Month: April 2009

Owned

by dday

Dick Durbin spoke about the destructive greed of the banksters today, the ones who torpedoed his amendment to allow bankruptcy judges to modify loan terms on primary residences the way they can on second homes, yachts, cars, and other pieces of property. He was unsparing and did not shy away from the statement he made on local radio in Illinois recently, that the bankers “own the place”. He set the needs of regular homeowners, who “don’t have any paid lobbyists,” against the desires of banks who took hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and face seemingly no consequence for their bad decisions.

Durbin is a close ally of the President and I feel he wouldn’t make a statement like this if he thought it too embarrassing to the Administration. He is trying to spark the American people to demand some change. Obama has done this too, albeit with more subtlety. We need to get their backs.

Here are a couple of excerpts (I’m transcribing):

One other argument that I think takes the cake: “Senator, you understand the moral hazard here. People have to be held responsible for their wrongdoing. If you make a mistake, darn it, you’ve gotta pay the price. That’s what America is all about.” Really, Mr. Banker on Wall Street? That’s what America is all about? What price did Wall Street pay for their miserable decisions creating rotten portfolios, destroying the credit of America and its businesses? Oh, they paid a pretty heavy price. Hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money sent to them to bail them out, to put them back in business, even to fund executive bonuses for those guilty of mismanaging. Moral hazard, huh? How can they argue that with a straight face? […]

At the end of the day, this is a real test of where we’re going in this country. Next up, after mortgages, credit cards. Next week, the same bankers get to come in and see how much might and power they have in the Senate when it comes to credit card reform. And the question we’re going to face, is whether or not this Senate is going to listen to the families facing foreclosure, the families facing job loss and bills they can’t pay, or whether they’re going to listen to the American Bankers Association, which has folded its arms and walked out of the room. Well, I hope that we have the courage to stand up to them. I hope this is the beginning of a new day in the Senate, a new dialogue in the Senate, that says to the bankers across America that your business as usual has put us in a terrible mess, and we’re not going to allow that to continue. We want America to be strong, but if it’s going to be strong, you should be respectful, Mr. Banker, of the people who live in the communities where your banks are located. You should be respectful of those families who are doing their best to make ends meet in the toughest recession that they’ve ever seen. You should be respectful of the people that you want to sign up for checking accounts and savings accounts, and make sure that they have decent neighborhoods to live in. Show a little loyalty to this great nation instead of just your bottom line when it comes to profitability. Take a little consideration of what it takes to make America strong…

I’ll offer this Durbin amendment as I did last year. When I offered it last year, they said, “Not a big problem, only two million foreclosures coming up.” They were wrong. It turned out to be eight million. And if the bankers prevail today, and we can’t get something through conference committee to deal with this issue, I’ll be back. I’m not going to quit on this […] At some point, the Senators in this chamber will decide, the bankers shouldn’t write the agenda in the United States Senate.

There’s really not much to add to that. Especially when you see the Senate vote 45 Yea, 51 Nay. (Roll call here). Nays included all Republicans and Baucus, Bennet, Byrd, Carper, Dorgan (?), Johnson, Landrieu, Lincoln, Nelson (NE), Pryor, Specter (awesome!), Tester. The Senators against this bill have lined up with the banksters, and for good reasons – they fund the campaigns, they throw the best parties, they share the interests and perspective of those disproportionately wealthy politicians. Last night, at Obama’s press conference, he offered another hint of how the federal government is so immense that he cannot wield the power to “get the banks to do what I want them to do.” Today he lashed out at the small group of hedge funds who forced Chrysler into bankruptcy, not just because they thought they could get a better deal from the bankruptcy judge, but because they’ll get paid off on their credit default swaps due to the bankruptcy.

The Obama budget, mostly laudatory, stripped out those elements which would have taxed wealth, instead protecting it in many instances. The system of government in this country has become a system of fealty to oligarchs. Democrats like Durbin made one concession after another on the bankruptcy bill, and still couldn’t get enough members of the Senate on board.

We have a major problem in this country, when the banksters hold this much control in the corridors of power. Dick Durbin is opening the window and showing the sick, decayed underbelly inside. Actions like the shareholder revolt ousting Ken Lewis from the chairmanship of Bank of America need to happen more and again. At some point, we can affect these people personally, and really damage them where they live. It’s the only way, through a broad-based movement, to overturn this horrible dynamic of financial industry control of government.

Here’s some video of Durbin’s speech.

…Ryan Grim finds the Mortgage Banker’s Association slapping five and drinking toasts to each other. Feel the excitement!

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Time Travel

by digby

So our lovely Miss California is going to become an anti-gay crusader. She probably thinks it’s a good career move, but it’s not exactly an original one. Recall that a former Miss Oklahoma and runner up to the Miss America contest is probably the most famous anti-gay crusader in American history:

In 1977, Dade County, Florida (now Miami-Dade County), passed an ordinance sponsored by Bryant’s former good friend Ruth Shack, that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.[1] Bryant led a highly publicized campaign to repeal the ordinance as the leader of a coalition named Save Our Children. The campaign was based on conservative Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality and the perceived threat of homosexual recruitment of children and child molestation.”

She said that “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life. […] I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.” The campaign began an organized opposition to gay rights that spread across the nation. Jerry Falwell went to Miami to help her.

Bryant made the following statements during the campaign: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children” and “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.” She also added that “All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God’s continued help we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation.”[2] On June 7, 1977, Bryant’s campaign led to a repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of 69 to 31 percent.

The gay community retaliated against Bryant by organizing a boycott on orange juice. Gay bars all over North America took screwdrivers off their drink menus and replaced them with the “Anita Bryant”, which was made with vodka and apple juice. Sales and proceeds went to gay political activists to help fund their fight against Bryant and her campaign.

Bryant didn’t know what hit her:

Bryant’s crusade was a galvanizing event that had the effect of empowering gays and eventually leading the country in the opposite direction Bryant and her antediluvian compatriots thought it would.

Somehow, I don’t the think the California orange growers are going to to signing Miss California up for an endorsement any time soon.

Serious Journalism

by digby

Yesterday was a low point for CNN in many ways. But this must have been the lowest:

I thought it was bad enough when the gasbag media was obsessed with sex.

Update: Jeff Zeleny of the NY Times, (who tristero takes downtown below) was on MSNBC earlier and said that the American people got to hear all the substantive answers they needed and his silly question was a chance to hear something important about how Obama felt about his first 100 days. Except, that’s nonsense. The American people didn’t hear a word about the banking crisis and Afghanistan, arguably the two most important, fundamental problems the government faces.

Condi Invokes The Nixon Defense

by dday

Condoleezza Rice, who’s being investigated and may go to prison if she ever sets foot in Spain, had a conversation at the Hoover Institute where she follows in the footsteps of another California politician:

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — And by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

Score one for pop culture, because thanks to the trailer to Frost/Nixon, most of the country understands the insanity of a statement like this.

Cenk Uygur notes that Rice was also questioned about her verbal authorization for waterboarding and other torture techniques to the CIA, and gave a classic answer:

“I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.”

Can we ask why she teaches at Stanford at this point, similar to asking why John Yoo remains at Berkeley and Jay Bybee on the federal bench?

Condi Rice’s entire career in the White House was marked by a denial of responsibility. “Nobody could have anticipated” should be the epitaph on her gravestone. But I don’t know what legal world exists where a conveyance of authorization does not equal an authorization. Uygur concludes:

This is why I say these people don’t understand the whole concept behind America. In our system of government, the president is not supposed to be above the law. He is not a king; his word is not the law. The president can violate the law and when he does, he is supposed to be held accountable. That is supposed to be one of the pillars of our democracy.

Look at what she said: “[B]y definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” Does that mean the president can authorize any kind of torture under the Convention Against Torture?

If someone doesn’t do something about this dangerous idea it will do more damage than the torture itself. Yes, the torture damaged our reputation across the world, helped terrorists recruit fighters against us, endangered our soldiers and sullied the name of America. But if this precedent – that the president can authorize anything and make it legal “by definition” – is allowed to stand, then our whole form of government is in jeopardy.

This was not the consensus view of everyone in the government at that time. Not everyone was swept up in 9/11 fever. Military experts warned against using these techniques for a variety of reasons, because it put our soldiers at risk and yielded bad information, setting aside the legal, ethical and moral implications of torture. So the use of these techniques, and the legal theories underpinning them, can only be seen as deliberate and thought-out by the perpetrators. They conspired to break the law for their own reasons, be it their warped beliefs about the Arab Mind, or their desire to expand executive power, or producing the false confessions necessary to assert an Iraq/Al Qaeda link, or whatever. These were sane people who made the decision to torture. And we have courts available to deal with the consequences.

…Here’s some more of this, including the bon mots that Nazi Germany wasn’t as consequential a threat to this country as Al Qaeda because the Nazis never “attacked the homeland of the United States.”

…Spencer Ackerman thinks Condi made news:

But Rice is now portraying herself as merely being a conduit for approving the CIA’s interrogation regime: “I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.” Well, there are only two more-senior officials than Rice in this context, and that’s Bush and then-VP Dick Cheney. If she hadn’t made a decision on the part of the administration for the Abu Zubaydah interrogation plan, only one of these two men would have had the authority to do so. And all of this would have happened before the Justice Department determined the interrogation techniques to be legal.

My impression of the SASC report was that Condi told the CIA they could do ahead and waterboard pending OLC approval. But it’d be nice to haul Rice before a panel and ask her to clarify this.

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But Remember, Greed Is Good

by dday

Over the last 30 days, Chrysler secured deals with their union. They got the bondholders to take 28 cents on the dollar. They made a deal with Fiat. They lined up pretty much every stakeholder and got them all to share in the pain. And then the hedge funds said no and forced them into bankruptcy.

Chrysler LLC is going to file for bankruptcy, an administration official confirmed to CNN Thursday.

The filing comes after some of the company’s smaller lenders refused a Treasury Department demand to reduce the amount of money the troubled automaker owed them.

Chrysler officials had no comment on the bankruptcy report. The company faces a Thursday deadline from the Treasury Department to reach deals with creditors who had loaned the company about $7 billion.

But the filing will not mean the halt of operations or liquidation for the troubled 85-year old automaker. Instead, the administration expects to use the bankruptcy process to join Chrysler with Italian automaker Fiat.

In addition, the United Auto Workers union announced late Wednesday night that its membership at Chrysler had overwhelmingly ratified a concession contract reached between the company and union leadership on Sunday night.

This will be a quick bankruptcy, since most of the deals are in place. But in this case, the hedge funds (they are the “smaller lenders” referenced in the article) are more likely to get a better deal from a bankruptcy judge. And we’re certainly going to see if anyone trusts buying a car from a company in bankruptcy. So Chrysler comes out of this, but diminished, because the hedge funds demanded payment.

Now can we tax their income as income instead of capital gains?

…Obama on the hedge funds, just now:

While many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you, some did not. In particular, a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout. They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none. Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting. I don’t stand with them. I stand with Chrysler’s employees, its families and communities. I stand with Chrysler’s management, its dealers and suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars. I don’t stand with those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.

Obama had an interesting bit last night where he talked about the enormous scope of the political landscape, and how “I can’t get the banks to do what I want them to.” It was a telling example.

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The Real Food Craze

by tristero

It’s just a detail, but a telling one, a tiny prelude to a near-certain media blitz of ridicule that will probably break soon. In a story about how local ordinances are changing to permit the limited raising of chickens, goats, and other food-producing animals within the bounds of a city, Peter Applebome types:

Of course, not many New Haven residents or Yale professors were raising chickens a few years ago. But some combination of the locavore craze…

What???? A locavore craze? Eating locally, which the human species did without exception for hundreds of thousands of years, that’s now called a “craze?” The mind reels.

No, the real food craze is eating food made like this. It’s a perfect example of a craze, an interest pursued with excessive enthusiasm – over 10 billion bucks of excessive enthusiasm – that can’t, and won’t, last. But eating this garbage is not only a craze. It’s also crazy, and it’s disgusting.*

But never mind. The “locavore craze” is code for dirty fucking hippie behavior – ie, stuff – like protesting an illegal and immoral war before it happens – that the Serious Ones needn’t bother to take seriously. And you can expect more of the same, and ever more direct disparagement of eating healthfully and sensibly the more popular the Obamas’ garden gets – and the more unpopular Republican-linked polluters like Smithfield become.* I predict that the silly and gently self-disparaging label “foodie” will be twisted to rival “politically correct” as a putdown, guaranteed to short circuit serious discussions of how truly horrible the food production and distribution industries are.

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* It is a common rejoinder; Those of us who are appalled that people are eating deliberately sickened animals raised full time packed tightly in their own shit and piss are told we want to “impose vegetarianism” on everyone. Not true. I am a vegetarian. My wife and daughter are not. I wouldn’t dream of imposing my diet on them or anyone else and I make no claims that being vegetarian is intrinsically more healthful or “moral” than any other way of eating.

That said, last night, I printed out the Rolling Stone article linked to above and asked my family to please consider not eating factory-raised beef, pork, or chicken (in fact, for the most part, they already don’t). Between farmer’s markets and specialty stores, you can buy sensibly raised meat products at a fair price. Yes, it’s more expensive, but treating health problems implicated by industrially-raised meats is far more so.

** A Smithfield subsidiary industrial hog farm was only 12 miles from La Gloria, the town believed to be the starting point of the Swine Flu strain that is sweeping the world; it is too early to say conclusively that the unbelievably unsanitary conditions there were a factor in the virus’s incubation,. The company, naturally, denies they had anything to do with the swine flu, but several experts have pointed out that the proximity of the industrial farm to the outbreak merits close investigation. See brief discussion with links here.

NY Times: And How Does Bo LIke The White House, Mr. President?

by tristero

Ok, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times didn’t ask how the First Dog was adjusting to his new home, But that’s only because he wasn’t allowed a follow-up to this idiotic question:

Jeff Zeleny.

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most and troubled you the most?

MR. OBAMA: Let me write this down. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Surprised.

MR. OBAMA: All right. I’ve got —

QUESTION: Troubled.

MR. OBAMA: I’ve got — what was the first one?

QUESTION: Surprised.

MR. OBAMA: Surprised.

QUESTION: Troubled.

MR. OBAMA: Troubled.

QUESTION: Enchanted.

MR. OBAMA: Enchanted. Nice. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: And humbled.

MR. OBAMA: And what was the last one, humbled?

QUESTION: Humbled.

Thank you, sir.

And as of this morning, Jeff Zeleny still has a job.

It’s important to note the context of this question. For the most part – although perhaps Digby and dday disagree – the questions were substantive. Some were bad-Republican-idea questions – like whether the border should be closed to help prevent the SWINE flu from spreading – but most were serious, from concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to the disproportionate impact the financial crises are having on African-American and Hispanic-American communities. One reporter even got Obama to repeat that waterboarding is torture.

But in his article (with Helene Cooper) Zeleny even missed the importance of the torture discussion, concluding:

He offered no shift, however, in his opposition to an independent inquiry into the Bush administration’s policies on the interrogation of terror suspects.

On the contrary, by not bringing it up when he easily could have, Obama appeared to signal a softening in his opposition.

Bill, Jill: Fire ‘im.

Prerogatives

by digby

Oh my. Apparently, Democratic Senators don’t like back room deals being made that deny them their prerogatives:

Senior Senate Democrats are objecting to the deal Majority Leader Harry Reid made with Sen. Arlen Specter, saying they will vote against letting the former Republican shoot to the top of powerful committees after he switches parties.
Several Democrats are furious with Sen. Reid (D-Nev.) for agreeing to let Specter (Pa.) keep his seniority, accrued over more than 28 years as a GOP senator. That agreement would allow Specter to leap past senior Democrats on powerful panels — including the Appropriations and Judiciary committees.“I won’t be happy if I don’t get to chair something because of Arlen Specter,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who sits on the Appropriations Committee with Specter and is fifth in seniority among Democrats, behind Chairman Daniel Inouye (Hawaii) and Sens. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and Tom Harkin (Iowa). “I’m happy with the Democratic order, but I don’t want to be displaced because of Arlen Specter,” she said.

[…]
One senior Democratic lawmaker told The Hill that the Democratic Conference will vote against giving the longtime Pennsylvania Republican seniority over lawmakers like Harkin, Mikulski and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) when they hold their organizational meeting after the 2010 election.
Under his deal with Reid, Specter would jump ahead of all but a few Democrats when it comes time to dole out committee chairmanships and assignments.
“That’s his deal and not the caucus’s,” the senior lawmaker said of Reid’s agreement with Specter.

I feel their pain. It’s very annoying when powerful party pooh bahs make back room deals that foreclose the normal Democratic processes. For instance, when they promise a party switcher that he won’t have a primary opponent. I hate when that happens.

Subtle Message

by digby

Chris Matthews sez:

Matthews: He wants to lessen the harshness of the reputation he’s getting among people who are complaining about the Notre Dame speech, that he’s too pro-choice. He wants to pull back from that by offering up the story, that I hadn’t heard before, that there’s a task force in his domestic policy council that’s looking at ways to reduce, I think he meant, to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, the number of situations that would lead a woman to make a decision about an abortion. I thought that was very positive.

Olbermann: And reaching out people from both camps, the anti-abortion and pro-choice camps, somehow involving them in that task force.

Matthews: Yeah. And I think that’s what you hear from people like Ryan of Ohio, people on both sides who are pro-choice and pro-life, who would like to radically reduce the number of people who choose abortion because they didn’t use birth control or they didn’t practice whatever or they didn’t … they put themselves in a situation where abortion was an option when …

It was a very subtle message to the pro-life community, I think.

This “subtle message” is Matthews’ latest “insight” which is that the little sluts are all having abortions out of sheer laziness and stupidity and they need to be forced to be responsible for their hootchies because decent people just won’t stand for their abortion loving ways anymore. He got this from Lord Saletan’s most recent stupidity and I dearly hope that the Obama administration knows how deeply offensive this particular approach is and are in no way sending messages that they concur.

Yes, we liberals want to help women avoid unwanted pregnancy. We have been advocating for that for years. Education and access to birth control have always been at the top of our agenda. But judging women as ignorant, irresponsible whores if they do get pregnant isn’t exactly a big step forward. In fact, I’m pretty sure that takes us right back to square one.

Perhaps someday birth control will be completely safe and available in every drug store and 7-11 in the land and then lazy, abortion loving women won’t have any excuses to fall back on anymore …

At What Point Do You Get Your House Speaking Privileges Revoked?

by dday

Speaking of Michelle Bachmann, here she is teaching history, on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

BACHMANN: The recession FDR had to deal with wasn’t as bad as the one Coolidge had to deal with in the early ’20s, Yet the prescription that Coolidge put on that, from history, is lower taxes, lower regulatory burden, and we saw the Roaring ’20s, where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we’ve never seen before in the history of the country. FDR applied just the opposite formula. The Hoot-Smalley Act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions, and of course trade barriers and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That’s what we saw happen under FDR, that took a recession and blew it into a full-scale Depression. The American people suffered for almost ten years under that kind of thinking.

None of this is right, but “Hoot-Smalley” deserves some kind of medal. Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley into law, by the way.

Bachmann is like a college student who skimmed the entire history book the night before the test, and knows a couple dates and places, and just connects dots randomly, making sense only to her.

Now I know where the people who think Stephen Colbert is a closet conservative come from – MN-06. Because clearly they elected one of their own to represent them.

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