Occupy the Supercommittee

Well they can’t ignore income inequality anymore.

Thank you Occupy Wall Street.

But despite the faux populist tone and understanding emanating from the White House, I’m not convinced President Obama or the rest of our politicians are getting the message.

If they were getting it, they wouldn’t be continuing to pursue policies that place the costs of our continuing economic crisis squarely on the backs of the 99 percent, while the 1 percent uses their political clout to avoid any inconvenience.

For example, the Obama administration has allowed California to cut hundreds of millions of dollars to Medi-Cal, which provides health care to the state’s poorest residents.

If the president’s party was getting it, the Democrats on the so-called Super Committee wouldn’t be pursuing a host of draconian cuts including $3 trillion in cuts to federal health care programs as part of a so-called “grand bargain,” along with some modest tax increases for the country’s wealthiest, you know “job creators,” who are just chomping at the bit to stop outsourcing jobs as soon as they cut yet another tax cut.

As for the Republicans, they’re maintaining the position that their corporate and Wall Street benefactors should have to pay fewer taxes, while the rest of us should get along with less.

I don’t know who these politicians think this bargaining is so grand for, certainly not the 99 percent.

They talk gamely about having “skin in the game” as though they’d be doing the suffering as a result of their proposed cuts. Meanwhile, the House members of the supercommittee did exceptionally well in their service during the third quarter, raking in nearly $372,000 in fundraising from the nation’s financial sector.

This disreputable bunch have turned what is supposed to be a serious democratic process into a demonstration of what our legislature has become – an auction where the government is for sale to the highest bidder, behind closed doors.

As the weather gets frostier in the nation’s capital, the Occupy movement might want to consider the supercommittee’s digs as someplace to get in out from out of the cold.

Martin Column / Occupy / Supercommittee - 10/31/2011

The Right to Remain Silenced

Here’s another stark inequality that has come to characterize our nation: for every 99 Occupy Wall Street protestors who’ve been arrested, about one millionth of one fat cat has been arrested. Okay, I realize you can’t arrest a tiny slice of a fat cat, no matter how fat, so let me put it this way: Over a thousand Americans have been arrested around the country for protesting Wall Street in recent weeks, according to estimates. But after a half hour scouring the web, I can only find a handful of  instances of financiers or speculators being arrested for causing the collapse of our economy back in 2008 – that’s out of the hundreds of thousands who work for the Money Industry. Not one of the titans of Wall Street – the hundred-million-dollar-a-year wizards who were manipulating our economy for their personal pleasure – have been perp-walked into a paddy wagon, much less prosecuted.

The internet’s aflame with this irony, so there’s no point in belaboring it.

More important, but far less noticed, is the nature of the crime for which most of the 99% protestors have been arrested:  exercising what many Americans consider basic First Amendment rights – the freedom of speech and assembly. As we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks, in many places in this country you have no First Amendment right to walk down a street, sleep in a park, enter a public building. This isn’t anything new: under many court rulings interpreting the US Constitution, government can place “reasonable” restrictions on your rights, so as to protect the rights of others not to be disturbed.

That made sense back when “rights” belonged only to human beings.

But we now live in a new day, under a different view of the Constitution, courtesy of five members of the United States Supreme Court. According to their infamous decision in the Citizens United case, corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings when it comes to the freedom to express themselves by spending money to buy elections or influence votes.

There’s just one hitch to the Supreme Court’s equation of humans with corporations: when corporations exercise their First Amendment right to spend money, they completely overwhelm the First Amendment rights of humans. Sure, you can exercise your First Amendment right to donate a few bucks to a candidate for public office, or to a ballot initiative. But once a corporation opens its bank vault, your freedom of speech right is obliterated.

It used to be that the Supreme Court upheld laws that put “reasonable” restrictions on corporate spending in politics, under the theory that one person’s exercise of their rights should not disturb another’s. But Citizens United stripped that quaint notion from the law books. Until we amend the Constitution, the fat cats get to make the laws and break the laws. The rest of us have the right to remain silenced.

This travesty of democracy is now laid bare in cities and towns throughout the United States. There’s been plenty of fun poked at the strange hand gestures developed by the Occupy Wall Street supporters to substitute for applause or boos – so as not to disturb the peace of the nearby corporations. Protestors who dare to up the decibel level by using more advanced technology – a megaphone – in a public park in New York City, in the hope they can make themselves heard merely across the street, face arrest. Meanwhile, up in the executive suites, a small number of stupendously wealthy and powerful individuals order billions of dollars worth of lobbyists, lawyers and propaganda pumped into our democracy every year. It’s a deafening and unstoppable inundation… intended to make sure no one can hear what the rest of us have to say.

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Occupy / Outrage / Supreme Court - 10/24/2011

9 For the 99 – Restoring the Real Economy

Remember how aggressively our leaders have talked about tackling unemployment and the housing crisis?

Remember all the strong action to make good on their promises?

Me neither.

Remember how all our leaders criticized each other for taking money from Wall Street and other powerful corporate interests?

Remember all the potent steps they took to rid our democracy of corporate money?

Me neither.

You’ve probably heard of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9-tax plan, the scheme he says will get the economy going. Do you think it will work?

Here’s our proposal to restore the real economy. Unlike the solutions proposed by our leaders, these proposals focus on the problems faced every day by most people, not bankers.

We’ll be offering it at OccupyLA in the next couple of days to complement their work.

  1. Support 28A, constitutional amendment overturning U.S. Supreme Court “Citizens United” ruling to stop the flood of toxic corporate cash poisoning our democracy
  2. Prosecute Wall Street crime, not Wall Street protestors
  3. Give citizens same right to borrow taxpayer money from the Fed at the same low interest rates that Wall Street got in the bailout
  4. Cap bank fees and interest rates
  5. Offer real foreclosure relief:  Require banks to provide principal reduction for underwater mortgages, including allowing judges to reduce home mortgage principal in bankruptcy court to encourage mortgage modifications
  6. Repeal unnecessary tax loopholes and other corporate subsidies (overseas tax breaks, local & state tax bribes for moving jobs from one community to another, make corporations pay taxes) and transfer savings to taxpayers and small businesses in the form of tax cuts.
  7. Repeal corporate-backed NAFTA-style trade deals, which export U.S. jobs overseas, reduce wages of American workers to that of laborers in foreign countries and weaken environmental regulation.
  8. Restore traditional separations between federally guaranteed consumer banking from other, riskier, financial business.
  9. Reform student debt, stop predatory practices.

 

 

For more information, check out http://www.wheresourmoney.org

On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/wheresourmoney

Twitter http://twitter.com/ - !/WheresOurMoney

Support 28A http://www.wheresourmoney.org/campaign-2011/

 

 

 

 

 

Action / Citizens United / Congress / Foreclosure / Martin Column / Supreme Court - 10/20/2011

What's Plan B For Jobs?

That’s the big question after the Republicans, true to their word, killed President Obama’s $447 billion jobs proposal.

In response, the president has pledged to break up his plan, which is already too small to significantly reduce unemployment, into even smaller chunks that the Republicans might swallow. It’s hard to find anybody who believes that’s a serious plan to put a dent in unemployment.

The only job the president seems to have a clue about preserving is his own, continuing to raise campaign cash at a record-breaking pace, raising $70 million for his own and Democrats’ reelection.

Meanwhile Republicans pursue their own single-minded agenda to enhance corporate power and their own – destroy President Obama, reduce taxes and cripple government regulation.

Unfortunately for Republicans, when you look at the facts, regulations don’t turn out to be much of a threat to jobs after all

The only legislation the two parties agree on are a handful of NAFTA-style trade agreements that most Americans fear will only lead to more outsourcing.

Where does that leave the 99 percent?

Out in the street.

That’s where they’ll be across the country and the globe today, to register their frustration with a political and financial elite whose actions created persistently high unemployment, plummeting home values, social service cutbacks and a world of growing economic uncertainty.

As OccupyLA states on its web site, “We have been giving away our representation to people who do not deserve it …”

Check here for a list of demonstrations around the world.

 

 

Congress / D.C. Disconnect / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 10/15/2011

News Flash: Giving Banks Billions Won't Create Jobs

Last year, President Obama signed into law the $30 billion Small Business Lending Fund as a way to stimulate job creation.

"It's going to speed relief to small businesses across the country right away," Obama said at the time.

It was supposed to help create 500,000 jobs.

Well, not so much.

Not only has the program been a dismal failure, with few banks applying to participate, but it turned into another giant taxpayer handout to bankers.

Only $4 billion was handed over to banks under the lending scheme. The bankers didn’t use it to boost small businesses, and it turned out they weren’t even required to. Instead the bankers used more than $2 billion to pay off their bailout debt to the Troubled Asset  Relief Program, according to a story in the October 12 Wall Street Journal (no link).

“It was basically a bailout for a 100-plus banks,” Giovanni Coratolo, vice-president of small-business policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Journal.

None of this should come as a surprise. Bankers said at the time that the problem was not that they didn’t have enough money to lend, but that demand for loans was weak because of the continuing bad economy.

“Until you start to see the economy improve and job growth you won’t see lots of loan demand,” Thomas Dorr, chief financial officer of Bank of Birmingham in Michigan, which received $4.6 million from the program, told Bloomberg. “You can’t force banks to lend.”

The lending program was either just another veiled handout to the banks or another lame attempt at trickle-down stimulus. Either way it contributes to the strong impression that our political leaders aren’t actually working on solutions, they’re getting in our way.

Congress / D.C. Disconnect / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / TARP - 10/13/2011

The Real "Entitlements"

For most of us, the Wall Street housing bubble popped in 2008, with painful consequences.

But for those at the top of the nation’s too big to fail banks, the party keeps rocking, even though their institutions are still in trouble and wouldn’t even exist without taxpayers’ generosity.

Take for example that wild and crazy region known as Bank of Americaland, where dwells one of the country’s biggest and sickest banks.

It’s basically never recovered from the financial collapse, which, in Bank of America’s case included a nasty hangover induced by swallowing up the king of sleazy subprime lending, Countrywide, as well as fallen investment banking titan Merrill Lynch (labeled in 2009 by the Wall Street Journal the “$50 billion deal from Hell – no link).

Here’s how Bank of America has squandered its share of the bailout: engaging in a pattern of improper foreclosures on military families and spending millions in campaign contributions and lobbying to fight regulation of its business. Most recently, the bank imposed a new $60 annual debit card on its customers.

After all, the bank’s president, Brian Moynihan, insisted, Bank of America “has a right make a profit,” which occasionally will have to be guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers.

The company is doing so poorly that it’s going to have lay off 30,000 of its employees, some of whom will spend their waning days training their lower paid, outsourced replacements. But the company isn't doing so poorly that it didn’t manage to tuck away $11 million to the ease of parting for two of its top executives.

After all, they’re executives of a floundering bank that’s made a series of poor business decisions. So they’re “entitled” to get even more money on top of their fat salaries.

Across the political spectrum, it’s become fashionable to belittle programs like Social Security and Medicaid as “entitlements,” turning that into a dirty word. But like so much about our current, out of touch with reality political debate, it’s completely upside down.

The way the debate has been framed by our political leaders and media, they’re only “entitlements” if they’re claimed by the 99 percent of Americans who have suffered in the collapse of the middle-class and economic meltdown.

We need a crackdown on “entitlements” all right, but on the real  entitlements, the ones claimed by the top 1 percent, like those Bank of America lays claim to, scooping up millions for its executives while gouging its customers and buying our political system through lobbying and campaign contributions.

But Bank of America won’t give up these entitlements without a fight, because the bankers believe that these are the benefits they’ have a right to, along with their profits.

Bank of America (BoA) / Martin Column - 10/13/2011

Rise of the Machines

In the Terminator movies, a massive computer network created by the U.S. military known as Skynet suddenly becomes sentient and launches a catastrophic attack on humankind that reduces the planet to rubble. Most of the action in the films takes place before that holocaust, as desperate humans travel back in time hoping to prevent Skynet from being invented in the first place. Technology in that bleak future was no gleaming iPad. It was a mortal enemy.

Unfortunately, there's no unwinding the myriad events of the 1980s and 90s that led to the Wall Street financial implosion in 2008. What's left now is the economic rubble left by the collapse of a massive speculation machine built by Wall Street firms with the connivance of elected officials and regulators.

The high priests and priestesses of the Money Industry were those who could program the computers to predict the market and trade at light speed.  Algorithms were the bible code of Wall Street. Billions were made by these middlemen as finance went viral, growing to a third of the U.S. economy, drawing the best and the brightest into the processing of paper and the manipulation of stocks, commodities, insurance contracts, and later packages of bundles of financial assets including mortgages, and then insurance contracts on those derivatives, as they are known.

Finally even the high priests and priestesses – never mind the regulators – no longer understood that the machinery was not doing, nor what any of the newly invented virtual assets were worth. Trading moved from the noisy floors of exchanges where traders frenetically bought and sold to super-fast processors operating silently on proprietary networks.

In retrospect, May 10, 2010 may come to be remembered as the day we had inkling that the machines were taking over. Suddenly stocks started falling in value and no one could figure out why. Within a matter of minutes on that afternoon, the Dow dropped 700 points. Then it miraculously recovered. No one really knows for sure, but most observers suspect that the so called "flash crash" was the result of high speed computers programmed to automatically react to unspecified market indicators. Today's New York Times reports that the regulators are fearful of more computer-driven crashes - and so are investors.

Another date to remember is June 1, 2009. That day, Air France flight 447, a highly computerized fly by wire Airbus A330 airplane, fell 35,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean off South America. All 228 on board died.

The cause remained a mystery until the black box flight recorder was recovered from the deeps earlier this year. Investigators determined that the pilots did exactly the opposite of what they were trained to do, and based on faulty information from the airplane's computer system literally flew the plane into the water.

Science fiction has become fact:  we are gradually, almost invisibly, forfeiting our judgment and our human attributes to technologies we do not fully understand and as yet do not fully control. This surrender pervades the culture: Corporations are persons for purposes of permitting them to exercise and ultimately swamp our First Amendment rights, the US Supreme Court has decreed. Restoring the primacy of human beings in the political process is imperative.

Like the Constitution, technology should serve us, not the other way around. An astounding outpouring of grief and affection for Steve Jobs this week has been followed by well-deserved odes to his creativity and acumen.  Jobs democratized computers, putting them in the hands of the masses. The operative distinction is that apple products gave consumers more control over their assets – music, video, photos. Every one of Jobs' creations came with an on-off switch. One wonders what the man had to say about technology run amok, used to gild the lives of a few at the expense of many more.

Citizens United / Financial Crisis / Harvey Column - 10/10/2011

Tweet Charlie: Pop the Corporate Personhood Question

Now that Mitt Romney has taken a stand on corporate personhood, shouldn’t the rest of the Republican field?

Luckily, they have the perfect opportunity to all go on the record this Tuesday at their debate in New Hampshire.

They may need a little help. That’s why we’re tweeting the debate moderator, Charlie Rose, to remind him about this key issue and suggest he should pin the candidates down on their stance.

In case you missed it, Romney made his position clear at the Iowa State Fair in August, when he said, in response to an angry heckler, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

The only other Republican candidate who I found has taken a stand is Ron Paul, who came out strongly against the notion that corporations are people.

Rose also might want to follow up with Romney: if corporations are people for purposes of political contributions, why aren’t they people for the purposes of paying taxes, where they have an entirely separate set of laws that enable corporations to take advantage of all kinds of arcane loopholes, so that many of the largest companies, like General Electric, pay absolutely no taxes?

If Charlie wants to get beyond the rhetoric to the heart of the uneasy feeling most people are having about our political system, he should follow up with these questions:

Is it good for our country for corporate lobbyists to have unlimited access to our politicians to engineer trillions in no strings attached bailouts and other special treatment for their clients, while Americans without that access get screwed?

Is it OK for corporations to buy our politicians with lavish anonymous contributions, making a mockery of our democracy? 

Nothing shows the disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country better than the U.S. Supreme Court’s terrible Citizen United decision last year, which defined corporations as people under the First Amendment for purposes of influencing elections and unleashed a tsunami of anonymous corporate donations to politicians and their PACs.

Isn’t the best way to fix the corporate dominance over our politics to pass a constitutional amendment, like the one we have proposed here, to undo Citizens United?

I’m sure I’m not the only American who’d like to hear the Republican candidates’ answers to these questions. I’m sure plenty of other Americans would like to hear the answers as well.

Tweet Charlie @charlieroseshow. Ask him in your own words or feel free to send him this post.

Go ahead, Charlie, pop the questions.

Citizens United / Martin Column - 10/07/2011

Government Under the Influence

While the media’s grand poobahs have been poopooing the Occupy movement as a bunch of clueless hippies, the occupiers themselves couldn’t be more focused on the source of their frustration.

It’s a political system addicted to corporate cash, with politicians willing to do and say anything to keep it coming.

The occupiers communicate a keen sense of just how outrageously we have been betrayed by a government captured by corporate campaign contributions, lobbyists and the cozy swinging door between government and big business.

Though the occupiers have been criticized for not arriving with a full legislative agenda in tow, the homemade cardboard signs they carry pithily describe the world that has been too often, until now, left out of the political debate between our two parties, which, just like other kinds of addicts, are unable to have an honest conversation about their substance abuse, or to acknowledge the damage it’s done.

The issue of corporate influence peddling has also been largely left out of the media’s horse race political coverage, which focuses on philosophical differences between left and right rather than what the occupiers are focused on – the corporate might that has overwhelmed our politics.

The occupiers know that at the root of our financial collapse, bank bailout, jobless recovery and continuing housing crisis is one root cause – the undue influence of bankers and corporate titans over our political system.


So it’s left to the youth camped out in parks across the country to pose the tough questions.

They’re picking up on the strong rhetoric Barack Obama himself used back when he was a candidate about the need for fundamental change in our political system. But the president abandoned that quest, and now he’s got to raise $1 billion dollars to fund his reelection ambitions.

The occupiers have also picked up on Obama’s call for civility, with their own devotion to process and making sure everybody gets heard. The cynics are having a blast mocking the occupiers’ general assembly meetings. But the atmosphere at the occupations is a world away from the toxic cable talking point battles that have gotten the country nowhere. Let’s see who has the last laugh.

Here at WheresOurMoney, we’re offering a powerful antidote to the toxic flow of corporate money that is poisoning our democracy: a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s wrong-headed Citizens United ruling, which said that for purposes of political contributions, corporations are just like people. This terrible decision will only make a bad situation worse and we’ve got to start the fight against it now. You can read the amendment, get more background on Citizens United, and sign a petition here.

Citizens United / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 10/06/2011

Steve Jobs and the Democratization of Technology

I am old enough to remember when a computer was something owned by a corporation or a university and filled a huge, specially constructed room. I did my college thesis using one of those “mainframes” to tabulate punch cards that contained data, which I inputted through a giant typewriter.

Then came the Apple II, a 1 MHz computer that had 4k of RAM, recorded data onto an audiocassette tape – later replaced by a 51/4 inch floppy disk drive. When it went on sale in 1977, it cost $1298.  With some trepidation about potentially undermining its mainframe sales to big business, IBM hurried to catch up with Apple, introducing its first personal computer in 1981. The Apple II was followed by the Macintosh in 1984. Quickly the personal computer found its way into the homes and offices of hundreds of millions of Americans, and later, through the iPhone, into their pockets.

Much will be said over the next few days about how Steve Jobs revolutionized the entertainment business. And he did, indeed.

But consider the impact his vision of a personal computer has made in placing the power of technology into the hands of the People. I wrote Proposition 103 on a Mac. I printed out campaign leaflets out an Apple LaserWriter, a $4000 printer that let you change the type style and made what I wrote look like it was printed by a professional press.

Today, as Americans assemble to protest our economic plight and the politicians’ fealty to powerful corporate interests, they access unfiltered information and communicate freely with each other through the internet and social networks that could not exist but for the democratization of computer technology pioneered by Steve Jobs.

Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 10/05/2011