Going Negative, Nicely

So, Newark Mayor Cory Booker felt all pukey inside when he saw that anti-Romney ad comparing Bain Capital to a blood-sucking vampire. And then the pundits said his career was toast, and then the Obama campaign staunchly defended the bloody verbal imagery in the commercial.

But lo and behold, other Democrats have begun slithering out of their own corporate closets in nauseous solidarity with Booker. Leave capitalism alone, they plead. For this is the week that the party of FDR, the party of labor and civil rights, the poor and oppressed, is very publicly acknowledging that it is indeed just the other half of the Money Party.

But other Dems remain closeted, "privately worried" that their Wall Street blood money is going to dry up because of presidential negativity. And, going full circle, the ever-skittish Obama campaign is now pushing back against the pushback against the pushback:

In an indication of how rocky the day was for Obama, however, one surrogate for the president generated controversy in his defense of the ad against Romney.

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, said Romney’s business practices amounted to “raping companies and leaving them in debt” for his own profit.

The Obama campaign quickly distanced itself from those remarks, telling media outlets it “strongly disagrees with Congressman Clyburn’s choice of words — they have no place in this conversation.”

Okay, everybody got that? Bain did indeed sink its cruel lecherous fangs into  tender flesh, sucking and sucking away in a frenzy until the victim was drained dry and fell down in a dead heap. But it absolutely did not have forceable sexual relations with that company. 

Acceptable

Unacceptable

Congress Talk Pretty One Day

Attention again, all grammarians, armchair psychologists and nitpickers. Somebody with a lot of time on his hands has come out with a study showing that Congress critters cannot string a coherent sentence together as well as they used to. Our lawmakers have actually been rated according to grade level, and the results are not pretty. Does it surprise anyone that the newest, most right wing extremist members also rank the lowest in the elocution department?

The Sunlight Foundation, using its own Capitol Words invention, arrived at the conclusion that Congress has sunk a full grade level in the past seven years. My first reaction was, only one notch? And if you've also been wondering how it is that Americans consistently vote these clowns back into office over and over again, against their own economic interests, the answer is that Congress is still smarter than the average shlub, who reads at late 8th grade level:

Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11^th and 14^th grade level. (You can find more comparisons here)

All these analyses use the Flesch-Kincaid test, which produces the 'reads at a n-th grade level' terminology that is likely familiar to many readers. At its core, Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences. It is important to understand the limitations of this metric: it tells us nothing about the clarity or correctness of a passage of text. But although an admittedly crude tool, Flesch-Kincaid can nonetheless provide insights into how different legislators speak, and how Congressional speech has been changing.

So in other words, if Michele Bachman utters a sentence like: "As the mother of 260 foster children, I consider myself a huge fan of antidisestablishmentarianism" she would score off the congressional charts? Sorry, but this measuring tool is just screaming out to be gamed by stupid cheaters to make themselves look good. But to be fair, according to the Congressional database, Bachmann actually scored above the average shlub, speaking at a mid-9th grade level, or approximately the degree of difficulty of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

What a nightmare. Somebody wake me up.

What's Wrong With This Sentence? (and everything else)

Attention all grammarians, armchair shrinks, and nitpickers. This was the last sentence in an article by Helene Cooper in today's New York Times:

“As the wealthiest nation on earth, I believe the U.S. has a moral obligation to lead the fight against hunger and nutrition and to partner with others,” Mr. Obama said Friday morning in remarks in Washington.

a) The professorial prez has used a dangling modifier. President Obama inadvertently refers to himself as the wealthiest nation on earth. He should have said: "As the wealthiest nation on earth, the U.S. has a moral obligation...."  I,yi yi, yi yi! (I just never got over my eighth grade sentence-diagramming days in Catholic school.)

b) He said we have a moral obligation to lead the fight against hunger and nutrition. Does this guy like to always have it both ways, or what? If I were a Freudian, I would call this a slip. Our president satiates our hunger with his populist speeches, yet fails to follow through on actual policies that would nourish the body politic. He calls Jamie Dimon the greatest banker of all time at the same time he says we need to rein Jamie Dimon in. He brags about the Volcker Rule now, even though his team of banker enablers has been working to delay it until 2014 or later. 

 We are all, of course, keeping a close watch on the happenings in the Chicago Police State, where the paramilitary thugs have already pre-emptively arrested some demonstrators in front of Obama's campaign HQ and elsewhere, and even charged a group of OWS protesters with being terrorist threats. I think that after this week, the meaning of NATO might be changed to "New Austerians Tase (Terrorize? Torture? Threaten>) Occupy". Most of the international bellicose bubbleheads gathering for the power elite confab are calling for the hoi polloi  to share the sacrifice. But somehow, money is never an object when it comes to perpetuating the military-industrial complex. Except for Francois Hollande, who is still too much of a newbie to have been co-opted, the NATO apparatchiks and their guests are there to celebrate the hegemony.

Meanwhile, the judge who just declared the indefinite detention clause of the NDAA unconstitutional wisely listened to Chris Hedges and his co-plaintiffs, who'd asserted the intentionally vague law was having a chilling effect on their writing and their activism. Would merely having a conversation with someone the administration arbitrarily calls a terrorist make the interviewer also a terrorist in the government's eyes, and thus subject to detention without trial? Since the government left that question dangling by refusing even to answer, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. That, of course, did not prevent the House from voting for indefinite detention yesterday. And not only that, the phony deficit hawks also proved their austerity rhetoric a sham once again by approving expenditures for useless military hardware and the construction of a massive East Coast anti-missile system. This, from GOP pod-people like Eric Cantor and John Boehner, who keep insisting the debt is destroying the country.

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, not so much because of the money or the indefinite detention clause (which he is totally for, as the wealthiest nation on earth) -- but because of the clause banning same-sex marriages on military property. Far from being concerned about the death of due process and free speech and assembly, the White House worries that the anti-gay clause might be illegal:

 The defense budget would also prohibit same sex marriage ceremonies on any military installation. The White House described the provision as a “troublesome and potentially unconstitutional limitation.”

And it might really get sticky if two gay Occupiers want to get married at West Point and have as their witnesses journalists who once interviewed suspected Yemeni militants. But as an obscure blogger, this scenario may probably never cross the president's mind. Like that clumsy sentence and the one at the top of this post, vague statutes are deliberately kind of left dangling, open to whatever interpretation any future leaders care to give them. In the meantime, Obama can indeed get away with claiming "L'état -- c'est moi."

Scandal Within a Fraud Wrapped in a Theft

Remember how each of the homeowners unfairly foreclosed on was supposed to get a paltry thousand or two dollars out of that pathetic sweetheart deal the Obama Administration put together with the criminal banksters earlier this year? The total settlement amount came to a mere $2.5 billion. And the bulk of it, theoretically, was supposed to go directly to the affected residents. At the very most it would have paid maybe a month's rent, or the cost of a moving truck, for each victim. There was also money put aside for general housing relief for the states. 

The upshot was, that after stealing billions and creating untold misery for millions, banks once again got away with murder*, or at least with fraud, conspiracy, perjury and grand larceny. It can't get any worse than that, right?

Wrong. The New York Times has published an article revealing that the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for housing relief for the states is being used for other purposes. The states are in budget crises from coast to coast, thanks to the de facto austerity policy that is in place here in the Corporate Homeland. Thanks are also due to the same big banks, whose recklessness crashed the economy in 2008, leading to an unemployment crisis and business closings and the resulting shriveling of local tax bases. Regular federal aid to states has dried up too, thanks to the machinations of the phony deficit hawks posing as responsible people in Washington. Dozens of states are, in effect, robbing Peter (the settlement funds) to pay Paul (everything else.) In the best case scenarios, they're robbing from the poor to give to the poor. In the worst case scenarios, they're robbing from the poor to give to the corporations and the rich. Perhaps the worst case of all is in Arizona, where the AG wants to use half the settlement money for (private) prisons. Well, they argue, prisons are considered housing too! You have to put a roof over the heads of all the marijuana smokers and undocumented folks! Luckily, a civil rights group has already sued to try to prevent this particular outrage. But how about Georgia, which will use its $99 million share to "lure job-creators" to move into their state?

Even in my home state of New York, whose attorney general was one of the big holdouts against the Obama Administration's mortgage fraud settlement until he was co-opted into running a non-existent mortgage fraud task force, admits New York's $15 million share will be used to fund legal clinics to counsel homeowners facing foreclosure rather than repay the people who were wrongly foreclosed on. The funding for the legal program was drying up, and the decision was made to use the money proactively rather than retroactively. So the people already out on the street or living in a relative's basement can probably kiss their thousand bucks goodbye. 

Texas, of course, never had any notion of using its share for the purpose intended. This is a state, remember, that was threatening to secede a few years ago. What else do you expect when you hand crooked Governor Goodhair (Rick Perry) a fat check from Washington? He'll either pretend to refuse it or find a sneaky way to funnel it to his rich friends. In the case of the fraudclosure settlement, it just went straight to the General Fund with no accountability even offered.

In cash-strapped California, where A.G. Kamala Harris was another diehard holdout on the puny bank settlement, Gov. Jerry Brown has announced his state's $400 million share will go directly toward closing the budget gap:

 (Harris was) holding out until the very end for a deal guaranteeing that a large share of the benefits would go to California, and then trumpeting her success in a news conference and a flurry of interviews with national news outlets. So Mr. Brown’s revised budget put her in an awkward position.

“While the state is undeniably facing a difficult budget gap,” she said in a statement, “these funds should be used to help Californians stay in their homes.” Both officials are Democrats.

When asked if Mr. Brown could legally appropriate the money, which is supposed to be held in a special fund “for the benefit of California homeowners affected by the mortgage/foreclosure crisis,” a spokesman for Ms. Harris declined to comment.

Just last week, Ms. Harris announced plans to give about half the money to groups that provide housing counseling and legal assistance to homeowners — groups whose budgets have shrunk while demand for their services grows. The other half would be used primarily for investigation of mortgage-related crime.

The Obama Administration apparently never saw this diversionary development coming. They are quietly, even desperately, begging the states to use their sudden mini-windfalls for the intended purpose. Fat chance. It's like giving a starving man $100 and telling him to use it to pay his electric bill.

The $2.5 billion was intended to be under the control of the state attorneys general, who negotiated the settlement with the five banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally. But there is enough wiggle room in the agreement, as well as in separate terms agreed to by each state, to give legislatures and governors wide latitude. The money can, for example, be counted as a “civil penalty” won by the state, and some leaders have argued that states are entitled to the money because the housing crash decimated tax collections.

Shaun Donovan, the federal housing secretary, has been privately urging state officials to spend the money as intended. “Other uses fail to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the settlement to bring real, concerted relief to homeowners and the communities in which they live,” he said Tuesday.

Yeah, Shaun. That ridiculous settlement sure would have changed the lives of all those victimized homeowners and their entire communities overnight. But here's the thing: what goes around, comes around. You force through a joke of a settlement, and guess what? The joke turns out to be on you.

Meanwhile, the Administration is trying to save face by launching an FBI investigation into that mysterious $2 billion ($4 billion? $14 billion?) Whale Fail loss over at mortgage fraudster JPMorgan Chase (one of the Big Five banks slapped on the wrist in the settlement.) The number of people believing there is going to be an actual probe is approximately zero.

* There is a case to be made that banks are literally killing people. Job loss and health insurance loss and home loss caused by the bankster-induced economic crash cut years off lives.  Bank-assisted suicide is another cause of premature death. 

Banker Wankers

I haven't written about the JPMorgan Chase $2 billion debacle till now, for two reasons. First, Mothers Day and Jamie Dimon don't mix. It was really in poor taste to put this guy on TV yesterday -- when you think of Dimon and mother, it's not the word "day" that comes after his name. (I kinda stole that from Obama's quip about Rahm Emanuel.)

Second of all, I understand bupkis about the machinations of the financial industry. But that's the whole point, right? The bankster class, with its credit default swaps, proprietary trading, tranches and myriad arcana, likes it that way. The public has no idea what they're doing. Of course, the bankers probably don't either. But they possess things  the non-psychopathic segment of the population does not: greed without guilt, reckless risk-taking, a grandiose sense of entitlement, government welfare in the form of endless no-interest loans from the taxpayer-funded Fed which they then relend to the public for their private profit .... And better still, little to no government regulations reining them in. And best of all, the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington that ensures that bankers will continue to own and control the entire country. And bestest of all, either no new laws criminalizing their bad behavior, or no enforcement of the laws already on the books.

For everybody else wondering why we should be mad at Jamie Dimon and his banking behemoth, here is an "Explainer" from Heidi Moore.

In his column today Paul Krugman calls for more banking regulations, while of course expecting no such thing to actually happen. Banker wankers have big egos and tiny memories and little to no capacity for self-reflection:

What did JPMorgan actually do? As far as we can tell, it used the market for derivatives — complex financial instruments — to make a huge bet on the safety of corporate debt, something like the bets that the insurer A.I.G. made on housing debt a few years ago. The key point is not that the bet went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees.

For the moment Mr. Dimon seems chastened, even admitting that maybe the proponents of stronger regulation have a point. It probably won’t last; I expect Wall Street to be back to its usual arrogance within weeks if not days.

Yeah, and don't expect the Obama Administration to suddenly jump up and demand reform either. This was my comment in response to Krugman:

Last month, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner cavalierly announced in a speech that "you can't legislate away stupidity and greed and risk-taking and recklessness."

Well, actually you can. And the outrageous fact is that nobody in a position of responsibility even tried to untangle the devil knot that binds the mega-banks and government together.

I was actually pretty surprised to learn that Dimon is not only chief of his bank, he's also a chairman at the N.Y. Fed. How did that even happen? The foxes are guarding henhouses every place you look. They continue to steal our eggs with impunity. No new laws, no prosecutions, barely a few slaps on a few plutocratic wrists. No banker left behind.

The revolving doors between Washington and Wall Street continue to spin. They need to be slammed shut, pronto. Three years ago, people were too stunned to realize what was going on when the economy crashed all around them and they lost everything. Now, thanks to a plethora of books and articles and documentaries and the Occupy movement, the public is all too aware of the stupidity, greed, risk-taking and corruption.

Forget the watered-down, delayed, and defanged Dodd-Frank Act. As others have suggested, it's long past time to bring back Glass-Steagall. It worked for half a century once, it can work for another half a century again.

Just to clarify, Dimon is a director of the Class A board at the New York Fed, and the chairman and CEO of the bank itself. I had initially misread the N.Y. Fed listings and mixed up his various titles. But in any case, it essentially makes for a triple conflict of interest. (h/t to reader Bilal, who shared the above linked chart explaining the hierarchy.) Dimon serves in an advisory capacity at the Fed, elected by and representing his fellow bankers only. But make no mistake -- he wields an extraordinary amount of influence in the economic and government sectors.  Elizabeth Warren wants him gone now. As far as I can tell, she is the only politician calling for his head. Or even for just a portion of his head. That speaks volumes on how soon we're going to see a stampede of politicians champing at the bit to reinstate Glass-Steagall.

Marriage Equality $tuff

I live in a small college town that has the unique distinction of being the site of some of the first same sex marriages in the country -- back when the very idea was shocking to many, and very, very illegal. The straight mayor of New Paltz, a recent SUNY grad at the time, was criminally charged for performing the ceremonies eight years ago, and he paid a heavy personal and financial price for it. He lost his bid for re-election, became ostracized by the moral majority, couldn't find a job, and was even reduced to sleeping on friends' couches.

Now Jason West is back, re-elected mayor on the Green Party ticket, and making his living painting houses. His response to President Obama's announcement that he had finally personally evolved into accepting same sex marriage? A big, fat "Meh."

"I'm happy the president finally joined the 21st century and has recognized the civil rights of these Americans. But until he starts pushing for a federal law, the various Gay-Straight Alliances in any high school in the country are doing more to advance the cause than he is. They're the ones in the front lines," West said.

Meanwhile, I have been counting all fund-raising emails coming in from various and sundry Democrats in the wake of the Obama Evolution. The first one arrived from Nancy Pelosi, not even one hour after the Robin Roberts interview aired. It asked me to sign a statement, to show solidarity with Brave Barry. I knew by signing I would be deluged, but I obliged anyway, just to see how intense the money-grubbing would get.

Sure enough, within minutes Nancy wrote back, asking for $3 for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ThinkProgress, the blog of The Center for American Progress (CAP), the neoliberal think tank with close ties to the White House, followed up, wanting me to sign President Obama's thank you card to mark the historic day. The White House itself sent a formal announcement, with video. Then  another email from Nancy Pelosi  urging me to be "part of history."  And to harvest emails by telling all my friends to be part of history too, of course.

The next day (Thursday) Jim Dean (Howard's bro) emailed me for a donation to Democracy for America, a DNC front group and asked me to tweet a thank you to the president. The White House sent a second official announcement, with video, just to remind me. Rep. Jared Polis, whoever he may be, emailed me and let me know the Republicans were already on the marriage equality attack. Contribute now!!! Another one from CAP to remind me to Tweet.

Sen. Al Franken, to his credit, did not directly ask for money. He just sent an email saying marriage rights activists should be proud and work hard to enshrine their work into law. But CAP sent a third missive titled "The Knives are Out", reminding me I had only seconds to sign my name to the Twitter message. Uh oh. I guess missed out.

MoveOn, which recently jumped on the Occupy co-optation bandwagon, asked me to "chip in" to Obama's re-election campaign because he deserves a reward for coming out so bravely. I guess the 99% money-making gimmick is a thing of the past. We liburls can just go back to drinking the kool-aid.

Meanwhile, I had to check my spam folder to see all the emails from the Obama campaign itself. I never asked, but Yahoo had started placing all the Bam Spam in the junk aisle. There is just so damned much of it, the automatic filter got it confused with the Nigerian scams and credit score alerts and porn. Let's see... I am counting one, two.... ten pleas for cash from Campaign HQ. But to be fair, one of them was based on Mothers Day. Barack wants me to wish Michelle well on her special day by sending him cash. What a stand-up guy.

Oh, here's something different and interesting. An email titled "Historic" just landed in my in-box. It's from Eric Schneiderman, the NY State Attorney General who was put in charge of the White House's mortgage fraud task force. Has he finally indicted a bankster? Nope.

Friend,

We witnessed a great moment this week as President Obama announced his support for the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples.

There is no doubt that having the President's support on this important issue will help ensure that all Americans are treated equally under the laws that govern our state and country.

And, you guessed it: Please donate to his campaign war chest. 

From BuzzFeed comes news that the Obama campaign has wasted no time ordering some gay swag to sell on its website. If you were afraid Barry was trying to co-opt OWS, just check out how he now totally owns Gaydom. Obama Pride.... sounds like a whole new brand. But still evolving, methinks, since the model is not quite ready to show her face.

.

Such, Such Was the Mitt

Many if not most politicians are sociopaths -- otherwise, how could they even live with their own lying, scheming selves? But the story of Mitt Romney's scissor-wielding assault on a fellow prep school student when he was 18 years old goes far beyond the merely nauseating. It reaches the ultimate point of true vomit-worthiness.


 Jason Horowitz of The Washington Post has written an excellently-sourced article about Romney's serial bullying in his teen years, which included playing incessant pranks on a blind teacher, and sneaking up on necking couples in a lovers' lane. But the worst of it was the attack on a gay student who had just dyed his longish hair blond. One day, Romney became so aroused that he formed a posse of preppies who held the kid down as Mitt hacked at his hair with a pair of scissors. This amounted to a criminal assault, and would additionally have been prosecuted as a hate crime today. But Mitt was never even reprimanded, let alone charged.


The victim, however, was later expelled after a group of elite tattle-tales turned him in for sneaking a cigarette. He died several years ago, and never forgot the incident, as one of the tormenters who encountered him in later life remembers. Mitt Romney, when confronted with the story today, at first semi-denied it, chuckled inappropriately, then apologized "if anyone was offended". A little late for the victim.


The WaPo story also has a lot of background on the elite Bloomfield Hills, Michigan school that was the scene of the crime(s). Cranbrook, the article says, was/is every inch a snobbish institution modeled after the British all-male boarding schools. I immediately thought of Christopher Hitchens' memoirs of his own school-day experiences at the hands of older boys and the rampant consensual homosexual experimentation amongst the pupils. And I was also reminded of George Orwell's classic indictment of boarding school cruelty and perversion, titled Such, Such Were the Joys.


Young Eric Blair (Orwell) was regularly beaten by the adults in the school and to a lesser extent, bullied by his peers. But there is another parallel to Cranfield and Orwell's alma mater, Crossgates -- and that is the extreme snobbery. Physical cruelty was matched only by Class War juvenilia. From the WaPo piece:

Lou Vierling, a scholarship student who boarded at Cranbrook for the 1960 and 1961 academic years, was struck by a question Romney asked them when they first met. “He wanted to know what my father did for a living,” Vierling recalled. “He wanted to know if my mother worked. He wanted to know what town I lived in.” As Vierling explained that his father taught school, that he commuted from east Detroit, he noticed a souring of Romney’s demeanor.

Orwell recounts an eerily similar incident:

I recall a conversation that must have taken place about a year before I left Crossgates. A Russian boy, large and fair-haired, a year older than myself, was questioning me.

'How much a-year has your father got?'

I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a small notebook and made a calculation.'My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,' he announced with a sort of amused contempt.

Orwell's hellish school-days occurred at the very beginning of the 20th Century, when ingrained class distinctions still reigned supreme. He didn't write his essay until after World II had served to erase class lines, if not cruelty to children. Or so he thought: "The snobbishness that was an integral part of my own education would be almost unthinkable today, because the society that nourished it is dead," he concluded.

No, not dead. Merely asleep and destined to cross the wide Atlantic to further wreak its cruel, prurient havoc in the New Gilded Age. Welcome to Mitt Romney's America, Mr. Orwell.