Congress - Represent Consumers

Dummies For Austerity

From Athens, Greece to Stockton, California and Detroit, bankers feast while citizens and workers starve.

The diet takes many forms. But the basic idea behind it is that the only way to save our government is to starve it, cut services to those who need them most, and above all, keep the big bondholders and wealthy political contributors happy.

Meanwhile, beyond the government halls and bankers’ offices, the austerity diet causes real suffering.

In Greece, the bankers have exacted a painful price, with tax hikes, and layoffs that pushed unemployment over 27 percent, including 50 percent youth unemployment, in exchange for $310 billion in aid from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

And of course the money doesn’t go to the Greeks. It goes to the too big to fail bankers who the Greek government borrowed from.

Meanwhile the health consequences of austerity-related cuts to the social safety net amid extended recession across U.S. and are widespread and dire. Oxford and Stanford University researchers found that the U.S. suicide rate jumped during the 2007-2009 recession, with 4,750 “excess deaths” – beyond what pre-existing trends would predict, with the highest increases in the states that experienced the most job losses.

In Greece, suicide rates have skyrocketed, increasing 26 percent over the past year. The Oxford and Stanford University researchers found that, with cuts to HIV prevention and a huge increase in youth unemployment and drug abuse, the rate of the infection has risen 200 percent, while the country has seen its first malaria outbreak in decades after mosquito-spraying programs were cut.

In the U.S., more than 5 million Americans have lost access to health care – including Stockton’s retired city employees. Millions of long-term unemployed Americans will see their unemployment benefits slashed or eliminated as a result of the congressionally-approved sequester budget cuts. Meanwhile, in England, austerity policies have thrown 10,000 British families have been thrown into homelessness.

“The harms we have found include HIV and malaria outbreaks, shortages of essential medicines, lost healthcare access, and an avoidable epidemic of alcohol abuse, depression and suicide,” David Stuckler, Oxford researcher and co-author of “The Body Economic: Austerity Kills,” said. “Austerity is having a devastating effect.”

With no end in sight. In the U.S. Senate, it’s not just Republicans who are enthusiastically getting behInd austerity. Democrats supported a $4.1 billion cut to the nation’s food stamp program, the Nation’s Greg Kaufman reported.

In addition, while debating the farm bill, Democrats supported a draconian measure that would bar the families of those convicted of certain violent crimes from receiving food stamps – ever.

For his part, President Obama himself who has advocated cuts to Social Security (which will do nothing to bring down the deficit) in his budget earlier this year. His supporters say the president is just trying to appear more reasonable in budget negotiations than intransigent Republicans, and that the president would never cut Social Security. But they ignore the fact that when President Obama appointed a task force to make recommendations on entitlements in 2010, he stacked it with austerity hawks from both parties bent on cutting Social Security, like former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson. While that commission failed to agree on specific recommendations, the president has continued to pursue proposals that would reduce Social Security benefits.

Austerity’s proponents don’t even pretend that that the majority supports it. The bankers and the politicians assure us they know what’s best, then try to sell their noxious cutbacks through fear and demonization – of the undeserving poor, overpaid government workers and others characterized by losing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as the “47 percent” who get assistance from the government.

Sanjay Basu, the Stanford researcher who worked with Stuckler, insisted that the negative health affects of recession are worsened by austerity. The researchers found the negative health affects and the anguish that accompanies them aren’t inevitable. The citizens of European countries that chose stimulus and maintained social safety nets, like Germany, Iceland and Sweden, fared much better than countries that imposed austerity, like Spain, Italy and Greece.

We don’t have to swallow the austerity diet. But we will have to fight to get a menu that doesn’t include it.

“Ultimately what we show is that worsening health is not an inevitable consequence of economic recessions,” Basu said. “It's a political choice."

Americans Unchained: Guns, Government and Justice

I’m starting to understand why there are 311 million Americans and 310 million guns in America. It’s not just about hunting or collecting.

It’s about self-defense – not against street crime, which has dropped like a rock over the last two decades, but against a world that seems to have run amok, and against which the government frequently seems inept or powerless.

I’m not just talking about 9/11 – though I’m willing to bet that gun sales spiked after our country, with all its military might and a $300 billion defense budget, proved defenseless against nineteen extremists with box cutters. Consider how Washington and Wall Street connived to betray America under the guise of “deregulation,” leaving our homes, jobs, and life savings at the mercy of greed-driven speculation. It will take years for most Americans to recover what they lost since 2008 – many never will. The U.S. government proved quite adept at arranging the immediate rescue of the Money Industry; but huge numbers of our citizenry are stuck in the equivalent of the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina – left to fend for themselves.

Name a major disaster and then connect the dots, as I have attempted previously: the Enron/California Energy Crisis Hoax, 9/11, Katrina, the mass shootings by deranged loners who somehow “fall through the cracks” till they slaughter our loved ones. Then add the nation’s gravely inadequate response to global warming – the most dangerous and disruptive threat to our security on the horizon. A fearful pattern of incompetence emerges.

And so, if our government cannot protect us, we will protect ourselves – or at least try to, as if putting weapons in cockpits or classrooms is going to work.

A dramatic decline in public confidence in the government is clearly underway. 81% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to the Gallup polling organization. That’s actually an improvement over its all-time worst score of 90% last August, but hardly anything the Founders would be proud of. President Obama is also doing better, but his disapproval rating has soared from 15% in January 2009 to 43% a few days ago.

These numbers change when Americans are asked to assess the presidency and Congress as institutions in the abstract. The former scored a 43% disapproval rating – nearly identical to the current occupant’s. But only 65% of Americans disapproved of the legislative branch – fifteen points lower than the disapproval rate for the current Congress.

Rating the federal government as a whole, 63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied.

That the executive and legislative branches are held in low esteem is not news, and being the so-called “political” branches, not particularly surprising.

More important is the ranking of the branch of government whose single job is to maintain the basic software of the U.S. operating system – our laws. These are the principles, originating in the Constitution, by which democracy and its citizens are supposed to abide. They are administered by the judicial branch, the one branch of government structured to be impervious to political pressure, including the influence of money.

Trust in the legal system is higher than either the executive or legislative branches, Gallup researchers report, but a solid third of all Americans disapprove of the judicial branch. The good news is that Americans’ view of the courts hasn’t changed much since 1973.

By some objective measures, however, America’s once vaunted system of laws fares poorly with respect to other socio-economically similar nations. The World Justice Project’s annual “Rule of Law Index” places the U.S. nineteenth out of twenty-nine countries, principally because of wealth-based disparities in Americans’ access to the legal system.

The judicial branch faces four serious challenges that, unless abated, are going to further undermine public confidence – not just in the judiciary, but also in government and democracy.

First is the increasingly politicized conduct of the courts themselves.

In 2000, the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court stopped the vote count process in Florida and awarded the election to George Bush. In 2011, the Republican majority on the high court ruled that those “arbitration clauses” inserted in the fine print of virtually every contract between a giant corporation and consumers must be enforced to deny people their right to sue a company in court. And then of course there is the infamous Citizens United case, in which the Republican majority ruled that injecting money into elections to influence the outcome is a form of free speech, and that corporations exercising that right are protected by the First Amendment. In that single decision, the Court disenfranchised the vast majority of Americans who cannot hire their own lobbyist or fund the election of a friendly politician.

Finally, most Americans are aware that Chief Justice Roberts broke with his Republican colleagues to uphold federal health care reform last year. What they’re not aware of is this: buried in the legalese of that decision, Justice Roberts opened the door to a change in constitutional jurisprudence that would roll back American law to the standards in effect in 1905, when the Supreme Court struck down congressional workplace and other reforms. Consistently favoring corporations over people is not just bad law, it’s bad for the credibility of the court.

And it’s not just the Supreme Court. The overtly political and severely partisan appointments process for federal judges leads to decisions based on ideology rather than law, as the New York Times, surveying several recent books, reports.

Second, special interests are increasingly trying to corrupt judicial elections, a phenomenon that I’ve noted grew to serious proportions last year as a result of the Citizens United decision. Business groups seeking favorable treatment are challenging the judges who have ruled against them, or might do so in the future. John Grisham’s novel “The Appeal” is thinly veiled fact; the searing documentary “Hot Coffee” exposes the true story of how several state supreme court justices were ousted by business lobbyists. Far from being embarrassed by the assault on judicial impartiality, no less an institution than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is leading the charge along with other business funded groups. The taxpayer-subsidized organizations’ two-step system is to first target state court systems based on whether they are pro-business or pro-consumer. A Chamber collaborator is slightly less nuanced: it calls these courts “judicial hellholes,” a term it has copyrighted. Then the groups help organize the political campaigns against the judges, replacing them with candidates who will rule in favor of big-business. An estimated $30 million was spent on TV ads alone in 2012 judicial elections. Once judges get sucked into the machinery of electoral campaigns, Americans will doubt their impartiality.

Third, the courts have approved crummy settlements in numerous lawsuits – often brought by government agencies – citing banks for unlawful foreclosure practices, illegal manipulation of interests rates, and a host of other multi-billion dollar heists and scams of breathtaking audacity connected to the financial debacle. My colleague Marty Berg has documented just a few of the many examples of settlements that leave the victims with next to nothing, while the banks and their fat cat execs get off with a slap on the wrist... or even a kiss on the lips. It’s not the courts’ fault that federal prosecutors can’t seem to throw a net around the high-level white-collar crooks that ran our economy into a ditch and destroyed so many people’s lives. But the courts do have the responsibility to reject the vacuous deals that benefit only the perps and their political friends. With the few notable exceptions of federal judges insisting on tougher terms, the vast majority of these sweetheart settlements are rubber-stamped.

Fourth, the court systems in many states have sustained heavy collateral damage from the Wall Street Financial Debacle of 2008. In California, budget deficits have led to massive cuts in funding for the courts; some courtrooms have closed; judges have retired; and parties now have to pay for their own court reporters to record the proceedings. It is not mere inconvenience that concerns lawyers here. “Justice is now being rationed in our state,” Patrick Kelly, the President of the California State Bar said. He told the Los Angeles Daily Journal: “The public….[is] used to a court system that handles all these issues, child support obligations, contract disputes. What is going to happen when the court system can no longer take care of that? … There is a potential [for] serious degeneration of civil responsibility in California.”

By applying the rule of law, courts play a critical role in preserving American ideals of fairness, competition and impartial justice. John Adams, who helped Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence and later became the second president of the United States, said this of the Seventh Amendment: “without the right to trial by jury we have no way to keep us from being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, fed like swine and clothed like hounds.”

The presence of a million more guns than people in this country is an alarming plebiscite on the nation’s confidence in the rule of law. If Americans lose faith in the courts as they have with other democratic institutions, disputes that would otherwise be settled by law will be settled by force. Take a look at the chaos and devastation now underway in countries where the only law that governs is the law of the jungle.

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 01/23/2013

Three signs that the fiscal cliff deal is malarkey

Remember the beleaguered middle class? Our political leaders don’t seem to.

Reeling from the fiscal cliff fiasco and hurtling toward the debt ceiling debacle, Washington has forgotten all of its election-year promises to focus on the best way to create jobs and enhance economic security for the 99 percent.

One of the most amazing aspects of the whole fiscal cliff/debt ceiling fiasco is the continuing ability of the political and media class to manufacture phony economic crises while ignoring the concerns that affect the majority of Americans every day.

High unemployment and rising health and elder care costs? Gnawing uncertainty about the future? Declining wages and disappearing pensions? Income inequality?

We haven’t heard much about them since Election Day.

Meanwhile our media elite cover every micro-twitch of the Washington insiders as they pose and posture their way through the debate, while smothering in ridicule anybody who dares question the prevailing deficit hysteria.

One piece of wisdom did surface briefly masquerading as a whacko proposal – having the government create a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Though this scheme was nixed by the Treasury, it did have the virtue of pointing up an important fact usually ignored in mainstream bloviating about the deficit – the government is not a family. The U.S. government can create money and does, except recently it’s been printing money only to hand it over to big banks with no strings attached, rather than using it to pay down the deficit, create jobs or fix bridges.

And how about that dramatic last-minute deal that averted the fiscal cliff? To paraphrase Vice-President Joe Biden (when he was dismissing Paul Ryan’s dismal budget plan), the whole thing is a load of malarkey.

Except this time Biden and his boss, President Obama weren’t blasting it, they were touting it as a great achievement.

If you’re not familiar with the term, Miriam-Webster defines malarkey as “insincere or foolish talk.”

The first tipoff that the deal constitutes malarkey is the whole dispute over whether it actually reduces the deficit at all.

The Congressional Budget Office contends the deal will increase the deficit nearly $4 trillion over 10 years, while the president, using a different starting for his calculation, argues that it will raise $620 billion over that time period. If you’re confused, you should be. The difference is not trivial, and makes the whole process stink. As the New York said, “How do you agree on what needs to be done going forward if you can’t agree where you are?”

When it comes to deficits, I’m from the Dick Cheney school. The former vice-president, in a rare moment of candor, said: “Deficits don’t matter.”

Except when politicians want to beat their opponents over the heads with them. Most recently, the deficit soared not primarily because of out of control government spending, but because the economy went in the toilet, and the government came to the rescue of our fellow citizens with jobless benefits, food stamps and stimulus spending.

Of course, Cheney was also trying to help out his boss, President George W. Bush, who wanted to give rich people a mammoth tax break and put two wars on the government’s tab, thereby running up the deficit.

What he meant was that Republicans don’t care about deficits when the money goes to support spending they like – like military contracts. What they oppose is spending money on social programs that they would just as soon dismantle.

The second sign that the recent fiscal cliff deal is malarkey is what the politicians did to the payroll tax cut, which was enacted in 2010 and put more than $1,000 a year back into the bank accounts of average Americans.

In spite of all President Obama’s promises not to increase the economic burdens already weighing down the middle class, our leaders allowed this relatively small but significant tax cut to expire. As a result, 125 million Americans who couldn’t afford to hire lobbyists saw their paychecks decrease in January. Since the payroll tax helps pay for Social Security, some applauded the demise of the payroll tax cut.

But the end of the payroll tax cut is just the latest example of our leaders solving budget problems on the backs of those who can afford it least.

In addition, the president had insisted, going in to the fiscal cliff negotiations, that he would get $50 billion in new stimulus money in the deal. But those funds never materialized.

The third red flag buried in the fiscal cliff deal is an item that neither of the parties mentioned in their press conferences announcing it. But it’s the surest way to tell that the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling, which are supposed to be about this massive crisis, are just the latest chapter in Washington business as usual: major corporations using the cover of a manufactured crisis to get their hands on more goodies.

As reported by Matt Stoller, the deal contains eight separate giveaways to individual businesses or industries, including Goldman-Sachs, Hollywood movie studios, NASCAR, coal mine operators and asparagus growers.

Of particular interest was the extension of the tax exempt financing of something called Liberty Zone in New York, funds which were supposed to be designated to help business in the city recover from 9/11. But rather than going to small businesses, big corporations like Goldman-Sachs got the breaks. Goldman-Sachs has gotten $1.6 billion in tax-empt bonds to help defray the costs of building? its new $2.1 billion headquarters.

So while the politicians have been posturing in public vowing to protect the middle-crisis and wringing their hands over the dire state of the government’s finances, they’ve been working overtime in private doling out expensive favors to their corporate donors.

The biggest threat to our future is not the deficit, not by a long shot. The far greater danger remains the largely unchecked and hidden power of corporations to control our government.

Congress / Fiscal clitt / Goldman-Sachs / Income inequality / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama - 01/17/2013

Five Things Senator Elizabeth Warren Should Do Right Away

Beating the $5.5 million that the Money Industry spent against Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren was the easy part.

Now Warren has to decide what she’s going to do in the U.S. Senate, where just a couple of years ago, powerful pro-Wall Street Democrats like Christopher Dodd and Treasury Secretary Geithner killed any chance that she’d be confirmed to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – possibly the most significant part of the post-2008 crash financial reform legislation. As they hoped, President Obama didn’t even bother to nominate her – even though the concept of a federal agency to protect consumers against Wall Street’s misdeeds was hers.

First, Warren has to choose what role she’ll play once she’s on the inside. Its members like to think of themselves as august and deliberative, but in fact the Senate is deeply dysfunctional and its Democratic leadership easily deterred from meaningful action by the mere threat of a filibuster. In a recent New York Times piece on the Senator-elect, you could easily spot the inside-the-Beltway types trying to crush expectations – Warren’s and ours.

Don’t dismiss the perils of the decision.

Official Washington wants Warren to play the game, wait her turn, not rock the boat and eventually win the respect and support of her “colleagues” – the traditional route to power, influence and effectiveness in the Senate. Or she can damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead in support of popular consumer reforms, at the risk of angering and alienating those who might otherwise be her allies.

And don’t forget who her true opposition is: the multinational corporations and their Washington lobbyists, who supply senators with the cash they need to get elected. That’s what drove the American economy into a depression four years ago, as we explained in our report “Sold Out: How Washington and Wall Street Betrayed America.” (PDF) Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, they’re free to spend as much of it as they want to influence the democratic process.

Senator-elect Warren has already indicated which way she’s headed. “If the notion … is we’re going to elect somebody to the United States Senate so they can be the 100th least senior person in there and be polite, and somewhere in their fourth or fifth year do some bipartisan bill that nobody cares about, don’t vote for me,” she has said.

That’s precisely the right call. Warren is a deceptively disarming warrior – I called her “the lawyer with the dragon tattoo” a few years back. She’s got unique nerd-quality credentials, a national support base, and the close attention of the news media. Not since Ralph Nader drew nationwide attention to consumer health, safety and environmental issues in the 1970s has there been such a respected and resonant voice on consumer issues.

No one else in the Senate – or even the federal government, with the exceptions of the President and the Secretary of State – comes close. She can leverage her rock star status to propel a progressive agenda of reforms that will be so popular with the public that the other 99 will have little choice but to go along. Her leadership will prove particularly helpful to her fellow Democrats, who badly need to show that as a majority they can get something done for average Americans. The Congress and the country needs a lion in the Senate. That’s what they used to call Ted Kennedy, whose seat Warren will occupy. It’s poetic politics.

The next question for Warren will be what to work on. Here are five suggestions:

1. Bankruptcy reform. Warren, a bankruptcy expert, became widely known in the 1990s for her critique of the practices of America’s banks and credit card companies in law reviews and academic pieces. When the financial industry was lobbying Congress to make it harder for the average American to declare bankruptcy, Warren penned a landmark analysis (PDF) that concluded that most Americans sought bankruptcy protection not because they were freeloaders or deadbeats but because they could no longer afford to pay their medical bills. Unfortunately, Wall Street won, and the so-called “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005” made it nearly impossible for beleaguered consumers to get a fresh start – a huge victory for the credit card industry that made sure repayment of plastic debt got higher priority than child support payments, for example. Warren should investigate the inequities of the 2005 law and then seek corrective amendments.

2. Lower credit card interest rates. Having bailed out the banking industry, Congress was under pressure to do something about credit card abuses. The “Credit Card Act of 2009” was the deeply compromised and flawed result – read our analysis here. Missing, especially, was a cap on credit card interest rates. While consumers are struggling to cover their mortgages, and pay down credit card debt at 20-30% interest rates, the banks and credit card companies get to borrow taxpayer money – our money – from the Federal Reserve at nearly 0% interest rates. That needs to be fixed, and if it is: imagine the stimulus effect on the U.S. economy.

3. Fix the Senate filibuster rule. The filibuster used to be a powerful tool for a minority of members of the Senate to take on the majority: Senators could block a vote on a bill by speaking on the floor of the Senate until they dropped... or sixty Senators voted to shut down the filibuster. Unfortunately, this extraordinary measure, once rarely invoked, has devolved. Under the current practice, a Senator need only threaten a filibuster to block a vote. It’s been used hundreds of times since 2006 by Senate Republicans to derail action on important bills and judicial appointments. Warren has already pledged to revise the filibuster rule when the Senate convenes in January. As she points out, preventing abuse of the filibuster is necessary if the Senate is going to move forward to address the nation’s most pressing problems.

4. Speak out every week. Lawmaking is just one role of a U.S. Senator. Another is to use the power and influence of the position to investigate and highlight problems in and outside of government. Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire did just that in the 1970s and 1980s through what he called “The Golden Fleece Award,” which he presented monthly to public officials who, he believed, were wasting taxpayer money. Proxmire’s pronouncements, which both amused and maddened taxpayers, were closely followed by the news media. Warren should initiate a weekly tradition of calling out waste, inefficiency, and corruption, wherever it is found.

5. Restore the First Amendment to Human Beings. According to five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the right of corporations to spend money to influence elections, and to give money and gifts to politicians for the purpose of influencing their votes, is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be limited or regulated. That’s the infamous ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Supreme Court’s decision has unleashed a tidal wave of corporate money, often undisclosed, into our elections, one that has drowned out the voices of average Americans and turned our country into an aristocracy in which the People are taxed for the benefit of the powerful elites that run Wall Street and Washington. A grassroots campaign is underway to enact a Constitutional Amendment specifying that, “the protections of the First Amendment that apply to the spending of money on lobbying and elections, whether by contributions, expenditures or otherwise, shall extend only to human beings.” Senator Warren should be one of the leaders of that crucial reform.

Citizens United / Congress / Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Harvey Column - 11/16/2012

Paul Ryan's battle for billionaires

Thanks to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, we’re going to be saved from a negative campaign. Now we’ll be elevated by a campaign about Big Ideas.

At least that’s the latest tripe being peddled by the Big Media, which has spent a lot of time drooling over the insane Ryan budget plan House Republicans passed before it died, only to be joyfully revived by Democrats who sought to pin in to the chests of their Republican opponents in Congressional races, then revived again by a befuddled Mitt Romney, who seems to want to cling to it (for his base) and distance himself from it (for everybody else).

According to the media, Ryan is a cheerful wonk who is the only one brave and bold enough to propose a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Never mind that the numbers don’t add up, or that his budget scheme involves a massive future reductions not only of Medicare but all government services except defense spending.

Ryan has become a top expert at capitalizing on legitimate skepticism about government and economic anxiety in the wake of the 2008 bailout and grafting those feelings on to the austerity agenda of the 1 percent – crushing all government regulation, reducing popular government services like parks and health care for the elderly, and privatizing Social Security while placing the burden of the nation’s fiscal problems on those least able to afford it and keeping tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans.

For our media elite, these are what pass for serious ideas. There’s little scrutiny beyond reporting Ryan’s rhetoric, in which he insists he’s out to save Medicare and merely facing a fiscal reality that others are afraid to confront.

You don’t have to dig very deep to find Ryan’s real motives, and who the winners will be if he wins his fight.

As usual in contemporary politics, the reality can be found in the money that has fueled Ryan’s rise. Among his top campaign contributors: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, UBS bank and Wells-Fargo, along with corporate powerhouses like AT&T, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Northwestern Mutual. He’s been closely associated with the billionaire Koch Brothers’ Americans For Prosperity.

Once you look into Ryan’s actual record, he looks a lot more like your garden-variety congressional hypocrite: preaching the free-market gospel while he votes for the 2008 no-questions-asked bank bailout, trashing the Obama administration stimulus package while making sure that his congressional district got its share of the spoils.

If the media were doing its job, Ryan would be dismissed for the craven con artist that he is, not lionized. Mitt Romney claims that he chose Ryan to balance out his own inexperience in Washington. But Ryan’s efforts to push through his budget scheme have failed miserably – except at making him a media darling.

If the media were doing its job, the headlines would be describing Ryan’s real, and embarrassingly modest, legislative record since he was elected to Congress in 1998. His first successful piece of legislation renamed his local post office in Janesville, Wisconsin for longtime Wisconsin Democratic congressman and former defense secretary Les Aspin in 2000. His other legislative achievement has been a bill to amend the IRS code to modify the taxation of arrow components. (Ryan uses bows and arrows for sport.)

Along with other fellow Republicans, he signed on to the Bush tax cuts, a partial-birth abortion ban and several efforts to increase sanctions against Iran.

Aside from that, he’s co-sponsored eight pieces of legislation issuing commemorative coins and five resolutions honoring Ronald Reagan.

There must have been some tough choices involved. Just who exactly should get a commemorative coin in their honor? Not just anybody, and you’re bound to make somebody mad. But it’s not exactly a profile of courage. How much courage does it take to do the bidding of the CEOs who keep you in office, against the retirees and the poor who can’t afford fat contributions and lobbyists?

Congress / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Social Security - 08/16/2012

Left, right and left out

On so many issues related to the state of our economic recovery, current notions of liberal and conservative don’t seem to apply.

For example, should we allow a real free market to work in our financial system?

Should we crack down hard on those Wall Street bankers who broke the law?

Should companies that want to foreclose on property have to follow the law?

If you’re in favor of real financial free market, tough law enforcement and following the law, are you conservative or liberal, left or right?

What you are is in the majority, and the most important political designation in the U.S. in 2012 – left out.

Your views are reflected only rarely in the political debate at all and never in the presidential debate. Sure, President Obama has repeatedly promised to get tough on Wall Street, most recently in the state of the union in January, but based on the results, those promises have little credibility. President Obama preaches for an activist role for government with the occasional populist flourish, but that impulse wilts if Republicans or campaign funders show the least resistance.

His opponent, Mitt Romney, considers any crackdown on Wall Street an affront to the beloved job creators to whom we should all be bowing down – even if they don’t actually use their wealth to create any decent jobs.

What we get instead of a real debate on how to get an economy that works for ordinary folks is a faux argument over the role of venture capitalist tycoons, between the candidate who used to be one and our president, who has relied on them a key source of campaign funding as much as Romney has.

What we get is the fiscal cliff drama about whether or not to shut down the government.

What we get is each side offering scary versions of what the other will do.

What we get are Mitt Romney’s assurances that if we just get the regulators out of the way, the wealthy job creators will get to work, regardless of whether anybody can afford to buy their products.

What we get is the president’s half-measures and handwringing. But it’s all political theater that doesn’t replace real jobs, real plans to revive housing and keep people in their homes and real accountability for bankers. It doesn’t replace a real debate about the role of big money in overshadowing those issues in our elections. Right now, both sides have left those out of their campaigns.

Politics is a team activity and our natural tendency is to root for our guy, downplay his flaws, and point out how much worse the other guy would be. But this election should not just be rooting for our team and beating the other guy. It should not be about rooting for our guy we’re so hyped up about how scary the other guy is.

It should be about who is willing to confront the big money, not bend to it.

It should be about who can really get people back to work, keep us in our homes, guide an economic recovery that’s not just for the wealthiest.

We should demand that we’re more than just a rooting section for our team, that our bread and butter concerns are not left out.

Congress / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 07/28/2012

Guide to congressional cosmetics

President Obama praised the STOCK Act when he signed it into law in April as a good first step to rid Congress of financial conflicts that undermine public confidence.

But it’s really no more than a fast makeup job to cover up the continuing blemishes on our democracy and give the president and members of Congress some talking points for the campaign trail.
The STOCK Act is supposed to prohibit legislators from profiting from the nonpublic information they get on the job. The STOCK Act also prohibits members of Congress from participating in initial public offerings unavailable to the public, and provides some additional public disclosure of congressional stock trading.
But we already know that members of Congress do better than civilians when they invest in the stock market. According to a 2011 study, investment portfolios of members of the House beat the market by about 6 percent annually, mimicking the performance of the stock portfolios of their Senate colleagues.
As an example, the Washington Post reported, four congressmen sitting on a committee investigating deceptive billing practices by video game makers sold their stock in the country’s biggest video game maker, GameStop, one of the companies under investigation.
One of the most egregious examples is Sen. Tom Coburn, the Republican Oklahoma senator who has made a name for himself preaching government austerity and self-righteously criticizing both parties for not having the courage to make the cuts needed to reduce the debt.
But austerity and sacrifice were apparently not on Sen. Coburn’s mind when he bought $25,000 in bonds in a genetic technology company at the same time he released a hold on legislation that the company supported. A hold is an informal Senate practice by which a senator can stall a piece of legislation. Coburn, meanwhile, cast one of the few votes against the STOCK Act, dismissing it as nothing more than a stunt.
One clue to just how innocuous the STOCK Act is: it was opposed by only two votes in the House and three in the Senate. This confirms my theory that whenever you see much ballyhooed-bipartisanship at work, you can be sure that members of Congress are either doing the bidding of the 1 percent, or covering their own butts.
The bottom line is that while members of Congress pass laws that prohibit other government officials from presiding over companies and industries in which they have a financial interest, Congress effectively exempts itself from such broad restrictions.
Writing on Yahoo Finance, Ron DeLegge outlines the STOCK Act’s major flaws and omissions: it still allows the sleazy, little-known practice of members selling “political intelligence” to lobbyists as well as continuing to allow members of Congress to own stock in industries over which they can exert influence.
The STOCK Act reminds us, when it comes to Congress, we shouldn’t be distracted by lame cover-ups or blather about bipartisanship, we should follow the money.
And we shouldn’t forget: it’s not their money.
It’s our money.

Bipartisanship / Congress / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 07/06/2012

Main Street talks back

Inside the D.C. bubble, Wall Street’s titans continue to have their way.

Their Republican allies in the Senate helped the titans kill the Buffet Rule, which would have required those who made more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes, double what investors pay on capital gains income.

Wall Street has continued to stifle efforts to regulate risky derivatives like the ones that led to the financial collapse, while most of the Dodd-Frank financial reform enacted in the wake of the financial crisis has yet to be implemented.

In the Wall Street Journal (no link), columnist David Weidner asserted Wednesday that Wall Street has gotten some of its swagger back. “Big financial interests,” Weidner wrote, “are beating back every broadside with a vigor not seen since the financial-bubble days.”

But outside Washington it is a different story.

Voting for the first time on the CEO compensation of a too-big –to-fail bank, Citibank shareholders rejected a $14.9 million annual compensation for its top executive. The “say on pay” vote, mandated as part of Dodd-Frank, is strictly advisory. Citibank officials can ignore it if they want.

For years, the company’s executives had promised that their pay would be strictly tied to performance. The CEO, Vikram Pandit, had been making $1 a year since the bailout during which time the bank performed miserably. But this year, the bank’s directors decided that Pandit deserved to get back on the gravy train with the rest of the industry’s CEOs.

The following day, shareholders at another smaller regional bank, FirstMeritCorp of Akron, Ohio, rejected the compensation package for their CEO in another “say on pay” vote. Directors of that bank wanted to raise the CEO’s pay $1 million to $6.4 million a year, after the bank’s stock had fallen 20 percent during the past year.

They’re just a couple of non-binding votes. But I found it striking that when Main Street voters had the opportunity to express their opinion directly on one aspect of Wall Street’s practices, the voters voiced disapproval.

Wall Street can’t dismiss their shareholders as a bunch of Occupy Wall Street types out to destroy the system, or marginalize their rejection as mere envy. These are hardnosed investors who would like nothing better than for Wall Street banks to get on solid footing and make money. But these voters realize that despite all the administration’s happy talk about how well the bailouts have worked, the banks still aren’t sound, and that the outrageous pay for top executives who haven’t delivered is a big part of the problem because it encourages focus on short-term profit, loading up on risk and relying on continuing government help to prop up their businesses.

According to Weidner, polls show that most voters have moved on from anger at Wall Street. That may be so. But if ordinary citizens, rather than Washington insiders beholden to Wall Street, were making decisions, I think they would coolly, calmly and rationally favor the wealthy paying their fair share of taxes, and sensible regulation that would keep the titans from getting too carried away with themselves and their schemes.

Congress / Derivatives / Executive Pay / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column - 04/20/2012

President aims to take the money and run

Here’s what President Obama wants you to believe about his relationship to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the toxic torrent of corporate cash polluting our politics: “it’s complicated.”

In their ruling, the justices determined that corporations had a free speech right to anonymously contribute as much as they wanted to third-party political action groups that worked in support of candidates, as long as those PACs had no formal connection to the candidate.

On the one hand, the president blasted the court’s ruling less than a week after it was issued, with the justices seated right in front of him, in his January 2010 State of the Union speech, for opening “the floodgates for special interests – including foreign companies – to spend without limit in our elections.”

On the other hand, his campaign decided two years later to “level the playing field” with Republicans and encourage Super PAC support for the president, by allowing cabinet members and senior White House officials to cooperate with a Super PAC that supports their boss.

On yet another hand, the president insisted he would support a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United.

And on yet still another hand, when the president had the opportunity to actually do something to shed some sunlight on the secretive stash of corporate donations unleashed by Citizens United, by issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to reveal all their political spending, he balked.

When you follow the president’s actions, rather than listen to his words, it’s not complicated at all.

The president and his Democratic Party colleagues are determined to “take the money and run.”

For nearly a year, President Obama had floated the idea of issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose all their political contributions – including contributions to PACs and organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce – when they submit a bid.

The biggest contractors, for the most part, are defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, which smother the politicians in contributions to keep the weapons contracts flowing. In the 2012 cycle, Lockheed’s PAC has spent more than $2 million in contributions that we know of, 59 percent to Republicans and 41 percent to Democrats.

Its contributions go beyond an attempt to win a single weapons contract. What they and the other contractors have been able to do is to purchase the country’s entire debate over defense spending, so that few of our representatives ever raise a peep about whether the expensive defense systems are necessary.

Republicans howled at the President Obama’s proposal, accusing him of attempting to politicize the bidding process. President Obama wanted to know who had made the contributions, the Republicans charged, so he could award bids to the highest-contributing bidders.

While President Obama stewed, the Republicans passed measures in May 2011 to block [m1] an executive order if it was issued.

The venerable Public Citizen organization made a suggestion that would sidestep the Republicans’ stated objection.

Why not, Public Citizen said, limit the disclosure requirement to the winning bidder?

But the president backed off – either because he didn’t want a fight with Republicans or because his fundraisers reminded him he had a tough campaign ahead and the little people they dote on with their solicitation emails weren’t going to be able to foot the bill.

On the most critical issue facing our political system, the president of the United States is incapable of leveling with the American people.

President Obama may want to do the right thing, but he is trapped in a system controlled by big money that is bigger than he is.

The first step to fight back against that system won’t come from Washington. It will come from building a grassroots movement to undo Citizens United. Read more about it, and our proposed constitutional amendment, which is easy to understand and will withstand any legal challenge, here.

Citizens United / Congress / Martin Column - 04/13/2012

Purchasing power, One-Percent style

There’s been a good deal of talk about how the Occupy movement “changed the debate in this country” to focus on income inequality.

But while members of Occupy Wall Street skirmished with police over a patch of ground in lower Manhattan, the members of the country’s top 1 percent bypassed the political debate and have gone back to work wielding their influence in the corridors of power.

It’s been a particularly wrenching patch for the 99 percent, who are excluded from those corridors.

First, Congress this week, with President Obama’s blessing, passed something Republicans misleadingly labeled a JOBS Act, which basically gives a green light for fraud by removing important investor protections under the guise of promoting startups.

Second, Congress has been pushing financial regulators to weaken even further a mild piece of sensible financial regulation that would prevent banks from making risky gambles with their own accounts – the ones guaranteed by you and me as taxpayers. It’s the final coup de grace marginalizing the views of one-time Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, for whom the rule is named. Volcker has been a lonely voice among the president’s financial advisers, advocating stronger action to rein in the behavior of the too big to fail banks. Largely ignored by the president, Volcker’s views are getting stomped by Congress and financial regulators.

There is no mystery why we have suffered these setbacks: our political system has been overwhelmed by the power of money. The bankers lobby has swarmed the Capitol to drown any opposition to its views. The bankers have also come with their checkbooks in an election year, and they’re looking to buy whoever is for sale, of whatever party. According to a new report by Public Citizen, politicians who advocated for a weaker Volcker rule got an average of $388,010 in contributions from the financial sector – more than four times as much as politicians advocating to strengthen the rule, who still managed to haul in an average of $96,897 apiece.

Our politicians, insulated by a celebrity-obsessed media and swaddled in Super PAC cash, could care less about the consent of the governed. Republicans have only to wave around their magic wand that makes all problems the fault of government regulation in order to hypnotize their followers, while the Democrats only have to remind their followers how scary the Republicans are to keep them in line.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement, which started with such promise in galvanizing public support against corporate domination of our politics, has splintered into a thousand pieces, wasting precious energy and time in confrontations with police rather than building a broad-shouldered coalition working on many different social and political fronts.

The challenge for Occupy remains the same: building a force that actually includes the members of the 99 percent who have not yet gotten active, who may be still stuck in apathy, cynicism or hopelessness or who may simply not have a perspective that includes social and political action.

The next opportunity is a series of protests planned nationwide for May 1, which has traditionally been a time of action around the immigration rights issue. This year occupiers, labor allies and a variety of community organizations are planning to join their issues. Can we forge a message strong enough and the numbers large enough to rock the corridors of power?

Congress / Martin Column / Occupy / Paul Volcker - 03/28/2012