Creepy Veepy

Just when you thought you couldn't take it any more, the presidential race suddenly got a lot more interesting. The Ayn Rand nihilist we all love to hate just won the veepstakes. We go from two boring nags plodding around the muddy track, to two boring nags joined by a foaming-at-the-mouth unbroken cannibal named Paul Ryan. This is the guy whose idea of a good time is starving grandmas and then serving them up to rich people with a bottle of Dom Perignon.

The addition of Ryan is a gift that will keep on giving to progressives. And that, of course, does not include right-centrist President Barack Obama, who recently complained that the Democrats don't get enough credit for wanting to cut Social Security and other safety net programs. The latest rumor floating around is that Catfood Commissioner and Obama surrogate Erskine Bowles is on tap to not only be the next Treasury Secretary but also the chief architect of the next Grand Bargain of Cuts.

So now, with Ryan on the national stage, Team Obama will have to pivot from its all-too-easy lambasting of outsourcing, tax-avoiding, issue-free Mitt Romney. Instead of running commercials accusing him of causing premature cancer deaths, they'll be forced to discuss Social Security and Medicare. The election will be a choice between two scenarios: do you want your safety net slashed with a Ryanesque machete, or would you rather have it gradually snipped and clipped into nothingness by an Obamian scalpel?

Can you imagine the debate in Florida? The Republican will defend handing out worthless vouchers to uninsurable older people, and the Democrat will defend raising the Medicare eligibility age to somewhere beyond the ever-decreasing life expectancy of the typical American. I can't wait for the reaction of suddenly wide-awake voters. Well.... we can always hope for a reaction. 

Imagine that you traveled back in time to 1932, and the presidential election was a Wall Street kabuki production between corporatist Herbert Hoover and his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon. Mellon would be pretend-peeved that Hoover was a socialist because he espoused soup kitchens and bread lines and Hooverville housing projects for the poor. Hoover would be politely begging Mellon to pay just a "little more" on his income taxes and predicting better times through public-private partnerships and shared sacrifice. If FDR was in the picture at all, he would be castigated by the pragmatic Hooverites as a spoiler.

September 17th: the first anniversary of the Occupy movement.

Bankster Bus of Blame

Jamie Dimon is a weird cross between Tony Soprano and Sarah Palin. In a combination political/mock execution tour, he and his consiglieres have boarded a big black bus to roll down the highways and shake down the masses. He is scolding everybody but himself for the financial meltdown and long depression. And, of course, demanding ever more concessions.

He is doing his crony capitalist duty to ram the second coming of the Catfood Commission down your throats. Stop whining that you're in pain just because his bankster mob broke a few of your precious financial bones. If the economy sucks, it's your fault too, people. Stop blaming him, because it makes him the sensitive market lose confidence. And by the way, pay tribute by cutting some entitlement programs, so the rich can get even richer and gain back some of that self-esteem so cruelly taken from them by the selfish underclass.

Dimon, who simultaneously acts as both CEO of JPMorganChase and board member of the NY Fed, (and thus regulates himself) flew to the Midwest on his private corporate jet this week, only to board an armored bus, the better to connect with his minions and customers in the heartland. (He did similar tours in foreclosure-riddled California and Florida last year.) They are a combination of chutzpah, browbeating and damage control. They're a way to connect with folks, and in the proudest godfather tradition, make them an offer they can't refuse. Convince them with a threatening smile that the interests of Wall Street and Main Street intertwine. Physically ingratiate yourself into their geographical space.

Dimon's exact itinerary has been kept very much on the QT, and his folksy meetings with customers and wage slaves have  been closed to the media. But Mark Williams of the Columbus (Ohio) Post-Dispatch somehow managed to infiltrate one of the Chase road-shows to listen to Dimon's shrill, finger-pointing harangue:

"It’s because of us. We scapegoat each other. We point fingers,” Jamie Dimon said yesterday while visiting with customers of the bank’s Kingsdale office in Upper Arlington, as well as the branch’s current and former employees.

And shades of John McCain's infamous 2008 remark that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" and Barack Obama's infamous 2012 gaffe that "the private sector is doing fine":

I actually think the underlying economy is not bad,” Dimon told about 200 people gathered in a tent set up next to the branch.

Consumers and small and large businesses have healthier balance sheets than before the recession, he said.

“I can’t prove it in real time,” Dimon said of his thesis.

But Dimon pointed to last summer’s debate in Washington over raising the debt ceiling and critical comments made of banks and other businesses as examples of how such episodes sap the confidence of consumers and businesses to invest and expand.

“We’ve done it to ourselves,” he said. “I just hope something breaks the back of this political environment.”

Hear that, peons? You and Jamie are in the same cozy little club and you did it to yourselves by buying a subprime-mortgaged house and using one of his usurious credit cards. If you want him and his corporatists to stop hoarding their obscene profits, you have to pay him back, with interest compounded hourly and ad infinitum. You have to give up your Social Security cost of living increases and wait till you're 70 to retire while they foreclose your underwater homes. That's the cudgel that will break your environmental back. 

Oops... Wrong Finger

Of course, there is another practical reason that Dimon is venturing into the heartland: Market share. JPMC is only Number Four in market share in the midwest. There are scads of small bankers in flyover country just waiting to be sucked up in the voracious Wall Street maw. From a Milwaukee Sentinel pre-show interview:

Dimon insisted that even for a megabank with $2.3 trillion in assets, a market such as Wisconsin is important.

"We contribute $1.5 million in philanthropy in the state, a lot of which is in Milwaukee," he said. "We make community development loans. We bank some of the bigger companies - like we're one of the banks to Harley-Davidson. So we really bring a lot, even though we're not local the way you think of a local bank."

And, echoing the mantra of Bain-style vulture capitalism:

"We want to make customers happy. So if they don't do a good job integrating and bringing their products and services to Milwaukee, yeah, it will give us an opportunity," Dimon said. "I don't wish for other companies to fail. But, of course, if they're not good at what they do, we'll win share."

Charity, motorcycles and corporate raiders -- what a way to win heartland hearts and minds, eh Jamie? John Gotti, the teflon don, used to give neighborhood street parties in between hits, too. Anyway, the new Dodd-Frank rules are way too cumbersome for the itty-bitty community banks to handle, so it's much better to let the mega-banks just eat them for lunch:

"Unfortunately, I think a lot of the new rules make it very tough for community banks," Dimon said "We're one of the biggest bankers to banks, including community banks. I think it will be easier for some of the big firms to accommodate all these new rules and regulations and capital. So in spite of the fact that they said they'd try to favor small banks in all this legislation, the law of unintended consequences usually means that's not what happens."

And he makes sure to blend some sweet rah-rah patriotism into the arsenic to make it easier for the doomed local economies to swallow. This guy deserves the gold medal for Bullshit Artist of the Year:

The underpinning of the American economy is actually quite good, and I wish our politicians would say what I'm about to say," Dimon said. "We have the best military, the best universities, the best businesses, the best capital markets - the widest, deepest, most transparent, even though we've had some problems in it. . . . Consumers are in far better shape than they were in. Corporations large and small are in far better shape. We've got a pretty good hand."

You can say that again, Jamie. You got dealt an exceedingly good hand, with nary a slap on the wrist from your political cronies in Congress and the DOJ for that unexplained "loss" of $5 billion or $9 billion in the London Whale deal.

You and your Wall Street mob are not content to simply throw us under the bus. You get on the bus, and you run us over, again and again and again.

Links / Open Thread

One more reason not to join a pretend faction of the monied Duopoly: the Obama Machine has an app for you. Privacy advocates (the Don Quixotes of America) are concerned that anybody, not just Obamabots going door to door, can download info on who you are and where you live if you're a registered Democrat. To be fair, the app only uses your first name and last initial along with your real physical address. And the information is already publicly available on the voter registration rolls. So what's the beef? Frankly, anybody can find out where you live if his mind is set on it. But not everybody comes to your door with a rote recital of proBama talking points. That's the part that creeps me out. As Election Day draws nearer, the Bots and the Jehovah's Witnesses will be tripping all over themselves in that sprint to your door. Lock up and hide.

If that isn't disturbing enough, we find out in today's N.Y. Times that the president is upset because he doesn't get enough positive coverage for still wanting to gut Social Security and Medicare while he's running for re-election. It turns out he is quite the news junkie, devouring his iPad journalism during his frequent visits to his second home (Air Force One.) Oh, and in case you needed another reason not to vote for him, David Brooks is his frequent private guest at the White House. I can just envision their heartfelt discussions of greedy geezers sucking up all the Social Security and eating their young.

Mitt Romney thinks Rudolph Valentino was shot at the Wisconsin Sikh temple. So tragic for so many reasons, because "sheik people, are among the most peaceable and loving individuals you can imagine." (Mitt was said to be exhausted after being forced to do his own fake grocery shopping one day this week.)

Run Wild, Run Free: The Guardian lists the 25 people responsible for the economic meltdown and where they are today. Hint: if it's surrounded by razor wire and armed guards, it's to keep you out. (h/t Valerie)

On a related note, there appears to be a dearth of white collar country club prisons in our great land. Besides, since criminal corporations are people my friend, there is no prison large enough to accomodate them all. And too, if you're the Department of Justice, you gotta know when to hold em and know when to scold em.

While the news media breathlessly cover Obamaloney and Romney Hood, they are still ignoring Libor. What if somebody gave a Scandal and nobody came? That's Libor for you. There is no interest in interest-rate rigging, because the powers that be have decreed it boring. Dean Baker adds Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to the Do-Nothing Bankers' Club, a group of impotent old white men for whom robust inflation is anathema, even as millions of people suffer. They are great believers, apparently, in Hobbes' Natural State of Man: a dog-eat-dog world where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." 

Clouds in My Coffee

You're so vain, you probably thought the electoral process was about you. You walk into that voting booth like you were mounting a pulpit, all self-involved and righteous and following your conscience. Your vote is your voice. That's what we were taught in school, anyway.

We've heard the conventional wisdom that the poor slobs who vote Republican are foolishly voting against their own best interests. And lately, more and more disaffected progressives have decided that voting Democrat is also pretty much giving your seal of approval to just one more corrupt faction of the plutocracy.

So why vote for Democrats? According to Robert Parry, an Obama apologist from way back when, if you don't re-elect the president, the weight of the entire miserable world will be upon your shoulders. A vote for a third party, or just sitting out the election from pure disgust, is selfish and vain. Parry brings the "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" meme to a whole new desperate level. When you advocate for a politician solely because he is the lesser of two evils, desperation is pretty much all you've got as a campaign platform. Desperation, fear, and enough guilt offensive to make even the Vatican or a Jewish mother green with envy. Parry writes:

Americans, especially on the Left, need to get realistic about elections and stop using them as opportunities to express disappointment, anger or even personal morality. Through elections, Americans are the only ones who can select our national leaders, albeit in a limited fashion.

The rest of the world’s people have no say in who’s going to run the most powerful nation on earth. Only we can, at least to the extent permitted in the age of Citizens United . The main thing we can still do is stop the more dangerous major-party candidate from gaining control of the executive powers of the United States, including the commander-in-chief authority and the nuclear codes, not small things.

So, when we treat elections as if they are our moment to express ourselves, rather than to mitigate the damage that a U.S. president might inflict on the world, we are behaving selfishly, in my view. That’s why I used the word “vanity.” U.S. elections should not be primarily about us.

U.S. elections should really be about others – those people who are likely to feel the brunt of American power – Iraqis and Iranians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, Vietnamese and Cambodians, Palestinians and Syrians, etc., etc. Elections also should be about future generations and the environment.

So it's not the economy, stupid. It's the guilt!

Parry conveniently fails to mention that as assassinator in chief, Obama has already fomented plenty of fear and discomfort in the rest of the world. Although other countries were initially as infatuated with The One as we Americans were, that positive vibe started plummeting once the predator drones started buzzing in third world skies. Parry's claim that a vote for Obama will protect the great unwashed global masses does not hold water. From the Pew Global Attitudes Project:

There remains a widespread perception that the U.S. acts unilaterally and does not consider the interests of other countries. In predominantly Muslim nations, American anti-terrorism efforts are still widely unpopular. And in nearly all countries, there is considerable opposition to a major component of the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy: drone strikes. In 17 of 20 countries, more than half disapprove of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders and groups in nations such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is appealing the ruling from a federal judge that bars the government from indefinitely detaining Americans that it deems to be associated with "militants". The government argues that since it has not heretofore subjected any citizens to its draconian policy, the plaintiffs in the case have no standing to complain -- they can't prove they have any reason to be afraid, because the president has not yet acted on his threats. Oral arguments on the case are scheduled for today.

But remember: if you vote against the politician who has unilaterally declared himself to be judge, jury and executioner of anyone, anywhere -- you're just being so damned vain. According to Parry, you just want to take the stupid high road when taking the low road is all we've got:

The hard decision is to support the imperfect candidate who has a real chance to win and who surely will do some rotten things but likely fewer rotten things than the other guy – and might even make some improvements.

I know that doesn’t “feel” as satisfying. One has to enter a morally ambiguous world. But that it is the world where many innocent people can be saved from horrible deaths (though not all) and where possibly actions can be taken to ensure that future generations are left a planet that is still habitable or at least with the worst effects of global warming avoided.

Better to put your stamp of approval on killing thousands of innocents rather than tens of thousands of innocents. Sell out your principles, because you're screwed anyway. Romney the Worser. Keep fear alive. What a country.

This attitude is all the more unfortunate, because Parry is a well-respected, Polk Award-winning journalist who broke the Iran-Contra story for the Associated Press and also helped expose the atrocities of the Bush years. And he has been a harsh critic of the corporate media. In another article last year, he wrote:

One truism that I’ve learned about political and media survival in Washington is that it’s always smart to shift toward where the power lies. In effect, that is what “practical” politicians and journalists do. They venture only as far as they feel they can without creating undue political or career risks for themselves.

The hard truth is that until the Left gets onto the field in a much more serious way and starts engaging the Right in its “war of ideas” – including making major investments in media, think tanks and other means of getting information to the public – politicians will continue to disappoint and embitter the Left. So will mainstream journalists.

How true. One more mainstream journalist shape-shifts and bites the dust as he abjures us to swallow his bitter pragmatic pill. Parry foretold his own sellout. Whatever happened to honest dissent? Whatever happened to adversarial journalism? Hangdog screeds like his only serve to instill chronic depression in the disaffected, when what we need is a giant jolt of caffeine.

Weekend Blogging

Somebody asked me the other day if I had any figures or stats on the exact number of American foreclosures, as well as just how many underwater homeowners are shlepping along while the White House  pretends to be interested. Well, I couldn't give an exact answer -- and neither, it turns out, can anyone else. As Matt Stoller writes in Salon, no single government entity is even bothering to track foreclosures! Our housing policy is not only a complete mess -- it is functionally non-existent. 

(Under Dodd-Frank) the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (were authorized) to create a national database of foreclosures. The bill, however, did not provide the necessary funding mechanism for HUD to do so, nor did it include a deadline. The next Congress, not surprisingly, has also failed to appropriate the funds. According to Brian Sullivan at HUD, the agency also lacks “statutory authority to compel the reporting to HUD of information necessary to compile localized loan performance data.”

Blatant political malpractice of this kind is becoming more and more prevalent. Pass some reforms and kinda sorta forget to fund them and staff them. If we dream it, it will come. This is passive-aggression, pure and simple, on the part of our public "servants."

Forbes Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg is inviting the unindicted criminals at Goldman Sachs to hedge their bets in a brand new casino game: wagering on recidivism at the world's largest penal colony, Rikers Island. The financiers are investing the relatively paltry (for them) sum of $1.9 million in an inmate rehabilitation program. If the mostly minority participants end up back in the slammer, the bank loses the bet. If they stay clean, Goldman somehow makes a profit -- apparently because we the taxpayers will reward them with interest for caring so much. This "scheme" as the Brits so aptly call things like this, has its critics: 

Mark Rosenman, director of the Washington-based Caring to Change organisation, said he was sceptical about the idea of a market-based solution to difficult and complex social issues. "My general concern is that when you open a portion of the non-profit sector to the profit motive, we find that it displaces concern about solving public problems with a concern for private profit. You see that with the healthcare sector and higher education."

He added that a particular problem was how success and effectiveness was accurately measured in any social impact bond scheme.

"How do you develop a metric to measure success that fully reflects the public purpose of the project?" he asked.

Indeed. And we also cannot put it past those clever banksters to devise a metric so that they can actually bet against troubled youths at the same time they invest in them. Maybe they can bundle minor drug offenders and hardcore gang bangers into Triple A-rated bonds and foist them on the public, knowing full well some of the chronics will re-offend and obligingly enrich the banksters.

Shades of the infamous Groveland Boys murder-by-police case from the 1950s: a young black man, arrested in Jonesboro, Arkansas on a minor drug charge, is frisked, handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car. Somehow he manages to commit suicide by gunshot wound to the right temple. In cuffs. While left-handed. The local cops are bemused and baffled and bored by the whole thing. Charles Blow of the New York Times has more.  

Did you get your invite from Michelle for Barack's birthday bash-for-profit in their Chicago back yard? Well, if you didn't RSVP and enter for a chance to win, don't despair. She's not bothering to show up either. Ouch.

Thursday Links / Open Thread

Jill Stein, presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket, has been arrested and charged with trespassing after a sit-in protest against foreclosures at Fannie Mae in Philadelphia. Since she had just won a place on the Pennsylvania ballot, she may be the first presidential candidate since Eugene Debs to become a political prisoner as a result. Also arrested were her running mate, two labor lawyers and a Catholic nun. Meanwhile, the Obama cabal just wrings its hands and writes a couple of letters begging a mere acting director to play nice with poor homeowners three months before Election Day.

In explaining why she joined the protest, Stein said that almost half of Americans now live in poverty or near poverty, eight million families face eviction from their homes due to foreclosures, and over a third of mortgage holders are "underwater" - meaning that they owe more to the lenders than their properties are worth on the market.  

Said Stein, "The developers and financiers made trillions of dollars through the housing bubble and the imposition of crushing debt on homeowners. And when homeowners could no longer pay them what they demanded, they went to government and got trillions of dollars of bailouts. Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense. It's time for this game to end. It's time for the laws be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators. It's time for a new deal for America, and a Green New Deal is what we will deliver on taking office. "

The same New York Times reporter who brought you the story of Obama's Terror Tuesday kill list now complains there is a new chilling effect on news-gathering as a result. The FBI is doing a pretend investigation of national security leaks, and in the process is intimidating erstwhile/potential government whistleblowers at various agencies. And that's the whole point, isn't it?  Although the recent articles on the kill list, the case of Underpants Bomber II, and the cyberwar against Iran's nuclear program all obviously came from White House sources, the White House itself will not be subject to proposed new legislation punishing leakers. That is because when the President's Men do the divulging, it's not to blow the whistle. It's to make themselves look tough on national security in an election year. It is to make themselves the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

Case in point: anonymous sources have just chest-thumpingly told Reuters that President Obama signed a secret order from his MANCAVE authorizing American support for Syrian rebels. The support includes shoulder-fired MANPAD missiles. Macho macho man, etc.

New Olympic Sport: bashing NBC's time-delayed coverage, with all its chest-thumping flag-wrapped corporate greed-for-profit. Chinese media are ticked off as well over allegations that its star female swimmer is ''roided" up:

“It is irresponsible for the Western media to pour filth on Chinese athletes who won because of hard training and years of arduous preparation,” the official state newspaper Xinhua said...... "By doing so, the Western writers have demonstrated an arrogance and prejudice against Chinese athletes that has ignited widespread criticism from all around the world."

Meanwhile, the commercial-free BBC (streams are blocked here in Security State USA) is doing its job in the public interest: broadcasting the events live, without annoying commentary, in all their raw glory. David Sirota opines on cringe-inducing Olympic Americana, past and present. 

I admit that before the latest culture war skirmish designed to deflect our attention away from the fact that we are living under the iron heel of the oligarchy, I had never even heard of Chick-fil-A.  I'd  had the Olympics beach volleyball game (live!) on the TV last night while fixing dinner, and before I knew it, MSNBC's Al Sharpton was shrilling about nasty anti-gay chicken with Meghan McCain whining about ideological cole slaw. I imagine that Chick-fil-A is making millions of dollars off all the free outraged publicity.

Where is the outrage from the liberal class about the horrid conditions at the factory farms where the chickens are crammed into crates from the minute they're born, force-fed on hormones and salmonella-resistant antibiotics and served up to the American public uninspected because of USDA budget cuts?

Meh. What a paltry concern, when there's a presidential election between two chicken hawks at stake.

Humping Dog Day

Welcome to Hump Day, and the so-called Dog Days of Summer, which actually started about a week ago. Seriously. The term has something to do with the rising of the Sirius dog star and its proximity to the sun during July and August, leading the ancients to believe that hot weather is caused by the wrathful gods. Not too different from the thought processes of our own contemporary climate change denialists, come to think of it.


When I was young and stupid, I thought Dog Days were called that because of the tendency of dogs to become moribund and pant a lot during warm weather. As a matter of fact, I still do think that. I also think of the rabid dog scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird", which I think is one of the best evocations of oppressive summer weather ever written (and filmed.)


Speaking of foaming at the mouth and brain pathology, Dog Days also has a Wall Street/political meaning. Common wisdom has it that August marks the economic doldrums, when the tycoons all retreat to their Hamptons estates, inertia blankets the land, and Congress wakes up from its coma just long enough to go home and collect more bribes raise money. But these too are myths. Writes Theo Francis of NPR:

August is supposedly a quiet month on Wall Street, in Washington, D.C., and for business and finance generally. Except sometimes it isn't — and it's always the run-up to September, which can be pretty eventful in itself (think 2008 and the collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Bros.)

So this week is shaping up to bring August in like a lion, with several potentially significant economic developments already on the calendar.

Two of the biggest: the potential for major Federal Reserve action on Wednesday (today), and some much-anticipated jobs numbers on Friday.

Francis certainly was prescient. The Algorithm Monster of Wall Street struck again this morning, creating so much volatility that the NYSE had to temporarily suspend the feeding frenzy. Maybe it was Cerberus, the hell dog, at the gates.

And then there's all the blog-snoring about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's rehabilitation tour in the wake of the Libor scandal. He is suddenly pretending to be on the side of underwater homeowners through much theatrical hand-wringing over the Fannie/Freddie acting director's refusal to help people write down their mortgage debt. This is one more example of the Obama Administration policy of being "caught trying" to be on the side of regular people. Yves Smith has more on this, making the salient point that "there is enough distress in the heartlands and enough well warranted antipathy for banks that it ought to be possible to make inroads on this front. But with Obama and Geithner dyed-in-the-wool neoliberals in charge, the failure in messaging comes from the top."


Obama has never failed to mention that only "hardworking, responsible" (read solidly middle and upper-middle class) homeowners who have good credit and jobs, who weren't the greedy unqualified homebuyers of right wing mythology, and who have always been on time with payments should get help with mortgage modifications. This leaves out the unemployed, the underemployed, most minorities and single mothers, anybody who got snookered into a sub-prime loan, and just about everybody who is struggling to make ends meet. And that's just about everybody.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.”

-- Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting.