No Banker Left Behind

How do we hate the mortgage fraud settlement? Let us count the ways. First, there are Yves Smith's dozen reasons why the deal stinks. (She should know -- she writes from the unique perspective of a shadow banking heretic who escaped to tell about it). And Dave Dayen, Jon Walker and Matt Taibbi, who has dutifully confessed that his initial optimism was woefully misplaced. As was mine, believing somehow that my attorney general (Eric Schneiderman) was the reincarnation of Eliot Spitzer -- who isn't dead, but simply marginalized and only occasionally allowed to speak truth to power on Current TV.

That we would be screwed once again was to be expected. But what is still breathtaking to me is the unbridled arrogance of President Obama in pretending this is a great deal for people. I missed his TV appearance yesterday, but just looked at the grim photos and the transcript. Yes, they actually had the nerve to preserve the broadcast of their litany of lies, the likes of which we haven't heard since.... oh, maybe a week ago when Obama bragged on the exquisite execution and precise precision of his officially nonexistent war crimes.  And the pictures memorializing yesterdays's heinous event actually reminded me of the publicity shot from The Sopranos. Mobsters, no matter the particular racket or crime family from which they hail, all seem to share the same body language and facial expressions: hands folded casually in front of their pricey dark suits, each oozing a uniform aspect of smug, sullen, cocky arrogance: 

You can read the transcript of Obama's bravura performance here. I am not going to parse the whole speech: its mendacity and unmitigated gall speak for themselves. But here are a few excerpts from a somewhat more truthful rough draft rescued from my imaginary waste basket:


All right, good afternoon, everybody.  Before I start, I just want to introduce my enforcers the folks on stage here, because the extraordinary work that they did is the reason that a lot of families are going to be screwed helped all across the country.....

The criminal actions of too big to exist banks and our complicit government housing bubble that burst nearly six years ago triggered, as we all know, the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes.  It cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and their homes.  And because I refused to break up the banks and bring back Glass-Steagall it remains one of the biggest drags on our economy.

Last fall, my administration unveiled a series of steps but failed to actually follow through on to help all responsible homeowners refinance their mortgages to take advantage of historically low rates.  And last week, I urged Congress to pass a plan that would help millions more Americans refinance and stay in their homes.  And I indicated that the American people need Congress to act on this piece of legislation. Election time is fast approaching, the Occupy movement happened, and I had to pretend to care.

But in the meantime, we can't wait to get things done and to provide relief to America's homeowners.  We need to pretend to keep doing everything we can to help homeowners and our economy.  And today, with the help of Democratic and Republican attorney generals from nearly every state in the country, and taking our marching orders from the banks themselves we are about to take a unprecented leap into the arms of our Wall Street masters major step on our own.
   
We have reached a paltry landmark settlement with the nation’s largest banks that will speed relief to their bottom lines and secure the bonuses of their CEOs hardest-hit homeowners, aid and abet end some of the most criminal abusive practices of the mortgage industry, and begin to turn the page on an era of recklessness that continues to leave has left so much damage in its wake.

By now, it’s well known that millions of professionals in the monied burbs Americans who did the right thing and the responsible thing -- shopped for a house, secured a mortgage that they could afford, made their payments on time -- were, nevertheless, hurt badly by the irresponsible actions of others:  by lenders who tricked and defrauded sold loans to people who couldn’t afford them; by buyers who knew who were snookered into signing documents they didn't understand  couldn’t afford them; by speculators who were looking to make a quick buck; by banks that took risky mortgages, packaged them up, and knowingly and fraudulently and maliciously traded them off for large profits.

It was the worst and biggest case of massive fraud and theft and forgery in the history of the world wrong.  And it is still costing cost more than 4 million families their homes to foreclosure.

Even worse, many companies that handled these foreclosures were such heartless bastards they planned ahead of time to steal people's homes out from under them didn’t give people a fighting chance to hold onto their homes.  In many cases, they deliberately committed fraud didn’t even verify that these foreclosures were actually legitimate.  Some of the people they hired to process foreclosures used fake signatures to -- on fake documents to speed up the foreclosure process.  Some of them didn’t read what they were signing at all. The deal I am agreeing to today absolves all these felons of criminal responsibility.

We've got to think about that. We did think about it, a little, and came to the conclusion that the American people are not as important as the banks. You work and you save your entire life to buy a home.  That's where you raise your family.  That's where your kids' memories are formed.  That's your stake, your claim on the American Dream.  And the person signing the document couldn’t take enough time to even make sure that the foreclosure was legitimate. And the person signing the document knew damn well what they were doing was illegal and immoral. He or she was getting paid minimum wage in a foreclosure mill working as a subcontractor to the criminal banking cabal. We should not be calling it "carelessness."

These practices were plainly felonies punishable by long prison terms. irresponsible.  And we are allowing them refused to let them go unanswered.  So about a year ago, our federal law enforcement agencies teamed up with state attorneys general to get to the bottom of these abuses to try to force a sweetheart deal to please the banks and sweep the whole thing under the rug.  The travesty settlement we’ve reached today, thanks to the co-optation and passive aggression work of some of the fucks folks who are on this stage -- this is the largest criminal conspiracy joint federal-state settlement in our nation’s history -- is the result of that extraordinary cooperation and complete takeover of our democracy by fascist elements.

Under the terms of this settlement, America’s biggest banks -- banks that were rescued by taxpayer dollars -- are getting yet another taxpayer bailout.will be required to right these wrongs.  That means simply paying a small fee of less than a penny for each dollar they stole more than just paying a fee.  These banks will put billions of dollars of other people's money towards relief for a mere fraction of families across the nation.  They’ll theoretically provide refinancing for borrowers that are stuck in high interest rate mortgages.  They’ll possibly but not probably and not in time to help reduce loans for families who owe more on their homes than they’re worth.  And they will deliver another kick in the teeth some measure of justice for families that have already been victims of Class A felonies abusive practices. If people who were robbed even get their moving costs covered maybe three years hence, they'll be lucky. 

All told, this isn’t good at all just good for those families -- it’s good for the banks their neighborhoods, it's good for their the bankers' families, and it's good for increased Wall Street donations to my SuperPac our economy.

This settlement also protects our ability to further ignore investigate the crimes practices that are stilling causing caused this mess.  And this lie is important for my own political prospects.  The woefully inadequate mortgage fraud task force I announced in my State of the Union address retains its full authority to cursorally aggressively investigate the packaging and selling of risky mortgages that led to this crisis.  This investigation is already well underway and will end mere days after the statute of limitations runs out and millions more families are kicked to the curb.  And working closely with the co-opted and bought-off state attorneys general, we're going to keep at it until I am safely re-elected we hold those who broke the law fully accountable.

Now, let me tell last whopper before I go count the Wall Street money in my war chest  I want to be clear.  No compensation, no amount of money, no measure of justice is enough to make it right for a family who's had their piece of the American Dream wrongly taken from them. This deal sucks -- so what?  And no action, no matter how meaningful, is going to, by itself, entirely heal the housing market. So shut the hell up if you don't like it. But this settlement is a pathetic response to a crime against humanity start.  And we're going to make sure that the banks live up to their end of the bargain until, in keeping with past promises and past behavior, we won't.  If they don’t, we've set up an independent inspector whom the banks have approved, a monitor that has the power to make sure they pay exactly the peanuts what they agreed to pay, plus a lashing with a wet noodle penalty if they fail to act in accordance with this agreement.  So this will be a big help. to the banksters.

Of course, even with this settlement, there's still millions of responsible homeowners who are out there who will still be illegally foreclosed on doing their best.  And what they need us to do is get back on their feet. and make a campaign donation to me. We've still got to stoke the fires of my personality cult of our economic recovery.  So now is not the time to pull back.

And the conspiratorial bipartisan nature of this settlement and the appalling outstanding work that these state attorneys general did is a testament to what happens when money rules politics everybody is only concerned with their own re-elections.is pulling in the same direction.  And that’s what today's settlement is all about -- screwing standing up for for the American people, absolving and continuing to reward and enable holding those who broke the law accountable, restoring confidence to in to our rentier class housing market and our financial sector, getting things moving and allowing the financial predators to get bigger in order to strengthen their chokehold on our very lives.  And we're going to keep on at it until the 99% are rendered moot everyone shares in America's comeback.

So, consiglieres ladies and gentlemen, thank you for selling out your outstanding efforts.  We are very, very proud of you.  And we look forward to seeing this settlement lead to some miniscule small measure of relief to a pathetic few lot of property owners families out there that need help.  And that’s going to strengthen my re-election chances the American economy overall. 
So thank you very much.

Black Bloc Backlash (say three times fast)

It's a given that Chris "Death of the Liberal Class" Hedges is one of the intellectual inspirations and living legend heroes of OWS. So when this Pulitzer Price-winning journalist wrote that there is a cancer growing in the movement, it caused a widespread stir. More than one stomach plummeted, heart sank, spine chilled. Depression became epidemic in a matter of hours as Hedges' TruthDig piece spread throughout progressive cyberspace.
   
Hedges, of course, was talking about so-called "Black Bloc" anarchist elements infiltrating various Occupy groups and fomenting violence. Occupy Oakland is the poster child for the radicalization of the movement, with its shutdowns of ports and storming of vacant buildings and "clashes" with paramilitary police.

That the corporate pundits are quick to smugly declare OWS dead and buried with each crackdown and each eviction is to be expected; they have, for the most part, denigrated it from Day One of its Zuccotti Park birth. From time to time, the mainstream press has legitimized the protests and it actually became chic to take quick rides on the resistence bandwagon, straight to cable. If you had a minor tussle with the fuzz and got the plastic cuff treatment for an hour or two, so much the better. It seemed like the nightly cable shows were filled with celebrities chattering about their forays into one camp or another. Then came the presidential horserace reality show, and Occupy was pushed off the national radar. Coverage revolved around the latest in a round of serial evictions. The public, decreed the pundits and their polls, was growing tired. The novelty of a protest movement was wearing off. 

And now, coupled with corporate media ennui, comes Hedges' declaration that there is a Cancer on Occupy. What's up with that?  I love Chris Hedges, I really do. But let's face it: the man is a professional diehard pessimist. Read his book -- he predicts that sooner or later we'll all be living in widely scattered communes, scratching out a miserable existence in a dystopian hell that even George Orwell didn't imagine.  During interviews at the burgeoning of Occupy, he expressed pleasant surprise that the propagandized masses had actually mobilized. It seemed like he was All In.

Then the revelation of the Black Bloc element, which Hedges predicts is a possible death decree to the inherently pacifist Occupy. Only peaceful nonresistance is allowed in a populist uprising. Be good little Gandhis, or begone, I reckon. The violent, "hypermasculine" outside agitators, he writes, will give the security state the perfect excuse to smash the entire movement into smithereens:

The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. It can use the Black Bloc’s confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished. If we become isolated we can be crushed. The arrests last weekend in Oakland of more than 400 protesters, some of whom had thrown rocks, carried homemade shields and rolled barricades, are an indication of the scale of escalating repression and a failure to remain a unified, nonviolent opposition. Police pumped tear gas, flash-bang grenades and “less lethal” rounds into the crowds. Once protesters were in jail they were denied crucial medications, kept in overcrowded cells and pushed around. A march in New York called in solidarity with the Oakland protesters saw a few demonstrators imitate the Black Bloc tactics in Oakland, including throwing bottles at police and dumping garbage on the street. They chanted “Fuck the police” and “Racist, sexist, anti-gay / NYPD go away.”

The absolute worst thing we as citizens can do is moan, groan, bitch that anarchists are spoiling things and therefore we might as well give up while we are ahead. What we should be doing is mounting a PR counteroffensive. The "official" newspaper of OWS -- The Occupied Wall Street Journal -- is doing just that, and publicizing the debate. Here's how Crooks & Liars Managing Editor Tina Dupuy tells it in one guest contribution: 

.... the destruction of property is exactly what Occupy is protesting against; it’s what the banks took from us. Occupy has pointed out the criminality of the banks and the seeming collusion with government to take wealth and property away from working people and give it to the wealthy. So protest property crimes, by committing crimes against property? It’s nonsensical.
Destroying property destroys moral authority.

On the other hand, protest movements throughout history have had their ugly, violent sides. People protest when they get angry, and some angry people have  anger management issues. And Occupy Oakland is unique. It exists in a city with a horrible reputation for police brutality and repression, even murder; its police force is on the verge of being taken over by the Feds because of its pattern of civil rights violations. Blogger Josh Cook of Deep Green Awakening thinks we can acknowledge the anarchic mindset without condoning it: 

Compare the “property damage” (and the whole issue of property and what sort of damage constitutes violence is another discussion altogether) with the long-term harm done to the People of Oakland, especially minority groups, activists, and Occupiers. It should dawn on rational, empathic people that such intense moments of conflict are practically unavoidable in the face of so brutal a system, and rather than waste time judging people, we ought to cry out louder for an end to the rule of the 1% and their system, the true root cause of social unrest and violence.
Furthermore, at this point, it is silly to talk about Constitutional rights. We in the US live in a Police State. We have no such rights — most recently and dramatically demonstrated by the passing of the NDAA. For moral force, I suggest speaking of human rights, as this has the added benefit of keeping us connected to the international dimension of this movement. Solidarity with all people struggling for democracy and justice is of utmost importance.

And in an article in Counterpunch (don't you love all these aggressive-progressive blog titles?) Peter Gelderloos accuses Hedges of using the C word as a scare tactic to frighten OWS into submission... or nonexistence. Nobody, he says, ever promised you a revolutionary rose garden:

The medical language of Hedges’ title, referring to the anarchists as a “cancer,” should immediately ring alarm bells. Portraying one’s opponents as a disease has long been a tactic of the state and the media to justify the repression. This language was used against the Native Americans, against the Jews, against communists, and many others. Recently the police and the right wing used this same language of hygiene to talk about the occupations around the country as health threats so as to justify their eviction and generate disgust and repulsion.....
But beneath the black masks, anarchists have been an integral part of the debates, the organizing, the cooking and cleaning in dozens of cities. Anarchists also participated in preparing the original call-out for Occupy Wall Street, and they played a key role in organizing and carrying out the historic Oakland general strike and the subsequent West Coast port blockades–probably the strongest actions taken by the Occupy movement to date.

There have been setbacks in every movement for change. Outside agitation is nothing new and it serves the agenda of the oligarchy in squelching protest only too well. Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) incident of violent elements nearly destroying the entire labor movement was the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, when an unknown assailant threw a bomb into a crowd of protesters, killing a Chicago policeman, with an ensuing gunfight killing more cops and citizens. It was not until several years later that the "anarchist" labor movement demonstrators got what they wanted in the first place: an eight-hour day. It's something we take for granted today, not something we can envision people actually dying for.

Randomly Ranting Edition

Wending my way through the various "progressive" news sites and blogs over the past day or so, I have been struck by the dearth of criticism of President Obama's latest foray over to the dark side -- to wit, his decision to embrace Citizens United, and accept unlimited and anonymous campaign donations via his SuperPac.

Maybe I've been looking for outrage in all the wrong places, or maybe the usual polemicists are still working on their material. But so far, I can count on the fingers of one hand the severe condemnations of the latest Barry flip-flop. The New York Times ran an editorial accusing the president of selling out democracy to the highest bidder. It even came close to accusing the president of criminal behavior for now allowing and encouraging members of his Cabinet to shill for corporate cash for the aptly named "Priorities First USA" SuperPac. (It is against the law for cabinet members to actively campaign and solicit money).

 Ditto for Robert Reich, who blogged about the "sad spectacle" that is the Obama re-election campaign:

The sad truth is Obama has never really occupied the high ground on campaign finance. He refused public financing in 2008. Once president, he didn’t go to bat for a system of public financing that would have made it possible for candidates to raise enough money from small donors and matching public funds they wouldn’t need to rely on a few billionaires pumping unlimited sums into super PACS. He hasn’t even fought for public disclosure of super PAC donations.
And now he’s made a total mockery of the Court’s naïve belief that super PACs would remain separate from individual campaigns, by officially endorsing his own super PAC and allowing campaign manager Jim Messina and even cabinet officers to speak at his super PAC events. Obama will not appear at such events but he, Michelle Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden will encourage support of the Obama super PAC.

 Former Sen. Russ Feingold also professed to be appalled and shocked, but ended his tirade by saying he still supports the president even though he is "dancing with the devil". So as far as I am concerned, he cancelled himself out. His purported disgust is full of baloney and shouldn't even count. He was among those "pragmatists" who helped quash talk for a primary challenger while there was still time.

The Times piece was greeted with scathing reviews by the Readers Who Comment. It is just so naive of the editorial board to think our pragmatic president wouldn't level the playing field, they cried. One reader huffed that the public at large simply does not mind that money rules politics. My own comment, meant as a tongue in cheek pre-emptive litany of Obama apologist talking points, seems to have been taken at face value by at least a few 'bots. I thought my irony was fairly obvious; for example, "you have to fight Evil with Evil."  One person responded "Totally agree! About time he took a gun to a gunfight!"

 Even the erstwhile renegade Keith Olbermann seems to have given the president a pass on this one. He has been out on an extended sick leave, and I can only surmise that his medical treatment included an IV cocktail with Obama kool aid mixed in with an MSNBC antibiotic. He has failed to mention Occupy and the mass evictions  even once this week, but is falling into the familiar and lazy pattern of guffawing at the latest GOP loathesomeness and waxing indignant at Susan G. Komen. Yeah, I get that Susan G. Komen for the Cure is full of horseshit. But it has always been a corporate gimmick, so why are we surprised about the Planned Parenthood de-funding? What about the Drone attacks, the media drumbeat for an Iranian War, the continuing Long Depression that is so bad that people have stopped getting married?

And do you know who Keith had on as his very special guest last night? Jerry Springer! These guys are apparently buddies from way back. Springer was celebrated on Countdown because he had told Fox and Friends they were not fair and balanced, to their faces. So apparently, you can exploit poor people on a TV show all you want, as long as you later insult the talking heads who are politically dishonest while performing their own brand of poor people-exploitation.

*****************************************************************

I admit it. I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday night, but just to see the commercials and the halftime show. Seriously! I kept the sound muted for the actual game, and read some of George Orwell's essays to pass the time. His Notes on Nationalism hit me like a ton of bricks. If you just substitute "partisanship" for "nationalism", he could be talking about the divisive and corrupt political cesspool threatening to drown us in this election year. Early in the essay is this trenchant observation:

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

Once citizens have allowed their own rational thought processes to be subsumed, whether by mindless allegiance to an authoritarian, attractive symbol of power, or by fear of "the other" -- be it nonexistent homegrown terrorists, or right-wing lunatics who want to crush the birth control pills of every woman in America, or whatever -- Democracy is doomed. Otherwise sane people literally lose touch with reality in their desperate quest to normalize the abnormal. Obama apologists now trying to justify legalized bribery fall into this  category. Orwell calls such rationalizing an "indifference" to reality. The same good, intelligent people who condemned the Bush War crimes, secrecy, and civil rights abuses, are turning a blind eye to the Obama crimes:

 All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

Should we even bother fighting back against this awfulness? Absolutely, says Orwell. Half the battle, he says, is to recognize the cognitive dissonance that is part of modern politics and life in general, to recognize that we all have biases, but never to allow these emotional defense mechanisms to trump rational thought. In other words, giving up at this point is just not an option, even though fighting back seems like crying out alone in the wilderness in these crazy times. 

Fight on. Resist. Occupy.

Update: Speak of dancing with the devil. Glenn Greenwald blasts the repulsive hypocrisy of so-called progressives who are just fine with Gitmo, warrantless wiretapping and assassinations. We knew Orwell was prescient. We just didn't how pin-pointy accurate he would turn out to be. As Greenwald says, the liberal pundits who blasted the war crimes of Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld now owe them a huge apology.  



Occupy Your Inner Orwell



Help the President Help the More Fortunate

I was a little late getting to President Obama's weekly radio address. But since the message keeps reverberating in much the same form, vis a vis the desperate plans of his Administration to "settle" with the criminal bankster class over their "mistakes" in defrauding homeowners, I think it's worth a parse. So, in case you still haven't had enough of the droning of Built to Last, here we go:

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been traveling around the country and talking with folks about my blueprint for an economy built to last.  It’s a blueprint that focuses on restoring the things we’ve always done best.  Our strengths.  American manufacturing.  American energy.  The skills and education of American workers.

Built to Last replaced the losing Winning the Future, in case you hadn't noticed. And now it's got the added gimmick of a blueprint, because I just love that idea. I got it from the Republican side of the aisle from friends like Paul Ryan and his Mediscare blueprint. It makes me seem like an architect who builds things. Like a Ford truck..... but really more like a commercial for a Ford truck. Rugged, leaderly, tough, nationalistic. Home Sweet Homeland.

And most importantly, American values like fairness and responsibility. We know what happened when we strayed from those values over the past decade – especially when it comes to our housing market. Lenders sold loans to families who couldn’t afford them.  Banks packaged those mortgages up and traded them for phony profits.  It drove up prices and created an unsustainable bubble that burst – and left millions of families who did everything right in a world of hurt.

Let us never forget the families who did everything wrong. It is important that I not alienate the conservative-leaning voters of the battleground states here. A lot of folks still buy into the canard born in the CNBC rant of Rick Santelli, post meltdown in 2009, that welfare queens and unemployed Mexicans getting liar loans caused the whole crisis. So I am going to compromise, wallow in a little phony centrism,  and mendaciously give that canard just a wee tad of presidential cred. Families who bought houses they couldn't afford are just as venal as the banksters. Families who got regular mortgages they could afford were hurt by irresponsible, subprime poor families. You think only Republicans can create phony wedge issues? Hah!

It was wrong.  The housing crisis has been the single biggest drag on our recovery from the recession.  It has kept millions of families in debt and unable to spend, and it has left hundreds of thousands of construction workers out of a job.

I won't mention the inconvenient truth that unfettered capitalism and unregulated banks caused the housing crisis, and are still a drag on the economy. Reinstating Glass-Steagall is just too hard. Supporting Elizabeth Warren as chief of the Consumer Protection agency she created?  Just too hard.  Construction workers are unemployed because the hoarding banks won't give out construction loans. Even though I keep politely asking. 

But there’s something even more important at stake.  I’ve been saying this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class.  And the housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle-class in this country: owning a home.  Raising our kids.  Building our dreams.

I am not bothering with you lesser people who rent their homes, either from choice or from necessity. Or, God forbid, folks who live in their relatives' basements or shelters.Let's define our terms. "Middle class" as defined by my campaign strategists means The Monied Burbs: employed professional people who can actually afford to get married, buy a house, and have 2.3 kids. And a dog. Maybe not a purebred Portuguese Water Dog like Bo, but at least a LabraDoodle or a Golden Retriever.

Right now, there are more than 10 million homeowners in this country who, because of a decline in home prices that is no fault of their own, owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.  Now, it is wrong for anyone to suggest that the only option for struggling, responsible homeowners is to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom.  I don’t accept that.  None of us should.

I am not mentioning that 10 million out of a 330 million population is rather a small demographic. And that by relentlessly harping on fault, I am signalling my utter disdain for irresponsible losers. Hardworking Heartland independents pride themselves on the work ethic. Let's face it: I am in campaign mode here. The monied suburbanites saddled with million-dollar homes now worth maybe eight hundred thou are the ones whose votes and donations and phone-banking I am counting on.  Responsible: code for employed professional.

That’s why we launched a plan a couple years ago that’s helped nearly one million responsible homeowners refinance their mortgages and save an average of $300 on their payments each month.  Now, I’ll be the first to admit it didn’t help as many folks as we’d hoped.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.

Yeah, it didn't work because our hearts just were not in it at the time. It was not an election year. Plus, it would have been too hard on the Wall Street banks.  Since my Administration never tried to penalize the banks for failing to help folks, they really had no incentive to go along, did they?   

That’s why I’m sending Congress a plan that will give every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgages by refinancing at historically low rates.  No more red tape.  No more endless forms.  And a small fee on the largest financial institutions will make sure it doesn’t add a dime to the deficit.

A small fee on the largest financial institutions... vague, unspecified, but it sounds good in a campaign speech. And I just can't help myself! Even though my handlers told me to curtail it on the austerity theme, I just had to get the D Word (deficit) in here somehow. Please don't forget that my plan will help only a select few mega-homeowners who pay their bills on time. If you own a modest home and have been paying late, you're out of luck. And if you're out on the street, you won't vote anyway. You are so screwed, in too many ways to count. So you don't count.

I want to be clear: this plan will not help folks who bought a house they couldn’t afford and then walked away from it.  It won’t help folks who bought multiple houses just to turn around and sell them. What this plan will do is help millions of responsible homeowners who make their payments every month, but who, until now, couldn’t refinance because their home values kept dropping or they got wrapped up in too much red tape.

Ad nauseum, ad infinitum! I keep repeating myself, just so I can hammer home my point. My campaign is geared toward well-to-do people who are not financially strapped, and never have to rob Peter to pay Paul. I am not interested helping people who chronically have their cable or electricity shut off.  If you don't pay your bills on time, you are just not responsible.  If you're hurting, it's really kind of your fault. But since I'm a Democrat (or so I am told) I just can't be as blatant about it as my friends in the other wing of the Uniparty.

But here’s the catch.  In order to lower mortgage payments for millions of Americans, we need Congress to act.  They’re the ones who have to pass this plan.  And as anyone who has followed the news in the last six months can tell you, getting Congress to do anything these days is not an easy job.
That’s why I’m going to keep up the pressure on Congress to do the right thing.  But I also need your help.  I need your voice.  I need everyone who agrees with this plan to get on the phone, send an email, tweet, pay a visit, and remind your representatives in Washington who they work for.  Tell them to pass this plan.  Tell them to help more families keep their homes, and more neighborhoods stay vibrant and whole. 

In order for me to help this small segment of well-to-do Americans who own a lot of house, I need you to join my campaign even if you merely aspire to homeownership at this particular time. Are you in? Call Congress (Dems or Pubs, they're all alike) and send me your email address. Don't let Falls Church Va or Westchester County go the way of central Florida! Keep the lifestyle liberals and their possessions strong and confident, vibrant and whole.

The truth is, it will take time for our housing market to recover.  It will take time for our economy to fully bounce back.  But there are steps we can take, right now, to move this country forward.  That’s what I promise to do as your President, and I hope Members of Congress will join me.

Pay no attention to what Paul Krugman wrote today in The New York Times, about everything not being o.k. and how it's wrong for governments to keep saying austerity is important. Forget about the cloud of economic depression on the silver lining of a few thousand more minimum wage jobs for which I take total and unabashed credit. Forget that I listened to Tim Geithner and didn't break up the banks and didn't demand adequate stimulus. If you will just call Congress and Tweet your hearts out, we can move forward just like my MSNBC offshoot tells you to. It will give you the illusion of doing something. It will once again suck you into the Cult of My Personality.  

 

The Jim Crow Guide to Fine Dining

Even the plutocrats of One Percent Nation have to eat. They eat well, they eat regularly, and they dine out. A lot. Because the Long Depression has not affected the pocketbooks of the wealthy, the high-end hospitality business is one of the few booming industries in this dismal economy. One out of every 12 private sector jobs is in restaurants. It is also very likely that when Richie Rich Congressman or K Street Kleptocrat sits down at, say, the Capital Grille, his server will be white.

 Brown and black employees rarely get table-waiting jobs in fancy restaurants. They're usually relegated to the clean-up crew, the dishwashing detail, or at best, to the crummy tables in the back of the room.  The restaurant employment watchdog group ROC (Restaurant Opportunities Center) says that in an industry already notorious for its poverty level wages, black employees earn an average of $4 less an hour than whites.

A 2009 study revealed that hiring discrimination in high-end New York City restaurants, where workers can earn up to $100,000 annually, is also common. The wealthier the clientele and the pricier the menu, the likelier it is that your server will be fair-skinned and accent-free. Unless, naturally, it's a French accent.

Now, a federal lawsuit against the Darden Group, a huge restaurant chain with a  reputation for serial discrimination, has been filed in Illinois. Minority workers in the chain, which includes Olive Garden, Red Lobster and the tonier Capital Grille, claim that they are paid less than minimum wage, are often forced to work off the clock, and are denied promotion. One restaurant (the Capital Grille in Washington) allegedly fired a group of black servers en masse because it was suddenly decided they didn't meet optical standards. How ironic, considering that Darden CEO Clarence Otis Jr is himself a well-regarded African American businessman. He used to work for JP Morgan, and is also a member of the Federal Reserve in Atlanta.

Otis, judging from an indignant editorial he wrote recently on the CNN website, finds it annoying that his wage slaves want to be treated with dignity. An Obama donor, he also reportedly met personally with the president to kvetch about how hard it is out there for job creators providing all those thousands of fantastic minimum wage jobs, only to have their largesse and civic-mindedness abused by burdensome government regulations eating into bottom lines and investor dividends.  We have no idea whether Obama told him off, placated him, laughed uproariously, or what. It was private. But here is what Otis actually had the chutzpah to whine about publicly: 

 Regulatory mandates flowing from federal health care reform may be the most visible, but the list also includes measures such as new mandatory paid leave provisions that require us to change the way we accommodate employees who need to take time off when they are ill and ever more unrealistic requirements regarding employee meal and rest breaks that, in California for example, force our employees to take breaks in the middle of serving lunch or dinner.

Otis, who makes $7.16 million a year, actually did get one of the many Obamacare waivers absolving him from having to fully cover his part-timers. Yet, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Chicago, he doesn’t even pay some of them minimum wage.  Color of Change, an African-American advocacy group, is outraged:

Darden runs nearly 2,000 restaurants nationwide and boasts annual sales of $7.5 billion. But the few Black workers who make it into the big leagues there often don't stay very long. According to reports from two Black servers who worked at Darden's Capital Grille in DC -- a restaurant patronized by politicians, lobbyists, and others in the Washington elite -- Black front-of-the-house staff were let go en masse within a short period of time because they “didn’t fit the company image.” They were all replaced by White workers.

Despite the pattern of racial discrimination, Darden -- the world's largest full-service restaurant company -- ranks in the "Top 100 Places to Work," an annual list published by Fortune Magazine. The company gets high marks for a diverse workforce (of course, there's no mention of who works which job.) At a time when Black unemployment is nearly twice the national average and the private sector is being heralded as our greatest hope, Darden's pattern of relegating Black workers to lowest wage work is unconscionable.

Despite the lawsuit, Darden will get a dollop of free positive publicity this week when First Lady Michelle Obama celebrates the second anniversary of her "Let's Move" anti-obesity campaign at a Texas Olive Garden restaurant. Darden is among the corporations which have pledged to gradually (they get five years) start reducing the salt and fat content of the food they sell and to add healthier sides. 

But I digress. If you're wondering whether your own favorite restaurant is among the many which treat its employees like crap, ROC has put out a handy Zagat-type rating guide to help you. (You can also sign Color of Change's petition telling Mr. Wonderful's Darden chain to cut the crap, right here.)  

The Guide evaluates more than 150 popular restaurants and chains nationwide against 3 criteria: provision of paid sick days, wages of at least $9 per hour for non-tipped workers and $5 per hour of tipped workers, and opportunities for internal advancement.
These are good criteria. I don’t want a sick person handling my food, nor do I want them to lose wages or jobs because they’re sick. The minimum wage for tipped workers has remained at a measly $2.13 per hour for nearly 20 years, so every day consumers have to push for a higher standard since Congress won’t. And finally, racial and gender hierarchies are a fact of life in the restaurant industry, with white men getting the best paying jobs at the front of the house. Across the country, ROC United has found that a system that enables internal promotion so that back of the house workers can get access to front of the house jobs, is a key element of restaurants that don’t discriminate.
The Guide goes further than telling you where to go. Since it doesn’t cover absolutely every one of the millions of restaurants in this country, ROC United asks diners to simply take a look around and ask a few questions when they eat out. Just opening our eyes will tell us who works where. Are all the waiters white? Are all the bussers Latinos? Are there no black people or women anywhere? It isn’t difficult to ask your waiter what his hourly wages are. And if the restaurant doesn’t meet the standards listed above, there are tear out cards in the back of the guide that you can leave with management to let them know where they can get help to do better.

Let Them Eat Cake... Or Not

Urban legend has it that Twinkies have a shelf life of decades: not only do they contain no actual food, but one ingredient is the same chemical used in embalming fluid. Even though this claim is probably bogus, all you Hostess junkies (and you know who you are) might want to start hoarding your supplies. In what has become a tried and true tactic of vulture capitalism, the private equity firm that bought out Hostess several years ago, and already forced it into bankruptcy once, is at it again. Wonder Bread, that miracle of unhealthy enzyme-enhanced sculptable softness beloved by kids, is in danger too.  Either the worker bees cave, or Hostess may shut down for good.

It seems that the debt-riddled owners (they have been predatory, many, and varied) sloppily forgot to eviscerate the union's pension plan last time around, and are heading back into court to force the Twinkie-transporting Teamsters and the factory food workers  to give up their contracts. Hostess executives from the Texas HQ went judge-shopping, and finally settled on a friendly New York bankruptcy court.

The judge with the reputation for coercing concessions from unions in bankruptcies to make the capitalist vultures happy and whole is one Robert D. Drain. I am not kidding. This guy is a living legend in the world of legal union-busting for fun and profit. Writes labor journalist Robert Vail:

Between 2005 and 2009 Drain presided over the infamous Delphi auto parts bankruptcy, in which the United Auto Workers saw its Delphi membership decimated.
More recently, he has been overseeing the case of the A&P supermarket chain. Just six weeks ago, about 30,000 grocery clerks and store employees represented by the United Food & Commercial Workers union were forced into broad concessions under circumstances just like those faced by the Hostess workers.

The workers are being asked to give up $659 million in wages and benefits over three years, in addition to relinquishing their pensions.  All for the good of the bottom line, of course. Management will apparently try to appeal to the employees' sense of junk food junkie grass-roots solidarity and job security. They might even stir up anti-union sentiment by threatening to raise the price of SnoBalls to $5 for the already-struggling indigent middle class. Divide and conquer -- works every time.

The union boss is not having it. He represents the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union. (Not to editorialize or anything, but the combo of Twinkies and cigs doesn't exactly inspire sympathy. On the other hand, it is pretty cruel and irresponsible for a company whose products contribute mightily to America's bloated health care costs to cut the medical benefits of its own employees. I call this the WWDBA-- the WalMart Way of Doing Business in America). Anyway, the union boss's name is Frank Hurt, and he is mightily pained:  

I find it deeply offensive and highly disingenuous for the company to claim that its financial woes are the result of its union contracts and pension and health benefits obligations. We contend that the company is in dire financial shape because of a string of failed business decisions made by a series of ineffective executives who have been running the company for the past decade.

For a junk food company, you'd think they'd know better than to indulge in that no-no of snacking: the double-dip. It previously filed for Chapter 11 in 2004, when it was known as Interstate Bakeries. The company also named a new chief executive, James R. Elsessor, who had taken over as CEO for Charles Sullivan,  replaced by Tony Alvarez. Confused yet? Mitt Romney, amazingly enough, is nowhere to be found in this labyrinth, but that doesn't mean he's not lurking nearby. Interstate Bakery's stock, which had been at one time $34/share, fell to $2.05/share as they declared bankruptcy.

At the time it was the longest bankruptcy in U.S. history. During that time, it fought a 2007 bid from Mexican baked goods giant Grupo Bimbo and ex-Bill Clinton vulture capitalist pal Ron Burkle of the Yucapaipa Companies. With the leadership of Craig Jung, the company emerged from bankruptcy as a private company on February 3, 2009.  The plan included a 50 percent equity stake by Ripplewood Holdings and lines/loans by General Electric Capital and GE Capital Markets, Silver Point Finance and Monarch Master Funding. Interstate's union workers made contract concessions in exchange for equity. Since declaring bankruptcy in 2009, Interstate closed nine of its 54 bakeries and more than 300 outlet stores. It also reduced its work force from 32,000 to 22,000 people and pulled out of some markets. (Wikipedia).

The next trial in New York's Southern District Bankruptcy court is scheduled for next month.

While you're waiting, do read the wonderful Charles Pierce's "In Defense of Twinkies", a masterpiece of junk food gourmandism and caloric history. An excerpt: 

   The Twinkie's formidable shelf life has aroused curiosity among bored undergraduates, the scientific community, and people who are, well, members of both. Most seriously, the Twinkie was subjected to a grim series of experiments eight years ago by a pair of young scientists at Rice University in Houston. They tested Twinkies for artificial intelligence (the cakes failed), electric resistivity (the filling bubbled a little, but that was all), and gravitational response, in which test a Twinkie was launched from a sixth-floor window, with the result that, upon contact with the sidewalk, only a small crack opened on the Twinkie's side. The pair also performed a solubility test, immersing a Twinkie in a glass of tap water. After 24 hours, they reported "the beginnings of a creamy ooze at the surface of the water."
     "After 48 hours in the water," they continued, "the Twinkie had not changed any more in size. However, the creamy filling somehow oozed out of the center and was collecting on the surface of the water. The water itself was a very dark brown. When we attempted to pour the water out of the cup, it quickly became apparent that the Twinkie had no structural integrity at all. It ... turned into a lump of goo in the sink."
     Pity. You should probably eat them if you're going to do anything with them. Or not. 

Okay, I think it's time for a Twinkie run. Watch out for vulture capitalists scarfing up the supplies in the snack aisles, and attack if you must. I won't tell if you don't.  

In Election Year, Poverty Swept Under the Rug

The politicians and the press, for the most part, will not cover poverty in this country. If you hold your breath waiting for that to happen, you're just going to die. -- Bob Herbert, former New York Times columnist, speaking at the Spotlight on Poverty Opportunity Forum.

Herbert is right. Although 88% of Americans believe that poverty should be an issue in the presidential campaign, media coverage of it is pretty much limited to whatever hateful outburst erupts from a GOP candidate on any given day. Newt Gingrich got plenty of press for suggesting poor kids work as janitors in their schools. Yet, major news organizations didn't fall all over themselves racing to a crumbling school in a poor neighborhood to actually talk to the kids to find out what they thought. As Bob Herbert points out, there have been no hard-hitting investigative pieces on faulty plumbing or wiring in public schools. Just a lot of "wow, can you believe what Newt just said?" from the so-called liberal media, who just can't get enough of wingnut psychopathology.

Today it was Mitt Romney's turn to generate some red meat buzz.  The MSM was faux-shocked when he allowed how he is not all that concerned about "very" poor people, because they're already protected by a social safety net. The point he was most likely trying to make is that you have to be literally in the gutter before qualifying for Medicaid, so where's the beef?  Or, more likely, Romney is not concerned about the poorest of the poor because they have a tendency not to vote. The corporate stenography slant: OMG, what will come out of this guy's mouth next? The numbers, the polls, the numbers! 

Since the Democrats have transformed themselves from being champions of the poor to groveling before Wall Street to get that all-important campaign cash, President Obama doesn't talk much about poverty at all.  He is more inclined to characterize the indigent as the "struggling middle class", not the nouveau-poor. The backdrops of his campaign speeches always include well-dressed, well-fed "folks" right out of sitcom suburbia. He did not involve himself in last summer's progressive caucus "Poverty Tour" with  Cornel West and Tavis Smiley.  When he does go to Detroit, it's to visit an auto plant, not an inner city neighborhood. When he causes massive traffic gridlock during his romps to Harlem, it's for canoodling with the slumming rich. Even the "cheap" seats at his recent Apollo gig went for $100.

(Actually, he did visit a ghetto last year. But it was Rio de Janeiro's notorious slum, as a photo-op during a "free" trade mission/family vacation with the wife and kids. You see, despite the fact that almost half of all American families are just a paycheck or two away from dire straits, poverty does not and cannot exist in the greatest superpower on earth).



The Obama Version of a Poverty Tour: A Foreign Country


It was not always thus. As recently as the 2008 post-election transition period, the Obama team dared use the "P" word.  There is a whole page still up devoted to the subject of poverty.  In those days, the president was a "lifelong advocate for the poor."  President-elect Obama wanted to prevent prison recidivism by providing substance abuse counseling for ex-cons. The reality? The War on Drugs is bigger than ever, minority youths are filling what are increasingly private prisons at record rates and black unemployment is well above 16%.  He promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011. Oops! He vowed to increase affordable housing for poor people. Instead, he cut neighborhood block grants and home heating assistance.  He did this without the Republicans even asking. He offered.

Meanwhile, nearly half of all children live on the brink of poverty and one-quarter actually do live below the poverty level. Data released by the Census Bureau last year put about one-third of Americans at the poverty level.

Stephen Gray of Time wrote about last summer's pre-Occupy poverty tour --

"Poverty and poor people are an afterthought" said (Tavis) Smiley. "For many folks in this country – politicians – they’re disposable, they’re invisible.” Poverty rarely stirs powerful political forces. There’s no major Washington lobby for the poor. There are few major Congressional figures with the stature of Ted Kennedy or Daniel Patrick Moynihan who’ve made poverty issues central to their political identities. The term “poverty” has taken on baggage, evoking in some images of the Cadillac-driving “welfare queen” introduced by Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign. Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a study questioning the plight of the nearly 44 million Americans whom the Census Bureau categorizes as impoverished, but also own appliances such as air conditioners and TVs.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was also a panelist at this week's poverty forum.  "In politics" he said, "I think there are two obvious coalitions. One is when the middle class allies with the folks below them, and one is when the middle allies with the folks above them."

Since neither political party identifies with the "lower folks" Occupy has served to fill the vacuum. Republicans and Democrats both love to pontificate about aspiring to that American Dream of consumerism, property ownership and moolah. The OWS movement has stepped up to talk about social injustice. It has brought the homeless and poor population to public attention, and that does not sit well with the political elites of either Wall Street-serving party. Mainstream coverage has carefully and dutifully not concentrated on the poverty aspect.The camps have been broken up by paramilitary thugs, and so the extreme poor and homeless are back where they came from. Out of sight, out of mind. 

(You can read the entire transcript of the poverty forum, as well as watch the video, here.)

Update: the president talked to struggling homeowners in Falls Church, Va today about how his plans for mortgage relief are better than Romney's. The median family income in Falls Church: $97,225. I rest my case.