Month: September 2013

The sad story of the shamed Masters of the Universe

by digby

Get ready for a major tug on your heartstrings:

Many of the top Wall Street bankers who were largely responsible for the disaster — and whose companies either collapsed or accepted billions in government bailouts — are also unemployed. But since they walked away from the disaster with millions, they’re juggling their ample free time between mansions and golf, skiing and tennis.

Meantime, the major banks that survived the crisis, largely because they were saved with taxpayer money after being deemed “too big to fail,” are now bigger and more powerful than ever.

The Center for Public Integrity looked at what happened to five former Wall Street kingpins to see what they are up to these days. None are in jail, nor are any criminal charges expected to be filed.

Why would there be? Haven’t these poor men suffered enough?

Take Richard Fuld. Five years after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the 158-year-old company he ran, collapsed under the weight of bad investments and sent a tidal wave of panic through the global financial system, Fuld is living comfortably.

He has a mansion in Greenwich, Conn., a 40-plus-acre ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho, as well as a five-bedroom home in Jupiter Island, Fla. He no longer has a place in Manhattan, since he sold his Park Avenue apartment in 2009 for $25.87 million.

He had to sell his Park Avenue Apartment for 25 million? The humanity!!! And even worse:

The five ultra-rich former Wall Street chieftains have simultaneously faded into luxurious obscurity while the survivors — Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs — have only consolidated their power as they alternate between being seen as great villains or near statesmen depending on the changing fortunes of their companies.

All they have to do all day is count their money. How horrible for them.

Read the whole sordid story — and take a tour of the hovels in which these poor men are forced to live. It’ll break your heart.

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Diplomacy 1, Bombing 0

by digby

So it appears that we have at least the hope of a diplomatic solution on Syrian chemical weapons and won’t be entering their civil war any time soon.

I’m hearing some kvetching by liberals that this means there is also no hope for the Syrian people and that’s daft.  Their horrifying situation isn’t made better but at least we’re not making it worse by bombing them. And that’s something. Having the UN involved with the Russians on board makes it far more likely they’ll be able to work this problem and try to get a cease fire.

It’s also obvious that the talking points require we believe that it was the threat of force that brought Assad to the table. Again, I have to point out that if that’s so, Assad and the Russians weren’t paying attention because it looked very much like the US Congress was going to deny the president the authority to use force as the British parliament had done earlier.  They had good reason to hold out at that moment and not give in.  In fact, one can just as easily make the case that it was the threat to withhold authorization that made the US realize it had to be more creative and they jumped at the chance when it presented itself (which is truly admirable.) I’m going to guess that everyone knew the situation was escalating dangerously out of control, were seeking a non-violent way out and found it. That shows some welcome rationality. And you can’t always count on that.

Not that it really matters.  The history of this won’t be written by people like me and frankly, I don’t care at this moment.  If they found a way for everyone to save face then it’s a good thing. What matters now is that there are no bombs falling on Syria adding to the misery of its poor people.  And perhaps because of the global attention, the possibilities of dialog between all the parties (including Iran and Israel) will turn out to have opened up a path to peace. It’s one good day. We should take them when we get them.

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QOTD: Melissa Mayer Yahoo CEO

by digby

At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference Michael Arrington asked her wanted to know what would happen if Yahoo just didn’t cooperate with the NSA and what would happen if she were to simply talk about what was happening, even though the government had forbidden it. She replied, “releasing classified information is treason.”

Actually it isn’t. The constitution is pretty specific:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

The government could feasibly interpret the CEO of Yahoo talking about the NSA requiring her company to secretly do certain things as giving aid and comfort to the enemy I suppose, but I’m not sure who the enemy would be in that case. I wouldn’t put it past them to try — they’ve been pretty willing to stretch the plain meaning of the 4th Amendment, after all. But that’s why the treason clause was put in the Constitution in the first place.

James Madison Federalist 43:

As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

Mayer can probably relax on the treason thing.

Nice little democracy you have here…

by digby

Over at The Nation, Perlstein has a great piece up about gun nuts and their effect on our civic life. This the idea that it’s considered completely acceptable for people to show up at political gatherings packing heat has always struck me as a far greater threat to my personal freedom than the abstract notion that my blind neighbor and I will someday be called to fight the marines with our semi-automatics as they go house to house here in Santa Monica.

He discusses a very creepy Militia website that illustrates why this is such a concern. They’re working themselves into quite a frenzy:

Once cowed at the thought of provoking Second Amendment supporters, leftists will soon attempt to ban ‘assault weapons’ (and much more) as legislation offered by Diane Feinstein makes its way to the Senate floor…. Maybe Democrats are confident that fallout from Sandy Hook [sic] will provide the floor votes necessary to disarm the American people. But if the left is willing to risk picking this fight with millions of American gun owners, it must also believe something far more important—that Americans who have spent years arming themselves against the ultimate expression of tyranny by their own government—the overthrow of the Second Amendment—will choose to not fight when the time finally comes.

He then highlights some of the lovelier comments. These were particularly vivid:

“thats right there could be a lot of dead LEFTIST!!”

“Stack them in the streets like cordwood. There’s no room for prisoners.”

Sure, it’s mostly idle blather from a bunch of losers. But when people show up at a political rally and stand around with guns, grimacing and saying nothing, this sort of thing tends to come to mind.

Perlstein discusses all this in the context of the Colorado recall elections this week in which a committed band of gun nuts managed to unseat two office holders who had endorsed some very mild gun restrictions in the wake of the Aurora massacre. They unseated them in spite of the fact that the majority of Colorado citizens are in favor of those restrictions. Why? They just care a lot more about this than those who want to stop the blood letting and got their people out to vote. As Perlstein points out, those of us on the other side of this issue can learn a thing or two from them.

But I cannot help but blame the Democratic Party just a little bit for this. For well over a decade we were all told that our quixotic insistence on chasing the rural white male voter, meant that guns were a deadly issue for Democrats. A good many of us bought into that CW and dropped all discussion of it. It lost its salience as a Democratic voting issue and the organizing that had been done around it withered and died.

Obviously, it shouldn’t take institutions to make people vote on an issue around violence and carnage in our communities. But it’s hard for voters these days to believe they can have an effect on anything, and this least of all. With yahoos getting away with killing unarmed teenagers in hoodies (and receiving huge support and accolades from gun owners all over the nation) while groups of menacing “protesters” show up at political events armed to the teeth, you can’t blame normal people for thinking that standing up and being counted on this issue could be a dangerous proposition.

We know people think that. When the gun control group Moms Against Action held a rally and armed protesters showed up it had a chilling effect:

A member of Moms Demand Action said that she felt unsettled by their presence and said that the organizers would have to think twice before holding another event, particularly one where children could be present.

Can you blame her?

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Republicans still in a vise over Obamacare

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent has a good catch today.

If you want to get a sense of the hardships the coming battle over Obamacare implementation could present for Republicans, check out this compelling local newscast out of Virginia that was flagged for me by a Democrat.

It reports that at least 200,000 Virginia residents could be in danger of falling into the “Medicaid gap,” i.e., they are too poor to qualify for the law’s subsidies, but also will not enjoy the benefits of the law because Virginia has opted out of the Medicaid expansion:

What you see here is another way in which we may be heading into new political territory in the battle over Obamacare, now that its benefits are set to kick in this fall. The media and political discussion is heavily focused on the problems implementation may bring. There’s no denying that there will likely be glitches. Those are likely to be hyped in the press — egged on by Obamacare foes — into proof that the law is a uniform disaster. But as more and more people have their own concrete experience of the law and its benefits, the Republican arguments about it could get harder to make…

The bottom line is that as the law kicks in, for many people, this will no longer be an abstract political debate that can be easily manipulated by lies and distortions. The debate over the Obamacare long depicted as a Kenyan Muslim Marxist plot to destroy American freedom will now be vying with the debate over the various ways the law expands coverage to real people while protecting living, breathing consumers and people with preexisting conditions.

Whatever the political difficulties Dems face — and there will be difficulties, to be sure — Republicans will also face formidable political challenges as Obamacare rolls out. Republican officials who are trying to sabotage the law will no longer be able to scream about death panels and jackbooted IRS thugs looking to turn ordinary Americans into Obamacare slaves. They’ll now be in the position of standing in the way of increased access to health coverage for their own constituents.

The media may not do a great job clarifying that intransigent Republicans in states they control are responsible for the “failure” of Obamacare, but one can be sure that no matter how clearly the media present the facts of the case, Democrats running against them in the next elections will make the fault line very clear.

Moreover, the differences between states where the program is working and the states where it isn’t are going to be become increasingly apparent not just in the press, but also by word of mouth among friends, relatives and colleagues from one state to the next.

Obamacare isn’t perfect by a long shot. It’s a Heritage foundation plan first put into place by Mitt Romney. But even so, it is a step in the right direction that will benefit most people’s lives directly, and Republicans will rue the day they called it “Obamacare” and called it the end of the civilized world.

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Nobody likes Larry

by digby

A prominent progressive in action:

Senator Elizabeth Warren has told the White House that she won’t publicly take a position on Larry Summers as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, though she privately told administration officials she has “serious concerns” about him as a nominee, according to people familiar with the situation.

Summers’s prospects have dimmed over the past week and the Obama administration has come to realize the opposition of a prominent figure such as Warren could deliver a fatal blow, several people said.

I love it.

But get a load of this depressing tripe:

White House officials privately have predicted Summers would win Senate confirmation because even if a handful of Democrats defected, the nominee would have sufficient Republican supporters, who would be swayed by financial interests that would back Summers.

Isn’t that nice?

Unfortunately, the president’s close pals in the financial sector and the Republican Party don’t like Larry much either.

Even worse, the smart money has it that he won’t pick Janet Yellen out of spite. Gotta discipline the left, dontcha know?

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Meanwhile, back in the NSA


by digby

This really seems worth a little more commentary than it’s gotten:

The US National Security Agency has been accused of spying on Brazil’s biggest oil company, Petrobras, following the release of more files from US whistleblower Edward Snowden. 

The latest disclosures, which aired on Brazil’s Fantástico news program, have led to accusations that the NSA is conducting intelligence-gathering operations that go beyond its core mission of national security – often cited as the key distinction between the agency and its counterparts in China and Russia.

I think this points out the central dishonest conceit about the NSA programs and why we should be much more skeptical than we have been: they can rationalize everything as a matter of national security, which opens up vast possibilities for law enforcement and the spying agencies to spy on people under the new legal doctrines established since 9/11.

And if that “national security” spying happens to be of use to certain commercial entities well that’s just frosting on the cake.

Also too: this from bruce Schneier.

Or how about this from Emptywheel?

I want to return to last week’s Edward Snowden related scoop (Guardian, ProPublica/NYT) that the NSA has corrupted cryptography. Remember, there are several reasons the story was important:

• NSA lost the battle for the Clipper Chip and turned instead to achieve the same goals via means with less legal sanction
• NSA broke some companies’ encryption by “surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware”
• NSA also worked to “deliberately weaken[] the international encryption standards adopted by developers”

One key result of this — as Rayne and Julian Sanchez have emphasized — is to make everyone more exposed to hackers.

This is a bit like publishing faulty medical research just to prevent a particular foreign dictator from being cured. It makes everyone on the Internet more vulnerable, increasing the chances that dissidents will be uncovered by despotic regimes and that corporations will fall victim to cybercriminals.

[snip]

Bear this in mind the next time you see people on Capitol Hill wringing their hands about the threat of a possible “Digital Pearl Harbor”—especially if they think the solution is to give more data and authority to the NSA. Because the agency is apparently perfectly happy to hand weapons to criminals and hostile governments, as long as it gets to keep spying too.

And since then, the NSA has responded to rampant cyberattacks and threats of them against targets it cares about by demanding yet more access to those targets’ data

I love the idea that this is all so benign that we needn’t worry our pretty little heads about it. But every new revelation shows an agency that has expanded its mission without proper oversight or even passing thought as to the possible ramifications of its actions.

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A Man of GOP first, a Man of God second

by digby

Isn’t this special?

The bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls has sent a letter to clergy saying he isn’t endorsing a nun’s speech at a private Catholic college in Yankton because of her views on the new federal health care law.

Sister Simone Campbell was scheduled to speak Thursday night at Mount Marty College on the topic “Health Care and the Poor.” She is the executive director of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice education and lobbying group, and an outspoken supporter of the new federal health care law.

He’s against the Medicaid expansion. So much for that Catholic social justice mumbo jumbo. But, in fairness, he’s an outlier. The Catholic Bishops around the country have (mostly) been lobbying for the medicaid expansion, even in places like Texas. This article by Ryan Casey explains:

Bishop Paul Swain of the Diocese of Sioux Falls, SD is out of step with the official stated position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which affirms that “health care is a basic right flowing from the sanctity and dignity of human life.” In the battle over Medicaid expansion, Bishop Swain chooses to remain steadfastly on the sidelines.
[…]
When questioned by local reporters and Catholic social justice advocates, Bishop Swain has so far refused to endorse the expansion of Medicaid in South Dakota. And while each bishop and his diocese are free to operate with relative autonomy, Bishop Swain is decidedly at variance with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who wrote in a 2009 letter to the U.S. Senate:

The bishops support the expansion of Medicaid eligibility for people living at 133 percent or lower of the federal poverty level. The bill does not burden states with excessive Medicaid matching rates. The affordability credits will help lower-income families purchase insurance coverage through the Health Insurance Exchange.

Furthermore, dozens of Catholic bishops across the country have themselves publicly and vigorously supported Medicaid expansion. Bishop Swain’s abdication of moral leadership is unacceptable for such a visible Church figure, especially on this urgent life issue.

Interesting little tid-bit about Bishop Swain here:

When criticized for remaining neutral on Medicaid expansion, Bishop Swain offered flimsy and inconsistent excuses. The bishop has asserted, for example, that it is not his role to be involved in the political process. Swain, who prior to converting to Catholicism served as Legal Counsel and Director of Policy for Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus (R-WI), said on a Sioux Falls radio program in February, 2013:

Part of it is a difference of opinion in what the role of the Church is, of a bishop is. And part of it is based on my past experience as a lawyer and working in government and having an understanding of the legislative process. The teaching of the Church is that affordable health care ought to be provided for all. And how that’s done is a challenge that people of goodwill can disagree on. Medicaid is a fine way to do it. But the details of it are beyond my personal understanding. And so I’ll defer to those who are experts in the field, and particularly to our elected officials to figure out how to do it.

Speaking on special interests in the political process, he acknowledged that the Church has a role to play, but said, “We’re not a political part of that power in that sense. So the Church sets principles based on the teachings of Christ.”
[…]
[But] Bishop Swain’s claims of political abstinence are inconsistent with his own past behavior. In 2006, he told cheering congregants that he would proudly vote for an abortion ban on that year’s ballot, along with a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. “…We must take stands on issues in the public sphere,” he told the gathered crowd, “when they touch the core of what we know by reason to be true and affect the salvation of souls.”

He sounds much more like a Freedomworks operative than a priest — a hypocrite at the very least. But then a GOP operative is pretty much what he was until he decided to join the priesthood. Clearly he’s a man of the GOP first, a man of God second.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who considers himself a Christian much less a Catholic could be against helping poor people get health care, but there you have it.

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Tea Party vs the Kochs?

by digby

Amy Walter has the bad news for Republicans:

As the GOP leadership in the House struggles to unite its fractious members around a deal to avoid a government shutdown or a default on the nation’s debt, polling from Pew out this week shows why that may be harder than ever.

Tea Party Republicans, Pew found, are much more disillusioned with their party leadership than they have been since they came to D.C. in 2011.

“The job rating of GOP leaders among Tea Party Republicans has fallen 15 points since February, from 42% to 27%. Disapproval has risen from 54% to 71% over this period,” said the Pew summary. “There has been no similar decline among Republicans who do not agree with the Tea Party. “

In fact, among Tea Party Republicans approval ratings of the GOP leaders has steadily declined since December of 2011. Meanwhile, those who do not identify with the Tea Party have been gradually warming to the leadership. Support among these “traditional” Republicans for the GOP leadership has gone up to 42 percent from 38 percent in December 2011.

Even with their outsized influence, Tea Party Republicans are not a majority of the GOP. Nor are they particularly popular among those who identify themselves as Republicans. An earlier Pew poll found that while the vast majority of Republicans (60%) say they disagree with the Tea Party, almost half of Republican primary voters (49%) say they agree with the Tea Party values.

In other words, the GOP primary electorate is already more inclined to support a Tea Party candidate. Now, that electorate is shaping up to be as anti-establishment and anti-incumbent as ever. The more closely identified a Republican incumbent with the Republican leadership, the more vulnerable he/she becomes in a GOP primary.

And, this makes the job of GOP leaders to cobble a deal on a CR or the debt ceiling that much more difficult. Republican incumbents are already skittish about the possibility of losing their seats to Tea Party conservatives in a primary. This only confirms their fears.

Of course the Tea Partiers are a blight on American politics. But it’s important to remember that it’s because so many of their views on how government should be run are heinous, not because they are exercising their clout as engaged political citizens. They are completely within their rights to organize as a faction of one of the two parties and do whatever they can to enact their agenda. That’s democracy under our system. The Republican Party that nurtured and enabled these toxic political attitudes over decades is responsible for this faction and they are going to have to find a way to accommodate or change them now that they are causing so many problems.

Frankly, I’m more concerned about this:

A single nonprofit group with ties to Charles G. and David H. Koch provided grants of $236 million to conservative organizations before the 2012 election, according to tax returns the group is expected to file Monday, underscoring the broad reach of the political movement the two business executives and their advisers have built in recent years.

Freedom Partners, as the group is now known, is playing a bigger role for the Kochs as the brothers seek a tighter rein over the advocacy groups and political organizations that their donor network finances and expand their involvement in Republican political causes.

The group, formerly known as the Association for American Innovation, functions as a clearinghouse for money and message strategy. Like other such groups on the right and left, Freedom Partners raises money from donors and then distributes it to other groups — most of them other nonprofits that mix issue advocacy and election advertising — to spend.

The arrangement gives the donors an extra layer of anonymity and blurs the original source of money that fuels controversial campaigns.

The scale of Freedom Partners’ fund-raising is striking: It raised $256 million between November 2011 and last year’s election, according to the returns, details of which were reported on Thursday by Politico. That rivals or exceeds the annual budgets of the largest advocacy groups in the nation, like the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But the returns also reflect a significant shift in the tax strategies the Koch operation deploys to avoid challenge from the Internal Revenue Service, which limits how much nonprofit groups can spend to aid or defeat candidates.

Other donor clearinghouses, along with nearly all of the political groups they support, register with the I.R.S. as “social welfare” groups under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code. That has let such groups spend money on elections while keeping their donors secret — drawing increasing regulatory and legislative scrutiny from critics who assert that some of the groups are violating campaign laws.

But Freedom Partners established itself in November 2011 as a 501(c)6 “business league,” typically a trade association of corporations, like the Chamber of Commerce, organized to promote a common business interest. Instead of donors, it has more than 200 “members,” each making a minimum $100,000 contribution, which Freedom Partners classifies as member dues. The approach gives it many of the same advantages social welfare groups have, with one significant addition: Some contributions to the group may be tax deductible as business expenses.

Brilliant.

Now it’s true that many of the teaparty groups are benefiting from Koch money, but their strength really does come from their engaged activist base that votes in low turnout elections and pushes their agenda on all levels of government. (Progressives could learn something from them in that regard.) But unlike these average citizens exercising their right to vote, the Big Money influence of people like the Kochs and the Adelsons is truly antithetical to American democracy and it’s at the root of our biggest problems.

And the funny thing is that if you can get beyond their indoctrination that government (and atheists/feminists/welfarequeens of course) are their greatest enemies, the average Tea Partier could probably be fairly easily convinced of that as well. Most of them know very well that the rich are not their biggest fans either. In fact, this rift between the “regular Republicans” and the Tea Party is likely to make that quite obvious over the next few years. It should be interesting to see how that plays out.

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California will raise its minimum wage to $10/hour, leading the way again

by David Atkins

Let the sunshine in:

A bill that would boost California’s minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016 won approval by the state Legislature on Thursday and was sent to Gov. Jerry Brown, who said he would sign it.

The measure would raise the current $8 minimum wage to $9 an hour next July 1 and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016.

The 25% increase would be the first minimum-wage hike in California in five years and would put extra money in the pockets of an estimated 2.4 million Californians.

“This is the time to raise the minimum wage to provide relief for hard-working families,” said the bill’s author, Assemblyman Luis Alejo (D-Watsonville). About 3 of 5 minimum-wage earners are 26 or older, he stressed

Labor unions lobbied heavily for the bill, both in the Legislature and at the governor’s office. Business groups opposed it.

The bill won final passage in the Assembly on Thursday evening by a 51-25 vote. Earlier in the day it received a 26-11 vote of approval by the state Senate.

We live in an era when asset holders take all the gains while wage earners get the shaft. We won’t fix our problems until that trend is reversed.

Raising the minimum wage slightly isn’t a huge fix, but it’s a major step in the right direction. All too often liberals focus on government services and the safety net. Those things are crucially important, to be sure, but they’re no substitute for changing the skewed rules that allow the asset class to walk away with all the loot.

National Democrats may still be mired in centrist DLC economic politics. But in places like New York, California and Massachusetts, the progressive economic revival is already well underway not just at a grassroots level, but at an institutional one as well.

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