Month: October 2011

Taking the cake

by digby

I can hardly believe that gazillionaire Mayor Bloomberg would have the nerve to host an exclusive dinner for the financial, corporate and political elite to persuade them to slash the social safety net. It’s almost beyond belief. But he did.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will host an intimate dinner at Gracie Mansion on Sunday night that brings together a bipartisan group of senators, Xerox chief executive Ursula Burns and other business and labor leaders to discuss how to pave the way for the Super Committee to “go big” and cut $4 trillion in federal spending, according to a source familiar with the dinner.

The Washington contingent includes Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Warner and Republican Sens. Bob Corker, and Saxby Chambliss, among others. The meeting will be a much smaller, more strategic affair — 10 to 20 people — than a similar dinner Warner threw at his home in September, which had a guest list of 60.

Sunday’s dinner is another in a series of conversations that lawmakers, policy makers and business and labor leaders have been having since last summer to make a business case for big cuts in spending. A number of senators and business groups, including the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having been urging the Super Committee to cut more than the $1.5 trillion it is charged with finding.

It’s mind-boggling I know. But they really don’t seem to have the vaguest clue what’s going on.

There were some people there to greet them, via Harry Waisbren:

While we rallied outside, New York City’s exceedingly out of touch Mayor for the 1% was hosting an intimate dinner party for Senators and corporate executives to urge the SuperCommittee to “go big” and cut $4 trillion in federal spending.

This would mean that much more dire straights for the 99%, given their desire to slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and everything else essential to our survival. It is also that much more ludicrous considering that if they really wanted to eliminate the budget deficit, they could simply tax the top 1% through a Millionaires Tax and a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street speculation and that would be that.

So, since we weren’t invited, we thought we would show up to let them know just how far removed from the people they really are. Fortunately, Marie Antoinette and Louis the XVI were able to join in the festivities, and they brought along plenty of cake to serve to us peasants!

A great time was had amongst the hundred or so participants at large, and we clearly got to the Mayor, if only considering the excessive police presence. They even shut down the public part next door to the mansion, much to the chagrin of the would-be dog walkers in the park. One thing I think even the least political amongst us know: dog-lovers are a constituency not to be trifled with!

You can check out our full Flickr set of photos and videos here, and a hearty thank you to Democracy for New York City, Yvonne Fitzner of Stop Fox and her cadre of 99ers, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street movement at large, for all of the support!

And a big hat tip to our Marie Antoinette, Job Party star supporter Rosemary Topar, for absolutely nailing the role! We had only heard about Bloomberg’s special plans on Friday, so this kind of event was only possible due to unflappable activists like herself stepping up (and then some) last minute.

Plus, Marie clearly had the line of the night, as when she was being rained down upon with chants of “off with her head!!”, she responded in an inquisitive French accent: “but I thought this was a non-violent movement?!”

If only Mayor Bloomberg and all the other social-safety-net-slashing 1%-ers could see the irony.

They’re so far beyond irony — or even normal perception — that if this takes on a more serious cast I’m afraid they really will be as clueless as darling Marie was in real life. That didn’t end well.

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Justice
by David Atkins

It is increasingly clear that the Occupy movement has tapped into a wellspring of pre-existing public sentiment that has been lying under the surface for a while now. What that sentiment is exactly has been the subject of some debate: is it anger about inequality? Fury over the plight of the less fortunate during the recession? Concern about powerlessless in a global economy? Frustration with an ineffective political system? The precise desires not just of the Occupiers themselves but of the broader public that supports them have been up for some debate as well.

Ultimately, though, you have a pretty decent sense of the zeitgeist when Matt Taibbi and Thomas Friedman start sounding a lot alike.

Taibbi and Friedman, normally at near opposite ends of the spectrum both in style and ideology, are both hitting on a shared fundamental theme: justice.

The mere fact that some people have more money than they could ever spend while the majority suffers, or that Washington is unable to step in to solve basic problems, or that America has a regrettable foreign policy, or any of the other oft-repeated reasons for deep-seated public anger really don’t get to the heart of the matter. Those issues have been present for quite some time now; progressives have been talking about them for years and years without too much traction.

But people have a much more emotional and almost animal reaction to the notion of justice. People can tell when they’re getting a raw deal. Game theory experiments have proven that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain just to enforce a sense of justice when the other player is perceived to be taking advantage of them. It is this same emotional dynamic that is leading people to camp out in the cold at Occupy sites all across America.

What Friedman and Taibbi are both pointing to is the fact that none of the people who were involved in major financial crimes have gotten more than a slap on the wrist. These people got bailed out of their untenable positions and continue to play with a stacked deck while preaching austerity to the rest of us. That sort of thing rankles people’s innate sense of justice.

For progressives concerned with more than just economic justice, this sense of lack of justice extends to the people who lied America into the invasion of Iraq, the people responsible for the BP disaster in the Gulf, the people responsible for outing CIA agents for political gain, the people involved in the Abramoff criminal conspiracy, the Department of Justice firings, and a host of other fusions of corporate and government criminality.

One doesn’t always have to be able to express coherently why or how one is getting screwed to know one is getting screwed. People get that the social order has broken down to the point that accountability is only for the little people anymore. Tea Partiers understand this, though they blame entirely the wrong people, and their Objectivist authoritarian mindset means that they are incapable of being any kind of assistance in solving the problems that got us here. But they do have a legitimate sense that society is out of kilter, and that accountability for elites is a thing of the past. Protesters in the Occupy movement also understand that justice is not being done, even if each person has their own sense of exactly what those injustices look like.

Greenwald’s new book postulates that this sense of lawlessness lack of accountability dates back to Nixon’s pardon. I’m not sure I buy that thesis exactly, but it’s hard to argue with the notion that something has gone askew with the way we address not just inequality in America, but accountability.

Gnawing, unresolved injustice eats away at societies. Ritual cleansings have been part of human organizations for millennia to resolve just this very issue. When major injustices have been committed, the public will continue to be agitated until they see some sort of resolution that involves accountability for those involved. Politically, that has taken the form of consecutive wave elections that make no rational sense politically, but do make sense emotionally.

People are only going to get more and more angry until they start to see some justice. Remarkably, though, our elites don’t even seem to get the idea that there were even misdeeds that require any accountability. That’s a recipe for increased acrimony and conflict. If bipartisan fetishists and various pearl clutchers want more public unity and less fractious political discourse, they should start looking into how to satisfy the public’s yearning to see justice done to those who continue profit at their expense.

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The Question

by digby

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Career makers

by digby

Chris Hayes noted on twitter this morning reacts with righteous aggression whenever they catch a glimpse of a sex scandal. It’s so true. The energy is palpable, the eyes glitter, the breathing comes faster, they are clearly stimulated.

But then there are big rewards too:

Jerry Zremski profiled NBC reporter Luke Russert, still best-known — but not for much longer, perhaps — as the son of legendary NBC political reporter Tim Russert.

The moment that boosted the 26-year-old Russert into the big-leagues: When he stood up to Rep. Anthony Weiner this past May. Here’s their exchange, as recounted by Zremski:

“But that’s not a picture of you?” the reporter asked.
“You know, I can’t say with certitude. My system was hacked, pictures can be manipulated, pictures can be dropped in and inserted….”

Yup.

Everybody loves gossip. But the Villagers love it more than anyone on earth.

h/t to @jaytingle

Appropriations

by digby

Greg Sargent has a good post up this morning deconstructing the latest right wing appropriation of liberal rhetoric to advance its own goals. This time it’s on income inequality. The bottom line is that they are now agreeing that income inequality is bad but that it’s because government is standing in the way of the “jaaahb creators.” This is, of course, the confidence fairy zombie (which would be my Halloween costume if I had one.) What else is new?

But I noticed a subtler one as well, and it’s one to keep an eye on. Greg points to this as one of the stages of GOP rhetorical appropriation:

We never said inequality and tax unfairness aren’t problems. (See Paul Ryan’s speech, in which he said that “nobody disagrees” that “bus drivers shouldn’t pay a higher effective tax rate than millionaires.”)

To those of us who believe in progressive taxation, this would mean that millionaires should pay a higher effective tax rate, right? But to people who want to protect millionaires’ from taxes, this would mean a flat tax, which is completely unprogressive, but would perfectly fit their definition of “tax unfairness.”

The right is extremely proficient at using the current zeitgeist to their own ends. It’s very clever and often quite successful.

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Cynical Police Action

by digby

This column in the NY Daily News about the growing stratification of the society Occupy Wall Street is building is fascinating. It discusses the group’s stated goal of creating an antirely different democratic/social organization with a new form of decision making and allocation of resources (of which I admit to being fairly skeptical — but then I’m old.) The article discusses how difficult it is to do such a thing and examines the way the culture has broken into two camps — participants and everyone else.

However, fascination at the movement’s growing pains quickly turns to horror when you get to this part:

But while officers may be in a no-win situation, at the mercy of orders carried on shifting political winds and locked into conflict with a so-far almost entirely non-violent protest movement eager to frame the force as a symbol of the oppressive system they’re fighting, the NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals.

The NYPD’s press office declined to comment on the record about any such policy, but it seems like a logical tactic from a Bloomberg administration that has done its best to make things difficult for the occupation — a way of using its openness against it.

“He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,” I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene with troublemakers inside the park, including a clearly disturbed man screaming and singing wildly at 3 a.m. for the second straight night.

“The first time I’ve heard cops mention our First Amendment rights,” cracked one occupier after hearing a lieutenant read off of that apparent script.

“A lot of you people smell,” a waggish cop shot back later after an occupier asked if he might be able to help find more appropriate accommodations for a particularly pungent and out-of-sorts homeless man.

“The police are saying ‘it’s a free for all at Zuccotti so you can go there,’” said Daniel Zetah, a member of several working groups including community affairs. “Which makes our job harder and harder because the ratio is worse and worse.”

It sounds as though they are promoting criminal behavior in order to disgrace the movement — and perhaps turn some of the protesters into victims of criminal predators. “Free for all” also means “anything goes.”

It might be useful for the OWS folks to consult with some people from Santa Monica, a liberal city in the midst of a major metropolis which has had a longstanding conflict between its desire to be decent to the homeless in the face of the rest of the city and environs pushing their dispossessed across its borders. It’s been quite the saga over the years and the outcome has not been particularly satisfying. Perhaps the working groups at Zuccotti Park will have more luck.

One thing Santa Monica did not have to face, however, was police in other jurisdictions doing this to degrade its reputation and create violence and mayhem within in its borders, (at least to my knowledge.) This appears to be a conscious effort to sabotage the movement. And it may work.

Feeding the homeless is a beautiful thing and I’m sure that many of those folks can find peace and safety in the numbers at Zuccotti Park they can’t find on the streets. But the homeless aren’t all saints any more than the rest of the population and it’s very difficult to deal with predators in your midst when the police — a quasi-military force — are basically working with them. Which, it seems, they are.

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Thomas Friedman, Dirty Hippie
by David Atkins

The column is already a day old, but a warm welcome is due nonetheless to Thomas Friedman, who has joined the ranks of the shrill:

This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo for the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the most striking things to me about that demonstration was how apolitical it was. When I talked to Egyptians, it was clear that what animated their protest, first and foremost, was not a quest for democracy — although that was surely a huge factor. It was a quest for “justice.” Many Egyptians were convinced that they lived in a deeply unjust society where the game had been rigged by the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists. Egypt shows what happens when a country adopts free-market capitalism without developing real rule of law and institutions.

But, then, what happened to us? Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.

That Friedman has belatedly woken up this reality some five years or more behind the curve is nice, but typical of the shortsightedness of the Very Serious People.

Back when Friedman was praising globalization, asset-based growth, bipartisan fetishism and all things neoliberal, it obviously never occurred to him that when you break down the ability of nation-states to control multinational corporations, you also break down the need for the global elite to adhere to any sort of rules. They become literally and figuratively above the law. When you use McDonalds to conduct diplomacy between nations, well, McDonalds will ultimately control the nature of the relationship between nations for its own benefit.

Who is it that Thomas Friedman believes will put in place the rules he advocates? The brave new world he championed for two decades led inexorably and inevitably to this point. Now Friedman is an open Sinophile, longing for a government that can move to get things done without the sclerotic inconvenience of bureaucracy and keep corporate corruption in check. But he only gives cursory acknowledgment to the rejection of democracy inherent in that position, and practically none to the fact that China is quite protectionist in its policies–a direct rejection of the stances Friedman has been advocating for decades.

An increasing number of “serious” people are coming to realize far too late the multinational corporations and the global financial elite really don’t follow any rules anymore, and don’t intend to. This is shocking to them. They never saw it coming even as they championed the asset-driven economic policies that empowered those same elites.

Conservatives and neoliberals alike assume that rule of law, infrastructure and basic decency just happen. They’re part of the automatic background of society, and they notice it as little as fish notice the water they swim in. It really doesn’t occur to them that when you weaken the structures that support those things, they can and do disappear. Infrastructure decays without upkeep. Corporations and elites realize that there are no consequences to openly flouting the rule of law. Decency is for losers and suckers.

And then they recoil in shock at the consequences of the ideologies they themselves advocated, without even realizing the implicit connection.

In the endless debate between whether our elites are evil or stupid, the kindest thing we can say about Thomas Friedman is that at least he’s apparently not evil. Welcome to the shrill hippie club, Mr. Friedman. Here’s hoping you spend a little time assessing how we got to this point, and your role in helping create our current predicament.

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Libertarians make the argument that the government is a threat to liberty because it employs “men with guns” who can rob you of your life and freedom. Without getting into that tired debate, I would just like to make one observation: for most Americans, the greatest threat to their freedom comes from “men with pink slips” not men with guns, particularly now. (These men with pink slips, by the way, are exalted by “free market” worshipers of all philosophical bents.)

Check this out:

Like a lot of companies, Veridian Credit Union wants its employees to be healthier. In January, the Waterloo, Iowa-company rolled out a wellness program and voluntary screenings.

It also gave workers a mandate – quit smoking, curb obesity, or you’ll be paying higher healthcare costs in 2013. It doesn’t yet know by how much, but one thing’s for certain – the unhealthy will pay more.

The credit union, which has more than 500 employees, is not alone.

In recent years, a growing number of companies have been encouraging workers to voluntarily improve their health to control escalating insurance costs. And while workers mostly like to see an employer offer smoking cessation classes and weight loss programs, too few are signing up or showing signs of improvement.

So now more employers are trying a different strategy – they’re replacing the carrot with a stick and raising costs for workers who can’t seem to lower their cholesterol or tackle obesity. They’re also coming down hard on smokers. For example, discount store giant Wal-Mart says that starting in 2012 it will charge tobacco users higher premiums but also offer free smoking cessation programs.

Tobacco users consume about 25 percent more healthcare services than non-tobacco users, says Greg Rossiter, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, which insures more than 1 million people, including family members. “The decisions aren’t easy, but we need to balance costs and provide quality coverage.”

[…]

The weak economy is contributing to the change. Employers face higher health care costs – in part – because they’re hiring fewer younger healthy workers and losing fewer more sickly senior employees.

The poor job market also means employers don’t have to be as generous with these benefits to compete. They now expect workers to contribute to the solution just as they would to a 401(k) retirement plan, says Jim Winkler, a managing principal at consulting firm Aon Hewitt’s health and benefits practice. “You’re going to face consequences based on whether you’ve achieved or not,” he says.

And those that don’t are more likely to be punished. An Aon Hewitt survey released in June found that almost half of employers expect by 2016 to have programs that penalize workers “for not achieving specific health outcomes” such as lowering their weight, up from 10 percent in 2011

The programs have until now met little resistance in the courts. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prevents workers from being discriminated against on the basis of health if they’re in a group health insurance plan. But HIPAA also allows employers to offer wellness programs and to offer incentives of up to 20 percent of the cost for participation.

President Barack Obama’s big health care reform, the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will enable employers beginning in 2014 to bump that difference in premiums to 30 percent and potentially up to 50 percent.

The article goes on to point out that some of these employee wellness programs have resulted in lower premiums as people became healthier. However, unless the program is very well designed and the people running them are persistent enough to change the culture, a lot of lower income people will just end up paying higher premiums and suffering from employer intrusion on a level not seen before.

I’m certainly not against people getting healthier or employers offering help for their employees and as a result lower their rates. Americans need all the help they can get. But this new “stick” approach smacks of private sector coercion I haven’t seen before. On one level it’s institutionalizing discrimination against people with illnesses (or potential illnesses due to being overweight)and on another it’s giving employers new incentives to get into the personal business of their employees — and eventually not hiring them altogether. The workplace always gets unfriendlier in hard economic times. These programs, however well intentioned, could easily end up changing the relationship of the employer to employee forever.

No exceptions
by David Atkins

Herman Cain in 1998:

“Too many people in the electorate are single-issue voters,” he commented, “and to try and cater to the single-issue voters and the single-issue pockets out there felt like I was compromising my beliefs. As an example, with the pro-life and pro-abortion debate, the most vocal people are on the ends. I am pro-life with exceptions, and people want you to be all or nothing.”

He added, “I am not a social-issue crusader. I am a free-enterprise crusader.”

Herman Cain today:

Herman Cain again attempted to clarify his position on abortion Sunday, declaring on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “I am pro-life from conception, period” – and that he does not support exceptions even for victims of rape and incest.

“I am pro-life from conception, period. If people look at many speeches that I have given over the years, that has and will still be my position,” Cain told CBS’ Bob Schieffer.

But there’s more to this than the flip flop compounded by a lie about his past statements. Herman Cain’s position here is interesting in that he also claims to be enough of a social libertarian that he would not actually enforce his views–whatever they may happen to be this week–on what women can do with their bodies:

“What I’m saying is, it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make,” Cain said in that interview. “Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.”

Cain doesn’t believe legislators should be making those decisions. Interestingly, he doesn’t qualify those statements with the word “federal,” either, so presumably he’s also against state legislatures making those decisions for families. Someone should definitely ask him about “states’ rights” in that context. Which is more important to Cain: the right of women to be unencumbered by state legislators making decisions for their families, or the right of states to make misogynistic laws free from federal interference?

But on a broader level, Cain’s flip-flop on abortion here is more proof that it doesn’t really matter how “reasonable” a Republican candidate is on the issues or what his or her personal beliefs are. When push comes to shove, all of them will do precisely what their corporate benefactors and rabid base want them to do, because Republicans are more afraid of their base than of Democrats or squishy “moderates.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are more afraid of “moderates” and the people who send the big checks than they are of their base. I believe that Barack Obama still supports a single-payer system:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” (applause) “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

Just like Herman Cain doesn’t actually believe in no abortion without exceptions. But the fact is that neither of these guys is free to express their actual opinion–nor does their actual opinion matter that much in the grand scheme of things.

Once you reach the presidential level, politics is about power dynamics, not about individual character. Individual character matters more as you go farther down the ballot and legislators can put more of a personal stamp on their actions. But putting “good people” in the Oval Office office changes nothing. You have to change the system. Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry are essentially interchangeable pawns.

All the media discussion about the differences between them is essentially hot air designed to distract from what matters, which is organizational and power politics.

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Haunt the House

by digby

More here:

This Halloween, there’s plenty to be scared of on Capitol Hill. The fate of $1.5 trillion rests in the hands of 12 members of the “Super Committee” tasked with slashing our national deficit. We’d like to think this Committee has our best interest in mind when they hover the axe, but the Committee’s been operating in the shadows where deep pocketed powerful special interests, creepy corporations and other things that go bump in the night are whispering in their ears. (Learn more here )

Will it be Medicare or environmental programs on the chopping block? Will taxes get hiked or revenues slashed? We don’t know. But as long as the Super Committee does their work in the shadows, the vampires and zombie lobbyists lurking there will be heard louder than the rest of us. It’s time to get the skeletons out of the closet and tell the Super Committee that transparency isn’t just for ghosts this year. Join us as we Haunt the House (and Senate). (More info below!)

Haunt the House (and the Senate) — and we want you to be there. We’ll be heading to Super Committee members’ offices all around the country to remind them who they work for. Head to meetup.com/transparency to join your local Haunt.When: Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 9AM (local time)
Where: Your local Super Committee member’s office. (Find it here!) or check our our “Main Haunts”

Afterwards stop by your local Occupation.

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