Banksters' Paradise

Only a day after he was showcased whining and obfuscating about his failure to bring criminal charges against any top Wall Street executives, the chief of the DOJ's criminal division has suddenly up and quit. Nobody's saying if he was fired before he resigned, but what is certain is that the Justice Department is attacking the producer of the PBS documentary, called The Untouchables. It seems they were deeply touched by the whole thing. And public servants to private interests that they are, will never sit still for another grilling, ever again.

The program effectively puts on full display the outright complicity between the government and the too big to fail/too big to jail banks. Lanny Breuer, the revolving-door white collar criminal defense lawyer in question, as much as admitted that his personal angst about the continued existence of financial monster institutions was the prime driver in his decision not to prosecute any head honchos. Moreover, he claimed, since so many of the alleged institutional victims of the various frauds were just as crooked as the perpetrators themselves, and probably knew and didn't care that they were being cheated, he can't prove that crimes were committed. Plus, if he went after the big shots, he'd have to go after their lawyers and accountants too. Lanny Breuer, a former defense lawyer for white collar criminals, would never dream of eating his own:

And if I show that sophisticated Bank One is doing a transaction with sophisticated Bank Two, and sophisticated Bank Two knows fully what it’s getting into or doesn’t care at all what the first representations are, then I cannot bring a case.

… The other issue we have here in those kinds of transactions [is] for the most part, you had the most sophisticated bankers and lawyers and accountants as consultants. So for me to bring a criminal case, I have to show that the very sophisticated lawyers on Wall Street who worked on this, the very sophisticated accountants, that either they were in on the crime, or frankly, what is reality is that in these disclosure documents out there, there was enough disclosure that we cannot bring a criminal case.
 

Breuer just admitted we have a two-tiered system of justice in this country. If you can afford an army of lawyers and better yet, if you can prove your alleged victim has a nasty case of dirty hands himself, you are home free. This truth is old news, but it is a pretty stunning admission to make on national television. 

The first half of the Frontline documentary showed various whistleblowers telling reporters that they were under direct orders from their Wall Street bosses to overlook the fraud on the "liar loans" that were ultimately sliced, diced and repackaged into investments which the sellers also bet against for even more profits. The whistleblowers were never contacted by the Justice Department for help in investigating the massive fraud. Breuer made himself look petty and inept as he actually dissed these witnesses:

Another criticism that has been thrown at you is that you’ve not done enough to go looking for the whistle-blowers that are out there. We have been able to contact a number of people who were inside the banks, doing due diligence work as contractors, who all told us that they were never contacted by the Justice Department.

I can’t talk in general about nondescript, anonymous whistle-blowers. But here’s what I can tell you. Whenever I personally have been in any public setting, I’ve invited whistle-blowers to come forward.

But why don’t you go out and look for them?

We do go out and look for them. I don’t even know what more I could do. I speak publicly. Preet Bharara, [U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California] Andre Birotte on the West Coast, the U.S. attorneys speak about it. We have a forum where we talk about mortgage fraud and investment fraud, and we go around the country, and we have fora.

We’re available to the press. I’m available to Congress. We passed Dodd-Frank [Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act], which gives whistle-blowers a financial incentive to come forward. I talk to our regulators more than ever. And when journalists come forward and they talk about whistle-blowers or TV shows come on that talk about whistle-blowers who make your very claims, we have FBI agents and lawyers and regulators come speak to those people right away.

… It shouldn’t be so easy for journalists to go out and find whistle-blowers that at this point, four years after the meltdown, haven’t been contacted by Justice.

I don’t accept for one moment that you all are finding whistle-blowers that we’re not. What I do believe is then when we speak to the whistle-blowers, we have to make a determination whether what they say is really a criminal case.

So in your scenario, before where you say, “How is it possible that the bank is able to keep some of the proceeds and not pass it over?,” the whistle-blower may say, “I saw that the bank kept those proceeds.” I’m offended by it, but unfortunately, when we look at the documents, when we look at the origination materials and we look at the contracts, it says in those contracts that this reprehensible conduct is permitted. …
 

I am not a lawyer, but I seem to remember learning that contracts which condone/allow criminal behavior are illegal and uninforceable on their face, and can actually be thrown out of court, especially if they do harm to a third party. I guess criminal conspiracy laws don't apply to banks, especially since the lawyers and lobbyists banks actually write the laws in the first place.

Above all, Lanny Breuer is clear that his priorities lie in protecting the banks over the people of the United States:

I think I am pursuing justice. And I think the whole entire responsibility of the department is to pursue justice. But in any given case, I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case there’s some huge economic effect, it affects the economy so that employees who had nothing to do with the wrongdoing of the company –

Or shareholders.

Well, first let’s talk about the employees. Employees may lose their jobs. Shareholders may or may not lose, and shareholders invested. But the employees perhaps did something different.

If it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly, it’s a factor we need to know and understand.

We have, as a government and as an administration, dug out of one of the great financial crises in the world. And at the Department of Justice, we’re being aggressive, but we should in fact take into consideration what the experts tell us.
 

And those order-giving experts, of course, come straight out of the Obama Treasury Department, and its revolving doors to and from Wall Street. It is surely only a coincidence that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is also blowing town for greener pastures this week, right along with Lanny. These guys could play the identical cousins in a remake of the old Patty Duke Show. The duo may not look alike, but they sure talk alike, they walk alike, and they are definitely two of a kind. They both have that annoying habit, for instance, of huffily whining about how "personally offended" they get by both Wall Street greed and those who have the effrontery to challenge them about not getting deeply offended enough to actually prosecute the fraudsters. See Lanny's deep offense defense in the film and transcript. See a few of Tim's throes of extreme and deep personal offense here, here, and here. Geithner also performed a prelude to the Breuer Defense in D-Minor at the Brookings Institute last year:

"Most financial crises are caused by a mix of stupidity and greed and recklessness and risk-taking and hope," said Geithner, who helped tackle the crisis for the Bush administration when he was the head of the New York Federal Reserve and has been urging Europe to act more aggressively to contain its debt problems.

"You can't legislate away stupidity and risk-taking and greed and recklessness. What you can do is make sure when it happens it does not cause too much damage and to do that you have to make sure you have good rules against fraud and abuse, better protections and you force banks to hold more capital against their risk," he said.
 

What the Frontline documentary did not mention was that after a smirking Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was raked over the coals by Senator Carl Levin in 2010, and Levin handed evidence of crimes on a silver platter to the Department of Justice, employees of the bank made a hasty and generous donation to the Obama re-election campaign war chest. And later, coincidentally of course, Breuer's boss, Eric Holder, decided that the evidence of fraud was not evidence of fraud.

The relationship between the Obama Administration and the banking industry has been long apparent, though new revelations of complicity are emerging all the time, thanks to private lawsuits and investigative journalism. The day after the PBS blockbuster aired, ProPublica was revealing that Morgan Stanley bankers were humorously aware enough of their own fraud to name their garbage packages such things as "Nuclear Holocaust", "Subprime Meltdown" and "Shitbag." Morgan Stanley executive William Daley, you may remember, served a brief stint as Obama's chief of staff before the revolving doors took him straight back to Morgan Stanley. His purpose at the White House was to make nice with big business and push back against Republican claims that Obama is not business-friendly. If only.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who managed to "lose" billions of dollars of client money in the London Whale Fail scandal, not only is walking free and acting like a jerk at the elite Davos convention in Switzerland this week, he is boastfully broadcasting his own immunity from prosecution. He sported, not FBI cuffs, but FBI cufflinks on the first day of the confab. When he was called before Congress to testify about the swindle last year, he wore his official magical protective Presidential Seal cufflinks as amulets. They worked.

Are you deeply offended? Or, like me, just deeply cynical?

 

Official Insignia of the National Protection Racket

Inau-gyration Speech Parsing, Cont.

I will now continue where I left off yesterday in my "instanalysis" of President Obama's inaugural address.

We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.

I have a sneaking suspicion that those "outworn programs inadequate to meet the needs of our time" might just be code for cutting Social Security in order to meet the needs of Wall Street. After all, it was back in 2006 that Obama appeared before the Goldman Sachs-funded Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, and declared that Social Security, as it was envisioned by FDR in 1937, would not be sustainable into the 21st century.

I don't know what the harnessing of new ideas and technology to remake our government is all about. We cannot ask, and he was not telling. But it sounds, well, technocratic and rather sinister. As in, Chained CPI, granny-starving (h/t Charles Pierce) sinister. But we do know what his definition of  "school reform" is, all too well. It's privatization. It includes more standardized tests to get rid of unionized teachers and to close schools in poor neighborhoods, as well as enabling profiteering through charter schools run by unqualified vulture capitalists.

"Empowering our citizens with the skills they need to work harder" sounds like a motto Joe Stalin might have dreamed up for his forced labor camps. Propaganda for the shock worker who will gladly absorb training to work longer hours for decreased wages for the glory of the motherland CEOs who make more than 300 times the amount they do. "This is what gives real meaning to our greed creed." 

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

OK, this is the graf that is giving the pseudo-liberals orgasms. This is the part where Obama goes full-bore progressive, takes a dig at Romney's 47% snark, and appears to full-throatedly vow to protect the New Deal. But all I can say is that we have to keep watching what he does, because as we have learned from past experience, his actions have a way of not matching his verbiage. Plus, look closely at his choice of words. "We the people still believe" is a nice centerpiece to this MLK/Founding Fathers pastiche of a speech, but may actually represent a mass herding into the veal pen of the continuing Obama campaign rather than a statement of executive intent. One of Machiavelli's prime tenets is to always tell the people what they want to hear. And, despite all the rosy rhetoric, there was this chilling caveat: "We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit." The subtext of looming austerity is never far beneath the surface. The fact that the best way of reducing health care costs would be to get rid of the private insurance leeches and establish Medicare for All was. of course, not mentioned by this president.

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

OK, I give him props for mentioning the need to address climate change. But he has a very recent history of squelching a report from an EPA scientist establishing that fracking poisons our drinking water. He has a history of greasing the wheels for oil companies to drill in the Arctic. He delayed EPA smog rules after manufacturers howled about their bottom lines, effectively condemning thousands of children and adults to early deaths from lung disease and asthma. Let's see if his New Creed translates into action. I am not holding my (cough) breath. Stayed tune for the Keystone Pipeline decision that should be coming soon via a Friday night news dump, preferably at the beginning of a three-day weekend.

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.

Oh please. We could go on all day about what a total crock this is. Google Disposition Matrix for info on assassination by drone for the next decade and longer. See the Washington Post's report on the secret playbook for murder by presidential fiat. But Obama was honest about the citizens knowing all too well the price that is paid for "liberty": airport body scans, indefinite detention without trial as enacted in the renewal of the NDAA, spying and eavesdropping on citizens through the renewal of the Patriot Act, suppression of free speech and right to assembly as evidenced by the orchestrated national police crackdown on the Occupy movement. Institutional paranoia is embodied by a Homeland Security state so massive that no one person is privy to what it is doing at any given time, how much it costs, and who is really in charge. At this point, it is a monster in charge of itself.

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

This part is simply the standard ode to American Exceptionalism and cheerleading for Empire that is obligatory to every Presidential Pronouncement. We will force our democracy down the throats of every backwater whose real estate is coveted by our multinational, tax-evading, plundering corporations. "We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for profits and power freedom." I suspect, but cannot prove, that this last bit was lifted from old George Bush II speech.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

This was the part with the obligatory alliterative flourish, as well as a nod to Martin Luther King Jr, whose leftist legacy has been bowdlerized into a kind of warm, fuzzy, do- and feel-good Kumbayism, with nary a nod to the fact that Dr. King's anti-war, pro-labor actions and words made him a virtual Enemy of the Government and even a reputed target for official assassination before an escaped convict conveniently obliged in that task. Stonewall was acknowledged as that original band of radical gay rights activists who fought back against institutional homophobia, and Seneca Falls, of course, was the birthplace of the American women's suffrage movement.

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.

Blah, blah, triple blah. Lily Ledbetter-inspired legislation did not give women equal pay for equal work. It made it easier to hire lawyers to sue employers for equal pay in court, assuming a low-paid woman can find pro bono counsel. Gay rights is something he "evolved" into after wealthy gay donors threatened to cut off his campaign donations. He deported more undocumented immigrants in four years that Bush did in eight. His draconian "Secure Communities" program discourages women without papers from reporting domestic abuse and other crimes to police, for fear of deportation. Keeping "all our children" safe from harm includes only American children. Pakistani children, Yemeni children, and Somali children will still sleep with Obama's drones flying over their heads. Our president does not cherish the children of certain foreigners. 

A few more platitudinous paragraphs follow, too generic to analyze in any cogent way. You can read the whole thing here.

Before I forget, I want to include a comment I made to a Sunday NYT op-ed by a CEO complaining about what a lousy manager President Obama is. If only he could learn to delegate authority to his underlings and canoodle with Congress, kvetches David Rothkopf, Obama could rate above the C+ grade he gives him. My (buried) response:

The president is an excellent manager, and an excellent collaborator. He managed to ensure that the mega-banks are still too big to fail and too big to jail. He managed to ensure that private insurance predators are not going to be left out of "near-universal" coverage (which does not, by the way, equate with actual health care.) He managed to leave Iraq only because its government refused to grant the troops immunity from prosecution for possible future misdeeds, and he still managed surround Iran with a plethora of military bases and economic sanctions. He managed to create a dubious rationale for his continuing campaign of targeted assassinations by drone, and he managed to avoid answering to either Congress or the American people on just who the Patriot Act manages to sweep up in its massive spying.eavesdropping. He managed to prosecute more whistleblowers than any previous administration. He managed to keep Gitmo open. He managed to fast-track Arctic oil drilling, fracking on federal lands, and squelching scientific reports on how fracking pollutes our lands. He managed to get sweeping bipartisan support for his Jump Start Our Business Start-Ups Act to make it easier to defraud consumers. And he still manages to enjoy a 50% approval rating!

I would give Obama an A-plus in management. It is too bad that all this author manages to do is sound petty and left out of the inner circle of Obama confidantes. We already have Maureen Dowd to fulfill that function.
 

And speaking of the New York Times, if you happen to suffer from photophobia, please do avoid their home-page today. The Obama inauguration lights blazing there are bright enough to cause snow-job blindness. So if you think my parsing of the president's speech is too harsh, you might want to check out their various analyses. The gist is that he has magically evolved into a progressive for the ages overnight. Or, as Alicia Keys sang it the inaugural ball last night -- "Obama's on Fiyuh."

Inoculation Day

 

Today is Martin Luther King's birthday as well as the anniversary of the Great March on Washington. Today is also the beginning of  Phase Two of the Age of Obama. Above all, today is the day we need to administer a giant booster shot in order to inoculate ourselves  against a new outbreak of an old disease sweeping over the land of the erstwhile progressives. And it ain't the flu. Because in this Age of Obama, progressivism has been pathologized into a form of wimpy pragmatism. Today does not augur well for us if we happen to be normal, everyday struggling people. This day of sick pomp and circumstance is being hyped as a day to celebrate the small, incremental achievements of one man, as well as a day to bury all the bad memories, forget the betrayals and sell-outs, and in the words of Stephen Colbert, hope for a better tomorrow, tomorrow.

Today, if Paul Krugman's column is any indication, we are at the cusp of Stage Four of Glenn Greenwald's prescient forecast of how pseudoliberals will cope and react in Phase Two of the Age of Obama.  I suspect that Krugman got a call from The White House and probably an advance copy of the president's speech. Because his column, on the theme of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the watered-down and non-existent, dutifully pimped out a laundry list of all the president's alleged accomplishments. It ends thusly: "Still, maybe progressives — an ever-worried group — might want to take a brief break from anxiety and savor their real, if limited, victories."

Even Krugman's most stalwart fans and Obama's usual defenders have taken issue with that little bit of defeatism.

We saw a hint of Krugman's resigned defeat/co-optation yesterday when he publicly disagreed with Joseph Stiglitz's excellent and universally lauded piece on income disparity in the Age of Obama. Krugman just doesn't see income inequality as putting a damper on recovery. Krugman, methinks, has been herded into the brand- spanking new veal pen known as Organizing for Action, which is a direct offshot of the Obama campaign apparatus, and which seems cynically designed to pre-empt any real populist dissent, such as Occupy, from resurging during Phase Two of the Great Sellout.

Inoculation Day is still young, and I will be adding to this blogpost at intervals, depending on how successfully I am able to withstand an onslaught of hyperemesis inawgyration, a symptom of overindulgence on brass bands, politicians in their finery, platitudes, bromides and a general assault of red, white and bluedom. Stuff like this:

Katy Perry Performing at Inawkwardal Children's Ball

Update: Some thoughts on the Inaugural Address. The delivery, of course, was superb. He was kind of forced into acknowledging Dr. King, and I about fell over when he actually mentioned the P word (poverty) once. But then he also felt compelled to acknowledge the deficit, effectively cancelling poverty out, as far as I'm concerned, by once again indulging his "balanced approach" addiction. At least, he gave no hint of a grand bargain of safety net cuts. But how could he even dare, given that vast sea of diverse faces in the crowd, many of whom no doubt traveled to the event from the Anacostia neighborhood, where every other child lives below the poverty level. All in all, it was a speech as far divorced from history or from future plans as any aspirant to a high score on the Machiavellian Scale could strive for. Some excerpts:

 

The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. For more than two hundred years, we have.

 

(Why, why why did he say this? Income disparity under the Obama regime is at its most extreme level in history. During the time of the Founders, colonial life was surprisingly egalitarian, even given the existence of slavery.

 

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.... No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.

(Revisionism to the max. We discovered that the market thrives when there are rules. When the economy crashed in 1929, due to wild unfettered speculation, only the Glass-Steagall Act passed in the next decade, the Age of FDR, put us on the path of ensuring fair play. A bipartisan cabal repealed all that during the Clinton regime, paving the way for the Crash of '08. We resolved, through the New Deal and the Great Society programs, that protecting the vulnerable is who we are. Obama has attempted on several occasions to dismantle those very programs in the name of austerity. In the penultimate sentence, in any event, he again cancels out his whole mendacious thought by dog-whistling to the plutocrats his conservative mantra of hard work and personal responsibility and free enterprise (read: risk, free trade and job-killing globalization.) Finally, he singles out math and science as the sole core curricula that will serve to enrich the ruling class. He never says a word about the necessity to study art, literature, political science, the humanities, or history. We. Must. Not. Learn. To. Think.)

 

This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. (Applause.) An economic recovery has begun. (Applause.) America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together. (Applause.)

 

(The reign of American state-sponsored terror is only beginning. See the Disposition Matrix, the Kill List, the new invasions and incipient occupation of the African continent. An economic recovery has begun... for the top One Percent, who have amassed 94% of all the wealth recovered since the 2008 crash. But he gets the last part right: more reckless risk for the Greed Brigade as it endlessly reinvents ways to enhance the harsh reality of life for most of us. Look at JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who lost $6 billion in a risky trade, got his annual pay cut in half to a measly $11.5 million, but retains his stash of Chase shares worth an estimated $263 million.) 

We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own. (Applause.)  

 

(This is where I will stop the parsing for now, because this is the part that perfectly encapsulates the Machiavellian bromides that pass for policy in this Administration. Obama, in his first campaign, had advocated  a national minimum wage of $9 an hour. Now he is reduced to spewing aspirational pablum, never once calling for any actual legislation that would serve to lift his generic little girl out of the bleakest poverty. When it comes to social mobility, the United States ranks dismally low. If you're born to wealth, you stay rich. If you're born in poverty, you tend to stay poor. That little girl could have a genius IQ, but her chances of success are far, far below those of a dolt born to the likes of Lloyd Blankfein.

A Scourge of Imaginary Friends

Reality assuredly bites, so the temptation to retreat into the cocoon of delusion is always there. It's just a part of being human. But too many lies and cons and fairytales have a tendency to build precariously upon themselves. And when they come crashing down, they tend to come crashing down all at once. I am talking to you, corporate media courtiers of America.

The Big Story today of course is about Heisman trophy hopeful Manti Te'o and the dead girlfriend who wasn't and the usual institutional cover-up of the fake dead girlfriend who wasn't and the usual journalistic lackadaisicality that permitted the fake dead girlfriend to live on in the continuing fictional narrative that makes America so special. I hadn't been paying much attention to this burgeoning scandal until the other day. All the elements are there: religious hypocrisy, the protection of institutions over individuals, greed, sports cheats. And that brings us to Lance Armstrong. Well no, it doesn't, because I am not going to waste any time belaboring Lance's sociopathic attempt at splainin' himself. You can get your fill about Manti and Lancey today with any random click of your mouse. I don't even need to supply you with any of the usual links.

But there is another massive con that is not getting nearly the attention it deserves. A wave of queasiness rolled over me when I read this headline in The Hill this morning: McConnell Seeks Fresh Start With the President.

I liked it better when Tortoise Face was vowing that his main goal was to make Obama a one-term president. No connection with Obama meant no grand betrayal. But now it looks at least vaguely possible that the president may achieve his Grand Bargain for the Grandees and a world of pain for the rest of us with the collusion of his new Imaginary Friend, Mitch. And even sloppy seconds Paul Ryan, who'd been missing in action since the election, crawled out of his hole this week to act pretend-reasonable. Hostage-taking over the debt ceiling is apparently off; negotiating the Petersonian cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is apparently on, without the default threat strings attached. (update: The House Republicans have agreed to lift the debt ceiling for another three months so the cutting of the safety net can begin apace. The Obama Administration is strangely, yet all too predictably, calling this a "victory." The nausea gets worse as the mind boggles.)

It's true that the GOP nihilists are still adamantly opposed to bilking obscenely rich people out of their hard-stolen fortunes, and that is the only sticking point that may, serendipitously enough, save us from The Only Adult in the Room. The one with the extra-notched belt and the bowl of peas.

There are some bright spots on the horizon, though. A few mainstream media people are waking up from their slumbers and putting the scold's bridle right back on the nattering heads of the deficit scolds. Case in point, this must-read by Kevin Brown, exposing the Journalists in the Service of Pete Peterson.

Paul Krugman follows up with a column and yet another blogpost pointing out that the deficit, even if it were the national catastrophe the imaginarians of the plutocracy insist it is, is largely fading away despite their best tactical efforts to keep it alive. Manti found it hard to give up his fake dead girlfriend, and so too are the deficit hawks and their media mawks finding it painfully hard to relinquish the mouldering love of their own entitled lives.

The infliction of pain on ordinary people is the Petersonian drug of choice, and it's a hard addiction to overcome. As soon as you flush the Fix the Debt poison pills, another loathesome toxin appears to take its place. The Business Roundtable cadre of CEOs sat around their Hogarthian abbatoir of a roundtable the other day and called for raising both the retirement and Medicare eligibility ages to 70. Rich people are living longer and age is no object when it comes to the vast accumulation of wealth -- so it naturally follows that poor people should share the sacrifice and the pragmatic economic patriotism of their betters. The BRT, as Richard Eskow points out in another must-read piece, is a right-wing extremist organization that actually wants to kill people whom they find personally inconvenient to their bottom lines.

But that didn't stop Mr. Balanced Approach from canoodling with the BRT just last month and kicking out the press corps who, the president agreed, would only spin the plutocratic lies and the greed and the plots and the lies out of all proportion were they allowed to stay and take actual notes.

These people, to borrow a line from my Krugman comment this morning, are like cockroaches. They scurry away whenever you shine a light on them, but sneak back in to steal your crumbs the minute your back is turned. So keep the high beams on, and the disinfectant ready.



Hogarth's Fourth Stage of Cruelty Reimagined: The BRT



Mawks & Hawks

Everybody knows that the Republicans are phony deficit hawks, pretending to care about spending only when they are out of power. (see: two unfunded wars, unpaid-for Medicare prescription drug benefit.) They hilariously paint President Obama as a big-spending socialist leading us down the road to financial ruin, even as he accurately points out that he has actually slowed down the rate of government growth.

But despite the fact that only about 15% of Americans point to The Deficit as their primary worry (most sane people declaring that the real national emergency is unemployment) Obama never wastes an opportunity to proclaim that the American People have given him a mandate to cut and grow, slash and invest, whip and woo. He likes to call it the Balanced Approach. I prefer to call it schizophrenia. How do you impose austerity and grow the economy? Paul Krugman writes himself hoarse trying to explain Keynesian economics, while Obama talks himself hoarse insisting that we need to tighten our belts now so that someday in the far-distant future, we can reach The Promised Land of American Feel-Goodism.

The truth is that Obama doesn't care about cutting the deficit any more than Republicans do. Otherwise, he'd be talking up the Public Option Deficit Reduction Act just introduced in the House. Government competition with the health insurance industry would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over a decade, say the bill's Democratic sponsors.

Forget about it. Obama would rather spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money for his mawkish "Get Out the Premiums!" campaign designed to sign up hordes of new customers for the profit-bloated insurance maggots to feed upon. He is actually using a former campaign operative and White House PR person to head up the effort, called "Enroll America."

It will be Anne Filipic's job to literally and figuratively go door-to-door in search of millions of uninsured people, convincing them to buy private insurance policies. In a puff piece published today in The Washington Post, she strongly implies that she will use the massive Obama for America database to pick and choose among potential new customers. So, in case you've been wondering how the campaign would use that much-coveted treasure trove of private information -- well, this is apparently it.

And Filipic is blunt about her main goal being that of burnishing Obama's image by selling private insurance to the masses:

 I truly believe there’s nothing more important for the president’s legacy than the number of people this law impacts. What is so exciting is how we can apply other tools, from electoral campaigns and the private sector, to increase the reach.... What I envision first is a lot of data and analytics, using a lot of the microtargetting that has taken off in recent years. there’s some potential to do what electoral campaigns do: Find people who wouldn’t be motivated to take action and inspire them in a way that they do. I think in terms of really building a list of the uninsured across the country. If we know where people live, there’s a real ability to have one-on-one conversations. We’ll be doing a lot of what the private sector does, and what a lot of recent electoral campaigns have done in figuring out how do you build that list and then how do you communicate with those people.

Filipic said she would not be surprised if the same vast  resources that propelled Obama into a second term would be matched by the Sign Up America effort. Since it was a billion-dollar re-election campaign, you have to wonder just how expensive this latest marketing campaign will be. All we're being told is "multi-millions."

 Obama is a shill for the corporate mawks. He just talks the fiscal restraint talk. The true cost of implementing ObamaCare is yet to be calculated. Yet, hiding in plain sight, staring him right in the face, is a bill that would reduce the deficit by $100 billion. Beginning right away. But it's being ignored, because it doesn't put profits over people.

And the profits keep rolling in. The insurance companies are drooling in anticipation of Sign Up America, raising their premiums in some states by double-digit percentages thanks to a convenient loophole in the Affordable Care Act. Corporate TV outlets are drooling in anticipation as well, since the Sign Up America campaign also plans a deluge of mawkish TV commercials. One planned spot involves a mother convincing her 20-something son to buy a policy, because it's the economically patriotic thing to do.

Meanwhile, health care spending growth itself is flattening out. It has nothing to do with people living healthier lifestyles and everything to do with them not being able to afford insurance co-pays, deductibles and pricey doctor visits.

Oh, and we're getting sicker and dying sooner than our counterparts in all other advanced countries. So get out your thin wallets, America, and Sign the Hell Up. The mawks need their meat.

*Update: Please see the comments for Denis Neville's excellent research/reporting on Enroll America. It is even worse than I thought. The already-blurred line between public assets and interests and private profits has pretty much been erased with this initiative. If you were among the millions of people who visited the Obama campaign website this past year or so, and thus were swept up in its secretive database, with such information as your age, medical history, current health status, assets, career history, internet search history, buying habits -- it appears likely that your private info will be shared with the insurance companies as they shill their overpriced and probably shoddy product with the added financial help of the same taxpayers they are already victimizing. If this is the case, I hope some class action lawsuits are filed on behalf of the American people against the government for such a gross violation of their privacy.

The Walmart-White House Connection, Revisited

Walmart has been getting some well-deserved bad press lately. Squelching union activity, paying abysmal wages, violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing officials in Mexico and elsewhere, neglecting hazardous conditions in its off-shore manufacturing plants.... the list goes on and on. The fact that the Walmart heirs now possess more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans combined only adds fuel to the fire.

So what more opportunistic time for Walmart, with the assistance of the Obama Administration, the New York Times and other media giants, to stage another publicity stunt as part of its endless and futile quest to repair its image -- all the while perpetrating historic income inequality by hoarding an outsized share of a nation's wealth. (The Times was getting a negative earful from its readers, and has quickly removed the story from its homepage.)

First Lady Michelle Obama, who in her past corporate life sat on the board for one of Walmart's main suppliers, and has previously shilled for its efforts to infiltrate so-called "food deserts" in poor neighborhoods, waxed enthusiastic over the latest public relations gimmick:

“We all believe that no one who serves our country should have to fight for a job once they return home,” Mrs. Obama said in the statement. “Wal-Mart is setting a groundbreaking example for the private sector to follow.”       

But in the top-rated NYT reader comment, "Horsedung" of North Carolina trenchantly observed, "As a former Marine Corps infantryman I cannot think of a more frightening future back in the US than working in Walmart."

To be fair to the Times, it does briefly manage to quote a labor historian critical of the Walmart campaign to hire military people:

They like military people because they have a sense of hierarchy and a commitment to the organization they are in,” said Professor Lichtenstein, who has been a critic of Wal-Mart’s management practices. “And that’s important to Wal-Mart.” In recent years, Wal-Mart has been the target of lawsuits by women, accusing the company of discrimination in salaries and promotions.  

The incestuous, neo-fascist, public-private pattern should be all too familiar by now. It repeats itself almost daily.

 Step One: Company is exposed by the Fourth Estate as a lawbreaker. Whether it's robo-signing fraud by banks, bribing Mexican officials by Walmart, money-laundering for drug cartels by HSBC, the vast landscape of white collar crime seems endless.

Step Two: Company joins forces with the United States Government to investigate itself.

Step Three: The Department of Justice signals there will be no prosecutions, but that the offending corporation will become a valued partner of the United States Government by taking steps to make the lives of all the little people better.

Along with the rest of felonious corporate America, Walmart will likely not only remain unpunished for its malfeasance, it will actually continue getting rewarded through various tax breaks, unfettered off-shoring of manufacturing and labor, praise from the first lady, and ever-creative forms of corporate welfare.

 Walmart, of course, has long been bragging about all the veterans it hires. Visit, if you dare, its "Careers With a Mission" webpage for the low-down of how one brand of regimentation can seamlessly morph into another:

The military instilled in you a sense of pride, honed your leadership skills, and drew on the deep sense of purpose you carry throughout everything you do. Continue making the most of those traits without compromise at Walmart. Our daily operations employ them to the fullest, offering a career experience that will feel like a natural fit for how you think, act and live your life.

The site purports to match veterans' skill sets with store positions. For example, if you were engaged in combat operations against peasants in Afghanistan, you'll be just perfect for "managing" wage slaves at Walmart! If you were a psy-ops specialist, disseminating propaganda to win the hearts and minds in occupied territory, Walmart wants you for such marketing campaigns as "We're Hiring 100,000 Veterans!" and "Unions are Un-American!" as well as convincing impoverished people that they can "Live Better!" by shopping at Walmart. If you served in military intelligence, you can either get a gig in store security, or if you're super lucky, become a personal bodyguard for Walmart Board members as they Travel the Globe, bribing corrupt officials. 

 One misleading TV commercial that ran a year or so ago told the story of a returning female vet who, through the magic of low wages, was able to buy a house and put her kids through college! Another Walmart good-will gesture, again garnering much free publicity through the White House's corporate-operated "Joining Forces" initiative, is to allow its minimum wage workers to transfer to another store if a military spouse gets redeployed. How noble can they get?

And to make the latest propaganda campaign even more effective, there are reports that President Obama is considering appointing the female president of the Walmart Foundation as his new Budget Director to replace Treasury nominee Jack Lew. (h/t Robert S.)

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who directs Walmart's various greedwashing endeavors, already serves on the president's newly-created Global Development Council. This is yet another of those in-house corporate lobbies that comprise the Obama Shadow Government, serving to promote private interests at public expense. The revolving door revolves several times each and every day in the wonderful world of Public-Private Partnerships.

Burwell, before revolving toward Walmart, worked on Obama's transition team as a banking expert, having previously served as deputy budget director in the Clinton Administration and chief of staff to bank-deregulating Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. She later headed up a global agricultural initiative for the Gates Foundation. (Walmart, coincidentally, has long been criticized for its role in putting third world subsistence farmers out of business.) Her first job out of college was a stint at the McKinsey and Co. lobbying consulting firm. Coincidentally, one of Chelsea Clinton's many jobs has been at McKinsey. And of course Hillary Clinton once served on the Walmart Board. I think Muckety needs to draw another one of its great maps for this latest web of incestuous intrigue.

And as the sticky threads are wrapped ever more cosily around Walmart and the White House, watch out for falling wages. Watch out for continued anti-union activity by the retail giant as the government looks the other way. Watch out for continued violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as Walmart metasticizes. Watch out for continued sales of weapons and bullets by returning veterans suffering from PTSD as they stand guard behind the Walmart gun display counters. Watch out for continuous corporate welfare for this retail behemoth that not only refuses to supply health insurance for its employees, but actually instructs them in how to efficiently apply for Medicaid and food stamps.

"We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do well while a growing number of Americans barely get by—or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules." -- Barack Obama.

Let's face it, people. That settlement has already been reached. And it is patently unfair to 99% of us. The Great Shrinker has spoken.

*Update, 1/16: The recent Fiscal Cliff Aversion Act extended and enhanced the generous tax breaks for companies which hire veterans. So, factoring in the average $8/hour starting salaries,  and the fact that veterans receive government healthcare to begin with, I think it is fair to assume that  Walmart's workforce will be more taxpayer-subsidized than ever, assuming of course that it can attract enough former cannon fodder into its big box labor camps.

The Coin Is Dead, Long Live the Coins



Was  your whole weekend  ruined by the weekend news dump that the Obama Administration had nixed the trillion dollar platinum coin and is opting instead for more Debt Ceiling Crisis drama? Don't despair. While you're waiting for Austerity to kick in, the president wants you to go on a spending spree on the off-chance that you still have any actual money to burn.  Just go ahead and plunk it down on a set of three Obama Coins. You heard it right. Although the Treasury declared that minting a coin to stave off national default is illegal, unethical, unfathomable and undoable even though it's constitutional, the president has minted a whole mint of gold, silver and bronze coins to help defray the cost of his second inauguration.

Okay, so they're pretend coins. But they do have value. They will pay for somebody else, not you, to attend one of the Gala Inaugural Balls  Or maybe they will pay for the tons of lobster and bison destined for a thousand slavering maws at the Congressional Inaugural Luncheon. My own senator, Chuck Schumer, is in charge of the menu, which includes pie made of apples from my very own Hudson Valley. He invited a New York Times food critic, not you or me, for a food-tasting binge to decide the ultimate party fare:

"I was hopeful of having Long Island duck, but unfortunately the tasters and I said the dish doesn’t quite work — where the bison was wow,” Mr. Schumer said, hastening to add that “the duck was not at fault,” but rather the preparation.

At 10:30 in the morning, the senator was sampling and praising the Tierce 2009 Finger Lakes Dry Riesling, to be served with the first course of lobster with clam chowder sauce, as well as the award-winning Bedell Cellars 2009 merlot from Long Island that will be served with bison. By 10:45, he declared that the lobster would be his lunch, with a few bites of the bison, a few sips of the Bedell and a sampling of dessert, a pie made with Hudson Valley apples.

Go ahead. You know you want to. Buy the freaking coin set so Chuckie and the gang can have more than a few bites of bison. Let them devour the near-extinct national animal that is no longer even on the nickel before they nickel-and-dime the rest of us to death. It is called Sharing the Sacrifice. It is called Economic Patriotism.

And by the way, where in the Constitution does it state that the Senate may provide itself with official food tasters? Of course, it is understandable that elected officials with a 9% public approval rating might find a food taster necessary to vet their victuals. Even Obama has been known to bring along his own personal food tasters to dangerous plutocratic fund-raisers and on official trips. Leaders of Empire can never be too austere when it comes to budgeting for the personal protection of their palates.

Meanwhile, take another close look at those coins. They look like they were inspired by the Little Orphan Annie comics. Obama's eyes are vacant circles! They forgot to etch in any pupils! And get a load of Biden in profile. He looks like the "before" image in a Lifestyle Lift commercial, what with the double chin and the sagging jowls. I think that $7,500 price tag is way too steep if they can't even idealize our politicians. As Annie would say, "Gee Whiskers!"