Class War? part 2--Some Recent Press Clips

Class War part 2--Press clips

Forgive me for painting all corporate media as only corporate propagandists--MSNBC apparently sometimes produces news that contradicts that sentiment, at least in the first two clips that follow. It seems to be exceptional in that regard, even though their advertising supports the original point. The following clips are perhaps even more germane, RE "Class War," than two recent shows at Democracy Now! on the same subject.
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Michael Moore with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Dylan Ratigan With Author Ron Suskind: "Tim Geithner Ran The White House, Stopped Attorney General Eric Holder From Prosecuting Wall Street"

Who's the White House boss?

Start watching at the 2-minute mark.  This is the most important Ratigan clip since his on-air meltdown.  You will hear that Geithner and Summers defied orders from Obama and took over White House policy, instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to back off Wall Street criminal prosecutions.

▪ "Geithner developed a system to keep the existing Wall Street structure in place with no prosecutions, and billions in additional bailouts."

You got that?  That's called an Executive Gag Order - Mr. President. . . .

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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A Good Fight

Robert Reich
--MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

So the really big fight — perhaps the defining battle of 2012 — won’t be over Medicare. It won’t even be over Obama’s jobs program.

It will be over whether the rich should pay more taxes.

The President has vowed to veto any plan to tame the debt that doesn’t increase taxes on the rich. The Republicans have vowed to oppose any tax increases on the rich.

It’s a good fight to have.

. . . .

Trickle-down economics has been a cruel joke.

On the other hand — given projected budget deficits — if the rich don’t pay their fair share, the rest of us will have to bear more of a burden. And that burden inevitably will come in the form of either higher taxes or fewer public services.

If anyone’s declared class warfare it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street (and who comprise a disproportionate number of America’s super rich). They’ve declared it on average workers.

The ratio of corporate profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And even as corporate salaries and perks keep rising, the median wage keeping dropping, and jobs continue to be shed.

You’ve got the chairman of Merck taking home $17.9 million last year. This year Merck announces plans to boot 13,000 workers. The CEO of Bank of America takes in $10 million, and the bank announces it’s firing 30,000 workers.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but the way I see it we’ve got a huge budget deficit and a giant jobs problem. And under these circumstances it seems to me people at the top who have never had it so good should sacrifice a bit more, so the rest of us don’t have to sacrifice quite as much.

According to the polls, most Americans agree.
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Attica Is All of Us: Cornel West on 40th Anniversary of Attica Prison Rebellion
. . . .
Cornel West, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University and the author of numerous books on race.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to another 9/11 milestone. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Attica rebellion. Forty years ago, September 9th, 1971, prisoners took over much of Attica prison in upstate New York to protest the prison conditions. Four days later, on the morning of September 13th, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state troopers to storm the prison. Troopers shot indiscriminately over 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Thirty-nine men would die—prisoners and guards. After the shooting stopped, police beat and tortured scores more prisoners. Ninety of the surviving prisoners were seriously wounded but were initially denied medical care. After a quarter century of legal struggles, the state of New York would eventually award the surviving prisoners of Attica $12 million in damages. . . . .

CORNEL WEST:

. . . .

And we live now in revolutionary times, but the counterrevolution is winning. The counterrevolution is winning. The greedy oligarchs and plutocrats are winning. One out of four corporations don’t pay taxes, been gobbling up billions of dollars. And yet, not just 21 percent of our children living in poverty, of all colors, each one precious, 42 percent of America’s children live in poverty or near poverty. That is sick. It’s a moral obscenity. It’s a national disgrace. And yet, we have a political class, no matter what color they are, that won’t say a mumbling word about that poverty. Why? Because it sits outside of the give and fro between a right-wing, mean-spirited Republican Party, run by the oligarchs and the plutocrats, and a spineless Democratic Party, that’s got ties to the oligarchs and plutocrats, and the poor people get left out. They get invisible, disposable.

And yet, we see the same brothers in the 1950s and '60s who were coming out of socially neglected and economically abandoned spaces, called "the ghetto" by Donny Hathaway. By Donny Hathaway, when he said "ghetto," that wasn't demeaning. If you’re from the ghetto, the way he talked about it, you straightened your back up. You got your mind together. You had love in your heart for your brother and sister on the block. And it started on the chocolate side of town, but it spilled over to the vanilla side and the red side and the yellow side and the brown side, too. The unity that we had in Attica among the black and brown—and I saw some white brothers, too. Oh, yes. And that’s elementary. You’ve got to have the unity, but you’ve got to be honest about the powers that be dividing and conquering. And this revolutionary moment, where the counterrevolution is winning. Every time I look at Brother Dhoruba—Brother, I’ve been so inspired by you for 25 years, because you’ve been talking the same thing I’m talking about right now. Same language, here and Africa. We had a good time in Ghana together. Oh, yes, we did. But now it’s coming back. It’s coming back.

And the young people are hungry and thirsty, but the young people are thirsty for truth. Oh, yes. They’re hungry for truth. And the problem is that most of our leaders have either sold out, caved in, gave up. They don’t want to tell people the truth. They’re too concerned about their careers. They’re too concerned about success. They’re too concerned about just winning the next election for their status. In 1971, the Attica brothers told the truth. But they weren’t the only ones. You had a whole cacophony of voices telling the truth. But who wants to tell the truth? The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. If you don’t talk about poverty, you’re not telling the truth. If you’re not talking about working people being pushed against the wall, with corporate profits high, you’re not telling the truth. If you’re not talking about the criminal activity on Wall Street and not one person gone to jail yet, you’re not telling the truth. Don’t tell me about the crime on the block with brothers and sisters and Jamal and Latisha out taken to jail, and yet gangsters who are engaged in fraudulent activity, insider trading, market manipulation, walking around having tea at night. That’s what we need.

But the sad thing is—and I’m going to end on this—the sad thing is, the kind of courage that these brothers had in 1971 is in short supply. It’s in short supply. Because when you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don’t want to allow for serious dialogue—unless we got Sister Amy or Brother Tavis and some others—and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, "If you speak the truth, we’ll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica," the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people. That’s the only thing that will keep you going, the only reason why the long-distance runner Dhoruba, the only reason why Baraka is a long-distance runner. I don’t care if you agree with them ideologically or not. It doesn’t make any difference. They got enough love for the people in their heart to still tell the truth about poverty, about suffering, about struggle, and be able to look—not just presidents, because by presidents you’re just talking about the placeholder of the oligarchs and the plutocrats—I don’t care what color they are—to tell that truth. And most people, they hold off on that. They say, "No, I got one life, one life. I saw what they did. I saw what they done."

We’re going to have a new wave. We’re going to have a new wave of truth telling. We’re going to have a new wave of witness bearing. And we’re going to teach the younger generation that these brothers didn’t struggle in vain, just like John Brown and Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey and Martin King and Myles Horton and the others didn’t. And we shall see what happens. We might get crushed, too. But you know what? Then you just go down swinging, like Ella Fitzgerald and Muhammad Ali.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Princeton University professor, Dr. Cornel West, speaking before close to 3,000 people, part of two panels at the Riverside Church in New York remembering Attica 40 years ago and talking about a blueprint for accountability today.

See Also: Smiley and West’s Poverty Tour
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The Social Contract
By Paul Krugman

September 23, 2011 "NY Times" --This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”
. . . .
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Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett
Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: September 28

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.

Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.

Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He’s said this for years, but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.

. . . .
Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up: Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor. That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.

So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy.

No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- or upper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.
. . . .
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Tracy Chapman - Talkin bout a revolution

Looting Main Street (and you too!)

Some Articles on Wall Street, the Federal Government, & You:
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The Sickening Abuse Of Power At The Heart of Wall Street

Posted: 24 Apr 2010 12:02 PM PDT
By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers

Here’s where we stand with regard to democratic discourse on the future our financial system: leading bankers will not come out to debate the issues in the open (despite being approached by reputable intermediaries after our polite challenge was issued) – sending instead their “astro turf” proxies to spread KGB-type disinformation.

Even Larry Summers [after watching the video at the link to the left, are you thinking this is someone you would like to trust?], who has shifted publicly onto the side the angels (surprising and rather late, but welcome anyway), cannot – for whatever reason – bring himself to recognize the dangers inherent in our unstable and too-big-to-manage banks.  Or perhaps he is just generating excuses that will justify not bringing the Brown-Kaufman amendment to the floor of Senate?

So let’s take it up a notch.

I strongly recommend that the responsible congressional committees request and require all assistant secretaries at the US Treasury (and other relevant political appointees over whom they have jurisdiction) to appear before them early next week.

The question will be simple: Please share your calendar of meetings this weekend, and provide us with a complete accounting of people with whom you met and conversed formally and informally. 

The finance ministers and central bank governors of the world are in Washington this weekend for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund.  As is usual, the world’s megabanks are also in town in force, organizing big meetings and small dinners.

Through these meetings dutifully troop US treasury officials, providing in-depth and off-the-record briefings to investors.

Banks such as JP Morgan Chase and the other top tier financial players thus peddle influence, leverage their access, and generally show off.  They accumulate information from a host of official contacts and discern which way policymakers – their “good friends” – are leaning.

And what is the megabank whisper mill working on?  Ignore the “economic research” papers these banks put out; that is pure pantomime for clients-to-be-duped-later.  I’m talking about what they are telling the market – communicated in specific, personal conversations this weekend.

They are telling people that, based on their inside knowledge, Greece and potentially other eurozone countries will default on their debt.  Perhaps they are telling the truth and perhaps they are lying.  Most likely they are – as always – talking their book.

But the question is not the substance of their whisper campaign this weekend, it is the flow of information.  Have they received material non-public information from US government officials?  Show me the calendar of the top 10 treasury people involved, and then we can talk about whom to summon from the private sector to testify – under oath – about what they were told or not told.

There is no question that the megabanks derive great power and enormous profit from their web of official contacts.  We should reflect carefully on whether such private flows of information between governments and “too big to fail” banks are entirely suitable in today’s unstable financial world.

Large global banks make money, in part, through nontransparent manipulation of information – this is the heart of the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs.  But the problem is much broader: the Wall Street-Washington corridor is alive and well on its way to another crisis that will empower, enrich, and embolden insiders (public and private) while impoverishing the rest of us.

The big players on Wall Street are powerful like never before – and they use this power to press for information and favors from sympathetic (or scared) government officials.  The big banks also appear hell-bent on abusing that power.  One consequence will be further destabilizing global financial markets – watch carefully what happens to Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain at the beginning of next week. 

It is time for Congress to step in with a full investigation of the exact flow of information and advice between our major megabanks and key treasury officials.  Start by asking tough questions about exactly who exchanged what kind of specific, material, market-moving information with whom this weekend in Washington.

[Please go to Baseline Scenario for the many informative links.

Also see other good posts on regulation of Wall Street at Baseline Scenario:

Greek Bailout, Lehman Deceit, And Tim Geithner

Break Up The Banks

John Paulson Needs A Good Lawyer

The Best Thing I Have Read on SEC-Goldman (So Far)

And search their posts for other info.
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Other links:

Looting Main Street

Merkley amendment to ban conflict of interest trading by banks (PROP Trading Act)

U.S. charges Goldman with subprime fraud

American Kleptocracy

What’s Wrong with the Financial Reform Bill

Dylan Ratigan Mocks Wall Street

Obama Oversees Trashing of the Dream- Ensures Continued Despair & Corporate Control of Government

In This Edition"

- Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout

- Bill Moyers Journal - "Truth is, our capitol's being looted"

- Robert Reich: Slouching Toward Health Care Reform
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Bill Moyers is said to be leaving PBS in the spring, so cherish one of the few outstanding journalists left while you have time.

On Friday's"Journal," Moyer's guests were Robert Kuttner and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have been mentioned on this blog. (Taibbi's blog is linked on my sidebar, but here it is: http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/) Moyers referred to Matt Taibbi's December 9, 2009 article in Rolling Stone, so I will put it first, followed by the transcript from Fridays Bill Moyers Journal.

In the third article, Robert Reich writes about Obama and the Democrat's deal making with "Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the AMA," as well as the Republicans, and how real health care reform slipped through the cracks in the process.
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Obama's Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print


(Watch Matt Taibbi discuss "The Big Sellout" in a video on his blog, Taibblog: http://taibbi.rssoundingboard.com/matt-taibbi-on-obamas-economy)

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.
Read entire Article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print
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Bill Moyers Journal

December 18, 2009
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript4.html

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

Something's not right here. One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you're about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House.

Truth is, our capitol's being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.

Here to talk about all this are two journalists who don't pull their punches. Robert Kuttner is an economist who helped create and now co-edits the progressive magazine THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, and the author of the book OBAMA'S CHALLENGE, among others.

Also with me is Matt Taibbi, who covers politics for ROLLING STONE magazine where he is a contributing editor. He's made a name for himself writing in a no-holds-barred, often profane, but always informative and stimulating style that gets under the skin of the powerful. His most recent article is "Obama's Big Sellout," about the President's team of economic advisers and their Wall Street connections. It's been burning up the blogosphere. Welcome to both of you.

BILL MOYERS: Let's start with some news. Some of the big insurance companies, Well Point, Cigna, United Health, all surged to a 52 week high in their share prices this week when it was clear there'd be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now. What does that tell you, Matt?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, I think what most people should take away from this is that the massive subsidies for health insurance companies have been preserved while it's also expanded their customer base because there's an individual mandate in the bill that's going to provide all these companies with the, you know, 25 or 30 million new people who are going to be paying for health insurance. So, it's, obviously, a huge boon to that industry. And I think Wall Street correctly read what the health care effort is all about.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton's Political Director. And Rahm Emanuel's take away from Bill Clinton's failure to get health insurance passed was 'don't get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.' So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we're not going to attack your customer base, we're going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it's not surprising that this is what comes out the other side.

BILL MOYERS: So are you saying that this, what some call a sweetheart deal between the pharmaceutical industry and the White House, done many months ago before this fight really began, was because the drug company money in the Democratic Party?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, it's two things. Part of it was we need to do whatever it takes to get a bill. Never mind whether it's a really good bill, let's get a bill passed so we can claim that we solved health insurance. Secondly, let's get the drug industry and the insurance industry either supporting us or not actively opposing us. So that there was some skirmishing around the details, but the deal going in was that the administration, drug companies, insurance companies are on the same team. Now, that's one way to get legislation, it's not a way to transform the health system. Once the White House made this deal with the insurance companies, the public option was never going to be anything more than a fig leaf. And over the summer and the fall, it got whittled down, whittled down, whittled down to almost nothing and now it's really nothing.

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, and this was Howard Dean's point this week was that this individual mandate that's going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular and it's going to be theirs for a generation. It's going to be an albatross around the neck of this party.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Think about it, the difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this. Social insurance everybody pays for it through their taxes, so you don't think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. But an individual mandate is an order to you to go out and buy some product from some private profit-making company, that in the case of a lot of moderate income people, you can't afford to buy. And the shell game here is that the affordable policies are either very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. Or if the coverage is decent, the premiums are unaffordable. And so here's the government doing the bidding of the private industry coercing people to buy profit-making products that maybe they can't afford and they call it health reform.

BILL MOYERS: So explain this to the visitor from Mars. I mean, just this week, the Washington Post and ABC News had a poll showing that the American public supports the Medicare buy-in that-

ROBERT KUTTNER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: By a margin of some 30 points-

ROBERT KUTTNER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And yet, it went down like a lead balloon.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Look, there are two ways, if you're the President of the United States sizing up a situation like this that you can try and create reform. One is to say, well, the interest groups are so powerful that the only thing I can do is I can work with them and move the ball a few yards, get some incremental reform, hope it turns into something better. The other way you can do it is to try to rally the people against the special interests and play on the fact that the insurance industry, the drug industry, are not going to win any popularity contests with the American people. And you, as the president, be the champion of the people against the special interests. That's the course that Obama's chosen not to pursue.

MATT TAIBBI: And I think, you know, a lot of what the Democrats are doing, they don't make sense if you look at it from an objective point of view, but if you look at it as a business strategy- if you look at the Democratic Party as a business, and their job is basically to raise campaign funds and to stay in power, what they do makes a lot of sense. They have a consistent strategy which involves negotiating a fine line between sentiment on the left and the interests of the industries that they're out there to protect. And they've always, kind of, taken that fork in the road and gone right down the middle of the line. And they're doing that with this health care bill and that's- it's consistent.

Read the rest of this transcript at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript4.html.
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Robert Reich's Blog
Robert Reich was the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book is "Supercapitalism." This is his personal journal.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2009
Slouching Toward Health Care Reform
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/12/slouching-toward-health-care-reform.html

"Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better," says the President and congressional insiders when confronted with the sorry spectacle of a health-care bill whose scope and ambition continue to shrink, and whose long-term costs to typical Americans continue to grow. They're right, of course. But by the same logic, neither the White House nor congressional Democrats will be able to celebrate the emerging legislation as a "major overhaul" or "fundamental reform." At best, it's likely to be a small overhaul containing incremental reforms.

Real reform has moved from a Medicare-like public option open to all, to a public option open to 6 million without employer coverage (still in the House bill), to a public option open only to those same people in states that opt for it, or about 4 million (the original Harry Reid version of the Senate bill), to no public option but expanded Medicare (the Senate compromise) to no expanded Medicare at all (the deal with Joe "I love all the attention" Lieberman).

In other words, the private insurers are winning and the public is losing.

Pharmaceutical companies are winning as well. Yesterday, proposals to allow US pharmacies and wholesalers to import prescription drugs from Europe and Canada were defeated in the Senate. No matter that American consumers pay up to 55% more for their prescription drugs than Canadians, or that the measure would have saved the government at least $19.4 billion over ten years (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Big Pharma's argument that the safety of such drugs couldn't be assured was belied by the defeat of another proposed amendment that would have allowed drug imports only if their safety and economic benefits were certified by the Secretary of Health and Human Service.

Doctors and hospitals are also winning. More and more of the putative "savings" from health care reform ("savings" should really be understood as projected costs that are under the wildly-escalating costs projected without such savings) rely on contraints on future Medicare spending. But the details of such constraints keep vanishing, while ever more of the messy work of coming up with them is assigned to a so-called Medical Advisory Board that will supposedly recommend them later on. What no one wants to admit is that Congress never actually implements promised Medicare savings. When crunch time comes, it caves in to the AMA and the AARP. In a few years time, when boomers swell the ranks of seniors, and the political power of the AMA and AARP together rival that of Wall Street, the cave-ins will be boggling.

Meanwhile, opponents of abortion are winning, too. Ben Nelson (a Nebraska Democrat who enjoys being the spoiler even as much as Joe Lieberman) is holding out for even more restrictions.

The political reality right now is that Harry Reid will do anything to get sixty votes -- which means Lieberman, Nelson, and even Olympia Snowe are able to use extortion on behalf of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, the AMA, and abortion foes. The President, meanwhile, remains eerily above the fray. Having closed deals months ago with Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the AMA -- in order to get their support in exchange for guaranteeing them big profits -- his only apparent interest is keeping the deals going while helping Reid corral sixty votes for just about anything. (The deals have caused some awkwardness for the White House. Drug importation would have cost Big Pharma far more than the $80 billion price tag it agreed to, forcing the White House to oppose importation even though the President had publicly supported it during his presidential campaign last year, and even though John McCain supported yesterday's amendment.)

Is the effort worth still worth it? Yes, but just. Private insurers will have to take anyone, regardless of preconditions. And some 30 million people who don't now have health insurance will get it. But because Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the AMA will come out way ahead, the legislation will cost taxpayers and premium-payers far more than it would otherwise. Cost controls are inadequate; in fact, they barely exist. If Wall Street's top brass are "fat cats," as the President described them last weekend, the top brass of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the AMA are even fatter. While they don't earn as much, they're squeezing the public for even more.

We are slouching toward health-care reform that's better than nothing but far worse than we had imagined it would be. Even those of us who have seen legislative sausage-making up close, even those of us who never make the perfect the enemy of the better, are concerned. That two or three senators are able to extort as much as they have is appalling. Why hasn't Reid forced much of the bill into reconciliation, requiring only 51 votes? Why has the President been so cowed? In all likelihood, the White House and the Dems eventually will get a bill they can call "reform," but they will not be able to say with straight faces that the reform is a significant improvement over the terrible system we already have.
posted by Robert Reich | 5:57 AM

For My Obamakin friends. . . .

I've been reading Alexander Cockburn since I don't remember when in "The Nation," back when Christopher Hitchens was a real progressive (OK, I'm getting really old), so I had to post this, because this is this is Alexander Cockburn at his best!!!

February 6-8, 2009
CounterPunch Diary

Obama's First Bad Week

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02062009.html

Barack Obama is certainly not the first president to get taken down a couple of rungs by nominees who get shipwrecked in their confirmation hearings. Bruised by thoe setbacks he has also taken serious fire for his $900 billion stimulus package, not just by Republicans but the sizable chunk of his own party who are Republicans in all but name. By the end of the week, particularly with his speech to the House Democrats at their retreat on Thursday night, there were encouraging signs that Obama was dropping the tedious nonsense about bipartisanship and beginning to fight like a man. A day later he had his deal and celebrated by adding three more corporate ghouls to his economic advisors.

But what’s been surprising in the last week is how a politician as smart as the new president could have failed to sense imminent peril concerning his nominations.

Since America’s political system is one of institutionalized bribery, overt (the legal political “donation”) and covert (the bag of cash ) and has a tax code with 50,000 pages of fine print, it stands to reason that of any ten nominees enduring scrutiny by White House investigators, by the staff of the Senate Finance Committee plus the occasional journalist probably 98 per cent will have some sort of explaining to do. Throw in infidelity and kindred offenses outlined at detail in the opening books of the Bible and maybe only Rep Ron Paul would survive.

Part of the problem is that most people reasonably think Mr Obama, who raised more money for his presidential run than anyone in history, is at the personal level an honest fellow. The last president who could be safely put in that category was Jimmy Carter. So when Obama puts up and then stands by nominees who are obviously severely compromised by corporate ties, odious enrichment or serious problems with the Internal Revenue Service they’re taken aback by such permissiveness in one so insistently high-minded in tone and so quick to announce supposedly tough new ethical guidelines for members of his administration.

On the one hand we have President Obama prohibiting individuals from working for government agencies they have lobbied in the past two years; on the other we have him nominating a defense industry lobbyist, William Lynn to be the number two man at the Pentagon, thus possibly the next Secretary of Defense. Lynn gets a waiver.

What’s amazing in the case of Tom Daschle, nominated to be Obama’s health czar, is the fact that neither the president, nor his staff, nor Daschle’s former colleagues in Congress nor the Washington press corps could see that his nomination was inherently preposterous, long before Daschle’s tax problems surfaced. Was health reform’s best advocate to be a former US senator who managed to make $5.3 million in two years trading on his former position as a rainmaker for a powerful law firm, hauling in consultancy and speaker fees from inmates of the self-same Augean stables he was charged, as Health Secretary-designate, with cleaning up? Was he going to get a waiver too, like Lynn?

It’s not entirely clear why Daschle finally threw in the towel. The New York Times editorialized against him, but that’s not an automatic death sentence. His former senatorial colleagues blubbered with dismay when he quit, so they weren’t going to vote against him. There is a theory that the White House felt Daschle couldn't be allowed to survive his tax problems once Killefer had been forced to drop out. More likely, Daschle or the White House felt another forkful of manure was about to drop out of his filing cabinet. But the net effect of his withdrawal, and that -- also for tax problems -- of Nancy Killefer, Obama’s nominee as a White House budgetary watchdog, was to rekindle public indignation about the confirmation of Treasury Secretary of Tim Geithner.

Geithner only owes his position to the fact that the White House felt that the infinitely more capable Larry Summers mightn’t survive nomination hearings, if put forward for the job he held in Clinton-time. At issue was Summers’ role as Harvard’s president in the scandal-ridden collapse of a Harvard advisory program in Russia, for which the US government levied a fine of $31 million on Harvard and other parties.

As with Daschle no one seems to have been perturbed by Geithner’s CV. Geithner had worked for the IMF. No problem. You can toil diligently for an outfit that is properly execrated as the Waffen-SS of international financial institutions and no one raises a bleat. Stiff Uncle Sam by not paying Social Security taxes for the maid who cleaned your quarters in the SS compound and you’re in trouble!

Geithner’s an obvious light-weight. As Treasury Secretary he’s in overall charge of the IRS and since tax season is gathering on its haunches to pounce, tax filers probably feel encouraged that an admitted scofflaw is in charge of the chicken coop. Anything to lower the moral tone, particularly when you’re in anxious conclave with your accountant about what precisely you think you can get away with.

But Obama isn’t in the business of promoting moral relativism, so how come Geithner survived, when Daschle and Killefer, not to mention Bill Richardson (who withdrew as nominee for Commerce Secretary over charges of favoritism in contract awards) all went down? The populist answer you hear often enough is, "What the bankers want, the bankers get, and they wanted Geithner." His designated role is to be prime exponent for their cause, which is continued government bail-out at tax-payers’ expense.

Geithner and his boss, president Obama, are all for ongoing bail-out of the banks, and – it seems – for the so-called “aggregator bank” or “bad bank” that will relieve at face value the bankers of their worthless assets. There’s talk of another $1 trillion or so for bank rescue. Senator Jim Tester of Montana said this week he thinks the bank bail-out tab will rise to $11 trillion.

As Daschle withdrew, Obama called in the networks seriatim and told them (this is from the NBC transcript) that “I've got to own up to my mistake which is that ultimately it's important for this administration to send a message that there aren't two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes."
After the lunatic obduracy of Bush Jr that he’d never made a mistake, it was refreshing to hear a president admit equably he’d screwed up, though he probably shouldn’t do it again for at least a year. But people aren’t so stupid as not to realize that what nomination hearings mostly show is that there are indeed two sets of rules and Geithner’s successful confirmation and the ongoing bank bailouts confirm they are securely in place, however manifestly honest a fellow the new occupant of the White House may be.

Incidentally, there’s something distinctly sexist about the treatment according Killefer (gone) and Hilda Solis, whose confirmation hearing as Labor Secretary has now been suspended. Both these women’s supposed problems with the IRS are in a different category to Daschle’s and Geithner’s defalcations. Solis’ purported problem is that her husband has a federal tax lien against his name in the public record. Killefer’s difficulty was $900 in unpaid unemployment taxes for domestic help. Really! This is all an argument for the flat tax. Of course Solis’ real problem is that she supports the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for workers to unionize. Republicans and many Democrats in Congress have been told firmly by their corporate sponsors that EFCA must not pass.
Dr Gupta’s Case Book

Of all the nominations and suggested appointments to Obama’s team, the proposed installation of CNN’s TV doc, Sanjay Gupta, as Surgeon-General is possibly the most frivolously objectionable, just as Daschle’s was one of the most arrogantly disgusting. Why not go the whole hog and put up Hugh Laurie?

I’m glad to say that CounterPunch can make available a measured dissection of Doc Gupta’s qualifications by Vicente Navarro, long recognized as an authoritative voice on genuine health reform. In the new edition of our newsletter, Navarro reviews Gupta’s services to the pharmaceutical industry, his ignorance about public health issues and his opposition to Single Payer and writes:

“I find it highly worrisome that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is likely to be appointed head of the USPHS. He is not an expert on public health and is not sufficiently knowledgeable, or competent, to do the job. Training and experience in neurosurgery do not provide the public health knowledge that the position requires. But, what is far more alarming is that he will most likely be the media spokesperson for the task force on health care reform. And this means that a person hostile to a single-payer system (the type of system that has most support among people in the U.S.); a person clearly unsympathetic to the principle of the government’s guaranteeing universality of health care coverage; a person who is part of the media that have been obfuscating, negating, and avoiding the real problems in health and medical care in this country , will be in control of selling the message of change in U.S. medical care. Is this the change we were promised by candidate Obama?”

How Bad Will It Get?

In This Issue:
- On The Edge

 - Paul Krugman



- Why Geithner Was Worse Than Daschle

- Tarp Fund Is Misleading the Public

- Interesting Letter to the Herald by Doug Darlington

- Yellow-headed Blackbird, Celebrating Spring in Baker County

- Convict Bush & Cheney
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No Comment at this point....
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On The Edge

 By Paul Krugman


February 06, 2009 "New York Times"
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article21918.htm

--- A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.



It's as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened - yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there's a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.



Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what's at stake - of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.



It's hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we're in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving - a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now. Developers of commercial real estate, watching rents fall and financing costs soar, are slashing their investment plans. Businesses are canceling plans to expand capacity, since they aren't selling enough to use the capacity they have. And exports, which were one of the U.S. economy's few areas of strength over the past couple of years, are now plunging as the financial crisis hits our trading partners.

Meanwhile, our main line of defense against recessions - the Federal Reserve's usual ability to support the economy by cutting interest rates - has already been overrun. The Fed has cut the rates it controls basically to zero, yet the economy is still in free fall.



It's no wonder, then, that most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we're headed for a deep, prolonged slump. Some private analysts predict double-digit unemployment. The Congressional Budget Office is slightly more sanguine, but its director, nonetheless, recently warned that "absent a change in fiscal policy ... the shortfall in the nation's output relative to potential levels will be the largest - in duration and depth - since the Depression of the 1930s."

Worst of all is the possibility that the economy will, as it did in the '30s, end up stuck in a prolonged deflationary trap.



We're already closer to outright deflation than at any point since the Great Depression. In particular, the private sector is experiencing widespread wage cuts for the first time since the 1930s, and there will be much more of that if the economy continues to weaken.



As the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out almost 80 years ago, deflation, once started, tends to feed on itself. As dollar incomes fall in the face of a depressed economy, the burden of debt becomes harder to bear, while the expectation of further price declines discourages investment spending. These effects of deflation depress the economy further, which leads to more deflation, and so on.



And deflationary traps can go on for a long time. Japan experienced a "lost decade" of deflation and stagnation in the 1990s - and the only thing that let Japan escape from its trap was a global boom that boosted the nation's exports. Who will rescue America from a similar trap now that the whole world is slumping at the same time?



Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won't have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that's why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective - to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts - are so destructive.



So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It's time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation's future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.



Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics. 

© 2009 The New York Times
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Why Geithner Was Worse Than Daschle
by Donald L. Barlett & James B. Steele
February 4, 2009 | 8:44am

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-04/why-geithner-was-worse-than-daschle

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team—and authors of The Great American Tax Dodge—on the breakdown of America’s tax system—and why Timothy Geithner’s lapses were far more egregious than Tom Daschle’s.

The tax troubles of some of President Obama’s Cabinet nominees have exposed one of Washington’s dirty little secrets: Tax avoidance, error and fraud are out of control.

The terms "taxpayer error" and "taxpayer mistake" have become convenient ways to describe the complete breakdown of the American tax system. By our own rough estimate, as much as $600 billion—more than two-thirds of the government’s stimulus package—is lost each year as a result of tax fraud and avoidance.

Geithner actually acknowledged years ago that he owed the taxes—but didn’t pay them until he was nominated for
TheTreasury job. That hardly counts as a mistake.

But don’t look for Congress to order the IRS to begin collecting. For a quarter-century, lawmakers have toiled tirelessly to discourage enforcement of the Internal Revenue Code. Thomas F. Daschle and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner are the latest poster boys for the success of that campaign.

But their offenses were not equal. Despite the fact that Geithner sailed through the confirmation process—while Daschle went up in flames—Geithner’s tax troubles were actually far more egregious. People tend to give Geithner a pass, because the overall amount he owed was smaller and it just involved Social Security and Medicare, rather than income tax. But Geithner actually acknowledged years ago that he owed the taxes—but didn’t pay them until he was nominated for the Treasury job. That hardly counts as a mistake.

Daschle, for his part, failed to count as income the value of a car and driver he received from a New York private-equity firm, InterMedia Advisors, during 2005-2007. He also overstated charitable contributions and understated income from InterMedia, which paid him $1 million a year. Daschle filed amended tax returns last month reporting $128,203 in additional taxes and $11,964 in interest. The revised tax returns were submitted after President Obama announced that he intended to nominate Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services.

Geithner’s situation was nonetheless a bigger ethical lapse. As an employee of the International Monetary Fund in 2001 and later years, Geithner was responsible for sending a check to the IRS to cover his own payroll taxes. He didn’t do so. What he did do was submit a request to the IMF for reimbursement of those taxes. And he collected.

According to the Senate Finance Committee, Geithner “filled out, signed and submitted an annual tax-allowance request with the IMF that states, ‘I wish to apply for tax allowance of US federal and state income taxes and the difference between the ‘self-employed’ and ‘employed’ obligation of the US Social Security tax which I will pay on my Fund income.’” In other words, Geithner—now charged with making sure Americans obey the tax laws—was given money by his employer to pay his taxes, but then didn't pay them. Not until, that is, he decided to become Treasury secretary.
Geithner dismissed his actions as “careless mistakes.” Whatever the case, the “mistakes” were not detected until he was a candidate for the top job at Treasury. That’s when he paid, years late, $34,023 in self-employment taxes that he owed and $8,679 in interest, for a total of $42,702.

Tom Harkin, the Iowa senator, was one of only three Democrats disturbed enough to vote against Geithner’s confirmation. As he put it on the Senate floor: “How can Mr. Geithner speak with any credibility and authority as America’s chief tax-enforcement officer?”

Geithner has plenty of company. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans—quite likely several million—also are ignoring or avoiding their payroll-tax obligations. Their ranks have swelled as a result of the government’s outsourcing of contracts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But contract employees everywhere often are paid through companies operating abroad that do not withhold the taxes deducted from the paychecks of most working Americans. For its part, Congress has made sure that the IRS lacks the resources required to collect those taxes, as well as income taxes.

Beginning with the Reagan revolution in the 1980s, Congress deliberately stymied tax-law enforcement. It refused to authorize adequate funding. It slashed enforcement efforts. It killed effective programs in place since the 1960s, like the Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program. Under that program, IRS subjected a select number of returns to intensive audits to determine the extent of taxpayer fraud and error so as to better allocate enforcement resources. But in 1995, after three decades, lawmakers finally marshaled enough support to terminate the TCMP audits. It did so by starving the agency for funds. In a related development, when lawmakers forced the canning of thousands of IRS agents, a jubilant Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, said that it would mean fewer “agents looking through your files.” In other words, taxpayers who cheated could continue to do so with impunity—at the expense of law-abiding citizens who paid the taxes they owed.

How bad is it? The giant Swiss bank UBS maintains secret accounts for 19,000 Americans who have failed to report their existence as required by law. Those accounts hold $18 billion.

The Swiss are resisting efforts to force disclosure. Even if the account holders are identified it would mean little. As longtime Washington tax lawyer and analyst Martin Lobel puts it, “nothing much is going to happen.” That’s because the IRS lacks the resources to pursue that many tax cases.

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele are contributing editors at Vanity Fair and have been writing about taxes for nearly four decades. Barlett and Steele have won virtually every major national journalism award including two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards. They are the authors of The Great American Tax Dodge, How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You, and six other books.

See also Democracy Now for February 6, 2009:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/6/investigative_duo_jim_steele_and_don
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February 6, 2009

Regulator Says Bailout Fund Is Misleading the Public
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/business/economy/06tarp.html?_r=1&sq=Bank%20Bailout&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

By REUTERS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Watchdogs monitoring the government’s bank bailout called for an overhaul Thursday, with one accusing those running it of misleading the public, while senators slammed the program as chaotic and poorly managed.
Under the $700 billion program meant to stabilize the financial system, the Treasury Department has so far spent nearly $300 billion to bolster financial institutions and automakers in exchange for preferred shares and warrants.

But in buying those securities, Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary, misled the public about how it was going to price them, said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and head of an oversight panel for the bailout, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

“Treasury simply did not do what it said it was doing,” Ms. Warren said at a hearing before the Senate banking committee. Many members of the panel condemned management of the program, which is barely four months old.
The program proceeded “in a chaotic, unorganized and ad hoc manner,” said Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii.
Neil M. Barofsky, another watchdog for the program, told the Senate committee his office was turning to criminal investigations. “That’s going to be a large focus of my office,” he said.

On projections by some analysts that TARP may need more money soon, Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said, “There will be no additional funding for this program without airtight assurances that it will be better managed.”
The Obama administration plans to unveil a strategy on Monday aimed at reviving the credit markets, helping struggling homeowners and lifting the economy out of recession.

Tighter TARP management is expected to be a part of that package. A preview of that came Wednesday when the White House announced a $500,000 annual cap on executive pay at companies receiving TARP money.
The Bush administration began TARP in response to an alarming slowdown in global capital markets set off by a housing slump that undermined mortgage-backed bonds carried on the books of major financial institutions.

Congress approved the $700 billion program after Mr. Paulson said it would be used to buy broken bonds and clean off banks’ balance sheets. But days after that approval, Mr. Paulson changed the focus to buying preferred shares in banks.
Ms. Warren, head of TARP’s Congressional oversight panel, told the banking committee that after three months on the job, her panel was still not getting enough answers from Treasury. She described the bailout as “an opaque process at best.”
Ms. Warren said she plans to release a report on Friday that calculates Treasury put about $254 billion into financial institutions in 2008, but got only $176 billion in value.

“That’s a shortfall of about $78 billion,” she said, adding that Mr. Paulson “was not entirely candid” in his description of TARP’s bank capital injection program.

Mr. Barofsky, the independent TARP inspector general at Treasury, raised concerns about potential fraud in one of several programs financed by bailout money, the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility. “Treasury should consider requiring that some baseline fraud prevention standards be imposed,” Mr. Barofsky said in his first report to Congress.
He told the committee the government had collected more than $271 million in dividends from its TARP-financed bank shares and said the department needed a strategy for administering its holdings.

A Treasury spokesman said the department would adopt many of Mr. Barofsky’s recommendations.
Treasury holds $279.2 billion in preferred shares from 319 financial institutions, paying dividends of 5 to 10 percent, according to Mr. Barofsky’s report.

The government also received common stock warrants from 230 institutions, most of which are now out of the money. The largest positions in warrants include the American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and General Motors.
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Get back to basics, America

http://www.bakercityherald.com/Letters/Letters-to-the-editor-for-February-3-2009
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Can Spring Be Far Away? I Hope Not. . . .

Birders are spotting tundra swans and white-fronted geese across Oregon this last week. Spring is just around the corner--well almost.

Yellow-headed Blackbird, Celebrating Spring in Baker County
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Convict Bush & Cheney
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/39585