Stock Shlock

Well, nobody in the Senate dared vote against insider corrupt stock trading, unless you count professional contrarian Tom Coburn, who votes against everything from healthy lunches for school children to a museum honoring women. And a North Carolinian named Richard Burr also nixed bringing it to a final vote this Thursday. I don't know why, and I don't care. He was probably just trying to be a thorn in Harry Reid's side.


As per usual, this bill has a cute and easy-to remember acronym: STOCK -- standing for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge. Not as sexy as SOPA and PIPA, but very catchy and righteous-sounding.  As in, Congress is finally taking stock of itself before the citizenry goes all tar and feathers and puts them in the stocks. For a minute I thought it meant "stop counting on congressional intelligence if you want the country to function", but that's another bill for another day.  Since Congress seems hell-bent on defunding and privatizing education, I was rather surprised they are having much of anything to do with something so entitle-y/elitist as knowledge. As God warned Adam and Eve and the right wing nihilist Republicans, don't eat ye the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, of Good and Evil. Stay stupid and stay safe.


Senator Reid obeyed his master Barry and immediately scheduled the vote to make it seem like they're really not all a bunch of crooks, and so the prez has something to run on besides Lilly Ledbetter and killing bin Laden. From The Hill:

Reid said the legislation would help restore confidence in Congress by stipulating that profiting from privileged political intelligence is illegal. 


"Members of Congress and their staffers have the duty to the American people," Reid said. "They may not use privileged information they get on the job to personally profit. [This bill] will end any confusion over whether members of Congress can be prosecuted for the serious crime. They can be."

Thank God, because I was feeling mighty jittery and befuddled, wondering if Nancy Pelosi would end up going scot free because of all the Visa stock she and her multimillionaire husband bought right before she made sure that credit card debt would not be included in tough new bankruptcy legislation.


Lawmakers were shaken when 60 Minutes ran a report recently about Pelosi and practically everybody in Congress making some heavy-duty bucks from insider trading.  Most of them professed shock that it was going on, and that they were doing it. Again, from The Hill article:

"I was shocked by this report, I think we all were," (Mass. Sen. Scott) Brown said. "[M]embers of Congress should not be lining their pockets on insider information. Serving our country is a privilege. I believe we must level the playing field and show the American people that the United States Congress does not consider itself to be above laws that apply to everyone else.”

When the bill passes Thursday and goes on to the House for approval, no doubt the nouveau- and olde-riche millionaires will be back-slapping each other in another orgy of self-congratulation. I can already see their 9 percent approval rating skyrocketing off the charts as the engaged public audience applauds their courage and honesty.


And to be fair, 60 Minutes did not really break this story. All its information came from a little book published in November called "Throw Them All Out", written in the best old-fashioned muckraking tradition.  A journalist named Peter Schweizer actually looked through votes and stock trades and their timing, and put two and two together. The info has been hiding in plain sight for decades, if not centuries.


Congressional corruption, says Schweizer, puts lie to the notion that the two political parties are engaged in a constant battle royal. Of course, we knew they were really two phony factions of an oligarchic uniparty, especially when it comes to funding wars, the security state, indefinite detention and anything and everything that does not make life better for their constituents. "Republicans and Democrats are not so different as you think", he writes. "They work together to enrich themselves. They have designed the system to work so that they can make lots of money doing things that would get the rest of us sent to jail".


Schweizer is painstakingly bipartisan and absolutely relentless in exposing both Democrats and Republicans. Besides Pelosi, he puts the spotlight on John Kerry; Tom Carper; Melissa Bean; Jared Polis; James Oberstar; Jeb Bradley; John Boehner; Jim McDermott; Amo Houghton; Johnny Isakson; Sheldon Whitehouse; Max Baucus; Jim Moran; Dick Durbin; Rahm Emanuel;  Gary Ackerman; Dennis Hastert; Carolyn Maloney; Judd Gregg; Ken Calvert; David Hobson; Heath Shuler; Bennie Thompson; Maurice Hinchey; Jerry Lewis.... and last but least, Harry Reid!!


The bill will pass, and then Congress will hire its own lobbyists to punch it to shreds with the obligatory loopholes. Or they won't bother to fund it, or they'll appoint Joe Lieberman their impartial watchdog when he retires next year. 


Throw the bums out.



Ye Olde Village Stocks



Hegemon-omania

Via Josh Rogin, we are just now finding out that the inspiration for President Obama's ode to American imperialism in his speech last week came from, of all people, Mitt Romney's NeoCon foreign policy adviser! According to Rogin, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, Obama just can't get enough of Robert Kagan's screed in the The New Republic, which says the good old days of American superiority are here to stay. People have always kvetched that the USA is in decline, even when it was in its fetal stage and Patrick Henry despaired.  It wasn't true then, says this cheerleader for the Iraq surge -- and it isn't true now. Depression, shmepression.  Economic inequality is just a bothersome and distracting subplot in the continuing saga of of American superiority over all other nations.  We are built to last, people!

And the title of Kagan's piece is just too damned cute for words: Not Fade Away. Nothing like co-opting The Rolling Stones* to make the case for endless hegemony. (Personally, I would have called it Sympathy for the Devil) Here are some of the mendacious snippets: 

The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions.

(Pay no attention to decades-long wars, the rise of the security state and the greatest income disparity the world has ever known. It's been peace, love and rock n roll all along.... reality is only for wimpy pessimists. As long as the 1% get along within their own elite cliques, who cares about the little people and the little countries).

 Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the United States has lost favor, and therefore influence, in much of the world, because of its various responses to the attacks of September 11. The detainment facilities at Guantánamo, the use of torture against suspected terrorists, and the widely condemned invasion of Iraq in 2003 have all tarnished the American “brand” and put a dent in America’s “soft power”—its ability to attract others to its point of view.

The fact is, Kagan seems to argue, is that the rest of the world has always gone through these periods of hating us, just like small children who, when throwing tantrums, scream that they hate their parents. But they don't really mean it, and everything always ends up sweetness and light because Father Knows Best. Kagan lists example after example of countries falsely hating the USA to their own detriment, case after case of past predictions of American decline never coming true. The Cold War is over, Communism was destroyed, we shall prevail. America has survived all the blows to its reputation abroad: the McCarthy witch hunts, racial discrimination, The Ugly American depicting Uncle Sam as a big fat bully, assassinations, Kent State, riots at conventions, Vietnam, Watergate.

If one wanted to make a case for American decline (Kagan continues) the 1970s would have been the time to do it; and many did. The United States, Kissinger believed, had evidently “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations.... Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed.” It was in the 1970s that the American economy lost its overwhelming primacy, when the American trade surplus began to turn into a trade deficit, when spending on entitlements and social welfare programs ballooned, when American gold and monetary reserves were depleted.

More examples follow of America not being to control external events: even the world paternalist could not make Israel and Palestine get along. The rest of the world continued to complain about American overreach throughout the 80s and 90s. So what if we don't have complete and total world dominion every minute of every day, Kagan retorts. Whoever said the people we dominate have to love us?  We still got de power! We're in it for the long haul. Here is possibly the most nauseating paragraph in the whole article:

Today the United States lacks the ability to have its way on many issues, but this has not prevented it from enjoying just as much success, and suffering just as much failure, as in the past. For all the controversy, the United States has been more successful in Iraq than it was in Vietnam. It has been just as incapable of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions as it was in the 1990s, but it has, through the efforts of two administrations, established a more effective global counter-proliferation network. Its efforts to root out and destroy Al Qaeda have been remarkably successful, especially when compared with the failures to destroy terrorist networks and stop terrorist attacks in the 1990s—failures that culminated in the attacks of September 11. The ability to employ drones is an advance over the types of weaponry—cruise missiles and air strikes—that were used to target terrorists and facilities in previous decades. Meanwhile America’s alliances in Europe remain healthy; it is certainly not America’s fault that Europe itself seems weaker than it once was. American alliances in Asia have arguably grown stronger over the past few years, and the United States has been able to strengthen relations with India that had previously been strained.

(Translation: we killed hundreds of thousands of people to make up for the murder of 3000 on 9/11. And we will continue to kill countless thousands more. Nothing is our fault.  The global banking cabal headquartered on Wall Street has bolstered our strength even as it has crushed our own citizens).

And finally, Kagan considers economic crises irrelevant to our continuing status of World Superpower. He continues the GOP lie that "entitlements" will destroy our nation faster than any war. Watch for this paragraph to be included, in some form, in an upcoming column by David Brooks: 

What about the financial expense? Many seem to believe that the cost of these deployments, and of the armed forces generally, is a major contributor to the soaring fiscal deficits that threaten the solvency of the national economy. But this is not the case, either. As the former budget czar Alice Rivlin has observed, the scary projections of future deficits are not “caused by rising defense spending,” much less by spending on foreign assistance. The runaway deficits projected for the coming years are mostly the result of ballooning entitlement spending. Even the most draconian cuts in the defense budget would produce annual savings of only $50 billion to $100 billion, a small fraction—between 4 and 8 percent—of the $1.5 trillion in annual deficits the United States is facing.

So yeah, since war is cheap, let's blame Grandma for eating more than her share. This is the theme hammered away in countless forms by Brooks. And as an aside, how's this for a Tale of Three Davids: Obama campaign operative David Axelrod told David Gregory yesterday that David Brooks is one of the country's "great public thinkers." 

This perfectly gels with Barry's new man-crush on Kagan. But maybe man-crush is too intense a characterization, because Kagan is already taken. He is married to Dick Cheney's former deputy national security advisor, Victoria Nuland. And just to show how much Obama is truly the embodiment of Bush's Third Term, Nuland was appointed spokesman for the State Department last summer. She replaced P.J. Crowley, who was fired after criticizing inhumane treatment of war crimes whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Ezra Klein elaborates on Obama's enthusiasm for his newfound hero: 

In a recent, off-the-record meeting with news anchors, Obama spent more than 10 minutes "going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed." National Security Advisor Tom Donilon was dispatched to Charlie Rose to "discuss Kagan's essay and Obama's love of it." So it's not just the president who likes Kagan's article. It's the White House communications team who likes the idea of letting people know the president likes Kagan's article.

Okay, it's official. Barack Obama is a NeoCon and he wants everybody to know it. So rest easy, Republicans despairing over losing this year's election: you have already won. 

*  The Rolling Stones did a cover of "Not Fade Away" in 1964, and that version is listed in the 500 greatest hits in rock history. It was originally recorded by Buddy Holly in 1957. Thanks, Marina.

Occupied Winter of Our Discontent (continued)

I have to admit that when President Obama tapped New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to lead a brand spanking new investigation into banksterism, my first cynical thought was "co-optation." Schneiderman would be just the latest in a long line of Democratic malcontents and holdouts to be taken on a figurative ride on Air Force One, emerging chastened, rewarded and mouthing "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" platitudes.

But there is reason to hope today that the pending sweetheart deal between the banks and the Obama administration may not be as sweet as the Big Five Banks had been hoping for. Schneiderman last night announced a relatively limited proposal: in exchange for a $25bn payout to victims of the robo-signing foreclosure fraud, there will be no criminal prosecution from the states which agree to the deal.  But the blanket perpetual immunity from punishment for the entire panorama of financial felonies apparently is not to be. The state agreement would not preclude the feds (read: Schneiderman and his posse of IRS and FBI agents) going after mortgage fraudsters.

Some of those skeptical that Barack Obama would ever go after the banking hand that feeds him were expressing mild shock today that there might be a Grand Perp Walk of Bank CEOs after all.  Remember, the president has stated time and again that he had no interest in punishing the banks. But then something called Occupy Wall Street came along, and made him an offer he couldn't refuse: investigate and prosecute, or we will hound you wherever you go.  Plutocracy or not, the United States still requires that presidents be voted into office. And savvy politician that he is, Obama knows which way the wind is blowing.

Sam Stein of The Huffington Post reports that banks will still be vulnerable in the following categories:

1. Criminal liability.
2. Tax liability
3. Fair lending, fair housing, or any other civil rights claim.
4. Federal Housing Finance Agency or the GSEs [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac]
5. CFPB claims for the period after they came into existence in July 2011
6. SEC claims
7. National Credit Union Association Claims
8. FDIC claims
9. Federal Reserve Board claims
10. MERS claims

Early reports from the banking sector in the wake of Friday night's announcement and the revelation that Schneiderman's task force has already issued subpoenas show them to be borderline-panicked and indignant. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post ran a McCarthyesque red scare editorial screaming that Schneiderman was "shaking down the banks" and how dare he leave the door open to future criminal prosecution after the banksters pay up in good faith? It's the same old canard used by Timmy Geithner and Co.: if you upset the too-big-to-fail banks, the whole world will collapse. From the right-wing Post:

Besides, the prospect of future court action, should Schneiderman prevail, sure won’t help the economy.
On the other hand, demonizing financial institutions in populist fashion might help rile up the left — which, no doubt, is what Obama and Schneiderman care about most.
New York’s union cat’s-paw, the left-wing Working Families Party, is already tickled pinko — er, pink — with Schneiderman’s appointment, calling it “a big victory for the 99 percent.”
For America and New York, a world financial center, it sounds more like disaster.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is cautiously optimistic that Obama's back may finally be up against the wall on Wall Street. He says the robosigning scandal is really small potatoes compared to what really went on and what remains unpunished:

The securitization offenses were massive criminal conspiracies, identically undertaken by all of the big banks, to defraud investors in mortgage-backed securities. If you’re looking for an appropriate target for a massive federal investigation, one that would get right to the heart of the corruption of the crisis era... well, they picked the right target here. If they were to do a real clean sweep on securitization, the federal prisons would end up literally teeming with senior executives from the biggest banks. A lot of very big names would end up playing ping-pong and cards in Otisville and Englewood.

It may end up being a case of Neopopulist Obama being forced to act upon his own words as much as it pains him to do so. Taibbi adds: "One thing we do know: Obama’s decision to tap Schneiderman publicly, and dump Geithner, and whisper about a millionaire’s tax, signals a shift in its public attitude toward the Wall Street corruption issue. The administration is clearly listening to the Occupy movement. Whether it’s now acting on their complaints, or just trying to look like it’s doing something, is another question. It’s way too early to tell. But it’s certainly very interesting".

And as for Schneiderman's being co-opted, Dave Dayen of Firedoglake writes that the AG has promised to publicly disavow the task force and publicly walk away if he is in any way impeded. I think the only thing we can do for now is give him some time to put his money where his mouth is. But not too much time.

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times has written an excellent piece on Obama's task force for her "Fair Game" series about the nefarious banking system. The upshot: if they don't do something big very soon, what little credibility they have left will be shot.

Another glass-half-full observation: for the first time in its elite 0001% history, the World Economic Forum at Davos has heard the "inequality" word uttered. Occupiers are camped out in igloos. Severe income disparity may not be so healthy for capitalism. Greed may not be so good after all, even for the greedheads. The parasite eventually bleeds the host dry. The cancer dies right along with the victim.

The Right Stuff

By Jay - Ottawa

Following events like an American presidential election can be a test of mental endurance and a challenge to the biliary tract.  After a while, one begins to lose faith in humanity.  Anyway, that was my day, until I came across an article about another president -- until late December, one our contemporaries, but from elsewhere and now gone forever.  We still have his legacy.  I’m speaking of Václav Havel (1936-2011).  You may have seen him in the past on the News Hour (PBS), or read one of his books, or seen one of his strange plays.  As a leader enmeshed in the tough choices of managing a country, he proved politics need not be one part lies and one part venality supported by greed.  Havel was different.

A Toronto writer and translator, Paul Wilson, went to Havel’s funeral in Prague.  His full account is linked above. Here are a few quotes in case you can’t take the time to read it all, but still need a boost as we continue to push through the big muddy of 2012 American politics.

Wilson describes a poster that went up all over Prague around the time of Havel's funeral, “a shot of Havel with his back to the camera, walking toward the ocean.”  On the poster was a quotation summarizing “one of Havel’s most deeply held beliefs”:  Then this paragraph near the end of Wilson’s tribute: 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. 

As I said, Václav Havel was different.  It is not madness or naiveté to insist upon -- and to push a little harder for -- that difference.

Like many great Czechs before him, Havel insisted on the importance of truth, but with a difference. “Truth and love,” he was fond of saying, “must prevail over lies and hatred.” He was often ridiculed for what seemed like a Hallmark sentiment (“Why love?” people asked), but he defended the slogan by referring to one of his greatest insights: truth, by itself, is a malleable concept that depends for its truthfulness on who utters it, to whom it is said, and under what circumstances. As a playwright, Havel turned this insight into a dramatic device: in most of his plays, the main characters constantly lie to one another and to themselves, using words that, in other circumstances, would be perfectly truthful. Truth by itself is not enough: it needs a guarantor, someone to stand behind it. It must be uttered with no thought for gain, that is, in Havel’s words, with a love that seeks nothing for itself and everything for others.  

  

SOTU, Barackus?

"One place to start is serious financial reform. Look, I am not interested in punishing banks, I'm interested in protecting our economy. A strong, healthy financial market makes it possible for businesses to access credit and create new jobs. It channels the savings of families into investments that raise incomes. But that can only happen if we guard against the same recklessness that nearly brought down our entire economy". -- Barack Obama

Okay, okay -- that was from last year's STFU, pre-Occupy edition.  How he pretends that things have changed, because now the president has directed Attorney General Eric Holder to whip up a financial crimes unit to punish the banks.  As former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer told Keith Olbermann Tuesday night, there are already dozens and scores of financial crime units floating in the ozone. This may be either a lot of empty rhetoric, or it may be a way to appease/co-opt the state attorneys general who are refusing to go along with that sweetheart deal I wrote about in a previous post. Time will tell.

He also suggested a ban on Congressional insider trading, which was met by thunderous silence from the millionaire congress critters. And his much-touted big applause line: "No bailouts, no handouts, no copouts" did not evince so much as one hand clapping. 

I was disgracefully way off the mark in my prediction that Obama would utter the word "folks" two dozen times. He only used it twice -- once when he referred to millionaire folks like himself, and the other about the poor slob brand of folks on Main Street. I should have known he would never refer to Congress as folks.

Other than that, the main phrase was "built to last". I counted five times. I just couldn't get the Ford truck commercial out of my head for the whole damned speech.

And did he really say he would still work with Republicans to reform (code for cut) Medicare and Social Security?  Are you kidding me?

And to give us a preview of his bellicose chest-thumping campaign theme, he began and ended the speech with the celebration of the assassination of Osama.

All in all, a totally predictable orgy of self-celebration by the political subdivision of the criminal oligarchy.

The Sun Reigns Supreme

Monday's Supreme Court decision that it's a no-no for police to slap a GPS device on a car without a warrant may be rendered moot by an event outside the control of even the almighty United States Government. A massive explosion on the sun is now showering the earth with enough radiation to knock the entire Global Positioning System on its ass. From CNN:

The largest solar storm for seven years is expected to send a shower of radioactive solar particles racing towards Earth at almost 1,400 miles a second this week, according to NASA.The flare, caused by a huge eruption on the sun's surface on Sunday, is expected to affect GPS systems and other communications when it reaches the Earth's magnetic field on Tuesday.Solar flares are our solar system's largest explosive events and can last from minutes to hours, according to NASA, releasing up to a billion tons of matter in the process.

The National Weather Service has issued a rare major geo-magnetic solar storm warning, which sounds more ominous that it really is.  You will not experience bodily harm unless you count acute withdrawal symptoms from disruption of your cell phone service, internet, electricity and TomTom device. Will Old Sol also disrupt drone strikes from Nevada trailers?  Let's hope!

More information can be found here.

Solar Flare Photographed by NASA 1/23/12

Whitewash Delayed is SOTU Spin Denied

Thanks to pressure from activists and a few stalwart attorneys general, President Obama has been denied the chance to belch out a major whopper at tonight's State of the Union address. It would have been a moment in which a whole chorus of "You Lies!" from the gallery would have been entirely appropriate.

Obama apparently had hoped to proclaim himself the middle class champion who went after the big bad banks to get a relatively paltry $20,000 slashed from each of the loans of a relatively small number of underwater homeowners  He was planning to spin a sweetheart deal with foreclosure fraudsters at five too-big-to-exist banks into a victory for the middle class.  And that would have been a major fib, because the money would have come not from the banksters themselves, but from pension funds containing bundled mortgage securities. It would have given to the middle class by taking from the middle class. The deal would not have sent one banker to jail, nor taken one nickel from the bloated bonuses of the likes of Jamie Dimon and Brian Moynihan.

The Obama Administration had summoned the state attorneys general to Chicago on Monday to try to persuade them to leave the criminals alone and to forget about extracting justice for their constitutents. From today's New York Times:

The housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, met on Monday in Chicago with Democratic attorneys general to iron out the remaining details and to persuade holdouts to agree with any eventual deal. He later held a conference call with Republican attorneys general. But as he renewed his efforts, Democrats in Congress, advocacy groups like MoveOn.org and several crucial attorneys general said the deal might be too lenient on the banks.....

Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa, said Monday that an agreement with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial — would not be reached “anytime this week.”

In a letter to administration officials, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio said the settlement as reported — its details were not fully known — was too small and would allow banks to pass on the cost of the settlement to “middle-class Americans” whose pension funds hold soured mortgage securities.

In addition to disagreements over the total amount, negotiations have been held up over the question of how much latitude authorities would have in pursuing investigations into mortgage abuses before the housing bubble burst in 2007. The banks are pushing for a broad release from future claims, but several attorneys general, including prominent figures like Eric Schneiderman of New York and Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, have demanded a tougher line on the banks.

A three-pronged pushback against the Administration from activists, legislators and the attorneys general created a major disruption of negotiations. The uproar, although relatively ignored by the mainstream press (The Times story was buried in the rubble of the GOP primary trainwreck) was reminiscent of the massive protest last week against SOPA/PIPA that had craven congress critters scampering for their burrows.

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith, who has provided some of the best coverage on the background and details of this story, thinks the collapse in negotiations Monday may spell doom for any hope the banks and Obama  had for a whitewash  going forward -- ever.  Obama apparently was counting on the party bosses of the recalcitrant AGs putting pressure on them to fall into line. That didn't happen. The AGs in question didn't bother showing up at Chicage HQ. Writes Smith:

We will hopefully get more intelligence (or maybe just better attempts at disinformation) but I read this as an indication the deal agreed between the Federal regulators and the biggest servicers somehow came unglued. Possibilities include: someone exposed a definitional/drafting flaw (the Feds thought it meant one thing and the banks thought it meant another); someone (one of the banks?) retraded the deal; the Administration has assumed it could rely on a certain minimum number of AGs to fall in line and they regarded that minimum number as essential, and the pow wow today exposed that they are below that level.

The beauty of protest movements like this is that they act like magnets for the timid and uncommitted. Fighting back against the oligarchy has become chic -- and safe. People just couldn't get onboard the anti-foreclosure settlement train fast enough:

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka said today “We call on the administration to reject any deal that insulates banks from full responsibility.” Bob Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future said “This is a fundamental question of justice and democracy.  The law is respected only if it is enforced.  No one who robbed a bank would be offered immunity, a modest fine and no admission of guilt – before there was an investigation into who stole the money and how much they took.” The co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, said “It’s past time we stand up to Wall Street and show the American people that no bank executive is above the law."

In case you missed it, here is a clip of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer on the foreclosure fraud background and White House involvement on Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes.

Have you got your bullshit detection meter charged up for tonight's State of the Union theater of the macabre?  Are we all fired up and ready to scream?  Digby says we should take a drink every time Obama says "frankly."  I, on the other hand, am now taking bets on how many times he will utter the word "folks."  My guess is an even two dozen. I'll have paper and pen handy, keeping score.