Alternative Presidents Day

Happy Presidents Day, everybody. It's the dregs of yet another three-day weekend in the guise of a VIP un-birthday. Last month it was MLK Jr., celebrated a day late and five decades of civil rights struggles and anti-war activism short. Today, we are required to revel in the February Happies of Washington and Lincoln, owner and freer of slaves respectively. But I don't feel like giving respec', as Da Ali G used to say, even though Abe is one of my faves.

Instead, let us honor three people who are daring to run for the highest office in the land, although they probably don't have a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning or even coming close. That isn't really the point, though, is it?  In this age of Citizens United, money rules politics, and voters are rapidly becoming superfluous.  We are but the warm bodies expected to do our duty and pull the lever for one of the two vetted and pre-approved candidates of the oligarchic duopoly.  But last I checked, we still have our first amendment rights, even though privacy is dead and the right to assemble is pretty much at the whim of the individual municipality and police force.

What alternative candidates and third, fourth, fifth parties are achieving right now is raising public awareness of what is possible, and what we deserve and what abysmally low standards we have set for ourselves as a putative Democracy.  According to polling, most self-identified conservatives actually support progressive causes, such as single payer health care and taxing the rich and ending the wars. Yet, the two sides of the Money Uniparty no longer answer to the will of the electorate.

I am sure there are more outsider parties and people (I am leaving out the Libertarians and Communists, although I may come back to them in a later post), but here is today's trio of independent candidates (links go to their official websites) : Rocky Anderson of the American Justice Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party, and Jerry White of the Socialist Equality Party.

Jerry White

Jill Stein

Rocky Anderson

First, Rocky -- he has the biggest organization of any declared leftist independent thus far.  Former three-term mayor of Salt Lake City, Anderson is an unlikely progressive from a traditional rock-solid conservative state. He ranks as one of the strongest environmentalists who ever held public office.  Unlike the corporatist deficit hawk DINO Barack Obama, Anderson embraced the ideals of Occupy before there even was an Occupy. From a profile of him in The Guardian:

His agenda is a familiar one on the left. Broadly speaking, he wants to break the hold of corrupting corporate influence on the two main parties and give a voice to ordinary working people. It also chimes with the general thrust of the Occupy movement, even though the latter has steered clear of engagement with electoral politics.

"The more time has gone on, the more it has become clear that we're not going see change in this country with these two parties," he says. "There are lots of good individuals in the Democratic party, [but] without Democrats voting the way they did in Congress, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. We wouldn't have suffered as a nation because of these Bush tax cuts.

"Obama received more money from Wall Street than any presidential candidate ever. And they got a great return on their investment."

This would represent the first attempt to apply the principles of the Occupy movement within the electoral area. Anderson points out discussions about launching the party preceded the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street. But while there are no organisational links, he says there is plenty of common ground. "There is clearly a convergence of interests regarding the concerns we have and the concerns of Occupy Wall Street. There's little I've heard from the Occupy movement that I would disagree with and I think there's little we support that they would disagree with."

Anderson thinks Obama's neopopulism is fraudulent. "How does he, with a straight face, talk about getting jobs back to the U.S. without even mentioning free trade agreements and the need to significantly renegotiate those agreements to put them in better balance in terms of worker rights and environmental protections?" (Anderson has a point -- everybody has conveniently forgotten that textile jobs are headed to South Korean factories peopled by North Korean guest slaves, and that Colombian farmers are still getting beaten up and worse by thugs in the employ of multinational corporations.)

Next up: Jill Stein is a physician from Massachusetts and this election cycle's Green Party candidate. An avid Occupy supporter, she is running on a platform for a "Green New Deal" --

the objective of which would be to employ "every American willing and able to work" to address "climate change...[and the] converging water, soil, fisheries, forest, and fossil fuel crises" by working towards "sustainable energy, transportation and production infrastructure: clean renewable energy generation, energy efficiency, intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, “complete streets” that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing of the goods needed to support this sustainable economy". The initial cost of the Green New Deal would be funded by various mechanisms, including "taxing Wall Street speculation, off shore tax havens, millionaires and multimillion dollar estates" as well as a 30% reduction in the U.S. military budget.

The four points of the Stein Green New Deal are the right to a job at a living wage; the transition to a sustainable, green economy; a financial sector serving Americans; and citizen empowerment. Sounds eminently logical and simple and refreshingly socialistic.

Which brings us to our third candidate and party, which you may not be as familiar with, although the principles of all three overlap.  The Socialist Equality platform stresses a strong labor movement, as originally advocated by Karl Marx, and is unabashedly anti-capitalist. If nothing else, it should demonstrate to the audiences of Romney and his ilk that Barack Obama is about as far right to socialism as it's possible to get without plummeting off a cliff.

White also ran on the Socialist Equality ticket in 2008 against Obama and McCain. A labor journalist, he is a long-time union organizer and strong proponent of the Auto Workers movement in Michigan. He is not at all impressed with Obama's auto industry bailout, which resulted in a draconian reduction in wages and benefits and record profits for the industry.  Here is what he has to say about Obama's playing of the populist card for purposes of his own re-election:

Yet under his watch, not a single banker, hedge fund manager or financial regulator responsible for the economic catastrophe has been prosecuted, let alone convicted. On the contrary, the president has handed them the keys to the national treasury and tailored his policies to enable them to continue their speculative activities and make more money than ever.

The fury of the state has been reserved for those who have sought to protest against the plundering of society by the financial elite and the resulting growth of poverty, unemployment and inequality. They, for the most part student youth, have been assaulted by baton-wielding police in riot gear, packing rubber bullets and using pepper spray. The protesters have been arrested in the thousands. Obama, with his silence, has signaled his support for these attacks, carried out for the most part by Democratic mayors.

The SEP platform includes an international working class movement (as opposed to one limited to the United States) and public ownership of banks and other institutions. Writes White: "There are some who say this is unrealistic. But what can be more unrealistic than maintaining a system that perpetuates the wealth of the few at the expense of the many? Is it more realistic to tell workers that they must accept a 50 percent wage cut to keep their jobs, or to tell the elderly that they must go without medical care, or to tell the young that they must go without an education?"

On this Presidents Day, depressed as you may be by the corrupt status quo, rejoice that there are people who refuse to lie down and take it. Activism lives. The left is resurging because there is no other choice. Rumors of the demise of the Occupy movement are grossly exaggerated. We don't have to settle for Rombama or Bamtorum. Go ahead. Spoil their day.

Rick Transit Gloria Mundi



Unintelligent Design

 Try as I might, I have been unable to escape the voice and visage of Rick Santorum, the overgrown Boy Scout engaged in a futile struggle to contain the psychosis bubbling just beneath the surface of his prim sweater vest. The guy even has his name creepily embroidered on his trademark couture. Why? Does he have parochial school flashbacks of getting lost after being left off at the wrong bus stop? I wouldn't be surprised if he had his phone number Sharpie-marked on an Opus Dei sackcloth undershirt too.

Just when we thought the Republican freak show had reached its apogee with Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum has burst forth in all his glory, fire and brimstone, spiked garter belts and chains. Even his own daughter inadvertently admits that he is demented. "So, here we go", she blogged last summer on Backstage with the Santorums. "We are out of the gates and into the race … and what a crazy journey it will be!"

Actually, Daddy did not so much decide to run for president, as he was called by God. In the same blog entry, Elizabeth Santorum writes that it took "months of discernment" for "Our Father", as she calls him, to announce. Not discussions with the family, nor talks with think tanks and pollsters. Discernment is a Catholic theological term, a form of soul-searching and meditation so intense that one can reach the point of literal arousal by the Holy Spirit. It goes way beyond prayer. It's what happens when a religious person is "called" by God to a vocation as a priest or nun. I think it is fairly obvious that Rick Santorum is not so much running for public office as he is on a one-man crusade to impose his medievalist oddball fantasies on an unsuspecting body politic.

Direct from the Eldest Daughter of the Santorum Cult/Clan:

Yesterday was a big day in the Santorum household. After long months of discernment, my father has decided to run for president of the United States of America. This morning, as I drove my sister Sarah Maria to school, she looked over at me and said, “Wow. I think I’m still absorbing how important yesterday was!” I had to agree.  
So, I’ll give a recap of yesterdays “behind the scenes” excitement. My Dad spent the morning doing radio and television interviews, while my Mom and I got all six of my siblings ready to go. As you can imagine, getting everyone ready is never an easy task. From “Oh no, did you pack the hairbrush?” to “Patrick, those had better not be grass stains on your khakis,” let’s just say that we averted several minor crises. Bella is often the easiest to get ready because she always looks adorable in whatever she’s wearing. Her sweet smile and peaceful demeanor are a constant source of joy for our family.   

What a typical family, right down to the authentic dialogue, huh? But I have one quibble. Elizabeth says she drove her younger sister to school. Aren't the Santorum spawn all supposed to be home-schooled by the parents? At least, that is what Dad brags about. Or are the kids driven around the block a few times before they are dropped right back at Home School?  Is Home School the name of an elite private academy nestled amidst the Homeland Security complex in Northern Virginia, where the Santorums have a home and initially got Pennsylvania state funding for their Home School? I emailed the campaign to ask, but they have not yet replied. Do I discern a brush-off?

 (The Santorum sons did go to an all-boys Catholic school in Washington, DC for a time -- see above Opus Dei link. The place was so insulated that rumor had it that secular mothers put condoms in their son's Christmas stockings.)

The Ricktus (he has the preternatural grin of a surprised corpse) was all over the TV this morning, rantsoruming about Obama's "phony ideology." Unfortunately, he is not complaining about  presidential corporatism or crony capitalism or even the usual straw-man socialism, because Rick unabashedly adores the One Percent God. Monuments and statues are erected in honor of the titans of industry and finance, says Rick, who probably missed the chapters on heresy and idol worship in Catechism Class. It is the Gospel of Inequality Rulz!

He also seems to take the story of Adam and Eve quite literally. He sunk even deeper into his own primordial ooze when he told one TV interviewer that Obama is wrong to put the fate of the earth before Man, who shall have dominion over it:

"I wasn't suggesting the president's not a Christian. I accept the fact the president's a Christian. I just said that when you have a world view that elevates the world above man, and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth by things that are frankly just not scientifically proven, like for example the politicization of the whole global warming debate, I mean this is just all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government. This is not questioning the president's beliefs in Christianity. I'm talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth, and have dominion on it, and be good stewards of it."

The anti-Environmental Protection Agency crowd must have loved this. The checks from the polluting Koch Brothers are in the mail even as we speak.

Rick, along with alcoholic Arizona Governor Jan Drinkwine Brewer, also seems to have a severed head fetish. In his Saturday column, New York Times writer Charles Blow recounts how Santorum has actually foretold the Second Coming of the French Revolution:

Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading religious people into oppression and even beheadings. I kid you not. Santorum said: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”

Obama as Robespierre. Ohhh-kay. Somebody needs to stage an intervention. Or a casting call for The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade!

Cutting the Crap

Have you heard about the special face armor that Chicago police will be wearing this spring at the G-8/NATO summits? Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is afraid that Occupiers will fight back against oligarchic bullshit by hurling some shit of their own. They may even retaliate against pepper spray attacks by splashing urine into the faces of the fuzz! --

Fraternal Order of Police President Mike Shields demanded the new shields to prevent officers from being blinded by bags of urine and feces thrown at them by “anarchists” and other hard-core protesters....

“We have 9,500 patrol officers. Every one of them needs a new shield because every one of them has the old one and it’s completely ineffective. It’s a very thin plexi-glass. If you press on it with your thumb, it would crack. If you threw a rock at it, it will pop off. Water can seep right through. Any liquid can seep right through,” Shields said.

“Rioters known to attend NATO and G-8 meetings have been known to throw bags of urine and bags of feces at police. Chicago Police officers need a shield that can adapt to what is being thrown at them.”

Wow. It seems we just cannot escape from nightmare scenarios of flying feces. Rick "Google-It" Santorum's SuperPac is running an ad in which Mitt Romney shoots brown stuff from a rifle at the poor hapless sweater-vested Rick. It is supposed to be mud, but I don't buy it. It looks suspiciously like projectile doggie doo to me, the kind that poor Seamus suffered from during his nightmare ride on the top of the Romney hellwagon. You decide -- check it out here.

If anybody needs protection from all the crap, it's us -- you know, the regular people. We're the ones who need face shields, brain armor against all the propaganda. The effluent flies fast and furious, it clogs up the toilet of political discourse, and it tends to stick. There is just way too much of it to cut through every single day, but let's give it a try anyway.

First of all is the fiasco of fraudclosure fecklessness. It leaked out today that this is indeed just one more bailout for the banks, and that the penalties they will pay, such as they are, in reality will be coming from taxpayers and investors. This is solidly crappy. Since when is it legal for a rapist to force his victim to serve his sentence?  Or say that you go to court, you win a judgment, but the loser is then allowed to freeze your bank account instead of the other way around? That is pretty much what the newest bailout does. Read more about it here and here. (H/T to readers Neil and Denis).

Oh, and that bipartishit payroll tax holiday stinks too. Instead of taxing the rich to help the poor middle class as Obama pretended to promise, they'll be taxing the middle class to throw a crumb to the middle class. The length of time you can collect unemployment benefits will be reduced. Applicants may have to undergo drug testing, even though statistics show that only about 2% of the newly jobless have a substance abuse problem. (You need to feel guilt-ridden and demonized to collect on an insurance policy that you paid into, because this way, the lie that it's an "entitlement" is more easily swallowed by voters. Divide and conquer!) In certain locales, you will be required to work for no pay in order to collect on your own insurance. Federal employees will be forced to contribute more to their pension plans. (another example of divide and conquer: placate the red-state masses by making the unions pay!)  Congress will actually auction off the public airwaves to the highest bidders. In exchange for partially funding the FICA holiday,  the telecoms may well be given carte blance to screw us into perpetuity, via rate hikes and monopolies. Privatization continues apace.

But what, inquiring minds want to know, about the Buffett Rule?  You know, the Rule that Obama has made the centerpiece of his An America Built to Last re-election campaign. This latest hurling of jingoistic bullshit says that everybody should have a fair shot, and do their fair share. The Rule is personified by Warren Buffett's secretary, who pays a higher effective tax rate than her billionaire boss. Obama was so sincere about it that he even used her as a prop in the First Lady's box during the State of the Union speech.

Well, not so fast. It turns out that the Buffett Rule is merely an aspirational thing. Obama did not even include it in his own budget! From Annie Lowrey of the New York Times:

But the White House says it is a “guideline,” rather than a legislative initiative. And it says it prefers not to establish the Buffett Rule without a broader overhaul of the tax code, though it would support a Congressional effort to carry it out alone.

“This is the guiding principle of tax reform,” said Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council. “To some degree, it’s a specific policy, where we set a floor, a minimum rate. And to some degree, it is a statement of principle of how you would like to design the tax system.”

So, in effect, Obama punted it over to the same Congress which he purports to disdain because of its chronic gridlock. This is pure unadulterated presidential bullshit, and I am surprised this story is not getting more outraged play. Timothy Geithner, meanwhile, says an overhaul of the corporate tax code will take "years." 

One more calling out of crap and I'm done. Remember how Team Obama defended their slinking into SuperPac territory this week by saying the Republicans are outpacing them in campaign money? The January results are in, and Obama raked in a record $29.1 million. In only one month. Romney has yet to post his figures, but they are expected to be much less. And this does not, of course, take into account the millions the president is raising during a two-day marathon fundraiser on the West Coast, nor the back-to-back Wall Street cash orgies planned on March 1. Obama, apparently, is playing the age card as part of his plea to wealthy donors:

Obama was concluding a three-day swing of California and Washington that included eight fundraisers, where he was expected to raise more than $8 million.
Obama repeatedly tells his audiences that this election will be more difficult.
"And that's not going to be easy because, first of all, I'm older and I'm grayer," he told about 70 high-dollar contributors in San Francisco on Thursday night.

It's nice to know that Obama is an equal opportunity bullshit artist, anyway. Gullibility knows no class boundaries.

Holder & Donovan Open Comedy Act in Vegas

The editorial in yesterday's Las Vegas Sun might have been titled "Moving Forward, Stabbing You in the Backward". Allegedly co-written by Attorney General Eric Holder and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, it's a cringe-worthy, craven apologia shamelessly directed at residents of one of the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

You have to read it to believe it.  I'm posting a somewhat condensed version, with translation (you can peruse the whole slimy thing here. And the daffy duo also crossposted their self-parody at the Obama-friendly Daily Kos for the even greater convenience of the koolaid-bloated masses) --

Too often, real progress in Washington can be stymied by bureaucratic red tape, turf fights, or conflicts between federal and state authorities. Unfortunately, it has become a place where partisan deadlock and political games can threaten to crowd out substantive debate.
In times of crisis – when people’s livelihoods are in jeopardy and families are losing their homes to foreclosure – they deserve better than intransigent bureaucracy. They need and deserve a government that actually solves problems.
This past week, the Obama Administration and a bipartisan coalition of 49 state attorneys general demonstrated what can be accomplished when people put aside turf wars and focus on what they can do to make things better. By working closely with one another across federal agencies, state boundaries, and party lines, we reached a historic mortgage servicing settlement on behalf of American homeowners.

(Translation: We have been putting pressure on a few recalcitrant Attorneys General for well over a year now, trying to get them to cave to a sweetheart deal letting the banksters off the hook. We are absolutely blaming the AGs for their altruistic foolishness -- and we are also accusing them of allowing even more homeowners to be foreclosed on while they diddled about trying to do the right thing instead of the expedient thing. We finally co-opted them through our sheer brute force. We worked closely with them by getting right in their faces. We are disdainfully reducing their bravery in the face of an overreaching federal government to a political "turf war.")

The need for a settlement on this scale has long been clear. Some five years after the housing bubble burst, America continues to pay a steep price. Lenders sold loans to people who couldn’t afford them and packaged mortgages to make profits that turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. Their actions hurt millions of families who did the right thing, but still lost their houses or saw their home prices drop. And, unfortunately, as our extensive investigations found, abuses continued long after consumers bought their homes.

(Translation: we were well aware this whole time of massive fraud and conspiracy. Even though our "extensive investigations" uncovered abuses, we did nothing. How unfortunate. We are not mentioning in this editorial that the crimes continue to this very day. Because we are corrupt, do-nothing political hacks. We are also throwing minorities under the bus by putting equal blame on some of the victims who were snookered into signing fraudulent documents. They rose above their station by buying into our American Dream malarkey. Even though many are uneducated and barely literate, we brazenly claim that they knowingly bit off more than they could chew. We continue to insinuate that poor black and brown people hurt the "responsible" homeowners just as much as the mega-banks did.)

In response to thousands of mortgage servicing complaints fielded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), state attorneys general, and banking regulators across the country, HUD initiated a large-scale review of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) 10 largest servicers in the summer of 2010. Devoting some 6,000 hours to reviewing servicing files for thousands of FHA-insured loans, the scope of this review soon broadened to encompass a long list of mortgage servicing issues, including lost paperwork, long delays, and missed deadlines for loan modifications. The Justice Department’s U.S. Trustees Program reviewed more than 37,000 bankruptcy claims and motions filed by the top five servicers. And HUD’s Office of the Inspector General, the Justice Department, and state authorities discovered that the country’s five largest loan servicers routinely signed foreclosure-related documents without knowing whether the facts they contained were correct.

Some have asked why we don’t address these actions by taking the banks to court. But rather than pursuing hundreds of lawsuits with varying degrees of success, the goal of this settlement has been to benefit struggling homeowners and to do so now – not sometime in the future, when it may be too late to help many families. 

(Translation: our chutzpah knows no bounds. We started this huge investigation a year and a half ago, spent 6000 hours reviewing files, looked at 37,000 pieces of paper filed by mortgage servicers and banks. We chose not to prosecute, because the success would only have been "varied". So we decided to give up while we were ahead, sweep the whole thing under the rug, and throw a few pennies at the victims before they die and it's too late.  Why we are not being investigated ourselves for legal malpractice and dereliction of duty is beyond the scope of this editorial and may be chalked up to our unbridled arrogance.) 

This settlement also forces banks to clean up their acts – and to fix the problems covered during our investigations – by committing them to major reforms in terms of how they service mortgage loans. This is significant, given that these banks service nearly 2 out of every 3 mortgages. And these new customer service standards are in keeping with the Homeowners Bill of Rights recently announced by President Obama – a single, straightforward set of commonsense rules that families can count on, requiring lenders and servicers to honor a long list of rights for those facing foreclosure.

 (Translation: We choose to call the crimes of the banksters "problems" in order to further absolve them and us, their willing and able co-conspirators and accessories during and after the fact. Slapping them on the wrist will scare the bejesus out of them and make them honest. They need a dose of common sense, not a jail term.)

 While this historic settlement isn’t designed to address all the issues of the housing crisis, it will offer significant help to those who suffered the most harm. Alongside the broad-based refinancing plan President Obama announced to help homeowners, it provides a path toward stability for our housing market and our broader economy. And, by ensuring that banks and mortgage servicers fulfill their essential obligations – and taking major steps to hold these institutions accountable – it proves that we can make real progress, and achieve extraordinary results, when we work together.

(Translation: A path toward stability for our housing market and our broader economy is simply doublespeak for more profits for the banks and a surge in their stock prices. This travesty proves that not only can they get away with murder, they can always count on us, their 'umble servants, to help them and cover up for them as they continue their stranglehold on the entire planet. They own us lock, stock and barrel; they pay us and keep us exactly where they can see us.)

In a related development sure to be swept under the rug as soon as the Obama Administration can make them an offer they can't refuse, San Francisco officials discovered that of the 400 foreclosures they audited recently, nearly all of them were fraudulent at worst, suspicious at best. The intrepid Gretchen Morgenson broke the story in today's New York Times. You can read it here. 

Donovan & Holder Share a Conspiratorial Chuckle At Our Expense

Bootlicking for Dollars

Enough with the Robin Hood shtick he's been forced to perform in Washington lately, co-opting the language of Occupy and presenting a lukewarm budget that pretends to take a little from the rich to give even less to the poor. It's time for President Obama to devote some attention to his neglected day job: crisscrossing the country in Air Force One to mingle with the fabulously wealthy at multimillion-dollar fundraisers, and do some old-fashioned political wheeling, dealing, and groveling.


Forget about the phony baloney nonsense of how Populist Obama is siding with the middle class against the rich. His real business is playing Silicon Valley off the movie industry, doing the bidding of Wall Street in private as he chides it in public, talking the 99% talk while walking the 1% walk.


Today he's off to Hollywood to placate pouty entertainment plutocrats like Senator-turned-lobbyist Christopher Dodd, who vowed last month to cut off the Obama cash because of the president's failure to support SOPA and PIPA.  If you were hoping to catch TV footage of the president crooning with the stars in the next few days, you're out of luck. All the events will be private, unless a millionaire Occupier manages to sneak in and get video.


And now that the paltry foreclosure fraud settlement is apparently a done deal, and Campaign Director Jim Messina has met with banksters to assure them that Obama has no beef with them, the president will go to four back-to-back Wall Street fundraisers in New York on March 1.  This is where it gets interesting.


It turns out that one of the $35,800-a-plate soirees will be hosted by regular Obama bundler Ralph Schlosstein, a hedge fund manager who is among a whole slew of financial overlords going public with opposition to the looming Volcker Rule. He is also among the money men whom Messina soothed last week, promising that the president will not be demonizing Wall Street in campaign speeches.


The Rule, which is set to go into effect in July, will ban proprietary trading by banks -- in other words, it will prevent them from trading with their own money rather than for clients. A centerpiece of the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, it says that banks should not make risky wagers while the government guarantees their deposits. It's designed to prevent the kind of bubble which caused the Crash of 2008. Or the kind of unpunished theft allegedly committed by former Senator and Obama Bundler Jon Corzine. But since these kinds of bets are so lucrative for banks, they are howling at the prospect of their profits being reduced in the interest of honesty, fairness and the public good.


Regulatory agencies only have four months to further tweak the Volcker Rule here and there and everywhere. They are being beset from all sides as they decide to either water down an already watered-down bill, or stand firm against the banks. From the L.A. Times:

The passion on both sides of the issue — and the big money that is at stake — are evident in the 14,490 public comments that the SEC had received and posted on its website as of Tuesday. Thousands of those were from private individuals expressing their support for cracking down on Wall Street's risky trading practices.

For banks, the debate comes at a particularly sensitive moment. The last few months have been filled with news of layoffs and pay cuts on Wall Street as banks grapple with a raft of newly proposed regulations and continued economic turmoil in Europe.

The proposed Volcker rule puts a number of new limitations on the financial industry. Big banks would be able to own only small stakes in private equity and hedge funds and they would have to do away with any trading desks that trade solely for the profit of the bank.

Schlosstein has gone on TV to signal publicly what he will no doubt be whispering privately in the presidential ear as he tantalizingly waves his bundle of cash. 

"Its (the Volcker Rule's) intent is to reduce risk in commercial banking and investment banking,” Schlosstein said today (2/14) in a Bloomberg Television interview with Betty Liu. “But the line between proprietary trading and market-making is almost impossible to draw. You wind up with this incredibly complex regulation with incredibly complex enforcement, all of which will really increase costs for investors and for companies in the U.S.,” Schlosstein said. (waaaaah)

The United States Chamber of Commerce has also bundled up corporations to stand in solidarity with Wall Street to protest the Volcker Rule. It may have unintended consequences for profit-hoarding "job creators", they fear. Corporations are people, my friend, etc.

But others, such as pension fund managers, individual citizens and even a few bankers, say the Rule -- even in its current un-tweaked, pre-Schlosstein influenced state -- does not go nearly far enough in reining in the big banks. It is one more weak, and delayed, and meagerly-funded part of the already limp Dodd-Frank financial "reform" bill (yeah, the same Dodd to whom Obama must also now kowtow for even more cash). One former banker who disagrees with Obama's bundler buddy is:

John S. Reed, who ran Citigroup from 1984 to 2000 and has been an outspoken proponent of financial reform, cited the recent cases of MF Global and UBS in his comment letter to make his case for tougher regulation, writing, "When a firm is focused on market gain, it will employ every available device to achieve those gains -- including taking advantage of clients and putting the firm at risk."

In his own way, Reed was a victim of the deregulatory environment on Wall Street that the Volcker rule aims to rein in. He was ousted soon after Citigroup was created in the wake of the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, allowing banking, securities and insurance firms to merge.

(See Reed's suggestions for improvement at the above link).


And this from Occupy the SEC, via Firedoglake.


Space is Limited, but the 1% Possibilities Are Endless 



Twisted Logic



Happy Valentines Day from Your Pretzel President (graphic by Kat Garcia)

I thought I had heard all the reasons why President Obama is being forced at gunpoint to embrace the Supreme Court Citizens United decision in order to fight nasty Republican dirt with clean Democratic dirt. But how wrong I was. The justifications for influence peddling and money-grubbing by the Obama re-election campaign are flying fast and furious.  George Bush choked on a pretzel; Barack Obama and his handlers are twisting themselves into one. It's the warm, soft, malleable kind that vendors sell on the street corners in winter.
 
Not only will Priorities USA  now accept unlimited cash for negative ads -- but Obama has given the go-ahead for members of his own cabinet to shill for him at SuperPac fundraisers. It is all perfectly legal, as long as they don't blatantly ask for money during their pay-to-play availabilities with wealthy lobbyists and CEOs. For example, when Energy Secretary Stephen Chu gives a speech in front of a group of oil tycoons about deepwater drilling safety at a SuperPac fund-raising event, he won't say a single word about campaign donations. This logic runs in tandem with the reasoning that it's okay for lobbyists to bundle campaign cash for the president as long as they are not registered lobbyists.


Chu and at least three other Cabinet officials are openly champing at the bit to get into the fund-raising that is not fund-raising sweepstakes. The reason?  They already have histories of being champion political bundlers. It might even be safe to say they got their jobs in large part because of the wads of cash they raised for their boss in his first campaign.


According to the Center for Public Integrity's  iWatch News, one such expert bundler is Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a fellow Chicago pol from the old days, who is anxiously awaiting invitations to speaking gigs. And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is an enthusiastic natural, having raised over $13 million for his own Senate campaign. Then there are U.S. Trade Rep Ron Kirk and the hundred grand he bundled for Obama's first campaign, and Chu, who even before the SuperPac decision, has "mingled" among donors at various political soirees.


That does it for the Cabinet officials -- so far. According to CPI, Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta will not be shilling for campaign cash, nor will Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and former bundler Susan Rice, who is now UN ambassador.


Politico is running a pretty hilarious piece today on the various criticisms and rationales from both the left and the right about the Obama cave on anonymous fundraising. The funniest conservative gripe comes from David Bossie, chairman of the Koch Brothers' astroturfing Americans for Prosperity. He so hates the Obama hypocrisy of deploring Citizens United only to then start PrioritiesUSA that he has produced a video funded by SuperPac money to condemn SuperPac money.


Besides the critics, there are also defenders from both the left and the right. Former Republican Congressman Philip English quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in defending Obama: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines", adding:

By robustly trolling for big money to fund the inevitable attack ads, the Obama campaign has demonstrated a predictable large-mindedness, free of hobgoblins. The only venue in which anyone should be shocked by this is Rick’s Place in Casablanca. One has to wonder - if a Republican incumbent displayed such ambidexterity, would the media be so placid?

Hmm. If I were more cynical, I'd say English is trolling for a team of rivals-type appointment in Obama's second term.


Then there are the usual Democratic apologists twisting themselves into knots:

We may not like the rules, but we didn't choose them. So as Democrats fight for campaign finance reform - which Republicans have repeatedly blocked - we will play by the rules as they are, not as we wish they were. -- Bill Burton, founder of Priorities USA.


Playing by the rules as they exist, the same rules that apply to everyone else, while they work to change those rules for everyone, is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the Republican expectation that Democrats hold themselves to a stricter standard than their opponent, when it was Republicans who stopped those standards from being put in place. -- Rodell Molineau, president of American Bridge 21st Century.


Unsurprisingly, the same Republicans who falsely claim the president is an appeaser expect him to unilaterally disarm his campaign. Thankfully he is too smart for that. President Obama knows that to change elections you have to win elections. -- Christine Pelosi, Democratic activist and daughter of Minority Leader Nancy.


There is no hypocrisy in working to change a system while following its rules as long as they are in place. In politics, acting like you are in a perfect system while your enemies kill you amounts to stupidity not idealism. The hypocrisy here is among those who are criticizing Obama for doing what they do. Also, I think this is a non-issue with Americans in general. For them, the dysfunction of the entire political system is the issue. -- Theda Skocpol, Harvard professor.


Obama's decision to tacitly support the super PAC set up to benefit him was just an acknowledgment of reality. With potentially hundreds of millions flowing to its anti-Obama counterparts, the president really had no choice but to act.
Don't think that this decision will drive a single vote away from Obama in the fall, however. In 2008, remember, Obama spurned public financing after promising he would accept it, and no one cared - except for John McCain, who sputtered around impotently about what an outrage it supposedly was. All of this is inside baseball that doesn't impact the behavior of real voters, who cynically and correctly assume that candidates are going to raise as much as they can no matter how they do it. Obama made the right decision. -- Garry South, Democratic consultant.


If we are ever going to right this political ship it will be the Democrats who do it not the McConnells and Boehners. There is no point of acting like lambs to the slaughter, and sacrificing the presidency and seats in Congress, if our ultimate goal is to have the votes to change the system. Obama made the only call possible. --  Peter Fenn, Democratic media consultant.

Speaking of hilarity, I got an amusing email the other day from the Obama campaign. It gives instructions on how to slap down mean talk about the prez from my redneck friends and relatives. The Empire Strikes Back it is not, but there is more than a hint of Homeland Security-lite in what they are asking "supporters like me" to do. If I hear something, I should say something. There are even downloadable talking points for Obamabots to stash in their arsenals. Sign up now to be a worker bee for the Ministry of Truth Truth Team. Campaign operative Stephanie Cutter writes:

Comunicating about the President's record -- and that of our opponents -- is what I do full-time. But people don't just want to hear from campaign statements or ads -- they want to hear from the family and friends they trust.

The President needs folks on board to roll up their sleeves, stand with him, and get the truth out all over the country.

So the next time you hear Mitt Romney accusing the President of "crony capitalism" or someone asking, "What has President Obama really accomplished?" you'll know what to do.

Stephanie has no idea what I am capable of doing. For one thing, most of my conservative family members and friends already despise Romney and the crew of wingnuts. And defending Obama against crony capitalism charges? Jeffrey Immelt, Timmy Geithner, Larry Summers, to name just a few.


Happy Valentines Day, fellow Sardonickists!

Quoth McRaven: "Give Me More"

The New York Times has a pretty stunning lead article today on how the admiral in charge of the elite and secret Special Ops wants carte blanche to bypass normal command channels and conduct his own War on Terror, in the interest of saving time and trouble. It seems as though he wants to be named Global Warlord and have a big say in dictating foreign policy from the battlefield of a shadow world war.

Reading between the lines of the article, it's obvious that both Admiral William H. McRaven and the Obama Administration are the likely sources. The usual leakers are not identified because they are "not authorized to speak". Or they are too coy to talk, and The Times is the willing stenographer. So we are left wondering whether McRaven is a loose cannon attempting a soft military coup against an inept executive branch, or whether this is a joint effort at a trial balloon to gauge public reaction before an end run around the State Department and Congress. The Times makes it clear that the White House is fully aware that McRaven is lobbying for more power.  President Obama, of course, is known to be a huge fan of McRaven, of the Special Ops, and the bin Laden-killing Navy SEALs -- who are now starring in their own commercial Hollywood movie. They're playing themselves in a documentary disguised as a thriller. It's a recruiting tool! It's entertainment for the masses! It's propaganda to feed our fear and make us safe!

From  today's article:

.... McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command, is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy. The plan would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their war-fighting equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.

It would also allow the Special Operations forces to expand their presence in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Administration, military and Congressional officials say that the Special Operations Command has embarked on a quiet lobbying campaign to push through the initiative. Pentagon and administration officials note that while the Special Operations Command is certain to see a growth in its budget and personnel when the new Defense Department spending plan is released Monday — in contrast to many other parts of the military that are being cut — no decisions have been made on whether to expand Admiral McRaven’s authorities.

The article contains just enough doublespeak to confuse us. On the one hand, McRaven is quoted as saying while he is not really interested in running the global war on terror, he doesn't want to go through normal Pentagon channels in deciding where troops are to be deployed, or how many are to be deployed -- because sometimes there just isn't enough time to be deliberate and cautious. So if he isn't running the shadow wars, who will be?  Is it because he doesn't want to bother Barry with a 3 a.m. phone call? Is it to give Barry plausible deniability?  This is pretty unbelievable stuff.

McRaven already runs the elite military within the military. It is unaccountable to the public, of course. And now it wants to be unaccountable even to the brass, or (disingenuously) tothe executive branch. Forget about Congress. The full extent of his activities is already been deep in the shadows. According to Nick Turso of Counterpunch, Special Ops represent an industrial scale killing machine:

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once “special” for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.
That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows. Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from (McRaven predecessor Admiral Eric) Olson: “I am convinced that the forces… are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer.”

On any given day, writes Turso, Special Ops are deployed in at least 70 countries (and likely about 120) throughout the world -- theoretically, by invitation only from the host country. Or whatever goon purports to be acting in behalf of the host country.  Read Turso's whole article. It's an eye-opener.

The latest gimmick in that "well-honed public relations campaign to project their superhuman image" is the new commercial Hollywood movie about the SEALs that I mentioned earlier. Act of Valor is scheduled to open in 3000 theaters nationwide next week, and it has already generated controversy. It was originally meant to be a  Pentagon  recruiting tool, but the scenes were so exciting and action-packed that the producers decided to go commercial and make a buck.

A retired army lieutenant general gave Admiral McRaven a dressing down last week for approving the  chest-thumping cinematic piece of propaganda, warning it might be used as a training tool for enemies. Others accused the admiral of using it as a tool to get more funding from Congress.

The movie reveals the faces of the SEALs -- but not to worry: 

At the New York premiere, held at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, the Navy seemed to be trying to find the right balance between glitz and discretion. Most of the Seals arrived in limousines, dressed in their dress blues. There were canapes and champagne served at the reception afterward. Squads of paparazzi and press handlers swarmed through the crowd.

But when the Seals took the stage for a question-answer session after the screening, introduced by their ranks and first names only, a Navy public affairs officer waived off any questions from the audience and would not allow the Seals to talk to a reporter.

This phony coyness is also very much the defacto policy of the Obama Administration's secret and exquisitely executed assassination program. The president pretty much destroyed the top secret nature of his kill list at an internet "Hangout with the President" PR appearance last week, when he bragged about the precise precision of his drone strikes. But he is still fighting a Freedom of Information request by the ACLU and others about the precise nature of the program.

JSOC, which has even been implicated in torture in the so-called black site prisons, has been described as Obama's own private army: a unique hybrid of killing machine and spy agency. Marc Ambinder, in a Wired magazine interview, describes the Constitutional end-run logistics:

There are legal restrictions on what the CIA can do in terms of covert operations. There has to be a finding, the president has to notify at least the “Gang of Eight” [leaders of the intelligence oversight committees] in Congress. JSOC doesn’t have to do any of that. There is very little accountability for their actions. What’s weird is that many in congress who’d be very sensitive to CIA operations almost treat JSOC as an entity that doesn’t have to submit to oversight. It’s almost like this is the president’s private army, we’ll let the president do what he needs to do. As long as you don’t get in trouble, we’re not gonna ask too many questions.

The American public has not displayed too much curiosity about the foreign policy being conducted in our name, either. We apparently do not care. A recent poll revealed the vast majority of us are perfectly content to let Gitmo remain open forever, and have no problem with drone strikes against alleged militants in foreign countries. Even if they are American citizens.

And don't look for Obama to even consider firing Admiral McRaven for insubordination or overreach. This is no Truman/MacArthur scenario, at least not yet. These men belong to a mutual admiration society,  McRaven having lauded the president for being the "smartest guy in the room", and in turn being awarded a prized seat in the First Lady's box at the State of the Union address. I guess the only consolation we have is that the "Protester" beat out the Admiral as Time's Person of the Year. (Read McRaven's magazine profile here.)

Admiral McRaven (first from left) at State of the Union Address