Synthetic Tea

If you were looking for leadership of a real grass-roots movement for social change, Dick Armey might not be your first choice.

After he rose to become House Republican majority leader, he quit to cash in on his political connections with the top lobbying shop DLA Piper law firm. He’s also on the payroll of the Koch Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, one of the main sources of organizational backing of the Tea Party.

I’ve been critical of the Obama campaign’s hypocritical promises of a new kind of fundraising campaign that relies only on small donors, not fat cats, while he seeks donations from Wall Street.

But Obama’s nemeses in the Tea Party are no better, portraying themselves as a grassroots populist movement while relying on members of the Republican permanent government like Armey for leadership.

Armey actually had to quit his lobbying job because of his DLA  Piper clients favored Obama’s health care reform, after the president cut a deal to secure support from drug companies. The Tea Party, meanwhile, has been dead set against the Obama plan.

It’s not that somebody like Armey, with his vast knowledge gained from slithering through the corridors of power all these years, might not have something to offer an authentic grassroots movement. But wouldn’t he have to offer a renunciation of his past connections before he participate? Wouldn’t he have to acknowledge that he had been part of the problem before he could be part of the solution?

Whatever minor disagreements Armey’s former clients might have with the Tea Party agenda, their interests dovetail neatly. Demonizing government and railing against strong regulations will only mean fewer watchdogs for the drug companies and bankers DLA Piper serves, and fewer tools to hold them accountable.

 

Martin Column - 06/28/2011

Get Off Corporate Crack

I spent last week at the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis, a gathering of activists who embrace the progressive label in one way or another.

The news media was there in force, churning out stories about how these progressives are dissatisfied with President Obama’s performance. That’s especially true in his handling of the economy, where unemployment is still too high, the foreclosure crisis is still rampant, the financial sector still hasn’t been adequately reformed after its excesses and Wall Street lobbyists have tangled up in knots even the meager attempts to regulate bankers.

One refrain summed up the frustration with the president’s performance on the economy: “No one has gone to jail.”

But beyond the venting that the media focused on was another, potentially bigger story that has the possibility of leapfrogging the divide between left and right.

That was the emerging demand for a mass movement to rid our politics of the corporate funding that has been as devastating as crack cocaine was in the streets.

Our politicians are hooked on corporate crack, and they will do anything and say anything to get it. They will break any promise, without caring how foolish and hypocritical they look.

This corporate money undermines both parties: Democrats promise to protect workers and consumers but end up promoting ineffective half-measures, while Republicans express support for the free market but actually support the unfettered power of a corporate oligarchy.

I had the opportunity to point out a recent example of how this corporate crack makes fools out of politicians and even the president of the United States during a Netroots session with Jeremy Bird, national strategy adviser to the Obama campaign.

I recounted how one day after reading about a secret meeting between Obama and his Wall Street donors at the White House, I received an email from Obama asking for five bucks, promising a different kind of fundraising campaign that didn’t rely on fat cats.

“Which is it?” I asked Bird. You can read Roll Call’s account here.

Bird responded that Obama’s “multi-faceted” fundraising wouldn’t take money from political campaign committees or lobbyists,  but Wall Street contributions are welcome.

Does the president really see a distinction, or is he just hoping no one is paying attention?

If the politicians are counting on people feeling too cynical and helpless to take action, that may be changing, sparked by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens’ United, which said that corporate campaign contributions are a form of free speech so they cannot be restricted.

During another session, John Nichols, the Nation’s crusading Washington correspondent issued a fiery call for a nationwide movement to promote a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens’ United.

He compared the potential impact of such a movement to the impact of  the movement for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Though the “right to life” movement hasn’t achieved success. Nichols said, it has changed the nature of the debate.
Back on the subject of overturning Citizens’ United, Nichols said, “I can live without the actual constitutional amendment. But I can’t live without the movement.”

We need a movement that labels corporate crack exactly what it is.  It’s not speech. It’s bribery.

 

Action / Around the Web / Congress / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 06/22/2011

“If We Build It, He Will Come”

Washington has become Wall Street’s “field of dreams.” There, the money conglomerates engage in their beloved sport of financial speculation, cheered on by a small but powerful group of public officials who have sold out the rest of the country.

Deregulation was a home run for the financial industry. Wall Street’s friends in Washington sacked the rules of the game, unleashing the hedge funds, banks, investment firms, insurance companies and other speculators who made billions before the crash, then got billions more from the taxpayers after the crash.

Meanwhile, as today’s New York Times points out, almost nothing has been done about “derivatives,” the virtual technology for the speculation that drove our economy into the dugout three years ago. Federal agencies that were supposed to issue new regulations to prevent another debacle have been tied up in knots by Wall Street lawyers.

Jobless and fearful for their kids’ future, people are furious about what happened.  But it was always going to be a daunting task to mobilize the public behind the necessary reforms when they are so complex, and anything drafted to appeal to directly to Americans’ wallets – say, by providing a cap on credit card interest rates, or low-rate mortgages, or other forms of financial relief – would have inspired the financial industry to retaliate with nuclear weapons. Neither the President nor anyone in Congress were willing to start that fight, principled as it would have been.

So it has all come down to Elizabeth Warren, the brainiac Harvard law professor who suggested, in a law review article in 2005, that Congress create a new federal agency with the mission of protecting consumers against false advertising, misleading contracts and the general thievery of the financial industry.  Democrats proposed the agency as part of the Wall Street reform legislation in 2009, and after the industry thought they had whittled it down to something they could easily live with – or simply get around – Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the President signed it.

Warren was the obvious person for the job, and almost immediately Americans began calling on President Obama to nominate her for the post.

What Wall Street didn’t realize at first is that it is way, way easier for Americans to get behind a human being than a thousand-page piece of legislation that has been lawyered and lobbied into mush. America has become a celebrity-driven culture, and while Elizabeth Warren is no Lady Gaga, she is one of a small number of outsiders that have occasionally busted up the D.C. establishment – just as Ralph Nader did in the 1970s, and Jimmy Stewart fictionally did in the Frank Capra movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Whether President Obama will nominate Warren to the position has become the defining question of his Presidency for millions of Americans, especially those who voted for "change we can believe in" in 2008.

When confronted with demands by civil rights leaders to take action against racial discrimination in the late 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary retort was “make me do it.” Whether he ever said that, the strategy he suggested is literally page one of the best manual for citizen empowerment and political organizing.

Let’s put it in more contemporary terms. President Obama has made it clear he doesn’t want to nominate Warren. It’s just another fight he’d rather not have. He embraces consensus, not controversy.

But the President has to know she’s the best person for the job. So the burden is on Americans to make it impossible for him not to nominate her. Part of that means punishing the people who are working against her – members of Congress, and those in the Administration – because they are doing Wall Street’s dirty work. These are the same people who let Wall Street plunder our nation and then bailed Wall Street out with our money.

My guess is, we can make Obama do it.

Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Harvey Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 06/22/2011

Quotable - Paul Wellstone

The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

Paul Wellstone
former U.S. senator, Minnesota

 

Homepage Content / Quotable - 06/13/2011

Missing the Message

It’s absolutely clear that the Republicans mean to work with the big banks to block any financial reform, no matter how watered down, by any political means necessary.

The Republicans have opposed the president’s nominees in committee. As far as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, they oppose not only the popular consumer champion Elizabeth Warren to be its chief, they will oppose anyone President Obama nominates. The Republicans have made their intentions clear – they want to gut the agency before it’s born.

Meanwhile the bank lobbyists have gone to work on the regulators who are writing the actual rules to implement last year’s financial reforms, and have effectively stalled the process in its tracks.

To make sure that no one is missing the message, J.P. Morgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon went on the offensive this week, publicly stating that excessive financial regulation was weakening the economic recovery. Without offering specifics, Dimon told Fed chair Ben Bernanke at a bankers’ conference, “I have a great fear someone’s going to try to write a book in 20 years, and the book is going to talk about all the things that we did in the middle of the crisis to actually slow down recovery.”

While the bankers have been working feverishly behind the scenes to further water down the weak Dodd-Frank version of financial reform, Dimon’s statements are the most aggressive public challenge yet to any attempts to rein in the big banks.

What’s unclear is why the president is not meeting this assault on one of his proudest achievements (Wall Street reform) head on, despite the Republicans’ and bankers’ clear signals that they have no intention to compromise. Rather than mounting a strong public case for Warren, for example, the White House continues to float alternative, less qualified, nominees. Obama seems to be laboring under the illusion that there is somebody else who satisfy the Republicans. What’s baffling is that he has no reason to think so: the Republicans haven’t exactly been ambiguous. The bankers are also taking off the gloves, with only a few lonely voices in Washington to make the case for stronger reform.

When will our president get the message?

 

 

Around the Web / Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 06/10/2011

3 Steps Toward Real Economic Recovery

Democrats should be less worried less about Sarah Palin’s mangling of American history and more concerned about the Obama administration’s consistent underestimation of the recession since the financial collapse.

The president and his team has been downplaying the seriousness of the jobs and housing crises since they took office, repeatedly taking inadequate steps to address the twin fiascoes of foreclosure and unemployment, while wrongly conceding to Republicans that the political focus should be the short-term deficit.

This is not only bad for the country but bad politics for the Democrats, increasing the chances that voters will blame them for not fighting harder for programs to create jobs and straighten out the housing mess. Never mind that Republican efforts to address these issues amount to less than zero.

Nobody expects the president and his party to win every fight. But we do expect him not to wave the white flag before the fight starts.

Circumstances still offer the president opportunities to show that he finally gets it – and to signal a more aggressive approach.

First, the president can launch a fight for Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Warren is popular, articulate and sensible, and the agency was her idea in the first place. Of course the Republicans hate her, in fact they don’t want a single head of the agency. Republicans favor a committee to run the agency, the more easily for the banks to bamboozle it.

Second, he can replace his outgoing economic adviser, Austan  Goolsbee with somebody more tuned in to the jobs and housing crises. How bad was Goolsbee (and the administration’s economic policies he defended)?

Here’s how economist Firedoglake blogger Scarecrow put it after listening to Goolsbee Sunday, saying it was up to the private sector to create jobs now because government could do nothing: “If I’d been asleep for the last decade and woke up to ABC This Week’s interview of Presidential economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, I would assume that Mitt Romney won the 2008 election, that he was predictably following Republican dogma about how to recover from a severe financial collapse and recession...” Scarecrow wrote.

With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?

Third, Obama can fire his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who has shamelessly pandered to his banker cronies while ignoring Main Street’s woes since he helped engineer the bailout as head of the New York Fed prior to the Obama administration.

Of course it will take more than gestures and a few appointments for the president to tackle the continuing severe economic challenges we face. But he can still saddle up and take a brave ride on the right side of history, if he chooses.

 

Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 06/06/2011