Kelo vs. New London revisited

Remember the case of Kelo vs. New London? Briefly, it was a case in which homeowners including Susette Kelo sued their municipality to stop it from taking their homes using the power of eminent domain. The city wanted to raze the homes and redevelop the area, making it shiny and new to complement the anticipated Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility. After all, one musn't allow the shabby dwellings of the peasantry to mar the image of success and corporate uniformity that one is trying to project:

So, the politicians picked a 24-acre lot and sold it Pfizer for $10, adding on special tax breaks. Also, state and local governments promised $26 million to clean up contamination on the lot and a nearby junkyard. But Pfizer executive David Burnett thought New London needed to do some more cleaning. "Pfizer wants a nice place to operate," the Hartford Courant quoted Burnett in 2001. "We don't want to be surrounded by tenements." The old Victorian houses in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood next door did not match Pfizer's vision - a high-rise hotel or luxury condominiums would be more fitting.

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The problem with lobbyists

Jeffrey Sachs talks about the problem with lobbyists:

Lobbyists for powerful corporations are crawling over every piece of pending legislation- from health care, to banking regulation, to climate change -- keeping a chokehold on deep reforms. Jankowsky says that lobbying is transparent. . . . Special interests have already spent $2.5 billion dollars this year on 13,000 lobbyists like Mr. Jankowsky and his colleagues at the firm Akin Gump, with many contributing their expertise to gutting financial oversight of Wall Street, delaying control of greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing real controls on health insurance costs.

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What’s up with economic reform? Not enough.

At Alternet, you can read Art Levine's detailed account of legal corruption of the economic "reform." It's not pretty, and the good guys are losing many of the important battles. Here's a passage, but go read the whole thing--it's well written and critically important:

So, the sleek, blond J.P Morgan lobbyist in a smart gray suit set off by a brightly colored scarf was able to saunter in shortly before the doors opened for the hearing to see just how many more loopholes could be added. (She declined to identify herself.) Like the evicted family in Michael Moore's new film being hired by the bank to clean out their own home, the banking-industry lobbyists in Washington have at long last created the ultimate trickle-down effect from the bailouts: hiring the jobless ( for $11 to $35 an hour) to hold their places in line to make sure there's no effective federal crackdown preventing more job-destroying speculation in credit default swaps and other derivatives.

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My recurring nightmare

What I am posting here is a gnawing, recurring and growing concern that sometimes seems like a nightmare to me. It embarrasses me that this thought keeps recurring because it makes me look like one of those crazy conspiracy theorists. What brought this “nightmare” to a head was watching Bill Moyers’ interview with U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur. Here’s an excerpt:

MARCY KAPTUR: Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, 'What should I know?' They said, 'Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us.' I said, 'Well, give me the top one.' They said, 'J.P. Morgan Chase.' I went back to Washington that night. And one of my colleagues said, 'You want to come to dinner?' I said, 'Well, what is it?' He said, 'Well, it's a meeting with Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase.' I said, 'Wow, yes. I really do.' So, I go to this meeting in a fancy hotel, fancy dinner, and everyone is complimenting him. I mean, it was just like a love fest.

They finally got to me, and my point to ask a question. I said, 'Well, I don't want to speak out of turn here, Mr. Dimon.' I said, 'But your company is the largest forecloser in my district. And our Realtors just said to me this morning that your people don't return phone calls.' I said, 'We can't do work outs.' And he looked at me, he said, 'Do you know that I talk to your Governor all the time?' He said, 'Our company employs 10,000 people in Ohio.' And I'm thinking, 'What is that? A threat?' And he said, 'I speak to the Mayor of Columbus.'

As I watched this, I was thinking how amazing it was that a bank president would dare to treat a U.S. representative as though she meant nothing to him, even though she is a sitting member of Congress and a member of the political party that controls both Houses and the Presidency. How is it that all the big financial players such as Chase, AIG, Goldman Sachs, always get exactly what they want out of Congress? How can Congress allow these entities to continue to grow (since the meltdown), even though it is clear that the reason Congress felt that they needed to be propped up with tax money is that they were considered “too big to fail?” Name even one other industry that can snap its fingers and watch meaningful Congressional regulation completely dissolve. Name another industry that can demand hundreds of billions of no-questions-asked tax dollars from Congress. Consider the vast power and potential abuses of the Federal Reserve, which works arrogantly and opaquely. Consider Matt Tabbi’s recent articles regarding these financial giants and Congressional Corruption (and see here). We’re not even finished paying off the damage from the S&L scandal from the 80’s, and now, in the past year, we’ve taken on a new debt that dwarfs that S&L debt. And consider that when someone like federal Judge Rakoff has the integrity to stand up to speak truth to power, he seems to be a lone voice calling from a distant hilltop, not part of any sort of chorus. Consider, too, the monumental struggle faced by Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel , who is facing immense opposition in Congress to establishing a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to make sure that consumers stop getting ripped off by banks through the use of unintelligible contract language (how can this possibly be controversial?). Pardon my French, but what-the-fuck? Using Occam’s Razor (the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best), how does one explain that huge numbers of our representatives have completely tanked on The People.

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Maher: American is the land of get nothing done

Bill Maher is distressed about America's lack of capacity to do good things and stop doing bad things. Our mechanism for meaningful change is completely broken.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States! We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016.
What do we need?
a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.
I find Bill Maher to be especially insightful--he cuts right through the BS over and over. This particular article by Maher was especially well written.

Continue ReadingMaher: American is the land of get nothing done