The Economic Crisis and the "Formula For Fraud"

Understanding how deregulation of banks helped caused the present economic calamity.
[Edited 4/18/12]
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During the current economic crisis, millions of homeowners have lost their homes through foreclosure, over 1.9 million in 2009 and 2010 alone. Almost everyone knows someone who has lost their home or who is currently at risk. The banks who made and encouraged the bad loans, and who sold them off as triple A rated, but nearly worthless, bundled, complex securities, and who are arguably most responsible for the economic collapse, have been bailed out. Little has been done to help those foreclosed upon, or homeowners in distress.

Back in 2010-2011, Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, (Right-to-Rent Would Ease Foreclosure Mess ) suggested the following:

"There is a simple alternative that involves no government money and no new bureaucracy. We could temporarily change the rules on foreclosure to allow homeowners the right to stay in their home as renters for a substantial period of time (e.g., 5 years) following a foreclosure.

During this period, they would pay the market rent as determined by an independent appraiser. They would have the same rights and responsibilities as other tenants, with the exception that they could not be evicted without cause. The lender would own the property and would be free to sell it, although the former homeowner would still have the right to remain as a tenant even if the home is sold.

This policy accomplishes several important goals. First and foremost it provides housing security for homeowners who got caught up in the middle of the bubble. These people can be blamed for having made a mistake by buying homes at bubble-inflated prices. But this mistake is small compared with the mistakes made by the banks that made hundreds of billions of dollars of bad and often deceptive loans.

We were willing to give these banks trillions of dollars of loans at below market rates. Allowing foreclosed homeowners to stay in their homes as renters seems a rather small concession in comparison. This right-to-rent provision can also be narrowly structured so that it only applies to owner-occupied homes of less than the median value that were bought during the bubble years. This will ensure that it is not exploited by wealthy homeowners or investors."

The banks and Congress didn't listen to Dean Baker, CEPR, and other economists who felt similarly.

So now, unfortunately, NPR reported on April 16, 2012, that instead, banks are selling thousands of seized homes to "big-time investors" so that they can rent them out at what ever price the market will bear, to, in many cases, the people who have been turned out of their homes.

Another article by NPR, City Rents Rise As Buyers Wait Out Housing Bust
by JIM ZARROLI

notes that:

"There's very little supply, there's lots of demand," he says. "People have been staying in the rental market longer 'cause they're not comfortable jumping into the sales market or they don't have the necessary down payments, so all of those things have been factored into a very tight and successful rental market."

That pattern is being repeated in many other parts of the country. Chris Herbert, research director of Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, says rents rose more than 5 percent last year in Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, Pittsburgh and other cities. Herbert says the increases reflect growing demand for rental properties."

"In 2011, there was growth of a million renter households across the country, while homeowner households fell by 350,000," Herbert says. "So in one year to have growth of a million renters, that's a number we haven't seen in a long time."

A million renter mystery?

But wait, where did a million renters come from? Dean Baker in the article mentioned above, notes that:

"We are virtually certain to see at least a million foreclosures in 2011 and comparable numbers in 2012 and 2013. Many more homeowners will lose their homes through distressed sales."

If homeowner households only fell by 350,000 in 2011, what about the million or so who were put out of their homes in 2011 alone by foreclosures? (Not to mention the few million in previous years of the current recession.) Did NPR count them? Are they homeless, living with parents or friends, or are they, like the millions before them, seeking rentals? NPR doesn't bother to make a connection between rising rents and a few million foreclosures. That's par for NPR's uninformative, mind-easing course, which is; every thing's fine: "People have been staying in the rental market longer 'cause they're not comfortable jumping into the sales market or they don't have the necessary down payments, so all of those things have been factored into a very tight and successful rental market."

At least the Huffington Post notes that:

"The practice of turning foreclosed homes into rentals is becoming so popular that the Federal Reserve issued guidelines earlier this month for banks to use when they're flipping foreclosures into rentals. But the practice also faces criticism: Namely, some are concerned that the very banks and agencies responsible for the housing crisis in the first place will now benefit from their own questionable practices."

See also:
Rentals Continue to Outshine Purchase Market, Home Values Still Plagued By Foreclosures
Foreclosure re-sales challenge previous peak in February, According to February Zillow Real Estate Market Reports

"The rental market remains a bright spot in the housing market, where many markets, especially hard hit ones, are experiencing significant annual rent appreciation and drawing the attention of investors. Converting distressed and vacant properties into rental units will reduce the oversupply of homes and speed up the recovery process."

Not to mention making rich people wealthier. Recovery? Recovery for who? Certainly not for the millions tossed out of their homes. Sounds like recovery for the 1 or 2%.

When you consider the reasonable alternative promoted by Dean Baker, i.e., to allow people to stay in their homes as renters, and the current reality that people's homes are being auctioned off at fire-sale prices to wealthy investors who charge increasing rents, that really says all you need to know about who the government cares about and who they are responsive to.

So why are all these people being foreclosed upon and how did the economic crisis come about in the first place?

William Black, "Formula for Fraud":

I’m going to quote from George Akerlof and Paul Romer’s famous article, or, at least, an article that should be famous where the title says it all: 'Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.' So, the bank fails or, in the modern era, is 'bailed' out, but the CEO walks away wealthy. And this is what Akerlof and Romer wrote about 20 years ago:

"Neither the public, nor economists foresaw that savings and loan deregulation was bound to produce looting, nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus, the regulators in the field who understood what was happening from the beginning found lukewarm support, at best, for their cause. Now, we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself.'

(c. 8:22) “George Akerlof was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. So, you might think economists would pay attention. You might think, since this article was written nearly 20 years ago, that the textbooks would mention fraud and looting. They don’t just ignore everyone here. They ignore Nobel Prize winners in Economics.

“So, what, again, was this lesson? It was the regulators in the field, the little people, not the fancy people, who understood from the beginning that deregulation would lead to massive looting. And it was the economists that ignored them. And after we had proven that it was fraud, after we had sent over a thousand elite bankers and their cronies to prison, after a Nobel Prize winner warned about it, after all those things, they ignored it and produced crisis after crisis, including the one we experience now.

(c. 9:59) “So, what did we know out of that savings and loan crisis, that was widely described at the time as the worst financial scandal in U.S. history? And we have a history rich in scandal. Here is what the national commission that investigated the causes of the crisis reported:

"'The typical large failure [grew] at an extremely rapid rate, achieving high concentrations of assets in risky ventures... [E]very accounting trick available was used... Evidence of fraud was invariably present, as was the ability of the operators to 'milk' the organisation.'

(c. 11:04) "That means to loot the organisation. But, speaking of milk, [Applause] the frauds I’m describing are in no way limited to the Unites States; they exist in every country. And they are common enough to explain; and they are old enough to explain what Balzac was saying because many of the wealthy become rich through precisely the scandals, the fraud, I will describe.

“In criminology, we call them financial super predators when we’re being lyrical. When we’re writing journals, we call them ‘control frauds,’ which is boring. Control fraud occurs when the person who controls a seemingly legitimate entity, like Parmalat, uses it as a weapon to defraud. And they can often use this weapon with impunity. In finance, accounting is the weapon of choice.  And these accounting frauds cause greater losses than all other property crimes combined, yet economics, again, never talks about it.  Worse, when many of these frauds occur in the same area, they hyperinflate financial bubbles, which is what causes financial crises and mass unemployment.  It makes the CEOs wealthy, produces Balzac scandals, and destroys democracy."

"William Black is Associate Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.  He is a lawyer, academic, and former bank regulator and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry."

The speech is highly recommended for those who still believe, after all the economic collapses we have repeatedly been experiencing, that deregulation is the answer.

Guns and Butter
"Formula For Fraud" with William K. Black from the first Italian economic Summit on Modern Money Theory in Rimini, Italy. How to become a billionaire - the four necessary ingredients in the recipe for fraud; the three sure consequences of banking control fraud; gutting of the underwriting process; Gresham's Law; The Business Roundtable; hyperinflation of a bubble.

Guns and Butter - April 4, 2012 at 1:00pm

Click to listen (or download)

Transcript Here

Today’s show has been ‘Formula for Fraud.’  William Black is Associate Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.  He is a lawyer, academic, and former bank regulator and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.  

“Please visit the University of Missouri, Kansas City New Economic Perspectives blog at www.NewEconomicPerspectives.org.  Visit the website for the first Italian Summit on Modern Money Theory at www.DemocraziaMMT.info.
Transcript by Felipe Messina for Media Roots and Guns and Butter

[Here is an outline of the recipe for bank fraud, by William K. Black, so please click this link if you are looking for an outline of the transcript of the speech. It is digestible if you have a general knowledge of the players and "economics" (god forbid!) and read it while listening to the speech, but the speech transcript is an easier read.]

The Banks: "Too Big To Fail" Must Become "Small Enough To Fail."

In the following article, Simon Johnson explains why "Too Big To Fail" must become "Small Enough To Fail."

The Baseline Scenario
What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it
What Would Really End “Too Big To Fail”?
with 47 comments

By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown

As we move closer to a Senate – and presumably national – debate on financial reform, the central technical and political question is: What would prevent any bank or similar institution from being regarded – ultimately by the government – as so big that it would not be allowed to fail. If you are “too big to fail” (TBTF), credit markets see you as lower risk and as more attractive investment – enabling you to obtain more funding on cheaper terms, and thus become even larger.

Everyone agrees, in principle, this is a bad arrangement. It’s an unfair distortion of markets – giving huge banks the opportunity to grow bigger, because they have implicit government guarantees. It is also manifestly unsafe, because it encourages reckless risk-taking: If things go well, the TBTF bank gets the upside; if there is mismanagement of risk, or just bad luck, the downside falls to the taxpayer and to society more broadly. These costs can be huge: 8 million jobs lost since December 2007.

But there remains sharp disagreement on what exactly would end too big to fail. The main views fall primarily into three camps.
. . . .

Make our largest banks small enough to fail. There is simply no other way to really end the problem of Too Big To Fail.

See What Would Really End “Too Big To Fail”? for full article, including Johnson's lucid arguments and associated links.

Hey, That Horse is Still Alive!: More on Citizens United

In This Issue:

- Ralph Nader on Citizens United & What Can Be Done About It

- Polls on Citizens United and Limiting Corporate Speech

- Paul Krugman and Simon Johnson on Obama Sucking Up to Wall Street
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The Case Against Corporate Speech

By Ralph Nader and Robert Weissman

February 10, 2010 " Wall Street Journal" -- Last month, by a vote of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court gave carte blanche to the world's largest corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to support or oppose candidates for elected office. Big Business domination of Washington and state capitals will now intensify.

The case of Citizens United portends dire consequences for the nation's constitutional premise of "we the people," not we the corporations. Our constitution, at its origins and through all of its amendments, makes no mention of corporate entities, only human beings and their government.

For 120 years, it was not Congress but the Supreme Court that expanded the definition of "persons" to include for-profit corporations for the purposes of applying constitutional protections. For 30 years, the court has granted First Amendment speech protections to corporations as "artificial persons."

But not until last month has the court declared that the First Amendment gives corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. The court majority, self-styled believers in precedent and judicial restraint, overturned two major Supreme Court decisions and reversed decades of campaign-finance laws aimed at preventing corporations from having undue influence over local, state and national elections.

Granted, existing campaign-finance rules have been inadequate. Regular news reports document how corporate spending debases elections and elected officials. But that doesn't mean things can't get worse. The court has challenged whatever social mores are left that view no-holds-barred corporate cash register politics as unseemly.

The disparities between individual contributions and available corporate dollars mock any pretense of equal justice under the law. A total of $5.2 billion from all sources was spent in the 2008 federal election cycle (which includes 2007 and 2008), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. For the same two-year period, ExxonMobil's profits were $85 billion. The top-selling drug, Pfizer's Lipitor, grossed $27 billion in sales during that time.

Such disparities invite corporations to spend whatever they believe necessary to further entrench the corporate state. The money they now spend will be used to reward friends and punish opponents.

Corporations know that money makes a big difference when it comes to blocking protections for workers, consumers and the environment. Wall Street, health insurance and drug companies, fossil fuel and nuclear power companies, and defense corporations have been hard at work defeating common-sense reforms that would make them more accountable.

Do we want more elected officials to believe that to challenge corporate agendas is to risk their career?

There is every reason to expect that there will be much more direct corporate electoral funding in the wake of Citizens United. Funneled without limit through trade associations and shadowy front groups able to run vicious attack ads without identifying their corporate patrons, such lucre will deter good candidates from running for office because they won't want to have anything to do with such dirty politics.

What can be done about this accelerating drift into the muck?

In the absence of a future court overturning Citizens United, the fundamental response should be a constitutional amendment. We must exclude all commercial corporations and other artificial commercial entities from participating in political activities. Such constitutional rights should be reserved for real people, including, of course, company employees, to enhance a government of, by and for the people.

Corporations are not humans. They do not vote. They should not be accorded a constitutional right to influence elections or public policies, especially given their enormous embedded privileges and immunities compared to real people.

While the arduous amendment process is underway, the progressive response to Citizens United rests with several legislative and administrative initiatives.

First, the Fair Elections Now Act in the House and Senate would provide candidates a base of funding to run viable campaigns without being indentured to corporate money. But these bills would not prevent corporations from overwhelming the public funding.

Second, a strong shareholder-protection policy should limit corporate political spending. This would require executives to get support from an absolute majority of their shareholders before spending any money on politics.

Third, as the nation's largest customer, the government could refuse, by statute or executive order, to contract with or provide subsidies, handouts and bailouts to any company that spends money directly in the electoral arena. This would help avoid corruption. No longer would Citigroup or General Motors, which were saved by taxpayers and are wards of Washington, be able to lobby as if they were stalwarts of sink-or-swim free enterprise.

As Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the minority in Citizens United, demonstrated, the Framers did not intend for the First Amendment to confer protections on businesses beyond freedom of the press. The robust guarantees of the First Amendment are vital for real, live human beings, to ensure their expressive and democratic participative rights are protected. There can be no level playing field between the giant multinational corporations and individual citizens without such differential rights.

It is worth recalling that representative democracy is rule by the people. Corporations, first chartered into existence over 200 years ago by the states, were meant to be our servants, not our masters. Especially in the aftermath of Citizens United, it is time to right this relationship.

Copyright ©2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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Polls on Citizens United and Limiting Corporate Speech

About a week and a half ago I heard a news report stating that the majority of Americans agree with the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United. When I looked at the actual Gallup Poll numbers, a different picture emerged.

A careful reading though, reveals that while 57% agreed that "campaign money given to political candidates" is a form of protected free speech, a whopping 76% think the government "should be able to limit the amount corporations and unions can give."

The Roper Center also reports that a FOX News poll found "that voters disapproving of the decision 53-27."
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The Baseline Scenario
What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it

President Obama On CEO Compensation At Too Big To Fail Banks
with 80 comments

Bloomberg today reports President Obama as commenting on the $17 million bonus for Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and the $9 million bonus for Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs,

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,”

and

““I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.” [Emphasis Added]

Taken separately, these statements are undeniably true. But put them together in the context of the Bloomberg story – we have to wait until Friday for the full text of the interview – and the White House has a major public relations disaster on its hands.

Does the president truly not understand that Dimon and Blankfein run banks that are regarded by policymakers and hence by credit markets as “too big to fail”?

This is the antithesis of a free-market system.[Emphasis Added] Not only were their banks saved by government action in 2008-09 but the overly generous nature of this bailout (details here) means that the playing field is now massively tilted in favor of these banks. (I put this to Gerry Corrigan of Goldman and Barry Zubrow of JP Morgan when we appeared before the Senate Banking Committee last week; there was no effective rejoinder.)

Not only that, but the incentives for the people running these megabanks is now to take on reckless amounts of risk. They get the upside (for example, in these compensation packages) and – when the downside materializes – this belongs to taxpayers and everyone who loses a job. (See my testimony to the Senate Budget Committee yesterday; there was no disagreement among the witnesses or even across the aisle between Senators on this point.)

Being nice to the biggest banks will not save the midterm elections for the Democrats. The banks’ campaign contributions will flow increasingly to the Republicans and against any Democrats (and there are precious few) who have fought for real reform.

The president’s only political chance is to take on the too big to fail banks directly and clearly. He needs to explain where they came from (answer: the Reagan Revolution, gone wrong), how the problem became much worse during the last administration, and how – in credible detail – he will end their reign.

What we have now is not a free market. It is rather one of the most complete (and awful) instances ever of savvy businessmen capturing a state and the minds of the people who run it. Is this really what the president seeks to endorse?

By Simon Johnson
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FEBRUARY 10, 2010, 10:59 AM
Obama Clueless

Paul Krugman

I’m with Simon Johnson here: how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?

The lead story on Bloomberg right now contains excerpts from an interview with Business Week which tells us:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.

Oh. My. God.

First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.

And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. Don’t take it from me, take it from the rating agencies:

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Hell on Earth

In This Edition:

- Copenhagen Climate "Talks"
- Joe Lieberman, Veterans, & Health Care "Reform"
- Dean: Public Option Essential to Real Health Care Reform
- Simon Johnson on Economic "Reform"
- McCain Leads Senate Effort to Reinstate Glass-Steagall
- U.S. gave up billions in tax money in deal for Citigroup's bailout repayment
________________________

Copenhagen Climate "Talks"

Copenhagen: Only the numbers count – and they add up to hell on earth
Climate Interactive's software speaks numbers, not spin – which is where the true understanding of the Copenhagen summit lies

Bill McKibben

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 December 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/dec/15/bill-mckibben/print

Climate change activists form the number 350 at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Photograph: Tim Cole/EPA

The Bella centre is a swirl of chatter, the streets of Copenhagen are a swirl of protest. Depending on what hour you listen to the news bulletin, the UN climate negotiations have "come off the rails" or are "back on track" or have "stalled" or are "moving swiftly". Which is why the only people who really understand what's going on may be a small crew of folks from a group of computer jockeys called Climate Interactive. Their software speaks numbers, not spin – and in the end it's the numbers that count.

First number to know: 350. It's what scientists have been saying for two years is the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. Those scientists have been joined by an unprecedented outpouring from civil society: in late October, activists put on what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history," with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, all rallying around that number. Three thousand vigils last weekend across the planet spelled out the number in candles. Thousands of churches rang their bells 350 times on Sunday, and yesterday the World Parliament of Religions, meeting in Melbourne and representing the "largest interreligious gathering on earth" sent an emergency 350 declaration here to Copenhagen.

The second number: 100. That's (roughly) how many countries are backing a 350 target here at Copenhagen. That's more than half the nations in attendance – unfortunately, they're the small, poor ones. But it's amazing to see them, in the face of enormous pressure, keeping the idea of real action alive. Yesterday Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, spoke to a roaring crowd of thousands: "We know what the laws of physics say: the most important number in the world is 350."

The third number: 4%. That's how much the US is offering to cut its emissions from their 1990 levels by 2020. Scientists tell us that the developed world would need to reduce by at least 40% to get us back on a 350 track, so the American offer is exactly an order or magnitude off. And they're not alone. All the rich countries, not to mention China, are looking to do as little as possible and still escape here with some kind of agreement they can hide behind.

The fourth number – and the most important one. When the folks at Climate Interactive plug in every promise made at these talks (the American offer on the table, the Chinese promise to reduce "energy intensity", the EU pledges, and so on) their software tells them almost instantly how much carbon they would eventually produce. When they hit the button last night, the program showed that by 2100 the world's CO2 concentrations (currently 390) would be – drumroll please – 770. That is, we would live in hell, or at least a place with a similar temperature.

So that's the scorecard. You may hear a lot of happy talk from world leaders over the next few days as they "reach a historic agreement". But that's how it all adds up.

• Bill McKibben is the coordinator of 350.org (http://www.350.org/)

Other Links:
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[The Elephant in the Climate Change Living Room--Human Population Size & Growth - Chris]

Population control called key to deal
By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-10 07:37

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-12/10/content_9151129.htm

COPENHAGEN: Population and climate change are intertwined but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC) .

"Dealing with climate change is not simply an issue of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the population concern fits right into the picture," said Zhao, who is a member of the Chinese government delegation.

Many studies link population growth with emissions and the effect of climate change.

"Calculations of the contribution of population growth to emissions growth globally produce a consistent finding that most of past population growth has been responsible for between 40 per cent and 60 percent of emissions growth," so stated by the 2009 State of World Population, released earlier by the UN Population Fund.

Although China's family planning policy has received criticism over the past three decades, Zhao said that China's population program has made a great historic contribution to the well-being of society.

As a result of the family planning policy, China has seen 400 million fewer births, which has resulted in 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions a year, Zhao said.

The UN report projected that if the global population would remain 8 billion by the year 2050 instead of a little more than 9 billion according to medium-growth scenario, "it might result in 1 billion to 2 billion fewer tons of carbon emissions".

Meanwhile, she said studies have also shown that family planning programs are more efficient in helping cut emissions, citing research by Thomas Wire of London School of Economics that states: "Each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one ton" whereas it would cost $13 for reduced deforestation, $24 to use wind technology, $51 for solar power, $93 for introducing hybrid cars and $131 electric vehicles.

She admitted that China's population program is not without consequences, as the country is entering the aging society fast and facing the problem of gender imbalance.

"I'm not saying that what we have done is 100 percent right, but I'm sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited," she said.

She said some 85 percent of the Chinese women in reproductive age use contraceptives, the highest rate in the world. This has been achieved largely through education and improvement of people's lives, she said.

This holistic approach that integrates policy on population and development, a strategy promoting sustainable development of population, resources and environment should serve as a model for integrating population programs into the framework of climate change adaptation, she said.

(China Daily 12/10/2009 page10)

Copyright By chinadaily.com.cn. All rights reserved
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Regulation, Not the "Free Market," Drives Technological Innovation

US left behind in technological race to fight climate change
A speech by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, shows how America's unquestioning belief in the free market has held back technological innovation

guardian.co.uk 12/15/09

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/dec/14/us-technological-race-climate-change/print

I have just been watching the tragic sight of a fallen giant flailing around on its back like a beetle, desperately trying to turn itself over.

The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement,
he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has
launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year. . . . .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/dec/14/us-technological-race-climate-change/print
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Copenhagen police release hundreds of detained activists
Only 13 protesters remain in custody after nearly 1,000 arrests during demonstrations at climate change summit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/13/copenhagen-protesters-freed/print
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High-profile activist's arrest fuels fears of police crackdown in Copenhagen
Climate Justice Action spokesman to face charges, as Danish
police prepare for mass protests at Copenhagen's Bella centre
Bibi van der Zee
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 December 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/15/danish-police-mass-protest-copenhagen/print

A high-profile climate activist was arrested ahead of tomorrow's major protests planned outside the Copenhagen climate summit, fuelling anxiety about how the Danish authorities are policing demonstrations.

Tadzio Mueller, a spokesman for the umbrella group Climate Justice Action (CJA), was arrested today by plainclothes police as he left the Bella centre, where the official climate talks are taking place. The police are holding him at the Retorvej detention
centre, and he will be charged in court tomorrow morning. The police refused to say what charges will be brought. . . . .
______________________

Joe Lieberman, Veterans, & Health Care "Reform"
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Joe Lieberman and the Health Care Train Wreck
Tuesday 15 December 2009
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truthout.org/1215098?print

When last we heard from Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, he was throwing sand into the gears of the Democratic push for health care reform by declaring he would filibuster any legislation containing the so-called public option. "I feel so strongly about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement," said the senator back in November. "The government going into the health insurance business - I think it's such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote."

This pronouncement came at the same time as word got out that Lieberman was also planning to actively campaign for GOP candidates during the 2010 midterms, further undercutting his erstwhile party's hold on the majority in Congress."There's a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans," he said at the time. "There's a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side. And in between is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them - and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who's not a Democrat."

For some reason, these twin insults did not motivate the Democratic Congressional leadership to expunge this hypocritical cretin from their ranks. Lieberman kept his committee chairmanship and was not even mildly censured by his colleagues. One month later, the decision to ignore his brazen disregard for his colleagues has come back to bite us all, for Mr. Lieberman has once again elbowed his way into the center of the health reform debate, and with a vengeance. "Mr. Lieberman threatened on national television to join the Republicans in blocking the health care bill, President Obama's chief domestic initiative," reported The New York Times on Tuesday. "Within hours, he was in a meeting at the Capitol with top White House officials. And on Monday night, Democratic senators emerged from a tense 90-minute closed-door session and suggested that they were on the verge of bowing to Mr. Lieberman's main demands: that they scrap a plan to let people buy into Medicare beginning at age 55, and scotch even a fallback version of a new government-run health insurance plan, or public option."

This turn of events is sickening and appalling on a couple of different levels.

First, of course, is the shameless reality that is Mr. Lieberman himself. During his 2004 presidential run, and again during his 2006 Senate campaign, Lieberman actively supported the public option's inclusion in any health care reform, and specifically supported the expansion of Medicare. As late as this past September, Lieberman continued to support such an expansion, as reported by The Connecticut Post. "As to how 47 million uninsured will afford coverage," said The Post, "Lieberman said only 12 million don't have insurance because they cannot afford it. By allowing citizens who are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid to buy in for a rate below the private market, the government can extend coverage to more of those who are currently uninsured, he said."

That was then, and this is now. In one of the most astounding examples of political flip-floppery, Lieberman opened this week by declaring himself dead-set against the very health care reform policies he once championed, and once again announced his intention to don a Republican cloak and tear up the Democrats' legislative efforts. Again.

Why? One would have to be deep into a severe state of personal denial to believe Lieberman has legitimate concerns about the impending health care legislation, given the fact that he very recently supported the exact provisions he now wants removed or destroyed. The only sensible explanation would seem to be that Lieberman is actively needling the Democratic leadership, and has become such an obnoxious obstructionist only to keep his name in the news. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo explains the situation, and what it means going forward:

The key issue senate Democrats now have in dealing with Joe Lieberman isn't his position on the Medicare Buy-In. They need to confront the problem that Lieberman isn't negotiating in good faith. No surprise that Republicans are giddy with what a problem he's creating for Harry Reid & Co. But in my conversations with them, it's as clear to them as it is to anyone else that he's now basically mocking his Democratic colleagues by moving the goal posts every time a new agreement is struck.

This puts the Democrats in an extremely difficult, politically untenable position. Yes, they need 60 votes. But they're not going to be able to hang on to Lieberman's vote long enough to get the bill passed. That now seems unquestionably clear. People who say that the Dems should just move to reconciliation don't necessarily realize the difficulties involved - either procedurally or politically, in terms of losing even more Democratic votes. Personally, I'd like to see them try it. But I don't know if it's possible.

Until a couple days ago I was close to certain a health care bill would pass. I still feel relatively confident one will simply because the Dems just don't have any choice but to pass one. Once it is passed, if it is, it's definitely time for the Democratic caucus to strip Lieberman of all the benefits he receives as a member of the Democratic caucus. But that doesn't accomplish anything at the moment. The only path I can see for the Dems is that they need to try to put 60 votes together with Sen. Snowe. Yes, that sounds crazy to me too. But I think she actually has a set of policy priorities that could be met. I don't think that's true with Lieberman. So further negotiating just means more game-playing.

The solution to all this, one would think, would be for the Democratic leadership in Congress to wrap Lieberman in bright red wrapping paper, slap on a bow, and ship him across the aisle to his ideological compatriots in the GOP as an early Christmas present. Strip him of his leadership position, show him the door, and publicly denounce him as nothing more than a stinking chunk of cholesterol clogging up the arteries of progress.

But no. Of course that isn't going to happen. Instead, Democrats appear poised to once again knuckle under to this fraud and further denude what has already become a half-a-loaf bill. According to several sources, Rahm Emmanuel and the White House are actively pressuring the Democratic leadership in Congress to give Lieberman whatever he wants in order to pass some form of health reform legislation, no matter how ragged, damaging and useless the final product may turn out to be.

The Senate won't vote on health care reform until next week, and the process has changed course two dozen times already, so the outcome of this latest idiot eruption is far from certain, but the writing does appear to be on the wall this time around. Joe Lieberman doesn't give a tinker's damn about the people he represents, the party that coddles him, his own positions on key issues or anything else beyond getting his mug in front of television cameras in the guise of someone who actually matters. The Obama administration is once again moonwalking away from doing the right thing on this issue, and the jellyfish pond that is Congress appears poised to do what jellyfish do: float, flop, flounder and drift with the scum in this rising tide.

In short, this whole thing is about to become a train wreck of galactic proportions. Stay tuned.
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135,000 Uninsured Americans Will Die Before Health Reform Takes Effect, Analysis Finds

Over 6,600 Uninsured Veterans Will Die by 2013: Estimate

By Brad Jacobson

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/135000-uninsured-americans-die-health-reform-takes-effect-study/

December 15, 2009 "Raw Story" -- If Democrats manage to pull off efforts to reform the US healthcare system and ensure coverage for millions who are currently without insurance, the new system -- by design -- will likely still leave tens of thousands to die without insurance before reforms kick in.

A Raw Story analysis, based on a recent Harvard Medical School study, estimates that 135,000 American citizens and over 6,600 US veterans will die due to a lack of health insurance before current proposed healthcare reform measures would take effect.

One hundred and thirty-five thousand US lives far exceeds the total number of Americans who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the attacks of 9/11 combined. The lives of over 6,600 US veterans is more -- by over 1,300 -- than the total number of US soldiers who have thus far died in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-author of the Harvard Medical School study, called Raw Story's estimates "quite reasonable."

Even more shocking is that these are modest estimates.

Health reform policy experts who spoke with Raw Story confirmed that the House and Senate bills would do virtually nothing for currently uninsured Americans until 2013 and 2014, respectively. Raw Story's calculations are based on the House health reform bill's projections. The Senate bill, however, would add another year of lethal lag time, driving up the estimated death rate by tens of thousands more US citizens and veterans. . . . .
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/135000-uninsured-americans-die-health-reform-takes-effect-study/
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Dean: Public Option Essential to Real Health Care Reform

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/08/17/dean_public_option_essential_t.html?waporef=evri.widget.1
The Associated Press reports:

Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, a leading figure in the liberal wing of his party, said Monday he doubts there can be meaningful health care reform without a direct government role.

Dean urged the Obama administration to stand by statements made early on in the debate in which it steadfastly insisted that such a public option was indispensable to genuine change, saying that Medicare and the Veterans Administration are "two very good programs that have been around for a long time." Dean appeared on morning news shows Monday amid increasing indications the Obama White House is retreating from the public option in the face of vocal opposition from Republicans and some vocal participants at a town-hall-style meetings around the country.

The former Vermont governor was asked on NBC's "Today" show about President Barack Obama's statement over the weekend that the public option for insurance coverage was "just a sliver" of the overall proposal. Obama's health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, advanced that line, telling CNN Sunday that a direct government role in a system intended to provide virtually universal coverage was "not the essential element." Dean, a physician, argued that a public option is fair and said there must be such a choice in any genuine shake up of the existing system.

"You can't really do health reform without it," he said. Dean maintained that the health insurance industry has "put enormous pressure on patients and doctors" in recent years.

He called a direct government role "the entirety of health care reform. It isn't the entirety of insurance reform ... We shouldn't spend $60 billion a year subsidizing the insurance industry." Dean also said he doesn't foresee any Republican support for a public option. "I don't think the Republicans are interested and in order to have a bipartisan bill, you've got to have both sides interested," he said.
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Dean urges defeat of emerging health care bill
The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 16, 2009; 8:52 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/16/AR2009121600755_pf.html

WASHINGTON -- Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean argued Wednesday that the health care overhaul bill taking shape in the Senate further empowers private insurers at the expense of consumer choice.

"You will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine," said Dean, a physician. "It's an insurance company bailout." Interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America," he said the bill has some good provisions, "but there has to be a line beyond which you think the bill is bad for the country."

"This is an insurance company's dream," the former Democratic presidential candidate said. "This is the Washington scramble, and it's a shame."

Dean asserted that the Senate's health care bill would not prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions and he also said it would allow the industry to charge older people far more than others for premiums.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., a prominent House liberal, protested the absence of any government-run insurance option in the Senate bill.

"We can't let the perfect be enemy of the good," Weiner said on CBS' "Early Show," "but we are reaching a tipping point."

When House and Senate negotiators go to conference to work out a compromise bill, Weiner said, "We should move away from some of the things the Senate has done and move back to where the House is. You need to contain cost. You do that with a public option."
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Is Joe Lieberman Protecting Israel?

By Robert Parry

December 16, 2009 "Consortiumnews" - http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121509.html

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24195.htm

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s latest threat to scuttle health-care reform – vowing to join a Republican filibuster to block an over-55 buy-in to Medicare, a proposal that he has long championed – is raising questions about his motives. But no one is mentioning the unmentionable, the cause that has come to define Lieberman’s career: Israel.

Is it possible that Lieberman’s obstructionist behavior doesn’t relate to Connecticut’s insurance industry or to his political ego – the two most cited explanations – but rather to a calculation that he can use his leverage on health care to limit the pressure that President Barack Obama can put on Israel to make concessions on a Mideast peace plan?

After all, the more common explanations of Lieberman’s behavior have holes in their logic.

While it is true that Lieberman’s constituent Hartford-based insurance companies fear any government intrusion in their industry, the actual proposals for the Medicare buy-in or the tightly constrained “public option” actually would benefit the industry in the near term.

Those uninsured Americans 55 to 64 are customers whom the insurance industry doesn’t want. They are the part of the uninsured population that is most likely to need medical care, which is why private insurers have driven up the rates so high that these people can’t afford to buy health insurance.

Letting these desperate Americans buy into Medicare wouldn’t cost the health insurance industry much of anything – and it would reduce the moral (and PR) crisis that has led so many Americans to view private insurers as vultures preying on the most vulnerable.

In his past position in favor of the Medicare buy-in, Lieberman has recognized this reality, noting that this over-55 group faces a particular crisis because they have “retired early or unfortunately have been laid off early” and can’t afford health insurance.

Though Lieberman has long been a major recipient of health insurance industry backing, that has never before prevented him from favoring this Medicare buy-in. Only now does Lieberman say that he would join a Republican filibuster to kill the entire bill if his earlier proposal is included.

So, Senate Democratic leaders have reportedly agreed to drop the buy-in provision to appease Lieberman even though such a watered-down Senate bill may complicate reconciliation with a more liberal House bill and is infuriating the Democratic base.

Killing the Public Option

Similarly, Lieberman has protested any inclusion of a government-run insurance option even if it is only triggered by the failure of private insurers to offer affordable alternatives or if it is so tightly constrained that it would attract only a few million customers, again drawn primarily from the ranks of Americans most in need of medical care.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that only about six million people would sign up for the House version of the public option whose rates would likely exceed those of private plans because the sick would gravitate to the government plan. The current Senate version, with a state-by-state opt-out provision, would draw even fewer customers, the CBO said.

Yet either version actually helps the health insurance industry by siphoning off sick people and thus allowing the industry to corner the market on healthier customers, where the biggest profits lie.

So, Lieberman may not be serving the industry’s best interests by jeopardizing passage of a health reform bill. Not only does the industry stand to pick up tens of millions of new customers who will be compelled to buy insurance – and sometimes with government subsidies – but a decent reform bill also blunts demands for more radical changes.

If Americans grow more furious with the current system – its rising costs and its failure to cover nearly 50 million people – voters might press for a single-payer approach which could eliminate private insurers altogether.

For these reasons, the Lieberman-is-in-the-pocket-of-the-insurance-lobby explanation isn’t entirely convincing.
. . . .
The Israel Factor

Which brings us to Israel, which arguably has become Lieberman’s most treasured priority in his political life.

Mark Vogel, chairman of the pro-Israel National Action Committee, once said, “Joe Lieberman, without exception, no conditions … is the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress. There is nobody who does more on behalf of Israel than Joe Lieberman.”

It was Lieberman’s embrace of neoconservative ideology and his aggressive support for wars against Israel’s Muslim enemies, the likes of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, that led Connecticut Democrats to deny Lieberman the Senate nomination in 2006 and prompted his successful run as an Independent.

Partly because Obama opposed the Iraq War, Lieberman went on the stump for Republican John McCain in 2008, even questioning Obama’s patriotism.

Standing with McCain in August 2008, Lieberman called the election a choice “between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not.’

Since the start of Obama’s presidency, Israel’s hawkish Likud government has made no secret of its concern that Obama might pressure it into making territorial and other concessions to the Palestinians and Syria to secure a Mideast peace agreement.

In Washington, the still-influential neocons also have been demanding that Obama continue Bush’s belligerent policies and side with Israel in a hard-line approach to Iran.

In that sense, Lieberman and the neocons have much in common with Republicans, such as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, who declared in July that “If we’re able to stop Obama on this [health reform], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

A broken Obama could be easier to manipulate regarding Mideast peace talks and Iran.
. . . .
Lieberman has been careful not to connect his disruptive behavior on health-care reform to his support for Israel, but there can be little doubt that a chastened Obama, either defeated on health care or forced to sign a bill that liberals will view as a betrayal, will have much less political capital to expend in applying pressure on Israel.

A hobbled Obama won’t be able to push Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt expansion of West Bank settlements or to take other steps that might lead to a Palestinian state. Obama also could be pushed around himself if Israel – itself an undeclared nuclear power – decides to launch airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Israel explanation for Lieberman’s behavior on health-care reform is the one that seems to make the most sense.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
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Simon Johnson on Economic "Reform"

“Wake Up, Gentlemen”
Posted: 15 Dec 2009 03:06 AM PST

http://baselinescenario.com/2009/12/15/wake-up-gentlemen/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29

The guiding myth underpinning the reconstruction of our dangerous banking system is: Financial innovation as-we-know-it is valuable and must be preserved.  Anyone opposed to this approach is a populist, with or without a pitchfork.

Single-handedly, Paul Volcker has exploded this myth.  Responding to a Wall Street insiders‘ Future of Finance “report“, he was quoted in the WSJ yesterday as saying: “Wake up gentlemen.  I can only say that your response is inadequate.”

Volcker has three  main points, with which we whole-heartedly agree:

1. “[Financial engineering] moves around the rents in the financial system, but not only this, as it seems to have vastly increased them.”

2. “I have found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy” and most important:

 3. “I am probably going to win in the end”.

Volcker wants tough constraints on banks and their activities, separating the payments system – which must be protected and therefore tightly regulated – from other “extraneous” functions, which includes trading and managing money.

This is entirely reasonable – although we can surely argue about details, including whether a very large “regulated” bank would be able to escape the limits placed on its behavior and whether a very large “trading” bank could (without running the payments system) still cause massive damage. 

But how can Mr. Volcker possibly prevail?  Even President Obama was reduced, yesterday, to asking the banks nicely to lend more to small business – against which Jamie Dimon will presumably respond that such firms either (a) are not creditworthy (so give us a subsidy if you want such loans) or (b) don’t want to borrow (so give them a subsidy).  (Some of the bankers, it seems, didn’t even try hard to attend – they just called it in.)

The reason for Volcker’s confidence in his victory is simple - he is moving the consensus.  It’s not radicals against reasonable bankers.  It’s the dean of American banking, with a bigger and better reputation than any other economic policymaker alive – and with a lot of people at his back – saying, very simply: Enough.

He says it plainly, he increasingly says it publicly, and he now says it often.  He waited, on the sidelines, for his moment.  And this is it.

Paul Volcker wants to stop the financial system before it blows up again.  And when he persuades you – and people like you – he will win.  You can help – tell everyone you know to read what Paul Volcker is saying and to pass it on.
By Simon Johnson
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McCain Leads Senate Effort to Reinstate Glass-Steagall
December 15, 2009 - by Donny Shaw
http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1410-McCain-Leads-Senate-Effort-to-Reinstate-Glass-Steagall?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCongressCongressGossipBlog+%28Open+Congress+Blog%29

Throughout the financial crisis one law has been cited over and over as a main cause of the collapse and, more significantly, the resulting bailouts of “too big to fail” banks. That law is the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, which repealed a New Deal-era financial regulatory rule known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which was signed into law by FDR to keep regular commercial banks separate from Wall Street investment banks. The law was repealed in 1999 by Bill Clinton; the pen that signed the law to repeal it is now hanging as a trophy in the halls of Citigroup’s corporate headquarters.

Now there’s a movement in the Senate to reinstate the Glass-Steagall protections. It’s being championed by Sen. John McCain [R, AZ] of all people. Newsweek reports:

John McCain lost the 2008 presidential election because of the financial crisis—at least that’s what his chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, suggested. “We were three points ahead on Sept. 15 when the stock market crashed. And then the election was over,” Schmidt said in a postmortem earlier this year. McCain was tarred with the regulatory failures of the Bush years, and it didn’t help that he had been a longtime acolyte of the Senate’s dean of deregulation, Phil Gramm, who once derided Americans as “a nation of whiners.” McCain also seemed to have few new ideas of his own about how to address the financial panic.

More than a year after the election, the Arizona Republican is looking to repair that reputation by joining up with Democratic firebrand Maria Cantwell to propose something that will be anathema to both Wall Street and the Obama administration. According to two congressional sources, the two maverick senators want to reinstate Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that forced the separation of regular commercial banking from Wall Street investment banking. The senators’ proposal echoes a failed amendment introduced in the House last week by Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York.

The Senate prospects for the success of the McCain-Cantwell bill—which the two plan to announce together on Wednesday morning—seem bleak at best. But McCain and Cantwell join a still small but not insignificant insurgency of chronic doubters, including former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who say not nearly enough is being done to change Wall Street and, in particular, to address the “too big to fail” problem. The issue is one of the few in Washington that can unite the left and right sides of the political spectrum. Democrats like Cantwell deplore Wall Street’s outsize role in the real economy and its lobbying influence, and conservatives such as McCain are appalled at the way the market system has been undermined—some would say rigged—by the power of the big banks.

By proposing a bill to reinstate Glass-Steagall, McCain and Cantwell are going well outside the usual D.C. thinking on financial regulation. An anonymous Treasury official, for example, is quoted in the article as saying, “I think going back to Glass-Steagall would be like going back to the Walkman.” Bringing back Glass-Steagall is something that has made a lot of sense to the grassroots and former officials who are no longer in power, but it hasn’t really found much support among people that are currently in positions of power in D.C.

There’s always more to the story than campaign contributions, but in cases like this it’s hard not to take a look. According to OpenSecrets.org, in 2008, financial firms gave an uncommonly large amount of money to the campaigns of current members of Congress. Included in their list (http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?cycle=2010&ind=F)of top ten recipients for this year are such powerful senators as Senate Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman Chuck Schumer [D, NY], Majority Leader Harry Reid [D, NV] and Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd [D, CT].
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U.S. gave up billions in tax money in deal for Citigroup's bailout repayment
DEAL MADE TO RECOVER BAILOUT
Firms exempted from rule when U.S. sells its stake
By Binyamin Appelbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 16, 2009; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504534_pf.html

The federal government quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis.

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to long-standing tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and a few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain billions of dollars worth of tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.

While the Obama administration has said taxpayers are likely to profit from the sale of the Citigroup shares, accounting experts said the lost tax revenue could easily outstrip those profits.

The IRS, an arm of the Treasury Department, has changed a number of rules during the financial crisis to reduce the tax burden on financial firms. The rule changed Friday also was altered last fall by the Bush administration to encourage mergers, letting Wells Fargo cut billions of dollars from its tax bill by buying the ailing Wachovia.

"The government is consciously forfeiting future tax revenues. It's another form of assistance, maybe not as obvious as direct assistance but certainly another form," said Robert Willens, an expert on tax accounting who runs a firm of the same name. "I've been doing taxes for almost 40 years, and I've never seen anything like this, where the IRS and Treasury acted unilaterally on so many fronts."
For rest of article, See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504534_pf.html

Getting screwed?--Paying attention?

I don't watch much corporate television news anymore, or any television for that matter. I have "issues" about their ability to tell the truth. Take for example Fox News: Did they transmit the information about the following subject while you watched over the last weekend?

How about OPB? OPB doesn't give you Democracy Now! either (although it comes "first year free"), but the internet does. Perhaps if you subscribe to OPB/PBS, you should ask them to show Democracy Now!. You know--they are the ones that claim to keep you informed--PUBLIC radio and television and all that. I, and another person I know in another part of Baker City, can't even receive the PBS signal over the PUBLIC airwaves with the little gray digital converter box the government forced us to get if we can't afford cable or satellite anymore. We received their signal for a while, but not anymore. Can you get it over the airwaves?

The local papers don't tell the whole story about foreclosures, and a lot of other things, either, and I leave it to you to reach your own conclusions as to why they don't.

Just below are articles on the real story about Wall Street and Banks cooking the books on foreclosures, and the bonuses made possible with your tax dollars, as well as the divide between rich and poor.

Democracy Now! (October 15, 2009)
Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez, with William Black

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/15/black

As Foreclosures Hit All-Time High, Wall Street on Pace to Hand Out Record $140 Billion in Employee Bonuses

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, as JPMorgan Chase reported massive profits in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that major US banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high. But on Main Street, foreclosures are also at record levels, and the official unemployment rate is expected to top ten percent. We speak to former bank regulator William Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

William Black, Former bank regulator at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. In the 1980s he helped expose the savings and loan scandal. He now teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and is the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.


JUAN GONZALEZ: The Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 10,000 Wednesday for the first time in a year, as JPMorgan Chase reported massive profits in the third quarter. The nation’s second-largest bank took in $3.6 billion during the last three months. JPMorgan is not the only bank making billions. Earlier this morning, Goldman Sachs announced it made about $3.2 billion in the third quarter.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that major US banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high. Goldman Sachs alone is set to pay out at least $20 billion in bonuses. That’s an average of $700,000 per employee.

The record bonuses come less than a year after taxpayers bailed out many of those same financial institutions.
While Wall Street is on the path of recovery, the real economy remains in a state of crisis. It was just announced that US foreclosure filings climbed to a record high in the third quarter. Nearly 940,000 homes received a default notice or were repossessed by banks—that’s a 23 percent increase from a year earlier. Meanwhile, economists project the national unemployment rate will soon top ten percent.

AMY GOODMAN: On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have been slow to implement any meaningful reform to help protect consumers and to curb what’s been described as Wall Street’s casino.

On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee began marking up a bill that would create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency and introduce the first regulation of the exotic financial instruments known as derivatives. The finance and business communities have been lobbying against both reform measures.

To talk more about this, we’re joined by former bank regulator William Black. You might recognize him from Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story. During the 1980s, Black helped expose the savings & loan scandal. He now teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.

Bill Black, welcome to Democracy Now! Your comment on just the latest figures? Dow Jones tops 10,000, Wall Street reports massive profits, executives receive record bonuses, and what? Foreclosures also at a record high.

WILLIAM BLACK: It’s one of the proofs that the real economy and the finance world have been completely unhinged. Finance is supposed to exist for only one purpose: to make the real economy work better. But now finance simply works for finance, and in particular for the elites within finance. And they harm the real economy on a regular basis, and periodically, they come close to destroying the real economy.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And William Black, where is the outrage? It seems to me, at this stage, with the—as the foreclosures continue to escalate in numbers, and yet we’re seeing these enormous profits less than a year after the financial crisis. There doesn’t seem to be the kind of outrage, even in Congress, that there was six months or eight months ago.

WILLIAM BLACK: There’s no palpable outrage, certainly not in Congress. The reform efforts on derivatives, for example, are a scandal. They exempt virtually all of the problem derivatives, and they’re designed to exempt it. And that’s the bill that’s introduced, and of course it’s likely to get worse with additional lobbying from the special interests.

Link the things that you’ve just been talking about. You talked about foreclosures reaching record highs. But in fact, foreclosures, relative to delinquencies, are quite low compared to historical ratios. In other words, banks have tons of folks who are not paying their mortgages on time, and they’re not foreclosing. And the reason they’re not foreclosing is, once you foreclose, you have to recognize losses under the accounting rules. And the banks gimmicked the accounting rules. They put pressure on Congress, and Congress put pressure on the accounting profession to gimmick the accounting rules now about a year ago. Now, these bonuses, of course, are paid compared to alleged profits. What happens if you understate your losses dramatically? You report much higher profits and much higher bonuses. So this is a web of fraud, in which they are getting as much as they can before the place goes to hell in a handbasket again.

AMY GOODMAN: William Black, talk about Timothy Geithner. Talk about Lawrence Summers. Talk about Obama’s inner circle and what they have to gain from this.

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, I mean, Summers, for example—you talked about Geithner’s aides and how much money they had made, and, of course, it’s absurdly large, and they’re making it typically for not doing much of anything. But they’re taking their cue from Summers, who got $5 million, roughly, for working one day a week in areas he had no expertise. So, you know, once you leave the federal service, then these interests that you were very helpful to find a way to make you spectacularly rich, and they know that that’s what’s coming in their future. That’s part of the problem.

But the bigger part of the problem, in many ways, is that they have such an ideology about the market and its ability to deal with all problems that has no basis in reality, has been exposed in this crisis as completely fictional, and yet they can’t give it up. I mean, think of yourself as one of these professors who’s been trained in the Milton Friedmanish views, and you’re in your fifties, and you’ve been saying—you know, everything you’ve said in your career is wrong. Everything you’ve learned in your career is wrong. All of your areas of expertise are wrong. Are you going to admit that? “Hi, I’ve been misleading you, and I’m sorry I caused this disaster. And by the way, I have no meaningful skills or experience.”

AMY GOODMAN: Would Alan Greenspan—
WILLIAM BLACK: It’s not going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: —fit into that picture?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, Alan Greenspan, of course, is doing this when he’s in his eighties and isn’t going to teach and isn’t going to do anything else. And even then, he didn’t volunteer it. He was asked pointed questions in front of Congress.
And that comes back to your point: where’s the congressional outrage there? There is some. We work with some of the progressives. You may have seen, your listeners may well have seen Representative Grayson asking very difficult questions. Representative Kaptur has certainly been on people. But that’s a tiny minority of folks within Congress. And it comes back, of course, to campaign contributions. And the Supreme Court is about to make that much worse. It’s almost certainly going to strike down the portions of McCain-Feingold that restricted corporate contributions, and it’s “Katy, bar the door.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you to go back to this issue of the foreclosures and delinquencies, which you make the point that the delinquencies are much higher. For instance, I think the delinquency rate for prime loans, not for the subprime or even the Alt-A or the more questionable loans, but for prime loans, rose to 6.41 percent in the second quarter from six percent, so that you’re getting supposedly the best loans in the home mortgage market are now at these very, very high rates of delinquency. What does this say about the future for these banks that are holding these loans?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, it means that many of these banks are deeply insolvent and actually losing money, but they have the gimmicked accounting, so they’re able to report that they have lots of profits.

And, by the way, the other thing they’re doing is speculating like crazy and other trading activities that add absolutely nothing to economic value. So, if they’re winning, somebody’s losing. Right? They’re doing bond trading, and they’re producing allegedly billions of dollars in profits in bond trading. Well, somebody’s the counterparty and losing money. And so, there’s going to be other bad news outside the financial sector.

And again, remember, financial sector exists supposedly for one purpose—to help the real economy—and it’s taking billions out of the real economy in trading profits. So the combination of these things, both in the financial sector and in the real economy, means very bad things down the road, in terms of increased business failures, increased banking failures.
But, of course, we’re not allowing the large banks to fail. In a part of his speech that was almost completely ignored, and it’s incredibly radical, but in the right word—you know, right drift range, Geithner said twice that for the largest banks we now have a program of capital insurance—not deposit insurance, capital insurance. In other words, we’re going to stand in there and bail out the shareholders, no matter how badly management screws up the place, even if management screws it up through fraud. And that’s just an appalling change in America.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to William Black, former bank regulator at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. In the ’80s, he helped expose the savings and loan scandal. Now he’s a professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. We’ll be back with him, and then we’ll be joined by the Slovenian public intellectual Slavoj ÎiÏek at the end of the broadcast. Stay with us.
[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is William Black, former bank regulator at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, now a professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, wrote The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.

So, let’s go back more than what, about a quarter-century now, William Black, to your specialty, to exposing the savings and loan scandal. What happened then, and how does it relate to today?

WILLIAM BLACK: What happened then was an epidemic of what we call in criminology “control fraud.” And that means what happens when the fraud is led by the person who controls a seemingly legitimate corporation or government agency. In this case, they were savings and loans. And these frauds were growing at an annual rate of over 50 percent.

Their weapon of choice is accounting fraud. So it’s real easy. It’s a three-part optimization. First thing you do is grow like crazy, Ponzi-like scheme. Second thing you do is deliberately make really bad loans, because they have a higher interest and higher expenses associated with them, so you report more profits. And the third thing you do is have extraordinary leverage. Leverage is simply lots of debt compared to your equity. And the point of this is, if you do those three things, you are mathematically guaranteed to report not just profits, but record profits.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But William Black, wouldn’t—
WILLIAM BLACK: At that kind of—
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m sorry, go ahead.

WILLIAM BLACK: At that kind of growth rate, with people concentrating on whatever the optimal area is for the fraud, you produce financial bubbles. In the case of the savings and loan crisis, we re-regulated the industry in the face of opposition from the Reagan administration, the House of Representatives and the Senate. And we looked for the Achilles’ heel for this kind of scheme, which is growth. And so, we restricted growth. And this kind of fraud also creates a distinctive pattern of operations, and we used that to triage and to go after these institutions while they were still reporting they were the most profitable savings and loans in America. People thought we were crazy, contemporaneously, who were conservative economists. But it turned out we were right about every single one of these institutions.

What does it mean for today? The same thing. We have another epidemic of accounting fraud. In this case, it’s not commercial real estate, which it was in the savings and loan crisis. It started out with, in the United States’ context, with home mortgages.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But William Black, it’s been amply documented the level—the extensive level of the fraud that occurred in this current crisis. I remember seeing the emails that Attorney General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, secured, where it showed that, for instance, Countrywide, whenever it started getting appraisals of properties that it did not like, it fired the appraisers, it got rid of them, told them they wanted higher appraisals. All along the line in these no-doc loans, there was constant fraud occurring—the lawyers that were involved in the cases, the real estate appraisers, the people who were packaging the loans—and yet, except for the occasional Madoff or a couple of individuals, there’s been no sort of criminal prosecution of these folks.

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, when you say it’s been amply demonstrated, you’re right, but only where people have looked. And people, to pick up your latter point, have generally not looked.

So, what happened? The FBI transferred 500 of its white-collar crime specialists out of white-collar crime into national security, in response to the 9/11 attacks. And, you know, you can understand why they did that. But you can’t understand why the Bush administration refused the FBI request to allow them to replace the lost agents. And so, white-collar prosecutions were down more than 25 percent under the Bush administration during the greatest wave of white-collar crime in the history of the world. The FBI has also testified that 80 percent of the mortgage fraud losses occur when lender personnel are involved.
To add to your point about appraisers, the only reason you inflate an appraisal is for fraud. There’s no other purpose in the world. And we have survey information that’s quite good on appraisers. In 2003, 70 percent reported that they had been the subject of an attempt to intimidate them to inflate appraisal values in that year alone. When we did the same survey in 2007, that percentage was up to 90 percent. So we have horrific, endemic fraud, and it’s coming out of the lenders, not the poor people who can’t pay the mortgages. And that is what brought this crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: William Black, the New York Times recently reported that Citigroup has hired Richard Hohlt, who was a top lobbyist for the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.

WILLIAM BLACK: Yes. He is the most notorious lobbyist out of the savings and loan crisis. Even within a notorious group, the US League of Savings Institutions, which back then was the political scientist types, often said it was the third most powerful lobbying group in America. That group had, in essence, a black ops subgroup, and Richard Hohlt led it and is responsible for causing immense damage in the savings and loan crisis.

Beyond that, of course, he then comes back in the slime campaign on—when Wilson went public with some of his protests against the lying about the intelligence that got us into the war, the invasion of Iraq, Richard Hohlt reappears. And now he’s back being hired by—in essence, by taxpayer money to help loot the taxpayers again. My phrase for it in the New York Times was that it was “singularly obscene.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that opened on September 17th. What do you expect to get out of it? I was looking at a piece in The Nation by William Greider. He says Chairman Phil Angelides, the former California state treasurer, says his purpose is “[to uncover] the facts and providing an unbiased historical accounting of what brought our financial system and our economy to its knees."
Greider goes on to say, “In the New Deal years, the Congressional investigation led by Ferdinand Pecora helped build the case for landmark regulatory reforms—legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from risk-taking investment banks. Like Pecora, Angelides does not intend to propose policy solutions but simply to discover what really happened.”
Your thoughts on it?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, it’s true that the Pecora Commission was critical to successful reforms and that those reforms worked for a good forty to fifty years, until we decided we were much brighter and got rid of a lot of them. To link the two things you just had me talk about, when you deregulate an industry or de-supervise, the rules stay in place, but the people enforcing them no longer enforce the rules; de facto you decriminalize it, because the regulators have to make the criminal cases as a practical matter.

And so, Pecora did—not only found the problems, he did something else that was critical. He exposed to the American people just how bad the elites were. For example, they discovered a list of prominent Americans that were able to buy stock at half price. The investment banks would let them buy stock at half of the market price. And that list included a former president of the United States of America. So that kind of exposure of corruption, exposure of the fact that the top bankers hadn’t paid any taxes in three years, all of this created the political space under which real reform could occur, as well.

Unfortunately, the Pecora Commission, the modern one, is not set up in that manner. It’s set up as a separate commission, whereas the real Pecora worked through the Senate Banking and had subpoena authority. The current commission can only subpoena if you can pick up a super majority; in other words, you have to pick up, in this context, Republican-appointed members’ votes to be able to do it. So the first big gut check is going to be, are they going to issue a vigorous set of subpoenas, and are they going to have unanimity, or near unanimity, in support for a serious investigation? Because, of course, it has the possibility of embarrassing greatly not just financial elites, but also political elites.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And William Black, what is your sense of the prospects now for stronger financial regulation, given the fact that—my understanding is now that the financial and securities firms have invested about $200 million in lobbying—in their lobbying efforts in Congress, and the halls of Congress are filled with the lobbyists now who are trying to influence the members of Congress on the new regulation of the financial system?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, the earliest effort is—should be a real wake-up call, because it’s horrible. Barney Frank has proposed legislation on financial derivatives that essentially exempts what are called over-the-counter derivatives from most regulation, and it is over-the-counter derivatives that have been a major cause of this crisis. So that’s utterly insane. There’s no conceivable justification for it. And he stacked the hearing. There were nine witnesses; eight of them were from the industry and, of course, testified that they were vital to the world. The ninth witness was the only person who was in the least bit skeptical, and he was promptly gaveled down, unlike the others, by the chair. So it’s not only a farce; they’re willing to have us see that it’s a farce. They are so little afraid of public opinion and outrage that they’re not even taking steps to cover up the cover-up.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Black, how much does the 2010 elections coming up have to do with what’s happening now—I mean, from preserving the health insurance industry to preserving the financial elite in this country and the money that goes into the—back into politicians’ pockets, into their coffers?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, it has a lot to do, in particular, with the Blue Dogs. The Blue Dogs are the more conservative Democrats, and they are racking up unprecedented political contributions, because, of course, they’re such a powerful voting bloc. Even though they’re not all that large in number, they can be decisive in whether anything gets through the Senate, in particular, but they can also be real obstructionists in the House. And by being obstructionist, they make themselves very attractive to the lobbyists. And a number of the Blue Dogs are in jurisdictions where, you know, they have to worry about reelection, and so they think maximizing political contributions is the best possible thing they can do. And the result is very perverse, in terms of our ability to get any reforms.

AMY GOODMAN: William Black, I want to thank you very much for being with us, former bank regulator at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. His book is called The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.
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Quotes from Information Clearing House:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/emaildigest.htm

"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
Noam Chomsky - American Linguist and Activist. b.1928
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"Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
George Orwell
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The Two Americas

By Andre Damon and Joe Kishore
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23752.htm

October 19, 2009 "WSWS" -- Two reports last week, just over one year since the onset of the financial crisis, shed light on the nature of American and world capitalism.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (“Wall Street on Track to Award Record Pay”), the top 23 Wall Street banks and financial firms are expected to hand out a record $140 billion in compensation this year—$10 billion more than the previous record year, 2007.

The rapid recovery in bank pay has been “boosted by a stronger stock market, thawing credit market, a resurgence in deal making and the continuing effects of various government aid programs,” the Journal noted.

The Journal article came as the largest banks posted their third-quarter earnings. Banks most heavily involved in trading and other forms of speculative activity fared the best, with Goldman Sachs reporting $3.2 billion and JPMorgan Chase $3.6 billion in profits.

On Friday, USA Today published a front-page article (“Wages Head to 20-Year Tumble”) reporting that average weekly wages for non-management workers in the US have fallen by 1.4 percent so far this year. If wages continue to fall at this rate, it will be the sharpest decline since 1991.

"Wages are usually the last thing to deteriorate in a recession," economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute told USA Today. "But it's happening now, and wages are probably going to be held down for a long time."

This report only hints at the social crisis facing millions of people. Official unemployment is close to 10 percent, and real unemployment is much higher. Employers are seizing on the weak labor market to cut benefits and reduce hours across the board. Initiating a trend that could well catch on, Colorado last week became the first state to lower its minimum wage since the federal law was introduced in 1938.

The coming together of record Wall Street profits and the soaring stock market, on the one hand, and increasing unemployment, falling wages and growing social misery, on the other, has prompted some liberal supporters of the Obama administration to express concern about the social and political implications of these trends.

Several commentators have warned that unless Wall Street develops a social conscience and Obama shows more “backbone,” the divergence in the “two Americas” could have explosive results. Such appeals ignore the real character of the American and world capitalist economy and the role of the Obama administration as the representative of the US financial aristocracy.

The economy of the entire planet is subordinated to the interests of a tiny layer of the population. The interests of this parasitical financial elite can be guaranteed only at the expense of the productive sections of society, principally the working class. . . . ."

For the rest of the article see:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23752.htm
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