Tag: ek Politics

(h/t Kevin Gosztola @ Firedog Lake)

(Transcript from OpEd News)

People like watching disasters. That’s why they watch NASCAR.

Or the Mets.

NFL Ends Lockout of Referees

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Thursday September 27, 2012 6:14 am

The NFL will have its regular officials back on the field tonight, as the owners ended their lockout of the referees, reaching a tentative agreement. The referees union must vote to approve the contract, but the NFL was holding up the return to play for the officials by locking them out, so their lifting that allowed the officials to go back to work.

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So they saved their defined benefit pension for five years, and get a fairly hefty defined contribution thereafter. In one of the other major sticking points, the league will be able to hire an indeterminate number of officials full-time, and have more officials available than the current staff of 121. This is certainly a better contract than the owners wanted to give; they wanted to end the defined benefit pension immediately.

Referees are well-paid, just like everyone associated with the lucrative business of professional football. But we saw over the last few weeks that they are paid at a level commensurate with their skills. And in a rare set of circumstances, the entire nation got a chance to see in real time the documented value of skilled labor over scab labor. It has relevance for a host of labor fights, and hopefully can be used as an object lesson. More on this from the New York Times.

At noon today, sorting the recycling was my biggest challenge.  Tonight I’m a scab.

It’s the Axe Body Spray.

According to ChaCha that phrase is from from Simpson’s #39 8F03 Bart the Murderer (aired October 10, 1991).

It was spoken by Fat Tony on seeing Itchy and Scratchy for the very first time.

Just something to think about when you read all those Romney/Stench pieces.

Paul Ryan vs. The Stench

By: Roger Simon, Politico

September 25, 2012 04:38 AM EDT

Jonathan Swift did not really want Irish people to sell their children for food in 1791; George Orwell did not really want the clocks to strike thirteen in 1984; Paul Ryan, I am sure, calls Mitt Romney something more dignified than “Stench” and Microsoft did not invent PowerPoint as a means to euthanize cattle. At least I am pretty sure Microsoft didn’t.

And you see, this is where Roger Simon is completely and totally wrong, it’s perfectly true that-

PowerPoint was released by Microsoft in 1990 as a way to euthanize cattle using a method less cruel than hitting them over the head with iron mallets. After PETA successfully argued in court that PowerPoint actually was more cruel than iron mallets, the program was adopted by corporations for slide show presentations.

Conducting a PowerPoint presentation is a lot like smoking a cigar. Only the person doing it likes it. The people around him want to hit him with a chair.

PowerPoint is usually restricted to conference rooms where the doors are locked from the outside. It is, therefore, considered unsuited for large rallies, where people have a means of escape and where the purpose is to energize rather than daze.

Don’t quit your day job.

We Are Now Entering The Terrifying End Game

Nigel Farage, King World News

September 24, 2012

What is really happening here is the eurozone crisis is so serious, and so dire, public opinion across Europe is turning so quickly in every country against the project, that what they are trying to do is seal and complete the project before everybody really wakes up to what’s being done in their name.

That’s what they are about.  We are now entering the end game in what has been a 50 year political project.  This is all going to come to a very dramatic head over the course of the next two years.

…

The end game for them is to effectively abolish the nation states of Europe, to completely abolish any concept of national democracy, and to vest all power, all the attributes we associate with normal countries, that is all to be vested in this new European political class.

That imperial ambition has been there from the start, but up until now it has been hidden.  I have to say that as far as most of Europe is concerned,  I am quite pessimistic.

You’re Dreaming If You Think The Euro Crisis Is Resolved

Raul Ilargi Meijer, Automatic Earth

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2012 12:54 AM

It makes no difference whether you call it shock doctrine or 21st century imperialism or hostile takeovers, you can’t take away from the people of Greece, Italy and Spain all the monuments of their past, as well as all powers they have over their own economies, production facilities and agriculture, and expect them to take that lying down. Not going to happen.

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The politico-banking class are all sitting there smugly and comfy in their bought-on-someone-else’s-credit plush offices, picking through the still rich and splendid spoils of once proud nations and fiercely independent peoples. And even if they do win some of the preliminary battles at the negotiating table, the real ones can be won only through the use of violence.

There isn’t much time left until that becomes a realistic threat, which means that now is the time for the people of Europe to decide whether they want to go down that road or not. And if they don’t, they need to draw conclusions and accept the potential consequences of that decision: Get up, Stand up. And no, I don’t have a lot of faith that they will. But I do hope that more people will now start to clue in on what that means: yes, violence.

Patience snaps in Portugal

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

September 24th, 2012

The Portuguese people have put up with one draconian package after another – with longer working hours, 7pc pay cuts, tax rises, an erosion of pensions, etc – all amounting to a net fiscal squeeze of 10.4 of GDP so far in cyclically-adjusted terms. (It will ultimately be 15pc).

They have protested peacefully, in marked contrast to the Greeks, even though the latest poll by the Catholic University shows that 87pc are losing faith in Portugal’s democracy.

Yet Mr Passos Coelho’s rash decision to raise the Social Security tax on workers’ pay from 11pc to 18pc has at last brought the heavens down upon his head.

He was hauled in front of the Council of State – a sort of Privy Council of elders and wise men – for a showdown over the weekend. Eight hours later he emerged battered and bruised to admit defeat. The measure will not go ahead.

Francisco Louca from left-wing Bloco suggested that the prime minister cannot survive such a defeat. “The government is dead”, he said.

…

If Citigroup is right – and views differ on this – Portugal is going into the same sort of self-feeding downward spiral as Greece. Debt-deflation is choking the country.

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The defenders of Portugal’s current policies have nothing to do with Friedman or orthodox monetarism.

They are disciples of an extremist subcult that believes in expansionary fiscal contractions, even though ample evidence from the IMF shows that such policies are mostly doomed to failure without offsetting monetary stimulus and/or devaluation.

Sadly, there seems to be almost nobody in public life in Portugal willing to tell the people that membership of the euro is the elemental cause of their current suffering.

Valencia: A Spanish city without medicine

Paul Mason, BBC

22 September 2012

Journalists sacked when a local paper closed have taken to doing “citizen journalism” – which today means organising a coach trip around all the various projects Valencia built in the good times.

There is the Formula One racetrack, which runs right through the city so the roads had to be redesigned. But the city has lost its Formula One race.

There is the America’s Cup dock, with huge sheds for ocean-going yachts and a massive white control tower. But there is no more America’s Cup racing in Valencia.

There is the Opera House, a cross between the one in Sydney and something you would imagine only in your more disturbed dreams – 400 million euros to build, 40 million a year to run – 15 performances a year.

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Whether by corruption – and there has been a great deal of that – maladministration, or pure bad luck, Valencia is littered with vanity projects that tell their own story.

The airport that has never seen a single plane land. The theme park built in a place where the summer heat rises above 40C (104F). The land bought at premium prices that is now worthless.

Spaniards rage against austerity near Parliament

By ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press

36 minutes ago

More than 1,000 riot police blocked off access to the Parliament building in the heart of Madrid, forcing most protesters to crowd nearby avenues and shutting down traffic at the height of the evening rush hour.

Police used batons to push back some protesters at the front of the march attended by an estimated 6,000 people as tempers flared, and some demonstrators broke down barricades and threw rocks and bottles toward authorities.

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Angry Madrid marchers who got as close as they could to Parliament, 250 meters (yards) away, yelled “Get out!, Get out! They don’t represent us! Fire them!”

“The only solution is that we should put everyone in Parliament out on the street so they know what it’s like,” said Maria Pilar Lopez, a 60-year-old government secretary.

Lopez and others called for fresh elections, claiming the government’s hard-hitting austerity measures are proof that the ruling Popular Party misled voters when it won power last November in a landslide.

Spain prepares more austerity, protesters clash with police

By Tracy Rucinski and Paul Day, Reuters

Tue Sep 25, 2012 3:40pm EDT

“Let us in, we want to evict you,” protesters chanted outside parliament. Evictions have soared in Spain as thousands of people have defaulted on bank loans.

Demonstrators said they were angry that the state has poured funds into crumbled banks while it is cutting social benefits.

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Half-year deficit data indicate national accounts are already on a slope that will drive Spain into a bailout. The deficit to end-June stands at over 4.3 percent of gross domestic product, including transfers to bailed out banks, making meeting the 6.3 percent target by the end of the year almost impossible.

it can only be failed.

Among some Paul Ryan backers, disappointment at Romney campaign trajectory

By Felicia Sonmez and David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post

Updated: Monday, September 24, 1:50 AM

Dissatisfaction with the trajectory of the campaign seems highest among Ryan’s most ardent backers. They view Romney’s campaign as having doubled back to a cautious strategy, avoiding Ryan’s trademark big ideas, and hoping President Obama will beat himself.

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Still, there have been unforced errors, such as the one Ryan made last month when he misstated his marathon time in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt – a misstep that has so become part of Ryan’s national profile that it was lampooned in the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.”

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And it’s not that Ryan is neglecting to cite the need to focus on the big problems facing the country. Aside from his first week on the trail, during which he barely mentioned his signature plan to overhaul Medicare, he has raised the issue at the majority of his roughly three-dozen campaign stops as GOP vice presidential nominee, including in his appearance on Friday at the AARP’s annual summit, at which he received a mixed reception.

Rather, the concern of some of the seven-term Wisconsin congressman’s supporters is that nowadays Ryan’s discussion of the big issues facing the country offers more specifics on what Obama has done wrong than what Romney and Ryan would do right.

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A Ryan spokesman disputed the notion that the campaign has not delivered on its promise of honing in on the big ideas, noting that Ryan frequently focuses in interviews as well as in his campaign-trail remarks on Medicare, tax reform and balancing the budget.

“Only one ticket has had the courage to talk about solutions to the big challenges facing America,” spokesman Brendan Buck said. “Not only has Paul Ryan championed the Romney plan to save and strengthen Medicare – he’s done it in front of Florida seniors and at the AARP. We are running on bold solutions – made even bolder compared to the pettiness of President Obama’s campaign.”

When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no – and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.- Mitt Romney

Likewise Neo-Liberalism-

Obama and the Center-Right Nation He Hasn’t Changed

By: masaccio, Firedog Lake

Sunday September 23, 2012 10:30 am

But he isn’t the only one who dismisses the concerns of his supporters. Barack Obama was elected in large part by people who wanted real changes from the Bush government. They wanted an end to wars, restoration of civil liberties, equality for LGBT people, strenuous regulation and law enforcement directed at the criminals on Wall Street, and economic fairness through support for homeowners and workers. With the notable exception of grudging support for marriage equality and equality in the ranks of the armed forces, Obama and the Democratic Party turned their backs on their supporters. It is impossible to find a single policy suggested by anyone from Paul Krugman to whatever is left of the left that made its way into any piece of actual legislation. No one from the Wall Street criminal class has been investigated, let alone prosecuted.

It was apparent by Fall 2009 that the Democrats believed what the Republicans were saying: America is a Center-Right nation. Time after time, Obama and the Democrats proposed legislation that only a Republican could love, then bargained further to the right to pick up votes from the most conservative Democrats and the least conservative Republicans. Time after time the resulting legislation was nearly useless when action was taken at all. Unions and the hard-working people they represent were probably the single greatest contributor to the Obama victory. They got slapped in the face. The stimulus was too small. Dodd-Frank relied on captured agencies to create rules. Obamacare threw millions of Americans into the maws of the private insurance companies. Every time I hear a Democrat brag on some piece of legislation, I think of the lost possibilities.

The nation was hungry for leadership, starving for action to make things better, desperate for change, and we got a President who was unwilling to push for anything that would actually change the status quo.

Ultimately, both Romney and Obama disrespect their constituents. Romney openly loathes the people he needs, and they know it. They may vote for him, but they know that they will suffer for it.

Obama is more circumspect in public, but look at the people he hires: Rahm Emmanuel who openly loathes the left, and Tim Geithner, who lives to serve Wall Street at any cost, like foaming the runway for bank foreclosures with the lives of millions of homeowners. Obama refuses even to talk to anyone who questions conventional wisdom, which is the nature of the intellectual activity of the left. It’s as if we professional leftists don’t exist for him, in exactly the same way the 47% don’t really exist for Romney.

This is no way to run a country. Ideas matter, policies matter, evidence matters. In a room full of smart people, the smartest person is the room. Romney despises his supporters, and will fill the room with silly people like those at his secret fund-raiser. So far, Obama has refused to listen to the room. He thinks he knows we are a center-right nation and that he can do nothing to change that, that he cannot exercise leadership. I hope that changes if he wins a second term.

Leadership means that the President listens to the room, clarifies thinking and helps everyone see the problems and the possible solutions. When that doesn’t happen, we are governed by a tiny group of jerks, responsible only to their moneymen and reliant on public relations tricks to pacify the masses. That will work until it doesn’t.

Five Big Opportunities on the Economy Obama Missed

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Monday September 24, 2012 9:32 am

One of the most frustrating things about having a two party political system, especially during the heat of an election, is that many important points get ignored if the don’t fit the partisan dynamic. One of the best examples I feel is the debate about Obama’s record on the economy.

The only arguments most people hear against Obama’s record comes from Republicans, but their criticisms are normally incoherent attacks based on fantasies about confidence and government crowding out the private sector. Most prominent figures who believe in Keynesian economics are at this moment defending Obama poor record mainly because it is at least noticeably less terrible than any proposal from Mitt Romney.

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People trying to defend Obama record from the left will often claim Obama didn’t try to get more stimulus only because Obama knew he wouldn’t be able to get the votes in the Senate. Yet here are things Obama could have done for the economy without Congress but he choose not to do them. Given that Obama didn’t even try to spend all the potential money for stimulus he had at his disposal, it is safe to assume the real reason Obama didn’t seek more stimulus money for Congress was simply because he mistakenly believed the economy didn’t need it.

The behavior and statements of the administration clearly show that they kept underestimating the size of the economy problem for years.

While Bill Clinton is defending Obama by claiming no president could have magically turned the economy to full employment, a honest look at the record would indicate another president could have done a better job even with the constraints Obama faced. Sadly though this critic of Obama’s record from the left is almost completely absent. Careful examinations of Obama’s failing are being completely overshadowed by how misguided Mitt Romney policy ideas are.

This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

September 25, 2:10 PM ET

Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama’s widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

That’s left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an incompetent challenger. Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn’t come down to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we’ve all missed out somehow.

…

The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and just tried a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned the entire population to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.

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These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don’t oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, helping finance the construction of new factories in places like China and India.

…

The people in this group inevitably support every war that America has even the slimmest chance of involving itself in, but neither they nor their children ever fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious, rarely if ever go to church, and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of criminal penalty for their behavior.

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For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life – he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague’s missing daughter (“It was a shocker,” Mitt said. “The number of lost souls was astounding”).

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If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people “wants to have a beer with,” how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife’s name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing “entitlements” like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq, and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it’s paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he’s Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane’s sneering, tux-wearing “Cal’ character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdink to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he’s literally Gordon Gekko). He’s everything we’ve been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn’t fight his own battles and insists there’s only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney’s part to pull safely ahead in this race is what speaks to the extraordinary brokenness of the system.

…

(W)hen one of the candidates is Mitt Romney, the race shouldn’t be close. You’ll hear differently in the coming weeks from the news media, which will spend a lot of time scratching its figurative beard while it argues that a 54-46 split, or however this thing ends up (and they’ll call anything above 53% for Obama a rout, I would guess), is evidence that the system is broken. But what we probably should be wondering is why it was ever close at all.

Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal

By SUZANNE DALEY, The New York Times

Published: September 24, 2012

“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”

…

“It’s against the dignity of these people to have to look for food in this manner,” said Eduardo Berloso, an official in Girona, the city that padlocked its supermarket trash bins.

Mr. Berloso proposed the measure last month after hearing from social workers and seeing for himself one evening “the humiliating gesture of a mother with children looking around before digging into the bins.”

…

But Mr. Berloso’s locks created something of an uproar across Spain, where the economic crisis is fueling more and more protests highlighting hunger. A group of mayors and unionists in southern Spain, where unemployment rates are far above the average, recently staged Robin Hood raids on two supermarkets, loading carts with basic foods and pressing them to donate more food to the needy.

More than a dozen people are facing prosecution for theft over the stunt. But they are unrepentant and appear to have huge local support. “Taking some food and giving it to families who are having a really hard time, if this is stealing, I am guilty,” one of the men, Francisco Molero of the farmworkers’ SAT union, told the local news media afterward.

I.M.F.’s Call for More Cuts Irks Greece

By LIZ ALDERMAN and LANDON THOMAS Jr., The New York Times

Published: September 24, 2012

The impasse has elevated tensions here as Greece braces for a nationwide general strike planned on Wednesday that threatens to bring public services to a halt. The Greek people are increasingly angry over the prospect that public salaries and pensions will be cut again in a last-ditch bid to secure a new loan installment of 31.5 billion euros, or $40.7 billion, from Greece’s creditors.

The Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, plans to address the nation this week to bolster support for the austerity package. He has already publicly warned his center-right party, New Democracy, that he will oust lawmakers of the party failing to back the package once it comes up for a vote, probably in early October.

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In this political calculus, Ms. Merkel and others see Mr. Samaras as the last best hope for Greece. They worry that if the government teeters, new elections might be called in which his party could lose power to the increasingly popular leftist party Syriza, led by the political maverick Alexis Tsipras. Mr. Tsipras advocates tearing up the loan agreement with Greece’s international creditors. That would raise the risk of default and an eventual exit from the euro.

…

At the meeting, Poul Thomsen, the I.M.F.’s lead negotiator for Greece, was pushing hard for additional tax increases and wage and pension cuts, these people say. Mr. Stournaras angrily gestured to a bullet hole in one of the windows of the Finance Ministry.

“You see this – this came from a bullet,” Mr. Stournaras said. “Do you want to overthrow the government?”

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The impasse reveals the extent of the government’s alarm at the worsening mood on the streets. More protests are likely in October, when Parliament is expected to vote on the measure. Many Greeks are now talking about the potential for civil unrest when the weather turns colder and many people may not be able to afford to heat their homes. Fuel prices, including gasoline, have been climbing, and whatever cushion Greeks on the margins had in their savings is gone.

Moreover, questions are swirling about the extent to which Greece’s police force will be willing and able to maintain public order, because it is also facing salary cuts. A number of officers were held off with pepper spray by riot police officers last week outside of Mr. Samaras’s residence, where they held a demonstration.

Draghi Rally Lets Skeptics Dump Spain for Bunds

By David Goodman and Emma Charlton, Bloomberg News

Sep 25, 2012 8:47 AM ET

Demand for German debt, perceived to be among the safest securities, is being sustained as Spain weighs a sovereign bailout to supplement a 100-billion euro ($129 billion) bank rescue package and as Europe’s economy slides toward recession.

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Even as policy makers strive to end the three-year debt crisis, the region’s economic outlook is weakening. Euro-area surveys on Sept. 20 showed services and manufacturing output fell to a 39-month low in September adding to evidence the economy is heading for a recession. Figures yesterday showed German business confidence unexpectedly fell to the lowest in more than two and a half years in September.

“We are in a period where the ECB has laid down its framework to save the euro but the fundamentals will ultimately creep back in and you will see new problems flare,” said Harvinder Sian, a fixed income strategist at RBS in London. “Bunds will remain supported. I think 1.55 percent to 1.70 percent is a good entry location.”

Spain is in its second recession in three years, endangering plans to trim its budget deficit and avoid a bailout. The euro-region economy will probably shrink 0.4 percent this year, the ECB said this month.

Stump Speeches (3:40)

Ads and Slogans (2:44)

Spin Doctors (2:43)

Campaigning in the Digital Age (2:54)

Picking a Running Mate (2:54)

(Matt Taibbi on Sam Seder, h/t Susie Madrak @ Crooks & Liars)

Wall Street Rolling Back Another Key Piece of Financial Reform

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

September 20, 9:33 AM ET

Jefferson County, Alabama was the most famous case – the city of Birmingham went bankrupt after being bribed and goaded into taking on billions of dollars of toxic swap deals – but in fact it was just one of hundreds of similar examples of localities being duped into suicidal financial deals by rapacious banks and financial companies. The Denver school system, for instance, got clobbered when it opted for an exotic swap deal pushed by J.P. Morgan Chase (the same villain in Jefferson County, incidentally) and then-school superintendent/future U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, that ended up costing the school system tens of millions of dollars. As was the case in Jefferson County, the only way out of the deal involved a massive termination fee that might have been even more destructive than the deal itself.

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Sounds simple, right? But Wall Street couldn’t have that. After all, if companies are required to have a fiduciary responsibility to cities and towns, how in the world can they screw cities and towns? The idea was a veritable axe-blow to the banks’ municipal advisory businesses.

So what did Wall Street lobbyists and trade groups like SIFMA (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) do? Well, they did what they’ve been doing to Dodd-Frank generally: they Swiss-cheesed the law with a string of exemptions. The industry proposal that ended up being HR 2827 created several new loopholes for purveyors of swaps and other such financial products to cities and towns.

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So basically, if you’re underwriting a municipal bond for a city or a town, and you happen also to give the city or town advice about some deadly swap deal that will put the city into bankruptcy for the next thousand years, you don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to that city or town. The banks’ view is that being asked to perform the merely-technical function of underwriting a bond is very different from advising someone to take on an exotic swap deal – so if a bank is mainly an underwriter and happens to offhandedly recommend this or that swap deal, it just isn’t fair to drop this onerous financial responsibility, this weighty designation of municipal financial advisor, on its shoulders.

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God forbid! Thankfully, this new law provides an exemption from that “highest standard of conduct” providing the bank or financial company is not just giving advice, but also performing a merely technical function like underwriting.

The details of this law are pretty hairy, but the basic idea is simple: provided a bank isn’t dumb enough to only provide advice, or to ask for separate compensation for advice, it doesn’t owe anyone any goddamned fiduciary responsibility. So they can keep screwing cities and towns as much as they’d like.

Crossposted from DocuDharma

A Rare Look at Why The Government Won’t Fight Wall Street

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

September 18, 10:28 AM ET

The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who’ve come at the issue from the inside.

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There are some damning revelations in this book, and overall it’s not a flattering portrait of key Obama administration officials like SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, Department of Justice honchos Eric Holder (who once worked at the same law firm, Covington and Burling, as Connaughton) and Lanny Breuer, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

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Connaughton writes about something he calls “The Blob,” a kind of catchall term describing an oozy pile of Hill insiders who are all incestuously interconnected, sometimes by financial or political ties, sometimes by marriage, sometimes by all three. And what Connaughton and Kaufman found is that taking on Wall Street even with the aim of imposing simple, logical fixes often inspired immediate hostile responses from The Blob; you’d never know where it was coming from.

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when Kaufman tried to advocate for rules that would have prevented naked short-selling, Connaughton was warned by a lobbyist that it would be “bad for my career” if he went after the issue and that “Ted and I looked like deranged conspiracy theorists” for asking if naked short-selling had played a role in the final collapse of Lehman Brothers. Naked short-selling is another controversial practice. Essentially, when you short a stock, you’re supposed to locate shares of that stock before you go out and sell it short. But what hedge funds and banks have discovered is that the rules provide “leeway” – you can go out and sell shares in a stock without actually having it, provided you have a “reasonable belief” that you can locate the shares.

This leads to the obvious possibility of companies creating false supply in a stock by selling shares they don’t have. Without getting too much into the weeds here, there is an obvious solution to the problem, which essentially would be forcing companies to actually locate shares before selling them. In their attempt to change the system, Kaufman and Connaughton discovered that the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation, the massive quasi-private organization that clears most all stock trades in America, had come up with just such a fix on their own.

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A roundtable to discuss the idea was scheduled by the SEC on September 24, 2009. Of the nine invited participants, “all but one” were for the status quo. Connaughton expected the DTCC representatives to unveil their reform idea, but they didn’t.

The Banker Who’d Cut Social Security and Medicare – and May Become Treasury Secretary

Richard (RJ) Eskow, Huffington Post

09/17/2012 11:08 pm

Before entering public life Bowles was a banker with Morgan Stanley. He now serves on Morgan Stanley’s board, and has done so through a series of that bank’s legal issues. As Dean Baker notes, Bowles was also on the General Motors Board “from June of 2005 until it went into bankruptcy in the spring of 2009,” and “joined the board of Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street investment bank, near the peak of the housing bubble in December of 2005.”

Bowles is also on the Board of Facebook, whose IPO has been the subject of controversy and scandal. (Baker offers a fun, interactive graph of the economic performance of the companies on whose boards Bowles has served. It isn’t pretty.)

…

The Simpson/Bowles proposal is often marketed — falsely — as the product of their deadlocked and failed Presidential Deficit Commission. It claims to be “centrist” because it offers unspecified tax increases as well as cuts — probably by decimating the middle class by eliminating tax deductions for employer health care, dependent children, and home mortgage interest. It also claims “bipartisanship” because Bowles the banker is also Democratic Party insider.

The “Simpson Bowles” austerity cuts to U.S. government spending closely resemble the cuts that have devastated the economies of Europe and Great Britain. Their plan would also cut Medicare and Social Security benefits — while providing drastically lower tax rates for billionaires and millionaires.

When you look at it carefully, Simpson/Bowles only differs from the radical right-wing Republican budget in a few areas, the most important of which is this: While the Republican plan calls for no tax increases at all, the Simpson/Bowles plan says it would offset its billionaire tax cuts. But since they also lower tax rates for billionaires, millionaires and corporations, they’re left to rely like Romney on unspecified loopholes, or “tax expenditures,” which could eviscerate the tax deductions that help the middle class get health insurance and pay their mortgages.

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Washington insiders scoff at anybody who dares question the sanctity of the “Simpson Bowles” concept. But once you leave Washington, that includes pretty much everybody. About 96 percent of the country’s voters reject their emphasis on deficits as our top priority, according to recent polling. The same poll showed that 37 percent of those polled considered “the economy and jobs” their top priority. That’s nearly ten times as many people.

That tracks closely with other poll results which showed that seventy percent of Americans were either “very uncomfortable” or “somewhat uncomfortable” with the Simpso(n)/ Bowles plan when it was released.

Meanwhile polls show that Medicare is a key issue in three battleground states, with Paul Ryan’s unpopular plan giving Democrats a decided edge on that issue. The selection of Bowles would damage that advantage if it was announced before the election, and would create a sense of betrayal if announced afterwards.

That particular form of right-wing wealth redistribution is what allows Simpson, Bowles, their funders and supporters to keep bragging that their plan is “brave.” If they were really brave they’d admit that they’re offering a right-wing austerity plan, not a “nonpartisan” solution to a long-term issue that’s receiving attention that should be focused on today’s jobs crisis.

Since Romney Raised the Issue of Freeloaders, What Is Erskine Bowles?

Dean Baker, cepr

Tuesday, 18 September 2012 04:42

Mr. Bowles has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards over the last decade. The stock prices of the companies on whose boards he sat have mostly plummeted. Since 2003 the Erskine Bowles stock index has lost more than one third of its value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen by more than 50 percent. If Mr. Bowles was trying to serve shareholders, he has not done a very good job.

If people think that this is a private matter, with Mr. Bowles just ripping off shareholders while Governor Romney’s freeloaders are ripping off taxpayers, think again. One of the companies on whose board Mr. Bowles sat, General Motors, went bankrupt with substantial costs to the government. Another, Morgan Stanley, would have gone bankrupt without extraordinary assistance from the Fed and Treasury, which continues to this day in the form of implicit too big to fail insurance.

So, if we want to have a debate about people who freeload on the rest of the country, we should have folks like Erskine Bowles at center stage. Of course he is in a much higher income bracket than the folks who get Social Security or unemployment insurance from the government, but that fact should not be allowed to color the debate.