Occupy the New Year

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Where’s Our Money greeted the New Year in church – All Saints Church in Pasadena.I moderated a panel on the foreclosure crisis, with three people who have been on the front line of trying to find solutions, help people save their homes and hold bankers for their continuing fraud.

I met Walter Hackett when I first began writing about foreclosures in early 2009. He’s a former banker who became a homeowner’s advocate, as well as a leader in training other lawyers in one of the most complex areas of law. Jono Shaffer and Carlos Marroquin were two of the great people I met through Occupy. Jono, a veteran labor organizer who spearheaded the Justice for Janitors campaign, now works with ReFund California, a coalition that is fighting the austerity agenda across a range of issues, including education, housing and making Wall Street and the 1 percent pay its fair share, rather than making the middle-class bear all the costs of the economic collapse.

Carlos is one of the great spirits of Occupy LA, who through his advocacy and blog, No2HousingCrime.com has helped individual homeowners and put the spotlight on the foreclosure crisis.

The panel was part of stellar afternoon teach-in sponsored by Occupy’s Interfaith Sanctuary as part of the run-up to the Occupy the Rose Bowl Parade the following day.

I thought Walter, Jono and Carlos each made strong presentations and I recommend that you catch up with them in the video shot by my friend Vincent Precht, a stalwart Occupier, special education teacher who also has a terrific blog, California Father, where he writes about education issues, among other things.

It was a great way to start the new year, joining with people who have been doing good strong work for a long time, realizing how much resources we have, along with all the people who are finding their own way into the Occupy movement.

 

 

Foreclosures / Occupy - 01/08/2012

The Overdogs Bite Back

Our corporate lords are a sensitive lot. They want it all. They want total control of the government and they want love and appreciation.

Who can blame them for being upset? They spend all that money to buy the government, hire all those lobbyists, all those PR people.

It’s true the politicians help them out when business is bad, but do they everything just the way the corporate overlords want? Apparently not.

Who knew?

And we don’t express enough love for them, or appreciate them enough for all the good things they say they do.

Instead, we brats just want them to pay more taxes, or put another way, the same rate of taxes they used to.

Even one of their own, Warren Buffet, tries to make them look bad by suggesting maybe they could afford to pay a little more in taxes.

Now the CEOs are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.

And they've created a new more loveable name for themselves:  job creators? Who wouldn’t love a job creator?

They want to make sure they’re getting their message across about how swell they are. It’s called, wonderfully enough, the Job Creators Alliance.

In an odd coincidence, their message bears a striking resemblance to pure Republican propaganda. Even the tiniest speck of regulation appearing on the horizon, for example Dodd-Frank financial regulation, causes the job creators to tremble and quake, and stop doing the only thing they really care about – creating jobs.

The Job Creators Alliance doesn’t blame the deep recession or the lack of demand for unemployment. They blame Dodd-Frank. This mild bit of financial regulation is blasted while the CEOs tote out one of the Republicans’ favorite phony themes – the financial collapse wasn’t caused by Wall Street greed, fraud and carelessness, but by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And the other big problem? You guessed it. Mandated health insurance.

Because both Dodd-Frank and mandated health insurance tamper with one of the job creators’ real sacred cows – the free market system.

As staunch defenders of the free market system, the CEO’s web site ought to be aflame with their righteous anger at the bailout and the Federal Reserve’s secret trillions in loans that propped up so many businesses in the wake of the economic collapse. But in what I’m sure is just an oversight, the job creators’ haven’t gotten around to posting about it yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Column / Outrage - 12/29/2011

Slamming the Door on Democracy

Revolving door just no longer cuts it to describe how large corporate interests have swallowed up the government officials that are supposed to be working in our interest.

First Street, a D.C. insiders’ guide to people, policy and influence peddling, recently published a guide to lobbyists. The highest paid lobbyists were former elected officials, with an average take of $178,000 a year, the next highest paid group was former staffers, with an average take of more than $144,000 a year. Both left the professional lobbyists far behind in their value to their clients.

In public, our corporate leaders use polite language describing themselves in glowing terms like “job creators.”  Republicans wring their hands over regulations; Democrats weep crocodile tears over the plight of the middle class. Meanwhile the politicians feast at the public trough and prepare for lucrative payoffs, I mean careers, in the private sector.

Revolving door implies that these officials are somehow going back and forth between serving the public interest and the corporate interests that lobby them, pay for their campaigns if they’re elected, and then hire them when they’re ready to cash out.

But that’s not what’s happening.

The door doesn’t revolve, it only swings one way. And what’s happening to our government deserves much stronger language than the description of a door.

We have to face up to the fact that under our present system, election to public office, or appointment to key regulatory posts, is for the vast majority is the entryway into a world of legalized prostitution, where major corporations wield nearly absolute power over our government.

At WheresOurMoney.org we’ve proposed a constitutional amendment, 28A, to undo Citizens United, the awful U.S. Supreme Court ruling that unleashes even more unrestricted and unreported corporate money into our political system. That won’t curb lobbying. But rallying around the reversal of Citizens United will focus attention on the culture of legalized corruption that has overtaken our government.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citizens United / Congress / Martin Column - 12/20/2011

Confessions of a Conflicted Occupier

When the LAPD stormed into Los Angeles City Hall Park after midnight my first reaction was fear.

They flooded into the park without warning through the doors of City Hall, a massive masked army in riot gear, batons raised.

Where was our order to disperse?

The raid was just the latest deterioration in the city government’s relationship with Occupy. First they welcomed us with open arms, the City Council invited us to stay, the police stood by with commendable restraint. Then, six weeks in, City officials launched a propaganda campaign stressing the problems of the encampment. The campaign was designed to erode public support, making it imperative that they move in.

I was in the park that night in solidarity with a movement for which I have great hopes, and somesgivings. Partly, it’s me. I’m not by nature a joiner. I spent years as a newspaper reporter and editor, doing my best to conceal my biases and not take sides.  By temperament as well as training, it’s natural for me to see both sides of an issue and poke holes in arguments, rather than come up with solutions. I’m better at asking questions than having to come up with answers.

But after eight years of disastrous policies during the Bush era, and severe disappointment with President Obama and the Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street, weak financial reform and tepid leadership in focusing on the main problems facing the economy – unemployment, foreclosure, widening income disparity and attacks on the middle class – I was more than ready for a movement that wanted to focus on those problems.

My wife and I visited Zucotti Square a week into Occupy Wall Street and were buoyed by people of all ages who had showed up from all over the country to figure out how to work together to deal with the issues. When I first head the human mic, in which the crowd repeats everything that a speaker says, phrase by phrase, I thought I had stumbled into a street theater performance. It took me a few minutes to realize that this was a meeting, the general assembly.

The next night, back home in downtown Los Angeles, we walked our dog Billie through the park at City Hall. Occupy needs to be happening here, I said, and it should be at City Hall.

A bunch of activists I didn’t know at the time was way ahead of me: they had been organizing for a couple of weeks. That very night, when we got home from our walk, the announcement that Occupy LA would begin the following day appeared on my Facebook page.

The next morning a thousand people marched from Pershing Square to City Hall, and a hundred of them set up tents.

I have a schizophrenic relationship to Occupy. The charms of the General Assembly have eluded me. All the crazy talk—like proposals to get money from the City to build a giant flower pot, complete with giant flower, on the grounds of City Hall, in which people would live. This scheme was met by an objection— a hard block. But the objector never questioned the sanity or practicality of the proposal; rather they had ideological issues with taking money from the Man aka the City. When the talk wasn’t bonkers, it was endless. I could also see conditions at the camp were deteriorating, with more and more people camped out to party and smoke pot, not to build a new social and political movement. Sometimes the wild mess of people was bracing and inspiring, but sometimes it was just heartbreaking.

One of the first nights I was there a guy pulled up with a card table and a pot of chili and started ladling it out. It was some of the most delicious chili I ever tasted. I got inspired and started making pots of vegan lentils and black beans to take to the camp. But then I would get another whiff of the increasingly squalid conditions in the camp and want it gone. Can’t the movement just evolve to the next step in which camping out would no longer be its most visible image and most important product?

I refused to make them soup, but then my wife, Stacie Chaiken, who helped organize an interfaith clergy group at Occupy, would give me a hard time and I would go back to making soup.

I saw what the Occupy meant to her, how she understood it in a way that went beyond the encampment and the endless meetings. I saw what it meant to my friend, a special-ed teacher, who has been in despair watching the corporatization of public education. I made new friends at Occupy who had a much higher tolerance for the mess and the meetings, who found at Occupy connections to other people and pieces of themselves that had been for such a long time missing.

I fell in with a group that was meeting with City officials, initially about logistics, and then about an attempt to conclude the encampment at City Hall, with the possibility that the City might turn over a patch of land and some office space to a nonprofit created by Occupy. The discussions eventually came to naught, in part because neither the City nor our group could deliver. Controversy erupted because a faction of Occupiers who have not been involved in the talks with City officials objected to our engaging in “secret” discussions because that went against the Occupy principle of complete transparency. If the Mayor and Police Chief wanted to talk to us, they should come to the General Assembly and get on stack, meaning they should wait in line like everyone else for their turn to speak.

Maybe those who objected were right. But I strongly doubt that City and police officials would have showed up at the General Assembly to discuss issues with—and submit to the verbal slings and arrows of the Occupiers, as many of them wished. And I found the discussions with the Police and Mayor’s office a fascinating experiment, very much in keeping with the open-ended spirit of Occupy. The conversations also served to prolong the Occupation at City Hall Park long after it would have doubtless have been shut down.

The night of the raid, there were about 100 people who had decided to get arrested in acts of civil disobedience. They were all people who had been trained in non-violence. I was not one of them. When the police arrived in their shock and awe attack, I was right in the middle of the park. I scampered through the maze of tents, out of the park onto to First Street. I encountered a police line, and asked the officers—wearing helmets, carrying weapons of non-lethal destruction—how I might safely exit the perimeter. They stared at me, stone-faced.

I told the police that if there were orders being given, we couldn’t hear them. Rumors swept through the street that everyone within the perimeter were about to be arrested.

Finally I made my way up Main Street to Temple, across the Triforium and down onto Los Angeles Street. I was able to walk west on Second Street, where I found my way to the Redwood for a stiff drink before last call at 2am, where I watched the rest of the proceedings broadcast live on KTLA.

I didn’t like the way it went down that night. It was inconsistent with the LAPD’s previous restraint and with the respect the City had expressed for this important free speech movement. After I got over my initial fear, I understood why the police—in their fear of potential violence from antisocial people in the encampment— reacted in the way they did.

None of this qualifies me for the Occupy Hall of Fame. Unlike some of those I’ve met in this movement, I don’t claim to have all the answers.

I do have more questions:

Has the Occupy movement really changed the national debate, as some occupiers have claimed, or has it taken a first baby step onto the national stage? Yes, I hear the president’s populist-sounding speeches, but I have yet to hear him propose a massive jobs program or even an adequate program to address foreclosures, let alone withdraw his support from the disastrous focus on austerity instead of getting the economy going.

Is this really a movement of the 99 percent, or is it a movement of the self-selected few—activists, anarchists, bohos, hippies and others who can camp on the lawn for weeks at a time, and stand through a General Assembly?

Should the heart and soul of a movement really be that endless meeting? The General Assembly seems more like a necessary evil than a true solidarity-building exercise. How about some dancing, or singing or poetry, or praying?

Can this movement evolve beyond the symbolic taking of public space and public debate into a forum we so badly need, to including a broader spectrum of people, that can take on the bread-and-butter issues of the distressed majority?

Where is the path out of City Hall Park into the heart of the City?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Column / Occupy - 12/13/2011

The Right to Remain Silenced

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News Flash: Giving Banks Billions Won't Create Jobs

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

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

It was supposed to help create 500,000 jobs.

Well, not so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Jobs and the Democratization of Technology

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

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

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

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

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

Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 10/05/2011

Going to the White House

I've been a politics geek since I was about 10 years old and I went from reading the sports page of the Detroit News to the front page. I've been reading about it, arguing about it, covering it on some level as a journalist, and some times writing about it as an advocate, ever since.
So getting invited to the White House as part of a delegation of California activists, organizers and bloggers, organized by the Courage Campaign, is a big deal. A lot of us have expressed frustration with the Obama administration for it’s unwillingness to focus on jobs and housing in a more effective way, for its embrace of the austerity agenda, and its failure to hold bankers accountable in any meaningful way for the financial collapse that the whole country is still suffering from.
I was ambivalent about going at first, because this administration has sometimes seemed so determined not to get to it, to prize elusive bipartisanship over a strong fight for what’s right, for its cluelessness about the depth of the unemployment and housing crisis that continues to cause so much misery across the country.
That cluelessness was on display again in the past few days, when the president proclaimed no deficit deal would be fair without “shared sacrifice” that would require hedge fund managers to pay higher taxes while the government cut Medicaid. Does the president really believe that the sacrifice is equivalent – millionaires having to get by on a little less while people who are dependent on the government for health care get less care?
Even in planning our visit, the White House doesn’t seem to get it. We’ll have break-out sessions on education reform, the new health care law, lesbian gay transgender bisexual issues, the environment and labor – but no session on the foreclosure crisis and housing. The administration’s efforts in this area, so crucial to California’s economy, have been particularly lame. Whether or not the president’s staff wants to focus on it, I’m sure they will get an earful.
What I will suggest to the president’s people is that he’s vulnerable because he hasn’t done enough to reduce unemployment or to address the foreclosure crisis, and because too often he has accepted the Radical Republicans’ and the deficit hawks’ terms of the debate. When the president debates on those terms, he loses. We all lose.
Still, I don’t want to give up on the administration or the people who continue to put their faith in him. I’ll go in memory of my father, Irving Berg, who would be 90 this year. He saw great promise in Obama and wouldn’t allow frustration to cause me to give up on him, or fail to participate in some effort that might set Obama on a firmer course.
We meet with the president’s top staff on Friday all day. Any messages you want me to deliver?

Action / D.C. Disconnect / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 09/22/2011

Bottom Line on Fed Bailout is No Secret

Were the bankers and Federal Reserve trying to hide something in particular? Or were they just fighting Bloomberg’s lawsuit to reveal the details of the Fed’s sweetheart bailout loans out of habitual arrogance?

I’ve been wondering about this as I make my way through Bloomberg’s expose based on the data the news service forced the Fed to turn over after several years of litigation.

The Fed and the banks tried to scare the courts into keeping the data secret, warning that disclosure would stigmatize those who received the low interest loans and cause them irreparable harm.

Finally, the courts saw through all the Fed’s and the bank’s bogus arguments and ordered the data made public.

The numbers are all so mind-bogglingly huge that it’s easy to be overwhelmed, for the information to lose it’s meaning. But as Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit pointed out, Bloomberg went straight to the heart of the issue, reminding us what kind of a bailout our politicians delivered, in which banks and other corporations got access to $1.2 trillion in low-interest loans – about the same amount U.S. homeowners are struggling with on 6.5 million delinquent or foreclosed mortgages.

But as RJ Eskow reminds us, we knew a lot of the grisly details before the latest data dump – like that the 10 largest banks got $667 billion in low-interest loans from the Fed.

What we didn’t know until now is how much of that money was an outright gift from taxpayers; Eskow estimates that it amounts to about $27 million on each $1 billion worth of loan, based on the difference between the usual 3.8 percent interest rate and the 1.1 sweetheart rate the Fed charged as part of its bailout. Because the Fed attached no strings to its generosity to the banks, the bankers never paid it forward to the rest of us, who saw our access to credit shrink. And it never occurred to the Fed that it might have stimulated the economy with a few well-placed low-interest loans to the rest of us.

The bottom line is that the Fed shouldn’t be handing out trillions of dollars without any accountability or transparency. Most Americans are not going to have wade through the details to confirm their gut feeling – we’re getting screwed.

Federal Reserve / Martin Column - 08/26/2011

Republic Gone Bananas

It wasn’t the sight of members of Congress fleeing the Capitol building last week after the debt ceiling debacle that startled me. It was the policeman armed with an M16 combat rifle outside the House of Representatives, guarding them.

 

The New York Times piece never mentioned the cop. Nor did the caption on the photo by Stephen Crowley. Only one of the hundreds of people who commented on the story online mentioned the unknown officer.

But that was the real story to me.

Yes, the debt ceiling got raised – that was never seriously in doubt, because the financial consequences of default would have been devastating even for the Tea Partiers…. especially for the Tea Partiers. Slightly more interesting was the question of whether the president and the Dems would negotiate their way out of the paper bag the Tea Party people had put them in. (Nope.)

It was the heavily armed Capitol policeman that summarized for me all that has happened to this country over the last decade as we slid into a stinking pool of fear, anger and greed so at odds with our heroic journey. To see that kind of weaponry at the greatest living monument to democracy seemed undeniably to question it.

Maybe some members of Congress have concluded that they need more guns to ward off a nut job like the one who opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and passers-by in Tuscon last January. But a machine gun on the steps of the Capitol building seems like way more firepower than necessary to stop a lone assassin.

It reminded me of the images we have come to expect from banana republics where the corrupt leaders treat themselves like royalty, insulated from the struggling populace by security men wielding polished pistols or machine guns.

When I lived and worked in Washington in the Seventies, the Kennedy and King assassinations were only a few years old and the wounds were still raw.

 

 

 

Shockingly, President Reagan was shot at the Hilton up on Connecticut Avenue, just after taking office in 1981. But no one – least of all Reagan, who deeply understood the power of imagery and symbolism – would have permitted the conduct of lunatics to steal our freedom and trap us in a mental state of siege.

Or is it simply that the moment has come when the rulers must protect themselves from the ruled?

Congress / Harvey Column - 08/08/2011