The Super Heroes vs The Super PACs

The Men in Black kicked the Avengers’ butts last weekend at the box office. The Avengers and the Mibsters both kicked the aliens’ butts (or their biological  equivalent). Gigantic movie battles between innocent, minding-their-own-business Americans and evil-doing invaders intent on destroying our cities have become a Memorial Day tradition. And it’s always the grit and chutzpah of a handful of superheroic patriots that saves the country and the planet.

Why do Americans especially embrace these fantastical films of victory against seemingly invincible enemies during a holiday that recognizes those who have given their lives for their country? It’s probably a coincidence. After all, how many Americans celebrating Memorial Day actually know what it stands for, apart from shopping, barbequing and movie-going?

Not many, is my guess. One reason is that only one half of one percent of the U.S. population – that’s 0.5% – has been on active duty in the military at any point during the last ten years, according to the Pew Research center.  Only a quarter of Americans say they “closely follow” news of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan. About half told pollsters the wars “made little difference” in their lives and that neither was worth the cost. This is hardly surprising; in fact, it was a deliberate strategy by the nation’s leaders.

There was never the congressional Declaration of War that our Founders mandated, in the Constitution, to ensure that the decision had the support of a majority of the country. To avoid a national draft, which they believed would be massively unpopular, Bush Administration officials disastrously outsourced a huge chunk of the work of the two conflicts to private corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater (both have since changed their names).  And war itself increasingly became a sterile and distant affair: U.S. soldiers directed drone attacks from buildings on U.S. soil, using high-tech weaponry much like blockbuster video games.

There was nothing like the clarity of purpose or mission that arises when a galactic Hitler seeks to wipe out the species  - the kind of “live free or die” choice that led a united United States to enter World War II. We were threatened – that much we knew – but the rest of the details were shrouded in secrecy and overt lies.  The post 9/11 wars were under the radar for many – maybe most –Americans.

That’s bad news for our democracy.  Countries whose populations were disengaged from the wars conducted in their name have not fared well in history, beginning with the archetypal example: ancient Rome.  As pointed out by Cullen Murphy, that city’s infamous decline and fall bears a distressing similarity to the privatization, coarsened discourse and elite-driven political establishment that characterizes contemporary America. A sense of betrayal and powerlessness – felt most painfully over the last few years as a result of the Wall Street debacle and bailouts – was behind the Tea Party (until it got take over by corporate interests) and Occupy uprisings.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, the disenfranchisement of average Americans has only accelerated since the crash while a small class of the warrior elite has been elevated: the political consultants. Their mission: to manipulate the judgment of citizens as they attempt to exercise the right to vote.

Back in the day, political consultants were restrained by whatever boundaries were imposed by the candidates and elected officials they represented. The candidates, in turn, were bound by rules limiting how much money special interests could give them.

No more, reports the New York Times.

Ruling in the outrageous Citizens United case that corporations and their leaders have the same First Amendment rights as people, the Supreme Court has cut the tether between candidate and consultant. Now, practitioners of the dark arts of domestic poly-sci warfare can work directly for corporate funded Super PACs without having to worry about anyone’s sensibilities. “You don’t have kitchen cabinets made up of well-intentioned friends and neighbors who don’t know what they’re doing but eat up a lot of your time,” a Republican consultant told the Times. “Super PACs don’t have spouses.”

The Supreme Court has done away with the middleman – the candidate – and, perhaps inadvertently, torn away the modest cloak of legitimacy that the old campaign finance laws used to provide to a fundamentally corrupt system.  Now the corporations and malefactors of wealth exercise with zeal their First Amendment freedom to blast their political opponents into oblivion.

Looking for the Avengers? If we are going to preserve our democracy against this final assault, citizens are going to have to become the superheroes.

Break of Day

Last August, right-wing television host Glenn Beck made a bizarre attempt to hijack the spirit of Martin Luther King’s 1963 Freedom March with his own manipulative March on Washington.

Millions of Americans wrung their hands in despair as Beck and his colleagues from Fox News and the Tea Party stood on what was deemed sacred ground and dominated the political discourse, while our own leaders failed to respond to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression or to hold Wall Street accountable for causing it.

Then last fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived.

Although the media tried to ignore them and then proceeded to belittle them, Occupiers tapped into a deep-seated longing, capturing the public imagination with their 21st century take on King’s message: overcome despair, shame and division; organize and dare to imagine; and fight nonviolently for a better society for everyone.

We don’t need a séance to know that for Martin Luther King, the notion that our government would dare to characterize the economy as “in recovery” while black unemployment remains nearly twice the national average would be an outrage, not a footnote.

Unlike the Tea Party, Occupy has avoided electoral politics, preferring to focus, as King did, on empowering the powerless through direct action on the streets. And while some have criticized Occupy for not delivering a more focused message, the Occupiers have clearly picked up the spiritual aspect of King’s call to action, posing profound questions about the kind of society we have become and what kind of society we want to be.

Occupy’s debt to King's non-violence is direct: In Los Angeles, activists are integrating techniques developed in the antinuclear and anti-globalization movements with the techniques taught at free monthly classes with the Reverend James Lawson, one of the men who guided King and taught him about Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolence strategy.

During the last year of King’s life, he expanded the focus of his actions and goals beyond African-American civil rights to building an all-encompassing movement to challenge U.S. militarism and poverty. His last appearance in Memphis was in support of a strike by sanitation workers, opening his arms wide to embrace the cause of what Occupy has forever branded “the 99 percent.”

Beck’s travesty in Washington hit rock bottom for those of us who have been observing and decrying a system that seems designed to benefit those whose values preclude equality and fairness. The assault on the middle class in our country has been brutal. There was—during those dark August days—no loud voice, outside the rarified world of blogs and op-ed pages, crying out in moral outrage.

In September, a small band set up camp in Zuccotti Square. Since that time, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited those cries, on the streets and from a growing number of pulpits nationwide.

These are the spirits that endure and the ties that bind.

For me and for many others, embracing the Occupy movement posed a challenge. As a long-time journalist, I’ve had to find a new kind of voice. Like so many friends and colleagues who had lost faith that we would ever be heard, I’ve had to overcome fear and cynicism, learn to act more boldly, engage more creatively.

The memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King reminds us that whatever our obstacles, we need to link arms and learn to put one foot in front of the other, keeping our eyes on the prize, a prize that belongs to all of us.

Angelides Panel Day 2: Bair, But No Flair

The first two days of the long-awaited Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings have been largely rambling and listless, with commissioners leading witnesses around the same debates and issues that even casual observers of the meltdown and bailout have heard many times.

Those with patience were rewarded Thursday with some nuggets of straight talk from FDIC’s Sheila Bair and state regulators skeptical of the benefits of financial innovation.

Phil Angelides is getting some raves for his clash with the head of Goldman-Sachs Wednesday and his knowledge of how the financial system works. Angelides compared Goldman to a used car salesman selling vehicles with bad brakes, and chided the firm’s chairman for describing the financial meltdown as a natural disaster like a hurricane.

I’m not buying it.

One dustup in the middle of two days of hearings did nothing to illuminate the meltdown. Goldman’s thick-skinned and well-paid Blankfein has already stared down the president of the United States and Congress. I doubt he’s going to change course after Angelides’ comments.

Angelides, his vice-chair Bill Thomas and the other commissioners seem to have no sense of urgency or flair for how to hold a public hearing. Angelides and company are either unprepared or appear not to have the stomach to bring out the story in a compelling way or hold bankers and regulators publicly accountable.

We have a long, proud history in this country of public hearings that focused on key issues, electrified the country, and galvanized political change, starting with the hearings on which the current panel is based, the 1930s Senate probe into the financial shenanigans preceeding the stock market crash, headed by Ferdinand Pecora.

Michael A. Perino, a professor specializing in securities regulation at St. John's University School of Law who's writing a book about Pecora, told "Bill Moyers Journal" that Pecora took complex financial transactions and turned them into simple morality plays. “Pecora was, if nothing else, a brilliant lawyer. He knew how to ask questions. He was a pit bull. He would not let people get away with hemming and hawing and hedging their answers. And he would go after them, politely, of course. But he would go after them until he got the answer he wanted.”

In the early 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver went after organized crime. Later in the decade, Sen. Robert Kennedy targeted corrupt union bosses.  In the 1970s, the country was riveted by the Senate hearings into the Watergate scandal, led by a superb lawyer named Sam Dash.

Each of those hearings, from Pecora to Watergate, was characterized by relentless preparation, tenacious questioning and savvy stage managing.

Dash unfolded the Watergate story like an episode of the old courtroom drama Perry Mason. It’s worth quoting Dash’s method at length for the stark contrast with Angelides.

“Having been a trial lawyer, I know that you begin a trial by starting at the very beginning,” Dash told NPR’s “On the Media” in 2003.  “It's like a detective story. In this particular case, there was the Watergate burglary; there were the cops that arrested the burglars. And then I would bring in a number of accusers like John Dean who had been counsel to the president who was pointing the finger at the president and [H.R.] Haldeman and [John] Erlichman, and so I was setting up this tension of the police work, the work of the people who were involved as co-conspirators, who were accusing, and then ultimately bring the accused – Haldeman, [John] Mitchell, and Ehrlichman – and in order to make sure that our story would be told in a consecutive and interesting fashion, every witness that I called had been prior called, before an executive committee.

“In other words I knew exactly what my questions were going to be and I knew exactly what the answers were going to be so that I could put it in a form that this would come out like a story, and I think it, it succeeded in the sense that the American people were glued to their television sets waiting for the next episode.”

In Thursday’s session we got the attorney general, Eric Holder, touting his successful prosecution of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and other cases that had nothing to do with the financial crisis. His office continues to investigate 2,800 mortgage fraud cases, Holder said.

No commissioner asked Holder any follow-ups about the recent failed prosecution of Bear Stearns hedge fund managers who were acquitted of lying to their clients about the funds’ mortgage investments, or lessons that the Justice Department might have learned from that embarrassing defeat.

Nor did the commissioners ask SEC chief Mary Schapiro, seated close by Holder, about the SEC’s colossal failure in ignoring repeated warnings about Madoff’s crooked deals.

What’s particularly frustrating is that Angelides appears to have the seeds of a theme: how banks and regulators ignored warnings of trouble prior to the meltdown. He has asked a couple of times about a 2004 FBI report that warned of a looming explosion of mortgage fraud. Surprisingly, though Angelides had raised it Wednesday with the bankers, when Angelides asked Holder about it Thursday, Holder replied that he wasn’t familiar with the warning but said, “We’ll look into that.”

That’s some indication of just how seriously the country’s top law enforcement officer is taking the hearings.

The commission’s second day of hearings focused on regulatory efforts of the SEC and FDIC as well as state efforts at financial regulation.

Amid strong lobbying by the big banks, state regulators have been largely pre-empted from financial regulation. Whether or not to give states back that authority is a key point of contention in on-going debate over financial reform; financial institutions continue to bitterly oppose it.

Sheila Bair, FDIC chair, whose strong voice for reform has sometimes been drowned out by those of other members of the Obama economic team, got a chance Thursday to reiterate her view of the failures that contributed to the crisis.

“Not only did market discipline fail to prevent the excesses of the last few years, but the regulatory system also failed in its responsibilities,” Bair said. Record profits across the banking sector, Bair added, also served to limit “second-guessing” among the regulatory community.

The Texas securities commissioner, Denise Crawford, also offered a sharp perspective not usually heard either on Wall Street or in Washington. “The great minds of Wall Street are probably right now coming up with new securitization products,” she told the commissioners. “It's not just mortgages. It's the entire structure of Wall Street and the super-wealthy that create the demand for new speculative products.”

A Trifecta of Failure

The near calamity on Christmas Day capped a year - a decade - when the ability of our government to protect its people was tested and, when it counted most, failed.

As Maureen Dowd at the New York Times put it: “If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?”

To that, I add: “If our elected representatives can’t overcome the Money Industry’s lobbyists and legislate a ban on speculation in derivatives, enact a cap on credit card interest rates and regulate the rating agencies after these evil-doers trashed our economy and after Congress saved them from bankruptcy by giving them trillions of taxpayer dollars, what can they do?”

Then there is health care reform, a seven decades-long fight for fairness and financial security that has ended up in an unprecedented gift to the very companies that are responsible for our ridiculously expensive and cruel system. “Congress is effectively making private insurers unnecessary, yet continuing to insist that we can’t do without them,” the New Yorker points out.

From any viewpoint, liberal or conservative, our government’s record over the last ten years is dismaying and alarming. First came 9/11, when the religious ideologues attacked our nation and we turned out to be defenseless against a bunch of amateurs even though the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the White House knew a catastrophic assault was in the works. It is an outrage that despite hundreds of trillions of taxpayer dollars spent on defense and weaponry, there were only a handful of fighter jets available to protect our homeland that day, and they were too late. Next came the free market ideologues who brought us the Mini-Depression of 2009 (We’re supposed to pretend it was a recession and that it's over but it wasn’t and it ain’t). There were plenty of warnings about the inevitable collapse of the Speculation Economy, but Congress, the White House and federal regulators all looked the other way.

What has been accomplished by the government’s efforts to protect us against foes foreign and domestic? After an almost unfathomably large expenditure of public resources by the government, not to mention considerable pain and suffering for the public, we seem to be right back to square one.

Which is of course why so many Americans have given up on health care reform.

The stakes are great for the Republic: once Americans lose confidence in government, Democracy itself is in danger. Restoring their trust will be the preeminent challenge of the next decade, which starts today.