Left, right and left out

On so many issues related to the state of our economic recovery, current notions of liberal and conservative don’t seem to apply.

For example, should we allow a real free market to work in our financial system?

Should we crack down hard on those Wall Street bankers who broke the law?

Should companies that want to foreclose on property have to follow the law?

If you’re in favor of real financial free market, tough law enforcement and following the law, are you conservative or liberal, left or right?

What you are is in the majority, and the most important political designation in the U.S. in 2012 – left out.

Your views are reflected only rarely in the political debate at all and never in the presidential debate. Sure, President Obama has repeatedly promised to get tough on Wall Street, most recently in the state of the union in January, but based on the results, those promises have little credibility. President Obama preaches for an activist role for government with the occasional populist flourish, but that impulse wilts if Republicans or campaign funders show the least resistance.

His opponent, Mitt Romney, considers any crackdown on Wall Street an affront to the beloved job creators to whom we should all be bowing down – even if they don’t actually use their wealth to create any decent jobs.

What we get instead of a real debate on how to get an economy that works for ordinary folks is a faux argument over the role of venture capitalist tycoons, between the candidate who used to be one and our president, who has relied on them a key source of campaign funding as much as Romney has.

What we get is the fiscal cliff drama about whether or not to shut down the government.

What we get is each side offering scary versions of what the other will do.

What we get are Mitt Romney’s assurances that if we just get the regulators out of the way, the wealthy job creators will get to work, regardless of whether anybody can afford to buy their products.

What we get is the president’s half-measures and handwringing. But it’s all political theater that doesn’t replace real jobs, real plans to revive housing and keep people in their homes and real accountability for bankers. It doesn’t replace a real debate about the role of big money in overshadowing those issues in our elections. Right now, both sides have left those out of their campaigns.

Politics is a team activity and our natural tendency is to root for our guy, downplay his flaws, and point out how much worse the other guy would be. But this election should not just be rooting for our team and beating the other guy. It should not be about rooting for our guy we’re so hyped up about how scary the other guy is.

It should be about who is willing to confront the big money, not bend to it.

It should be about who can really get people back to work, keep us in our homes, guide an economic recovery that’s not just for the wealthiest.

We should demand that we’re more than just a rooting section for our team, that our bread and butter concerns are not left out.

 

 

 

Where have all the task forces gone?

President Obama announced a new task force today to investigate the disappearance of the mortgage fraud task force he appointed earlier this year as well as another one he appointed in 2009.

“When duly appointed task forces vanish into thin air without a trace, this administration will not accept it,” the president said. “We expect this new task force, which will be called the Task Force Task Force, to move forcefully to accomplish its task.”

The Task Force Task Force’s mission will be made easier, the president said, because he appointed as one of it’s co-chairs the New York state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. The New York state attorney general was also appointed co-chair of the mortgage fraud task force, which has not been seen or heard from since the president announced it during his State of the Union speech January 24.

Schneiderman said he would move “quickly” to interview himself as soon as he had a chance to familiarize himself with the circumstances of the disappearance of the mortgage fraud task force.

“We will get to the bottom of this,” Schneiderman pledged.

To show his seriousness, the president said he was reconvening the band of Navy SEALS who worked on the mission to find and kill Ban Laden in Pakistan, and putting them at the service of the Task Force Task Force. “When a group of American citizens go missing in the service of their country, we take it very seriously,” the president said. “One task force vanishing is bad enough, but two?”

Schneiderman refused to be pinned down to a timetable for the investigation. He also refused to comment on his previous insistence that he would “take action” if the mortgage fraud task force was stymied.

Schneiderman also refused to answer specific questions swirling around the mortgage fraud task force, such as why the entire mortgage fraud task force had a mere 50 lawyers when the Enron task force, convened to investigate a previous financial scandal involving a single company, had more than 100 lawyers working on it and why the mortgage fraud task force apparently still doesn’t have office space.

Schneiderman acknowledged that there are some mysteries that may be too deep for the new task force to unravel.

Was the mortgage fraud task force, aka the Residential Mortgage-Back Securities Working Group, actually a part of the earlier Financial Fraud Task Force, established November 17, 2009? Was the mortgage fraud task force actually something new, or just a PR offensive that amounted to nothing more than a repackaging of already existing efforts?

Though U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has touted the administration’s efforts in going after financial fraud as nothing less than “historic,” the administration has yet to bring a criminal prosecution against a single major executive of a too big to fail institution. Some have questioned whether the president, who received more money from Wall Street than his Republican opponent, John McCain, really has any desire to hold Wall Street executives accountable for their actions.

Schneiderman’s investigation into the vanishing task forces may lead him right into the Oval Office to the man who appointed them.

A month before President Obama announced his new mortgage fraud task force in the State of the Union speech, the president told 60 Minutes, “Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street — in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street — wasn’t illegal. That’s exactly why we had to change the laws.”

 

 

Is There a Secret White House Memo on Corporate Control of our Country?

An internal White House memo in 2010, just before the Supreme Court’s outrageous decision in Citizens United, suggested President Obama address the influence of money in politics. Other items crowded his agenda instead, but this election year President Obama would be wise to take up the citizen call for a 28th Constitutional Amendment to end the corruption caused by the Court’s corporate personhood decision.

First, some important background on the 2010 memo. It used to be that a history of a presidential administration would await the president’s departure, but in recent years mid-term profiles have become the norm. Bob Woodward chronicled the Bush White House with four books, and Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men,” published last year, captured President Obama’s errors in strategy and communications. Both authors had access to sources close to the top of the White House. But this week’s New Yorker takes the genre to a new level. Ryan Lizza’s “The Obama Memos” is a fascinating analysis of the Obama presidency that relies greatly on White House memos that Lizza somehow obtained.  One of them, the transition team’s memo to the president-elect in 2008 on the economy, is available in its entirety for download on the New Yorker site.

It was another memo, excerpted in a sidebar, that really got my attention. It was from the President’s political advisers, in late December 2009 according to Lizza, and listed “ideas on how on how try and recapture some of the anti-Washington spirit of his 2008 campaign” in the President’s 2010 State of the Union address. One of the suggestions in the memo anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case.

Campaign Finance reform: By the time of the SOTU [State of the Union], the Citizens United case will have been handed down and at the time of the decision will likely make an announcement on our response/plans. We could use the SOTU opportunity to push the ball forward on whatever proposal we put forward, calling on Congress to act by a ‘date certain’ or further fleshing out our proposals.

The Court handed down its decision on January 21, just a week before the State of the Union speech. Of course, no one expected the decision to cement into American Constitutional law the proposition that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings and that spending money to influence elections is a form of free speech. So when the advisers referred to the White House's “response/plans,” it was not clear what kind of decision they were expecting, or what they thought they could do about it.

We now know that the only thing that can be done about Citizens United is for the American people to join together to overrule it, by passing the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, such as the one we have proposed.

Meanwhile, the President had something to say about corporate money in politics at the end of his State of the Union speech on January 27, 2010, and it stirred quite a controversy. He began by noting that a byproduct of the 2008 financial collapse was the public’s loss of confidence in government of, by and for the people:

We face a deficit of trust -– deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; to give our people the government they deserve.

 Then, with members of the Supreme Court seated right in front of him, he slammed the Court’s ruling in Citizens United:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

It was a powerful moment, to be sure, though hardly the assault on the Court that it was subsequently described as, at least in some quarters.

What happened next created the evening’s drama. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who had voted in favor of the Court’s ruling, took it upon himself to provide some instant analysis. Cameras caught Alito angrily mouthing the words “not true” in response to Obama’s critique. The New York Times recalled the moment recently.

Whatever the President or anyone else thought that night about the week-old decision, it has since opened the floodgates of corporate money while individual Americans – I’m referring to the human beings who cast ballots, not so-called "corporate citizens" – have become bystanders. Decades-old laws limiting the influence of big money in politics have fallen, with few exceptions – one of which I wrote about last week.

It’ll likely be a few years before we get to read the memos that his political team is forwarding President Obama this year. But focus on Citizens United and the power of corporations to determine the outcome of supposedly “free” elections in what is proudly hailed as the world’s greatest democracy is certainly consistent with the themes of government accountability and the ninety nine percent vs. the one percent that are dominating public discourse and even the debates between the pro-corporate Republican presidential candidates. Obama would find a welcoming, bipartisan audience for the 28th Amendment. Let’s see how far he’s prepared to go.

 

Quotable – FCIC report

“The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire,” the report states. “The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble.”

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, January,  2011

Around the Web: Volcker Rules - Not!

Until the morning of January 21, 82-year-old former Federal Reserve president Paul Volcker had been a lonely and largely ignored figure among President Obama’s economic advisers.

Volcker seemed to be the only one of Obama’s advisers not under the spell of the “too big to fail banks” and their highly touted innovations.

Volcker was especially vocal about protecting the public from the financial world’s riskier innovations. As he told a financial conference last year, “Riskier financial activities should be limited to hedge funds to whom society could say: ‘If you fail, fail. I'm not going to help you. Your stock is gone, creditors are at risk, but no one else is affected.’ ”

It was Volcker who had said that the only financial innovation to benefit consumers in the last 20 years was the ATM card.

But he wasn’t getting much traction with the president and his advisers.

Then the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

In a lurch back toward the populism he had embraced during his campaign, President Obama hastily reached out for Volcker.

During a press conference, the president endorsed something he called the Volcker rule as an essential plank of his financial reform plan. That rule would restrict banks from risky proprietary trades with their own (borrowed) money.

Here’s what the president said:

“Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest, or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers.  If financial firms want to trade for profit, that's something they're free to do.  Indeed, doing so –- responsibly –- is a good thing for the markets and the economy.  But these firms should not be allowed to run these hedge funds and private equities funds while running a bank backed by the American people.”

For more on proprietary trading and the Volcker rule, read this from Rortybomb’s Mike Konczal and the NYT. For more about why the Volcker rule was a good idea, see this from WSJ’s Dealbreaker.

Obama mentioned the Volcker Rule a couple more times, as did the man who was marshaling financial reform through the House, Rep. Barney Frank.

But neither the president nor anybody else in the Democratic leadership ever mounted a public campaign to make it an essential part of reform. In fact, within a month, the president was already backing off his support of the Volcker rule.

And now, like many other parts of the reform that would have protected consumers and inconvenienced banks, it has been largely gutted.

Bloomberg reports “lobbying by banks and congressmen sympathetic to Wall Street’s views, as well as some administration members in the banks’ defense, trampled the views of Volcker and others who favored a stronger proposal.”

The weaker provisions won’t even go into effect for as many as 12 years.

It would have been one thing for Obama and the Democrats to go down swinging on the Volcker Rule. But they didn’t even put up much of a fight.

If you’re as disappointed as I am with the president’s lack of leadership on this, after he made such a big deal about it, why not let him know?

Quotable: Neil Barofsky

"Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car."

Neil Barofsky, January 2010