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The Virtues of Public Anger and the Need for More
With lightning speed and lockstep unanimity, opinion-making elites jointly embraced and are now delivering the same message about the public rage triggered this week by the AIG bonus scandal: This scandal is insignificant. It's just a distraction. And, most important of all, public anger is unhelpful and must be contained or, failing that, ignored.
This anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.
It makes perfect sense that those who are satisfied with the prevailing order -- because it rewards them in numerous ways -- are desperate to pacify public fury. Thus we find unanimous decrees that public calm (i.e., quiet) be restored. It's a universal dynamic that elites want to keep the masses in a state of silent, disengaged submission, all the better if the masses stay convinced that the elites have their best interests at heart and their welfare is therefore advanced by allowing elites -- the Experts -- to work in peace on our pressing problems, undisrupted and "undistracted" by the need to placate primitive public sentiments.
While that framework is arguably reasonable where the establishment class is competent, honest, and restrained, what we have had -- and have -- is exactly the opposite: a political class and financial elite that is rotted to the core and running amok. We've had far too little public rage given the magnitude of this rot, not an excess of rage. What has been missing more than anything else is this: fear on the part of the political and financial class of the public which they have been systematically defrauding and destroying.
* * * * *
These endless lectures from sober, rational pundits about the relative quantitative insignificance of the AIG bonuses are condescending straw men. Nobody thinks that $165 million in bonuses for the people who destroyed AIG is what has caused the financial crisis. Nobody thinks that recouping those bonuses or having prevented them in the first place would solve or even mitigate systemic collapse. The amounts are miniscule in the context of the broader economic issues. Everyone is aware of that; nobody needs to have that pointed out. As Armando astutely observed, the attempt now to dismiss the anger over the AIG bonuses as the by-product of simple-minded ignorance and/or ideological rigidity (class warfare! crass populism!) is quite similar to how anti-war arguments were stigmatized before the attack on Iraq : ignore the screeching pacifists and let the sober Experts make the decisions, for they know best.
The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them.
Eliot Spitzer is absolutely right that, even at AIG, there are far larger scandals than the bonuses, such as the undiscounted compensation of AIG's counter-parties such as Goldman Sachs (and just by the way: it is indescribably symbolic that Spitzer has been punished and disgraced for his acts of consensual adult sex while the targets of his prescient Wall St. investigations, who basically destroyed the world economy, remain protected and empowered). But the bonus scandal is illustrative of why the crisis happened, who caused it to happen, and the ongoing political dominance of the perpetrators. It is, as Robert Reich put it, "a nightmarish metaphor for the Obama Administration's problems administering the bailout of Wall Street."
The financial crisis has merely unmasked the corruption and rot in our establishment institutions that are staggering in magnitude and reach. Just as the Iraq War was not the by-product of wrongdoing by a few stray bad political and media actors but instead was reflective of our broken institutions generally, the financial crisis is a fundamental indictment on the way the country functions and of its ruling class. What would be unhealthy is if there weren't substantial amounts of public rage in the face of these revelations.
* * * * *
Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone article perfectly summarizes what the AIG scandal reveals about our political and economic system, and should be read in full. In sum: financial elites own the Government and both political parties. Their money drowns Washington and their lobbyists control it. They used that ownership of Government to abolish decades-old legal and regulatory protections which previously constrained what they could do. In the lawless environment which they literally purchased from our political leaders, they were able to pillage and pilfer and steal without limit. And even now that everything has come crashing down, they continue to dictate what the Government's response is, to ensure that they -- the prime authors of the disaster -- are the prime beneficiaries, at the public's expense, of the "solutions," solutions which preserve their ill-gotten gains and heighten even further their power and influence. Taibbi:
The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.
In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets - the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.
God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. . .
Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?
But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
The story of Goldman Sachs -- its tentacles entrenched in every aspect of the Government and the blindingly favorable treatment it therefore continues to receive -- demonstrates, just standing alone, how pervasive the oligarchical decay is.
Atrios has been writing a version of the same key observation virtually every day for weeks -- that almost every plan to "solve" the financial crisis involves nothing more than transfers of enormous amounts of public money into the pockets of the same unchanged system and the same people who caused the collapse in the first place:
The issue is that [Geithner] and friends never distinguished between bailing out the system and bailing out the players. There was a way to do that, and they didn't do it.
In condemning Geithner's "bank rescue" plan, Paul Krugman notes that -- yet again -- it enables great benefits for the richest investors, with the public protecting them from the risk of losses (privatize gains; socialize losses), and concludes: "The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system." When it comes to its primary challenge, the administration elected on a platform of "change" is, above all else, viciously devoted to preservation of the status quo. Read John Cole's summary of expert reaction to Geithner's banking plan.
That is why the AIG scandal, rightfully so, is producing so much public outrage -- because it demonstrates what the political and economic system really is, a system which the Government continues to prop up and embrace. Brian Beutler put it this way:
It's not that the success of the bailout depends on what happens to these $160 million, but that these $160 million strongly suggest that some very rich, and, perhaps, very bad men have leveraged their way into control of the whole bailout process and the government's now following their lead. And their incentives are, to say the least, not in line with the best interests of the vast majority of taxpayers. . . .
It's simply not the case that Geithner and other high-level economic officials were so concerned with the bigger picture that they outsourced the question of compensation to Congress entirely. On the contrary, they were extremely involved in resolving that very question. They were opposed to strict compensation limits. . . .
But clearly they also thought that letting executives take home big fat piles of government money was either a matter of expedience or a matter of necessity. And either way it has huge implications for the success or failure of one of the most expensive and urgent government programs in the country's history.
The AIG scandal vividly reveals how corrupt and self-interested are the people who are still exerting primary control over this process, which is why our establishment class is so eager to demand that everyone look away. For months, Americans have been told that they must sacrifice and trust the Government to engage in extraordinary actions if they want to stave off another Great Depression, only to watch as hundreds of billions of dollars fly to the very people who are the prime culprits. As Jane Hamsher put it: "The 'populist rage' that the pundits find so unseemly is actually the appropriate response."
* * * * *
We saw this week the benefits which unbridled and intimidating public rage can produce. The retroactive, confiscatory tax on bonuses imposed by the House is, to be sure, a crude and troubling (and arguably unconstitutional) response. But the virtues of that episode easily exceed its vices: Congress sought to seize those bonuses because, for once, they were afraid of simmering public fury and responded to it rather than to the dictates of the corporate and lobbyist class that owns them and which they serve. Whatever marginal "unfairness" that tax might produce pales by many, many magnitudes when set aside the decade-long (and ongoing) pillaging of America's financial security and the future of its middle class by the financial owners of our political system.
And that's the point: only this true, intense, and -- yes -- scary public rage can serve as a check on ongoing pilfering by the narrowed monied factions who control our Government for their own interests and who otherwise have no reason to stop. Who else is going to impose those checks? The bought-and-paid-for, incomparably subservient, impotent and inept Congress? The establishment-loyal, vapid political press? An executive branch run by the very people who are most vested in, dependent on, and loyal to the financial system that produced these disasters? Only a healthy fear of the populace -- exactly what has been missing -- can achieve that.
Obviously, mass rage can entail its own excesses and, and if unchecked, can lead to mob rule, a form of majoritarian tyranny (as Armando notes, its isolated, unrepresentative excesses (death threats!) are already being exaggerated to discredit the underlying anger itself). But we are far, far, far away from the point where unchecked public sentiment plays too great of a role in how our political institutions function. Rather: we're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.
The overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? The overarching question is: why has there been so little? A political establishment that can function without any fear of the citizenry will inevitably trample on its interests. That is what has been happening more than anything else. And it is why we need far more public outrage, and fear of that outrage more deeply implanted in the minds of our political and financial elites.
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Show AllThe worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.
Six two and even that's exactly what happens. We'll have to have a calamity much much worse even than this one to finally put an end to Republicans and Democrats and the Monumental Through-The-Looking-Glass Scam and Flim Flam that is now the United States.
World wide economic collapse...does not get much worse than that...unless we wait for another false flag...nuclear this time....and by then it will be too late.......and the peoples fear will have over-ridden everything....stop waiting for THEIR next move......STAY ANGRY....STAY ALERT...GET READY..Do not take any more!...NO MORE BAILOUTS! NO MORE BAILOUT! WE ARE SELLING OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN'S FUTURE...............
Sioux Rose
Or the orchestrators of this financial plot understood that once the money was "reappropriated" to the elite caste the public would swell with justifiable anger, and therefore it was important to preempt this response by having not only prison beds waiting in abundance (2.2 million and counting), but already on the books an elaborate legal infrastructure that essentially made any earnest politically passionate response to tyranny close enough to meet the definition(s) of terrorism so as to warrant the intervention of one of Homeland Security's many paid uniformed domestic soldier-troops. Welcome to the era of the elite... until The Transition alters the pyramid substantially.
The United State of America - 2009
Torture People? - whatever
Start Illegal Wars based on Lies - who cares
Take away my civil liberties - so what?
Touch my Money? - Off with their heads!!!!
The founding fathers are trying to wriggle out of their graves and head offshore.
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
if you aren't angry you haven't been paying attention.
to mangle Dylan:
Rage against the dying of our rights!
"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." -- James Baldwin
And rage is born out of that loss.
vdb,
since I'm pretty sure you don't know mr. thomas personally,and since the rest of us certainly don't, why not avoid confusing people and call him dylan thomas? just so peple won't confuse him with that other dylan, bob.
Maybe with this fiasco, the American electorate will learn what our Southern neighbors have learned. We'll have to trash our MSM and start reading more. Perhaps "The Shock Doctrine" or "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". Perhaps listening to Amy Goodman rather than Katie Couric.
After being crushed by our ruling elite, we'll take to the streets, banging pots & pans demanding their ouster. Like the workers in Argentina & Venezuela. Like the voters in El Salvador, Equador and Bolivia. They had been stomped on by "American style capitalism" with the help of Freidman's "freemarket policies" and the IMF.
Maybe we'll start to realize the dangers uber capitalism, of large corporations, of their lobbyists, of an "embedded press", and globalization.
As stated in the film, "The Take", "Que se vayan todos!"
If we back up a step, we can all agree that Congress should be a recipient of a large dose of American rage. They're in the pockets of the corporatists and yet have the potential power to strip them of their horrible financial grip on Americans if they themselves were willing to forego lining their own pockets. In some ways, Congress is MORE potentially powerful than the corporations because without Congress, the corporations couldn't screw America and the world as they have done. Congress took their money and in return gave them the green light to do as they pleased.
So I'm pretty pissed at Congress even before my rage turns toward the banks and financial institutions.
It is past time for Congress to strip corporations of their "personhood" under the law.
THEY (the financiers, the corporatists, the globalists) must be pretty confident they have their 'security' measures in place...
...time will tell.
Exactly. I'm not seeing any public anger at all. A pack of greedy loan sharks have just decided that it isn't enough simply to waste their own lives in the childish accumulation of material stuff, not content merely to live like feeder hogs in gated golf ghettos from the Hamptons to the Bahamas, but have gone blithely ahead and destroyed the world economy and tossed hundreds of thousands of families into the street and trashed everybody's retirement savings, then have proceeded to sack the treasury for a few billion more for bonuses to which they feel perfectly entitled, while telling the public that their books and the disposition of our money is none of our business. I could see stringing these flies up from the nearest lamp post without any more anger than taking out the garbage. The toothless displeasure the public has managed to muster has not been sufficient to introduce even a pang of conscience into the boardrooms of AIG, let alone change their behavior and or get back the money, let alone blow the whole goddamn corrupt system away with a fire hose or throw certain sociopathic bastards in jail and start over. The representatives of our pitchfork waving mob have just voted to tax the bonuses, and even this pathetic gesture has been characterized as an overreaction! I can't imagine what kind of wanton larceny, what degree of blatant insult, would be required to elicit a vital response from the torpid swamp of public opinion. I see no burning banks, no upended limousines. Just Jay Leno and our silver tongued President making big funny inspirational one-liners to turn the whole thing into a feelgood story about how Americans always come back from adversity stronger and smarter and nobler than ever. From here it looks like if we come back at all it will be with a fresh coat of fleece for our beloved predators to shear from us.
Life in America is about to become difficult, as it has always been in other parts of the world. We need to lose the layer of fat, but my guess is that right under that is a layer of fear and under that a layer of nastiness. Hard to say how far down we'll need to go to find our intelligence and our altruism.
I don't believe it's a question of getting in touch with We the People's intelligence or altruism. It's a question of making a conscious decision to take action. Most Americans are in a state of plausible deniability. As my friend Tom from the 911dvdproject.com quotes.."You cannot awaken a person who is pretending to be asleep". Seems to be a fear of action and a fear of consequences. One of the reasons we see so many of those reality prison programs on TV....keep the fear fresh...alive...We have the information....we have the numbers....what's stopping the average Joe/Jane is fear. Most would rather accept the slavery under which they live than confront the fear it will take to rise up and regain our DIGNITY AND POWER.
"You cannot awaken a person who is pretending to be asleep"
That's very good. I'll remember that.
I think intelligence and altruism are a bit out of reach these days, and I agree that fear is the dynamic du jour. We place our fortunes in the hands of Arthurian heros like Obama rather than take responsibility for the consequences of our own Emersonion decisions. Some of it might be a function of size. There are too many of us. Consensus seems impossible, so we elect somebody more or less smart and hope for the best. When "We the People" reach a level of misery that compels us to take charge of our society, who will we be? Who will speak for us? Who will be the scapegoats? The democracy of the mob might be satisfying, but it is pretty scary stuff. I imagine an elegant guillotine at the end of the reflecting pond in the capital mall, the symbol of rising up, of regaining power. But consider: 57 million people (most still living) voted for George Bush twice. Misinformation travels as quickly as truth. When it comes time for our great nation to designate the bad guys responsible for this calamity, can we be sure that it won't be us?
But maybe what you can do is convince the person to pretend he is awake.
Anger that is directed and off course is wasted emotion. Anger at a few bonuses that amount to one thousandth of the public monies given AIG is directed anger. The powers that be, from Obama to a couple of Senators and Representatives, express some seemingly moral outrage and we the people follow like a herd of sheep to the shearing.
Our anger has enough real outlets, enough places more important to which it needs be directed yet we get stuck on this seemingly innocuous avenue for protest. Never mind that there remains still no serious intent to restore regulatory powers to our governmental agencies, never mind that no in depth investigation seems to be underway into the root causes of this debacle, including Phil Gramm's role in exempting the very stock derivatives that caused this collapse. Speak not to the power that the financial community had and still has over the legislation coming out of committees in both Houses of Congress.
Oh no, dont look over here folks, look over there....We are still wedded to a system that will never, ever keep this nation from its apparently inevitable slide into third world status.
"Never mind that there remains still no serious intent to restore regulatory powers to our governmental agencies, never mind that no in depth investigation seems to be underway into the root causes of this debacle, including Phil Gramm's role in exempting the very stock derivatives that caused this collapse. Speak not to the power that the financial community had and still has over the legislation coming out of committees in both Houses of Congress."
Yes sir! And I'm about ready to throw in the towel on Obama.
Though I'd suggest that the anger over the AIG bonus's is "focused" anger. Perhaps it serves a very real purpose rather thasn wasted motion.
I find no one paying much attention to the "anger" coming from the culprits and Obama. They are just absolutely disgusted with the whole mess....retention bonus's at Freddie and Fanny....the only comments I've heard were "don't let the door hit them in the butt leaving" actually phrased a bit more stringently.
Obama running around talking about healthcare, education and amnesty is not what the American people want to hear. Geitner has been a disaster. Pelosi always was....but Americans that favor enforcement of our laws and reject illegal immigration as a right are un-American? The Attorney General....the American people are cowards? Darn....makes me wish I were handling Senate and Congressional runs for Republicans in 2010. These folks are too stupid to survive.
Once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory..........
PS Ok...ok...MoveOn isn't radical, but slime yes. Counterpart to Rove and Cheney methods. Slime is slime no matter the side.
Speaking of focused anger, Thomas, it is past time for you to end the distraction of illegal aliens. Even if your estimates of the cost of these twelve million on our economy is correct, and I believe it exaggerated, it is still a drop in the bucket compared to what is being stolen by white anglo saxon protestants, born here, educated here, and living the "American Dream".
I am reminded of the way so-called "poor white trash" ( not my term) was distracted from the low wages, horrid working conditions and lack of benefits by focusing their anger on those "beneath them", black workers. We need turn our attention to the real problems besetting this nation and stop allowing clever propagandists to distract all of us "poor trash" fromt he real theft around us.
RR
"Speaking of focused anger, Thomas, it is past time for you to end the distraction of illegal aliens."
Well my friend, its not a distraction, its quite a problem. And its well over 20 million still. If you simply extrapolate a job, the consequential job loss and the illegal family plus the American worker and his family that all go on overnment services and the cost, you will see it is not a distraction at all but a rising disaster for our states.
Aside from that we are going to have to decide if we are a nation of laws or no nation at all. We can't be both.
As to anger, I am very angry at the scum that hire these folks, that exploit them and injure our own people by unemployment and forcing down wages. Left up to me I'd bring back public flogging for them. They are traitors to our country and no better than the traders in human flesh that supply them. I'm afraid my anger continues to grow against them and will till they are stopped.
This is just part of the problem, but a very real part of the larger problem.
Before the year is out most people will choose sides, Americans and the law or big business and their acendency in governance.
PS I'm beginning to despair of Obama's staff......all of them.
This is not in any way a focus on "those beneath them" type problem or argument. Not in any way.
Depends on the source,Thomas:
This analysis demonstrates that the December, 2003 Department of Homeland Security estimates of 8-12 million illegal aliens in the United States and 700,000 new illegals entering and staying per year represent significant undercounts.
http://www.theamericanresistance.com/ref/illegal_alien_numbers.html
The above extremist web site agrees with you, the more mainstream article bnelow agrees with me:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/10/02/ST2008100203040.html
*
The report by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center offers the most detailed picture of the illegal immigrant population to date, and its findings are in line with trends identified in less comprehensive recent analyses by the Department of Homeland Security and the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that advocates stricter limits on immigration.
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The Pew report found that the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States has declined from an average of 800,000 a year in 2000-04 to 500,000 a year in 2005-08.
By contrast, the flow of immigrants who are legal permanent residents has remained unchanged at 650,000 a year and has exceeded the number of illegal immigrant arrivals since last year.
The study also found a major slowdown in the growth of the illegal immigrant population that reflects additions to that population and subtractions because of people leaving the country, dying or changing to legal status. From 2000 through 2005, the illegal immigrant population rose by an average of 525,000 people a year. Since then, it has averaged increases of 275,000 a year. Over the past year, little to no increase appears to have occurred.
"This was a population that was growing very rapidly and substantially for at least 15 years, and the growth has essentially come to a halt," said Jeffrey S. Passel, co-author of the study.
Despite the slowdown, the number of illegal immigrants remains at an all-time high, up more than 40 percent from about 8.4 million in 2000 to 11.9 million in March, according to the Pew study. Illegal immigrants make up about 4 percent of the U.S. population and about 30 percent of its foreign-born residents. More than four out of 10, or 5.3 million, arrived since the start of the decade.
About four out of five illegal immigrants come from Latin American countries, mainly Mexico. Since last year, the number from Mexico appears to have leveled off at 7 million, and the number from other Latin American countries has fallen.
Yo, Thomas, If you are still here I would add that this is but a distraction from the real problems facing our nation, and those nations from which these 12 or 20 millions originate. You are far too intelligent to continue to support this racist rant!
REFUSE TO PAY TAXES!!!!
Glen has got it right! It's time to speak out, to protest, to drive the amoral moneychangers from the temple.
We need a new world system. The vile capitalism model is broke. Besides, it only ever benefited the few anyway.
It's time to set up a whole new model, one that advantages everyone, one that is sustainable, one that despises greed and selfishness and conspicuous consumption!
Check my blog for some ideas on how we might proceed.
www.dangerouscreation.com
It's as if Elliott Ness came to town to become the nemesis of organized crime, and then recruited a staff of made men-- mob soldiers-- to get the job done.
The Obama administration really is on the spot, and has put itself in an increasingly impossible position trying to cope with the financial crisis; it remains to be seen whether it can sustain public confidence. It has to take what's essentially a Good Cop/Bad Cop approach with corporate executives and tycoons, and "we may hate the sin, but never the sinner" to boot.
Thus, Obama or his surrogates and spokespersons may echo public anger at sideshows like the bonuses debacle, and presidential finger-wagging gets headlines. At times, watching a politician handle a classic crisis is like hearing a new tenor or soprano sing a classic aria; Obama did a competent turn at recapping Claude Rains as the police captain in Casablanca who is "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" while quietly pocketing his winnings.
And Obama's steadfast support of Geithner and Summers, an exercise in executive loyalty common to both parties, may be commendable-- all things being equal. There is always an impulse to quench a crisis by bringing forth a scapegoat, and it is wise for a leader to resist it.
But this is assuredly not the last horror story of fantastic enrichment to the upper echelons of business and finance at the taxpayers' expense; there are sure to be more solid-gold skeletons in the closet. If members of the administration approved or facilitated or developed any part of whatever it is, they're increasingly-- and justly-- going to be seen as Part of the Problem.
Excuse the déclassé Sixties rubric.
Foolish distraction or decoy notwithstanding, the pseudo-scandal highlighted or disclosed the ultra-orthodox mindset of the Obama administration, and its inclination to preserve the status quo of the US financial market in the course of repairing and restoring financial stability.
They want to build a bridge to the New World by first restoring the Old World.
No flags went up over the bonuses when they were routinely approved last fall, because in Old World terms they were literally no big deal; it was just a mundane exercise in a standard compensation package for corporate executives. The syndicate employs time-and-custom honored methods for splitting the vig; that's just business.
I don't see how populating an administration with made men conduces to profound and radical reform and transformation, such as recently advocated by James Galbraith:
[ http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/19-11 ].
· Yr Obd't Servant
An American expat in the Paris segment of Michael Moore's Sicko said it best: The difference between the European system and the U.S. is that in Europe the police are afraid of the people. In the U.S. the people are afraid of the police. It's time to shed our fear, folks, and take our feelings to the offices of Congress and the Administration. And go back again and again until they get sick of filling the jails. Change indeed!
Do you know how much money are WS execs and fat-cat investors fighting for these days ? Obama cannot go against these masters of the universe cold turkey and deny them the bailout they "deserve" (since they "concede" to the taxpayers the money that the taxpayers earn anyway, according to their delusional self-serving world view!).
If he did, this neo-feudal class of parasites would cough up in a sec more than enough savings to hire full time and for several years every one of the many mercenary armies of the USA plus the whole of organized crime, just to get rid of him.
Obama must proceed carefully so he can change things when it's possible. Time is on his side since the dozens of trillion dollars of financial vaporware that need to be "saved" cannot possibly be "ameliorated" without ruining the USA or ruining the fat cats.
So be patient and be careful about what you ask for else you may end up having to whine about "the friend of the usurer" aka Joseph Biden...
The whining and hoping for the great leader's redemption must stop. What is needed from the left now is to
i) publicize non-stop which are the great fortunes that demoblicans are trying to save by crying wolf about "saving the financial system", and denounce their owners as members of a neo-feudal class with names but no addresses (no, nobody wants to save "the banks" or "WS", how can anybody be so naive and fall for such an obfuscation!);
ii) convince the public that the bailout money should be used to jump-start the economy directly with or w/o the co-operation of WS and private banks;
iii) make sure that Obama and the demoblicans are confronted at every stop with questions about who are the specific *individuals* who would benefit personally most if the financial system is "saved" and why exactly these *individuals* deserve so badly to be saved at a price of billions of dollars each.
Changing the public's mood and informational sophistication will give Obama the freedom to move in the right direction. He is smart, he does not want to be a martyr and go down in flames.
So let's stop complaining about WS, the banks, and the great leader's lack of leadership and vision. Let's make sure the citizenry understands where Obama should go and why and that it starts demanding it and loudly so.
Ask the citizenry, e.g., if it really wants that the Randolphs' billions in derivatives be purchased at face value from them by the taxpayers "to save the financial system".
Wake up and rise up!!!!!!!!!!!!
>>In condemning Geithner's "bank rescue" plan, Paul Krugman notes that -- yet again -- it enables great benefits for the richest investors, with the public protecting them from the risk of losses (privatize gains; socialize losses), and concludes: "The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system." When it comes to its primary challenge, the administration elected on a platform of "change" is, above all else, viciously devoted to preservation of the status quo.
There it is. "Change"....."Hope".....nothing but marketing slogans, sucked up by so many. Whether it's war or preservation of corporate capitalism, Obombem is there to defend them (not us).
Speaking of sucking, isn't it about time for Joe Dope to show up here with his Pompons to tell us how we (and Glenn) are all so wrong about the "status quo" and how we should happily give up our taxpayer money for Geithner/Paulson/Bernacke etc. so they can continue to dole it out to the corporate criminals who raped the country for so many years, because....well, gosh! We just need to give Obombem a chance? People....you just need hope! Because after all, Obombem can walk on water and certainly he will cure all of our nation's ills.
"There it is. "Change"....."Hope".....nothing but marketing slogans, sucked up by so many."
YES WE CON!
Here's a good one:
Yahoo News: Protesters visit AIG officials' lavish Conn. homes
By John Christoffersen, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 36 mins ago
The company, in response to the protests, said all its employees were "working very hard to pay back the government and help the U.S. economy recover."
"The people working at AIG today are part of the solution, not part of the problem," company spokeswoman Christina Pretto said in an e-mailed statement.
We may be angry but we are going to go back down the same road that got in this situation . When we gave our life savings to the Wall Street Bandits we invited them to rob us . They now control all our currency , our government , and our life savings . We can fix this problem just by putting our savings in US Treasury Savings Accounts and making laws that allow individuals to do just that . It won't be as exciting but every dollar we put in will be there when we need it and JUST THINK : our government would not need to beg for loans from other countries because all our money Wall Street has been playing with would be in our government accounts where it could be used for useful things instead of Wall Street toys . BUT Wall Street will blow dust in our faces and convince us how rich thay can make us and there we go again .
we dont have to do this
If you don't like being manipulated, unplug yourself from the MSM: keeping your attitude and emotions in check is their job.
I realize your remark is facetious. BUT, the sad truth is that if you live in this country, there is no way not to be manipulated...either by the MSM or the Federal Reserve.
Outrage delayed is outrage denied. The root of this mess (as much as it is possible to seperate out any root cause) is when the Reagan administration declared war on the middle class with it's "supply side economics" mumbo jumbo, "government is the problem" philosophy (but not too much of a problem to bust the air traffic controlers union). The Reagan (Republican) philosophy: The rich deserve everything and screw everybody else. That philosophy gave us lax regulation, reduced taxes on extravegant income, the savings and loan scandal and who can count how many boom and bust bubbles since.
Make no mistake, it is low taxes on "millionaires" (just as in the 1920s) more than anything that has brought us here. It has caused the executives to become lone guns in search of personal riches instead of team members working for the long term good of the companies they work for. It has lead to the steady erossion of the real wealth of the middle class and nation as that wealth has been transferred gradually to the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. And perhaps worst of all, too much loose money in the hands of people with nothing better to do with it than speculate looking for easy money (pumping up bubbles).
The outrage is long over due and can't possibly be aimed at all of the people who are really to blame. When the French peasants rolled out the guilotine to put an end to the aristocracy they were pretty much onto the only real sollution. My dad remarked, after reading an article about how the modern French citizens regreat those acts of barberism, "Yeah but those SOBs never came back to bother them, did they." That is the real quetion that this article begs: How can we keep those SOBs from coming back to bother us? I think the answer may start with a whole lot more outrage that this author seems ready to contemplate.
I would offer that your analogy is somewhat false in that the reality is that the aristocracy of birth has been replaced by the aristocracy of wealth. We are still under the thrall of of those who are exempt from the laws they themselves write while the "mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation".
The path taken to the position of official parasite may be changed but parasites are parasites and they need to be purged from the system before any kind of recovery can begin. And as to the aristocracy attaining that position by birthright, I would bet the vast majority of Wall Street movers and shakers are children of wealth. The idea that these people get those jobs on merit can be dispensed with by looking at their performance. The whole system is being run by George W. Bush type ivy leaguers who got gentlemans' Cs. It is that or they are more manevilent than I care to contemplate. Really both I suppose.
I beg to disagree...the ROOT of this problem is with the Fed and the international bankers that are raping the world economy.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22276.htm
Yes but it is the philosophical foundation installed by the Reaganite Republicans that have cleared the way for them to do their dirty work. That is the garbage that must be cleared before meaningfull repairs can be instituted. It must be established in peoples' minds that rich bankers are not "the good guys" by default. ROOT problems in societies are almost always philosopical.
We all know the sociological phenomenon (can't recall the name) where people are less likely to help an individual when there are lots of others around. The same exact thing happens with political matters. People say to themselves, "why do I have to be the responsible one?" and end up ignoring the problem. This is especially true when figuring out what to do involves a lot of research and filtering of bad information--all for one more vote for the good guy or one more angry protester. I personally enjoy thinking about politics and have time to educate myself, but if I was working 60+ hours a week in a high-stress environment, I don't think I would.
In contrast, Greenwald places the blame on the "elites" working hard to pacify the public who might otherwise be more organized and united. I have a strong suspicion that even without these efforts, the public as a whole would be a disorganized, confused, and largely ineffective lot. At this point, a larger protest might form over steroids in baseball than AIG bonuses. People are largely in the dark about the financial system and aren't really sure what side is right. It is hard to get too angry when you don't really understand the issue and even harder to figure out what to do about it. Hence you have people who are passionate about social issues but don't have much of an opinion on monetary policy, fiscal policy, the banking system, foreign policy, etc.
When Bill Clinton became President, Allan Greenspan and Robert Rubin took him aside and said words to the effect of: "We know you want to govern like FDR, but we're gonna teach you the facts of life."
Slick Willy listened. He who controls the money supply controls the politicians. Obama may have good intentions, but he has appointed the same bunch of swindlers and shysters who helped create this pandemic banking crisis.
Andrew Jackson was the only president to stand up to the money lenders.
Day by day, more people are losing their jobs, savings, and healthcare. Why hasn't Obama declared healthcare for all and fight for this with a passion, and will he slash the military budget by 60 % and redirect that money to insure all citizens with single payer coverage?
More people are starting to comprehend the situation and how they are getting screwed, and the momentum for progressive change is growing. The public is having doubts about the greed and selfishness philosophy of Milton Freidman and the infamous University of Chicago School of Economics.
I s _ O b a m a _ r i d i n g _ a _ D e a d _ H o r s e __
[ _____ attempting to cross the finish line ? _____ ]
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Say things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in todays environment.
10. Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
11. Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
14. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
15. Do a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
16. Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
18. Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
20. Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
22. Move the finish line to behind the " horse's ass "
23. Invent a "Credit Default Horse Swap" vehicle
24. Wait for the maggots to finish eating, and bet on which one crosses the finish line first
Namaste
Ha!
Very clever.
The financial elite, with the help of their thoroughly corrupt and anti-democracy D and R enablers, have a choke-hold on us and our economy. They are blatantly trying to maintain their elite positions, ruin our economy and make debt slaves of us and our children. All in broad daylight with cameras rolling recording the demise of the audacity of hope for real change we can all believe in. Stop supporting the Democrats and I mean all of them. They support each other, not us! It's better to support anyone else, lose, and be able to hold your head up than to deceive yourself and foolishly hope that the Democrats will assist us in permanently breaking free from our captors. They are the problem not the solution.
Amen, Mr. Greenwald. The corporate interests who have hijacked our political process also own our public square, our collective dialogue, aka television. They are desperate to keep us from focusing how we got into this mess, so first they manufacture the Official AIG Bonus Outrage, and then they denigrate our real outrage over the whole damn fraudulent pillaging of the country. It's not just the bonuses. It's AIG, it's all the other Wall St. fraudsters, the Lehmans and all, the banks. It's the war. It's everything done to this country in the name of 9-11, the adding of a Department of Homeland Security to the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice. All of them, every single one of them missing in action. We pay and we pay and we pay. For what? None of them appear to be working for "us," for our entire government now takes our money and uses it against us.
Outage? How dare we be outraged? How dare we not? Anyone want to make the anger constructive could focus on two root causes of our problem. One, we let corporate interest and special interests bribe congress. Two, we let those same interest monopolize our discourse. No wonder we can't find answers when we have the same corrupt media driving the get away car for the same financial interests who have hijacked our political process. They approve of Obama. He's no change at all. We would be the change if we can find it within to finally overthrow this long process of hijacking our democracy.
The anger needs to become the motivating force behind a coherent movement to put wealth in the hands of those capable of producing useful goods that fulfill real human needs. In analyzing the reason why all the plans seem to focus so narrowly on making the players who made this wreck whole, it seems that Krugman has it right: In Obama's mind, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system. In the words of a recent posting on the Nonviolent Jesus (http://nonviolentjesus.blogspot.com/2009/03/cognitive-regulatory-capture.html), "If the goal of Barack Obama is to 'fix the economy', meaning to restore it to its previous state before the cascading effects of loss of trust, then what he is doing makes perfect sense. He is pumping massive amounts of equity into the failed system in order to re-inflate the bubble economy and restore it to its previous state. Bonuses make sense in this context because they are the primary motivating factors for those who created the bubble economy. He can only be considered off-target if his goal is truly to transform the current banking system. But nothing in his rhetoric or practice indicates that it is – his goal is preservation of the status quo, nothing more, nothing less."
This straightforward explanation can also direct us to the agents in charge of the bailout process - the same Wall Street bankers who profited so much from the high risk speculation. The further question arises as to when they took control of the process - recently with the start of the Obama administration or previously with the Bush bailouts in September. Or perhaps before?
Once the public recognizes "...the decade-long (and ongoing) pillaging of America's financial security and the future of its middle class by the financial owners of our political system" we will begin to summon the necessary political force to make fundamental alterations, but this force must be guided by a deep understanding of the nature of that system and the imagination to create true alternatives. Rage can easily be deflected toward new targets which the corporate media will be glad to promote.
Mob rage in and of itself cannot effect these changes. It only serves to force the ruling class to react in a frenzied attempt to placate the outrage. Without organization, its fury will soon be spent or redirected to more convenient enemies. The narrow monied factions know this and can wait out the storm.
Unfortunately, for the immediate future, we have no other power to rely on. Those of us who recognize the situation may be able to remedy this critical gap through new political formations and we should act quickly to begin to coalesce into organized groupings. There is another possible reaction to public outrage by those who find it inconvenient, one that the Nazis brought to a high degree of perfection.
As to why there has been so little public outcry, it seems to me that our education and media system condition us to act as purely private agents seeking maximum benefits for ourselves, not public citizens with sacred obligations to others, in our country and in our world.
You call THIS anger?
I don’t see any guillotines; I don’t see any car fires or burning effigies; I haven’t seen any mobs of 10,000 roving Wall Street breaking into buildings and pulling people out to tar and feather. If the problem here is the amount of anger it is absolutely that there is not enough. But I don’t think that’s what the problem is. The average person doesn’t know nearly enough to know who to be angry at, so any attempt to do the usual and personalize the situation will ignore larger questions, systems that need to be changed and skewed psychology that needs to be healed.
The politicians who allowed the destruction of Glass-Steagall and our other protections, the public who weren’t paying attention… who's to blame? (You don’t have to even know what Glass-Steagall was, you just have to have been paying attention to the kind of people we kept electing and what else they were doing to know that this was our destination. This is embryonic corporate feudalism; this isn’t even the beginning of what the people in charge would do if we let them, addicted as they are to money, power, punishment and the image of the father-god which reverberates from the top of the system to the bottom.
Unless we begin to understand WHY people do what these people have done, and how the system we have co-created not only lets but encourages them, after we take away their bonuses and make a few retire early there will be more, waiting for their chance to do the same thing. Or at least something similar enough to be different without distinction. This is not Enron. But it’s the same as Enron, on a far more massive scale. Why did we not fix this problem after Enron? Because we were angry at too few people, didn’t make the connections between the individuals and the system, and didn’t understand the whole picture, including the pervasive psychology of our society. Want more of this? Keep being angry at a few executives who got obscene bonuses.