WATCH OUT FOR THE PITCHFORKS: Obama’s got it wrong. It’s the bankers who will pull his and the Democratic Party’s chestnuts out of the fire.
Archive for 2009
April 10, 2009
THE LATEST CRAZE IN ADULT DATING: Conjugal visits! I hope this is a parody site. I’m pretty sure it is, as I think I recognize one of the photos from IowaHawk’s “Hoosegow Honeys” series.
CHOSEN: The most beautiful female politician. And a stirring runner-up.
MEET THE NEW BOSS, YADA YADA: TPM: “Obama Mimics Bush on State Secrets”. Dan Froomkin calls it “Un-American.” Jake Tapper writes, “Meet Barack W. Bush.” What surprises me is that these people are surprised. It seemed obvious to me that Obama had no real commitment to civil liberties, and that talk to the contrary was just to fool the rubes.
Moe Lane, likewise.
ERIC SCHEIE: Sometimes denial can be a good thing.
THE ERA OF THE MONEYED UNDERCLASS?
What happened to the rich and powerful’s power? While the federal government debates Barack Obama’s proposals to milk the well-to-do, New York is poised to approve a substantial personal-income-tax hike for people making more than $500,000. New York’s business elites are now wondering how they lost out. . . . Dan Cantor, who runs the labor-affiliated Working Families Party, gave his own diagnosis. “We just work much harder than the right-wingers. They think they can just do it by writing checks to the politicians. We don’t have money. We have our passion.”
That’s not quite true. In Albany, the wealthiest and most well-connected groups often are representing the little guy. The teachers unions burn through $4 million a year on donations to state lawmakers and lobbying expenses, rivaling the outlays of the state’s hospital associations, which also pressed for a tax hike. Since December, the supporters of the rich tax—an alliance of organized labor and community-activist groups—waged a campaign that further weakened Governor Paterson. They spent millions on ads attacking him and staged feisty protests. (At one near City Hall last month, 1199 SEIU president George Gresham mocked his adversaries: “Where are the wealthy going to go? Iowa?”) . . .The idea of a moneyed underclass isn’t a new one. Tocqueville, a contemporary of President Jackson’s, saw wealth as a “cause of disfavor and an obstacle to gaining power” in America. The rich, he wrote, “never form a body which has manners and regulations of its own,” and prefer to retreat into private life than to “engage in an often unequal struggle against the poorest of their fellow citizens.”
Read the whole thing.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Under tyranny of everyday hypocrisy.
The fatal flaw in former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s alleged schemes of pay-to-play politics could come down to the quid being too close to the quo. Had the separation been wider, it would have been business as usual among politicians in Springfield or Washington. Sweetheart deals happen all the time in state capitols and in Congress, where politicians are more circumspect. Examples abound:
•Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, got two sweetheart, low-rate mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corp. for his home in Connecticut and condo in Washington. . . .
•Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania unilaterally awarded a lucrative no-bid contingency fee contract to the Houston law firm of Bailey, Perrin & Bailey, which had contributed more than $90,000 to the governor’s 2006 re-election bid.
•Michelle Obama was employed by the University of Chicago Medical Center. Her husband, as a U. S. senator, requested a $1 million earmark for the center.
The gazillion dollars spent on earmarks for bridges back home are rife with quid separating quo just long enough to appear as constituent democracy in action. When Dodd, organized labor, Rendell, Obama and Congress do it, it’s called “democracy,” or “lobbying” or “free speech.” When Blagojevich does it, with the quid too close to the quo, it’s called “a crime.”
Read the whole thing.
MEGAN MCARDLE: The Incredible Shrinking Public Pension Funds. “This is not, it should be emphasized, exclusively a problem of public sector pensions; private firms are also underfunded. But the scale is vastly different. According to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which regulates and insures pensions, the total deficit in private plans covering about 34 million workers was a little over 10 billion as of September 2008. That’s almost certainly multiplied quite a bit since then. But the current underfunding in public plans, which cover about 22 million workers, seems to be something north of a trillion dollars. And they’re not insured.”
UPDATE: See Megan’s update, which indicates that the private-sector problem, while still much smaller than the public-sector problem, is also much bigger than stated above.
ADVANCING YOUR LEGAL CAREER with fake boobs.
DARREN HUTCHINSON: Et Tu, Olbermann?
PHONE SABOTAGE IN SAN JOSE:
Santa Clara County officials have declared a local emergency after they said someone intentionally cut an underground fiber optic cable in south San Jose, causing a widespread phone service outage in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties today that included disruption to 911 emergency phone service.
John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T, said it appears somebody opened a manhole in South San Jose, climbed down eight to 10 feet and cut four or five fiber-optic cables.Britton also said there was a report of underground cables being cut in San Carlos. . . . “We’ve never to this extent in recent history had this kind of phone outage,” said Gilroy police Sgt. Jim Gillio.
ATMs in South Santa Clara County were not working.
Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy cancelled all elective surgeries in response to the emergency, according to county officials.
“It’s kind of like an earthquake” said Jack Ahlin, a driver with T. Marx Towing who was standing outside the Gilroy police department.
An earthquake that can be caused by one guy with some clippers. Lots of communities are at risk for this sort of thing, as infrastructure is neither hard enough, nor fault-tolerant enough, to survive such attacks. That needs to be fixed.
LINING UP TO DO jobs Americans won’t do.
Plus, from Mickey Kaus: “Will Obama’s New Legalization Push Screw American Workers? Or Has It Already Screwed Them? Both supporters and opponents of illegal immigrant legalization think trying to pass it “while the U.S. economy is mired in economic turmoil” might be difficult. The fear/expectation is that Americans will see the new law as a plan to allow foreigners who aren’t supposed to be here to compete for the few jobs that are left, bidding down wages in the process. But here’s the thing: Just by re-opening the legalization issue, without passing any new law, Obama has already encouraged foreigners who aren’t supposed to be here to come and compete for the few jobs that are left, bidding down wages in the process. What better way to encourage more illegal immigration than by promising a possible amnesty in the next few years?”
PLANNING TO ATTEND A TEA PARTY PROTEST? Please join the PJTV citizen reporter corps and help with coverage. PJTV will have crews out, but with 300-500 tea parties scheduled, no media organization will be able to cover them all. So cover them yourselves, and let PJTV help get the word out! (Repeated). They tell me that about 250 have signed up, but more is always better!
CHRIS DODD UPDATE: REVOLVING DOOR: BAILOUT EDITION:
Financial firms seeking big bucks and favorable terms from Congress and the White House are deploying Capitol Hill aides turned lobbyists to win favorable treatment from the congressional lawmakers who are managing various aspects of the financial recovery—overseeing or appropriating nearly $3 trillion in spending and lending. And some lawmakers—including Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Senate banking committee—have declined to disclose whether they have had contact with former aides now lobbying for the financial sector. . . .
Ex-staffers for at least 10 members of the Senate finance committee—including the committee’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), and senior Republican member Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)—have lobbied lawmakers on behalf of big financial firms receiving billions of dollars of government assistance. And at least five members of the Senate banking committee have former aides lobbying Congress on financial matters. These include Dodd and ranking Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.
Several leading lawmakers with ex-aides lobbying for bailed-out financial titans were not eager to discuss contacts between their offices or committees and those lobbyists. The offices of both Dodd and Shelby refused to respond to requests for information about any interactions with former staffers now on the payroll of financial firms. (Ditto for Dodd’s banking committee.)
Well, that’s kind of a tipoff in itself, isn’t it?
HEY, IF YOU’RE ATTENDING OR AROUND any of these lefty A New Way Forward demonstrations, send me a report and some pics. Their message — banks that are “too big to fail” are too big, period — is fine with me, and I’d be interested in how they’re doing.
UPDATE: A suggestion that I’m too generous in my assessment.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT: KU professors found companies realized big tax savings by spending for lobbyists. “Ninety-three of the country’s biggest multinational firms pulled in tax savings of more than $62 billion — after spending just $283 million to lobby for the bill. The study concluded that almost 500 companies got an average 22,000 percent return on their lobbying investments.”
With that kind of return, corruption is inevitable. A simpler system would make that kind of corruption impossible — which is why Washington won’t give us a simpler system.
POLITICO: Obama Signs PLO Office Waiver. “President Obama signed a waiver Thursday that will allow the Palestinian Liberation Organization to retain its office in Washington D.C. . . . The waiver was released at about the same time that Obama was having a Passover Seder at the White House with friends and members of his staff.” Not really sure why Politico is making such a big deal about this, as it’s happened before. Maybe it’s the Seder touch. Or maybe it’s the bow.
RASMUSSEN: Only 27% See the U.N. As America’s Ally. “Just 27% of U.S. voters regard the United Nations as an ally of the United States, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.”
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Congress needs Google to find out where stimulus money went.
WELL, THAT’S A BUMMER: Harold Koh’s support for international gun control efforts.
CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Dodd’s role in deregulating banks comes back to haunt him.
Does U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd rue the day a decade ago when he brokered the deal to repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which some analysts have called the most important financial legislation to come out of the Great Depression?
Buoyed by the five-term Democrat’s misadventures with his two Countrywide “VIP” mortgages and an amendment that let American International Group hand out big bonuses, Dodd’s Republican opponents have taken to citing his personal role in busting up the New Deal barrier between commercial banks and investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies. . . . Reporters and bloggers writing about Dodd as the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee out to “modernize” the nation’s financial regulatory system also have begun to connect him to the repeal, which President Barack Obama has suggested helped spark the wave of deregulation that contributed to the current economic crisis.
In a Dodd profile published two weeks ago, a Fortune magazine editor quoted the head of the American Bankers Association lauding the senator as the “unsung hero” in the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, which actually dismantled the key Glass-Steagall provisions intended to protect bank depositors from risky and speculative investments.
“Dodd doesn’t like to talk about it anymore,” the writer added, “not when he’s trying to rebuild vital parts of the same regulatory framework he helped knock down.”
Read the whole thing.
CONFIDENCE-BUILDER: Fed Said to Order Banks to Stay Mum on ‘Stress Test’ Results.
MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Where’s the Social Democratic Boom in Europe? “What is interesting, though, is that in the thick of a global financial crisis many European voters are not migrating to parties of the left.”
Civilian libertarians were apoplectic over former President George W. Bush’s “warrantless wiretap” program, which sought to monitor communications from terrorist networks overseas. So why are they not screaming bloody murder now that President Barack Obama appears slated to receive unprecedented power to monitor all Internet traffic without a warrant and to even shut the system down completely on the pretext of national security? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 – introduced by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, and cosponsor Olympia Snowe, R-ME – bypasses all existing privacy laws and allows White House political operatives to tap into any online communication without a warrant, including banking, medical, and business records and personal e-mail conversations. This amounts to warrantless wiretaps on steroids, directed at U.S. citizens instead of foreign terrorists.
Well, if it’s not aimed at terrorists, I guess it’s okay.
UPDATE: Related: EFF: In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s. “Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ’s radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama’s own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws. This isn’t change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.” Actually, it’s pretty much the change I expected.