The 16 Democratic Senators Who Sided with the Banks Today

A move to delay implementation of the part of the Dodd Frank Act which would have capped the amount the big banks can charge merchants for debit card transactions was narrowly defeated today, but no thanks to the Democratic majority.  A surprising 16 Democrats sided with the banking lobby, which cried to Congress that it should be able to charge whatever fees it wants, because that's how the free market is supposed to work.  The unlimited fees charged to merchants would have inevitably raised the prices charged to us, the consumers.  The final tally, crossing party lines, went like this: (60 votes required for passage).

Grouped By Vote PositionYEAs ---54  ---  For the Banks:

Akaka (D-HI)

Alexander (R-TN)

Ayotte (R-NH)

Baucus (D-MT)

Begich (D-AK)

Bennet (D-CO)

Blunt (R-MO)

Boozman (R-AR)

Carper (D-DE)

Coats (R-IN)

Coburn (R-OK)

Cochran (R-MS)

Coons (D-DE)

Corker (R-TN)

Cornyn (R-TX)

Crapo (R-ID)

DeMint (R-SC)

Gillibrand (D-NY)

 Hagan (D-NC)

Hatch (R-UT)

Heller (R-NV)

Hoeven (R-ND)

Hutchison (R-TX)

Inhofe (R-OK)

Johanns (R-NE)

Johnson (D-SD)

Johnson (R-WI)

Kirk (R-IL)

Kyl (R-AZ)

Lee (R-UT)

Manchin (D-WV)

McCain (R-AZ)

McCaskill (D-MO)

McConnell (R-KY)

Mikulski (D-MD)

Moran (R-KS)

 Murkowski (R-AK)

Nelson (D-FL)

Nelson (D-NE)

Paul (R-KY)

Portman (R-OH)

Risch (R-ID)

Roberts (R-KS)

Rubio (R-FL)

Schumer (D-NY)

Sessions (R-AL)

Shelby (R-AL)

Stabenow (D-MI)

Tester (D-MT)

Thune (R-SD)

Toomey (R-PA)

Warner (D-VA)

Webb (D-VA)

Wicker (R-MS)

NAYs ---45  --  For the Consumer:

Barrasso (R-WY)

Bingaman (D-NM)

Blumenthal (D-CT)

Boxer (D-CA)

Brown (D-OH)

Brown (R-MA)

Burr (R-NC)

Cantwell (D-WA)

Cardin (D-MD)

Casey (D-PA)

Chambliss (R-GA)

Collins (R-ME)

Conrad (D-ND)

Durbin (D-IL)

Enzi (R-WY)

 Feinstein (D-CA)

Franken (D-MN)

Graham (R-SC)

Grassley (R-IA)

Harkin (D-IA)

Inouye (D-HI)

Isakson (R-GA)

Kerry (D-MA)

Klobuchar (D-MN)

Kohl (D-WI)

Landrieu (D-LA)

Lautenberg (D-NJ)

Leahy (D-VT)

Levin (D-MI)

Lugar (R-IN)

 Menendez (D-NJ)

Merkley (D-OR)

Murray (D-WA)

Pryor (D-AR)

Reed (D-RI)

Reid (D-NV)

Rockefeller (D-WV)

Sanders (I-VT)

Shaheen (D-NH)

Snowe (R-ME)

Udall (D-CO)

Udall (D-NM)

Vitter (R-LA)

Whitehouse (D-RI)

Wyden (D-OR)

Not Voting - 1  (Lieberman)

It wasn't surprising that my own two Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, essentially thumbed their noses at their constituents.  They are from New York and in the thrall of Wall Street.  Gillibrand, who often pays lip service to a progressive agenda and manages to get herself on TV a lot to promote the latest liberal cause, was the biggest single recipient of campaign contributions from the mega-banks during her first election campaign. (She had been appointed by Gov. David Paterson to replace Hillary Clinton in 2009.)  Were your senators on the list you didn't want them to be on? Were you shocked that your senator voted in your interests for a change?

The Republicans siding against the banks were the biggest surprise, and a pleasant one at that.  Did you ever think Saxby Chambliss would be pro-consumer? 

Hey -- here's an idea.  President Obama can now appoint Elizabeth Warren head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and she can go through a Senate confirmation after all!  The Senate is just a great big happy family, with some Republicans having values and some Democrats having none.  Who would not love to see Chuck the Two-Faced squirm as he has to pretend to be nice to Warren and pro-middle class while stuffing his pockets with Wall Street largesse?

From ProPublica, here is a really detailed explanation of what today's vote was all about.

Don't Vouch For Me, Paulie Ryan

According to Paul Krugman, the Republicans are not well pleased to have their defeated Medicare Voucher Program being called a voucher program. I agree -- it just sounds so coupon-y and tacky.  So let's just stop with the damn demagoguing and help the fine folks of the GOP come up with a more apt term for their plan to kill save Medicare, shall we?  It's got to be easy to remember, and meaningful, so an acronym might work best. Some suggestions:

MediPRIC (Paul Ryan's Insurance Cabal).

MediPOP (Profits Over People).

MediCRAP (Conservative Republicans Against Patients).

MediKIL (Kleptocratic Insurance Limited).

MediSCAM (Social Conservatives Against Mankind).

MediCHEAT (Conservatives Hiding Eugenics Agenda Totally).

But not to worry. The Democrats have a plan too. It's called MediTLOTE (The Lesser of Two Evils). Commenter Jay from Ottawa invented it.  Thanks Jay!

Or, Obama might compromise unnecessarily and come up with these Medicare cuts improvements. (Remember, the Democrats will always give you choices.  They are pro-choice).

MediBUT (Bipartisanship Under Table).

MediPUNT (Pragmatism Until New Term).

MediSTRIP (Surrender to Republicans in Peace).

They Just Can't Stand a Bare Table

_

Those Pesky Headwinds and Their Blowing Spin

It's Hard Out There for a Windy Presidential Candidate

Last fall, it was the car driven into the ditch by Republicans that President Obama blamed for the lousy pace of the recovery.  He has finally picked a new metaphor to show just how much he personally distances himself from the ongoing crisis: "headwinds".

At a speech Friday to workers in a Jeep plant, Obama said: "We're facing some tough headwinds. Lately, it's high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and unease about the European fiscal situation. That will happen from time to time."

(Yeah, every once in awhile those breezy conditions pop up and just blow away all those jobs -- poof!).

And from his weekly radio address Saturday:  "Even though our economy has created more than two million private sector jobs over the past 15 months and continues to grow, we're facing some tough headwinds. Lately, it's high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and unease about the European fiscal situation."

(Uh-huh. Wall Street and tax-dodging corporations are all a-tremble that a big quake will strike Lower Manhattan.  And oh, that market unease.  If only the global plutocracy could just get confident, everything would be A-OK!.  The cost of filling up their Hummers and armed Mercedes has left them reeling and unable to hire even a part-time janitor to scrub out their gold plated toilets).

Of course, the obedient little stenographers of the mainstream media are marching right in lockstep with Leader.  Here is what Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg wrote in The New York Times Saturday:

"The campaign is shaping up as a test of whether the much-vaunted organizing abilities of Mr. Obama and his team can offset the headwinds he faces. In battleground states, volunteers are fanning out by the thousands to reach out to neighbors who helped Mr. Obama in his first presidential campaign and persuade them to re-up."

Of course, the press is making Friday's dismal jobs report all about how it will effect the 2012 presidential race -  not about how it is affecting the actual people who don't have jobs. At least it's a switch from the totally made-up Debt Ceiling Showdown bringing us to financial Zero Hour. It can't be all that bad: after all, good buddies Obama and John Boehner have a golf date next weekend.

But getting back to that Times article.  It was nothing more than a thinly disguised piece of White House boosterism.  Zeleny and Rutenberg uncritically reported that "several thousand times a week, still-committed volunteers knock on the doors of potential new recruits and neighbors involved four years ago to see if they will join in."  These two supposedly seasoned reporters were in Chicago for a campaign pep rally and obviously are swallowing the Messina gospel hook, line and sinker.  They did not provide locations or names or photos to prove claims that thousands of Obamabots are annoying their neighbors in "battleground" states a year and a half before Election Day.

But back to what Obama is not doing about jobs -- his campaign has a thrilling answer. Again, according to the Times article:  

"While Mr. Obama will not fully engage in campaign activity until next year, aides said, he is embarking on weekly economic-focused trips throughout the summer. Doing so will allow him to use his bully pulpit to show that he is focused on addressing joblessness, the issue that more than any other could shape his electoral prospects and that Republicans are using to assert that his policies have failed."

Nothing like using the bully pulpit in a new factory every week, speaking in that g-droppin' folksy campaign rhetoric, surrounded by the 250 blue collar workers of America who still have $10 an hour jobs, to show how much he is addressing unemployment.  It's like the family sittin around the table.  You lose a job, what do you do?  You tighten your belts, you don't go on vacation, you don't go out to eat as much.  But what you don't do is you don't stop savin for college to win the future.  The guy doesn't even need a teleprompter for this kind of soarin oratory.

That's it.  Just campaign talk, buying time till he gets that second term.  We really should be hoping that either Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman get the nomination, because among the three of these men, there is little difference.  All three, for example, have espoused the same kind of health care "reform" we really got.  All three are traditional, conservative Republicans and none is really admitting it.  Obama must pretend to be somewhat progressive, while the other two are forced to pander to the right wing Tea Party.  All three are pro-corporate, status quo kind of guys. Choice we can believe in.

NYT Slow on the Censorship Uptake

The comments I submit to The New York Times get dumped or buried much of the time, but today I reached a milestone.  I had a comment (#12) get published under the "Playing With Matches on the Debt" editorial at about 1:30 a.m. today, got over 100 readers' recommendations with a ranking of fourth or fifth in popularity -- but when I went back to check it some twelve hours later, the comment was replaced with the "This comment has been removed" message.  No more comment!  No more readers' recommendations!  No more turkey soup, turkey hash, turkey sandwiches.  The Times Bumpus Hound moderators done struck!

So I am reprinting it here, because I can, dammit!

And the silence from The White House is deafening.  The debt ceiling "crisis" is a wholly manufactured theatrical trick to give both parties cover as they fail to conduct the business of the American people.  On a daily basis we get TV soundbites of these politicians crossing the street, meeting behind closed doors, and then somberly reappearing before the microphones with their usual message: "Everything is on the table."

For all we know, these hacks are having a game of pinochle as the world waits with baited breath.  It will play out as it always does:  a new Crisis Zero Hour will approach, President Obama will pretend-capitulate to the Republicans and call it a victory, and the slow and steady dismantling of the New Deal will continue its preordained course.

And the corporate media are playing along, deflecting our attention with Sarah's mystery bus tour and Anthony's Weiner, while unemployment reaches critical mass and both Democrats and Republicans do the bidding of their Wall Street masters.  We know it, they know we know it, and they do it anyway.  One of these days, their cynicism and corruption will backfire on them.... one of these days, right in the kisser! 

Okay, on second thought, I am really surprised this got past the censors at all.  Anyway, thanks to all the readers who recommended it.  I shall never forget.

Obama Swears off Lobbyists and PACs, Claims Obama

I got another one of those time-warp letters from Senator Barack Obama this morning, and it reads like it's 2008.  He wants me to go up to somebody I don't know, and somebody he doesn't know, tap them on the shoulder, hit them up for money and get them to join this neat grass-roots "movement" he is starting.  The email reads, in part:

You have the ability to reach out to someone who isn't yet invested in this campaign and say, "Hey -- we've got to get started."

Our campaign will not take money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs. You're going to build this 2012 campaign by bringing in more people who share our values. We'll ask them to find a few more. Those people will find a few more -- and after a few million person-to-person connections, we'll have built a grassroots campaign that can change the outcome of an election and change the course of this country.

That's the spirit that drives us.

It all starts with a tap on the shoulder, and your willingness to match someone's commitment. Give it a try.

Okay, this is getting scary.  He wants us to believe he has split himself in two and that there are really two Obamas.  There's the guy in the White House, who has surrounded himself with lobbyists (David Plouffe, straight from a one-year, million dollar gig at G.E.) and CEOs (Jeffrey Immelt of G.E. is handling the unemployment crisis by shipping more jobs overseas and not paying corporate taxes) and bankers (Chief of Staff Bill Daley of Morgan Stanley) and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (of the Glass-Steagall repeal banking cabal). And then there is that long-forgotten hope-monger who has just been living in the shadows this whole time. 

 Obama is obviously a puppet of Wall Street, yet he persists in claiming he is not taking any campaign donations from PACs, even as the Democratic Party has already admitted it will be taking advantage of anonymous donations courtesy of the Citizens United decision.

He is still pretending to be a blank slate upon which we can pin our hopes and dreams.  And what are his "values"?  I wish he would be more specific.  But I don't think he knows.  I don't even think he wrote the email.

Ralph Nader was right.  We need a second political party with a strong labor platform. What we have now is a deeply corrupt duopoly - one united Wall Street front of two slightly different factions, each manufacturing grass-roots movements to retain power.  The corrupt politicians are pretending to fight over a manufactured debt ceiling crisis as we slide into a Third Great Depression.  All they are doing is the bidding of their masters.

Share My Value

P.S./Update:  Thanks to "P. Kent", who just sent me this video of George Carlin speaking of the Death of the American Dream.  RIP, George. Your words are more apt than ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

Taking Us for a Ride

Turn on the TV cable news or glance at the homepage of The Times tonight and what do you get?  Not the collateral damage of murdered children in Afghanistan.  Not the growing crisis of widespread unemployment. Not the Congressional challenge by Dennis Kucinich over the right of the president to wage war in Libya.

Here is what passes for news today, this week, next month.  Only the faces will change.  Because it's all about the personalities of the lunatic fringe political sweepstakes, and everybody is covering this crap.  Somebody who we all thought went away suddenly buys a million dollar house in Arizona and takes a motorcycle ride and goes on a bus tour and has pizza with Donald Trump.  So she is obviously running for president, according to Beltway media insiders whose job is to deflect our attention away from serious issues that might be hurting us.



The Wonderful World of Journalistic Make-Believe



From The Times: "An aide to Mr. Trump said Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, had sought the meeting, having 'reached out' that morning. Ms. Palin has generated more buzz about a possible presidential bid with the start of her road trip on Sunday — she has visited Gettysburg and the Liberty Bell — did not reveal why she wanted to pay a call on Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania. His own flirtation with a Republican presidential campaign ended last month amid speculation it was all intended to jolt his business interests."

Doesn't take much to generate buzz in their busy little brains, does it?  What are they thinking?  Better yet, what are they drinking?  I think I must be missing something, not to be experiencing that elusive Buzz.

And here is how annoying White House correspondent Chuckles Todd put it in the lead item on NBC's "First Read" email this morning: "Over the next 10 months, the race for the Republican nomination will become the chief political story in America, and that will affect the contours of the general election. We even started seeing it yesterday, with Palin, Pawlenty, and Bachmann taking center stage. 'The Democratic ‘race’ is more akin to watching a single athlete run a marathon,' says Democratic strategist Jano Cabrera."

In the shallow world of Washington journalism, the race is the thing.  Who is tweeting what?  What conservative bad boy hacked a congressman's Twitter account to insert a naughty pic?  Why is Sarah being so coy and hard to get?  Why do they care, why do they think anybody cares?

Of course, the conventional wisdom is that Obama, the cool adult front-man of the Oligarchy, is an obvious shoo-in.  He is so comfortable, in fact, that he just hired a new White House attack dog to tamp down the disaffected base of progressive idealogues.   The job has been given to DNC operative Jesse Lee, whose new title is "Director of Progressive Media & Online Response". He will be responsible for blogosphere PR , as well as squashing any negative stories.

The position is being criticized by both the Left and the Right. Fox News is calling Lee the Administration's new "Pushback Czar."  Sounds about right to me.

The pols and the hacks have our ostensible journalists both coming and going.  It's an irresistably heady mix of propaganda and infotainment.  Keep us alternately dumbed down and titillated and frightened. It's the age of American neo-fascism.

What Was She Thinking?

To hear the political hacks and lobbyists and experts in diplomacy tell it to The New York Times, Elizabeth Warren has committed the biggest breach of etiquette since Michelle inappropriately touched the Queen. You just don't tell an honorable member of Con-gress that you're fixing to quit the room, especially if you're an uppity liberal female bureaucrat!

Warren, a low-key but passionate consumer advocate, is so despised and feared by Wall Street that the Senate Republicans are refusing to shut down business this week in order to forestall a possible presidential recess appointment behind their backs. Barney Frank is calling the move a slap in the face of democracy.

Meanwhile, a petition with nearly one million progressive signatures, demanding that she head her own consumer agency, is headed for the Oval Office.  Politicians in both parties are being backed into a corner over an appointment none of them has the spine or the stomach for. They are all too beholden to their real masters, the banksters.


So powerful men are doing what powerful men do when confronted by an assertive, powerful woman. They call her a bitch.


Oh, they're being cagey and cunning and oblique about it. They used another woman, a New York Times reporter named Sheryl Gay Stolberg, to get their message out.  According to the Sunday piece, called "The Polite Way to Say No Way," Warren probably blew her own chances for nomination by not being deferential enough to a subcommittee congressman. Stolberg wrote that Warren has committed "a bureaucrat’s brazen violation of a cardinal rule of the Capitol Hill etiquette book: the Congressman Is Always Right."


While Stolberg did give fair comment  to a few Democrats praising Warren, she failed to go beyond treating the story like a TMZ scandal of a gross breach in etiquette.  Nowhere did she mention that the hearing time was changed at the last minute. Nowhere did she mention that Rep. Patrick McHenry had immediately launched into an ad hominem attack against Warren from the outset of the hearing. Like other corporate media outlets, The Times has chosen to dwell on the "sensationalistic" final few minutes of the hearing when words were exchanged.


Stolberg obviously did not watch the hearing in its entirety.( Her usual beat is The White House, so you have to wonder about the provenance of her article.)  Warren remained calm, cool and collected throughout, even as she was accused of lying by McHenry from the outset -- about whether she did or didn't talk to the Justice Department about bank mortgage fraud.  Rarely did he allow her to even answer one of his questions without his own rude interruptions.


Since writing my initial post on the hearing, I have learned a few more unsavory facts about McHenry, other than the most publicized one that he is a shill for the big banks, and that he got away with taking a bribe from Countrywide Financial while he was supposed to be investigating it.  Here are a few more tidbits about this Karl Rove protege, who may have had a hand in the rumor mongering that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child during his primary fight with George Bush.

 - In 2008, while on a Congressional visit to Iraq, he threw a hissy fit after being denied access to a gun.  He called a soldier a "two bit security guard" in another one of those name-calling exchanges he seems to be so addicted to.


- He put a video on his campaign website that violated Defense security guidelines by divulging information about Iraq deployments.


- During his  2008 campaign, McHenry called his opponent, Daniel Johnson, "Nancy Pelosi's chosen recruit" with "pockets stuffed with cash from Washington liberals."  He later erased the slur from his website following pressure by his own party.


-  He was one of the signatories in a letter to the IRS demanding  an investigation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for excessive lobbying and failure to register as a lobbying organization.


- He introduced legislation to put Ronald Reagan's face on the $50 bill.


- During the Mark Foley pedophile scandal, he claimed it was engineered by Democrats.


-He was one of Tom Delay's staunchest defenders when the former speaker was indicted on money laundering charges.


-He proposed a military strike on Iran.


And on and on it goes.  Yet Elizabeth Warren erred in not showing him the due deference he is so eminently entitled to, according to the lobbyists and other hacks The Times used for its source material?


Commenter Jay from Ottawa reports that when he tried to email McHenry demanding that he apologize to Warren, his message was returned because of server overload.  Thinking that perhaps McHenry had rigged his email to reject all references to her, I emailed McHenry with a phony "I Love You" as the subject matter.  No dice.  I got mine back from the Mailer Daemon too.


It doesn't sound like the congressman has any friends left.  His own colleagues are disowning him. His inbox has exploded. Yet the New York Times sources think he is due some respect, just because the sick custom is to call all congresspeople "The Honorable."  Go figure.

Update -- here is the link to the Times article again; apparently it was not showing up well in this post: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/weekinreview/29etiquette.html?ref=us