The rot at the center

Robert Reich has noticed how the democratic base is demoralized. Who is to blame?

A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government." Much of the reason for the Democrats' astonishing reluctance to place blame where it belongs rests with big business's and Wall Street's generous flows of campaign donations to Democrats, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. And unless or until it's remedied, it will be difficult for the President to achieve any "change you can believe in.
And if you are looking for America by the numbers, you'll find the sad up to date statistics right here, in this Alternet post by David DeGraw.

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What passes for ethics in DC

What do they want in order to make a finding that a politician was politically corrupt? Apparently a signed confession, based on an article in the Washington Post:

The House ethics committee ruled Friday that seven lawmakers who steered hundreds of millions of dollars in largely no-bid contracts to clients of a lobbying firm had not violated any rules or laws by also collecting large campaign donations from those contractors.

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The problem with politicians

Colin Beavan (No Impact Man) sums it up like this at his blog:

[T]he politics of Washington are defunct. The Democratic politicians want to beat the Republicans. The Republican ones want to beat the Democratic ones. They are, like the rest of us, scared for their jobs! But the American people? We just want to get along with each other and solve problems. We want happy lives and to be kind to our neighbors. We want leaders who care about us more than their own careers.
Americans are often under the illusion that we have meaningful choices when we vote in national elections, but that is dangerously simplistic. Big money and commercial media pre-designate the candidates who qualify as "serious candidates" long before the citizens vote. Those candidates who prevail are those that have given sufficient winks and nods to big money such that they continue to get well-funded. To compound things, big money likes the status quo. Hence, Barack Obama's continuing lovefest with Wall Street (Disclosure: I voted for Obama but I'm sorely disappointed--yet I still think he is far preferable to McCain-Palin). There are no easy solutions to this problem. The start of a solution, in my opinion, is to give smart, "non-connected" and non-monied people a real chance to get elected. There are several "clean money" campaign reform proposals floating about (for details on one of these, see this post by Lawrence Lessig). The purpose of clean-money elections is the radical idea promoted by the Founding Fathers: that We the People would self-govern. The topic Colin Beavan raises today is the most important political topic out there, in my opinion. Without an honest, open and self-critical deliberative process, we don't actually have a democracy. With the current system of private-money elections (especially in the wake of Citizens United), we don't have an honest, open and self-critical deliberate process. What we have instead, is what Beavan has described: a big expensive game where politicians do anything and say anything to maintain their power and perks.

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Guantanamo homicides; government cover-up

I am feeling as though I'm in shock after reading "The Guantánamo 'Suicides,'" an article by Scott Horton that appears in the March 2010 edition of Harper's Magazine (available online only to subscribers). The official story offered by the United States government is that these three prisoners, who occupied non-adjacent cells, simultaneously committed suicide on June 9, 2006. According to the NCI as documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's 8-foot high steel mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat area we are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his wash basin, slipped his head through the news, tightened it, and left from the wash basin to hang until he asphyxiated. Horton's incredible article names names and provides details with regard to all of the following: * The United States appears to have murdered at least three of the prisoners at Guantánamo. None of these three men had been charged with any crime. Two of these men were set to be released. There is no credible evidence that any of them were terrorists. Evidence strongly suggests that they were beaten and then further tortured through waterboarding on the night they were killed. * The United States has worked furiously to cover up these murders, spewing countless lies in the process. * The United States maintained a special torture building ("a black site") far from the main prison camp at Guantánamo, and those who worked at Guantánamo were told to not ask any questions about it. It was called "Camp No," and those who have come forward at considerable risk have reported hearing screaming from that building. * After the three prisoners were apparently murdered, those in charge of Guantánamo viciously attacked the dead men, arguing to the press that "They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own." * In the process of "investigating the suicides," the U.S. government seized all written communications possessed by the other Guantánamo prisoners, including communications clearly constituting attorney-client privilege. * When presented with the facts presented in Horton's article, the Bush administration and the Obama administration's both refused to conduct any meaningful investigation. Both administrations actively suppressed the truth. * The Obama administration would simply rather not have to deal with the criminal actions of the Bush administration. I'm sure that many Americans are disgusted, as I am, that the United States has engaged in this sort of behavior. I'm also sure that millions of Americans would be outraged that Horton would dare to accuse the United States of anything improper; these sorts of people (I've met some of them and I've heard many on television) don't care whether the Guantanamo prisoners were really terrorists and don't care whether they were tortured. It's disturbing on many levels. It all makes you wonder what has become of us. The following is from a related article from yesterday's NYT, where it is reported that the Obama Administration is upset that a British Court released U.S. information indicating that U.S. treatment of prisoners "violated legal prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners." You'd think that Mr. Obama would abide by his campaign promise to be an open book, but he's doing the opposite: A spokesman for President Obama expressed “deep disappointment” in the court’s decision, which might have been shocking except that Mr. Obama has refused to support any real investigation of Mr. Bush’s lawless detention policies. His lawyers have tried to shut down court cases filed by victims of those policies, with the same extravagant claims of state secrets and executive power that Mr. Bush made. In another a related matter, Dick Cheney reminded the world yesterday that he has long been a big fan of A) waterboarding and B) telling his lawyers what to tell him.

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Why financial reform will never happen

President Obama, 1/29/09:

...when I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses -- the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 -- at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don't provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads -- that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful.
President Obama, 1/14/10:
As we all know, our country has endured the deepest recession we've faced in generations. And much of the turmoil was caused by irresponsibility on the part of banks and financial institutions. Firms took reckless risks in pursuit of short-term profits and soaring bonuses, triggering a financial crisis that nearly pulled the economy into a second Great Depression. ... My commitment is to recover every single dime the American people are owed. And my determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people -- folks who have not been made whole, and who continue to face real hardship in this recession. We want our money back, and we're going to get it. And that's why I'm proposing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee to be imposed on major financial firms until the American people are fully compensated for the extraordinary assistance they provided to Wall Street. If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers.
New York Times, 2/7/10:
Just two years after Mr. Obama helped his party pull in record Wall Street contributions — $89 million from the securities and investment business, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics — some of his biggest supporters, like Mr. Dimon, have become the industry’s chief lobbyists against his regulatory agenda. Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street’s “buyer’s remorse” with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street “fat cats,” they may fight back by withholding their cash. ... Though Wall Street has long been a major source of Democratic campaign money (alongside Hollywood and Silicon Valley), Mr. Obama built unusually direct ties to his contributors there. ... Wall Street lobbyists say the financial industry’s big Democratic donors help ensure that their arguments reach the ears of the president and Congress. White House visitors’ logs show dozens of meetings with big Wall Street fund-raisers, including Gary D. Cohn, a president of Goldman Sachs; Mr. Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; and Robert Wolf, the chief of the American division of the Swiss bank UBS, who has also played golf, had lunch and watched July 4 fireworks with the president.
Bloomberg News, 2/10/10:
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay. The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.” “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.” Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.
Any questions? And are trillion-dollar bailouts for these firms also a part of our "free-market system"?

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