Throughout the past ten years, Democratic politicians have increasingly relied on the term “centrism” as a euphemism for “corporatism”. As centrism has been replaced by adherence to corporatism, it has become difficult to identify any politician who advocates centrist views. Republican politicians are too afraid of offending their party’s “base”, whose opinions are shaped by the Trump/Fox News axis. By now, nearly all Democrats who identify as centrists are actually corporatists.
During the current campaign cycle, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and most mainstream news outlets have advanced the cause of promoting a “centrist” presidential candidate as the best route for defeating Donald Trump in 2020. The chant, “Vote Blue no matter who” seems to mean “Shut up and vote for the corporatist, designated as your candidate by the DNC”.
In a recent interview, Michael Moore explained that the majority of Americans agree with the progressive Democrats who support “Medicare for all”, increased measures to limit climate change, increasing the minimum wage and reducing this nation’s absurd incarceration levels. Moore emphasized that a significant majority of the American people hold views to the left of what mainstream news outlets define as “the center”.
Moore’s point is now reverberating through news reports, which acknowledge voters’ increasing support for Bernie Sanders. On December 26, The New York Times ran a piece by Sydney Ember entitled, “Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat”. At Newsweek, an article by James Crowley offered the following perspective about the Sanders campaign from President Obama’s senior advisor, Dan Pfeiffer:
“He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of winning Nevada,” said Pfeiffer, noting that these early odds improved Sanders’ chances going forward. “He could build a real head of steam heading into South Carolina and Super Tuesday,” …
Although the DNC and CNN have pushed hard to promote the candidacy of Joe Biden (Hillary 2.0) Biden’s popularity waned as he began to prove himself worthy of Kim Jong-un’s now-famous label, “dotard”. At that point, former Republican Mike Bloomberg jumped into the race, offering Democratic voters a billionaire alternative to progressivists, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Mainstream news outlets began to express excitement about the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg (Hillary 2.1) who could carry the corporatist banner. However, as political commentators demanded that Buttigieg identify the corporations for whom he did work as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, Buttigieg’s polling numbers became stalled in the single digits. When the Ukrainegate scandal began to dominate the news, Biden’s popularity experienced a rebound. Nevertheless, many commenters remained doubtful that Biden could maintain his leading position long enough to secure the Democratic nomination. As a result, several news sources attempted to boost support for the charisma-deficient corporatist, Amy Klobuchar (Hillary 2.2).
At this point, it is clear that the political center – which formerly embraced a balance of liberal and conservative views – has become irrelevant to the 2020 presidential campaign. Centrism died with the rise of Trumpism and the Democrats’ insatiable quest for money from deep-pocketed corporate activists. Worse yet, a May 23, 2018, opinion piece by David Adler for The New York Times revealed that only 42 percent of people identifying as “centrists” considered Democracy as a very good political system. Adler’s analysis of polling data revealed that in the United States, fewer than half of people in the political center viewed elections as essential. Adler reached this disturbing conclusion:
“As Western democracies descend into dysfunction, no group is immune to the allure of authoritarianism — least of all centrists, who seem to prefer strong and efficient government over messy democratic politics.”
Regardless
of the accuracy of David Adler’s analysis, America’s current appetite for “centrism”
is restricted to those policies most beneficial for advancing a corporatist
agenda.
Comments Off on Wall Streeters Who Support The Occupy Movement
Forget about what you have been hearing from those idiotic, mainstream blovaitors – who rose to prominence solely because of corporate politics. Those bigmouths want you to believe that the Occupy Wall Street movement is anti-capitalist. Nevertheless, the dogma spouted by those dunder-headed pundits is contradicted by the reality that there are quite a number of prominent individuals who voice support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the fact that they are professionally employed in the investment business. I will provide you with some examples.
On October 31, I discussed the propaganda war waged against the Occupy Wall Street movement, concluding the piece with my expectation that Jeremy Grantham’s upcoming third quarter newsletter would provide some sorely-needed, astute commentary on the situation. Jeremy Grantham, rated by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the Fifty Most Influential Money Managers, finally released an abbreviated edition of that newsletter one month later than usual, due to a busy schedule. In addition to expressing some supportive comments about the OWS movement, Grantham noted that he will be providing a special supplement, based specifically on that subject:
Meriting a separate, special point are the drastic declines in both U.S. income equality – the U.S. has become quite quickly one of the least equal societies – and in the stickiness of economic position from one generation to another. We have gone from having been notably upwardly mobile during the Eisenhower era to having fallen behind other developed countries today, even the U.K.! The net result of these factors is a growing feeling of social injustice, a weakening of social cohesiveness, and, possibly, a decrease in work ethic. A healthy growth rate becomes more difficult.
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Sitting on planes over the last several weeks with nothing to do but read and think, I found myself worrying increasingly about the 1% and the 99% and the appearance we give of having become a plutocracy, and a rather mean-spirited one at that. And, one backed by a similarly mean-spirited majority on the Supreme Court. (I will try to post a letter addressed to the “Occupy … Everywhere” folks shortly.)
Hedge fund manager Barry Ritholtz is the author of Bailout Nation and the publisher of one of the most widely-read financial blogs, The Big Picture. Among the many pro-OWS postings which have appeared on that site was this recent piece, offering the movement advice similar to what can be expected from Jeremy Grantham:
To become as focused and influential as the Tea Party, what Occupy Wall Street needs a simple set of goals. Not a top 10 list — that’s too unwieldy, and too unfocused. Instead, a simple 3 part agenda, that responds to some very basic problems regardless of political party. It must address the key issues, have a specific legislative agenda, and finally, effect lasting change. By keeping it focused on the foibles of Wall Street, and on issues that actually matter, it can become a rallying cry for an angry nation.
I suggest the following three as achievable goals that will have a lasting impact:
1. No more bailouts: Bring back real capitalism
2. End TBTF banks
3. Get Wall Street Money out of legislative process
* * *
You will note that these three goals are issues that both the Left and the Right — Libertarians and Liberals — should be able to agree upon. These are all doable measurable goals, that can have a real impact on legislation, the economy and taxes.
But amending the Constitution to eliminate dirty money from politics is an essential task. Failing to do that means backsliding from whatever gains are made. Whatever is accomplished will be temporary without campaign finance reform . . .
Writing for the DealBook blog at The New York Times, Jesse Eisinger provided us with the laments of a few Wall Street insiders, whose attitudes are aligned with those of the OWS movement:
Last week, I had a conversation with a man who runs his own trading firm. In the process of fuming about competition from Goldman Sachs, he said with resignation and exasperation: “The fact that they were bailed out and can borrow for free – it’s pretty sickening.”
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Sadly, almost none of these closeted occupier-sympathizers go public. But Mike Mayo, a bank analyst with the brokerage firm CLSA, which is majority-owned by the French bank Crédit Agricole, has done just that. In his book “Exile on Wall Street” (Wiley), Mr. Mayo offers an unvarnished account of the punishments he experienced after denouncing bank excesses. Talking to him, it’s hard to tell you aren’t interviewing Michael Moore.
* * *
I asked Richard Kramer, who used to work as a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs until he got fed up with how it did business and now runs his own firm, Arete Research, what was going wrong. He sees it as part of the business model.
“There have been repeated fines and malfeasance at literally all the investment banks, but it doesn’t seem to affect their behavior much,” he said. “So I have to conclude it is part of strategy as simple cost/benefit analysis, that fines and legal costs are a small price to pay for the profits.”
Mr. Kramer’s contention was supported by a recent analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission documents by The New York Times, which revealed “that since 1996, there have been at least 51 repeat violations by those firms. Bank of America and Citigroup have each had six repeat violations, while Merrill Lynch and UBS have each had five.”
At the ever-popular Zero Hedge website, Tyler Durden provided us with the observations of a disillusioned, first-year hedge fund analyst. Durden’s introductory comments in support of that essay, provide us with a comprehensive delineation of the tactics used by Wall Street to crush individual “retail” investors:
Regular readers know that ever since 2009, well before the confidence destroying flash crash of May 2010, Zero Hedge had been advocating that regular retail investors shun the equity market in its entirety as it is anything but “fair and efficient” in which frontrunning for a select few is legal, in which insider trading is permitted for politicians and is masked as “expert networks” for others, in which the government itself leaks information to a hand-picked elite of the wealthiest investors, in which investment banks send out their “huddle” top picks to “whale” accounts before everyone else gets access, in which hedge funds form “clubs” and collude in moving the market, in which millisecond algorithms make instantaneous decisions which regular investors can never hope to beat, in which daily record volatility triggers sell limits virtually assuring daytrading losses, and where the bid/ask spreads for all but the choicest few make the prospect of breaking even, let alone winning, quite daunting. In short: a rigged casino. What is gratifying is to see that this warning is permeating an ever broader cross-section of the retail population with hundreds of billions in equity fund outflows in the past two years. And yet, some pathological gamblers still return day after day, in hope of striking it rich, despite odds which make a slot machine seem like the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In that regard, we are happy to present another perspective: this time from a hedge fund insider who while advocating his support for the OWS movement, explains, in no uncertain terms, and in a somewhat more detailed and lucid fashion, both how and why the market is not only broken, but rigged, and why it is nothing but a wealth extraction mechanism in which the richest slowly but surely steal the money from everyone else who still trades any public stock equity.
The anonymous hedge fund analyst concluded his discourse with this point:
In other words, if you aren’t in the .1%, you have no access to the derivatives markets, you have no access to the special deals that hedge funds and other wealthy investors get, and you have no access to the resources, information, strategic services, tax exemptions, and capital that the top .1% is getting.
If you have any questions about what some of the concepts above mean, ask and I will try my best to answer. I’m a first-year analyst on Wall Street, and based on what I see day in and day out, I support the OWS movement 100%.
You are now informed beyond the influence of those presstitutes, who regularly attempt to convince the public that an important goal of the Occupy Movement is to destroy the livelihoods of those who work on Wall Street.
Comments Off on No Free Pass For The Disappointer-In-Chief
December 14, 2009
The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency was hailed by many as an event that “transcended race”. Ever since Obama’s primary election victory in lily-white Iowa, the pundits couldn’t stop talking about the candidate’s unique ability to vault the racial barrier before Hillary Clinton could break through the glass ceiling. As we approach the conclusion of Obama’s first year in the White House, it has become apparent that the Disappointer-in-Chief has not only alienated the Democratic Party’s liberal base, but he has also let down a demographic he thought he could take for granted: the African-American voters. At this point, Obama has “transcended race” with his ability to dishearten loyal black voters just as deftly as he has chagrined loyal supporters from all ethnic groups.
Charles Blow’s recent opinion piece for the December 4 edition of The New York Times, entitled: “Black in the Age of Obama” shed some light on the racist backlash against the black population as a result of the election of our nation’s first African-American President. Mr. Blow then focused on Obama’s approach to his sinking poll numbers:
This means that Obama can get away with doing almost nothing to specifically address issues important to African-Americans and instead focus on the white voters he’s losing in droves. This has not gone unnoticed. In the Nov. 9 Gallup poll, the number of blacks who felt that Obama would not go far enough in promoting efforts to aid the black community jumped 60 percent from last summer to now.
* * *
The Age of Obama, so far at least, seems less about Obama as a black community game-changer than as a White House gamesman. It’s unclear if there will be a positive Obama Effect, but an Obama Backlash is increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, black people are also living a tale of two actions: grin and bear it.
As Silla Brush reported for The Hill on December 2, ten members of the Congressional Black Caucus had threatened to withhold their votes on the financial reform bill, because the President had not been “doing enough to help African-Americans through the bleak economy”.
It has been easy to understand the dissatisfaction with Obama expressed by the Democratic Party’s liberal base. In a piece entitled “The Winter of Liberal Discontent”, Louis Proyect incorporated the umbrage expressed by such notables as Tom Hayden and Michael Moore, while providing a thorough assessment of Obama’s abandonment of the Left. He concluded the piece with a quoted passage from an essay written for The Huffington Post by Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional TARP Oversight Panel. Mr. Proyect quoted Ms. Warren’s reference to some brutally unpleasant statistics, raising the question of whether America will continue to have a middle class. The theme of Mr. Proyect’s discussion was based on this point:
The chorus of disapproval is louder than any I have heard from liberal quarters since 1967 when another very popular Democrat did an about-face once he was in office. When LBJ ran as a peace candidate, very few people — except unrepentant Marxists — would have anticipated a massive escalation in Vietnam. It was well understood a year ago that Obama was committed to escalating the war in Afghanistan, but the liberal base of the Democratic Party was too mesmerized by the mantras of “hope” and “change” to believe that their candidate would actually carry out his promise.
There is a tendency to regard right-wing Republican presidents being replaced by idealistic-appearing Democrats who betray their supporters, thus enabling a new Republican candidate to take over the White House, as a kind of Western version of karma. We are compelled by universal law in some way to undergo an endless cycle of suffering without hope of redemption short of Enlightenment.
The criticism of Obama expressed by African-American commentators underscores the President’s unique ability to alienate those who might support him on the basis of ethnic solidarity, just as thoroughly as he can antagonize the melanin-deficient “limousine liberals” of Park Avenue. On December 11, Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns made a point of letting us know that the complete text of Matt Taibbi’s recent Rolling Stone article, “Obama’s Big Sellout” is now available online. Before quoting some of the discussion in Matt Taibbi’s essay, Mr. Harrison provided some hard-hitting criticism of the Obama administration’s financial and economic policy shortcomings. You may note that the administration’s abandonment of the African-American base was not discussed. It wouldn’t do justice to Mr. Harrison’s great work to quote a snippet of this because it’s too good. I have to give you the whole thing:
As you probably know, I have been quite disappointed with this Administration’s leadership on financial reform. While I think they ‘get it,’ it is plain they lack either the courage or conviction to put forward a set of ideas that gets at the heart of what caused this crisis.
It was clear to many by this time last year that the President may not have been serious about reform when he picked Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as the leaders of his economic team. As smart and qualified as these two are, they are rightfully seen as allied with Wall Street and the anti-regulatory movement.
At a minimum, the picks of Geithner and Summers were a signal to Wall Street that the Obama Administration would be friendly to their interests. It is sort of like Ronald Reagan going to Philadelphia, Mississippi as a first stop in the 1980 election campaign to let southerners know that he was friendly to their interests.
I reserved judgment because one has to judge based on actions. But last November I did ask Is Obama really “Change we can believe in?” because his Administration was being stacked with Washington insiders and agents of the status quo.
Since that time it is obvious that two things have occurred as a result of this ‘Washington insider’ bias. First, there has been no real reform. Insiders are likely to defend the status quo for the simple reason that they and those with whom they associate are the ones who represent the status quo in the first place. What happens when a company is nationalized or declared bankrupt is instructive; here, new management must be installed to prevent the old management from covering up past mistakes or perpetuating errors that led to the firm’s demise. The same is true in government.
That no ‘real’ reform was coming was obvious, even by June when I wrote a brief note on the fake reform agenda. It is even more obvious with the passage of time and the lack of any substantive reform in health care.
Second, Obama’s stacking his administration with insiders has been very detrimental to his party. I imagine he did this as a way to overcome any worries about his own inexperience and to break with what was seen as a major factor in Bill Clinton’s initial failings. While I am an independent, I still have enough political antennae to know that taking established politicians out of incumbent positions (Joe Biden, Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Kathleen Sebelius or Tim Kaine) jeopardizes their seat. So, the strategy of stacking his administration has not only created a status quo bias, but it has also weakened his party.
The magic of the Obama candidacy has vanished with the disappointments of the Obama Presidency. His supporters have learned, the hard way, that talk is cheap. The President’s actions during the next three years will not only impact the viability of his administration — they could undermine the careers of his fellow Democrats.
TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.
