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.

Republic Gone Bananas

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

 

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

But that was the real story to me.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

Synthetic Tea

If you were looking for leadership of a real grass-roots movement for social change, Dick Armey might not be your first choice.

After he rose to become House Republican majority leader, he quit to cash in on his political connections with the top lobbying shop DLA Piper law firm. He’s also on the payroll of the Koch Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, one of the main sources of organizational backing of the Tea Party.

I’ve been critical of the Obama campaign’s hypocritical promises of a new kind of fundraising campaign that relies only on small donors, not fat cats, while he seeks donations from Wall Street.

But Obama’s nemeses in the Tea Party are no better, portraying themselves as a grassroots populist movement while relying on members of the Republican permanent government like Armey for leadership.

Armey actually had to quit his lobbying job because of his DLA  Piper clients favored Obama’s health care reform, after the president cut a deal to secure support from drug companies. The Tea Party, meanwhile, has been dead set against the Obama plan.

It’s not that somebody like Armey, with his vast knowledge gained from slithering through the corridors of power all these years, might not have something to offer an authentic grassroots movement. But wouldn’t he have to offer a renunciation of his past connections before he participate? Wouldn’t he have to acknowledge that he had been part of the problem before he could be part of the solution?

Whatever minor disagreements Armey’s former clients might have with the Tea Party agenda, their interests dovetail neatly. Demonizing government and railing against strong regulations will only mean fewer watchdogs for the drug companies and bankers DLA Piper serves, and fewer tools to hold them accountable.

 

Will Afghan Bailout Trump U.S. Homeowners?

At least you know where the Tea Party stands. If it’s a government program, they want to end it.

The Democrats are murkier. They propose tepid solutions to serious problems like the foreclosure crisis, then when their programs don’t work it, ends up reinforcing the Tea Party’s arguments that government doesn’t work.

So the Tea Party-driven Republicans come along and want to whack the Obama administration’s failed foreclosure prevention scheme known as the Home Affordable Modification program. They would probably want to whack it even if it was working, but that’s another subject.

The Tea Party doesn’t offer anything in its place. Homeowners are pretty much on their own at the mercy of the banks.

So much for the American Dream.

Many people have pointed out that the HAMP program is something between an abject failure and a scam that rips off already beleaguered homeowners.

The Obama administration doesn’t offer so much of an argument in its defense as a hapless shrug. In this video, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledges that the foreclosure prevention program amounts to a “tragic, terrible mess.”

But hey, the administration says, it’s better than nothing.

Meanwhile, the foreclosures continue while authorities investigate massive fraud by the banks in the foreclosure process.

This is not a debate calculated to offer much confidence that our public officials can deal effectively with the problems that afflict those of us who live in the reality-based community.

I was reflecting on this tawdry spectacle while reading about the latest developments in the latest “too big to fail” bank bailout to strike at U.S. taxpayers – this one in Kabul, Afghanistan. My colleague Harvey Rosenfield warned about this brewing fiasco several weeks ago.

Apparently the wildly corrupt officials and their cronies used the bank as their private piggy bank, and the bank’s imminent collapse is now a greater threat to Afghanistan’s security than the Taliban.

As recently as last September, officials were offering assurances that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay for a bailout. Now apparently if we don’t cough up $1 billion the war and the country will be lost and all the previous billions we’ve squandered there will have been wasted.

So we can’t afford a dime to help homeowners in this country but we must spend $1 billion to bail out the Afghans.

I don’t expect the Democrats to put up much of a fight against such an outrage.

I hope the Tea Party stands strong on this one.

 

 

 

Night on Fantasy Island

As a snapshot of the wildly dysfunctional state of our political union, last night’s festivities were a smashing success. All sides were serving up plenty of mom, apple pie and platitudes while ignoring what’s actually left on plates of millions of Americans –nothing.

I did find at least something to agree with in what each of the speakers said. Who can quarrel with President Obama when he calls on us to “win the future?” And I want my government as lean and mean as Paul Ryan and the Republicans do, without any wasteful subsidies that boost corporate tycoons and their overseas expansion rather than creating decent-paying jobs here at home.

It’s true that the tea party’s spokeswoman, Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota, looked like aliens had captured her brain and were speaking through her. Maybe we would have been better off if the aliens had captured Obama and Ryan too. At least Bachman briefly took note of the high unemployment rate before she went off to into her own rhetorical fantasyland.

That’s more than you can say for President Obama, who was pitching us his hallucination that his new pals from the Chamber of Commerce are going to beat their corporate profits into ploughshares in partnership with government, in an effort to foster new technologies and growth that we all share. Forgive me if I can’t get too worked up about this. Didn’t we try this government-corporate partnership recently? Wasn’t that what the bailout was?

Back here on Planet Earth, that didn’t work out so well for a lot of us, though it does seem to have worked well for the president’s friends at General Electric and JPMorgan Chase.

Both Ryan and Bachman aren’t interested in any partnerships; they want to dismantle government altogether so that GE, JPMorgan and the rest of the corporatariat can run the show without any interference at all. The only difference is that Bachman would like to do it faster, with less nice talk, than Ryan.

Neither the president, Ryan, or Bachman could focus on reality long enough to mention the long, steep decline of the middle class or the on-going foreclosure crisis, or offer any specific ideas on addressing those very real issues.

Back here on Planet Earth, we’re going to have to harness all of our ingenuity, strength and diversity just to wrestle our political system back from these leaders and their corporate backers before they plunder what’s left of it.

Money Never Sleeps

Oliver Stone’s sequel to his 1984 hit "Wall Street" opens as the Bubble is about to burst on a culture of material excess that makes Gordon Gekko’s 1980s cell phone – then a symbol of extravagance available only to the mega-rich – ridiculously quaint. Stone’s Wall Street circa 2008 is set in a New York constructed of light, with ubiquitous flat screens providing instantaneous, 24/7 updates on the status of global power and wealth. When the results of decades of speculation first hit the housing market and then the stock markets, the great titans of Wall Street start eating their own. But that was only an appetizer for the main course: the American taxpayer.

I really couldn’t enjoy the love story between Shia LaBeouf and money, much less the one between Shia and his girlfriend, who happens to be Gekko’s estranged daughter and thus presents a trading opportunity for the ambitious young man. As the movie traced the collapse of Bear Stearns and then the stock market into a pile of scrap paper, I got more and more angry.

In one scene, the silver-haired heads of the giant firms that run Wall Street – surrogates for Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, etc. – cloaked in bespoke suits, are gathered around an ornate table in a wood-paneled conference room with one of their former colleagues, who is now the Secretary of Treasury (aka Hank Paulson), to discuss how much taxpayer money they need in order to stay afloat. Hundreds of billions of dollars are referred to in single digits. The consensus, quickly obtained, was “seven.” It was like the Godfather movies, when the heads of the Families would convene to handle some event that threatened their criminal way of life.

I found myself remembering the scene, in the third Godfather, when small-time hood Joey Zasa locked the conference room doors from the outside, trapping the heads of the Families inside so they could be slaughtered by his assasins.

The nation hardly needs Oliver Stone’s portrayal of the markets as organized crime to stoke people’s recollection of what the debacle did to our economy and our kids’ futures. Our anger has reached a white hot point that, like the sun in a magnifying glass, is now being directed against public officials all over the country. “Money never sleeps” is Gordon Gekko’s new mantra, and vast sums of money are flowing into the political process to influence the November elections - largely an attack on incumbent Democrats in Congress.

But where was all this money back in the third week of September, 2008, when the Bush Administration’s three page proposal to bail out Wall Street with billions in taxpayer money was presented to Congress along with the threat that the United States would collapse if it wasn’t approved on the spot?

In what I must acknowledge was a serious overestimation of the impact one citizen could have at such a moment, I flew to Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, thinking I might be able to draw someone’s attention to the sheer lunacy of what was being proposed. Joan Claybrook, the President of Public Citizen, and I held a news conference just outside the House Banking Committee hearing room, where the plan was being presented by the Bush Administration. We were like two voices whispering in a hurricane. Later, I met with members of the California congressional delegation who were in shock and ready to do the bailout deed forthwith. Ok, I said, at least require disclosure of how our money was spent and a quid pro quo: that the companies receiving taxpayer dollars could not loan them back to us for more than a few percentage points profit. The legislators responded to the interest rate cap as if I had proposed that they resign from Congress.

It would have been nice back then if there had been a hugely funded campaign backed by angry Americans telling Congress not to act hastily or stupidly. But in fact, the big money we are seeing now in American politics is not from the grassroots, but from the same greedy folks who caused the debacle in the first place or who profited from the bailout. According to US News and World Report, business and conservative backed organizations are behind the  “independent expenditure” campaigns that are targeting Democrats and outspending them two to one. A recent article in the New Yorker uncovered two extremist billionaire brothers funneling over $100 million from their family oil business into Tea Party non-profits. Long-time big business Republican operatives like Karl Rove (now running a group called "American Crossroads") and Dick Armey ("FreedomWorks") are supplying more than tea for the new tea party.

The sudden resurgence of interest in politics on Main Street would be cause for great celebration, and the opportunity for real change, as citizen leader Jamie Court writes in his new primer on political activism: “The Progressive’s Guide To Raising Hell.” Instead, it’s just another dismaying example of big money corrupting our political system. If it succeeds, get ready for more speculation, more bubbles, and more pain for the average American.

"Greed is good," Gekko said back in the day, but Wall Street needs to own Washington, and Wall Street is already projecting victory in November.  Commenting on the rise of the Dow in September, an analyst said, "’There is a good chance that the strength we have seen in the market recently is due partly to an expectation about the result of the election... Investors are starting to understand that a likely result of this election is gridlock, and that is good."

Quotable: Neil Barofsky

“There’s a reason there are Tea Partiers out there, and when you look at it, anger at the bailout is one of the first things they talk about...This Treasury Department and the previous Treasury Department bear some of the responsibility for not being straightforward with the American people."

Neil Barofsky

TARP inspector general

Bloomberg News

April 28

Don’t Dump the Government, Sue It!

When our government institutions fail us through incompetence or corruption – the financial collapse being Exhibit A – what is the solution? That’s the question I posed a few weeks ago.

The Tea Partyers increasingly seem to advocate getting rid of government altogether, or at least the federal government. They (and the health insurance industry) are getting a lot of mileage these days by arguing that the Wall Street debacle shows government cannot be trusted to regulate health care. It’s not a crazy argument, but their solution is.

When government fails, the answer is not to get rid of government, but to force it to work better. How?

To start, citizens should be given “standing to sue” the federal government. It might surprise you to learn that the courts have often rejected the right of citizens to go to court to enforce state and federal laws. When I worked for Congress Watch, the D.C.-based lobbying group founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, back in the late 1970s, one of our top goals was to make sure that when Congress passed a law, no matter the subject, it gave Americans the right to sue if a federal agency failed to enforce that law, conducted itself in an arbitrary manner, spent taxpayer money improperly, or if the law was unconstitutional. We were often unsuccessful, defeated by lobbyists for big business who hoped to later subvert the agencies with impunity. Nader has written frequently about this tool of democracy, and it’s also covered in an excellent biography of the Nader consumer organizations by David Bollier that is now available online.

Can you imagine how much economic damage could have been  avoided if citizens had been able to sue the federal agencies that unilaterally stopped regulating the Money Industry over the last decade?

A lot of Americans don’t like litigation – because they have never seen how it can work to protect their interests as consumers or taxpayers. But suing the government is a crucial, even life-saving right that is part of the law in some states, including California. For example, my colleagues at Consumer Watchdog and I sued the California Department of Managed Health Care when it suddenly started permitting HMOs to evade state laws and deny autistic children medically-necessary treatments. The agency’s misconduct began after intense behind-the-scenes lobbying by the heath insurance companies. The trial will be held this fall in a Los Angeles Superior Court and based on a recent preliminary ruling by the judge, we are looking forward to forcing this renegade agency to follow the law.

No doubt the prospect of litigation against the government raises fears of wasted taxpayer resources. But court rules allow judges to block truly frivolous cases. And I believe the costs would be more than offset by the benefits to Americans.

Standing to sue is one of many proposals for systemic reform that you don’t hear much about, because they aren’t sexy. They involve changes to the internal mechanisms of government. But if they were adopted, government would operate far more effectively and with much greater accountability to the public.

Tea Party For Two

Is the Democratic Party obsolete?
That’s the question that keeps nagging me as I watch President Obama and the Democratic leadership fumble away their opportunities to fight for meaningful reform of health care and the financial system.
The president and congressional leaders consistently shy away from fighting for reforms they themselves propose, such as the public option or the consumer financial protection agency.

They obsess over whether someone will accuse them of partisanship, or whether they will spook the markets if they crack down on reckless profligate bankers. They appear to find any excuse to avoid pushing the kinds of fundamental of changes that would challenge the health care and financial industry.

I don’t think you can blame the Republicans, whatever their own faults. They oppose reform. They’re fighting Obama and his policies as a way to regain power. They’re pursuing that opposition determinedly, and they’re betting it will pave their way back to a majority. It’s not the Republicans’ fault if they set traps for the Democrats and the Democrats continually fall for them.

Members of the Democratic leadership have shown profiles in cowardice when it comes to fighting for any reforms opposed by the insurance or financial industries. In the latest display, House and Senate leaders are furiously trying to blame the other for the death of the public option, even though it’s supported by a majority of Americans and even 40 members of the U.S. Senate.

But the insurance companies have fought the public option, which would provide those forced to buy health insurance under reform an alternative to private insurance. So the Democratic leadership has shown determination to find a way to eliminate the provision without leaving their fingerprints on the corpse.

The same with financial reform, where the Democrat leadership has zigged and zagged but hasn't won the fight for strong independent consumer protection or meaningful regulation of the complex investments that blew up in the meltdown. Sen. Chris Dodd, the long-time friend of insurers and financial titans who serves as Senate Banking chair, flirted with a strong reform proposal when he was running in a tough reelection campaign. But he backed off after he decided to retire and now appears ready to resume his traditional role in service to the bankers’ lobby. As an industry publication recently noted, insurance companies will miss Chris Dodd.

The Democratic leadership don’t seem to stand for any strong principles.
The president and Democratic leaders pay only lip service to the deep anger in the country over the erosion of the middle class, and the bank bailout that pumped up Wall Street while leaving Main Street on life support. The Democrats fear that anger because they know that their own Wall Street-friendly policies have helped fuel the series of speculative bubbles that brought prosperity and then a crash that wiped out the financial security of millions of Americans.
The president and his party are banking that the economy will improve enough by later this year, and 2012, to blunt voters’ anger.
If it does, the Democrats will claim credit for setting the economy right without having unduly upset their contributors in the financial and insurance industries. Even better for the Democrats, they will be able to bolster their fundraising by showing how they hung tough against the call for stronger reforms.
The Democrats came into office promising not to “waste a crisis.” But their efforts to reform health care and the financial system and to put Americans back to work have shown a distinct lack of urgency.
Could there be another way?

Obama will face voters on the 100th anniversary of the last presidential election in which a third-party candidate beat a major party candidate. The third-party candidate was a former president, Teddy Roosevelt, running on the progressive Bull Moose ticket promising to bust up the powerful big corporations of the day, known as trusts. Roosevelt was angry that the president who followed him, Republican William Howard Taft, hadn’t followed in his activist political footsteps. The former president was not afraid to show his ire, calling on his followers to launch “a genuine and permanent moral awakening.”
Taft, for his part, favored a laissez-faire policy toward business and regulation that resonates with the era that we’ve been through. “A national government cannot create good times,” Taft said. “It cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow.” But by meddling, government could “prevent prosperity that might otherwise have taken place.”
Sound familiar?

Roosevelt lost the election to Woodrow Wilson, but he got more votes than hands-off Taft.
Today the tea party is rumbling on the right, threatening revolt against the Republicans. There’s already the beginnings of a coffee party. If the economy doesn’t cooperate with the Democrats, the tea party’s discontent could be just the beginning of the end of the two-party stranglehold on our government.

Bad Government

In his weekly address last Saturday, President Obama said, “What’s being tested here is not just our ability to solve this one problem, but our ability to solve any problem.” Obama’s speech was about health care reform, but his point goes to the heart of the debate underway in this country – a debate that the Tea Party movement has given a sharp edge.

American’s have lost their confidence in the basic institutions of our democracy. It’s not just the President’s rating that is down in the polls, it’s Congress’s, the United States Supreme Court, even the college system.

There is more than ample justification for this stark collapse of trust. As I wrote last summer, I believe it all begins with the crash of the Money Industry after years of deregulation by federal officials who, quite simply, sold out – and then showered billions of taxpayer dollars to save the speculators while the rest of the economy, along with millions of people’s jobs and savings, went into the tank. Even now, the Wall Street execs whose greed and speculation caused the crash continue to call the shots in D.C.

After that pitiful performance by our government, who can blame people for distrusting Washington’s plan to fix the health care system?

Lately I’ve been pondering two other disasters that might have been averted had government done its job.

An appendix (PDF) to the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission describes in agonizing detail how our government was unable to mount a defense of the nation that day despite trillions of dollars spent on defense and the military in preceding years. That morning, there were only fourteen jet fighters guarding the country. Flight controllers couldn’t connect the dots as the multiple hijackings unfolded; FAA officials failed to follow procedures to communicate with the military; scrambled fighters were too far away and sent to the wrong locations; the military never even knew how many or which commercial airplanes were involved until all four were down. A fateful order from the White House to shoot down any commercial planes that refused to land never even reached the fighter pilots who by then were flying combat cover over the East Coast.

On that horrible morning, it was only when individuals took matters into their own hands – the passengers of United 93 who fought the terrorists as their plane headed for a strike on he nation’s capitol, or an FAA manager who ignored protocols and unilaterally ordered all planes in the air to land – that more lives were spared.

Or, consider the case of Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama professor who shot six colleagues a few weeks ago. As rendered by the New York Times, her profile now, after the deed, reads like the description of “angry loner” we have grown familiar with from previous mass murders, but no one ever connected the dots of her obviously deranged life. In 1986, she killed her brother but claimed it was an accident and got off, perhaps due to political connections; in 1993, she was questioned in connection with a pipe bomb sent to one of her college professors; in 2002, she punched a women in the head at a House of Pancakes for taking the last booster seat.

What to do, then, about such profound failures by government? Do we follow the suggestion of Glenn Beck, who over the weekend blamed progressivism – the philosophy of engaged government championed by Theodore Roosevelt – for our nation’s ills?

I’m not one of those people who is offended by the eruption of angry Tea Party organizations around the country. To the contrary, the TP’rs are raising questions, pointing out problems and demanding answers from elected officials – just what an active citizenry is supposed to do.

But I disagree with their premise, which is that government is responsible for all that is wrong with our country, and that the solution therefore is a castrated federal government or no federal government at all.

That’s stupid.

We need police. We need the military. We also need a cop on the corporate beat in the executive suites of Wall Street. And we need rules and regulations to prevent health insurance companies from ripping us off or condemning us to death.

When our government institutions fail us, as they have, through incompetence and corruption, the answer is not to get rid of government, but to make it work better. How to do that? Read my next column.