What's Really Wrong With the Economy?

Adam Smith and the
Roots of Neo-Conservative Hypocrisy

You've doubtless seen recent headlines showing that unemployment in the US is above 10% officially, higher than it's been since 1983. But that's not the whole story.

New figures in Friday's jobs report from the Labor Department indicate that the broadest measure of unemployment—including those unemployed who have looked for work in the last four weeks, discouraged workers, and the "underemployed" (part-time workers looking for full-time work)—has hit its highest recorded rate. More than one in six, or 17.5 percent of workers, are unemployed or underemployed, and in some hard-hit states like California, Arizona, and Michigan, the figure can get as high as 20 percent. The current figure is almost a half-percent higher than the previously recorded high of 17.1 percent in December 1982, even though the official jobless rate remains lower than its peak in the 1980s.
(more details at The New York Times)

While all the Wall Street firms are flush with the money from the Bush bailout, Main street has yet to see full benefits from the Obama stimulus package. As always America's top-down priorities can be summed up as "comforting the comfortable." Station Agent's post today got me thinking about the whole 'too big to fail' meme, and this post is an expansion of my response there in comments.

Adam Smith is almost universally considered to be the father of economics. His book The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, and that coincidence in date leads conservatives to regard it as though it was one of America's founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence. Much in Wealth can be used as an argument for unbridled and unregulated capitalism, but like the Bible (Old Testament, New Testament, or any religious writings for that matter) cherry picking of certain passages while ignoring others can lead to a conclusion far from the original intent.

It's no accident that people with mental illness are often referred to as 'unbalanced.' If your every thought and consideration pulls you in one direction it's just a matter of time before you're dragged over the edge. I haven't actually read Wealth of Nations, but I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that it has been cherry-picked mercilessly to present only one side of Smith's philosophy. Smith himself was seemingly quite aware that his own thoughts ran a considerable gamut.

On the road from the City of Skepticism,
I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
-- Adam Smith --

One can certainly cherry-pick through Smith's writings and assemble quotes backing every core conservative argument. He is presumed to have been against regulation and the welfare state, for instance. Quotes can easily be found to bear that out.

"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice,
is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way,
and to bring both his industry and capital into competition
with those of any other man or order of men."

"Every man is, no doubt, by nature,
first and principally recommended to his own care;
and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person,
it is fit and right that it should be so."

An argument mitigating the laissez faire effect of that first quote would focus on the underlined phrase. Smith lived and died well before the emergence of the modern multinational corporation. How would he have reacted to the idea of corporate lobbying, especially when the intent is so often to alter the laws so they no longer even resemble justice? What would he have thought of a government that was blatantly for sale to the highest bidder?

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul
can always depend on the support of Paul."
-- George Bernard Shaw --

Just because you bribe or coerce the Legislature into making something legal that was once criminal doesn't make it right. And one other question; would Smith have seen the monopolistic practices of giants like Microsoft as constituting a form of market regulation of their own?

Those who might cite Smith in defense of the free market could in no way rely on him in the case of the crony capitalism that now dominates the global economy. He quite clearly abhorred monopolies, trusts, and price fixing.

People of the same trade seldom meet together,
even for merriment and diversion,
but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public,
or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The whole justification for free-market capitalism can be summed up in a sentence; "it creates a free market environment where competition spurs excellence." That's fine in theory, but where the rubber hits the road you always see capitalists trying to merge into entities that are not just too big to fail, but too big to compete with. Whether they buy out anyone who challenges them, as for example Microsoft has always done, or collude with them and form a cartel, as you see in the oil and health insurance industries, the result is the same. No competition. No free market. Prices are fixed at artificially inflated values, and the public is screwed.

As the saying goes; "in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice they are quite different." This is true in spades in the field of economics.

The sad truth about free market capitalism is that it inevitably leads to concentration of wealth in so few hands that the free market vanishes. You're left with crony capitalism. Which as I've already stated, is a kind of regulation unto itself. I'm absolutely certain that Smith would have considered the no-bid, cost-plus model that Cheney used to dole out cash to Halliburton and Blackwater as nothing less than criminal. I certainly do.

Happily my search for Adam Smith quotes led me to this brilliant post that contains the conclusion to the first book of Wealth of Nations. You should, indeed MUST read this post in its entirety.

It is my contention that much of today's discourse is seriously distorted by the near universal acceptance of some points which are, in fact, completely false. One of these is the idea that modern Conservative/Republican philosophy is strongly tied to the principals of free market capitalism as espoused by the like of Adam Smith.

The author then shows that Smith considered the investor class to be parasitic on the rest of the economy, and their interests contrary to general prosperity.

The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connexion with the general interest of the society as that of the other two.
[...]
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

By taking the top-down investors-first approach to the economy Barack Obama's financial advisers (all members of the investor class and most alumni of the Goldman Sachs boardroom) ignore the lessons of history and all credible economic theory. Listening to those , "who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it," would seem to constitute Obama's biggest mistake to date.

That mistake, to be blunt, has been to pick the wrong side in what is really a class struggle. Or, put another way, it's like investing in new draperies for a house whose foundation is crumbling. Even Republicans once recognized that prosperity is based in the working class. Anyone who looks at it honestly agrees to that, regardless of ideology. Even John McCain, caught in the absurd statement that the economy was strong while the banks were failing, tried to rescue himself by equating the American worker with the 'fundamentals.' For once he was right.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor,
and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.
Labor is superior to capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration."
-- Abraham Lincoln --

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase -
money that was paid for all things.
It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour,
that all wealth of the world was originally purchased. ”
-- Adam Smith --

"Capital is dead labor,
which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,
and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
-- Karl Marx--

By this yardstick there is only one thing that could be more dangerous than the gloomy unemployment statistics at the head of this post. And that danger is that the blood-sucking investor class can continue to shop for fancy draperies (paid for by the taxpayer) while the nation's foundation crumbles beneath them. Conservative philosophy revealed itself to be unsustainable practically speaking with the banking crisis last year. Hopefully this post shows that it is and always has been a sham on the theoretical side as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

UPDATES: There are a couple of pertinent links to add to this, which have just appeared on the web since I posted on Friday.

Ellen Brown has a new post up at Truthout: "Shifting the Burden from Main Street to Wall Street: Why We Need a Tobin Tax"

The BBC has released the results of a new poll: "Free market flawed, says survey"

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well. Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary. There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

So, as some celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall (which was after all a good thing) others regret the collapse of communism that brought it about.

TAGS: Economics, Adam Smith, Republican Hypocrisy
Cherry-picking the Facts to Support an Unsustainable Argument

Rachel Maddow Has Already Taken Down 60Plus.org, but there's one more little nugget...

Rachel Maddow has already exposed 60Plus.org's affiliation to Jack Abramoff. But there's a motive and some connections of 60Plus.org, that I wanted to explore, so I did some more digging.

The Ad: In case you haven't seen it. Clearly senior scare mongering -



Rachel Maddow's Take Down and Tie to Abramoff:



The 60Plus.org website:

60Plus.org would like to be known as "the conservative alternative to AARP." It's president is Jim Martin which you wouldn't know from the website itself; you'd need to do an advanced google search to dig up this bio-page:

Now Mr. Martin serves as the President of the 60 Plus Association, which has been called an "increasingly influential lobbying group for the elderly--often viewed as the conservative alternative to the American Association of Retired Persons."

60 Plus is a hard hitting organization dedicated to protecting the tax rights of seniors, and to repealing the most confiscatory of all taxes--the inheritance or estate (death) tax. Jim Martin has been quoted as saying that while there are two certainties in life, taxes and death, now, thanks to the death tax, Jim adds a third certainty--taxes after death. 60 Plus presents a Benjamin Franklin Award to Members of Congress in both parties who sponsor legislation to abolish the third certainty, taxes after death. Original sponsors are Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

Pretty classy, hiding the leadership bio page, yes? So who would do that? Well, the firm that provides the technology and registered the domain names, and appears to host 60Plus.org's email servers might do it. And who would that be? Generation X Strategies, GXS.net. And who is GXS.net?

Why it's none other than the recently former head of the VA Republican Party, Jeff Frederick!

Amongst the list of GXS clients which I'd like to highlight are Media Research Center (Bozell's outfit) as well as the RNC and the Texas Christian Coalition. And what else is supercool is that GXS has procured some Federal and State government contracts, as well as a Minority Owned Business status by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Jeff Frederick was ousted as the VA Republican Party Chair in April of this year, but prior to that, since July 8 1996, and up to today runs GXS services
for 60Plus.org, and then therefore powers the contribution technology at 60Plus.org's website, which is what this is all about. Money.

Abramoff (Shill-ius Maximus), Martin (Astroturfius Nastius), Frederick (Republicanus, Head of VA Party), PhRMA (Tauzin, probably hired because he has a drug sounding name) - probably all legal relationships, but they seem way too cozy to me. And the poor saps who are scared by this fearmongering ad have no idea that PhARMA doesn't need their help to keep their drug prices high, but Jim Martin and Jeff Frederick are really happy to facilitate the money exchange for them.

The icing on the cake? 60Plus.org's National Spokesman is Pat Boone. Yep, No More Mr. Nice Guy Pat Boone - and when you think about it, none of them in this tale are nice guys at all if you ask me.

TAGS: Astroturf, Republican Crime Syndicate, Jerks, Scaremongering

Call It "Medicare for Everyone" And Just Get Over It Already

If you take this whole health care legislation thing seriously these days like I do, you should take 35 minutes and watch this piece from Bill Moyers.

BILL MOYERS: So why are you speaking out now?

WENDELL POTTER: I didn't intend to, until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used over the years, and particularly back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.

BILL MOYERS: But during this 15 years you were there, did you go to them and say, "You know, I think we're on the wrong side. I think we're fighting the wrong people here."

WENDELL POTTER: You know, I didn't, because for most of the time I was there, I felt that what we were doing was the right thing. And that I was playing on a team that was honorable. I just didn't really get it all that much until toward the end of my tenure at Cigna.

BILL MOYERS: What did you see?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was beginning to question what I was doing as the industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, to what they refer to as consumer-driven plans. And they're really plans that have very high deductibles, meaning that they're shifting a lot of the cost off health care from employers and insurers, insurance companies, to individuals. And a lot of people can't even afford to make their co-payments when they go get care, as a result of this. But it really took a trip back home to Tennessee for me to see exactly what is happening to so many Americans. I--

BILL MOYERS: When was this?

WENDELL POTTER: This was in July of 2007.

BILL MOYERS: You were still working for Cigna?

WENDELL POTTER: I was. I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued.

BILL MOYERS: So you drove there?

WENDELL POTTER: I did. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

BILL MOYERS: People are going to say, "How can Wendell Potter sit here and say he was just finding out that there were a lot of Americans who didn't have adequate insurance and needed health care? He'd been in the industry for over 15 years."

WENDELL POTTER: And that was my problem. I had been in the industry and I'd risen up in the ranks. And I had a great job. And I had a terrific office in a high-rise building in Philadelphia. I was insulated. I didn't really see what was going on. I saw the data. I knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn't put faces with that number.

Just a few weeks later though, I was back in Philadelphia and I would often fly on a corporate aircraft to go to meetings.

And I just thought that was a great way to travel. It is a great way to travel. You're sitting in a luxurious corporate jet, leather seats, very spacious. And I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with. And then I remembered the people that I had seen in Wise County. Undoubtedly, they had no idea that this went on, at the corporate levels of health insurance companies.

BILL MOYERS: But you had, all these years, seen premiums rising. People purged from the rolls, people who couldn't afford the health care that Cigna and other companies were offering. This is the first time you came face to face with it?

WENDELL POTTER: Yeah, it was. You know, certainly, I knew people, and I talked to people who were uninsured. But when you're in the executive offices, when you're getting prepared for a call with an analyst, in the financial medium, what you think about are the numbers. You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations. That's what you think about, at that level. And it helps to think that way. That's why you-- that enables you to stay there, if you don't really think that you're talking about and dealing with real human beings.

BILL MOYERS: Did you go back to corporate headquarters and tell them what you had seen?

WENDELL POTTER: I went back to corporate headquarters. I was trying to process all this, and trying to figure out what I should do. I did tell many of them about the experience I had. And the trip. I showed them some pictures I took while I was down there. But I didn't know exactly what I should do.

You know, I had bills of my own. And it was hard to just figure out. How do I step away from this? What do I do? And this was one of those things that made me decide, "Okay, I can't do this. I can't keep-- I can't." One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."

And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."

BILL MOYERS: Your own resume says, and I'm quoting. "With the chief medical officer and his staff, Potter developed rapid response mechanisms for handling media inquiries pertaining to complaints." Direct quote. "This was highly successful in keeping most such inquiries from becoming news stories, at a time when managed care horror stories abounded." I mean, you knew there were horror stories out there.

WENDELL POTTER: I did. I did.

BILL MOYERS: You put these techniques to work, representing Cigna doing the Nataline Sarkisyan case, right?

WENDELL POTTER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: And that was a public relations nightmare, you called it. Right?

WENDELL POTTER: It was. It was just the most difficult. We call them high profile cases, when you have a case like that — a family or a patient goes to the news media and complains about having some coverage denied that a doctor had recommended. In this case, Nataline Sarkisyan's doctors at UCLA had recommended that she have a liver transplant. But when the coverage request was reviewed at Cigna, the decision was made to deny it.

It was around that time, also, that the family had gone to the media, had sought out help from the California Nurses Association and some others to really bring pressure to bear on Cigna. And they were very successful in getting a lot of media attention, and nothing like I had ever seen before.

[PROTESTERS: Shame on Cigna! Shame on Cigna!]

WENDELL POTTER: It got everyone's attention. Everyone was focused on that in the corporate offices.

BILL MOYERS: You were also involved in the campaign by the industry to discredit Michael Moore and his film "Sicko" in 2007. In that film Moore went to several countries around the world, and reported that their health care system was better than our health care system, in particular, Canada and England. Take a look at this.

[snip]

MICHAEL MOORE: Even with insurance, there's bound to be a bill somewhere. So where's the billing department?

BRITISH WOMAN #1: There isn't really a billing department.

BRITISH WOMAN #2: There's no such thing as a billing department.

MICHAEL MOORE: What did they charge you for that baby?

BRITISH WOMAN #3: Sorry?

MICHAEL MOORE: You've got to pay before you can get out of here, right?

BRITISH WOMAN #3: No.

BRITISH MAN #1: No, no, no. Everything's on NHS.

BRITISH WOMAN #3: This is NHS.

BRITISH MAN #1: You know, it's not America.

BILL MOYERS: So what did you think when you saw that film?

WENDELL POTTER: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.

BILL MOYERS: What were they afraid of?

WENDELL POTTER: They were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore.

BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry's trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, "Highlight horror stories of government-run systems." What was that about?

WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.

So let's do this:

Call it "Medicare for Everyone", which every American will understand instantly and not connect it with some dumb fuck idea of socialism, and let the HealthCareProvider CEOs pee their fucking pants.

Interview, Part One

Interview, Part Two

Another Edition of: Where Are They Now?

I was watching this on Rachel Maddow:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And while I thought I was just going to do a primer on the the genesis of Graham-Leach-Bliley Act that I've been bitching about for a while in comment sections everywhere, doing the homework reminded me of several things. The whole ass-end of the '90s flashed in my head. Bill-Gotta-Blow-Job was the dominant theme, and everything revolved around "What You Could To To Make Clinton Pay You For Getting An Unauthorized Hummer While Prez!"

Such leverage was entirely unfortunate, because years of lobbying efforts became true (patience please, as I do snag some long swaths from the wayback machine):

The NYT, Oct. 23rd, 1999, reporting that an agreement was nigh:

Agreement Reached on Overhaul of U.S. Financial System

The Clinton Administration and top Republican lawmakers reached an agreement early Friday to overhaul the financial system, repealing Depression-era laws that have restricted the banking, securities and insurance industries from expanding into one another's businesses.

The deal was announced about 2 A.M. after a compromise was reached over the measure's effect on lending rules for the disadvantaged, the source of months of partisan bickering between the White House and Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who heads the banking committee.

[...]

For instance, the nation's largest financial services company, Citigroup, would have been forced to sell some of its insurance operations as part of the $72 billion merger last year between Citibank and Travelers Group without either the legislation or a waiver from regulators. [emphasis mine (these above and all emphases below too) - the merger was "technically" illegal - read ILLEGAL - at the time, and this was a retro-patch to make it legal. Sound familiar?]

[...]

Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said in an interview, "At the end of the 20th century, we will at last be replacing an archaic set of restrictions with a legislative foundation for a 21st-century financial system." The measure, he added, "would provide significant benefits to the national economy."

[...]

The idea behind Glass-Steagall, named for the two lawmakers who wrote it, was that confidence in America's financial house could best be restored if bankers and brokers stayed in separate rooms. Such a separation, it was thought, achieved two purposes.

First, it would reduce the potential conflicts of interest between investment banking and commercial banking that were thought to have contributed to the speculative frenzy in the stock markets. Under the 1933 Banking Act, commercial banks could receive no more than 10 percent of their income from the securities markets, a limit so restrictive that most simply abandoned business on Wall Street.

Second, it would provide a safe harbor for the money of ordinary Americans by enabling them to put their money in accounts that were protected by deposit insurance and insulated from more speculative investments like stocks. (The 1933 act also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which now insures bank deposits up to $100,000.)

Over time, Federal judges and regulators chipped away at the Glass-Steagall Act and other restrictions on cross-ownership of banks, insurance companies and securities firms, enabling, for instance, Citibank to merge with Travelers last year to form Citigroup, the world's largest financial services company. But large hurdles remained that have discouraged the expansion by banks into new businesses.

[...]

The breakthrough in Friday's legislation came in a backroom meeting at the Capitol soon after midnight, when a group of moderate Senate Democrats -- led by Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Charles E. Schumer of New York -- forced a compromise between Gramm and the White House over the legislation's effect on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 anti-discrimination law intended to encourage lending to minorities and others historically denied access to credit.

Dodd, whose state is home to the nation's largest insurance companies, and Schumer, with strong ties to Wall Street, have long sought legislation to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act. Both men said in interviews Friday that they moved to strike a compromise after it became apparent that the legislation might be killed, as it was last year by Gramm, over the debate about the Community Reinvestment Act.

Gramm had maintained that he did not want anything in the bill that would expand the application of the Community Reinvestment Act because it was, he said, unnecessarily burdensome to banks. He had sought a provision that would exempt thousands of smaller banks from the law. He also wanted a provision that would expose what he has described as the "extortion" committed by community groups against banks by requiring the groups to disclose any special financial deals the groups extract from the banks.

But the White House found that provision unacceptable and had its own ideas about community lending. It wanted the legislation to prevent any bank with an unsatisfactory record of making loans to the disadvantaged from expanding into new areas, like insurance or securities.

The White House had insisted that the President would veto any legislation that would scale back minority-lending requirements. Four days of intense negotiations between Summers, Gene Sperling, the President's top economic policy adviser, and Gramm, while moving the two sides closer, failed to resolve the differences.

Such was the state of play Thursday evening when Gramm decided to force the issue by having the House-Senate conference committee vote on his proposed compromise, which the White House had already rejected for failing to block banks with bad lending records from expanding to new businesses.

When Gramm's measure was defeated by one vote, it quickly became clear that there would be no law unless Gramm could get some Democrats to break from the White House.

But Administration officials had spent all day making sure that the Democrats remained solidly against the measure until their concerns about the Community Reinvestment Act could be worked out.

After receiving calls from executives of some of the nation's leading financial companies, Dodd and Schumer began trying to work out a compromise. An agreement was quickly reached on the issue of banks and expanded powers -- no institution would be allowed to move into any new lines of business without a satisfactory lending record.

The lawmakers bogged down on Gramm's insistence that all community organizations disclose to the regulators what benefits they get from banks. Some Democrats expressed the fear that Gramm's proposal would require the Boy Scouts to file reports with the regulators.

Ultimately, the following provisions were drawn up and both the White House and Gramm said they could accept them:

-Banks will not be able to move into new lines of business unless they have satisfactory lending records.

-Community groups will have to make disclosures to regulators about certain kinds of financial deals with banks that they have pressed to make loans under the Community Reinvestment Act.

-Wholesale financial institutions, a new kind of business that takes large, uninsured bank deposits, cannot be affiliated with commercial banks.

-Small banks with satisfactory or excellent track records of lending to the underserved would be reviewed less frequently under the Community Reinvestment Act. As a practical matter smaller banks are reviewed about every three years. The deal struck today allows all rural banks and banks with less than $250 million in assets to undergo examination once every five years if their last exam resulted in an "outstanding" grade and every four years if they last scored "satisfactory."

Familiar? The playahs are really the same from yesterday to today. Not really a surprise. But the nugget I get out of that is revenge of the Banksters today regarding sticking them with CRA provisions: "Hey, if We, The Banksters Of The United States (TBOTUS) are going down, so are those godamned brown and poor people that you made us have in our godamn cake. Otherwise our plan WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT!"

The NYT, Oct. 23rd, 1999 on background:

Behind the Banking Bill, Years of Intense Lobbying

[...] banking deregulation has been vigorously lobbied and debated for 20 years by three of the nation's wealthiest industries: banking, insurance and securities.

In 1997 and 1998 alone, these three industries gave $58 million to Federal political candidates, according to compilations by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. They donated $87 million in so-called soft money to the political parties, and they reported spending $163 million in additional lobbying expenses.

Some other issues generate larger donations and expenses over limited periods of time. Health care lobbyists on both sides of the managed-care debate, for example, reported $230 million in lobbying expenses in 1997 and 1998. But that issue has been lobbied for a relatively short time. Over two decades of lobbying, the insurance and financial services industries have certainly spent more.

"A tremendous amount of money has been spent just because it has gone on for such a long, long time," said Wright Andrews, a longtime Washington lobbyist who over the years has represented companies on both sides of the debate.

Of course, not every dollar donated by every bank and insurance office was dedicated to this subject. But Gary Hughes, a senior vice president with the American Council of Life Insurance, noted: "The lion's share of our resources have been devoted to this. We viewed this is as critical to the long-term viability of our industry."

Yingling of the bankers association said: "The way we saw it, if we didn't get this legislation we were going to disappear. This was our top issue for a long, long time. The resources devoted to it were huge, and we fought it tooth and nail."

[...]

Schumer was on the House Banking Committee and is now on the Senate Banking Committee. He has long been regarded as the securities industry's strongest ally in Congress. Of course, most brokerage and financial services companies are based in New York City, parts of which Schumer represented in the House. He received more money from the securities industry in 1997 and 1998 than anyone else now in the Senate, almost certainly because he was running for the Senate.

Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, is regarded as one of the strongest allies of the insurance industry. Hartford is the nation's insurance capital. Between 1993 and 1998, Dodd received $325,124 from insurance companies -- not a great deal less than the Republican chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, the man who determined whether banking bills came up for a vote.

The insurance industry gave Gramm $496,610. He also received $760,404 from the securities industry and $407,956 from the banking industry.

[...]

Oddly, though, the lists show that Jim Leach, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the House Banking Committee and has the power to bring bills up for votes or bury them, received meager amounts from the three industries in 1997 and 1998: $8,570 from the bankers, $10,483 from the securities industry and just $3,000 from the insurance companies.

A member of his staff explained: " Leach doesn't take money from PAC's; he never has." Much of the industry money has been donated to members of Congress through political action committees.

More on Leach momentarily.

----------------------------

Let's look at and memorialize who actually voted against Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

Senate:

NAYs ---8
Boxer (D-CA) Bryan (D-NV) Dorgan (D-ND)	Feingold (D-WI) Harkin (D-IA) Mikulski (D-MD)	Shelby (R-AL) Wellstone (D-MN)

Present - 1
Fitzgerald (R-IL)

Not Voting - 1
McCain (R-AZ)

House: (Dems in Italics)

---- NAYS 57 ---

Baldwin Barrett (WI) Barton Brady (PA) Campbell Capuano Clay Condit Conyers Costello Coyne Davis (IL) DeFazio DeLauro Dingell Dixon Edwards Evans Fattah

Filner Frank (MA) Gejdenson Gutierrez Hastings (FL) Hefley Hinchey Inslee Jackson (IL) Kaptur Kildee Kucinich Lee Lewis (GA) Lipinski Luther Markey McDermott McKinney

Meek (FL) Mica Miller, George Obey Phelps Rivers Rodriguez Roybal-Allard Rush Sanders Sanford Schakowsky Serrano Taylor (MS) Thurman Tierney Waters Waxman Woolsey

---- NOT VOTING 15 ---

Bereuter Dickey Kanjorski Larson Martinez

McInnis Mollohan Ney Norwood Paul

Radanovich Scarborough Shuster Stark Taylor (NC)

These are the "relatively" good guys on today's economic issues.

Certainly, I must withdraw my previous strong support for Dodd. I applauded his FISA floor speeches, which I still do, but civil liberties and ordinary citizen economic liberties are indeed LINKED in my view. A strong citizen, all the way around, both civilly and economically are really the American way. You can't have one without the other Chris Dodd, and you split the baby. Don't get shy when EFCA comes up or you are really doomed. Ask Arlen Specter about that.

Anyhow, amongst the Senators, at least Feingold has both issues right. I still mourn Wellstone.

---------------------------

So I looked up the headliners on the GLB (hah!) Act, except for Phil Gramm. He gets enough ink, and I just didn't want to. Blergh.

Bliley has been replaced in the House, beginning in the 2002 class, by Eric Cantor. Bliley works at Steptoe & Johnson, and has made most of his 2008 lobbying money, well, look here for yourself. Kudos on the autism, Tom, but it's a shame that it's the least amount of money, where the others are generally reprehensible.

Leach - is a little weirder character. I can't figure out the total angle, as he didn't take PAC money, and strangely broke rank with Republicans and endorsed Obama, and even spoke at the Convention (YouTube). He is, however, a Lecturer and John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professor at Princeton.

Goldman Sachs - the world revolves around YOU!



TAGS: Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Economic Crisis, Goldman Sachs, Prates, Jerks and Thieves

One Simple God-damned Thing: The Lifetime Ban

The bailout's coming for ya baby. Despite overwhelming disapproval from the American people, Congress is set to roll over for Bush like a tired old dog seeking its owner's approval. So if we have to swallow this bullsh*t, I want one thing, one simple god-damned thing:

Any firm that receives a cash injection from the bailout fund (regardless of what that money purchases, be it distressed assets or whatever-the-f*ck Paulson decides he needs to acquire) must fire all officers of the company, and all those former employees must accept a lifetime ban from working in the financial industry. It works for sports (well sort of). Why not here?

NO BAN - NO FUNDS! Suck on that, Wall Street!

TAGS: Wall Street, Bailout, Paulson

A Very Important Speech

Yes, Even More Important
Than Hillary's Concession Speech

Bill Moyers' entire NCMR address (40 minutes)

- or click here to go to YouTube,
(if you wish to watch it full-screen.)

You can't help feeling that Mr. Moyers isn't really talking about the media so much as he's talking about a last-ditch effort to save democracy. But he can speak for himself as well as anyone, and better than most, so I'll just excerpt a couple of what I consider to be his most important statements.

What we need to know to make democracy work for all Americans is compromised by media institutions deeply embedded in the power structures of society.
[...]
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent while enhancing the power of the state and the privileged interests protected by it.

As the state has accumulated more power it has simultaneously devolved towards protecting the privileged. At the same time the media has been co-opted into serving those very same privileged interests. This is decidedly NOT a good thing. The multinational corporatocracy has a huge incentive on getting a grip on the power structures of American (and international) society. The people have to wake up to the realization that they have a vested interest in opposing this naked fascist power grab.

RISE UP! Before it's too late.

---

BONUS VIDEO: I know that the Bill Moyers speech, at 40 minutes, is very long for YouTube, or for anyone on the rapid-fire internet to devote their time to. Still, I give you this five minute speech from John F. Kennedy on the dangers of secret societies. It was delivered to the National News Publishers Association on April 27, 1961.

Somehow I feel as if the US federal government has become a branch office of Skull and Bones, with the co-operation of FOX news, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. Everything is secret, and no-one seems willing to expose any of it. Everything that Kennedy warned of has come to life. Anyway, kudos to the person who posted this - the series of accompanying images is very appropriate. More here, with a transcript of the entire (19 minute) speech.

TAGS: Bill Moyers, Addresses the NCMR, Media Reform
Talking Overpaid Bobbleheads Pushing Pre-processed Pablum Down the Necks of a Gormless Public

Wall Street Journal Spoof Hits Newsstands

...Hilarity Ensues

Richard Belzer was talking on AAR yesterday about My Wall Street Journal, a spoof that anticipates the decline of journalism at the real WSJ now that Rupert Murdoch owns the already quite conservative paper. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Murdoch 'parity' hits newsstands

A nude caricature of Anne Coulter, a not-so-subtle joke about John McCain and death taxes, as well as a few swipes at media baron Rupert Murdoch make up the highlights reel of a Wall Street Journal satire that was dropped on newsstands today.

Released to coincide with tax day, the newspaper parody titled My Wall Street Journal (a dig at Murdoch's ownership of MySpace, as well as the Journal) hit on the theme of media consolidation. In particular, Murdoch's ownership of Fox News, which the satire implied would have a detrimental and sensationalizing effect on the Journal's reporting.

No online version has yet been sighted, but the New York Times reports the WSJ sending employees out to buy up all copies before they get in the hands of the public.

It seems someone at The Wall Street Journal really likes a biting new parody of the paper — likes it enough, in fact, to leave at least one newsstand with no copies remaining for anyone else to buy.

It was not supposed to go on sale until this week, but some newsstands began selling it early. Last Thursday, Alexander Laurence was working at one such stand in Los Angeles, chatting with a customer, David Metz, when, both of them say, a man in a shirt with a Journal logo asked if anyone had seen a paper that looked sort of like The Journal.

“This guy comes by all the time to bring promotional stuff for The Wall Street Journal — bags, coin trays, stickers,” Mr. Laurence said.

Sure enough, they found what he was looking for. “He grabbed them all, said, ‘I need to buy all of these,’ ” Mr. Laurence said. “He had been going around to different stands, buying them.”

The man paid with a corporate American Express card. “At first he’s saying they have to make a correction or it’s not supposed to be out yet,” Mr. Metz said. “But then he said these are not published by The Wall Street Journal.”

A spokesman for The Journal, Robert H. Christie, declined to comment.

It looks like the spoofers expected just such a move. They were ready with yet another brilliant spoof, in the form of this YouTube vid showing Murdoch in a tirade against the paper spoof, and (he he) ordering that all copies of My WSJ be bought up and burnt.

'Murdoch' on YouTube

That spoof was good enough to fool the author of the above-cited Seattle PI article. But The Gawker saw right through it, as well as weighing in with some other important background:

Incidentally, the Murdoch imports at the Wall Street Journal continue to tread on the newspaper's delicate sensibilities. You'll remember Marcus Brauchli, the Journal's managing editor, had a speech ready to welcome his new overlords, but they never called on him. That was just the first humiliation.

Here's another very watchable YouTube vid discussing Murdoch's impact on 'journalism' in America so far, and the likely impact on the real WSJ. In case you don't click, I'll give you this brilliant characterization of Murdoch from Bill Moyers, "He is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power he's carnivorous; all appetite and no taste. He'll eat anything in his path." Keith Olbermann is none too pleased with Murdoch either.

Lamentably there is no online version of the spoof (yet), so the best I can provide is this image of the front page. This one looks to be a pretty effective antidote to Murdoch's corporate propaganda machine. The Wall Street Journal is dead. Long live My Wall Street Journal.
UPDATE: Huge hat-tip goes to Gary SF in comments. We now have a link to www.wsjparody.com (click the graphic above to go there.) You get a readable blow-up of part of the front page, and ordering info, NOT an online edition. We're breaking our unwritten unruly unrule about not promoting anything commercial for this because:
1) - It's brilliant satire.
2) - It puts a vital message in front of the American public, "your media is bought and paid for by giant corporations and can't be trusted."
3) - We can. It's at times like this that I most love being unruly.

Cross-posted to Ice Station Tango

TAGS: Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal, WSJ Spoof, Corporate Media Trolls

Wal-Mart: Cheating kids out of a paycheck. Always.

This is low, even by their low, low standards:

Wal-Mart prides itself on cutting costs at home and abroad, and its Mexican operations are no exception. That approach has helped the Arkansas-based retail giant set a track record of spectacular success in the 16 years since it entered Mexico as a partner of the country’s then-leading retail-store chain. But some of the company’s practices have aroused concern among some officials and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that Wal-Mart is taking advantage of local customs to pinch pennies at a time when its Mexican operations have never been more profitable.

Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private-sector employer in the nation today, with nearly 150,000 local residents on its payroll. An additional 19,000 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 work after school in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores, mostly as grocery baggers, throughout Mexico—and none of them receives a red cent in wages or fringe benefits. The company doesn’t try to conceal this practice: its 62 Superama supermarkets display blue signs with white letters that tell shoppers: OUR VOLUNTEER PACKERS COLLECT NO SALARY, ONLY THE GRATUITY THAT YOU GIVE THEM. SUPERAMA THANKS YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING. The use of unsalaried youths is legal in Mexico because the kids are said to be “volunteering” their services to Wal-Mart and are therefore not subject to the requirements and regulations that would otherwise apply under the country’s labor laws. But some officials south of the U.S. border nonetheless view the
practice as regrettable, if not downright exploitative. “These kids should receive a salary,” says Labor Undersecretary Patricia Espinosa Torres. “If you ask me, I don’t think these kids should be working, but there are cultural and social circumstances [in Mexico] rooted in poverty and scarcity.”

In a country where nearly half of the population scrapes by on less than $4 a day, any income source is welcome in millions of households, even if it hinges on the goodwill of a tipping customer. And Wal-Mart did not invent the bagger program that, as a written statement from the company notes, pre-dates the firm’s arrival in Mexico, nor is it alone within the country’s retail sector in benefiting from the toil of unpaid adolescents. But in Mexico City, for example, the 4,300 teenagers who work in Wal-Mart’s retail stores free of charge dwarf similar numbers laboring unpaid for Mexican competitors like Comercial Mexicana (715) and Gigante (427). Although Wal-Mart’s worldwide code of ethics expressly forbids any “associate” from working without compensation, the company’s Mexican subsidiary asserts that the grocery baggers “cannot be considered workers.” The Mexico City government’s top labor official dismisses that contention as so much corporate hogwash. “To my mind, that is not an accurate description because the bagger is providing a service on the store’s premises that benefits the company by serving the customer better,” argues Federal District Labor Secretary Benito Mirón Lince. “In economic terms, Wal-Mart does have the capability to pay the minimum wage [of less than $5 a day], and this represents an injustice…”

The rest here. (H/t to Working Life.)

An "injustice." Yeah.

Geez… they actually claim to have a “code of ethics”?

PS: WalMart Watch has a petition you can sign to force Wal-Mart to allow the Shank family to keep their own money. You can sign it here.

Oil Spill, Court Case Linger

Nearly 20 years later, Alaska is still feeling the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

From The L.A. Times:

When the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil in March 1989, the world saw images of blackened seabirds and otters and seals, of bloated whale carcasses and once-pristine beaches covered with crude. Hardly anything was said about the herring.

No one at the time understood the fish's central place in the ecosystem, nor did anyone know the herring's demise would lead to years of hardship for the people here.

(more)

Exxon Mobil has fought a $2.5 billion judgment against it all the way to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this week. Not a very popular company in Alaska.

UPDATE: I'm trying to confirm that the picture in this post is the actual Exxon Valdez. I found the picture on Flickr here and there's no info other than the title--Exxon Valdez. I did find this article from 2002, which explains the fate of the Exxon Valdez. After a name change to SeaRiver Mediterranean, the Valdez was permanently retired in September 2002, "Too expensive to sail on, it was pulled from service late last month and anchored off some forgotten coastline in East Asia, perhaps to die."

Crossposted at Ice Station Tango.

TAGS: Environment, Oil Companies, Supreme Court, Alaska

Exxon Mobil Practicing Economic Terrorism

British Court Freezes Venezuelan Assets

The Toronto Star printed this AP story yesterday that illustrates the kind of economic imperialism that has become the hallmark of the big multinational corporations.

CARACAS–Venezuela's top oil official accused Exxon Mobil Corp. yesterday of "judicial terrorism," but said court orders won by the oil major do not amount to confiscation of $12 billion (U.S.) in assets.

Exxon Mobil has gone after the assets of the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, in U.S., British and Dutch courts as it challenges the nationalization of a multi-billion-dollar oil project by President Hugo Chavez's government.

A British court last month issued an injunction "freezing" as much as $12 billion in assets.

But Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said: "They don't have any asset frozen. They only have frozen $300 million" in cash through a U.S. court in New York. As for the case in Britain, PDVSA doesn't have "any assets in that jurisdiction that even come close to those sums" of $12 billion, Ramirez said.

He called it a "transitory measure" while PDVSA, the state company, presents its case in New York and London. Exxon Mobil is also seeking international arbitration, which Venezuela has agreed to.

But Ramirez, who is PDVSA's president, said Exxon Mobil "hasn't respected the terms of the arbitration" and its claims in the nationalization dispute "don't even come close to half the sum of $12 billion claimed by them."
[...]
He accused the Texas-based oil major of employing "judicial terrorism" and trying to generate "financial nervousness" around PDVSA.

Court documents show Exxon Mobil has secured an "order of attachment" on about $300 million in cash held by PDVSA. A hearing to confirm the order is set for Feb. 13 in New York. In a Jan. 24 "freezing injunction," a British court said PDVSA "must not remove from England or Wales any of its assets ... up to the value of $12 billion."

There's just a couple of comments I'd like to make about this. One is the acceptance of the idea that if white people live over a resource by dint of their having stolen the land from red people, they have control of that resource. As in say, Texas or Alberta. This principle is not to be extended to brown people, who never own or control a resource even if they've been living over it for millenia. As in say, Iraq.

The other thing is that it's pretty obvious that the big multinationals are getting way too powerful. While we usually associate the term economic imperialism with nation states, it's becoming increasingly clear that the practice has passed into the hands of unelected and unaccountable capitalists. And they're not exactly being coy about it. In fact, Canada's largest oil company is called Imperial Oil. I'd call that pretty blatant.

What is more disturbing is the clear indication that they are now using the court systems and even the military resources of powerful nations like the USA and Britain to impose their will on a world that hasn't the wherewithal to oppose them. And sadly, I don't see that trend reversing itself in the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: (h/t Green Libertarian) This story from xinhua.net (Chinese news service) helps show Exxon's motivation for these actions against the people of Venezuela.

The Exxon-Venezuela dispute has aroused markets concerns that world oil supply may be destabilized.

Prices of light sweet crude for March delivery rose 4 percent, its biggest gains in two months, to settle at 91.77 dollars per barrel at New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday.

In London, Brent North Sea crude for March delivery also saw an up of 3.43 dollars and settled at 91.94 dollars.

That should drive the cost of filling your tank up considerably, and with it Exxon's profit margin.

TAGS: Economic Imperialism, Big Oil, Filthy Oily Slime, Globalization

Conservative Ideology Deconstructed

A Theory Gone Horribly Wrong

There is a very simple reason that reight wingnuts have such a strong aversion to facts; the facts just don't support their warped world view. This is the apparent reason that they oppose the teaching of evolution, reject the idea that global warming exists, and fail to see that George W. Bush is both a sociopath and a cretin. And they still insist that Ronald Reagan was a genius that saved the country and defeated Communism. All lies that are easily exposed as such by the application of a little reality therapy. Paul Krugman takes apart Reaganomics like a cheap toy in this NY Times article:

If this Times report is at all right, Republicans will hold any attempt to help the economy now hostage to yet another try at making the Bush tax cuts permanent — thereby, among other things, crippling future possibilities for health care reform. I suspected that’s what would happen, but thought that maybe, just maybe, the GOP would be sufficiently scared by the prospect of a nasty recession in an election year that it would back off. Guess not.

Krugman provides this chart that graphically refutes anyone still clinging to Reaganomics and the trickle down theory, as practiced under the Bush regime.

There are of course other metrics that could have been used to illustrate the same point. Government revenues also fell during both the Reagan and Bush eras, resulting in the largest deficits in American history. This refutes another Reagan myth, that the 'economic stimulus' provided by tax cuts would actually increase revenues.

So why would they still be pushing an idea that is so patently false? Well, for the same reason that dogs lick their own genitals - because they can. These tax cuts are to the benefit of the same elite, a small fraction of one percent of the populace, who also control the media, run the lobbying industry, and fund both political parties. As long as they have the American public voting against their own interests based on this pack of lies, they will continue to deal bottom cards from that same old dogeared pack. And the news whores of the media will happily distract you while they steal from your stack of chips.

It's not because they are so stupid as to believe their own lies. They don't. They just want you to believe them while they rob you.

"A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot
but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook."
-- Bertolt Brecht --

Let's back up to that Krugman quote from earlier. "If this Times report is at all right.." If you follow that link, it highlights how complicit the Democrats are in the class war the corporate elite are carrying out.

...even as Ms. Pelosi renewed a call by Democratic leaders for cooperation with President Bush and Republicans in Congress, lawmakers in both parties said that efforts to develop a short-term stimulus plan could easily fall prey to partisan disputes like whether to extend Mr. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which expire after 2010.

The Democrats are insisting that Republicans not inject their desire to extend the tax cuts into negotiations of a short-term rescue package intended to dampen the impact of a recession. But in interviews, several Republican lawmakers said they could not imagine a debate not involving long-term tax policy.

“The planning for 2010 in a business sense is happening now,” said Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan. “So it isn’t too soon to talk about making permanent the Bush tax cuts.”

Given recent history, would anyone want to bet that the spineless Democrats are going to stand up to the Republicans now on this issue? I didn't think so.

And there are a couple of good reasons to think that they won't change things much even if elected by a wide margin in November. This post from Digby points out why, as does this post from Station Agent. The two front running Democratic presidential hopefuls are entrenched corporatists, and O'Bama (put that apostrophe in there and it's a fine Irish sounding name isn't it? Should be good for a few votes in the Boston area.) has just compared himself to Ronald Reagan for crying out loud.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

And as Digby points out, as much as Obama promises to co-operate with the elite, Hillary's husband already has.

In the global economy of the 1990s, economic growth won't come from government spending. It will come instead from individuals working smarter and learning more, from entrepreneurs taking more risks and going after new markets, and from corporations designing better products and taking a longer view...

Which all goes a long way to explaining why John Edwards is invisible in the mainstream media, doesn't it? It also explains the long-term failure to bring about meaningful campaign finance reform, and how the already nearly monopolistic mass media is becoming even more consolidated than ever. They would like you to think that there is still some kind of democratic contest for control of the world's mightiest nation. There is no dualism, no duel - it's all Kabuki theater, a Punch and Judy puppet show.

The public is being played like a cheap banjo.

Right now I see John Edwards as probably America's last best hope to ever recover from the nightmare. He's having a fundraising drive right now, I hope you can contribute. You can visit his site for details. (Disclaimer: This is just me talking. The rest of the unruly mob may feel differently, support another candidate or even a third party solution.)

TAGS: Voodoo Economics, Class Warfare, Election Coverage, John Edwards

The Oligarchs Strike Back

War Declared on Populism

Or maybe it would be safer to say that a surge has been declared in a war on the ordinary people that business has been waging pretty much since the American Revolution. Here's the item that has me upset, from TPMMuckraker.

Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said....

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions....

"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."

I'm bewildered. What 'candidates deemed to be anti-business' could Lord Donohue be referring to? All of the front runners of both parties are clearly bought and paid for. Sure, John Edwards has declared a desire to reduce the power of the biggest multinational corporations, but the furniture stores on Main Street don't have to be afraid of anything. In fact if you look at the Saudi princes who are the biggest beneficiaries of tax breaks to Exxon, Enron and others, maybe the 'U.S.' chamber of commerce should consider changing their name. Besides, Edwards isn't doing that well. So do you think Ralph Nader is poised to make a miracle comeback? I think the concern about anti-corporatist rhetoric is misplaced.

So, I've written an open letter in response to Tom Donahue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

---

I think it's time for a reality check Mr. Donohue. Is there any validity to your complaint that you're not getting enough input into the political process?

Current campaign laws combined with the dubious principle of Corporate Personhood make your donations to candidates and your third party political ads to be 'free speech.' Imagine that - a corporation that speaks. Not only that, but the major media are owned by corporations - so you also have the power to stifle the free speech of anyone whose ideas you don't like, as Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul know only too well. The synergy of this is awesome to behold. The candidates have to toe your line to get advertising dollars, which you just get back in revenues at the television and radio stations you own. Pretty slick.

You've created a special industry of over 30,000 lobbyists, the vast majority working for corporations to make sure your point of view is always on the agenda of every elected representative in the country between election cycles. It would seem on the surface that your influence on the political process is overpowering. And you have the nerve to begrudge the common man his input for the less than a minute he spends in the booth every four years? It just doesn't pass the laugh test.

OK, reality check part 2: While you're busy whining about how hard done by your ultra-wealthy membership is, how have you been doing on advancing your agenda?

Well, the percentage of government revenues coming from taxes on business has steadily declined over the last half century. Environmental regulations have been weakened, and those still left are no longer enforced. The heads of regulatory bodies under the Bu$hCo regime are themselves from the industries they are supposed to police. Likewise, business-friendly labor laws have weakened the unions, who now have a much smaller fraction of the workforce on their roles than they used to.

Antitrust laws haven't produced a meaningful lawsuit in some time. There was a significant judgment against Microsoft over Windows 95, but it was never enforced. Hell, Exxon still hasn't paid any fines over the Valdez oilspill in Alaska. CEOs salaries are off the charts, golden parachutes assure that there is no accountability. The most recent outrage is this story about Stanley O'Neal - whose stewardship of Merril Lynch cost the company $15 Billion in write-downs, but left him with a handsome $101 million pay-out. That's pretty hard to swallow for the working stiff who can't even cope with the rising cost of just about everything or the possible loss of his job or home.

Reality check, part 3 - What are the electorate seeing as the result of your success at getting your own way?

Globalisation has allowed you to outsource to other countries, increasing your profits, decreasing the taxes paid to the U.S. government - all on the backs of your workers, many of whom are now your ex-workers. Unemployment is up by 5%, but that should make you happy because it drives the cost of labor down domestically. Who cares how many people lose their homes over it? Or that the result is a nation-wide recession? The fact is the top 1/10th of 1% have been strip mining the American economy since the Reagan years, and this is the result. You've got yours, to hell with anyone else, right? I swear your overall objective is to bring back the Dark Ages under a system of Corporate Feudalism.

As for who it is that creates wealth and benefits for society, it is and always has been the 'little guy' whose input into the political process you so fear. I'm calling you on that bullshit Mr. Donahue. If you want to call your beloved corrupt Republican party "the party of Lincoln," perhaps you should heed what he had to say on the subject:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor,
and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.
Labor is superior to capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration."
-- Abraham Lincoln --

That must sound like Marxism to your ears. In fact, I would almost guess old Karl may have read Lincoln when I read this.

"Capital is dead labor,
which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,
and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
-- Karl Marx --

And speaking of Karl Marx and Corporate Personhood, don't forget he also said,

"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."
-- Karl Marx --

Sounds pretty prophetic to this LIVING, BREATHING person. Have a nice day, Mr. Donahue. On second thought, don't bother. Frankly I found that threat about biting me on the butt kind of distasteful.

Further Reading:
John Edwards: My Plan to Stop Corporate Abuses
Corporate Media Trashes Edwards
Alicia Morgan: Neocons fear Populism

TAGS: Greed, Oligarchy, Corporate Feudalism, Social Justice

Count On Yahoo!

To Sell You Out

Sometimes business just gets in the way of democracy.

Just ask the people running that second rate search engine Yahoo!

When they were confronted with the possibility of alienating a massive client--the People's Republic of China--Yahoo! decided they would be better served to hand over the information of a pro-democracy journalist than defend the principles our country was founded on. Well, why should they be the only one?

That journalist--Shi Tao--he's now serving a decade in prison.

Thanks, Yahoo! You jerks.

Yesterday, Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang executive vice president Michael Callahan faced the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Al Jazeera English covered the hearing.

To Yang and Yahoo's partial credit, they apologized. Maybe Shi's mother can console herself with that apology while her son rots in a Chinese jail through 2015.

Committee chair Tom Lantos had the line of the century, but first he built up to it:

A company of Yahoo’s resources should have taken every conceivable step to prevent the automatic compliance with a request from the Chinese police apparatus.

To this day, Yahoo has failed to change any of its practices in order to prevent such collaboration.

While Mr. Callahan may not have known the relevant facts, other Yahoo employees, in fact, did know the nature of the Chinese investigation against Shi Tao prior to our committee hearing. (Yahoo’s actions were) spineless and irresponsible.

I do not believe that America’s best and brightest companies should be playing integral roles in China’s notorious and brutal political repression apparatus.

Much of this testimony reveals that while technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.

In 2005, the Chinese government had Shi arrested after he posted a warning about a crackdown on Chinese dissidents returning to mainland China during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests. Shi used his Yahoo email account to send a warning to the website for the Asia Democracy Foundation.

Beijing police found Shi by using information provided by Yahoo, the committee said.Yahoo's senior vice president Michael Callahan testified last year that Yahoo didn't know why the Chinese government asked the company for personal information about Shi.

In June, Shi's mother accepted the Golden Pen of Freedom on behalf of her son (video here).

Yahoo is trying to have a lawsuit filed in Northern California that accuses Yahoo of violating U.S. and international law when they provided the Chinese government with the information that led to the arrest of Shi and other dissidents.

The BBC looks at some of China's activists including Shi.

Amnesty International has a campaign on Shi's behalf here.

By the way something, if any pygmies were insulted by Lantos's line... I'm sure the Republicans will make him apologize real soon.

UPDATE: Turns out pygmy is a rather insulting term. I didn't know that. Thanks to Tireiron Chef for schooling me. I'd edit the post, but then you wouldn't know what this update was all about. Still Yahoo! are jerks and Lantos did a good thing by calling them out. Next time, just do what I do and call them assholes. You can do that on the floor of the Senate right?

TAGS: Yahoo, Democracy, Shi Tao, Squashing Dissent