nader's candidacy and fawning for the 'chosen-one' is listen to Nader when he described the Democratic Party and Mr. Obama as indebted to the corporations and lobbyists of K-street, and in the end, would (as usual) not deliver on their campaign promises of change and reform.

In arena after arena -- government, workplace, marketplace, media, environment, education, science, technology-- the dominant players are large corporations. What countervailing forces that our society used to depend upon for some balance are not in retreat against the aggressive expansion of corporate influence far beyond its traditional mercantile boundaries?

The enlarged power that corporations deploy to further increase their revenues and socialize their costs comes from many sources-- old and new. Roughly eighty percent of the money contributed to federal candidates come from business interests. The mobility to export capital has given transnational companies major leverage against local, state and federal officials, not to mention against organized and unorganized labor. The swell of corporate welfare handouts has reached new depths. The contrived complexity of many financial and other services serves to confuse, deplete and daunt consumers who lose significant portions of their income in a manipulative marketplace. Alliances, joint ventures and other complex collaborations between should-be competitors have made a mockery of what is left of antitrust enforcement.

- Ralph Nader, Introduction to Mokhiber and Weissman's "Corporate Predators" 1999.