President Barack Obama - Page 2 - Represent Consumers

For bailed-out executives, the gravy train never ends

How many bailed-out executives does it take to screw the American taxpayer?

Not many, when they have the kind of phony oversight the Treasury Department has been providing for the companies we bailed The latest report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) - known to the rest of us as the Wall Street bailout – portrays the Treasury Department’s bailout overseers as more concerned with coddling corporate titans than they were with protecting taxpayers – even though excessive compensation was a main cause of bankers’ reckless risk-taking in the first place by rewarding short-term performance rather than more sustainable long-term gains.

The damning IG report, issued January 28, outlines a pattern of the Treasury Department’s acting pay czar, Patricia Geoghegan, approving excessive compensation for the corporate executives who took public funds while ignoring previous recommendations from the special IG’s office to implement polices to restrain their pay.

Treasury’s continuing approval of the excessive salaries contradicts President Obama’s vow to rein in bank pay in the wake of bankers’ outrageous bonuses after the bailout. “It does offend our values when executives of big financial firms that are struggling pay themselves huge bonuses even as they rely on extraordinary assistance to stay afloat,” the president said in 2009.

Geoghegan, a retired lawyer for the white-shoe Wall Street corporate law firm Cravath, Swain & Moore, justified her approvals for three companies, AIG, GM and Ally Financial Inc., citing the companies’ concerns [for losing the executives while they worked to get their firms out of debt to the TARP program as quickly as possible. rephrase] AIG has since paid back its TARP money; GM and Ally remain in the program.

Geoghegan approved huge pay hikes for executives overseeing units of the companies that were not doing well – and even going bankrupt.

While her predecessor set guidelines that barred cash salaries at the bailed-out firms exceeding $500,000 except for good cause, the IG found that Treasury in 2012 approved salaries of $3 million or more for 54 percent of the top 69 bailed-out bank executives, while another 23 percent got salaries of $5 million or more.

In her report, the special inspector general, Christy Romero concluded: “While taxpayers struggle to overcome the recent financial crisis and look to the U.S. Government to put a lid on compensation for executives of firms whose missteps nearly crippled the U.S. financial system, the U.S. Department of the Treasury continues to allow excessive executive pay.”

Rather than develop her own analysis of the company’s request for compensation, Geoghegan merely parroted what the company said to her. According to the report, “[Geoghegan’s decisions] were largely driven by the companies’ pay proposals, the same companies that historically, and again in 2012, proposed excessive pay, failing to appreciate the extraordinary situation they were in, with taxpayers funding and partially owning them.”

If the pay czar won’t question the firms’ salaries request, “who else will protect the taxpayers?” Romero asked.

Obviously not the Treasury Department, which was given a chance to address the Inspector General’s criticisms. In its written response, the Treasury Department disagreed with the IG’s findings and conclusions and did not agree to implement any of its recommendations.

The Treasury Department shouldn’t be allowed to thumb its nose at taxpayers in such a flagrant manner, or at the president’s clearly stated wishes. Or does Treasury’s cave-in to the bankers indicate that President Obama changed his mind?

We should demand that Congress conduct a thorough and public investigation into who thwarted the president’s efforts to scale back pay at bailed-out firms.

A great place to start would be contacting the members of the Senate Banking Committee to demand they look into it.

For lobbyists and their bosses, budget crisis is big winner

Turns out not everybody was distressed that Congress has been tied up in knots for months obsessed with the self-imposed fiscal cliff crisis.

The lobbying industry, which had previously been in the dumps because of the do-nothing Congress, came roaring back to life in 2012, due in large part to the prolonged budget crisis.

According to the Center For Public Integrity, about half of the country’s top 100 lobbying firms spend more in the fourth quarter last year than they did in the third quarter, and about half showed an overall increase for 2012 over the previous year.

The top spender was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which laid out a whopping $125 million in 2012, an 88 percent increase over the previous year. That doesn’t include the $36 million they paid to influence the outcome of the election. Another big spender was J.P. Morgan, which served up $8.8 million in lobbying and another $784,923 to influence the election.

This increased lobbying activity unfortunately goes on outside public view. Only later can we tally up the damage from this legalized corruption of our democracy – and our pocketbooks.

And when lobbyists win, so do the corporations that pay them big bucks.

I wrote earlier this month about the corporate goodies hidden away in the fiscal cliff deal that represented just a part of the lobbyists’ handiwork – a down payment from members of Congress on their debt to the corporations who foot the bill for their campaigns and other political adventures.

Because there was no grand bargain, Congress couldn’t go all the way on their corporate overlords’ agenda, such as implementing the Social Security and Medicare cuts the CEOs have been hammering away at.

One of the most recent glaring examples of how our government does corporate bidding in secret, contrary to the public good, is the recent favor Congress did for biotech and pharmaceutical giant Amgen, hidden in the fiscal cliff deal.

As revealed by investigative reporters for the New York Times, Amgen received a very profitable gift in that deal – an exemption from Medicare price controls for one its kidney dialysis drugs. It’s the second such exemption Amgen obtained for the drug, Sensipar, which accounted for $950 million in sales last year, an 18 percent increase over the previous year.

So the $7.6 million the company paid for lobbying, and another $1.7 million in political contributions the company showered on both parties, was a small price to pay the government to keep its mitts off the company’s hot property.

At the center of the fiscal cliff deal were two senators, one Democrat, Max Baucus, and one Republican, Mitch McConnell, who are prime recipients of Amgen’s generosity. Since 2007, Amgen has given Baucus $67,500 and McConnell $73,000.

Amgen has also donated $141,000 to President Obama, who signed off on the fiscal cliff deal.

Congress’ secret favor for Amgem is expected to cost Medicare $500 million.

In December, before the fiscal cliff deal was set, President Obama was stressing the importance of reducing Medicare costs.

“I’m willing to reduce our government’s Medicare bills by finding new ways to reduce the cost of healthcare in this country," Obama said. "That's something that we all should agree on. We want to make sure that Medicare is there for future generations. But the current trajectory of health care costs is going up so high we've got to find ways to make sure that it’s sustainable."

The Amgen exemption also highlights the revolving door nature of business in Washington; current lobbyists for Amgen include former chiefs of staff for Baucus and McConnell.

A Vermont congressman has introduced legislation to undo Amgen’s sweet deal. Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, told the Los Angeles Times: “Amgen managed to get a $500-million paragraph in the fiscal-cliff bill and virtually no one in Congress was aware of it. It’s a taxpayer ripoff and comes at a really bad time when we’re trying to control healthcare costs. Amgen should not be allowed to turn Medicare into a profit center.”

Call your representative and senator and let them know how you feel about major corporations like Amgen getting secret favors behind closed doors.

Action / Bipartisanship / Fiscal cliff / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 01/28/2013

Four ways to tell if President Obama was lip-syncing

So it turns out that Beyonce’s ardent, flawless performance of the Star-Spangled Banner may have been lip-synced. The more important and far trickier question is whether President Obama’s impassioned promise to fight for the middle class and a just society is for real, or just more lip service.

The president pushed all the right buttons to our inspire our belief, crafting a theme of “We the people,” defending the importance of collective efforts and evoking battlefields in the people’s fight for justice, from March on Selma to Seneca Falls to the Stonewall bar. And he took the oath of office with his hand on Martin Luther KIng’s traveling bible, the one the civil rights leader carried with him and scribbled notes in as he led the movement.

Many people have invested their hopes and dreams in the president’s leadership and are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the tepid economic recovery and unkept promises. I thought it was a terrific speech but I’m less giddy about the speech and our prospects for the next four years.

One source of my skepticism is the president’s choice to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, under whose leadership, blessed by the president, the too big to fail banks got bigger, no bankers were held accountable for the financial collapse, and the government’s efforts to clean up the foreclosure mess floundered. Geithner, meanwhile, ridiculed efforts by others on the Obama economic team who wanted to fight for a bigger stimulus that would have helped others who weren’t bankers.

To replace Geithner, the president chose his chief of staff Jacob Lew, who enjoyed a brief, highly paid stint at too big to fail Citigroup from 2006 to 2009, as a manager in a unit that bet against the housing market in the run-up to the financial collapse. After Citigroup reaped its share of the taxpayer-funded bailout, the bank awarded Lew a $950,000 bonus. Before his service to Citigroup, he served as head of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, which gave bank deregulation its final push into reality. Of his Citigroup gig, Robert Kuttner wrote, “It was mainly a chance for a skilled public manager to make himself some money until the Democrats returned to power.”

Especially troubling is the lack of expertise Lew demonstrated in comments during a 2010 Senate hearing, where he candidly acknowledged he was not particularly sophisticated in his financial understanding – but went on to downplay the role of deregulation in the financial meltdown.

“My sense, as someone who has generally been familiar with these trends is that the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation; there was an increasing emphasis on highly abstract leveraged derivative products that got us to the point that in the period of time leading up to the financial crisis risks were taken, they weren’t fully embraced, they weren’t well understood,” Lew said. “I don’t personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause. I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.”

But the even the grandaddy of financial deregulation himself, Alan Greenspan, has acknowledged what a fiasco it was. As the Consumer Education Foundation pointed out in its March 2009 report, co-authored with Essential Information, “financial deregulation led directly to the financial collapse” by allowing banks to concoct and sell complex investments based on worthless mortgages – without any government oversight or interference.

Regardless of his expertise or lack of it in high finance, Lew is a member in good standing of the elite financial industry – government corridors of power that have been peddling austerity – a particularly hostile landscape for the hopes and dreams of the middle class. Is this really the person Obama believes is best to lead the economic team that is supposed to protect the middle class? If Obama is serious about following through about his inaugural speech promises to protect and preserve economically vulnerable Americans, he’s going to need a much more ambitious and specific agenda than he’s offered so far, and he’s going to need to abandon some major policies he’s been pursuing. And he’s going to need a cabinet and a political team to flesh those policies out, sell them to the country and skillfully push them through Congress. Lew will have to reach way beyond his comfort zone, in which he has functioned as a quintessential insider and number-cruncher.

A great inaugural speech is not about to convince the vast corporate interests that have poisoned our politics to pack up and go home.

To truly protect the middle class, the president is going to have get outside the austerity bubble that Washington has built up around itself with the help of the media wise men and women who judge political courage and wisdom by how much our leaders are willing to slash from social programs.

The way to protect the middle class is straightforward – but demands a departure from the conventional thinking that rules Washington.

Economist Robert Pollin suggests two very specific – and grand – goals for Obama to shoot for. First, cut unemployment in half by the end of 2016, back to 3.9 percent, where it was in 2000, creating an additional 13 million jobs, through a combination of federal stimulus funding,and grabbing the excess funds that the Federal Reserve has shoveled to banks. While bankers have profited from the Fed’s generosity, they have not used those funds to spur the broader economy. Here’s an interview in which Pollin details his views.

The second is creating a real program to fight and reverse rising poverty in the U.S., reducing the number of people living in poverty from 15 to 11 million, again aiming to reduce the poverty to 2000 levels. Again, Pollin says the best way to do this is by focusing on resources on job creation.

Inside Washington’s austerity bubble, this idea of dramatically reducing unemployment or poverty is never discussed any more, amid assumptions that either people are poor because of their own failings or the government can’t afford to do anything about it.

But outside the bubble, economists like Pollin and others suggest another path, and if Obama is serious about the ideals he articulated in his speech, he’ll lead the fight to burst the austerity bubble, embracing this more activist path.

If he’s really intent on helping average Americans, there are two policies President Obama is pursuing that he should immediately discard, because they will hurt the middle class.

The first is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the latest in a long line of so-called free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, that have been sold to the public as boosts to the economy but have really crushed low and middle income jobs by increasing outsourcing and lowering wages. While the TPP talks exclude the public, corporate lobbyists have free access.

The president and his team should acknowledge the dangers to America of these phony free trade deals, and abandon the TPP and others like them.

The president should also drop the idea of “tweaking” Social Security by adopting “chained CPI,” which is a way of calculating the “cost of living” that would reduce future Social Security payments. The president has suggested that “chained CPI” could be part of fiscal grand bargain to reduce the deficit. While the president has touted the plan as a kind of a technical fix that would strengthen the program in the long run, Social Security watchdogs say chained CPI would result in substantial benefit reductions.

You’ll know the president is serious about keeping his promise to protect the middle class when you see him following through on this short list.

Citibank / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 01/27/2013

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

D.C. Disconnect: Whose cliff is this?

Think big money didn’t win in the last election? Think again.

It’s a pretty safe bet that the majority of Americans who voted for President Obama didn’t want unemployment to go up and the safety net shredded.

But we’re now in the midst of some extended Washington lunacy over the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, with both sides trying to whip the public into a frenzy with scary scenarios of economic hardship

Is this what the majority voted for?

I don’t think so.

This is what America’s CEOs want. If they’re going to be forced to pay slightly more in taxes, they want cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange – even if those programs have nothing to do with the federal government’s budget deficit.

If you’re looking for a reason why our leaders would so eagerly flout the will of the majority, you might start with the money spent in the recent election – one of the most expensive in history.

Which brings is back to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. One of the big mistakes the Supreme Court made in the Citizens United case unleashing corporate spending in politics was in its overly literal definition of how money works in elections.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said independent corporate spending does “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” and “influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt.”

According to the justices, corruption is defined only by a very specific quid pro quo.

Those who are dismissing the role of big corporate donors in the 2012 elections are making a similar misjudgment: Just because some of the most notorious big spenders, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers, didn’t win.

So the fact that Adelson, the Las Vegas mogul, and the Kochs, the energy magnates, couldn’t buy the election for Mitt Romney, means that the role of big money has been exaggerated, according to some analysts. “Spending by outside groups. it turns out,” the Washington Post reported, “was the dog that barked but did not bite.”

This isn’t the right way to view the 2012 election results, or the influence money has in our politics. Rather than focus on who wins and who loses in a particular race, or whether a particular bill is passed or defeated, we need to examine whose interests benefit, especially over a long period of time.

That’s what those big donors are after – gains over the long term. For example, the financial industry fought for 20 years before it finally won repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that kept separate publicly-insured banking from riskier bank investing.

Most donors and politicians are more sophisticated than to offer flat-out bribes. Elected officials, donors and lobbyists long ago learned to speak in code they understand but sounds innocuous to the public. In the case of Glass-Steagall, the bankers and their backers didn’t say they wanted to make gajillions while leaving taxpayers on the hook for bailouts when the bankers’ bets went bad. No, what they talked about publicly was “modernizing” antiquated banking laws.

A more recent example is the work of the man who Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik dubbed the “influential billionaire in national politics.” He’s not one of the Koch Brothers or Adelson. He’s former Nixon Commerce secretary and retired hedge fund mogul Pete Peterson, who has spent $457 million in the past 5 years in a campaign to convince the politicians and public that “entitlements” are in crisis and need to be cut. He has gathered around him leading politicians, intellectuals and corporate CEOs. What do all they share? The conviction that if there’s a problem with the federal budget, those who are most vulnerable economically should have to suffer to fix it.

That’s why we end up with our current debate and the “fiscal cliff” focused on the government deficit, not creating jobs and repairing the housing mess.

That’s why we end with a political debate that somehow manages to equate cuts to badly needed social programs for people still hurting from the recession with tax increases for the nation’s wealthiest.

Peterson isn’t focused on the result of one election or one skirmish in the battle over the safety net. He’s in it for the long haul.

As for Adelson, he is learning from his 2012 mistakes so he can invest his millions more successfully in pursuit of his anti-government agenda.

While President Obama has criticized the Citizens United ruling and supported a constitutional amendment to overturn it, neither he nor the Democrats are about do without their mega-donors and super-PACs in the meantime, nor are they about to make money in politics it a priority.

In this atmosphere, will the president keep his promises to fight for the interests of the middle class for increased economic security and better jobs?

The politicians’ chase for the big money is like the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 60s between the U.S. and Russia, which both sides acknowledged was a disaster for their economies. Neither side was willing to give up. Meanwhile, more and more of the expensive, dangerous weapons were stockpiled. There’s an important difference, however: our politicians and corporate chieftains have grown fatter on the current money race in politics. The ones who are facing a dire threat to our existence are the rest of us.

Fiscal cliff / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 12/10/2012

Still too close to call

The president won the election by convincing a majority of voters that he was the genuine protector of the middle class.

His opponent ran as a shape-shifter, one day a rabid Tea Partier, the next a moderate. But among the many conflicting themes Mitt Romney tried out in his unsuccessful presidential campaign, one that he clung to was the out of control federal deficit and the need to rein in spending on the nation’s safety net programs.

As you recall, both the president and Romney stressed that the election was about the best way to create jobs.

But now President Obama says he will spend some of his precious time hitting the campaign trail again, this time trying to sell the American people on why it’s a good idea to agree to some cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as part of a “grand bargain” with congressional Republicans to avoid going over the so-called fiscal cliff, a set of congressionally-self imposed tax increases and budget cuts. The president is adamant that taxes on the rich will have to go up as part of a “grand bargain,” which of course, Republicans, Wall Street and corporate CEOs all adamantly oppose. Their opposition has created a false consensus inside the Beltway that maintains that essential programs such as Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable.

Voters might be forgiven if they’re surprised by this wheeling and dealing over Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as Matt Bai writes in the New York Times, “The possible terms of a grand bargain never came up because neither side [during the campaign] wanted to talk about it.”

But all of a sudden that’s all our leaders are focused on, when they’re not consumed with David Petraeus’ sex life and shirtless FBI agents.

Where’s the jobs program?

The president has been hanging tough on the need to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans but now seems to be waffling about protecting Social Security and the other safety net programs that protect the well being of hundreds of millions of Americans after a lifetime of work. In negotiations with Republicans during his first term, the president had already offered to make cuts in the safety net.

Unions and progressive groups say they are now mobilizing to protect the social safety net. But will they buck the president if he deems such cuts necessary to make a deal with Republicans?

Dave Dayen at Firedoglake, who has followed the assault on social insurance programs, expresses doubts. Noting that polls show a majority of the public is opposed to such cuts, Dayen wrote: “The Obama coalition has always been more tribal than ideological, willing to take their cues from their standard bearer.”

One troubling sign comes from a column by Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast, suggesting that “entitlements” need to be on the table with Republicans, even if they’re not the cause of the deficit, because the president needs bargaining chips to get the tax increases on the rich. So the safety net has to be sacrificed, not because it’s causing budget problems, but to satisfy Republicans – who just got whooped in the election!

Does anybody think President Obama would have been reelected if had told voters he planned to use Social Security and Medicare as bargaining chips?

The president should hit the road, but he should do it in support of the social insurance programs a majority of Americans want unscathed, and against the budget hokum that blames these programs for the deficit.

The president and his team have shown they know how to get the job done when his own job is at stake. Now it’s time for them to use their prowess to protect the safety net from the vultures that are circling it.

Call the president today and ask him if he’s got our backs.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 11/15/2012

The Battle for Obama's Soul

We know which Barack Obama won reelection Tuesday night.

The question is: which one woke up and went to work Wednesday morning?

Was it the passive Obama who, after winning a stirring, historic victory in 2008, allowed the insurgent tea party to inaccurately redefine his affordable health care plan as a government takeover?

Was it the conciliatory Obama who chose not to use his considerable rhetorical skills to rally the country against intransigent Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who opposed even the most modest attempts to use government to rein in Wall Street excess?

Was it the detached Obama of the first presidential debate October 3 who bizarrely said that he and the Republican candidate Mitt Romney agreed in their approach to Social Security?

Or was it the other Obama, the one whose 2012 campaign struck early and often against Mitt Romney, branding him as an out of touch plutocrat, while defining the president as the staunch defender of the threatened middle class?
As Mark Weisbrot of the Center For Economic and Polcy Research points out, Obama and his team carefully shaped a populist message for the 2012 campaign that was much more specific than the 2008 message of hope and change, and it was tailored specifically to win blue-collar votes in the swing states that decided the election.

Will the president continue to embrace that message or abandon it now that he’s won the election?

Which is just another way of saying that the fight for President Obama’s soul continues.

The current battlefield is the drama over the $7 trillion fiscal cliff and the “grand bargain.” As portrayed in the media, if Congress and the president can’t come up with a combination of budget cuts and revenue to cut the budget, Congress has agreed to impose a set of draconian budget cuts.

At the heart of the dispute is the continuation of the Bush cuts and the payroll tax holiday, the extension of unemployment benefits, and a variety of defense and other cuts. Some congressional leaders from both parties are pushing for a “grand bargain” to avoid the cliff – and they want to include cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

President Obama may have wavered on protecting Social Security, but Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader and 28 other senators have not. They’ve signed a pledge to avoid cuts to Social Security as part of any deficit reduction package.

Which makes complete sense since Social Security doesn’t add a single dime to the deficit.

Have your senators signed the pledge? If they have, call them and thank them, and suggest they add Medicare and Medicaid. If they haven’t, urge them to sign. The more senators that sign the pledge, the better it will be for our president’s soul.

Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 11/08/2012

In austerity fight, deceptions have just begun

Only time will tell how much of a boost Republican challenger Mitt Romney will get from his debate win over President Obama.

The president seemed flatfooted and unprepared to respond to Romney’s shift toward the center, even though Romney’s campaign had suggested that’s exactly what they would do - use the Etch-a-Sketch to pivot away from the extreme right toward a more moderate stance during the general election campaign.

The debate felt like a replay of the scenario that has played out so often over the past four years: aggressive Republicans concealing their real motives and putting passive Democrats on the defensive.

Romney was acting every bit the CEO in charge, telling the customers what he thought they wanted to hear to make the sale; in this case, that his deficit reduction scheme wouldn’t favor the wealthy and damage the middle-class.

The contrast between CEO Romney talking to voters (customers) and CEO Romney talking to his big contributors (his board of directors) at a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. in May couldn’t have been starker. In what he thought were private remarks that have now blown up, Romney, you recall, dismissed the 47 percent of the country that supports Obama as self-pitying moochers who need to be taken care by the government.

We know that all politicians say one thing in public and another in private. That’s not a shock. But what’s striking is just how much contempt CEO Romney expressed for nearly half the voters when he was talking to the people who will hold real power in his administration: his board of directors.

Most CEOs wouldn’t let such feelings slip, even in private. But just as Romney told the Denver audience what he thought it wanted to hear at the debate, so too he was telling his contributors what he thought would please them.

Because make no mistake, plenty of the big money is preparing to work with whoever gets elected in November to launch a major offensive against Social Security and Medicare as well as to end tax breaks that favor the middle class, such as the mortgage interest tax break, under the guise of backing a new grand bargain to balance the budget.

For example, billionaire hedge fund executive Pete Peterson, who has also spent $458 million of his own money to push an austerity agenda, is now backing a bipartisan group known as Campaign to Fix the Debt. Ryan Grim at Huffington Post reports that the initiative has raised $30 million so far, including $5 million from a single unnamed donor.

The operation has hired 25 to 30 staffers, with plans to double, Grim reports. Along with a paid-media campaign, aims to influence press coverage in 40 states with locally focused teams.

This “bipartisan” initiative is just the latest attempt by Wall Street and its allies to pass the costs of the government deficits created by the financial crisis on to the middle class and those who can least afford it. Though President Obama has said he won’t let these programs be cut in a way that hurts the most vulnerable, to keep that promise he’ll have to grow backbone that was missing Monday night – and through much of his first term.

Lobbying / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 10/05/2012

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

London calling – is anyone listening?

Here we go again.

The scandal over bank manipulation of a key interest rate is just the latest strong signal that bankers rigged the system to benefit themselves and screw everybody else.

Not that we need another signal.

The scandal stems from something called LIBOR – the London Interbank Offered Rate. It’s an integral part of the global banking system. LIBOR is supposed to reflect the interest rate at which banks loan money to each other. It’s also a benchmark rate for other transactions, everything from home mortgages and credit cards to complex derivatives.

That means that the cost of the mortgage loan is pegged to whatever LIBOR is. On a home mortgage loan, for example, the interest rate might be a few points above LIBOR. The Financial Times estimates that about $350 trillion worth of contracts are tied to LIBOR.

It turns out that British-based Barclays Bank was manipulating the rates to increase their own profits, and to disguise how the bank was performing – possibly with the collusion of their regulators. The conservative Economist calls it “the rotten heart of finance,” and cautions that it is about to go worldwide.

The scandal hit home in England first, causing Barclays’ Bank president to resign and pay a record fine, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic promising to get to the bottom of it.

But there are strong suspicions that Barclays wasn’t alone, that other too big to fail banks might have also engaged in the same shenanigans. The Wall Street Journal reports that at least 16 banks are under investigation, in three criminal and 10 civil probes.

It’s bad enough that Barclay traders have been caught discussing the manipulation in emails, referring to the rate manipulation as “the fixings” and requesting a particular rate as casually as if they were ordering a double latte.

What’s worse, the Financial Times started raising questions about the LIBOR-rigging five years ago and the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on the banks’ LIBOR practices in May 2008. 2008. So any regulator or prosecutor with an iota of curiosity could have been digging into LIBOR since then.

As we already know, curiosity about bankers’ malfeasance has been a rare commodity among the officials who are supposed to be scrutinizing their bank behavior. Remember President Obama’s repeated promises to get tough on bankers, most recently in his State of the Union speech in January?

Don’t expect Mitt Romney to make an issue of it – at least 15 of Barclay’s most senior U.S.-based bankers have donated the maximum $2,500 contribution to his presidential campaign. The CEO who resigned, Bob Diamond, had been among the co-hosts for a London fundraiser when Romney goes to London for the Olympics. (Barclays’ political action committee has also contributed significant amounts of cash to Democrats, though not the president, over the years.)

The LIBOR scandal rips the curtains away from one of the nastiest Big Lies on both sides of the 2012 presidential campaign: the president’s line that his Dodd-Frank reform has fixed the financial system, and Romney’s pitch that regulation is the problem and that we should leave bankers alone to run their business as they see fit.

Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 07/09/2012