USuncutMN says: Tax the corporations! Tax the rich! Stop the cuts, fight for social justice for all. Standing in solidarity with http://www.usuncut.org/ and other Uncutters worldwide. FIGHT for a Foreclosure Moratorium! Foreclosure = homelessness. Resist the American Legislative Exchange Council, Grover Norquist and Citizen's United. #Austerity for the wheeler dealers, NOT the people.
USuncutMN supports #occupyWallStreet, #occupyDC, the XL Pipeline resistance Yes, We, the People, are going to put democracy in all its forms up front and center. Open mic, diversity, nonviolent tactics .. Social media, economic democracy, repeal Citizen's United, single-payer healthcare, State Bank, Operation Feed the Homeless, anti-racism, homophobia, sexISM, war budgetting, lack of transparency, et al. Once we identify who we are and what we've lost, We can move forward.
SOURCE: AP/IDAHO STATESMAN | NATION | MAY 21, 2012
Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are backing Montana in its fight to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision from being used to strike down state laws restricting corporate campaign spending.
During college graduation season, attention often turns toward the labor market prospects of the young men and women preparing to enter the workforce. We can get a sense of the earnings this new crop of graduates might expect by looking at the wages of young (age 21-24) college graduates. In 2011, young college graduates had an average hourly wage of $16.81 per hour, which translates into an annual income of roughly $35,000 for a full-time, full-year worker. Average hourly wages for young female graduates remain substantially less (13.9 percent) than those of young male graduates.
The wages of young college graduates have fared poorly during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Between 2007 and 2011, the wages of young college graduates dropped 4.6 percent (5.1 percent for men and 4.1 percent for women). As the figure shows, however, the wage growth of young graduates was weak even before the Great Recession began; they have fared poorly over the entire period of general wage stagnation that began during the business cycle of 2000–2007. Between 2000 and 2011, the wages of young college graduates dropped 5.4 percent (1.6 percent for men and 8.5 percent for women).
The wage declines since 2000 stand in sharp contrast to the strong wage growth for these groups from 1995 to 2000. During that period of low unemployment and overall strong wage growth, wages rose 19.1 percent for young college graduates (18.7 percent for men and 19.5 percent for women). The stark difference between these two economic periods illustrates how the wages for young graduates vary considerably depending on the health of the U.S. labor market. Young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of strength (e.g. 1995–2000) face much stronger wage prospects than young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of weakness (e.g. 2001 to the present).
Bill talks to RoseAnn DeMoro, who heads the largest registered nurses union in the country, and will lead a Chicago march protesting economic inequality on May 18. DeMoro is championing the Robin Hood Tax, a small government levy the financial sector would pay on commercial transactions like stocks and bonds. The money generated, which some estimate could be as much as $350 billion annually, could be used for social programs and job creation — ultimately to people who, without a doubt, need it more than the banks do.
DeMoro and her organization, National Nurses United, have an inspiring history of defeating some of the toughest opponents in government and politics.
[The National Nurses United protest fires up Daley Plaza. — Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2012]
The first of two major NATO weekend rallies in Chicago is getting under way Friday, May 18 at Daley Plaza as a crowd gather in support of a plan to make Wall Street provide more money for health, education and social service programs.
National Nurses United organizers have said that they expect about 2,000 people to attend the rally, where they will call for a so-called Robin Hood tax in financial institutions' transactions in order to offset cuts in health care and social services. City officials estimate the crowds including Occupy Chicago could swell to nearly three times that group's projected turnout, in part because of a performance by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, an Occupy activist who has been at the movement's forefront.
Yesterday I posted (twice!) a Think Progress chart proving that the government under president Obama had pursued austerity policies. It was done to refute Mitt Romney's outright lie that the president had spent the country into oblivion, but some of us wondered why the Democrats would think it was such a good thing in any case. Dday asked the fellow who made the chart for CAP:
I asked Linden why any progressive should look at this information with anything approaching pride or pleasure. “If your argument is that we shouldn’t be having a fiscal consolidation during a recovery, that’s a fair criticism of it,” Linden said. He claimed that his chart was more of a myth-busting document, merely showing the facts of the situation. It attempts to rebut criticism from the right of Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal Democrat exploding the deficit. But what about the criticism that the economy needs more, and not less, fiscal support?[...] Linden didn’t really contest the argument. “You can argue (the information on the chart) was the wrong direction, given our economic issues, given the fragility of our recovery,” he said. Linden did add that “it’s worth remembering that the President proposed a substantial jobs package last year and the Republicans blocked it.” That is true, although the payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment insurance, a substantial part of the American Jobs Act, did pass. But this gets to the point of who should take credit for that chart. Republicans in Congress demanded less spending, lower taxes and cuts to the deficit when they took power in the House in 2011. The chart shows that this happened. They blocked higher fiscal spending. They got a debt limit deal that constrains spending for the next ten years. They put forward the measures that will reduce the deficit by trillions, if the trigger remains in place. Republican House members should be just as comfortable tweeting out this chart as the President. It falls in line with virtually every one of their professed favorite policies. “Both things are true,” Linden said. “One, that it is a myth that the President has been a great big spender… but you can also say, if you’re looking for a partial reason why our recovery hasn’t been faster, that may be one of the answers, that the President is pursuing the preferred policy path of his conservative critics.”
I think he may have missed the point. When the president and his supporters send out a chart like that lauding their success at cutting spending and taxes, they are telling people that it's their preferred policy too. But they've done this from the beginning, going all the way back to the transition when the president was giving the entire village a woodie with his Grand Bargain vision. The health care bill was sold as primarily a money saver (although nobody believed it...) They have oftentouted their tax cuts as huge accomplishments. president Obama himself promised to cut the deficit in half in his first term (a first term virtually defined by an epic economic downturn.) It's quite easy to see why people would assume that they truly are proud of their record of spending cuts and tax cuts and think that a soft austerity was a pretty good idea. Dday winds up with this:
“It’s a mythbusting piece more than anything else,” Linden concluded. “These are the numbers. Spending, taxes and the deficit have gone down. You can say fairly that this is not the economic policy we should be pursuing. If you want to criticize the President because he’s not been Keynesian enough, that’s OK with me. If you’re saying that he’s been too much of an austerity President, fine. But especially on a day when Mitt Romney is out there talking about the President running up massive debt and spending wildly, you have to say this is just not true.” The problem is that the policy that would be best for the economy is the policy that would feed this myth, and when I look at what’s more important, the myth or millions of people suffering needlessly, I know where I come down.
Someday, someone is going to make the case to the American people for policies that will work instead of operating entirely on the basis of conservative myths. I'm not sure when that will be but keep your eye on Europe over the next few months to see what happens when austerity finally bites so hard that the people get fed up.
To achieve any redemption for Americans, to make possible any more just, humane and life-honoring society, will require complete abandonment of the system of Predatory Capitalism.
The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
A new movie produced by Class War Films that lays out the grim reality of the current situation.
There is good news: people from all over are awakening and rising up and they are using creativity and community and love to combat this capitalist monster.
The Occupy Movement is an important part of this.
This is where we are.The great question now is whether we as a nation can awaken from this long historic nightmare and face the terrifying and exhilarating prospect of living in the full light of reality without the false props and dishonest constructs of a hoodwinked, herded and dishonored people or, whether we have internalized the falsity and disease to such an extent that it has become an organic, overmastering form of insanity.
A brief and crucial history of the United States.
So the American Myth is dead, and yet it lives on in its deadness, horribly masking our crapshot economy, our bankrupt debtors prison of a society, our Ghost Dance charade of kabuki democracy, while typhoons of impending social, economic and ecological disaster build their enormous, lightning-charged thunderheads above the dark future before us.
And what is it that the dead Myth still imperfectly obscures for Americans? What is outside and beyond the opaque wall of faltering, failing dishonesty and deception? What is the horror that the shoddy, tattered Myth has so long and so effectively concealed?
It is the world that has suffered unrelieved exploitation by the violence of our imperialist mania. It is the many wrecked and pillaged economies financially looted by our imposed predatory capitalist austerity regimes. It is the teeming hundreds of millions of starved, deprived and dying children sacrificed to Wall Street commodities gaming. It is the multitudes of humble, innocent, ignorant people, barely surviving in absolutist and dictatorial regimes propped up in their barbaric cruelty by our military while our banks siphon off the profits left after arming their brutal police and armies and bribing their ruling Kings, Sheikhs or Generals.
It is the millions of dead and maimed in the raped populations of simple tribal people whom our indiscriminately murderous juggernaut has left in its bloody wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is the appalling legacy of hate and repulsion, disdain and fear, that America has earned with its appalling hegemonist villainy in every corner of the world.
And at home, what is it we Americans have been so complicit in hiding from ourselves in our devotion to the perverse legend that has come to inhabit our souls like a succubus?
It is the millions of us with no work and no hope in middle age whose jobs and homes have been devoured by the heartless fraud machine of Wall Street. It is the trashed and demolished weedlots of our major cities eroding in crumbling, fire-gutted ruin. It is the many towns and cities with industries shut down and factories deserted or dismantled and shipped overseas.
It is our decaying, disintegrating public schools, our bankrupt states and counties, our overtaxed, antiquated public transportation systems, our obsolete, dissolving infrastructure, our bloated, irrational prisons complex, our punishing and inadequate health care disaster, and over it all, the repressive mechanism of our police state, armed and empowered, ready for use against the American people themselves.
Full transcript follows...
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine
Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening.
Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.
For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.
America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base.
With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind.
In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.
* * *
A Constitution was written that came to be regarded as American Holy Writ. Its central purposes were to defend private property and suppress mass democracy. It has fulfilled both those mandates beyond the wildest dreams of its creators.
Once the existing oligarchy was secure in law and native people largely exterminated, the ruling class increased its wealth and power fantastically in the 19th century, using the government as its enabler, exploiting to the limit the device of chartered corporations.
With its phenomenal money power, the financial elite began to use the military to expand its sway beyond the continent. Regions, territories, islands, and whole countries were annexed, invaded, and possessed outright, their peoples crushed, suppressed, and ruled.
Because ordinary Americans, like any people, need to believe that whatever the ruling elite undertakes in their nation’s name must be essentially benevolent, noble in purpose and justified in fact, the myth had to be radically modified for imperial expansion.
The foundational story was that Americans had come to a howling wilderness teeming with godless savages and, through invincible strength of character and purity of purpose, had tamed the land and honorably earned the right to possess their bountiful home.
In the era of extra-territorial expansion that version was polished to justify and ennoble imperialism. The new corollary was that America could not ignore colonialist brutality but was obliged, by the Manifest Destiny that led us to civilize our own continent, to carry our mission into barbaric darkness wherever tyranny created abuse and suffering.
A national myth that absolutely binds the loyalty of a people to its government must be a subtle and powerful elixir that elevates and aggrandizes that people’s self-regard. National policy will then appear to be an extension of its superior citizenry’s inchoate will, and the basis for a justified arrogance toward the lesser world.
The simple, powerful myth of America’s altruistic and heroic benevolence, shaped and maintained by the financial/political power elite, infused Americans with a deep and outrageously hubristic sense of racial superiority that, mobilized behind various imperial enterprises, has given all such adventures the character of a quasi-religious crusade. In this way insatiable imperialism acquires the apparent moral perfection of a syllogism.
* * *
With WWII, the world was reconfigured. American Capitalism emerged supreme from the horror that had virtually wrecked its capitalist partners. The Soviet Union, though, having absorbed by far the greatest devastation from Nazi Germany, had astonishingly risen above its ruin to become the leading challenger to America as a world power.
This challenge was not competitive, it was systemic: Soviet Communism was a direct threat to American hegemony in that it categorically refuted the philosophical basis of Predatory Capitalism. Grounded in Marx and Lenin, it attacked Capitalism’s inherent evils, monstrous inequities and flagrant injustices that, exacerbated by speculation, exploitation and fraud, would destroy it. And it promoted world revolution to that end.
This face-off of giants in the Cold War necessitated further refinement of the American myth. Now, instead of simply intervening in situations where despotism or tyranny required America to forcefully implant our just and ethical democracy, America had to become the shield and bulwark of the sacred capitalist system in which “free enterprise” was magically and increasingly identified with democracy and equally to be defended.
This version prevailed through many surrogate confrontations around the globe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction and survived even the debacle of Vietnam, lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the propaganda stream became ever more intense and pervasive. On radio and television Americans were subjected to an unrelenting barrage of hyper-patriotism in which American moral superiority was a given, and America’s self-touted courage, generosity and decency were its unchallengeable proofs.
The implosion of the Soviet Union left America, in its own terminology, the “Sole Superpower in a Unipolar World”. This, however, did not result in diminution of the myth. The practical effect of having no doomsday enemy--China couldn’t plausibly be cast in that role then--was to supercharge it by increasing its element of pure, hubristic ego.
America was no longer just called upon to defend the “Free World” from monstrous heresy; it was now, by virtue of its universally acknowledged, beatific “exceptionalism”, required to oversee and police it in the interests, and for the benefit, of lesser nations.
* * *
“Power corrupts”, said Lord Mahan, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
When the only rival and counterweight to American power disintegrated there was a sense within the American power elite that the opportunity existed, for the first time in history, for one country to absolutely dominate and effectively control the entire world.
This consensus was expressed in a policy statement composed by a cadre of major right-wing political players representing massive corporate capitalist interests called the Project for a New American Century. This triumphalist manifesto laid out a plan for absolute American access and control of essential resources and raw materials worldwide, to be guaranteed by the military which would enforce Full Spectrum Dominance.
The American Myth, which had seemed to have lost momentum and its animating principle in the totally unexpected so-called Cold War “victory”, was now re-energized with a less defensive and reactive essence, and given the glowing radiance and patina of a true and, for the first time, self-professed and articulated, imperial mission.
The attack on the Towers, an unimaginable provocation, was the trigger mechanism for the explosive launch of the effort to impose that imperial model in practice on the world.
* * *
It has been without question the most spectacular failure in the history of American misadventure. After a decade marked by the waste of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, the stunning bankruptcy of our internally burglarized nation, and a consequent recession more fundamentally damaging than the Great One, Imperial America has nothing to show for the botched folly of its arrogant overreach but unequivocal disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with no end of madness in sight.
An impartial observer would have to say that the hypnotic hold of the American Myth on the loyalty of the people has led only to disgrace and disaster, and set a direct course to inevitable imperial decline and ruin. That would be inarguable on any rational basis, but it entirely mistakes the motive for, and the purpose of, the myth. The American Myth was never intended to serve the interests either of our country or of our people: it was created solely to buttress, shield, and exalt the ruling financial class. It has done that with astonishing and unbroken success that staggers the imagination from our earliest days.
The massive looting of Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan war funding to enrich the Corporate Tyranny—for that is what it has become—is on an unique scale of its own, without anything remotely comparable to its flagrant obscenity in the whole long history of war.
Neither the Pentagon nor any branch of the U.S. government can give any accounting whatever of the many billions of tax-generated dollars that have vanished, evaporated.
There is no doubt but that beyond the outrageously inflated, no-bid contracts handed to giant corporate favorites with their preposterous guaranteed profits, much of the money was simply stolen in bulk by, through, or in spite of the military, and distributed among thieves and accomplices, some of it on huge pallets… for convenience, presumably.
* * *
While this wholesale robbery was going on under the oversight of the military abroad, the Corporate Tyranny had evolved a whole set of impenetrably complex devices for the generation of money without any economically productive source or result at home.
The sole driving force and purpose of Capitalism is the realization of profit. According to that calculus, reducing production costs increases profit margin. This leads to the obvious conclusion that as production costs near zero, profit is maximized.
There is no provision for social good in Capitalist theory. Corporations, created to optimize business opportunity through efficient specialization, were originally required to operate for public benefit but that provision was quickly finessed and forgotten.
American law courts have always favored corporate concentrations of wealth since they, like the Congress, exist to serve the moneyed interests. The American Myth was created to provide cover for the financial oligarchy to exploit the country and the citizenry, and the judiciary has consistently cooperated in ruling for corporations against the people.
Indeed, without ever considering the question in law, the Supreme Court long ago endowed corporations with “personhood”, that is with all rights of human beings under our Constitution. The way this travesty occurred--the slipshod by-product of an obliquely related case--shows that the court preferred to incorporate this perversion of the plain intent of the 14th amendment as an unexamined assumption rather than risk an eventual test which would unquestionably have created violent public outrage.
Given the collusion of Congress and the courts in securing legal invulnerability for the Corporate Tyranny and the principle that the only duty of corporations is maximization of profit, it was not surprising that megabanks, huge brokerage houses, giant insurance conglomerates, gilded hedge funds and the credit agencies pretending to certify their work, all engaged in massive and systemic fraud and deception for just that purpose.
The result was the crash of ’08, the recession, and the stunning and unprecedented rescue and bailout of the biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance and credit conglomerates with taxpayer dollars. So much for the hallowed Invisible Hand of the Free Market…
* * *
The last decades have seen two related megatrends in American geopolitical mechanics, both with dire effects on the power of the American Myth. First, what belief the world at large had in it has been shattered by a catastrophic series of imbecile and irretrievable military failures and disasters, which has caused erosion of its efficacy at home. Second, in response to this, the State has made increasingly crude efforts to boost the Myth’s waning power by the imposition of totalitarian methods of surveillance, intimidation and coercion on the American people to a degree unprecedented in scope and scale.
The whole clanking, medieval apparatus of Homeland Security that has sprouted like an enormous poison fungus since 9/11 with its brutal police state mindset; the odious Patriot Act with its flagrant subversions of the Bill of Rights; the endless, fantasy-based terror-peddling of the prostitute corporate media with its clowns and harpies churning irrational fear and anger in the uninformed: all this grim, repressive endeavor is a concerted attempt to distract Americans from the real causes of their injury, abuse, and oppression.
And yet, even with the American Myth now totally and irreparably blown full of holes and exposed demonstrably for the tissue of lies, deceptions and frauds that it has always been, it somehow keeps its phenomenal hold on the great mass of the American people. The tragic reality is that, for the majority, their own identities have been so deeply and thoroughly infused with the myth that to disbelieve it is to disbelieve in themselves.
* * *
So the American Myth is dead, and yet it lives on in its deadness, horribly masking our crapshot economy, our bankrupt debtors prison of a society, our Ghost Dance charade of kabuki democracy, while typhoons of impending social, economic and ecological disaster build their enormous, lightning-charged thunderheads above the dark future before us.
And what is it that the dead Myth still imperfectly obscures for Americans? What is outside and beyond the opaque wall of faltering, failing dishonesty and deception? What is the horror that the shoddy, tattered Myth has so long and so effectively concealed?
It is the world that has suffered unrelieved exploitation by the violence of our imperialist mania. It is the many wrecked and pillaged economies financially looted by our imposed predatory capitalist austerity regimes. It is the teeming hundreds of millions of starved, deprived and dying children sacrificed to Wall Street commodities gaming. It is the multitudes of humble, innocent, ignorant people, barely surviving in absolutist and dictatorial regimes propped up in their barbaric cruelty by our military while our banks siphon off the profits left after arming their brutal police and armies and bribing their ruling Kings, Sheikhs or Generals.
It is the millions of dead and maimed in the raped populations of simple tribal people whom our indiscriminately murderous juggernaut has left in its bloody wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is the appalling legacy of hate and repulsion, disdain and fear, that America has earned with its appalling hegemonist villainy in every corner of the world.
And at home, what is it we Americans have been so complicit in hiding from ourselves in our devotion to the perverse legend that has come to inhabit our souls like a succubus?
It is the millions of us with no work and no hope in middle age whose jobs and homes have been devoured by the heartless fraud machine of Wall Street. It is the trashed and demolished weedlots of our major cities eroding in crumbling, fire-gutted ruin. It is the many towns and cities with industries shut down and factories deserted or dismantled and shipped overseas.
It is our decaying, disintegrating public schools, our bankrupt states and counties, our overtaxed, antiquated public transportation systems, our obsolete, dissolving infrastructure, our bloated, irrational prisons complex, our punishing and inadequate health care disaster, and over it all, the repressive mechanism of our police state, armed and empowered, ready for use against the American people themselves.
* * *
This is where we are. The great question now is whether we as a nation can awaken from this long historic nightmare and face the terrifying and exhilarating prospect of living in the full light of reality without the false props and dishonest constructs of a hoodwinked, herded and dishonored people or, whether we have internalized the falsity and disease to such an extent that it has become an organic, overmastering form of insanity.
In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, offended to his soul by the injustice of the American government’s invasion of Mexico, protested it and went to jail for his convictions. Later, in his essay On Civil Disobedience, he said this:
“If injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
To attempt to break the hold of the American Myth will be a titanic, daunting challenge. To even begin to openly rebel against the might of the National Security State will require the courage to face much more than official disapproval and denunciation.
Imperial America will not respond to even the most peaceful and orderly protest with anything less than hard police repression and the level of punishment will rise in relation to the scope and seriousness of the action undertaken.
Small protests will have no effect and will be meaningless. Organized mass events, when they occur, will draw the whole fiercely and brutally motivated National Security State apparatus down upon themselves. Americans, excepting those of our underclass who have felt it, have no experience with violent police or military repression.
Those who commit peaceful civil disobedience, a first and innocent tactic of serious protest, will swiftly find out to their cost how it works.
In a National Security State that has excised and eradicated all defensive laws and regulations intended to prevent abuse of the public, whatever the State does is legal.
To such a pass have we in America come as a result of our long historic indoctrination in serving our financial elite, our Ruling Class.
To achieve any redemption for Americans, to make possible any more just, humane and life-honoring society, will require complete abandonment of the system of Predatory Capitalism. If offers no prospect of reform or improvement and we have all been witness to the idiocy of the so-called “democratic process” in action for generations now.
America is nearing the greatest crisis point in its history and the terrific cataclysm, when it happens, will determine the future our country is to have. If we cannot, in dominating numbers, rise to reject the heartless, mindless, soulless machine of Imperial Predatory Capitalism, we will be condemned to a fascistic command and control horror in which human beings are mere possessions of the State, units of production or service, and then perhaps not even that, as excess population in that brave, new world nay be eliminated.
That end is not inevitable. We are not lost. We are not even defeated because to this moment we have not engaged. We have not honored our responsibility as human beings. We have not risen to defend our humanity. We have let ourselves be ruled.
All around the world the thunder of vast and immeasurable discontent can be heard and felt. In Egypt and Spain, Jordan and Greece, Iraq and Sudan, Afghanistan and Ireland, Latin America, the Far East and Africa, the legitimate anger of humanity is expressing itself against the dead and killing hand of Predatory Capitalism and its agencies of violence.
And here, in America, so long trapped and encapsulated, frozen like a fly in amber in a false religion of state idolatry, the anger is deep, widespread, and growing.
It is up to those who know and care to lead. As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nothing is guaranteed us. That can’t matter. We cannot be concerned with odds or outcomes.
We cannot let the Machine of Injustice grind on. We must oppose it with all the moral force we own. We must act with quiet courage to confront a vicious tyrannical system that is destroying the earth, its life, and its people. We must put our lives on the line to oppose it.
The Nightmare Machine of rapacious exploitation has overthrown humanity’s decency and reason and its bloody inhuman treason flourishes over us. This must be ended.
Let your life be a friction now to stop the Machine.
I mentioned the annual Pete Peterson Poor People Ritual Sacrifice confab earlier, but this piece about the man's material devotion to his cause by Ryan Grim is a must-read:
According to a review of tax documents from 2007 through 2011, Peterson has personally contributed at least $458 million to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to cast Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government spending as in a state of crisis, in desperate need of dramatic cuts. Peterson's millions have done next to nothing to change public opinion: In survey after survey, Americans reject the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare. A recent national tour organized by AmericaSpeaks and largely funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation was met by audiences who rebuffed his proposals.
But Peterson has been able to drive a major shift in elite consensus about government spending, with talk of "grand bargains" that would slash entitlements, cut corporate tax rates and end personal tax breaks, such as the mortgage deduction, that benefit the middle class.
To put Peterson's spending in context, all corporations and unions combined spent less than $4 billion on lobbying in 2011.
This shows, once again, just how dangerous it is to have this .001% that is richer than God deciding they'd like to buy themselves a government. They can, literally, afford it. Just as we are seeing obscenely wealthy people write checks for millions to Super PACs without blinking an eye, ideologues like Peterson are willing to put up even more over time to completely change the basic structure of government for their own gain.
The article goes on to describe the breadth of his endeavors to shred what's left of the safety net and it's amazingly comprehensive. I'll just add a bit of history from an earlier post of mine:
Pete Peterson is not a "centrist." He's not a liberal either, although he's pretended to be both over the years depending on which constituency he was trying to con at the time. He has one mission and one mission only: to end "entitlements." There is no deal, short of that, that will satisfy him and as long as the beltway considers him and his ilk to be nice, centrist deficit hawks instead of the wrecking crew they are, they will be right there with him until he (or whoever follows him) gets the job done.
I suppose it's possible to imagine a "deal" which would modestly raise taxes on non-wealthy individuals in exchange for benefits cuts (which doesn't sound like much of a deal to me.) But if it happens I can guarantee that Pete Peterson and the boys will be back in business the next day. They have been doing this for 30 years and they aren't going to stop until they get what they want. After all, actuarial balance doesn't mean anything to people who don't believe that social security is separately funded in the first place.
"We will no longer be able to afford a system that equates the last third or more of one's adult life with a publicly subsidized vacation."
I think that most accurately reflects his real concern.
In January of 2009, before President Obama was inaugurated, I could see the handwriting on the wall when CNN turned two hours on two days to Pete Peterson and his crew. I wrote a long piece about it here and I'll just repeat this one thing:
[T]hese people are going to cause trouble, which comes as no surprise to me. I've been writing about this for years. It's one of the reasons why I believe in liberal rhetoric (and, yes, the dreaded "ideology.") If you don't bother to educate people counter to the myths and propaganda they hear from the right, they have nothing to hold onto except faith in the Democrats in the face of arguments that have been built layer by layer over many years. (And having faith in Democrats really take courage.) The fact that they refuse to do this doesn't automatically spell failure for democratic policies, but it makes it many times harder to succeed.
They don't even seem to intend to do tank the stimulus, just restrict it. What they are doing is setting the stage for entitlement cuts and a swift, premature pullback on government spending --- thus extending the crisis. And if the Democrats are cowed by these people (they always are --- they hate being called spendthrifts) there will be enough egomaniacs in the congress to hamstring the administration and force them to adopt these "common sense" methods of running the economy --- which is precisely how we got into this problem in the first place.
I underestimated the administration's zeal to join the crusade, but other than that, I think it's pretty much gone down as expected. Not that I was particularly prescient. That's how it's been going down for a couple of decades and it was clear that nothing substantial had changed. The only thing different was the fact that we were experiencing an epic economic downturn which might have shaken the foundation enough to unmoor the political establishment from this destructive obsession. But it was not to be.
So now we have the Village elite gathering at Pete Peterson's feet paying obeisance to his moneyed grandeur:
Politicians in Washington regularly say that major reform to entitlements -- and by reform, they mean cuts -- can only be accomplished with bipartisan consensus. "We have to hold hands and jump," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday. To that end, and unlike the Koch brothers, Peterson spreads his money across the ideological spectrum. He has given millions to the liberal Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute and New America Foundation; the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute; the centrist Brookings Institution and Bipartisan Policy Center, and on and on.
Moreover, Peterson's connections to the White House, evidenced by Geithner's attendance at the current 2012 summit, aren't hurt by his foundation's multimillion-dollar contract with SKDKnickerbocker, which includes former top administration official Anita Dunn.
Republicans, too, have joined in Peterson's crusade, including Boehner; Ryan, the architect of a federal budget plan that ends Medicare; and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), much discussed as a potential GOP vice presidential candidate. All three were in attendance at Tuesday's conference.
Media luminaries such as George Stephanopoulos, Brokaw and Politico's Harris were also scheduled to speak
As reporters keep digging into the “London Whale” story, the picture that emerges about the caliber of risk controls and management supervision at JP Morgan only look worse and worse.
The latest revelations comes via the Wall Street Journal. First, that there was no treasurer during the period when the CIO entered into the loss-making trades. The idea that a bank of any size, let alone one as big as JP Morgan, would go for months (five in this case) without a treasurer in place is stunning. JP Morgan contends this is not germane, since (allegedly) the CIO did not report to the treasurer. Then pray tell, why was it housed in the treasury at all? And the bank’s efforts to make this all sound normal are undermined by this part of the story:
Joseph Bonocore, who left the treasurer’s post last October before the trading losses ballooned, reviewed weekly the positions being taken by the office and had raised general concerns about risks being taken by the London office that placed many of the questionable trades, according to a person familiar with the situation. Mr. Bonocore knew the investment unit well; he previously was its chief financial officer for roughly 11 years.
So the former treasurer was looking over the positions, even if he was not part of the reporting line (or was he?).
But worse, the risk manager tasked to the oversight of the unit appears underqualified for the job, and that might not be unrelated to the fact that he is the brother-in-law of a JP Morgan executive. The Key extracts:
J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -4.31% & Co. didn’t have a treasurer in place during a five-month period when the bank’s Chief Investment Office placed trades that led to more than $2 billion in losses.
In addition, the executive put in charge of risk management for the Chief Investment Office in February, Irvin Goldman, was a former trader, not a risk manager. He is also the brother-in-law of another top J.P. Morgan executive, Barry Zubrow. JP Morgan argued that many risk professionals come from trading (true) but his background does not look logical for oversight of a business dealing in complex “hedges”:
Mr. Goldman had little risk-management experience before taking the chief risk officer post at the Chief Investment Office. He spent most of his career as a trader, starting at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. He oversaw interest-rate product sales and trading at Credit Suisse First Boston and in 2003 joined Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was president of its debt capital markets and asset management divisions. Mr. Goldman ultimately left Cantor in October 2007 after his unit piled on trading losses during the previous summer.
Even though his role at Credit Suisse might sound relevant, he left that position nearly 10 years ago, and I would anticipate practice has changed quite a bit. Cantor is known primarily as an inter-dealer broker in Treasuries. Readers are welcome to correct me, but I am not aware of Cantor being a significant player in complex derivatives, and they would not seem to be positioned to play that role (you need a large balance sheet and good market share in the related cash products to be competitive).
An article at CNBC yesterday raised another troubling issue, that the CIO had a more permissive value at risk model than the rest of the bank. This is consistent with the idea raised by Michael Crimmins earlier today, that the “whoops we allowed that model to put on a lot of risk, didn’t we?” was not an accident, but a way to allow a unit that was expected to take risk to put it on, and/or put less capital against those positions. From CNBC:
The JPMorgan Chase unit that lost more than $2 billion through a failed hedging strategy had looser risk controls than the rest of the bank, according to people familiar with the situation.
The risk of losses is tallied by the bank using a so-called value at risk (VaR) calculation. However, the Chief Investment Office, the unit responsible for the high-profile loss that JPMorgan disclosed last Thursday, had a separate VaR system.
It used a less stringent calculation that gave a lower risk assessment of its trades, according to people who previously worked at the bank. The unit also reported directly to CEO Jamie Dimon, a factor which allowed it to maintain a separate risk monitoring set-up to other parts of the investment bank, these people said.
Despite repeated warnings from executives inside the firm as long ago as 2005, the CIO unit remained notably free from oversight. A source with knowledge of the situation said that these warnings included the size of the CIO, the fact that its risk reporting was not transparent and the scope for the unit to get “bigger and bigger” because it had a lower cost of funding than the rest of the investment bank.
Until April, the CIO unit’s unusual autonomy allowed it to build up risky positions without triggering alarms.
Sports fans, letting a unit run with lower VaR and is completely inconsistent with the JP Morgan party line, that the CIO was in the business of hedging. And this part is therefore no surprise:
Indeed, the unit was encouraged to be a profit center, as well as hedging against risk…
The facts in the public domain about this unit are damning. And if Jamie Dimon survives, as expected, it will serve as yet another bit of proof of how deeply the Obama Administration is in bed with major banks.
The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
