The Corruption is Now Complete

Sergeant Pepper Spray of UC-Davis has officially been replaced as National Bad Guy. That dubious honor now belongs to Sergeant Slaughter of the US Army. The cop who mounted a one-man chemical assault against peaceful student  protesters last year was placed on administrative leave and never charged with a crime. The soldier who got airlifted out of Afghanistan after his massacre of civilians as they slept in their beds will probably get a whole lifetime of administrative leave and will have to be charged with a crime. But if history is any guide, he could also eventually walk free, or at most spend his days under perpetual psychiatric care. His compatriots in the Haditha and My Lai massacres all walked free, once the public outrage abated and people moved on. 

The big difference is that Sgt Bobby Bales, as he is fondly being remembered by people who probably didn't know him all that well, is also being cast in the American media as a sympathetic victim who just snapped after one deployment too many. Legend already has it that he joined up out of patriotism, post 9/11,  to serve his country and fight the terrorists. Only... not so fast. It turns out that Bales may have joined the Army simply to escape accusations of fraud stemming from his stint as an investment broker. He'd been ordered to pay actual and punitive damages totalling more than $1 million to a retiree he had cheated out of his life savings. The Washington Post has the story.

But, whatever. Our duly elected president and Congress are set to legalize fraud anyway. The guilty shall be absolved. After Obama's in-house lobby of CEOs known as the Council on Jobs & Competitiveness told him they wanted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act dismantled, he was only too happy to comply. That was the law enacted during the Bush Administration in the wake of the Enron scandal; it made it illegal for corporations to defraud their investors, and forced potential cheaters to make honest disclosures about risk.

Now, the oligarchs have convinced their apparatchik in president's clothing that honesty is both a job-killer and a second term killer. It's not enough that they, like the war criminals, have walked free from past felonies. They won't be satisfied until they get permission to commit even more unpunishable crimes.

Hilariously, the weasels of the political class have named this scam of a bill the JOBs Act -- standing for "Jumpstart Our Small Business Start-Ups."  It passed in the House almost unanimously, giving lie to the narrative that bipartisanship is dead. Democrats and Republicans love to pretend-fight over contrived issues like birth control, the better to sneak their Wall Street-enabling agenda past the public. Democratic apologists are already making the excuse that their side was hoodwinked into voting for it, seeing how the name would fool anybody, plus they probably didn't have time to actually read it. What a joke. If they didn't have time to read it, it was because they were too busy fund-raising from the bill's actual mega-rich authors.  

The Senate is expected to pass the measure this week with the usual fast-track speed reserved for bills that screw the 99%. There is some surface pushback, but since Harry Reid made sure a super-majority will be needed to defeat it, some Democrats will be able to save face and brag how they voted against it and still get what they really want. 

Former N.Y.Gov Eliot Spitzer, who once prosecuted the fraudsters now hoping to be exempt from culpability, has a scathing smackdown of this latest political scandal in Slate:

Once again, the Puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn’t recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian ”JOBS Act”—a bill that should in fact be called the “Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.” The bill will undo some of the most important reforms placed on Wall Street in a generation.

Even the staid New York Times is calling the proposed legislative chicanery "Orwellian" in its scope. From an editorial titled You Scratch My Back:

With their eye on campaign cash, President Obama and lawmakers from both parties have decided they can all get more from corporate constituents if they cooperate to enact legislation that big donors want.....

Its proponents — stock exchanges, venture capital groups, biotech start-ups, investment banks — say that the easier it is for companies to raise money, the more they will grow and hire workers. Its opponents — the current and former chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the association of state securities regulators, AARP, the Consumer Federation of America, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. labor federation and unions, several big pension funds and many prominent securities experts — have presented ample evidence to show that deregulation raises the cost of capital by harming investors and impairing markets, making it harder for legitimate companies to thrive.

John Coates of Harvard Law School recently told a Senate banking subcommittee that the proposals in the JOBS Act “could not only generate front-page scandals, but reduce the very thing they are being promoted to increase: job growth.” Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and other supporters, notably Senator Charles Schumer of New York, have responded to the warnings by fast-tracking the bill for passage. Over the past week, Senate Democratic leaders scrapped plans for introducing a Senate version that presumably would have restored some of the protections gutted in the House bill. Instead, they chose to embrace the House version.

Former financial regulator William Black calls the JOBS bill the most cynical thing to come out of Washington in living memory:

The JOBS Act is something only a financial scavenger could love. It will create a fraud-friendly and fraud-enhancing environment. It will add to the unprecedented level of financial fraud by our most elite CEOs that has devastated the U.S. and European economies and cost over 20 million people their jobs.... Financial fraud is a prime jobs killer.
Powerful regulatory regimes -- strong accounting rules, strict corporate governance, tough securities laws, and vigorous civil and criminal enforcement of the regulations and laws is the greatest infrastructure for strong economic growth that a nation can provide. For decades, the U.S. had an enormous competitive advantage over other nations in raising funds through securities because investors placed great trust in issuers that were subject to effective regulation. U.S. equities traded at a substantial premium compared to securities issued in other nations (which means that companies could raise capital much more effectively and inexpensively). Regulators serve as the "cops on the beat" that prevent a Gresham's Dynamic in which "bad ethics drives good ethics out of the markets."

The only "cops on the beat" in evidence these days are the paramilitary thugs who beat up Occupy protesters, stop and frisk minorities on suspicion of being minorities, and spy upon Muslims. Fraud is being openly celebrated as a virtue and peaceful demonstration is being vilified as a crime. The political miscreants are no longer even trying to pretend they work for the people who voted for them. Mendacity must get so exhausting after awhile.

Do you really think Obama and his Justice Department are going to crack down on the psychopathic NYPD?  Think again. The president just had Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg to lunch, ostensibly to offer him a job in his second term. The president rakes in millions of dollars on any given day while canoodling with the obscenely wealthy and satisfying their every craven whim. His grand plan to shred Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is still very much on the table, despite his shallow populist rhetoric. Even serial Obama apologist Jonathan Chait has had enough of defending him. Read about the first (but not last) attempt at the Grand Bargain/Big Sellout here.

Electoral politics no longer has any meaning for regular people. The presidential horserace is a product of the mainstream stenographic media and SuperPacs  -- a shallow sporting event to which we are invited to take sides and pretend our vote matters. Rombamarama will be a contest between two guys vying to see who can raise the most money and who can do the most to please the plutocrats. That is it. 

The fact that Occupy is alive and well and growing every day is testament to the fact that the people are just not buying this crap any more.

It's time for a JOBS Act, all right. We need to Just Overcome B.S. And get ready for May Day.

**Update: Harry Reid has yanked the bill after amendments more protective of investors and the import-export bank failed, and the final cloture vote looked set to fail as well. You can read further details from Dave Dayen via Firedoglake. I think a little burst of public sunshine helped them see things from a reasonable point of view. Meanwhile, lobbyists will continue to open their checkbooks in hopes of better days for the professional fraud class.

Unctuous Utterances

President Obama is totally to blame for the sharp rise in gas prices and he's simply ecstatic about it, say Mitt Romney and the usual suspects at Fox News. It's because he won't Drill Baby Drill, and because he won't allow construction of the tar sands pipeline, and because he's the heartless killer of a million jobs. Nonsense! say the reasonable people and pundits of pragmatic progressivism. No president can control the price of gas, fer cryin out loud! He's not a king, despite the fact that he has declared himself to be above the Constitution and can kill people. Stop piling on Barry. And of course, we are right and sensible to call out the GOP for the lying liars they are.

Obama, for his part, points to Congress and its tax subsidies for Big Oil as the reason for our pain at the pump, as well as the drumbeat for war with Iran, and rising demand because of voracious Chinese consumerism. These causes have at least a vestige of verisimilitude, and they sound good.
But in making this a conversation about politics, and the crazy side blaming the reasonable side and vice versa, what's missing is that neither party is really addressing the issue head on. No party and no branch of government is pointing the finger of blame where it really belongs: the greedy speculators at such too big to exist banks as Goldman Sachs. (I wrote about unregulated speculation in a Paul Krugman comment last week and was promptly accused of being a Republican sock puppet by another reader!)


It's an election year, and no politician wants to bite the hand that feeds him or her. There are a few exceptions to the rule, such as Bernie Sanders, and I'll get to him later. But first, let me indulge in one of my favorite pasttimes: the Parse a President game. This edition is from a slightly condensed version of Obama's Saturday radio address, titled Ending Subsidies for Big Oil Companies.

Hi, everybody. As I’m sure you’ve noticed over the past few weeks, the price at your local pump has been going up and up. And because it’s an election year, so has the temperature of our political rhetoric.

(It's costing families about $40 extra for fill-ups -- the same magic number I said the average family would get when we passed that tax holiday sunsetting thingmabob that will never really sunset, and will give us deficit hawks an excuse to cut Social Security. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.)

What matters most to me right now is the impact that rising prices have on you. When you’ve got to spend more on gas, you’ve got less to spend on everything else. It makes things harder. So I wanted to take a minute this weekend to explain what steps my Administration is taking when it comes to energy – most importantly, producing more of it while using less of it.

My approval ratings are down, so let me take some precious time away from my weekend and try to improve my numbers through a little friendly propaganda.

The truth is: the price of gas depends on a lot of factors that are often beyond our control. Unrest in the Middle East can tighten global oil supply. Growing nations like China or India adding cars to the road increases demand. But one thing we should control is fraud and manipulation that can cause prices to spike even further.
For years, traders at financial firms were able to game the energy markets, distort the price of oil, and make big profits for themselves at your expense. And they were able to do all that because of major gaps and loopholes in our regulations. When I took office, we did something about it.
The Wall Street reforms I signed into law are helping bring energy markets out of the shadows and under real oversight. They’re strengthening our ability to go after fraud and to prevent traders from manipulating the market. So it’s not just wrong, but dangerous that some in Congress want to roll back those protections and return to the days when companies like Enron could avoid regulation and reap enormous profits, no matter who it hurt.

Okay, here is where it gets really, really dicey. I am actually venturing into some blatant lying here, folks. That Wall Street reform law I signed to control speculation two years ago, that Dodd-Frank thing? Well, the oil speculation part has never even been enforced! Gary Gensler, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, has the sworn duty to stop folks like Goldman Sachs from manipulating the market and driving up oil prices to artificially high levels. The too big to exist banks are still ripping off you fine folks at the gas pump like there's no tomorrow. Of course, Gensler used to work at Goldman Sachs, but I am not telling you that. Goldman Sachs is a friend of mine and a friend of my friend, Michael Bloomberg. I am not going to diss them in an election year, or any year. Because they run the whole show. This is pure Kabuki. There is no oversight of the financial crime family. I repeat. No oversight.

What’s more, at a time when big oil companies are making more money than ever before, we’re still giving them $4 billion of your tax dollars in subsidies every year. Your member of Congress should be fighting for you. Not for big financial firms. Not for big oil companies.
In the next few weeks, I expect Congress to vote on ending these subsidies. And when they do, we’re going to put every single Member of Congress on record: They can either stand up for oil companies, or they can stand up for the American people. They can either place their bets on a fossil fuel from the last century, or they can place their bets on America’s future. So make your voice heard. Send your representative an email. Give them a call. Tell them to stand with you.

I am ignoring the fact that Senator Bernie Sanders has demanded that we do  something about those wild and crazy speculators. I am ignoring the fact that as your president, I have it in my sole power to release just a smidgen of our oil reserves to make Wall Street speculation stop in its tracks and prices drop like a rock. Why, just the other week, Reuters put out a false report that Gordon Brown and I had agreed we'd release our reserves. And the price of oil immediately tanked. And when it turned out the rumor was false, the price went right back up. What do you know about that?  Heh, heh. In the meantime, I will convince you its you and me against the world, babe, and blame both parties in Congress. I may as well call my campaign The Truman Show, get it? Because Harry ran against Congress. Congress evil, Barry good. Heh.  

And tell them to be honest with you. It’s easy to promise a quick fix when it comes to gas prices. There just isn’t one. Anyone who tells you otherwise – any career politician who promises some three-point plan for two-dollar gas – they’re not looking for a solution. They’re just looking for your vote.

They lie! Demonize Congress even more and forget about the banksters, folks! Trust me. Triple Heh.

If we’re truly going to make sure we’re not at the mercy of spikes in gas prices every year, the answer isn’t just to drill more – because we’re already drilling more. Under my Administration, we’re producing more oil here at home than at any time in the last eight years, that’s a fact. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high, that’s a fact. And we’ve opened millions of acres on land and offshore to develop more of our domestic resources.

Never fear. By the time Election Day rolls around, this pain at the pump will be but a dim memory, Wall Street will have raked in billions, my campaign war chest will have swollen to bursting. And of course, I am drill baby drilling -- dangerous deepwater operations are back to full capacity and there will be a fracking well in every back yard if I have anything to say about it. Remember my State of the Union address? As long as the big polluters promise they won't use toxic chemicals in the water they shoot down into the earth, then it's all good. Forget about Dow Chemical and Bhopal and the BP spill. Let's look forward, not backward. And notice how I don't suggest that people actually drive less, or  conserve energy. Because this has nothing to do with an energy shortage and everything to do with greed.

(here, though, he does speak about fuel efficiency in the vehicles of the future, as well as solar and wind power. Nobody can quibble with that.) 

We can do even better. And we will. But what we can’t do is keep being dependent on other countries for our energy needs. In America we control our own destiny. So that’s the choice we face – the past, or the future. And America is what it is today because we have always placed our bets on the future. Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Again with the moving on meme. The only folks betting on the future and winning are the unregulated Wall Street greedsters. Your own futures? Meh.

***********************************************************************************
You may recall last summer when Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont leaked a lot of embarrassing info about the oil speculators, proving that they had been the sole cause of the last (unexplained until then) big spike in prices in 2008. The  players in this regulated-in-name-only casino are all the usual suspects: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the Koch Brothers, T. Boone Pickens. All the erstwhile "confidential" devils are here.

And now they're at it again, and Sanders is at it again. He and 69 other legislators have written a letter to Gary Gensler to remind him that he is falling down on the job and flouting the law in not regulating the Wall Street greedsters who continue to inflict so much human misery. I just wish he had also written directly to the president to ask why he is falling down on the job and not firing Gensler. Much as I love Bernie, he will only go so far and no further.

Sanders points out that the skyrocketing prices have nothing to do with a short supply or a particularly rising demand, the usual cause of spiking numbers. There is no shortage of oil in the world market. "According to the Energy Information Administration," said Sanders, "the supply of oil and gasoline is greater today than it was three years ago, when the national average price for a gallon of gasoline was just $1.90. Today, the national average is more than $3.70 a gallon at a time when the demand for oil in the U.S. is at its lowest level since April of 1997." 

Eighty percent of the futures market is now controlled by unregulated financial institutions, compared with just 30% a decade ago.

So with the exception of Bernie Sanders and perhaps a precious few other altruistic types who still act in the interest of the voters, here is what our elected officials are actually doing. Because this is how the dance is performed: The president pretends to push, and Congress passes, some watered-down legislation that merely nibbles around the edges of reform. The new rules never actually kick in right away, because can-kicking is so lucrative. To make sure the carious teeth of Dodd-Frank never clamp down and actually bite, lobbyists fall all over themselves, frantically contributing to campaign funds. The politicians sign their names to letters demanding enforcement of the rules, and they leak these demands to the media. We think they really care about us. Lobbyists lobby the politicians some more, and politicians get more campaign cash. The President blames Congress and tells us we can make a difference if we'd only pick up the phone and call them. His campaign sends out emails telling us to stop the Republican lies. He asks for $15 to help stop the Republican lies. The speculators laugh all the way to the bank, we get screwed, and the mad world spins.

Fingerpointing USA (from top, Gensler, Sanders, Obama)

The Other War Against Women

The war against women is nothing new, and it isn't limited to the GOP misogynists who don't want us to have access to birth control. The war against women is really an economic one, waged by the .01 percent against the rest of us. The real war is the class war being waged against the women, men and children of the 99%. The birth control battle, while odious, is just a part of the larger oppression of poor women, working women, and minority women. Wealthy white women get treated with dignity and respect, regardless of the medical circumstances. Paris Hilton will never be forced to undergo an ulstrasound if she doesn't want one. 

You don't get the big picture by reading or watching the mainstream media accounts. The debate that rages is whether it's false equivalence to compare Rush Limbough's vitriol with Bill Maher's potty mouth. Liberals are torn between championing the hate machine's right to free speech and calling for its silencing. Reactionary politicians are trying to out-do each other in creative medievalism, turning routine ob-gyn visits into torture. There is not a little pornography in the current political discourse.

And meanwhile, American women are still only earning about 82 cents to the man's dollar -- an apparent increase from just a few years ago, when we got 75 cents to the dollar compared to men. However, that increase is mainly due to the fact that men lost more jobs during the meltdown; the hard truth is that everyone's wages have shrunk. Men's pay decreased by two percent, while women lost an average of .09 percent. Moreover, black women still earn only 70% of what white men get, and Latinas, just 60%.

The  Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, much vaunted by the Obama Administration as one of his signature legislative accomplishments, really has had nothing much to do with the very slight improvement in the pay scales of working women.
As a matter of fact, Lilly Ledbetter herself is having trouble making ends meet on her meager retirement benefits. In an interview with WNYC this week, she said her income has fallen by over 50% since her husband died in 2008. Despite her fame and her seat of honor at the State of the Union address, she is "just scraping by."  You can listen to the interview here. Instead of contributing to politicians who are co-opting this brave woman for their own ends, you might want to purchase Mrs. Ledbetter's new book. It's called "Grace and Grit." As she says in the audio, income discrimination is not just a woman's problem -- it's a family problem. I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. It will open your eyes and make you mad as hell. You'll find out how she did all the work herself to get the law changed, and that she didn't earn a single extra penny as a result of her efforts.

Jenny Brown of Labor Notes writes that over her lifetime, the typical working woman loses $379,000 because of the continuing income gap. And as Lilly Ledbetter has experienced, this loss carries over into retirement. Social Security benefits are predicated on the amount of lifetime earnings. And then too, wage discrimination is usually built right into jobs that are traditionally held by women.

Hospitality and retail jobs are a big part in the "improving" employment statistics, because the increasing wealth of the one percent has given them scads more money to burn in hotels and restaurants and stores. So of course thousands more servants and lackeys are needed to meet the needs of the very rich. And service industries are dominated by low-paid female workers. The average wage for a restaurant server is only $2.13 an hour -- well below the legal minimum wage, but exempt from the law because tips theoretically compensate. Only they often don't, because employers don't make up the difference as they are required to do. Some bosses force the wait staff to pool their tips among the cleanup crews and even pocket their own cut.

Then there's the hotel business. The Hyatt Chain, owned by the wealthy Pritzker family, is notoriously anti-union and anti-woman. Management ordered heat lamps turned on striking workers outside the Chicago hotel during a heat wave last summer. At the Hyatt hotel in Santa Clara, California, bosses celebrated “housekeepers appreciation week” last September by grafting photographs of housekeepers’ faces onto bikini-clad bodies on surfboards. If Hyatt employees want health insurance, a $400 monthly premium is deducted from their checks.

Yet Hyatt heiress, Forbes billionaire and Obama bundler Penny Pritzker has a seat of honor at the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. That should immediately suggest that this hilariously named in-house lobby of CEOs and a few token, co-opted big labor leaders has absolutely nothing to do with jobs. When you hear the word "job creator" in Washington, it refers to an oligarch who not only wants to keep more of his/her hoarded wealth, but wants to make sure what little the rest of us have left is taken away through "shared sacrifice."

President Obama was happy to pose with Lilly Ledbetter at a few photo-ops, and never hesitates to use her name as a campaign talking point. But he also never dreamed of appointing her to his phony jobs council. She might have spoken too many inconvenient truths. She might have made Penny Pritzker uncomfortable.

The war on women is bipartisan. The Republicans just have an uglier and more vocal way of expressing it. 

A Study in Contrasts: Ledbetter (top) and Pritzker