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Charade Ends For Pseudo-Populists

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The Occupy Wall Street protest has exposed the politicians – who have always claimed to be populists – for what they really are:  tools of the plutocracy.  Conspicuously absent from the Wall Street occupation have been nearly all Democrats – despite their party’s efforts to portray itself as the champion of Main Street in its battle against the tyranny of the megabanks.  As has always been the case, the Democrats won’t really do anything that could disrupt the flow of bribes campaign contributions they receive from our nation’s financial elites.

The “no show” Democrats reminded me of an article which appeared at Truthdig, written by Chris Hedges, author of the book, Death of the Liberal Class.  In his Truthdig essay, Chris Hedges emphasized how the liberal class “abandoned the human values that should have remained at the core of its activism”:

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of widespread public scorn, prefers the choreographed charade.  It will decry the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or call for universal health care, but continue to defend and support a Democratic Party that has no intention of disrupting the corporate machine.  As long as the charade is played, the liberal class can hold itself up as the conscience of the nation without having to act.  It can maintain its privileged economic status.  It can continue to live in an imaginary world where democratic reform and responsible government exist.  It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power.  But the uselessness and irrelevancy of the liberal class are not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the indignities of the corporate state.  And this is why liberals are rightly despised by the working class and the poor.

If it had not been obvious before the 2010 elections, it should be obvious now.  Back in July of 2010, I was busy harping about how the Obama administration had sabotaged the financial “reform” bill:

As I pointed out on July 12, Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute documented the extent to which Obama’s Treasury Department undermined the financial reform bill at every step.  On the following day, Rich Miller of Bloomberg News examined the results of a Bloomberg National Poll, which measured the public’s reaction to the financial reform bill.  Almost eighty percent of those who responded were of the opinion that the new bill would do little or nothing to prevent or mitigate another financial crisis.  Beyond that, 47 percent shared the view that the bill would do more to protect the financial industry than consumers.

Both healthcare and financial “reform” legislation turned out to be “bait and switch” scams used by the Obama administration against its own supporters.  After that double-double-cross, the liberal blogosphere was being told to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”.

In an earlier posting, I discussed the sordid efforts of the Democratic-controlled Senate to sabotage the financial reform bill:

The sleazy antics by the Democrats who undermined financial reform (while pretending to advance it) will not be forgotten by the voters.  The real question is whether any independent candidates can step up to oppose the tools of Wall Street, relying on the nickels and dimes from “the little people” to wage a battle against the kleptocracy.

Since the Occupy Wall Street demonstration has gained momentum, a number of commentators have analyzed the complicity of hypocritical Democrats in ceding more unregulated power to the very culprits responsible for causing the financial crisis.  The most important of these essays was an article written by Matt Stoller for Politico.  Stoller began the piece by debunking the myth that the cancer known as “financial deregulation” was introduced to the American system by the Reagan administration:

Like President Bill Clinton before him, Obama and his team believe in deregulation and are continuing a “let them eat cake”-style social contract that solidified during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  As this contract has fallen apart, so has the strong coalition behind Obama’s presidency.

We haven’t seen a challenge to the bank-friendly Democratic orthodoxy for 40 years.  The progenitor of this modern Democratic Party was Jimmy Carter. Though Reagan and Clinton helped finish the job, it was Carter who began wholesale deregulation of the banking industry – as Jeff Madrick details in his new book, “The Age of Greed.”

In signing the landmark Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, which lifted usury caps, Carter said, “Our banks and savings institutions are hampered by a wide range of outdated, unfair and unworkable regulations.”

Stoller provided some hope for disillusioned former supporters of the Democratic Party by focusing on three Democratic state attorneys general, who have been investigating possible fraud in the securitization of trillions of dollars of mortgages.  Matt Stoller referred to these officials – Eric Schneiderman of New York, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Beau Biden of Delaware – as the “Justice Democrats”.  As Stoller observed, a number of other officials have been influenced by the noble efforts of these Justice Democrats:

There are other politicians following this path.  Jefferson Smith, an Oregon state representative now running for mayor of Portland, successfully fought legislation to make foreclosures easier in that state.  Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen in North Carolina took on banking interests by fighting foreclosure fraud.  Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings has been dogged in his investigations of mortgage servicers.

It should not be surprising that these officials have been getting quite a bit of pushback from their fellow Democrats – including Delaware Governor Jack Markell as well as a number of high-ranking officials from the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless.

When the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, what little coverage it received from the mainstream media was based on the “giggle factor”.  With the passing of time, it becomes increasingly obvious that the news media and our venal political leaders are seriously underestimating the ability of the “little people” to fight back against the kleptocracy.


 

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Federal Reserve Bailout Records Provoke Limited Outrage

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On December 3, 2009 I wrote a piece entitled, “The Legacy of Mark Pittman”.  Mark Pittman was the reporter at Bloomberg News whose work was responsible for the lawsuit, brought under the Freedom of Information Act, against the Federal Reserve, seeking disclosure of the identities of those financial firms benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs.

The suit, Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York) resulted in a ruling in August of 2009 by Judge Loretta Preska, who rejected the Fed’s defense that disclosure would adversely affect the ability of those institutions (which sought loans at the Fed’s discount window) to compete for business.  The suit also sought disclosure of the amounts loaned to those institutions as well as the assets put up as collateral under the Fed’s eleven lending programs, created in response to the financial crisis.  The Federal Reserve appealed Judge Preska’s decision, taking the matter before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  The Fed’s appeal was based on Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act, which exempts trade secrets and confidential business information from mandatory disclosure.  The Second Circuit affirmed Judge Preska’s decision on the basis that the records sought were neither trade secrets nor confidential business information because Bloomberg requested only records generated by the Fed concerning loans that were actually made, rather than applications or confidential information provided by persons, firms or other organizations in attempt to obtain loans.  Although the Fed did not attempt to appeal the Second Circuit’s decision to the United States Supreme Court, a petition was filed with the Supreme Court by Clearing House Association LLC, a coalition of banks that received bailout funds.  The petition was denied by the Supreme Court on March 21.

Bob Ivry of Bloomberg News had this to say about the documents produced by the Fed as a result of the suit:

The 29,000 pages of documents, which the Fed released in pdf format on a CD-ROM, revealed that foreign banks accounted for at least 70 percent of the Fed’s lending at its October, 2008 peak of $110.7 billion.  Arab Banking Corp., a lender part- owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the window in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.

As government officials and news reporters continue to review the documents, a restrained degree of outrage is developing.  Ron Paul is the Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy.  He is also a longtime adversary of the Federal Reserve, and author of the book, End The Fed.  A recent report by Peter Barnes of FoxBusiness.com said this about Congressman Paul:

.   .   .   he plans to hold hearings in May on disclosures that the Fed made billions — perhaps trillions — in secret emergency loans to almost every major bank in the U.S. and overseas during the financial crisis.

*   *   *

“I am, even with all my cynicism, still shocked at the amount this is and of course shocked, but not completely surprised, [that] much [of] this money went to help foreign banks,” said Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX),   .   .   .  “I don’t have [any] plan [for] legislation …  It will take awhile to dissect that out, to find out exactly who benefitted and why.”

In light of the fact that Congressman Paul is considering another run for the Presidency, we can expect some exciting hearings starring Ben Bernanke.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont became an unlikely ally of Ron Paul in their battle to include an “Audit the Fed” provision in the financial reform bill.  Senator Sanders was among the many Americans who were stunned to learn that Arab Banking Corporation used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the Fed during the 18 months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  The infuriating factoid in this scenario is apparent in the following passage from the Bloomberg report by Bob Ivry and Donal Griffin:

The bank, then 29 percent-owned by the Libyan state, had aggregate borrowings in that period of $35 billion — while the largest single loan amount outstanding was $1.2 billion in July 2009, according to Fed data released yesterday.  In October 2008, when lending to financial institutions by the central bank’s so- called discount window peaked at $111 billion, Arab Banking took repeated loans totaling more than $2 billion.

Ivry and Griffin provided this reaction from Bernie Sanders:

“It is incomprehensible to me that while creditworthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was providing tens of billions of dollars in credit to a bank that is substantially owned by the Central Bank of Libya,” Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a letter to Fed and U.S. officials.

The best critique of the Fed’s bailout antics came from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi.  He began his report this way:

After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds.  And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size – a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

As Matt Taibbi began discussing what the documents produced by the Fed revealed, he shared this reaction from a staffer, tasked to review the records for Senator Sanders:

“Our jaws are literally dropping as we’re reading this,” says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  “Every one of these transactions is outrageous.”

In case you are wondering just how “outrageous” these transactions were, Mr. Taibbi provided an outrageously entertaining chronicle of a venture named “Waterfall TALF Opportunity”, whose principal investors were Christy Mack and Susan Karches.  Susan Karches is the widow of Peter Karches, former president of Morgan Stanley’s investment banking operations.  Christy Mack is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley.  Matt Taibbi described Christy Mack as “thin, blond and rich – a sort of still-awake Sunny von Bulow with hobbies”.  Here is how he described Waterfall TALF:

The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility.  But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called “giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all.”  If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along.  This is what welfare for the rich looks like.

The venture would have been more aptly-named, “TALF Exploitation Windfall Opportunity”.  Think about it:  the Mack-Karches entity was contrived for the specific purpose of cashing-in on a bailout program, which was ostensibly created for the purpose of preventing a consumer credit freeze.

I was anticipating that the documents withheld by the Federal Reserve were being suppressed because – if the public ever saw them – they would provoke an uncontrollable degree of public outrage.  So far, the amount of attention these revelations have received from the mainstream media has been surprisingly minimal.  When one compares the massive amounts squandered by the Fed on Crony Corporate Welfare Queens such as Christy Mack and Susan Karches ($220 million loaned at a fraction of a percentage point) along with the multibillion-dollar giveaways (e.g. $13 billion to Goldman Sachs by way of Maiden Lane III) the fighting over items in the 2012 budget seems trivial.

The Fed’s defense of its lending to foreign banks was explained on the New York Fed’s spiffy new Liberty Street blog:

Discount window lending to U.S. branches of foreign banks and dollar funding by branches to parent banks helped to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis in the United States and abroad by containing financial market disruptions, supporting loan availability for companies, and maintaining foreign investment flows into U.S. companies and assets.

Without the backstop liquidity provided by the discount window, foreign banks that faced large and fluctuating demand for dollar funding would have further driven up the level and volatility of money market interest rates, including the critical federal funds rate, the Eurodollar rate, and Libor (the London interbank offered rate).  Higher rates and volatility would have increased distress for U.S. financial firms and U.S. businesses that depend on money market funding.  These pressures would have been reflected in higher interest rates and reduced bank lending, bank credit lines, and commercial paper in the United States.  Moreover, further volatility in dollar funding markets could have disrupted the Federal Reserve’s ability to implement monetary policy, which requires stabilizing the federal funds rate at the policy target set by the Federal Open Market Committee.

In other words:  Failure by the Fed to provide loans to foreign banks would have made quantitative easing impossible.  There would have been no POMO auctions.  As a result, there would have been no supply of freshly printed-up money to be used by the proprietary trading desks of the primary dealers to ramp-up the stock market for those “late-day rallies”.  This process was described as the “POMO effect” in a 2009 paper by Precision Capital Management entitled, “A Grand Unified Theory of Market Manipulation”.

Thanks for the explanation, Mr. Dudley.


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No Justice For The Wicked

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Although the drumbeat continues, I remain skeptical as to whether any of the criminals responsible for causing the financial crisis will ever be brought to justice.  In the weeks before President Obama’s Inauguration, the foremost question on my mind was whether the new administration would take the necessary steps to change the culture of corruption on Wall Street:

As we approach the eve of the Obama Administration’s first day, across America the new President’s supporters have visions of “change we can believe in” dancing in their heads.  For some, this change means the long overdue realization of health care reform.  For those active in the Democratic campaigns of 2006, “change” means an end to the Iraq war.  Many Americans are hoping that the new administration will crack down on the unregulated activities on Wall Street that helped bring about the current economic crisis.

On December 15, Stephen Labaton wrote an article for the New York Times, examining the recent failures of the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the environment at the SEC that facilitates such breakdowns.

At that time, I also focused on the point made in a commentary by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, which appeared in the January 3 New York Times:

It’s not hard to see why the S.E.C. behaves as it does.  If you work for the enforcement division of the S.E.C. you probably know in the back of your mind, and in the front too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall Street you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it.

I concluded that piece with a rhetorical question:

Let’s hope our new President, the Congress and others pay serious attention to what Lewis and Einhorn have said.  Cleaning up Wall Street is going to be a dirty job.  Will those responsible for accomplishing this task be up to doing it?

By March 23, 2009, it had become obvious that our new President was more concerned about the “welfare” (pun intended) of the Wall Street banks than the well-being of the American economy.  I began my posting of that date with this statement:

We the people, who voted for Barack Obama, are about to get ripped off by our favorite Hope dealer.

On August 27 of that year, I wrote another piece expressing my disappointment with how things had (not) progressed.  My October 1, 2009 posting focused on the fact that H. David Kotz, Inspector General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, issued two reports, recommending 58 changes to improve the way the agency investigates and enforces violations of securities laws, as a result of the SEC’s failure to investigate the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.  The reports exposed a shocking degree of ineptitude at the SEC.

After the release of the report by bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas, pinpointing the causes of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I lamented the fact that the mainstream media hadn’t shown much concern about the matter, despite the terrible fraud exposed in the report.  Nevertheless, by the next day, I was able to highlight some great commentaries on the Valukas Report and I felt optimistic enough to conclude the piece with this thought:

We can only hope that a continued investigation into the Lehman scandal will result in a very bright light directed on those privileged plutocrats who consider themselves above the law.

If only  . . .

By the eve of the mid-term elections, I had an answer to the question I had posed on January 5, 2009 as to whether our new President and Congress would be up to the task of cleaning up Wall Street:

One common theme voiced by many critics of the Obama administration has been its lack of interest in prosecuting those responsible for causing the financial crisis.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless to initiate any criminal proceedings against such noteworthy individuals as Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo or Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers.  On October 23, Frank Rich of The New York Times mentioned both of those individuals while lamenting the administration’s failure to prosecute the “financial crimes that devastated the nation”:

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene.   It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance.
*   *   *
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not.

The special treatment afforded to the perpetrators of the frauds that helped create the financial crisis wasn’t the only gift to Wall Street from the Democratically-controlled White House, Senate and Congress.  The financial “reform” bill was so badly compromised (by the Administration and Senate Democrats, themselves) as it worked its way through the legislative process, that it is now commonly regarded as nothing more than a hoax.

By the close of 2010, I noted that an expanding number of commentators shared my outrage over the likelihood that we would never see any prosecutions result from the crimes that brought about the financial crisis:

A recent article written by former New York Mayor Ed Koch began with the grim observation that no criminal charges have been brought against any of the malefactors responsible for causing the financial crisis:

Looking back on 2010 and the Great Recession, I continue to be enraged by the lack of accountability for those who wrecked our economy and brought the U.S. to its knees.  The shocking truth is that those who did the damage are still in charge.  Many who ran Wall Street before and during the debacle are either still there making millions, if not billions, of dollars, or are in charge of our country’s economic policies which led to the debacle.

Most recently, Matt Taibbi has written another great article for Rolling Stone entitled, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”.  It’s nice to know that the drumbeat for justice continues.  Taibbi’s essay provided a great history of the crisis, with a particular emphasis on how whistleblowers were ignored, just as Harry Markopolos was ignored when (in May of 2000) he tried to alert the SEC to the fact that Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund was a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.  Here is a great passage from Matt Taibbi’s essay:

In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type.  Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion.  Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent.  In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would “demean the seriousness” of the offenses.

So there you have it.  Illegal immigrants:  393,000.  Lying moms:  one.  Bankers:  zero.  The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious.  You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players.  But for stealing a billion dollars?  For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure?  Pass.  It’s not a crime.  Prison is too harsh.  Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on.  Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry.  That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead.  But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year.  What’s next?  Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

Wouldn’t it be nice if public opinion meant more to the Obama administration than campaign contributions from Wall Street banksters?




Revenge Of The Blondes

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My vintage iPhone sputtered, stammered and finally stalled out as I tried to access an article about derivatives trading after clicking on the link.  The process got as far as the appearance of the URL, which indicated that the source was The New York Times.  I assumed that the piece had been written by Gretchen Morgenson and that I could read it once I sat down at my regular computer.  Within moments, I was at The Big Picture website, where I found another link to the same article.  This time it worked and I found that the piece had been written by Louise Story.  “Wrong blonde”, I thought to myself.  It was at that point when I realized how much the world had changed from the days when “dumb blonde” jokes had been so popular.  In fact, a vast amount of the skullduggery that caused and resulted from the financial crisis has been exposed and explained by women with blonde hair.  After a handful of unscrupulous Wall Street bankers brought the world’s financial system to the brink of collapse, an even smaller number of blonde, female sleuths set about unwinding this complex web of deceit for “the Average Joe” to understand.  Here are a few of them:

Yves Smith

All right  .  .  .   It’s an old picture from her days at Goldman Sachs.  Cue-up Duran Duran.  (It’s almost as old as the photo of Ben Bernanke in my fake Chandon ad, based on their  “Life needs bubbles” theme.)  On most days, the first blog I access is Naked Capitalism.  Its publisher and most frequent contributor is Yves Smith (a/k/a Susan Webber).  At the Seeking Alpha website, a review of her recent book, ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism, began this way:

ECONNED is the most deeply researched and empirically validated account of the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 and how its unaddressed causes predict similar crises to come.  As a long-time Wall Street veteran, Yves Smith, through her influential blog “Naked Capitalism” lucidly explains to her over 2500,000 unique visitors each month exactly what games market players use and how their “innovations” evolved over the years to take the rest of us to the cleaners.  Smith is that unusual combination of scholar, expert, participant and teacher, who writes with a clarifying sense of moral outrage and disgust at the decline of ethics on Wall Street and financial markets.

Smith’s daily list of Links at Naked Capitalism, covers a broad range of newsworthy subjects both within and beyond the financial realm.  I usually find myself reading all of the articles linked on that page.

Gretchen Morgenson

Gretchen Morgenson is my favorite reporter for The New York Times.  She has proven herself to be Treasury Secretary Turbo Tim Geithner’s worst nightmare.  Ms. Morgenson has caused Geithner so much agony, I would not be surprised to hear that he named his recent kidney stone after her.  With Jo Becker, Ms. Morgenson wrote the most revealing essay on Geithner back in April of 2009.  Once you’ve read it, you will have a better understanding of why Geithner gave away so many billions to the banksters as president of the New York Fed by way of Maiden Lane III.  Morgenson subsequently wrote her own article on Maiden Lane III here.

Ms. Morgenson has many detractors.  Most prominent among them was the late Tanta (a/k/a Doris Dungey) of the Calculated Risk blog, who wrote the recurring “Morgenson Watch” for that site.  Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism (see above) accurately summed up the bulk of the criticism directed against Gretchen Morgenson:

Gretchen Morgenson is often a target of heated criticism on the blogosphere, which I have argued more than once is overdone.  While her articles on executive compensation and securities litigation are consistently well reported, she has an appetite for the wilder side of finance, and often looks a bit out of her depth.  Typically, she simply runs afoul of finance pedants, who jump on misapplication of industry jargon or minor errors when those (admittedly disconcerting) errors fail to derail the thrust of the argument.

A noted example of this was Morgenson’s article of March 6 2010, in which she explained that Greece was hiding its financial obligations with “credit default swaps” rather than currency swaps.  The bloggers who vigilantly watch for her to make such a mistake wouldn’t let go of that one for quite a while.  Nevertheless, I like her work.  Nobody is perfect.

Louise Story

As I mentioned at the outset of this piece, Louise Story wrote the recent article for The New York Times, concerning anticompetitive practices in the credit derivatives clearing, trading and information services industries.  Discussing that subject in a manner that can make it understandable to the “average reader” (someone with a high school education) is no easy task.  Beyond that, Ms. Story was able to explain the frustrations of regulators, who had hoped that some degree of transparency could be introduced to the derivatives market as a result of the recently enacted, “Dodd-Frank” financial reform bill.  It’s an important article, which has drawn a good deal of well-deserved attention.

Last year, Ms. Story co-authored a New York Times article with Gretchen Morgenson, concerning collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) entitled, “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won”.  As I pointed out at the time:  Pay close attention to the explanation of how Tim Geithner retained a “special counselor” whose previous responsibilities included oversight of the parent company of an investment firm named Tricadia, Inc.  Tricadia has the dubious honor of having helped cause the financial crisis by creating CDOs and then betting against them.

These three women, as well as a number of their non-blonde counterparts (including:  Nomi Prins, Janet Tavakoli and Naomi Klein) have exposed a vast amount of the odious activities that caused the financial crisis.  They have helped inform and educate the public on what the “good old boys” network of bankers, regulators and lobbyists have been doing to this country.  The paradigm shift that took us beyond the sexist stereotype of the  “dumb blonde” has brought our society to the point where women – often blonde ones – have intervened to alert the rest of us to the hazards caused by what Paul Farrell of MarketWatch described as “Wall Street’s macho ego trip”.

If you should come across someone who still tells “dumb blonde” jokes – ask that person if he (or she) has read ECONned.


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Libertarian Accuses Socialist Of Selling Out

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Quite a bit has been written about the Federal Reserve’s December 1 release of documents revealing the details of its bailouts to those business entities benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs initiated as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.  When you consider the fact that those documents concern over 21,000 transactions, all the attention should come as no surprise.

The two individuals who seem to have benefited the most from this event are Congressman Ron Paul and Senator Bernie Sanders.  The two became unlikely allies in their battle to include an “Audit the Fed” provision in the financial reform bill.  Ron Paul, the Libertarian Republican from Texas (considered the “Godfather of the Tea Party movement”) authored the book, End The Fed.  Congressman Paul sponsored the original “Audit the Fed” proposal in the House of Representatives – H.R. 1207.  Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, sponsored the watered-down “Audit the Fed” bill — S. 3217 — which replaced Congressman Paul’s version in what finally became known as the Restoring Financial Stability Act of 2010.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal by Maya Jackson Randall recalled the backstory of how the Sanders proposal was incorporated into the financial reform bill:

Under pressure from the Obama administration, Mr. Sanders, who has described himself as a democratic socialist, made last-minute changes to his proposal; it doesn’t require audits of monetary policy, and it doesn’t require disclosure of the names of banks that use the discount window.

An unhappy Paul, a long-time Fed critic, said Mr. Sanders had “sold out.”

Who would have ever thought that a Libertarian Republican would, one day, accuse a democratic socialist of “selling out” on a bill to regulate the financial industry?

With the Republicans’ becoming the majority party in the House, the numerous committee chairmanships will now pass from the Democrats to the GOP for the 112th Congress.  Although quite a bit of concern has been expressed by liberal pundits that the banking lobby will now have unfettered control over Congress, many banking industry lobbyists are sweating over the fact that Ron Paul will be the likely Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.  That fear and the efforts by ranking Republicans to assuage that dread were discussed in a recent article by Phil Mattingly and Robert Schmidt for Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.  If Boehner, who will help determine who gets to chair subcommittees as early as Dec. 8, rejects Paul, he may have to contend with thousands of grassroots supporters and dozens of younger lawmakers who see Paul as a hero.  Boehner, through a spokesman, declined to comment.  “A lot of the older members probably think Ron is a little bit out of step,” says Representative Bill Posey, a Florida Republican and unabashed Paul fan.  “The depth of his knowledge on monetary policy, his understanding of it all, is second to none.”

Nevertheless, Ron Paul accused a socialist of  “selling out” by capitulating to the pressure exerted by the banking lobby through its puppet – the Obama administration.  His use of such a reproach demonstrates that Congressman Paul cannot be trusted to make certain that the House Financial Services Committee serves as a tool of the banking lobby.  Beyond that, the extreme, partisan elements of the Republican Party cannot depend on Congressman Paul to “follow the script” written to portray Obama as the socialist.

As the Bloomberg BusinessWeek article pointed out, any efforts to deprive Congressman Paul of this chairmanship will guarantee some serious blowback from the Tea Party ranks as well as the other supporters of Ron Paul.  John Boehner is in a serious double-bind here.  If he allows Paul to assume the chairmanship, Boehner’s anticipated efforts to keep Paul “on a tight leash” should provide some good entertainment.


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Senator Kaufman Will Be Missed

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Ted Kaufman filled Joe Biden’s seat representing the state of Delaware in the United States Senate on January 15, 2009, when Biden resigned to serve as Vice-President.  Kaufman’s 22-month term as Senator concluded on November 15, when Chris Coons was sworn in after defeating Christine O’Donnell in the 2010 election.

Senator Kaufman served as Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel – the entity created to monitor TARP on behalf of Congress.  The panel’s November Oversight Report was released at the COP website with an embedded, five-minute video of Senator Kaufman’s introduction to the Report.  At the DelawareOnline website, Nicole Gaudiano began her article about Kaufman’s term by pointing out that C-SPAN ranked Kaufman as the 10th-highest among Senators for the number of days (126) when he spoke on the Senate floor during the current Congressional session.  Senator Kaufman was a high-profile advocate of financial reform, who devoted a good deal of effort toward investigating the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.

On November 9, Senator Kaufman was interviewed by NPR’s Robert Siegel, who immediately focused on the fact that aside from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil suit against Goldman Sachs and the small fine levied against Goldman by FINRA, we have yet to see any criminal prosecutions arising from the fraud and other violations of federal law which caused the financial crisis.  Kaufman responded by asserting his belief that those prosecutions will eventually proceed, although “it takes a while” to investigate and prepare these very complex cases:

When you commit fraud on Wall Street or endanger it, you have good attorneys around you to kind of clean up after you.  So they clean up as they go.  And then when you actually go to trial, these are very, very, very complex cases.  But I still think we will have some good cases.  And I also think that if isn’t a deterrent, they will continue to do that.  And I think we have the people in place now at the Securities Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to hold them accountable.

We can only hope so   .  .  .

Back on March 17, I discussed a number of reactions to the recently-released Valukas Report on the demise of Lehman Brothers, which exposed the complete lack of oversight by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — the entity with investigators in place inside of Lehman Brothers after the collapse of Bear Stearns.  The FRBNY had the perfect vantage point to conduct effective oversight of Lehman.  Not only did the FRBNY fail to do so — it actually helped Lehman maintain a false image of being financially solvent.  It is important to keep in mind that Lehman CEO Richard Fuld was a class B director of the FRBNY during this period.  Senator Kaufman’s reaction to the Valukas Report resulted in his widely-quoted March 15 speech from the Senate floor, in which he emphasized that the government needs to return the rule of law to Wall Street:

We all understood that to restore the public’s faith in our financial markets and the rule of law, we must identify, prosecute, and send to prison the participants in those markets who broke the law.  Their fraudulent conduct has severely damaged our economy, caused devastating and sustained harm to countless hard-working Americans, and contributed to the widespread view that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street.

*   *   *

Many have said we should not seek to “punish” anyone, as all of Wall Street was in a delirium of profit-making and almost no one foresaw the sub-prime crisis caused by the dramatic decline in housing values.  But this is not about retribution.  This is about addressing the continuum of behavior that took place — some of it fraudulent and illegal — and in the process addressing what Wall Street and the legal and regulatory system underlying its behavior have become.

As part of that effort, we must ensure that the legal system tackles financial crimes with the same gravity as other crimes.

The nagging suspicion that those nefarious activities at Lehman Brothers could be taking place “at other banks as well” became a key point in Senator Kaufman’s speech:

Mr. President, I’m concerned that the revelations about Lehman Brothers are just the tip of the iceberg.  We have no reason to believe that the conduct detailed last week is somehow isolated or unique.  Indeed, this sort of behavior is hardly novel.  Enron engaged in similar deceit with some of its assets.  And while we don’t have the benefit of an examiner’s report for other firms with a business model like Lehman’s, law enforcement authorities should be well on their way in conducting investigations of whether others used similar “accounting gimmicks” to hide dangerous risk from investors and the public.

Within a few months after that speech by Senator Kaufman, a weak financial reform bill was enacted to appease (or more importantly:  deceive) the outraged taxpayers.  Despite that legislative sham, polling results documented the increased public skepticism about the government’s ability or willingness to do right by the American public.

On October 20, Sam Gustin interviewed economist Joseph Stiglitz for the DailyFinance website.  Their discussion focused on the recent legislative attempt to address the causes of the financial crisis.  Professor Stiglitz emphasized the legal system’s inability to control that type of  sleazy behavior:

The corporations have the right to give campaign contributions.  So basically we have a system in which the corporate executives, the CEOs, are trying to make sure the legal system works not for the companies, not for the shareholders, not for the bondholders – but for themselves.

So it’s like theft, if you want to think about it that way.  These corporations are basically now working now for the CEOs and the executives and not for any of the other stakeholders in the corporation, let alone for our broader society.

You look at who won with the excessive risk-taking and shortsighted behavior of the banks.  It wasn’t the shareholder or the bondholders.  It certainly wasn’t American taxpayers.  It wasn’t American workers.  It wasn’t American homeowners.  It was the CEOs, the executives.

*   *   *

Economists focus on the whole notion of incentives.  People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat.  If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.

And that’s why, for instance, in our antitrust law, we often don’t catch people when they behave badly, but when we do we say there are treble damages. You pay three times the amount of the damage that you do.  That’s a strong deterrent.

For now, there are no such deterrents for those CEOs who nearly collapsed the American economy and destroyed 15 million jobs.  Robert Scheer recently provided us with an update about what life is now like for Sandy Weill, the former CEO of Citigroup.  Scheer’s essay – entitled “The Man Who Shattered Our Economy” revealed that Weill just purchased a vineyard estate in Sonoma, California for a record $31 million.  That number should serve as a guidepost when considering the proposition expressed by Professor Stiglitz:

If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.

What are the chances of that happening?


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Maria Cantwell For President

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I was going to hold off on this and give President Obama the benefit of a doubt – at least for a few months.  Nevertheless, after reading the magnificent piece by Barry Ritholtz, entitled:  “The Tragedy of the Obama Administration”, I decided that it was time to start discussing leadership alternatives for the next Presidential term.

On October 30, the Associated Press published the results of a poll it conducted with Knowledge Networks.  Forty-seven percent of the Democrats surveyed expressed the opinion that Obama should be challenged for the 2012 Democratic Presidential nomination.  In the wake of the mid-term election massacre, I expect that more Democrats will be anxious to find a new standard-bearer for their party in 2012.  The AP article concerning the AP-KN poll, mentioned the theory that the public’s opinion of Obama could change if the economy improves.  Unfortunately, most American consumers will not observe any significant improvement in the economy during the next two years.  There is a greater likelihood that the Chicago Cubs will win next year’s World Series.

We currently find ourselves bombarded with a wide spectrum of opinions, which purport to explain what the results of the 2010 elections really mean.  The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this event is that the voters resent being taken for chumps.  Obama’s supporters were promised change they could believe in by a President and a party that sold its soul to the Wall Street megabanks at the cost of America’s future economic health.  When he had the opportunity to do so in early 2009, Obama refused to put those too-big-to-fail, zombie banks through temporary receivership.  As a result, we are now approaching a situation which – according to financial risk management expert Chris Whalen – will necessitate another round of bank bailouts.  When President Obama had the opportunity and the public support (not to mention Democratic control over both houses of Congress) to enact an adequate stimulus program to save the economy from a decade(s) – long, Japanese-style recession, he refused to so.  If an extra $600 billion had been added to the $787 billion in 2009 (as part of a better-thought-out, infrastructure-based stimulus program) we would be experiencing significant economic growth and a recovering job market right now.  Australia keeps reminding us of this.  (Oops!  Australia just did it again!)  Instead, America finds itself in a situation wherein the Fed is now appropriating that $600 billion toward another round of quantitative easing, which will serve no other purpose than to push investors into the stock market.  According to economist Andy Xie, those stock investors will have an unpleasant experience when Chairman Bernanke’s latest asset bubble pops in 2012.

While many Senate Democrats (along with operatives from the Treasury Department) were busy removing all of the teeth from the financial reform bill, Maria Cantwell was fighting those efforts as one of the few advocates for the American taxpayers.  Back on May 19, Arthur Delaney and Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post described how Senator Cantwell stood up to the efforts of Harry Reid to use cloture to push the financial reform bill to a vote before any further amendments could have been added to strengthen the bill.  Notice how “the usual suspects” – Reid, Chuck Schumer and “Countrywide Chris” Dodd tried to close in on Cantwell and force her capitulation to the will of the kleptocracy:

There were some unusually Johnsonian moments of wrangling on the floor during the nearly hour-long vote.  Reid pressed his case hard on Snowe, the lone holdout vote present, with Bob Corker and Mitch McConnell at her side.  After finding Brown, he put his arm around him and shook his head, then found Cantwell seated alone at the opposite end of the floor.  He and New York’s Chuck Schumer encircled her, Reid leaning over her with his right arm on the back of her chair and Schumer leaning in with his left hand on her desk.  Cantwell stared straight ahead, not looking at the men even as she spoke.  Schumer called in Chris Dodd, who was unable to sway her.  Feingold hadn’t stuck around.  Cantwell, according to a spokesman, wanted a guarantee on an amendment that would fix a gaping hole in the derivatives section of the bill, which requires the trades to be cleared, but applies no penalty to trades that aren’t, making Blanche Lincoln’s reform package little better than a list of suggestions.

*   *   *

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to cut off good consumer amendments because of cloture,” said Cantwell on Tuesday night.

Senator Cantwell has proven herself worthy of our trust.  Her nomination as the 2012 Democratic Presidential candidate will revive the excitement and voter enthusiasm witnessed during the 2008 campaign.  On the other hand, if President Obama decides to seek a second term and wins the nomination, we will likely find a greater enthusiasm gap than the example of November 2.  As a result, by January of 2013 we could have a new administration in the White House, espousing what economist Nouriel Roubini describes as “the economic equivalent of creationism”.

Here’s to a bright future!


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Bad Report Card Haunts Democrats At Mid-Terms

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It doesn’t take much time or effort to find out how or why the Democrats have alienated so many independent voters (and so much of their own base) during the 2010 election cycle.  You don’t need to look to the Fox News or Andrew Breitbart for an explanation.   Reading through the opinion pages of The New York Times should provide you with a good understanding of what the Democrats have been doing wrong.

One common theme voiced by many critics of the Obama administration has been its lack of interest in prosecuting those responsible for causing the financial crisis.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless to initiate any criminal proceedings against such noteworthy individuals as Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo or Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers.  On October 23, Frank Rich of The New York Times mentioned both of those individuals while lamenting the administration’s failure to prosecute the “financial crimes that devastated the nation”:

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene.   It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance.
*   *   *
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not.

The special treatment afforded to the perpetrators of the frauds that helped create the financial crisis wasn’t the only gift to Wall Street from the Democratically-controlled White House, Senate and Congress.  The financial “reform” bill was so badly compromised (by the Administration and Senate Democrats, themselves) as it worked its way through the legislative process, that it is now commonly regarded as nothing more than a hoax.  Frank Rich finds it ironic that the voters are about to return power to “those who greased the skids” to facilitate the financial catastrophe:

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose.  But the Obama White House is hardly innocent.  Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

David Weidner of MarketWatch recently discussed the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to bring the Wall Street culprits to justice.  After acknowledging the often-used pushback argument made by those opposed to such a prosecutorial effort — that those cases are impossibly difficult to advance through the legal system — Weidner made this observation:

These cases may be difficult, but they’re not impossible.  And given the creation of a lawless marketplace where one economy-destroying decision can be made on top of another for short-term personal gains, something has to be done.

But nothing’s happening.  Maybe it’s because of the money Wall Street lavishes on Congress.  Perhaps it’s the close ties between the industry and the administration.   It could be, as Nouriel Roubini said in the new documentary “Inside Job,” investigators are “afraid” of what they will find.

A special prosecutor, in a bid to make a name for himself or herself, might be immune to such pressure.   It’s our best hope for outing the scoundrels and creating an industry where greed finally takes a backseat to the law.

Back at The New York Times, Charles Blow brought our attention to the recent rant by Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless, who – despite his uselessness in the aftermath of the financial Ponzi-crisis – stands at the ready to prosecute marijuana smokers in the event that Proposition 19 becomes law in The Golden State.  One would think that the Obama administration might prefer that a large bloc of voters should remain stoned for as long as possible, so as to prevent those citizens from realizing what a lousy job their President is doing for them.  Worse yet, Charles Blow explained how the Democrats have been advancing the Clinton-era Byrne Formula Grant Program, as a vehicle for financing a war on pot smokers, over the objections of former President George W. Bush and conservative groups, who emphasized that the program “has proved to be an ineffective and inefficient use of resources.”  Nevertheless, the Democrats were able to direct two billion dollars from the financial stimulus program to the so-called Byrne Grants.  Remember: that’s two billion dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – which was supposed to put people back to work and save the economy – misappropriated to the effort of putting pot smokers in jail.  I guess that the Obama Justice Department has to look like it’s doing something.

Another issue that has not escaped the public’s radar – despite the efforts of the Obama administration – is the never-ending catastrophe in the Gulf of Corexit, caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout.  Washington’s Blog recently featured an important posting, with links to several articles about this environmental disaster, which the administration wants you to forget about (at least until after the election).  The BP-sponsored, mainstream media seem more than happy with the claim of  “mission accomplished” voiced by Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft (the man in charge of the federal response) and his top science adviser, Steve Lehmann.   A review of any one of the articles linked at the Washington’s Blog posting will scare the hell out of you — just in time for Halloween (and Election Day).  Nevertheless the people who will get the worst haunting of Halloween 2010 will be the Democrats.  Unfortunately for us, most of them deserve it.


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A Shocking Decision

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September 23, 2010

Nobody seems too surprised about the resignation of Larry Summers from his position as Director of the National Economic Council.  Although each commentator seems to have a unique theory for Summers’ departure, the event is unanimously described as “expected”.

When Peter Orszag resigned from his post as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the gossip mill focused on his rather complicated love life.  According to The New York Post, the nerdy-looking number cruncher announced his engagement to Bianna Golodryga of ABC News just six weeks after his ex-girlfriend, shipping heiress Claire Milonas, gave birth to their love child, Tatiana.  That news was so surprising, few publications could resist having some fun with it.  Politics Daily ran a story entitled, “Peter Orszag:  Good with Budgets, Good with Babes”.  Mark Leibovich of The New York Times pointed out that the event “gave birth” to a fan blog called Orszagasm.com.  Mr. Leibovich posed a rhetorical question at the end of the piece that was apparently answered with Orszag’s resignation:

This goes to another obvious — and recurring — question:  whether someone whose personal life has become so complicated is really fit to tackle one of the most demanding, important and stressful jobs in the universe. “Frankly I don’t see how Orszag can balance three families and the national budget,” wrote Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post.

The shocking nature of the Orszag love triangle was dwarfed by President Obama’s nomination of Orszag’s replacement:  Jacob “Jack” Lew.  Lew is a retread from the Clinton administration, at which point (May 1998 – January 2001) he held that same position:  OMB Director.  That crucial time frame brought us two important laws that deregulated the financial industry:  the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which legalized proprietary trading by the Wall Street banks) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which completely deregulated derivatives trading, eventually giving rise to such “financial weapons of mass destruction” as naked credit default swaps.  Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that Lew does not believe that deregulation of the financial industry was a proximate cause of  the 2008 financial crisis.  Lew’s testimony at his September 16 confirmation hearing before the Senate Budget Committee was discussed by Shahien Nasiripour  of The Huffington Post:

Lew, a former OMB chief for President Bill Clinton, told the panel that “the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation,” and after discussing those issues, added that he didn’t “personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause.”

Experts and policymakers, including U.S. Senators, commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission, top leaders in Congress, former financial regulators and even Obama himself have pointed to the deregulatory zeal of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as a major cause of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

During 2009, Lew was working for Citigroup, a TARP beneficiary.  Between the TARP bailout and the Federal Reserve’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities from that zombie bank, Citi was able to give Mr. Lew a fat bonus of $950,000 – in addition to the other millions he made there from 2006 until January of 2009 (at which point Hillary Clinton found a place for him in her State Department).

The sabotage capabilities Lew will enjoy as OMB Director become apparent when revisiting my June 28 piece, “Financial Reform Bill Exposed As Hoax”:

Another victory for the lobbyists came in their sabotage of the prohibition on proprietary trading (when banks trade with their own money, for their own benefit).  The bill provides that federal financial regulators shall study the measure, then issue rules implementing it, based on the results of that study.  The rules might ultimately ban proprietary trading or they may allow for what Jim Jubak of MSN calls the “de minimus” (trading with minimal amounts) exemption to the ban.  Jubak considers the use of the de minimus exemption to the so-called ban as the likely outcome.  Many commentators failed to realize how the lobbyists worked their magic here, reporting that the prop trading ban (referred to as the “Volcker rule”) survived reconciliation intact.  Jim Jubak exposed the strategy employed by the lobbyists:

But lobbying Congress is only part of the game.  Congress writes the laws, but it leaves it up to regulators to write the rules.  In a mid-June review of the text of the financial-reform legislation, the Chamber of Commerce counted 399 rule-makings and 47 studies required by lawmakers.

Each one of these, like the proposed de minimus exemption of the Volcker rule, would be settled by regulators operating by and large out of the public eye and with minimal public input.  But the financial-industry lobbyists who once worked at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. know how to put in a word with those writing the rules.  Need help understanding a complex issue?  A regulator has the name of a former colleague now working as a lobbyist in an e-mail address book.  Want to share an industry point of view with a rule-maker?  Odds are a lobbyist knows whom to call to get a few minutes of face time.

You have one guess as to what agency will be authorized to make sure those new rules comport with the intent of the financial “reform” bill   .   .   .   Yep:  the OMB (see OIRA).

President Obama’s nomination of Jacob Lew is just the latest example of a decision-making process that seems incomprehensible to his former supporters as well as his critics.  Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism refuses to let Obama’s antics go unnoticed:

The Obama Administration, again and again, has taken the side of the financial services industry, with the occasional sops to unhappy taxpayers and some infrequent scolding of the industry to improve the optics.

Ms. Smith has developed some keen insight about the leadership style of our President:

The last thing Obama, who has been astonishingly accommodating to corporate interests, needs to do is signal weakness.  But he has made the cardinal mistake of trying to please everyone and has succeeded in having no one happy with his policies.  Past Presidents whose policies rankled special interests, such as Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan, were tenacious and not ruffled by noise.  Obama, by contrast, announces bold-sounding initiatives, and any real change will break eggs and alienate some parties, then retreats.  So he creates opponents, yet fails to deliver for his allies.

Yes, the Disappointer-In-Chief has failed to deliver for his allies once again – reinforcing my belief that he has no intention of running for a second term.




Disappointer-In-Chief Keeps On Disappointing

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September 20, 2010

Many prognosticators have voiced their expectations that disappointment in the Obama Presidency will destroy the campaigns of Democratic candidates in the 2010 elections.  The rationale is that disappointed former supporters of Obama will be feeling too apathetic to vote in November, while the energized supporters of Tea Party candidates will turn out in huge numbers.  Beyond that, many pundits believe that Obama is actually having a “radioactive” effect on those campaigns where he intercedes.  Discussions of this subject eventually result in speculation that President Obama will not seek a second term.  After all …  he couldn’t possibly intend on running for re-election after what he has done to his supporters.  Consider the way Mr. Obama speaks about his supporters and there are only two explanations.  The first explanation is based on the theory that Obama is arrogant and unconcerned – taking his constituency for granted.  The second theory is that he is unconcerned about what his supporters think of his performance because he has no intention of seeking a second term.

President Obama recently spoke at a $30,000-per-plate fundraising event for the Democratic National Committee at the home of Richard and Ellen Richman.  (Think about that name for a second:  Rich Richman.)  Mr. Richman lives up to his surname and resides in the impressive Conyers Farm development in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Christopher Keating of the Capitolwatch blog at courant.com provided us with the President’s remarks, addressed to the well-heeled attendees:

.   .   .   Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get — to see the glass as half empty.   (Laughter.)  If we get an historic health care bill passed — oh, well, the public option wasn’t there.  If you get the financial reform bill passed — then, well, I don’t know about this particularly derivatives rule, I’m not sure that I’m satisfied with that.  And gosh, we haven’t yet brought about world peace and — (laughter.)  I thought that was going to happen quicker.  (Laughter.) You know who you are.  (Laughter.)

The tactlessness of those remarks was not lost on Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.  Mr. Greenwald transcended the perspective of an offended liberal to question what could possibly have been going on in the mind of the speaker:

What’s most striking about Obama’s comments is that there is no acceptance whatsoever of responsibility (I’ve failed in some critical areas; we could have/should have done better).  There’s not even any base-motivating vow to fight to fix these particular failures (we’ll keep fighting for a public option/to curb executive power abuses/to reduce lobbyist and corporate control of our political process).  Instead, he wants you to know that if you criticize him — or even question what he’s done (“well, I don’t know about this particular derivatives rule, I’m not sure that I’m satisfied with that”) – it’s your fault:  for being some sort of naive, fringe-leftist idiot who thought he would eliminate the Pentagon and bring about world peace in 18 months, and/or because you simply don’t sufficiently appreciate everything he’s done for you because you’re congenitally dissatisfied.

*    *    *

Sitting at a $30,000 per plate fundraising dinner and mocking liberal critics as irrational ingrates while wealthy Party donors laugh probably does wonders for bruised presidential egos, but it doesn’t seem to be a particularly effective way to motivate those who are so unmotivated.  Then again, Barack Obama isn’t actually up for election in November, so perhaps the former goal is more important to him than the latter.  It certainly seems that way from these comments.

Of course, liberals weren’t the only Obama supporters who felt betrayed by the President’s abandonment of his campaign promises.  In fact, Obama owed his 2008 victory to those independent voters who drank the “Hope and Change” Kool-Aid.

Glenn Greenwald devoted some space from his Salon piece to illustrate how President Obama seems to be continuing the agenda of President Bush.  I was reminded of the quote from former Attorney General John Ashcroft in an article written by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker.  When discussing how he expected the Obama Presidency would differ from the Presidency of his former boss, George W. Bush, Ashcroft said:

“How will he be different?  The main difference is going to be that he spells his name ‘O-b-a-m-a,’ not ‘B-u-s-h.’ ”

One important difference that Ashcroft failed to anticipate was that Bush knew better than to disparage his own base.  The likely reason for this distinction could have been Bush’s intention to run for a second term.



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