Midnight in the Garden of Fleecery and Evil

 ** Updated Below.

The Ready for Hillary SuperPac is holding a humungous going out of business sale in anticipation of Hillary herself formally announcing her candidacy as early as this week. You can get your Hillary fleece jacket, your Hillary fleece scarf, your Hillary fleece hat, your Hillary fleece headband. Each and every item of apparel is guaranteed Made In USA and bears the exclusive "Formidable" label, just in case you thought you were getting something cheap made in a Bangladesh Walmart sweatshop.

And just in case you were worried about the jobs of the Hillary retailers, don't be. They will be painlessly subsumed into the official campaign itself, simply moving their store to a new, shinier location. Only the logos will be changed. There will always be fleece.

The fleecing of America has been going very strong for a long while now, regardless of the political party or the president. We are just getting the shocking word that New York City municipal workers have been getting royally fleeced  by Wall Street! An analysis by the city comptroller reveals that over the past 10 years alone, at least $2 billion in "fees" have been paid to wealthy money managers by teachers, sanitation workers, cops, firefighters and other workers who thought they'd been saving for their retirements and earning interest on their payroll deductions.

As New York Times reporter Patrick McGeehan puts it in his lede (h/t Robert S.), "The Lenape tribe got a better deal on the sale of Manhattan island than New York City’s pension funds have been getting from Wall Street."

“When you do the math on what we pay Wall Street to actively manage our funds, it’s shocking to realize that fees have not only wiped out any benefit to the funds, but have in fact cost taxpayers billions of dollars in lost returns,” Mr. (City Comptroller Scott) Stringer said.

Why the trustees of the funds — Mr. Stringer included — would not have performed those calculations in the past is not clear.

Mr. Stringer, who was a trustee of one of the funds when he was Manhattan borough president before being elected comptroller, said the returns on investments in publicly traded assets, mostly stocks and bonds, have traditionally been reported without taking fees into account. The fees have been disclosed only in footnotes to the funds’ quarterly statements, he said.

The stakes in this arena are huge. The city’s pension system is the fourth largest in the country, with total assets of nearly $160 billion. It holds retirement funds for about 715,000 city employees, including teachers, police officers and firefighters.

Most of the funds’ money — more than 80 percent — is invested in plain vanilla assets like domestic and foreign stocks and bonds. The managers of those “public asset classes” are usually paid based on the amount of money they manage, not the returns they achieve.

Except that somebody changed the rules without telling the workers. Now, all Wall Street has to do is merely touch other people's money before turning it into gold... for themselves.  And it sure smells like Stringer is doing some ass-covering here himself. He knew what he knew when he knew it, and maybe figured it was better to expose himself rather than have some reporter or watchdog group do it for him.

This scandal will not stop Wall Street from its continual fleecing of the workers of America, however. If you thought that self-interested plutocrats had given up on the idea of cutting Social Security to augment their robbing of public pension funds, think again. They have a wealth of think tank surrogates to do the dirty for them. Just because their latest tactic of scapegoating Elizabeth Warren as an anti-capitalist witch is already getting stale doesn't mean they're actually going to stop. They won't stop until they succeed in burning every retiree and disabled person, every widow and orphan and low wage worker at the stake and then sweeping up their ashes as a commodity ripe for investment and future profit.

Reactionary pundit Ramesh Ponnuru did the honors in this week's Bloomberg View while his godzillionaire boss was getting knighted, blessing the Bush-Clinton dynasty, munching canapes with Joe Biden, not-running for mayor of London, and building a new bronze palace over the ruins of a Roman temple.

 Ponnuru's logic is nothing if not ponerological*:

Social Security is becoming a worse deal for each generation. Those now joining the workforce are expected to pay more into the system than they get out of it. Warren's plan is to shower more money on the current generation of retirees, but without increasing the deficit over the next 10 years. That means, in all likelihood, raising taxes on current workers while also increasing the program's long-run fiscal deficit.
The strongest argument in favor of expanding benefits is that Social Security should keep all senior citizens out of poverty, and doesn't. That fact, though, is really a remarkable indictment of the way the program is currently structured. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Andrew Biggs has pointed out, the program substantially reduces work, saving and even birth rates without accomplishing this key social goal.

Translation: give Wall Street your tired, your poor and whatever pennies remain. Tax not what your wealthy elites hoard for themselves, but what you can bestow on the wealthy elites. And by the way, the only surefire way to keep people out of poverty is to get rid of poor people altogether. It's 21st Century Eugenics 101.

It's the same fleecing song that reactionaries have been singing since time immemorial. Karl Marx wrote about the selfishness of the elites in the mid-19th century in one of his New York Tribune newspaper columns, slugged Pauperism and Free Trade: The Approaching Commercial Crisis.

Karl knew that the term "free trade" was a neoliberal buzzword for enforced immiseration of the masses. How he  would have loved skewering NAFTA and the TPP. Back then, the elites were celebrating the Irish potato famine and "transportation" of the marginalized to the penal colony of Australia as the greatest cures for poverty the world had ever seen. Disasters culled the welfare rolls magnificently. "Never let a crisis go to waste" was not a slogan invented by right wing Democrat Rahm Emanuel, who recently bought himself a second term as herd-culler extraordinaire.

As a matter of fact, I'm going to play a little game and tweak some of the names and places in Marx's op-ed:

In a (mansion) malt-house in (Chicago) Banbury, Mr. (Emanuel) Henley, (mayor of Chicago and NAFTA architect) President of the Board of Trade, lately explained to his assembled (godzillionaire donors) farming friends that Pauperism had decreased but by circumstances which had nothing to do with (his own policies) free trade; and above all, by the (irresponsible mortgagors, poorly performing schools)  famine of Ireland, the discovery of gold abroad, the exodus of Ireland, the great demand consequent thereon for (Wall Street/ free market solutions) British shipping, &c., &c. We must confess that  (globalization and privatization) "the famine" is quite as radical a remedy against Pauperism as arsenic is against rats. "At least," observes (corporate media pundits) The London Economist, "the (hippies) Tories must admit the existing prosperity and its natural result, the emptied workhouses."

By the way, Marx's gig at the Trib didn't last too long. When he complained about not getting paid enough or on time, they told him not to bother sending them any more articles. Plus ca change, etc. Even socialists and hippies have to eat, which in Neoliberal World makes them greedy little bastards who need to donate more skin to the game.

* Political Ponerology: a term coined by Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski to scientifically explain how evil can take over entire countries and political systems. His book by the same name, recommended by contributor Denis Neville, is well worth delving into, despite it not being an "easy read." The gist is that all it takes are a few psychopaths to infect a society and its government. A preview is available here.

** Update, 4/10. You heard it here last. Hillary Clinton is making the Big Announcement Sunday on Facebook. For somebody who claims to want to run a down-to-earth campaign, though, she sure is picking a funny way to show it. Because as her candidacy is revealed in cyberspace, she will actually be way up there in outer space, soaring high above it (and us) all on her way to Iowa for chit-chats with the carefully vetted just plain folks. The courtier press will find their instructions swearing them to secrecy and script-adherence under every kitchen chair. In exchange, they will be granted occasional access to a high level staffer for those all important news-crumbs.

Meanwhile, we get a preview of the preview, in which Hillary plays doting Granny harboring a tender desire for a whole nation full of entitled little Charlottes. This was juxtaposed with Elizabeth Warren kvetching hilariously last night about tender little fannies. No connection at all, I am sure.

Here is my New York Times comment on this subject:

“'I’m more convinced than ever that our future in the 21st century depends on our ability to ensure that a child born in the hills of Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta or the Rio Grande Valley grows up with the same shot at success that Charlotte will,” Mrs. Clinton wrote, referring to her new granddaughter."

Let's be clear. Charlotte has an absolute guarantee of success, not a mere shot at it. "Shots" are for the little people and their bootstraps, as are those reassuring dog whistles to Wall Street known as Ladders of Opportunity and Level Playing Fields.

It's not careerist success or the desire to be as rich as a Clinton that we're after, Hillary. It's sheer survival in a world gone mad with hyperactive capitalistic greed.

If these are the kind of bromides that Mrs. Clinton will present in lieu of actual policies -- like taxing the rich, coming out against the corporate coup known as the TPP, expanding Social Security, reining in and prosecuting Wall Street criminals, leading the fight to overturn Citizens United -- then she is going to need every penny of that two billion dollar donation stash to buy her way into the White House.

We no longer have a functioning democracy. So thank goodness that Elizabeth Warren is out there, putting the pressure on and speaking truth to power.

 She's giving voice to the real theme of Dynastic Horse-race 2016: "It's the Corruption, Stupid."

Shit Happens

A letter doesn't get mailed because it has a stamp on it. A letter gets mailed because you wrote it. Or maybe somebody else wrote it and you accidentally on purpose signed your name to it. And since millions of postage stamps, especially the forever ones, don't get recalled or retracted just because of a little plagiarism issue, let's just call it a day and put a stamp on it. Let's not relitigate the past. We must look forward, not backward.  We must progress to the next chapter of our long national nightmare narrative. As we have recently learned so sadly and so painfully, a Rolling Stone gathers no moss.

The phrase on the stamp honoring the late Maya Angelou was actually written by Joan Walsh Anglund and originally appeared in her poetry collection called "A Cup of Sun." The quote has been wrongly attributed to Angelou for many years, not least because she often quoted it herself without attribution, and thus was the plagiarism perpetuated, even recently by the great man himself. Barack Obama requoted the quote during a 2013 award ceremony for Angelou, who is said to have stood mutely by without bothering to correct either the record or the president. I know not why the caged tongue. I can only assume that she didn't want to embarrass the president, whom she had endorsed for reelection. However, as Angelou herself wrote, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

The Postal Service is not going postal over the malattribution, so why should you? Spokesman Mark Saunders shrugged it off, telling the Washington Post that attribution doesn't  matter if it's been part of the False Narrative since forever. Why else would they call it a forever stamp?

“Had we known about this issue beforehand, we would have used one of [Angelous's-sic] many other works,” USPS spokesman Mark Saunders said in an e-mail on Monday. “The sentence held great meaning for her and she is publicly identified with its popularity.”
“The Postal Service puts a great deal of time and energy into vetting the stamps it releases each year,” Saunders added in a follow-up email. “This stamp was similarly vetted. We found that the phrase was widely attributed to Angelou in many mediums and by some dignitaries and we were not aware of Ms. Anglund’s 1967 book.”

Even the official unveiling of the Stamp was fraught. Just as Oprah Winfrey got up to speak at the event, the lights went out. Because electricity doesn't happen because Oprah wrote a speech. It happens because the infrastructure is properly maintained and chunks of metal don't fall onto power lines for no apparent reason.

Maybe the Postal Service can make good on its error by issuing a forever stamp for Joan Walsh Anglund. One of her iconic children's illustrations can be matched with an original saying by Maya Angelou. 

'Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass'

Like a Teflon Rolling Stone

Nobody who perpetrated the fraudulent and now-retracted Rolling Stone article about a University of Virginia gang-rape is getting fired. When propaganda in the interest of the ruling class replaces muckraking journalism in the public interest,  the facts become secondary. Stephen Colbert even coined a new word -- "truthiness" -- to describe the phenomenon of using story-telling to advance a particular agenda.

And that is just what the story of "Jackie" did. It jibed perfectly with the Democratic Party campaign strategy of fetishizing rape on college campuses, framing a felonious crime and its prevention into an identity-politics female empowerment movement. It deflected our attention from the inconvenient truth that the party of the New Deal and the Great Society has become the party of Wall Street and Permawar.

At the exact same time (last summer and fall) that Rolling Stone contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely began issuing what amounted to a casting call for the ideal college rape victim to star in her blockbuster article, the White House was rolling out an anti-rape branding campaign called "It's On Us." The Democrats desperately needed a narrative to differentiate themselves from the Republicans for the upcoming midterms. They desperately needed a new wedge issue variant to counter the GOP's "war on women." The perceived epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses fit the bill perfectly. Rather than talking about the rape of a nation by a gang of unprosecuted financial predators of Wall Street, we could talk about the rapes of young women by their unprosecuted predatory male peers on elite college campuses.

Mass post-meltdown public angst and outrage could be safely channeled by liberal leaders of the media-political complex. Nobody is a fan of rape, after all. We all have daughters, granddaughters, sisters and nieces. We can all relate.

Rolling Stone, an establishment magazine of "popular culture," knew a trending topic when it saw one. Sabrina Rubin Erdely found the ideal victim, and went on a sensationalistic rampage. Since the magazine was on a mission -- the cultural  equivalent of William Randolph Hearst's fraudulent but splendid little warmongering, sparked by the explosion of The Maine -- no corroborating evidence, witnesses or basic fact-checking were required. "Jackie" was the co-invention of both Jackie and Sabrina. Facts would only have gotten in the way of the yellow journalism. It is a conspiracy by any other name.

Columbia University, in its "scathing" report of the fraud, called it a failure of journalism. It should be called a botched, failed, criminally dishonest marketing campaign. The magazine officials themselves are in "mistakes were made" mode. Nobody is admitting to perpetrating a fraud. Nobody will lose his or her job over the unfortunate little episode. The worst tragedy that could come out of the whole thing is if we stopped believing that campus rape is a real problem, if we automatically assume that every rape victim is lying. And that is why Rolling Stone "reached out" to a panel of independent investigators in order to discover "where they went wrong."

Editor Will Dana practically brays out the noblesse oblige as he humblebrags about his own innate decency:

This report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone. It is also, in its own way, a fascinating document ­— a piece of journalism, as Coll describes it, about a failure of journalism. With its publication, we are officially retracting 'A Rape on Campus.' We are also committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report. We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students. Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings. 

Painful and sad.... but oh so fascinating, too!  From now on, they will police themselves, just like a Wall Street bank. We apologize if you were offended. Your comfort is our deepest concern. If you are now afraid to report your rape, that makes us sad. But not sad enough to fire ourselves. Because even though the story was retracted, it got an amazing number of clicks when it was published. It attracted more than 2.7 million views, the most ever for an article "not about a celebrity."

To its credit, the Columbia investigating team didn't buy Rolling Stone's self-protective altruism as an excuse. From the report:

Yet the explanation that Rolling Stone failed because it deferred to a victim cannot adequately account for what went wrong. Erdely's reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie's position.
It would be unfortunate if Rolling Stone's failure were to deter journalists from taking on high-risk investigations of rape in which powerful individuals or institutions may wish to avoid scrutiny but where the facts may be underdeveloped. There is clearly a need for a more considered understanding and debate among journalists and others about the best practices for reporting on rape survivors, as well as on sexual assault allegations that have not been adjudicated. This report will suggest ways forward. It will also seek to clarify, however, why Rolling Stone's failure with "A Rape on Campus" need not have happened, even accounting for the magazine's sensitivity to Jackie's position. That is mainly a story about reporting and editing.

By the time Rolling Stone's editors assigned an article on campus sexual assault to Erdely in the spring of 2014, high-profile rape cases at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt and Florida State had been in the headlines for months. The Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education was leaning on colleges to reassess and improve their policies. Across the country, college administrators had to adjust to stricter federal oversight as well as to a new generation of student activists, including women who declared openly that they had been raped at school and had not received justice.

There were numerous reports of campus assault that had been mishandled by universities. At Columbia, an aggrieved student dragged a mattress around campus to call attention to her account of assault and injustice. The facts in these cases were sometimes disputed, but they had generated a wave of campus activism. "My original idea," Dana said, was "to look at one of these cases and have the story be more about the process of what happens when an assault is reported and the sort of issues it brings up."
Jackie's story seemed a powerful candidate for such a narrative.

Erdely, ironically enough, boasts on her own website that she specializes in writing about fakes and frauds and weirdos:  "She has written about con artists, murder investigations, vicious divorces, power brokers, lovable eccentrics, bioweapons, cults, sexual violence, medical ethics, hackers, LGBT issues, and teachers who have affairs with students—among other subjects."

She is a graduate of the Hearst School of Yellow Journalism. No, she isn't. I just made that up. She truthily dropped out of the Hearst School of Yellow Journalism before ever getting her degree. I didn't need a fact-checker for that fact, because there is, in fact, no such school. But it enhances my narrative.

The celebrity mattress-toting student was, in actual documented fact, a special guest at the narrative that was President Obama's State of the Union Address. (I am not making that up.) During February's televised Grammy Awards show, Obama himself in fact made a special cameo appearance to announce that "Rape is Not O.K." (although permawar and drone assassinations and financial crimes and deep-sea drilling and job-destroying secret corporate trade deals are still good to go.)

The Obama White House's campus rape fetish of a marketing campaign went into full swing last September, relying heavily on the same click-baiting culture of celebrity that Rolling Stone does.

Wired --another edgy culture-tech magazine -- called it "a smart branding campaign against sexual assault." (even though Obama's claim that one out of every five college women is sexually assaulted turned out to be wildly non-factual.)

The pre-midterm elections stunt was pure Madison Avenue, a direct creation of an advertising agency. It used celebrities (including, ironically, Jon Hamm, who plays an alcohol-soaked sexual predator on Mad Men)  and a slogan -- "It's On Us" -- to deliver the heretofore unknown message that sex crimes are not cool. The subliminal message? Vote Democrat. GOP fetus-detecting vaginal wands, rapists' penises, they're all the same in the grand electoral scheme of things. From the Wired article:

 After the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault compiled a report on sexual assault in April, the White House and Generation Progress (an arm of the nonprofit Center for American Progress) decided to launch a campaign promoting “bystander intervention.”
This is a new tack for these kinds of public service announcements: Rather than telling men ‘no means no,’ and instead of imploring women to report attacks when they happen, a bystander campaign calls on everyone to keep their eyes peeled and to create a culture that won’t tolerate sexual misconduct.
From there, Mekanism (the ad agency) essentially had free rein to whittle down the message. They pitched five ideas, almost went with “Get in the way,” and then settled on “It’s on us.” “The way most sexual assault messaging in the past has been, there’s a perpetrator and the victim and those are the two parties involved,” says David Horowitz, Mekanism’s creative director.

It's only a cynical hop skip and jump to the Tee shirts and testimonials and corporate sponsorships and interactive video games. You can even log on to take the It’s On Us pledge, and the website will generate a profile with your mug shot framed in the shape of the logo. (with the ultimate destination being the NSA Utah storage facility? It's an Obama two-fer!)

 

 You can then scroll through a rainbow land of Tips Against Rape, and educate yourself about "The Cause." In It's On Us World, all the men become predators, all the women are urged to become cartoonified Joans of Arc. No Means No! If you see something, say something.

The Rolling Stone rape story has been lambasted as a travesty of journalism. But it's not journalism. It's political marketing. It never would have been made possible without a tacit grant from the big money-driven media-political complex. The article is not part of any problem. It's simply a part of the neoliberal solution: keeping the masses alternately ignorant, sedated, entertained, and terrorized.

That is a fact.


 

Greedwashing Grifters

And a very Good Friday to one and all. 

It's been quite the OCD epidemic of self-serving damage control among greedy corporations lately. Apple, which has grown filthy rich off its slave labor in Chinese suicide mills and the minimum wage retail labor of debt-ridden millennials in Exceptional America, issued a strongly-worded statement against gay-bashing in Indiana this week. And Walmart did them one better, issuing a strongly-worded statement against gay-bashing in Arkansas only weeks after it offered a minimal increase in its starvation wages to a few carefully selected employees.

Somebody alert the Pope to start the canonization process.

And then there's McDonald's, which just makes itself look worse every time it tries to redeem itself in the court of public opinion. It was bad enough when they came out with that survival skills manual for employees a couple years ago, helpfully advising the Help to cut back on heat and food and sell last year's Christmas presents in order to afford this year's Christmas. It was hilarious enough when they started a marketing campaign in which lucky customers got randomly chosen to do a random good McDeed for the sole purpose of corporate greedwashing for TV. It was disgusting when they gave a miniscule wage increase to a miniscule number of employees this week. It was doubly disgusting when they actually gleaned glowing headlines for their cynical PR effort from the corporate media.

Of course, Walmart and McDonalds are among the corporations that only very recently and ostentatiously cut their public ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing billionaire bill mill that regularly churns out anti-labor "right to work" legislation designed specifically to destroy unions and thus keep everybody's wages depressed.  They're also among the 600 or so multinational corporations which are directly, or through such lobbyists at the US Chamber of Commerce, negotiating the anti-labor Trans-Pacific Partnership and its evil twin, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP.) Apple is in a global free market paradise all its own. The late lamented Steve Jobs made no secret of having no interest in bringing manufacturing jobs back to America.

New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman, in his usual Panglossian fashion, praises Walmart and McDonald's with the faintest of damns in his latest column. Sure, their token wage increases are on the crappy side, but they could also be the harbinger of things to come! "We" can give America a raise if we want to, fellow elite folks! Pretty please.

And then he really pulls a fast one. He stealthily inserts a plug for the TPP:

For one thing, global competition is overrated as a factor in labor markets; yes, manufacturing faces a lot more competition than it did in the past, but the great majority of American workers are employed in service industries that aren’t exposed to international trade.

I really had to restrain myself responding to that snide little remark, which obliquely trashes both TPP opponents and that lowly, yet "protected," category of servility:

So, since most of us are servants, we shouldn't worry about the Trans-Pacific Partnership because the billionaires haven't yet figured out a way to offshore all those great cashier and hamburger flipping jobs?

People who lost their good-paying factory jobs to NAFTA have been forced to become members of the Precariat, working for peanuts at Walmart and McDonalds. And now they're expected to jump for joy because the billionaires decide to throw them a few pennies and bennies and milk the good press for all it's worth.

Disgusting and shameless.

The TPP, which has been described as NAFTA on steroids, will in fact destroy thousands and thousands more American jobs. Factory orders on durable goods in this country are already way down, and the situation will only grow worse with every new trade deal. At least PK isn't falsely claiming, as are other "progressive" astroturf campaigns, that the TPP will protect American jobs and level the playing field.

The living wage movement must join forces with other trade unions to fight back against both globalization and the anti-labor "right to work" cookie cutter ALEC bills now showing up even in blue states like Oregon.

Solidarity is our only hope.

Meanwhile, the latest employment report shows a slowdown in hiring for even the crappy New Abnormal jobs. Black people are especially hard hit, with their median wages falling by 3.6 percent since the start of the long depression, a rate twice that of whites.  Meanwhile, the AARP reports that nearly half of all job seekers over the age of 55 have been out of work for at least half a year.

Tell us again that deregulated hypercapitalism and globalization don't have a toxic trickle-down (actually more of an acid rain downpour) effect on the Servant Economy. We are not lovin' this.
 

No Fooling

 The president does not give a crap about you. 

In order for millions of mortgagors to save their underwater homes, all the newly-elected Barack Obama had to do in 2008 was give the O.K. to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Obama could have made a moratorium on foreclosures a pre-condition of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. But like Bartleby the Scrivener, he preferred not to. 

We already knew, from former TARP inspector Neil Barofsky's Bailout, that Obama and his own treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, had made relief for the banking cartel their top priority. They used TARP money to "foam the runway" for the Too Big To Fail/Jails (TBTFJs) by spreading out the foreclosures in a gradual fashion so as not to overburden the pampered plutocrats with too much paperwork. (Much of which later turned out to be fraudulent anyway, but that's another story.)

Now, as Dave Dayen notes, former House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank has casually mentioned in his new memoir that President-elect Obama coldly, callously and deliberately threw millions of innocent victims of the financial meltdown under the bus. Just because he preferred to.

TARP was doled out in two tranches of $350 billion each. The Bush administration, still in charge during TARP’s passage in October 2008, used none of the first tranche on mortgage relief, nor did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson use any leverage over firms receiving the money to persuade them to lower mortgage balances and prevent foreclosures. Frank made his anger clear over this ignoring of Congress’ intentions at a hearing with Paulson that November. Paulson argued in his defense, “the imminent threat of financial collapse required him to focus single-mindedly on the immediate survival of financial institutions, no matter how worthy other goals were.”
Whether or not you believe that sky-is-falling narrative, Frank kept pushing for action on foreclosures, which by the end of 2008 threatened one in 10 homes in America. With the first tranche of TARP funds running out by the end of the year, Frank writes, “Paulson agreed to include homeowner relief in his upcoming request for a second tranche of TARP funding. But there was one condition: He would only do it if the President-elect asked him to.”

Frank goes on to explain that Obama rejected the request, saying “we have only one president at a time.” Frank writes, “my frustrated response was that he had overstated the number of presidents currently on duty,” which equally angered both the outgoing and incoming officeholders.
Obama’s unwillingness to take responsibility before holding full authority doesn’t match other decisions made at that time. We know from David Axelrod’s book that the Obama transition did urge the Bush administration to provide TARP loans to GM and Chrysler to keep them in business. So it was OK to help auto companies prior to Inauguration Day, just not homeowners.

Now that Obama is in the twilight of his presidency, it is becoming safe for Democrats like Frank to come out of the closet and openly criticize the White House's corrupt allegiance to Wall Street. His fellow Massachusetts Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, has just added a bombshell of her own to the revised paperback edition of her own memoir, A Fighting Chance.  Missing from the original hardcover bestseller was an anecdote of a meeting she once held with Obama's favorite banker, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, to discuss government regulation of the TBTFJs:

When the conversation turned to financial regulation and Dimon began complaining about all the burdensome rules his bank had to follow, I finally interrupted. I was polite, but definite. No, I didn’t think the biggest banks were overregulated. In fact, I couldn’t believe he was complaining about regulatory constraints less than a year after his bank had lost billions in the infamous London Whale high-risk trading episode. I said I thought the banks were still taking on too much risk and that they seemed to believe the taxpayers would bail them out -- again -- if something went wrong.
Our exchange heated up quickly. By the time we got to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we weren’t quite shouting, but we were definitely raising our voices. At this point -- early in 2013 -- Rich Cordray was still serving as director of the consumer agency under a recess appointment; he hadn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate, which meant that the agency was vulnerable to legal challenges over its work. Dimon told me what he thought it would take to get Congress to confirm a director, terms that included gutting the agency’s power to regulate banks like his. By this point I was furious. Dodd-Frank had created default provisions that would automatically go into effect if there was no confirmed director, and his bank was almost certainly not in compliance with the those rules. I told him that if that happened, “I think you guys are breaking the law.”

Suddenly Dimon got quiet. He leaned back and slowly smiled. “So hit me with a fine. We can afford it.”

Dimon could well afford to sneer. Every time his bank gets slapped with token criminal charges by Obama's justice department for face-saving public relations purposes, he saunters over to Eric Holder's office to demand and get a sweetheart deal. Holder holds the requisite press conference, collects a fine (on paper only, because banks can always claw back the cash through declaring losses on their tax returns) and he and Jamie give each other big sloppy kisses under cover of darkness.

 Matt Taibbi, in one of his many articles exposing the criminal collusion between Wall Street and the White House,  quotes a financial reform advocate who describes the perfidy this way:

 "The kid-gloves approach that the DOJ and the SEC take with Wall Street is as inexplicable as it is indefensible," says Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets, which would later file suit challenging the Chase settlement. "They typically charge only one offense when there are dozens. It would be like charging a serial murderer with a single assault and giving them probation."

Taibbi was writing about the case of a former JPMC employee who blew the whistle on the bank, only to find herself out of a job and her whistleblowing hidden from public view by Eric Holder, thanks to Dimon paying a clawed-backed fine to the government in exchange for the A.G.'s silence.

This past year she (whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann)  watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts. 

After Jamie made his latest deal with Eric, he got a huge raise and the bank's stock value skyrocketed while hundreds of low-level employees were laid off. Crime really does pay during the Age of Obama.

The president not only does not give a crap about you. He openly despises you.

Still,  I guess we should count ourselves lucky that we don't live in Yemen, Somalia,Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya and all the other parts of the earth that the Nobel Peace laureate continues to bomb with impunity. Or in Egypt, whose murderous authoritarian ruler just got the Jamie Dimon treatment: a sweetheart deal from Obama of another billion dollars in aid, along with tanks, missiles and F-16s  in exchange for a meaningless promise to cut back on persecuting gays, jailing journalists and executing protesters.

Victimization-by-state is always, and only, a matter of degree.

Dollars & Pence

Money talks, and Indiana Governor Mike Pence is listening.

It took the threat of an economic boycott and the declaration that the Hoosier State is an apartheid state to get presidential hopeful Pence to walk back his homophobic bill of hideousness. It seems that mistakes were made by the readers of the law, not by the writers of the law. Just because the law states that merchants are within their "religious" rights to deny service to the LGBT community doesn't mean that bigots don't respect the gays, whined Pence and his cohort. Their gateway drug to pre-civil rights right-wing euphoria seems to have gotten recalled before even making it out of Dr. Moreau's lab of legislative horrors. At least its toxicity might get watered down:

Speaking at a news conference, Mr. Pence said he thought the clarification was needed because of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the legislation.

He said that while the intent of the bill was not to discriminate against gay people, state officials must confront the perception that the law would allow just that. He asked lawmakers to pass legislation that would be on his desk by the end of the week.

“I believe this is a clarification — but it’s also a fix,’ Mr. Pence said. “I’m determined to address this this week.”

The law has set off a firestorm, with both critics and some supporters saying it would allow businesses to deny service to lesbian and gay customers if it offended their religious beliefs. Businesses, organizations, politicians and many celebrities have spoken out against the law, some of them canceling events in the state.

Money talks. Gay people and the people related to them and the people who do business with them spend money. Pence saw the $$$ on the wall. Although he may rely on anonymous billionaires to finance his state and national political machinations, he still relies on ordinary people for his continued professional existence. Better to pretend to swallow his bitter moral pill now so that he upchuck it back out at us later in a different form. Hate takes so many forms, and even haters are sometimes forced to pick their battles.

Although the Supreme Court has granted corporations speech rights, the granting of religious rights as cover for all manner of civil rights abuses is finally getting some blowback. When the NCAA threatens to pull the basketball championship from the Basketball State, even bigotry has to take a back seat to greed.

Which brings us to the rest of the country. Although there is no direct proof that the libertarian American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has directly orchestrated the sudden simultaneous influx of religious bigotry laws, they do have "bill mill" written all over them. The authors of the Indiana law are, in fact, members of ALEC.  And while ALEC officials deny they're behind the Indiana law and others like it, they also deny having anything to do with gun control legislation -- despite providing the template for the Stand Your Ground laws that enable the extermination of black people by thugs like George Zimmerman.

So, since the economic threat to Indiana has turned out so well, how about a boycott of not only the states passing homophobic and racist laws, but of all the  states and cities hosting ALEC conferences? Its next big confab is the annual Spring Task Force Summit on May 15 in Savannah, Georgia -- which relies very, very heavily on those millions of tourism dollars for its continued survival. How about we put our state legislatures on notice that we won't countenance spending public money to send our elected officials on this junket and others like it?

No More Trickle-Down Bigotry on the Public Dime

Gay advocacy and other civil rights groups might also spend their money to register for this event and liven things up a bit. You're apparently allowed to bring along a spouse, but not a live-in partner. The registration form actually stipulates "legal" spouse only, along with members of one's immediate, legal family. I am not kidding. Guests must wear their legal spouse name-tags at all times to seminars plotting such abominations as how to get rid of clean air and water and health care for the masses.

 The possibilities for fun are endless. And the actual summit only lasts for one day, so as to give participants plenty of time to conspicuously cavort and consume in Savannah, even take pleasure cruises to nearby Hilton Head Island. And it gives potential party crashers, both gay and straight, black and white and brown, plenty of time to picket and boycott and raise a general ruckus at every luxury venue where your local legislative grifter is caught living it up on the public dime.

Would lawmakers even dare show their faces in Savannah after the Indiana debacle? Of course they would. Because staying away would require a moral compass and the capacity for shame, which are automatic disqualifiers to ALEC membership. Any sense of shame has to be applied firmly from without and come attached with a price tag payable only by the actual venal politician caught in the act of serial perfidy.

Because money talks.

The Attempted Gaslighting of Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has the reverse Midas touch: every plutocratic nerve ending that she touches turns into a jello salad heavy on the fool's gold nuggets with some harmlessly dull razor blades thrown in for an added taste sensation.

You shall know the elite owners of the American political system by their desperation. The latest futile attempt to destroy the increasingly popular Warren is to cast her as the left wing mirror image of Ted Cruz. This exercise in false equivalency by the golden fools of the Extreme Center comes right on the heels of threats by big bankers to withhold a couple of thousand bucks from Democratic candidates who won't stop carping on wealth inequality.  The shakedown artists of Wall Street promptly fell flat on their asses with that pathetic attempt at extortion.

So today, an anonymous Democratic lobbyist slithered forth to accuse Warren of being Ted Cruz in drag. The Hill, a combination Politico-style gossip rag/ corporate news aggregation site, did the gaslighting honors in a lame attempt to give equal time to the increasingly dull-razor minds of the Trans-Pacific Partnership claque. The headline blares "Elizabeth Warren Plays Ted Cruz Role with House Democrats." (She might be on the verge of not only losing it, but hypnotically reading Doctor Seuss to them as she plots to shut down the government!)

What really happened was this. As Warren calmly explained the anti-democratic nature of Investor State Tribunals with which trade negotiators would supersede sovereign judicial systems, pro-trade Congressman Sander Levin (D-Mich) attempted, as the Hill article spins it, to "intervene" (that is, stage a mental health intervention) to get Warren to shut up during her own briefing session. This populist rhetoric of hers, complain the pro-trade plutocrats, is getting way too rancorous for their refined sensibilities:

One former Democratic staffer turned financial services lobbyist compared Warren's involvement in the House to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who frequently meets with House Republicans.

“Elizabeth Warren is the mirror image of Ted Cruz, and if we aren’t careful, she’ll drive the Democrats into the same ditch Cruz is trying to drive the Republicans,” the former Democratic staffer said.

The revolving door Democratic staffer is of course too cowardly to give his name.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street think tank Third Way, which is obviously the source of the anonymous gaslighter, is crazily granted "left of center" status in The Hill piece, the better to make Elizabeth Warren appear like the crazy lefty version of Ted Cruz.

In another Hill article by the same reporter (Kevin Cirilli) published earlier this month, former Democratic Party chairman Howard "The Scream" Dean also had attempted an intervention by telling Warren to "tone it down." (she has that malady commonly diagnosed by men about opinionated women: she is "shrill". It is not becoming for women to have "misplaced rage." Even "good billionaire" Warren Buffett is upset that Elizabeth is definitely not cute when she's angry. She doesn't do the Lean In trickle-down feminism thing well.)

“Our program cannot be soak the rich — that's a mistake and alienates middle class people. But on substance, the Warren wing is correct,” said Dean.
“The rhetoric about wealth creation needs to be scaled back because Americans like wealth creation,” he added. “The level playing field argument wins it for us. The reason you do not want to talk about ‘tax the rich’ is because when middle class people hear it, they hear ‘they're going to raise our taxes.’ Democrats can't do that.”

It's not that Democrats can't, Howie. It's that they won't. They're as beholden to billionaires as the Republicans. As one "pragmatic" Dem put it, in the falsely equivalent way that only radical Wall Street centrists can,  the GOP's vicious assault on ordinary people is the same thing as Elizabeth Warren's criticism of the corrupt plutocracy. "To the extent that Republicans beat up on workers and Democrats beat up on employers — I'm not sure that offers voters much of a vision," Peters (Rep. Scott Peters, D-CA)  said.

And then there's the subtle photography. From a recent article in Politico, headlining Warren as a power-hungry outsider, there was this unflattering, harshly-lit, larger than life portrait:

 Compare it to Newsweek's crazy-eyes rendition of Michele Bachmann in 2012:

With Hillary, you get literally decades of dynastic choices between Crazy Cat Lady and Haggard Hag:

 

Sorry, ladies. Because try as the corporate media might, they can never make you look as threateningly scary as this guy: