. . . .And on the same pop culture note, Star Trek is being released on DVD and Blu-Ray on November 17th. If you didn't catch it this last Memorial Day weekend at your cineplex, pick it up immediately and check it out. J.J. Abrams didn't just reboot the franchise, he gave it new life, new blood and whole new possibilities.
. . . .And not a word about Sons of Anarchy until I get the chance to watch it on my DVR.
. . . .As promised, back into the fray. First up, the large piece of elephant shit that was delivered on Saturday night by the House of Representatives. Now a couple of points right off the bat. I know a good number of people, sincere, good people who truly believed that this was the best thing for them to work for, and that it would do some long term good, who are right now really looking like someone has hit them upside the head, hard, with the flat side of a shovel and wondering just what in the blue hell happened. Well, first up, I'm going to re-run a piece that I wrote and published back on October 13th about the legislative process:
. . . .Now, what responses from readers let me know is that a whole lot of people don't know how the legislative process actually works. So today, we're going to do two things, explain how the mechanics of the legislative process works, who the real players are on the field, and how they're being manipulated.. . . .And that's precisely what happened to it, it sat in a rules committee all day Saturday, away from the eyes and ears of the press and the public, and it was rushed to the floor for vote on Saturday night.
. . . .So, on to the real legislative process, in this case, Baucus's turd will suffice to serve as the guidepost as to how it all goes together. A bill, any bill, House or Senate, first goes through it's committee of jurisdiction, in this case the Senate Finance Committee, for what's called a chairman's mark-up, where the initial framework of the bill is hammered out, with the various and sundry mark-ups, attachments, and riders are put together and it's put to a committee vote, that's what happened today with the Baucus bill. Now, that was public spectacle, and in truth, most committee mark-up votes are the ones you see televised and pundits nodding sagely about and analyzing. In truth, this is only of 4 way stations in a bill's life cycle, and like all hideously, grotesquely hatched entities, when it goes through it's other 3 life cycles, may be a different animal completely. From the committee of jurisdiction, it now goes to the Rules committee, which most of you have never heard of. There's a reason for this. In the Rules committee, the Rules chairperson now lays the bill out for the Rules committee, and it's here, where members of the majority party attach all types of riders, attachments, amendments or take a bunch out, and members of the minority party wail and gnash their teeth together about what's happening. Now the interesting part is that yes, the Finance committee vote was scheduled at 11 AM Eastern time in full view of every media outlet, and Finance committee debates were highly televised. Not so once it hits the Rules Committee, which will most likely schedule it's hearings on it for about 3 AM on a Wednesday morning (really, they will!) and this is quite on purpose, because by the time the Chairman's mark-up leaves the Rules committee as a rule, it will be an entirely different sort of monster altogether, completely rewritten with new amendments, riders, other items taken out. Now, there's been much ado about the "72 hour" rule, about how there's supposed to be 72 hours by the time a "rule" (which is what the mark-up is called once it leaves the Rules Committee) and the floor vote, and much blaming of this newest Democratic Congress. They're only payng back tit for tat. That 72 hour rule has been suspended due to "emergency" since the Republican Congress of 2001, and hasn't been put back in place once since 9/11. Everyone, everyone is using it to their advantage, and has for the last 8 years now. So, this particular bill will leave the Rules committee in the middle of the night, and there will be a general floor vote on it within minutes of it's leaving Rules. Now, at that point, it becomes a bill, but it only came from the Senate, before it ever goes for signature, it has to go through a conference committee of both House and Senate, which has arcane rules all it's own, to hammer out all the differences. The point is, no matter what you heard or saw today, this bill will be completely rewritten 2 more times,and be a totally different animal, that reads entirely differently, before it ever arrives for any signature. So, what you've hearing today is not what it will be.
. . . .The idiocy is that Pelosi and company are absolutely in love with themselves over the process, and completely lost sight of the end product. All I kept hearing was that this is the first time in 60 years of attempted health care reform that a bill was able to pass the House, and that 's what I keep hearing. The second piece of idiocy is the attempt to call it bipartisan, one vote from a lone Republican rep that had to be wined and dined solo by the White House is not bipartisan.
. . . .There's so much that's wrong with this thing, it's impossible to go into it in one day or one column, but suffice to say, from examining it, one whole hell of a lot deals got cut that make the health insurance companies richer, Big Pharma richer, and the doctors are going to love it.
. . .The only good thing that came out of it was Bart Stupak outing himself as a stooge for The Family, the C Street Fundamentalist Christian mafia that he's a tool for, and the people who are trying to array themselves to go up against Goldman-Sachs. We'll start examining The Family and their pervasive influence as deeply as we explored Goldman, and get back to getting all the players straight in the world that runs the world we live in.
. . . .Goldman, you know, those people on Wall Street, whose CEO claims they're doing "God's work". From Charles Gasparino, one of the better financial writers I know:
. . . .Why am I so hard on them? Could it be because we're no longer a democracy, a republic, but are instead a corporatocracy run by Goldman? From Felix Salmon, over at Reuters:The only thing worse than Goldman Sachs amassing close to $20 billion in bonus money for its executives based on various government subsidies and bailout measures is listening to senior executives there trying to explain it all away. The spin job has been coming from an unlikely source: The normally media shy Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been making the rounds lately, talking to selective reporters, including William Cohan, who recently wrote a book about the fall of Bear Stearns and now has the firm's complete cooperation as to write something on Goldman Sachs, the most prestigious of the Wall Street firms, even if it needed a bailout to survive last year's financial crisis..
Cohan's Bear book, the first of many financial crisis tomes (including my own
) wasn't exactly a puff piece, but trading access for information is a time honored journalistic practice, and it's human nature to be nicer to someone who gives you information. So presumably we'll all find out from Cohan how, in the throes of the financial crisis, Goldman really didn't need the $10 billion in bailout money it received from the federal government as its stock cratered; that it was forced to take the cash from then-Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman CEO) Hank Paulson, or how despite its exposure to troubled insurance giant AIG, Goldman was miraculously "hedged," against losses, meaning that the fed's AIG's bailout last year didn't really help Goldman survive last year's panic. No, Goldman survived because it was built for survival.
Forget the absurdity of such claims, Blankfein has been on a roll of late, repeating them time and again, not just presumably to Cohan, but to a growing number of credulous journalists who will stomach just about anything to get a few minutes with the CEO of the Great Goldman Sachs, even if its greatness was put to the test last year.
Blankfein's spinning is reaching epic proportions. Several recent stories about Goldman have cast the firm as the Great Satan of the securities markets, or as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi put it, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." No longer is Blankfein simply trying tell the world Goldman isn't the root of all evil; rather, old Lloyd is informing us all that Goldman is a source of goodness in the world. The exact quote, from the Times of London has Blankfein professing that as CEO of the vampire squid he's actually "doing God's work," simply by doing what banks get paid to do: Raising money for clients and investing in businesses.
Oh really, Lloyd? My brother is a doctor who works in the intensive care unit of an inner city hospital; he could have a cushy lucrative practice here in New York, but he likes helping people, and yet he has never once told me he's doing God's work even after he explained one afternoon how he had just saved a homeless man's life by massaging his heart.
Believe it or not, I happen not to fall into the camp of Goldman haters, where people believe the firm is behind every scandal and conspiracy and may have even created the swine flu virus so it could corner the market for drug stocks. (Though Goldman and several other firms did seem to have no problem obtaining for their employees the swine-flu vaccine, which is in short supply.) Indeed, as I show in my new book The Sellout
, when it came to risk-taking over the last 30 years on Wall Street, Goldman did it better than any other firm on the Street. The folly that was found at a firm like Bear Stearns, with its CEO caring more about playing bridge and golf (and allegedly smoking marijuana) than tending to the firm's balance sheet, would never happen at Goldman Sachs.
But there is something truly unsettling about the new message coming from the firm, honed I hear from a phalanx of image consultants who are literally trying to re-write history as the firm gets ready to dole out its enormous bonus pool. And that's what all this spinning is about. For the record Goldman Sachs didn't take down the financial system last year -- Citigroup, Merrill, Lehman or Bear are much more responsible for that. And for the record every firm spins -- its called public relations, and Goldman will need all the PR it can muster as it decides in the coming weeks how much of the $20 billion it will hand out to its executives. My sources at Goldman say Blankfein won't be stingy because he needs to prevent top producers from bolting to hedge funds and private equity.
What makes Goldman so contemptible is that its level of spin has almost no basis in reality. We are supposed to believe Goldman wasn't bailed out; it didn't need the government's money when big investors where yanking funds from the firm and its stock was plummeting and now the firm is doing "God's work," even as government bureaucrats continue to subsidize how the firm makes most of its money -- through risk taking and bond trading, all on the backs of the US taxpayer.
Goldman, in case you haven't heard, has been classified as a commercial bank, meaning it can borrow cheaply to finance its risk taking, and can borrow from the Federal Reserve in a pinch. That's why it's amassing such massive profits. And yet not a penny of its massive bonus pool will be lent out to funding-starved small businesses. Think about that: The Federal Government run by the most Liberal Administration in years, is subsidizing big business at the expense to small business.
How did this bizarre scenario develop? Who knows, but it should come as no surprise that Wall Street -- Goldman in particular -- funneled far more money to president Obama than it did to his Republican challenger, John McCain. Maybe that's why the president has been eerily silent on the Goldman Sachs subsidy, even as Lloyd Blankfein tells the world he's doing "God's work."
First up there was the pairing of Robert Rubin and Stephen Friedman. Both of them attempted to become venerable eminences grises, but neither succeeded, in the end. Friedman became chairman of the New York Fed,
where he helped towhich put together the deal under which AIG’s CDS counterparties, foremost among them Goldman Sachs, got paid out at 100 cents on the dollar,He was also involved in approvingand which also approved Goldman’s request to become a bank holding company. He then inexplicably bought tens of thousands of shares Goldman shares in the open market — a clear conflict of interest given his position at the Fed — resulting in his resignation shortly afterwards.Rubin, of course, looks even worse. As arguably the most Wall Street-friendly Treasury secretary ever, he helped to inflate the deregulatory financial-services bubble on the basis that big banks were extremely sophisticated and more than capable of looking after their own risk books. He then moved to the ultimate cushy job at Citigroup, where he got paid $10 million a year despite having no employees, no P&L, and no defined responsibilities. In hindsight, his main contribution to the bank was to be the biggest internal cheerleader for the fixed-income group, which he encouraged to take on ever-greater amounts of risk despite the fact that no one in senior management (including himself) really had a clue what they were doing. Result: disaster.
Rubin and Friedman were succeeded by Corzine, whose post-Goldman career has been spent almost entirely in politics. He was pretty ineffective in the Senate, before moving to the governorship of New Jersey. (In a classic case of the squid’s tentacles being everywhere, he there helped oversee the incoherent mess at Ground Zero, due to New Jersey’s 50% stake in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, charged with rebuilding at the site, was former Goldman senior partner John Whitehead.) Never much of a natural politician, he basically bought both jobs, which at least meant that he wasn’t corrupt. But after he was almost killed in a 91 mile-an-hour car crash where he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, he lost a large chunk of whatever leadership ability he had formerly held. His political demise yesterday, at the hands of an oafish opponent, comes as little surprise.
Corzine, in his turn, was replaced (indeed, ousted) by Hank Paulson. Paulson’s post-Goldman career, of course, was spent as the Treasury secretary who oversaw the biggest financial meltdown since the 1929 crash. Reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, which was clearly written with a lot of help from Paulson, he comes across as a man who was always at least one step behind the curve, someone who could never get ahead of the unfolding crisis, who was prone to inconsistent and ad hoc decisionmaking, and who went out of his way, even before getting a waiver allowing himself to talk to Goldman Sachs, to be as helpful to them as he possibly could.
Paulson seems to have spent a large amount of the crisis throwing up in his office bathroom, and even into Nancy Pelosi’s wastebin. Of course, he couldn’t simply go see a doctor, like the rest of us, because he’s a Christian Scientist. Similarly, he hobbled his ability to communicate by refusing to ever touch email: instead, any time he wanted to say anything to anybody he’d have to do so over the phone or in person. No wonder he was semi-permanently hoarse, and his phone records are insane.
Paulson’s biggest failure, of course, was that of Lehman Brothers: he set up an emergency weekend confab at the New York Fed in an attempt to save it, but refused steadfastly to ever consider any public help at all, and also failed to keep British regulators in the loop, despite the fact that their assent would be needed in the event that Barclays were to acquire Lehman. In fact, when the fateful phone call to the Brits was made, it was the hapless Christopher Cox who made it, rather than Paulson. In general, Paulson was more of a bully than a leader, and he managed to be equally unpopular both on Capitol Hill and at the White House.
Looking at the list, it seems to comprise men who are very long on hubris, and who have no doubt that if they can run Goldman Sachs, they can do anything else, with normal rules not really applying to them. All of them, post-Goldman, have been tarnished. If Lloyd Blankfein has any sense, he’ll retire quietly.
. . . . .All of which makes a nice transition to this wonderful piece penned by David A. Love:
. . . .Now, one last one, which I didn't cover over the last few days, the shootings at Ft. Hood in Texas back on Friday, which the media, in it's frenzy, got all wrong.Often, people will look at a high-profile example of corruption, and conclude that the egregious act is an exception to the rule. In reality, it might be the tip of the iceberg.
On October 29, 2009, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania did a wonderful thing when it expunged the records of as many as 6,500 juveniles in Luzerne County. That’s not a misprint.
Two judges in that county were sent up the federal river for locking up thousands of innocent children over five years, in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan helped the developers secure the county contracts to build the prisons. Moreover, they filled the detention centers with warm bodies— many of whom were first-time offenders with minor infractions— and illegally denied the teens access to an attorney.
In the case of Luzerne, the “cash for kids” scheme was a coldblooded expression of greed, and we should not downplay the seriousness of the crimes committed. Yet, what happened in this rural county in northeastern Pennsylvania is a reflection of what America’s criminal justice system has become— a for-profit, money-making enterprise.
Often, our poorer children, disproportionately of color, are funneled into a cradle-to-prison pipeline through adulthood. With a criminally negligent public school system, and job opportunities outsourced abroad, many children at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are ensured a future of little else than street corners or prison bars. In fact, many urban schools are nothing more than prison prep, complete with police and metal detectors.
Interestingly, the children of Luzerne, a county which is nearly 97% white, did not resemble the “usual suspects” in the criminal justice system. But that really is not the point— when prisons are a capitalistic endeavor, warm bodies are needed as the raw materials, and so they must come from somewhere. And consequently, justice takes a backseat to dollars. From the foodservice industry and the phone companies, to the Wall Street bankers and the investors, many people have a vested interest in filling up those empty prison beds and maximizing their cut. American capitalism made the U.S. prison population the world’s largest at 2.5 million, with mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses and victimless crimes.
And American-style capitalism is problematic for the culture of corruption it has enabled, in the absence of an effective regulatory framework. Much attention has been paid to Bernie Madoff, that poster child of the Ponzi schemes, who defrauded investors out of $65 billion. The damage he created is impressive, from the family savings that were forever lost, to the charities that went under. But like the judges in Luzerne County, Madoff was merely a cog in a wheel of corruption that enabled greed.
Madoff himself said he was surprised his scheme lasted so long, and that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigators were so clueless about his fraudulent activities over 16 years. The fact is, some members of the SEC staff were inexperienced or just idiots. Further, Madoff had too much credibility with the SEC and was not properly investigated, with red flags uncovered yet ignored.
With the deregulation of the financial sector and the evisceration of the Glass-Steagall Act came the financial crisis of 2008. The system had become the Ponzi scheme. The economy was built on paper shuffling and no tangible products. Consumers were preyed upon with sketchy, deceptive and destructive subprime mortgages. Banks gambled people’s money in high-risk, high-stakes poker games. And with a revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury department, the same people with the gambling problem are running the casino, and “monitoring” it as well.
The banks that ruined the country swore by the free market when it suited them. But now, they gladly accept their corporate welfare bailout checks, and scoff at the rest of us. Wall Street has rebounded, business as usual, and Gordon Gekko is smiling. Meanwhile, America’s former middle class is joining the ranks of the poor, and the foreclosed are filling the nation’s homeless shelters. Short of bold government action of Rooseveltian proportions, there will be no economic recovery for everyday people. After all, the unemployed, the homeless, and the soon-to-be unemployed and homeless generally are not big spenders.
The moneyed interests also have corrupted the political process, and a prime example is the behavior of Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and the “Blue Dog” Democrats in the health care reform debate. Lieberman has earned a special place in the hearts and minds of progressives of late for vowing to stand with Republicans, and filibuster any health care bill that contains a public option. He has even said he would rather have no bill at all than a bill with a public option.
In American political folklore, the Senate is presented as an august deliberative body where cooler heads prevail, where genteel statesmen and stateswomen put the brakes on rash and potentially harmful legislation, for the betterment of all. In reality, the Senate is a place where bold legislation for the public good is killed, because industries put a contract out on democratic ideas. And they instruct their employees, the senators, to stop these ideas in their tracks. This is a bipartisan endeavor. The Blue Dog Democrats, who are the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives of their party, distinguish themselves from other Democrats by their greed and hypocrisy. They receive the most corporate money, and have rejected less costly health reform bills that would hurt their benefactors. Ask Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, chair of the Senate Finance committee, and a key player in this year’s health reform debate. Baucus received $3.4 million from health and insurance industry interests between 2003 and 2008, more than any other member of Congress. Judging from the sad excuse for a health reform bill that came out of his committee, the industry got its money’s worth.
And Lieberman, the dirty dog that Democrats love to hate, is a fully-owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. Over the course of his career, he has received $2.6 million from the insurance companies. In addition, his wife is a health care industry lobbyist. Despite the overwhelming popular support in Connecticut for a public option, Lieberman has decided to follow the money. The Democrats must take Lieberman to the woodshed for his double-crossing ways, and relieve him of his coveted chair in the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. Not to be outdone, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), whose wife has made at least $2 million sitting on the board of a major health insurance company, hinted that he would filibuster the public option as well. Apparently, faced with the prospect of the Democratic leadership opening a big can of whup ass on him, he backed off.
The problem here is not just Senators Lieberman, Baucus, Bayh and a few other unscrupulous politicians. The fact is the entire political game, the link between money and politics, is rancid and is killing democracy. In the case of health care reform, the corrupting influence of money is literally sucking the country’s life blood.
As in the days of old before the 1929 stock market crash and the New Deal, corporations have far more influence in this society than they are entitled. Citibank gleefully proclaimed in a series of reports in 2005 and 2006 that the U.S. is a plutonomy— a system of wealth inequality in which the richest 1% hold a disproportionately large share of wealth. The rich are likely to get even wealthier, at the expense of labor. This rising inequality, Citibank predicts, will lead to a political backlash.
And some backlash is needed now. It is certain that the outrageous displays of greed and corruption deserve our attention and our outrage. But to dismiss them as exceptions to the rule, rather than products of a systemic, vulturous culture that must be attacked, is to choose a perilous path.
- First and foremost, this is an Army matter, for it's CID (Criminal Investigative Division), and once that report is finalized for it's investigative commanding officers, what they decide to release of it's particulars will be their business, period. That's how the Army works. Anything else, anything else at all, will be complete and total speculation.
-For comparison's sake, there were 3 other shootings on Army posts this year, which you probably didn't hear about.
- There were 78 other shootings that day across the United States, resulting in fatalities.
- Today, gunmen burst into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and opened fire, killing one, down near El Paso
- In Tualatin, Oregon today, a gunman opened up on a lab that does drug test processing, and killed 2 and injured 2 others.
. . . .In other words, it happens in this country a lot, but because we are obsessed as a nation with having a Darth Vader at all times, with having an identifiable enemy in these times that seem so out of control, it is much easier to point at Hasan, and paint him as a sleeper terrorist, instead of what he was, a jihadist in an American Army uniform who had clearly given signal after signal to his commanding officers that this was something that was coming from him, acting on his own and of his own volition, all of which speaks more to the negligence of his commanding officers and the dereliction of their duty and passing him on continually as "someone else's" problem, than it does to someone, who upon viewing and hearing the body of their work, was so clearly giving those signals.
. . . From Cenk Uygur, one of my favorite commentators:
. . . How irrelevant is Sarah Palin and how far has she fallen. Well, apparently taking over for Glenn Beck on "conspiracies from thin air" front, she is now claiming an anti-Christian conspiracy in the redesign of U.S. coins. Of course, Sarah points to the nefarious Barack Obama for it. It's so whacked out that Fox News, of all people, took up the fact checking on this one. Brett Baier did the fact-checking on who called the shots on this unholy redesign. It was. . .drumroll. . .George W. Bush. . . .go back to defending Carrie Prejean's tits and homemade sex tape Sarah.Predictably, after the Ft. Hood shooting some idiot conservatives are suggesting that we do some sort of loyalty exam for Muslim-Americans before allowing them into the US military. Who is "we"? Who gets to do this exam? What, presumably more American people like whites or Christians?
Why don't Muslim Americans decide which Christians get to enter the US military? Oh, does that sound offensive? Does it sound weird? Why should it sound any different than Christians getting to decide which other Americans they will allow into the US military?A lot of people are rightfully making the point that you can not generalize about millions of Muslims in this country based on two guys. Just as you cannot generalize about all right-leaning white Christians (let alone all Christians in their entirety) based on what domestic terrorists like Tim McVeigh did, or Terry Nichols, or Eric Rudolph, or Scott Roeder or ...
But there is a more important point here. Muslims Americans don't have to prove a damn thing to you. They are Americans just like anyone else, whether right-wing clowns like it or not. They are not 80% American. They are not 90% as American as you are. You don't get to judge how American they are.
Here is the unalterable fact that the right-wing of this country has to get used to: Muslim-Americans are 100% American. There are no degrees of how American you are. They have the same exact rights, privileges and responsibilities as any other American does. They don't have to answer to you.
I'm agnostic now, but I was born Muslim. My whole family is Muslim. They're all Americans. Not one of them is one percent less of an American than any other race or religion in this country. My family became American by becoming naturalized. If anything, that shows that we are even more loyal to this country. Our citizenship is not an accident of birth, we chose America.
If someone challenges how American I am based on my race, ethnicity or religion (or lack thereof), them's fightin' words. These colors don't run. There is no one in the country more American than I am.
And at least I understand the whole point of the country. We are all created equal. We all have the same rights. We do not judge people based on their race or religion. That is part and parcel of what America is all about. And if you don't understand that, I question how American you are.
. . . . . Some other round-ups from the end of the day:
Yglesias:
Make it electric:
. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one gets to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't a dress rehearsal, it's the real thing, right here, right now. Make it count.— Giant piles of garbage are floating around in the oceans.
— Anti-tax movement ponders defeat in Washington and Maine.
— The future of real estate is in walkable urbanism.
— Stupak Amendment is potentially much more far-reaching than its proponents claim.
— Obama says that “instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln’s words, and always pray to be on the side of God.”
— Snoop Dogg supports entrepreneurship; I’ve got my mind on my money and money on my mind.
— Hezbollah foreign relations chief endorses Oprah.
The Desolation Angel











