Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

The "Hammer" sentenced to the Slammer!

Tom Delay, former Republican majority leader, was sentenced yesterday to three years imprisonment for his involvement "for illegally plotting to funnel corporate contributions to Texas legislative candidates." The Washington Post has a complete report on the sentence. Additional discussion of Republican party corruption can be found in these previous posts: here, here, and here.

Delay to the very end complained he was an innocent man, who was simply doing what everyone else was doing. Maybe that's the problem Tommy! All you assholes up on the hill are doing everything, but what you're supposed to be doing; which is being public servants engaged in running the government on behalf of the people and not the corporations.

Consider what Texas prosecutors had to say about Delay and Delay's request that he only be subject to probation and community service.

"Conservative values . . . are supposed to include obeying the laws of the state and taking personal responsibility," [Lead prosecutor Gary] Cobb said. If DeLay received only probation, Cobb warned the judge, he would "wear that probation" like Jesus and call himself a martyr.

A colleague, prosecutor Steve Brand, separately claimed at the hearing that probation would not only send the wrong message to other members of Congress, but would signal to working-class citizens that DeLay was treated lightly just because he wore "a suit and a tie." He said that DeLay's repeated claims in a recent memoir that he did nothing improper were "the equivalent of a 'screw you' to the system."

Delay's unethical behavior and institutional corruption serve as a reminder as to the true nature of the system of governance that exists in Washington.  Although his arrest, prosecution, and sentencing are a small victory against the forces of corruption.  The beast still lives on with venal politicians -on both sides of the aisle- doing the bidding of their paymasters, lobbyists flooding the hallways of congress, a revolving door between government officials and businesses, and an electoral system that is hijacked by both parties.

Why Big Business hates Obama

Obviously when the S&P 500 index has rebounded by almost 50% in the time that Obama has been president, the only thing left to do is publicly blame him for all the horrible and destructive socialist policies he is pursuing. After all, how else can someone explain that "American companies just had their best quarter ever, earning profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter." Deutsche Bank has stated that corporate profits per worker have rebounded to nearly an all-time high in the period. In addition, the banking industry, oil companies, and health insurance companies, all companies with extensive lobbying operations, are all likely to break profit records for 2010.

How this comports with the general narrative that Obama and the Democrats have created a climate of legislative uncertainty is unclear. American businesses are now as or even more profitable than they were before the start of the great recession. The only intelligent answer is that Obama's policies have greatly benefited big business, while it has done little to significantly reduce unemployment and mobilize those people whose jobs have been offshored into gaining new skills and meaningful careers.

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.

A Government for, by, and of the Corporations

Bloomberg News has an end of the year article ("Out of Lehman's Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants") and an interview with its lead author,  Christine Harper, on the subversion of  the financial industry reform and the underlying power of the banks over Washington DC's political class.

The past two years have seen the worst economic turn down in the American economy since the Great Depression.  The origins of this downturn emanate nearly exclusively from America's financial industry, which manipulated legislators in the 1990's to abandon historic safeguards and firewalls and then engineered novel methods to expand and grow their balance sheets.  The result was a global recession that destroyed trillions of dollars worth of capital, reduced nations like Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia into economic wastelands, and has crippled growth across the Western world. However, in that same period, the same institutions that caused so much damage and harm to the world have grown richer than ever.

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses -- six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The article elaborates on how the Obama administration, from its very inception, was uninterested in challenging the banks. The inclusion of former Clinton era deregulatory stalwarts, like Lawrence Summers, and persons directly responsible for the financial crisis, such as former president of the Federal Reserve bank of NY, Timothy Geithner, lead Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, to conclude “that the banks were going to get a free pass." Reformers were politely ignored and persons that significantly challenged the status quo "were dismissed as unrealistic, misinformed, advancing ulterior motives or damaging to U.S. competitiveness."

The too big to fail (TBTF) banks are now even bigger and the legislation crafted by congress is incapable of deterring these monopolies from engaging in even more disastrous swindles.  Meaningful changes, such as the re-introduction of Glass-Steagall or even what became known as the Volcker Rule, which would "ban proprietary trading at regulated banks and prohibit them from owning hedge funds and private equity funds" was water-downed, gutted, and then abandoned altogether.

Attempts to reign in the excessive salaries and bonus structures at the big banks were immediately defeated by representatives from both the corrupt Republican and Democratic parties. 

71 percent of Americans said big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts, and 17 percent said bonuses above $400,000 should be subject to a one-time 50 percent tax. Only 7 percent of the respondents said they consider bonuses a reflection of Wall Street’s return to health and an appropriate incentive.

Even though a clear majority of citizens wanted the plutocrats pay to be cut for their egregious mishandling of the economy, congress in collusion with the robber-barons would have none of it.

To ensure that none of their paid whores in congress would go off message or engage in populist pandering, lobbying efforts during the 2010 election period were thrown into overdrive.

The biggest financial companies increased their spending on lobbying in the first nine months of 2010 as they sought to influence the legislative outcome, according to Senate records. JPMorgan’s advocacy spending grew 35 percent, to $5.8 million from $4.3 million, while Goldman Sachs’s jumped 71 percent to $3.6 million.

The Dodd-Frank Act for financial industry reform was eventually passed, but:

The law won’t prevent lenders with federally guaranteed deposits from gambling in the derivatives markets, though it will place restrictions on some types of contracts and require more transparent trading and central clearing. It does little to solve the danger posed by leveraged firms reliant on fickle markets for funding.

Two decades of legislative changes have given the banks and the financial industry everything they wanted; yet that was not enough.  Today every American citizen, through the generosity of their political representatives in Washington, is forced to subsidize the incompetence and greed of the bankers.  In return you, joe-public, are given a moribund economy, marginal economic growth, reduced benefits, no retirement, a society with high structural unemployment, and the comforting thought that all those rich motherfuckers on Wall St. are enjoying their vacations in the Hamptons on your dime.

Matt Taibbi explains the Financial sector's hold on Democrats

I personally think the reason Rick Sanchez got cut from CNN was that he rubbed some of the MSM top honchos the wrong way during his time at the anchor desk.  Populism is fine for the plutocrats when it works to their advantage, as in the case of the ignorant and deranged Tea Party advocates.  However, when discussions of the collusion between those at the top of the economic pyramid (i.e. the banks) and government officials begin, which leads to the magnification of the nexus of institutional corruption, the grand-poobahs get antsy. 

Consider the above video with Sanchez and Rolling Stone magazine contributor and author Matt Taibbi, where the discussion veers into understanding the basis of the 2009 financial sector bailout pursued by the Obama administration. In it, Sanchez makes the connection that Washington DC is effectively corporate controlled territory. He notes that Goldman Sachs and other bankers wield inordinate levels of power over the legislative and executive branches and control the system through campaign contributions to both parties and the installation of their people into key government portfolios. There was no requirement for Obama to bring people like Larry Summers, who had been an architect of the deregulatory fiasco of the 1990's that lead to this current economic malaise, into the fold.  There was no requirement to appoint Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury or to re-appoint Ben Bernanke, other than it appeased the poobahs on Wall Street.

For all the talk of change, the Obama administration made sure that corporate America knew that the new sheriff in town was going to be the same as the old one.  They let it be known that "Greed was still good," and regardless of how the economy reacted, all the merry sociopaths, looking down at us little people from the glass towers in the Financial District, would still get all their bonuses that would allow them to feed their insatiable want for coke, hookers, and good times.

All this nonsensical talk that Obama is somehow a socialist is the musings of truly stupid people.  The facts are plain to see that this administration is not terribly different than any of its Republican or Democratic predecessors.  The facts are also clear that it is the greedheads at the top of the financial food chain who have been the winners for the past 30 years.  When the next economic calamity arises in the near future, we'll see who gets saved again and who the ignorant masses will blame for it.

Glenn Greenwald on why the Democrats lost

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown.  Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating.  Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests).  They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront.  They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces.  And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles.  Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality.  And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

Glenn Greenwald in a blog post at Salon.com, takes on MSNBC commentator Lawerence O'Donnell in his assertion that the Democrats lost because they are too "liberal" and the country simply prefers "conservative" candidates and governance.

Over the past decade, I too have excoriated those who babble about the fundamental divide between philosophical and political liberalism and conservatism in America.  The terms in themselves are inexhaustibly used incorrectly by both sides to impugn their opponents and distort the overall discussion.  Virtually no credible conservative government has existed at the federal level in the past forty years in America.  Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Dubya were pro-corporatist presidents who advanced statist agendas.  Government under each of these men was widely expanded; the national debt ballooned; war and the invasion of numerous countries in violation of international law was conducted; treaties were maligned and rejected at whim; established precedents in US constitutional law were regularly dismissed and abrogated with presidential approval; corporate take over of the executive and legislative branches was perfected under Republican rule over these decades.  At what point did the fanatics of conservative causes rally against these changes?

The pro-corporatist Democrats have always used the excuse that they could not execute a liberal agenda, that was and is favored by a majority, because of the stalking horse of conservatism amongst the population.  People now realize that because of gerrymandering, corporate donations and special interest meddling, and a two-party system that invalidates third party politics, that there is very little that they themselves can do to upend and change a system.  America has for the past decade not been a democracy, but  a plutocracy governed by people who are servants, not to the constitution or the people, but to multinational corporations: including bankers, insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, oil companies, and a bevy of special interests that are more than willing to bribe politicians into executing their agenda.

O'Donnell represents the liberal version of a cultural manager; a person who nonchalantly bemoans the tyranny of the left-wing of the Democratic party, but refuses to address the perennial failure and Pavlovian response of the Democratic party hierarchy in pursuing Republican-light policies once they are elected.  Clinton was elected to improve the economy, introduce health care, and end the brutal twelve years of Republican mismanagement.  Instead, he pursed a strategy of triangulation and capitulated to conservative policies of energy and financial deregulation, which has left the American economy broken and on unsound footing.  Obama in the face of aggressive citizen support has sought legislative capitulation to the banks, big oil, big-pharma, insurance companies, and the Military-Security state.  Obama's claims which he made during the 2008 election, of attacking special interests and the oligarchs appear little more than pleasant lies told to naive children.

Open Advice to President Obama

Dear Barack,

I know you don't care what I think, with all those high-paid clowns dispensing all that brilliant strategy to you on how to piss-off those loser hippies who funded, supported, and fought for you across America in 2008, but here it is.

You're a bit like Bubba, in that despite all those flowery speeches about hope or being from a place called hope (who can get it straight anymore) you've given over the past few years, we really don't know what you believe.  I mean, the nihilists and brain-dead masses think you're a Marxist Fascist with ties to Kenyan revolutionaries.  I don't know what that means either, other than interpreting it as an odd way to just call you a nigger.  I've never really thought you were the second coming of FDR, but you were a better option than the Queen corporatist Madam Clinton.  People liked what you had to say and what you represented, but back then it mostly was about voting against eight hard and dismal years under the Bush junta.  However, you waffled and instead of steamrolling what remained of the right wing yahoo's and pushing through a progressive and liberal agenda, you coddled and capitulated to their bizarre demands.  Let's recap:

• Did exactly what Bush said he would do in ending the Iraq war; that being leaving 50K troops to babysit the Shia thugocracy in Baghdad.
• Escalated the Afghan war, which everyone has already admitted is lost.
• Caved into special interests in the health care bill, by eliminating the public option and preventing the  importation of drugs from Canada.
• Created a health care bill that would force individuals to purchase lame health care coverage and subsidise the crooked insurance companies.
• Pushed through a special debt committee, filled with right-wing ideologues and hacks demanding that Social Security be privatized under the guise of bi-partisanship.
• Bailed out your friends and big-donor buddies in the banks, but left the rest of the nation submerged with debt and ever-expanding (and now illegal) foreclosures
• Failed to prosecute any of the major players in the Bush junta for war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Constitution, and numerous illegal acts and unethical behavior
• Advanced the post-911 security-surveillance state to new levels
• Advanced the military-industrial complex in the face of mounting debts and limited resources
• Let Israel make a complete mockery of you, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and your entire administration relating to the Palestinian issue
• Allowed the minority blue dog Democrats to dictate the terms of major legislation, so they could retain their congressional seats (which as every poll indicates, they won't)
• Put in charge Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, effectively creating what others have referred to as Bush's 3rd term with respect to governmental regulation and resource management of public assets
• Colluded with BP to lie to the public on the scope and severity of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

People who voted for you, in the deluded belief that government could mend it ways, are looking at a moribund economy, a Democratic Party that is incapable of defending themselves against corrupt Republican and Tea Party slander, and a crypto-fascist uprising funded by the same assholes whose jobs and balance sheets you saved from complete Armageddon.  A lot of people said early on that you were playing three-dimensional chess and were way smarter than the rest of the dolts on the Hill.  It's pretty clear that not only don't you have game, but you're really not as bright as those Harvard and Columbia degrees might imply.

So Barack, if you want to do something meaningful, do yourself a favor and grow a couple, because this nonsense you've been pedalling for the past 21-months is getting tired and no one is going to vote for you if you keep selling the same recycled shit that Bush left behind on the White House's going-out of business sale in November 2008.

Fuck-you very much.

The Lifer.

Elizabeth Warren Lays Down Some Principles

Felix Salmon reports that Elizabeth Warren is off and running with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), by laying down regulatory principles, rather than conventional "thou shall not" rules of operation.  In his post, he expands on the difference in her approach to regulating versus the conventional approach used by the banks and their slimy lobbyists within the DC Beltway:

The fact is that it makes perfect sense for a consumer-protection bureau to regulate from the point of view of the consumer, rather than from the point of view of bank managers. Warren’s simple questions are good ones, and they’re hard to capture with rules. If banks provide valuable products to consumers, then consumers will value them. If, on the other hand, banks create products which are designed to prey on human foibles, then consumers will come to believe, in Warren’s words, that “dealing with banks is like handling snakes – do it long enough and you’ll get bit.”

If Warren can continue making in roads by challenging the financial industry in cleaning up their act and creating a long-lasting framework to the benefit of consumers, the Democrats may have a real contender for delivering the "Change" that Obama himself has failed to deliver.

Quote of the Day: Roubini on Financial Regulations

Unless we make these radical [financial system] reforms, new Gordon Gekkos – and Charles Ponzis – will emerge. For each chastised and born-again Gekko – as the Gekko in the new Wall Street [movie by Oliver Stone] is – hundreds of meaner and greedier ones will be born.

- Nouriel Roubini, Gordon Gekko is Reborn, Project Syndicate

What Roubini is expounding, is that all the ethics and certification programs that have been touted for MBA students, will amount to nothing, unless the prime motivators for excessive risk and greed generation are curtailed.  He suggests four areas that must be effectively dealt with:

1. Compensation schemes for individuals must be realigned so that, "bonuses based on medium-term results of risky trades and investments must supplant bonuses based on short-term outcomes."
2. Reconstituting Glass-Steagall like regulations -which the watered down Volcker rule did not achieve in the recent financial system reform legislation- to separate the commercial banks, investment banks, and the institutions engaged in hedge fund-like casino capitalism.
3. The enormous conflict of interest that currently exists between financial firms and markets, needs to be resolved, permitting greater transparency to reign and allowing confidence in the overall market to be established.
4. Allowing all businesses, including their employees and shareholders, to understand that the government -that being the people's money- will not go towards bailing out their poor decisions; i.e. there should not exist too big too fail.

Since, the US government has not engaged in any meaningful regulatory scheme to ensure that the above occurs, and has in fact gone in the opposite direction in relation to some of these points, we can only assume that the concept of regulatory capture can now be extended to the US Congress as a whole and the office of the President of the United States.  The financial industry alone has spent $251 million this past year to manipulate the legislative process in their favor.  Collectively, they spent more than any other industry group between the months of April and June ($126 million).  Goldman Sachs and  JP Morgan Chase alone, spent in the first half of 2010 as much as they spent all last year (2009) chasing down congressmen, senators, and those involved in regulatory decision making.

The game is rigged folks.  If you think any of these rich, pretentious assholes in the corner office of these banks or in the House of Representatives care about the little people on the street or democracy, you probably still think voting for Democrats or Republicans will make a difference.  It won't.

Surprise, Republicans and Sarah Palin Lie Again!

Whereas all politicians and their paid hacks in the MSM constantly lie and ply the public with erroneous data, deliberately misleading statements, and more-often-than-not propaganda, few entities are as skilled in dissembling as the Republican Party.  Case in point is a recent flare up on the right-wing news cycle by Caribou-Barbie (aka Sarah "I'm an idiot" Palin), in which she accused the Obama administration of deliberately not waiving a 1920 law, called the Jones Act, which "requires all shipping between U.S. ports or in U.S. coastal waters to be carried in U.S.-flag ships that are owned and crewed by U.S. citizens." (Kevin Drum, MotherJones.com).

As McClatchy Press states:

From former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Arizona Sen. John McCain to junior members of the House of Representatives, conservative Republicans have accused President Barack Obama of failing to do all he can to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because he hasn't waived a U.S. maritime law called the Jones Act.

The Republican talking point is that the Obama administration is preventing much needed foreign vessels from engaging in clean-up efforts arising from the Deepwater Horizon rupture, which still remains uncapped to this day.

The central problem with this bit of hysterics is that "Maritime law experts, government officials and independent researchers say that the claim is false. The Jones Act isn't an impediment at all, they say, and it hasn't blocked anything."  Furthermore, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said that no Jones Act waivers were necessary, since all the activities were occurring outside the 3-mile limit to which the act was applicable.

On Tuesday the State Department announced that new offers of aid would be accepted from 12 foreign countries and international organizations, but spokesman P.J. Crowley noted that booms donated by Mexico, Norway and Brazil had been in use since May 11,and that 24 foreign vessels from nine foreign countries already have been helping with the cleanup.

With the exception of McClatchy, most in the press did not find it odd that ex-Governor Palin (technically 1/2-term Governor and full time moron), who claimed to understand oil politics better than any past or present governor, doesn't understand the basic facts surrounding the maritime law she is quoting.  Senator John McCain, another lying dingbat, stated that the Jones Act was subverting the recovery and was costing Americans jobs!  Others were quick to realize that the preening of the Republicans had little to do with maritime conservation or assisting the Gulf coast community, but rather an attempt to push for the removal of a federal law that limited foreign interests from controlling maritime trade within US waters.

The perennial willingness of Republicans to sell out national interests to the first multinational corporation with a fist-full of dollars, is as close to treasonous as it gets.

US Banks Forced to Limit Debt Card Fees

According to the NY Times, legislation was passed by the US Senate several days ago to "impose price controls on debit transactions over the furious objections of the beleaguered banking industry."

The Durbin amendment gives the Federal Reserve new authority to regulate and limit the fees that businesses pay to card companies. It specifically addresses payments processed through the Visa and MasterCard networks. American Express and Discover cards are not covered by the bill...
 
The legislation directs the Fed to cap those fees at a level that is “reasonable and proportional” to the cost of processing transactions. The Nilson Report estimated that last year, fees averaged 1.63 percent of the transaction amount.

A second set of provisions applies to both credit and debit card transactions. Visa and MasterCard impose an all-or-nothing requirement on businesses, requiring them to accept cards even on small transactions, and prohibiting businesses from offering discounts based on the method of payment. The amendment strikes those rules.

Despite the narrative of the Times article, the change in rates is not necessarily a victory for consumers, but  rather a win for businesses (including some very large ones like Amazon.com, Home Depot, and Walmart) over the much reviled banks.   This was a contest between lobbyists for the banks versus lobbyists for retail businesses utilizing debt cards. 

Earlier last year, consumers did achieve a decisive victory through the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, which includes the following:

• Cardholders Deserve Protections against Arbitrary Interest Rate Increases
• Cardholders Who Pay on Time Should Not Be Penalized.
• Cardholders Should Be Protected from Due Date Gimmicks.
• Cardholders Should Be Protected from Misleading Terms.
• Cardholders Deserve the Right to Set Limits on Their Credit.
• Card Companies Should Fairly Credit and Allocate Payments.
• Card Companies Should Not Impose Excessive Fees on Cardholders.
• Vulnerable Consumers Should Be Protected From Fee-Heavy Subprime Credit Cards.
• Congress Should Provide Better Oversight of the Credit Card Industry.

Overall, these two pieces of legislation firmly limit some of the excessive and predatory actions conducted by the banks upon both consumers and retail operations alike.

The Demon of 85 Broad St.: Goldman Sachs

Brian Griffiths, A Goldman Sachs International adviser, recently told a forum on investment ethics in the UK that, “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” You have to give it to these folks at Goldman Sachs; they are indisputably some of the most immoral creatures slithering up and down the financial food-chain.

McClatchy Newspapers has published a four-part series on Goldman Sachs investment strategies in the American housing market. The articles outline how the company grew unbelievably rich by,

making massive bets against the housing market while simultaneously selling off billions in soon-to-be worthless securities. In 2006 and 2007, the bank reportedly peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

As impressive as Goldman Sachs earnings are, their true achievement isn’t making it big through casino-capitalism. No, its greatest accomplishment is creating a world-wide network of faithful former employees that are embedded throughout the regulatory and legislative branches of government, allowing them to place themselves at the center of a global financial system that has effectively co-opted democracy. The entire securitization game has been shown to be a complex scheme that utilizes outright fraud, deception, and market manipulation to achieve exorbitant profits for the demon bankers insulated at 85 Broad St. New York.

The articles elaborate how throughout the years leading up to the crash, “Goldman Sachs used its name to buy, bundle and sell some of the worst investments in the history of trading. It jumped into the subprime game with dubious mortgage lenders. And it played it ruthlessly, selling off toxic assets that carried bogus quality ratings and the assurance of its venerable name.”

McClatchy's investigation found that Goldman Sachs:

• Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they'd misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants' incomes to justify making hefty loans.
  
• Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.
  
• Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.
  
• Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.

The conclusion one must realize is that Goldman Sachs is not serving its intended commercial and societal purpose of allocating capital to create an efficient market-place nor is it enhancing the public sphere by enriching productive companies. Their racket is and has been to generate maximum earnings solely for themselves at the detriment to society, by exploiting "so-called sophisticated investors", who in actual fact are just dumb insitutional players who knew less than them, and simply steal their money; even if they have to change the laws to do so.

As Dylan Ratigan says,

Now this method of "business" is only possible if the government continues to allow these crooked insurance contracts to be written in secret, allows them to hold little or no money in reserve for payment and allows them to sell enough coverage on enough vital national assets that if there is a default -- the taxpayer has no choice but to pay.

No meaningful legislative change will occur, because the US government and the demon bankers of Broad Street, are one and the same. Just see a few of the recent parties in government (Republican and Democrat) with ties to Goldman Sachs.

Adam Storch: Appointed the SEC’s first Chief Operating Officer on Oct. 15, 2009. This branch of government regulates the securitization industry, including mortgage backed CDO’s and related derivative products. The 29 year old Storch comes directly from Goldman Sach’s business intelligence unit.

Henry Paulson: Served as Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush. Was CEO of Goldman from 1999 to 2006.

Robert Rubin: Served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. Previously, he was co-chairman of Goldman from 1990 to 1992.

Robert K. Steel: Served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, the principal adviser to the secretary on matters of domestic finance and led the department’s activities with respect to the domestic financial system, fiscal policy and operations, governmental assets and liabilities, and related economic and financial matters. Retired from Goldman as a vice chairman of the firm in 2004, where he worked as head of equities for Europe and head of the Equities Division in New York.

Mark Patterson: Chief of Staff to Secretary Tim Geithner. Was director of government affairs at Goldman.

Dan Jester: Key adviser to Geithner, who played a key role in shaping the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Was strategic officer at Goldman.

The list goes on. For a comprehensive listing of the numerous figures in positions of government authority that were associated with G-S visit the following link.

Propaganda Alert: The World is Not Cooling!

I'm sure you've heard the recent claims made by Climate Change skeptics that much of the data and arguments pointing towards global warming are little more than bulk conspiracy theories. The BBC ran an article a month ago by Paul Hudson, asking "What happened to global warming?" It makes the declaration that "the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998" in the past decade and further states that skeptics believe "there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature."

While it is true that global temperatures reached a high point in 1998, it is not true that temperatures across the planet have been in decline since. Given the controversy, a re-analysis of the existing data led by the US NOAA's (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) climate data center was conducted and no statistically significant cooling trend was found. An AP story quotes the agency as stating:

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. "Even if you analyze the trend during [the skeptics] 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."

Furthermore, in relation to ocean temperatures, NOAA asserts that of the 10 hottest years recorded, "eight have occurred since 2000, and after this year it will be nine because this year is on track to be the sixth-warmest on record."

What skeptics have done is what they always done: manipulate the truth. Depending on the starting year of their so-called ten year interval and the robustness of the data set, one can get one of three different outcomes: temperatures trending upwards, constant, or downwards. So which one is correct? According to David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor, the methodology used by the skeptics to claim a downward cooling trend is "not scientifically legitimate." AP quotes Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who calls their efforts, "a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers" prior to the international climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

People need to stop listening to these hucksters who are peddling refuted arguments prettied up with bogus statistical data for political gain. These are not trivial matters. For example:

• Heat waves in Europe in 2003 caused nearly 40,000 people to die.
• Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall, that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, according to researcher Peter Baines of Melbourne University in Australia.
• Forest fires that have decimated parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, and Western North America in the past few years have been linked to a "positive feedback loop" caused by increased global temperatures.
• Glaciers across the world continue to melt at an unprecedented rate. Many of the world's most populous regions including India, China, and nations along the Andes are highly dependant on these bodies for water utlized in agriculture. Displacement of these massive bodies of ice has also been predicted by geologists to lead to an increasing number of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in unexpected places.

A world that is less stable and less able to sustain human habitation, is simply a world with less humans.

***

I have additional blog entries about recent public opinions shifts in America on Climate Change (here) and a brief discussion on scientific research confirming CO2 concentrations and global temperature increases (here).

Elizabeth Warren: Banks are Jerking us ALL!

At the recent Buttonwood conference held at New York's Pace University and hosted by the Economist magazine, Elizabeth Warren (the TARP overseer) told Yahoo Tech Ticker that:

This is a moment when all around the country people are saying we've had it about up to here with these large financial institutions that want to write the rule then take our money. I find it astonishing that they have the nerve to show up and say, 'I'm a big financial institution. I took your money. And now I'm going to lobby against anything that might offer some protection to ordinary families in this marketplace'

To contextualize, both the American consumer and government are grossly over-leveraged. The gross public debt is estimated to exceed 100% of US GDP ($13 Trillion) next year. Estimates place all government liabilities, from Treasury bonds to Medicare to military pensions, at a value of $63.8 Trillion (490% of GDP). In the meantime, the dollar continues its decline against other currencies, unemployment is rising, foreclosures increased by 5% in Q3 2009, manufacturing industries are running significantly under capacity and at historical lows, and yet the big banks are making record profits and handing out equally obscene bonuses.

The real question is why there aren't angry pitchforked masses storming 'The Bastille' so to speak today?

The hyper-partisan tea-baggers are certainly not a real source of protestation, for their objective is get more "real Americans" or Sarah Palin-esque clones who are dismally educated congenital corporatists that also happen to be WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon persons) back into the White House.

History on the other hand is replete with examples, the French Revolution but one, where the public realizing the criminal excesses of their political and aristocratic masters demand through civil uprising to remove the sclerotic and incompetent regime du jour. Unless the oligarchs of casino-capitalism and the congressional stooges who have been bought and sold like disposable sex-workers are removed (i.e. off with their heads!), America will continue to decline. The Obama administration has proven itself incompetent or at least unwilling to truly challenge big business and deliver the "change" that they endlessly advertised during his presidential campaign. It remains to be determined whether those who voted for change will have the courage to inflict a lasting and necessary punishment on the Democrats and Republicans, in order to rid the nation of these maleficent corporate parasites.

Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin | vanityfair.com

Andrew Sullivan's criticism of Sarah Palin during the 2008 election was devastating and continues to be unyielding. As a conservative commentator, he dispels any doubt that her choice as VP was a grotesque political folly and perhaps, to the persistent detriment of the Republicans, the single most important reason why independent and moderate voters thought John McCain was unfit to be President. Sullivan excoriates Palin in his review of the Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece, which in itself is an examination of the duplicity, fraud, and freakishness of the candidate of "real Americans."

Sullivan states:

The narcissism, the pathological and incessant lying, the viciousness, the delusions of grandeur, the vindictiveness, the fathomless and proud ignorance, the opportunism, the vanity, the white trash concupiscence and fraudulence in almost every respect: these are now indisputable. How an advanced democracy came that close to having this farce of a candidate running the most powerful country on earth reveals how deep the corruption of our politics and especially our media are.

As an aside, America at the federal level is not a democracy. America is a plutocracy, as it is defined by the "fusion of money and government" and controlled by a small elite of wealthy individuals (including corporations). If one recognizes this fact, it then is not unexpected that the titular (public) leaders of both predominant parties are often populist molded figureheads who espouse so-called average middle-American sensibilities. As an example, in the 2008 elections, Republican candidates McCain, Giuliani, and Romney each were multi-millionaires and portrayed themselves as vanguards of entrepreneurs, middle-class people, and the religiously devout. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, Edwards, and Obama were all millionaires and equally pledged allegiance to America's poor, minority groups, and middle class values. Earlier this year when Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), Majority Whip, attempted to pass legislation to provide homeowners with the legal option of changing mortgage terms, bank lobbyists assisted in defeating the bill. Durbin stated, "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

Tweedledee versus Tweedledum: Democrats vs. Republicans

Does anyone remember why Bill "aka Bubba" Clinton got elected in 1992 the first place?

It could have been the twelve disastrous years under Reagan-Bush that left the country with the largest debt since the Second World War, three recessions, the stock market crash of 1987, $160 Billion spent rescuing the Saving & Loan industry, the post cold-war peace dividend spent invading Panama and Iraq (the first time), or the looming threat of seeing more American jobs being shipped overseas through NAFTA during a harsh economic turn-down. My opinion is that the primary reason, if you exclude that Ross Perot received 18.9% of the vote, was affordable health care for all American citizens.

Americans did not want another free-market dogmatist, they wanted a fresh face to run the affairs of state and provide them with minimal health care coverage, that other great superpowers like Denmark and Australia were able to provide to their own. During his candidacy Clinton heavily promoted and invested in the theme of health care reform. However, after loosing the lower house in '94 to Newt (who names their child after an amphibian?) Gingrich, Clinton switched teams and told everyone, "Don't ask and Don't tell!"

Sixteen years later the Obama administration and USA are in the same conundrum that 'Bubba' was facing in 1993, but worst. Bill Maher states what has been obvious for years, that the Democrats and Republicans who hold power are merely two heads of the same mutant jackass, that has long been ridden by the rapacious lobbyists of K-Street. When the actions of Nicholas Sarkozy, the conservative president of France, is demonstrably more liberal than the policies of Barack Obama, what really then is the most appropriate label for the current American president?

Maher with his classic sarcasm tells:

Every time Obama takes on a major 'progressive' cause there is a major party standing in his way; the Democrats...

When you go to the polls your choice is for the guy who voted for the first bailout or the guy who voted for the next ten...

Shouldn't there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget, a party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep direct taxing of polluters?

...What we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren't being served by the Democrats, because bottom line: Democrats are the new Republicans.