Can you imagine Barack Obama cracking down on financial industry insiders rather than giving them White House jobs? Jeff Cohen can’t:
With U.S. media obsessing on the fight here at home among conservatives vying to become president, most of them missed some big news about France, which already has a conservative president. This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take the lead — even go it alone within Europe, if need be — in introducing and pushing a Financial Transaction Tax in his country.
That’s right — the conservative president of France wants to tax the financial traders and speculators.
Referring to the tax as a “moral issue” and blaming deregulation and speculation for the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy has said that traders must “repay for the damage they have caused.”
What does it tell us about U.S. politics that the conservative president of France – on this issue and others — is way to the left of President Obama? The U.S. president has not publicly promoted a Wall Street transaction tax (even though U.S. financial institutions, not the French, were largely responsible for the global crisis).
I’m joking, Newt Gingrich is a long way from siding with OWS. However, in his speeches and attack ads against Mitt Romney, Newt sounds a lot like the thousands of Occupiers who actively protested the vulture capitalism that Mitt personifies.
Mr. Gingrich sought to frame the issue as reflective of Mr. Romney’s “judgment” and “decisions,” in particular deals in which workers lost jobs and pensions while Bain [Capital] investors profited. “I’ve raised the question, which I think is a totally legitimate question – what about some companies that Bain took over that went bankrupt?’’ Mr. Gingrich asked Greta Van Susteren of Fox on Wednesday night.
Mr. Gingrich is hoping that his anti-Wall Street theme will connect with a deep vein of economic populism in the South, including South Carolina, with its high unemployment and depressed housing market. Speaking here at a convention of senior citizens, he portrayed the pressure on him to reverse course as coming from the establishment, both on Wall Street and elsewhere.
“I’m not going to back down or be afraid to say we the American people have the right to know, and any candidate for president has an obligation to tell us,’’ he said.
“No one tells the American people they aren’t allowed to learn what is going on in their very own country,’’ he said.
How beautifully ironic that a creep such as Gingrich is helping fuel phase two of the movement to wake Americans to the fact that the financial industry has wrecked the real economy and lowered the living standards of most people who have, or had, real jobs. Even funnier is the fact that Mittens left himself open to Newt’s attacks by lying about what he did as head of Bain.
This I’m posting in connection with the scary news item from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The nuclear weapons situation last year looked so grim — everybody has them! — that the scientists reset the Doomsday Clock a minute closer to midnight. We’re within minutes of Armageddon, which might work out to five years in Bowie-time.
Which is good in a way. I’ve got a lot of writing to do and deadlines help me get down to business, and the fact that there won’t be any readers left is beside the point.
Then again, Bowie wrote the song around 1972, when he was doing his Ziggy Stardust thing. He turned 65 on Jan. 8. It’s safe to not take the song literally.
But keep your eye on that Doomsday Clock.
Footnote: In the Guardian, Alexis Petridis explains why it’s fitting that Bowie keeps such a low profile these days:
Bowie was an early adopter of the internet, but he didn’t really fit with the notion of a star in the 21st century, an era when the manufacturing of pop music has been laid bare on the TV and where stars are perpetually available on Twitter and Tumblr. Rock music currently exists in a world of 360 degree connectivity that’s supposed to bring the artist and the fan closer and reveal the real person behind the myth. But as the best of his umpteen biographers David Buckley pointed out, with Bowie, revealing the real person behind the myth is missing the point: “the myth has far greater resonance and is far more intriguing than stolid attempts to identify a ‘true’ essence … his appeal has lain in the generation of myths.” Those myths look likely to remain intact forever, which seems perfectly fitting.
Mitt Romney actually managed to out-slime Newt Gingrich in campaign ads leading up to the Iowa primary, but Newt is hitting back with a 27-minute film, “When Romney Comes to Town,” that convincingly portrays Mittens as the cold-blooded jobs-killer he was as CEO at Bain Capital:
Produced by a former top Romney strategist, the film focuses on people turned out of their jobs at four of the many companies Bain essentially looted, tapping into the popular discontentment with Wall Street to label Romney a “corporate raider.”
The companies — laundry equipment maker UniMac, electronics maker DDI, toy store chain KayBee Toys and office supplier AmPad — were all purchased by Bain [Capital] and liquidated, “killing jobs for big financial rewards,” the film explains.
“They could care less about us, the way I see it,” one of the film’s subjects explains. “Who am I? Mitt Romney and them guys, they don’t care about who I am.”
The pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future placed a top-dollar bid on the 27-minute film after pro-Romney PACs essentially destroyed Gingrich’s chances in Iowa with a flood of negative advertising that blanketed the airwaves.
Sing along with Vera Lynn: We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker thinks the world is becoming less violent, but scientists believe we’ve taken a step back in our efforts to avert nuclear catastrophe:
It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.
Despite the promise of a new spirit of international cooperation, and reductions in tensions between the United States and Russia, the Science and Security Board believes that the path toward a world free of nuclear weapons is not at all clear, and leadership is failing. The ratification in December 2010 of the New START treaty between Russia and the United States reversed the previous drift in US-Russia nuclear relations. However, failure to act on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by leaders in the United States, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, and North Korea and on a treaty to cut off production of nuclear weapons material continues to leave the world at risk from continued development of nuclear weapons. The world still has approximately 19,500 nuclear weapons, enough power to destroy the Earth’s inhabitants several times over. The Nuclear Security Summit of 2010 shone a spotlight on securing all nuclear fissile material, but few actions have been taken. The result is that it is still possible for radical groups to acquire and use highly enriched uranium and plutonium to wreak havoc in nuclear attacks…
Earlier today, I posted about Stephen Colbert’s satiric campaign to wise people up to the corrupt campaign financing laws that help elect corrupt, often incompetent candidates. But I didn’t mention what we can do to help make reform possible.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, as usual, is one of the only elected official in D.C. who’s on the case. This is from a piece he wrote about working to deep-six Citizens United:
…The goal of the top 1 percent is simple. They will spend as much as it takes to elect candidates who support a right-wing corporate agenda. They will spend as much as it takes to defeat those candidates who are fighting for working families. And that’s about it!
Our strategy must be equally simple. Short-term, we must do everything we can to support those progressive candidates in 2012 who are fighting for the middle class and the values we believe in. Long-term, we must overturn Citizens United and fight for real campaign finance reform which limits the power of big money.
Last month, I introduced a constitutional amendment, the Saving American Democracy bill, to overturn Citizens United. This amendment states that:
—Corporations do not have the same constitutional rights as human beings.
—The people have the right to regulate corporations.
—Corporations are prohibited from making campaign contributions.
—Congress and states shall have the power to set reasonable limits on election spending.
As we approach the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision, please join me, Daily Kos and Democracy for America in pledging to fight to overturn Citizens United and to counter the unlimited resources of the right-wing in 2012.
Click on the link in Bernie’s message to send a message.
Who would have thought a TV talk show host/satirist would prove himself to be smarter and more ethical than most of the people on the U.S. Supreme Court? Well, probably most of us.
See this week’s NYT Magazine for a piece about Stephen Colbert’s ongoing adventures in the slimy world of campaign financing. Phawker excerpted some of the piece on Sunday. Writer Charles McGrath recounts how Colbert helped set up a super PAC called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, an entity that is…
…entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t ‘coordinate’ with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical…”
Watching Colbert on TV last summer was an education for voters who didn’t realize the law is a daunting obstacle to the nomination of candidates who aren’t crooked and/or incompetent. He used his PAC to jab at the fundraising practices of presidential candidate Rick Perry and, in general, at the process of campaign financing, which hit a new low after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010.
McGrath notes that ads sponsored by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow were “made possible” by the Colbert Super PAC SHH Institute:
…Super PAC SHH (as in “hush”) is Colbert’s 501(c)(4). He has one of those too — an organization that can accept unlimited amounts of money from corporations without disclosing their names and can then give that money to a regular PAC, which would otherwise be required to report corporate donations. “What’s the difference between that and money laundering?” Colbert said…
…Referring to the [Citizens United] ruling that money is speech, and therefore corporations can contribute large sums to political campaigns, Colbert said, “Citizens United said that transparency would be the disinfectant, but (c)(4)’s are warm, wet, moist incubators. There is no disinfectant.”
Footnote: Colbert continued to fight the good fight, in his perverse way, by trying to purchase the right to make the “corporations are people” concept a referendum issue… When McGrath asked him if he’d run for president again, as he did in 2008, Colbert was quick to mimic your typical unctuous politician: “I don’t think you ever say ‘never,'” he said. “That’s a discussion I’ll have to have with my family. I’ll have to pray on it.”
Mike Lofgren of CounterPunchrecently wrote that the super-rich have seceded from the United States. OK, we knew that, but read to the end of his article to see how deeply he appreciates the implications of their secession:
…Steven Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues…
…This lack of skin in the game may explain why Willard Mitt Romney is so coy about releasing his income tax returns. It would also make sense for someone with $264 million in net worth to joke that he is “unemployed,” as if he were some jobless sheet metal worker in Youngstown, when he is really saying in code that his income stream is not a salary subject to payroll deduction. The chances are good that his effective rate for both federal income and payroll taxes is lower than that of many a wage slave.
The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years – a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies – and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists, and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.
The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.
Footnote: Rod Stewart was a soulful singer with the Jeff Beck Group and with the Faces. He also recorded some terrific solo stuff, but he hasn’t cut a good album in about 35 years. He became someone who would record anything and perform anywhere if you threw enough money at him. He and Steve Schwarzman were perfect together.
I’ve been writing too often about politicians — dull creatures, in most cases, with bad ideas and base motives. So here’s a belated review of my favorite movie of 2011, director/writer Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. I only saw six new movies last year, three of them on DVD, so it was an easy choice.
Malick starts with a quotation from the Book of Job and tells his story in carefully wrought images, with occasional bits of voice-over and dialogue. We meet an attractive couple, played by Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt, and their three children, living in an idyllic looking American town in the 1950s. We see them at home, happy together. There is an apparent jump in time. A letter is delivered — one of the kids is dead. Mom and Dad are shown grappling with their grief.
Cut to Sean Penn looking forlorn, roaming under a vaulted glass-and-steel ceiling, through the halls of a glacial looking skyscraper. It becomes clear we’ve been flash-forwarded to the present, that Penn is one of the sons, working as an architect. He’s having a middle-age crisis and is thinking of his parents and long-dead brother. In voice-over, he says things like “How did I lose you?” He’s addressing his brother, his mother, or maybe his idea of God.
And then… WTF? Malick cuts to the history of the world — the Big Bang, celestial vistas, erupting volcanoes, roiling seas, primordial ooze, primitive sea creatures, even a kindly dinosaur. What was the point of all this commotion, he seems to ask, if everything ends in death?
In case you haven’t guessed, this movie is not for Zach Galifianakis fans. The only other director who would have attempted anything so grand — or grandiose, if you prefer — is Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that Kubrick was totally cerebral, indifferent to his characters, whereas Malick is trying to make sense of life and death from a humanist perspective.
After the Genesis interlude, the story — I use the term loosely — resumes in the 1950s. This time the family’s little world is not so idyllic, although it’s just as sunlit and beautiful. We see father-mother, father-son and brother-brother conflicts. The angry father vents feelings of failure. The stately music swells. Everything happens as if in a flood of memories.
I won’t try to tell you how the movie ends, and I’ve only touched on a few of its themes. You might find it a nostalgic-seeming bore, or a purposeful and daring attempt to convince us that love is transcendent, stronger than death. I’m in the latter camp. Malick’s movie makes life feel like a dream, but the dream seems more real than most conventional realistic dramas or, God help us, reality TV.
Footnote: I don’t know how well The Tree of Life went over in the theaters. Some people I know would run for the exits after the first ten minutes. Others would be stunned, if only by its visual beauty. I watched it at home by myself and felt overwhelmed. See it with someone close to you if you can, someone who enjoys arguing.
I like to think each of us is in some way unique, not because we have different fingerprints and DNA, but rather because of our souls, whatever those are.
A case can be made for Mitt Romney’s uniqueness, even though he appears to be an assembly-line android built for the sole purpose of being a politician — i.e., he’s enormously wealthy and Ken-doll handsome, with no history of infidelity, and no spontaneity or wit. He’s a relentless self-promoter, a tireless campaigner, and a compulsive, unapologetic liar.
But one must add to those qualities Mitt’s proud history of job-destroying business ventures. He’s unique because he brags of his wealth while trying to sell himself to voters, even though his wealth was largely built on leveraged buyouts that put many thousands of voters out of work. In fact, as ThinkProgress reported today, Mitt thinks it’s his wealth that makes him worthy of holding office:
During Sunday morning’s Meet the Press debate, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney suggested that people who need a job to pay their mortgage shouldn’t run for office. Recalling something his father, who served as governor of Michigan, told him, Romney said, “He had good advice to me. He said, ‘Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage. If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference, you oughta have a responsibility to do so.’”
A few moments later, Romney bragged about making former Senator Ted Kennedy take out a mortgage on his house when Romney ran against him. “I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” Romney said…
Mittens used to seem like nothing more than the ultimate Plastic Man, with zero capacity for empathy or self-examination. But now that there’s a chance he might be president, he looks like something more sinister.
Put another way:
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt
Odd Man Out 