Barry's Blog: The Empire Strikes Back

[Barry]

Hey Everybody,

I'm outraged by the recent Supreme Court ruling eliminating all limits on corporate political contributions. I can hardly believe its happening.

This is it. The chips are down.

Mr. Obama has had his first cozy year with 60 votes in the senate. The warm ups are over (whether used or wasted is your call). The game is on.


I'm glad to say, in my opinion, the battle appears to be joined.

Mr Obama has found is backbone at long last (right after he saved the world's economy from disaster).

I am heartened by his immediate repudiation of the Supreme Court ruling and his recent initiative to get control of the banks couldn't be more timely.

I know in Star Wars, the Empire referred to the bad guys. But in this fight, the good guys, imo, have the top spot and most levers of power. And we're going to need every bit of this to set it right.

Here's a great New York Times article about the shift in position by the Obama administration. BTW, I am delighted to see Paul Volker at his side.

---

January 22, 2010
With Populist Stance, Obama Takes On Banks

By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — The tougher approach to financial regulation that President Obama outlined on Thursday reflected a changed political climate, the rebound in big banks’ fortunes after their taxpayer bailout and a shift in power within the administration away from those who had been seen as most sympathetic to Wall Street.

In calling for new limits on the size of big banks and their ability to make risky bets, Mr. Obama was throwing a public punch at Wall Street for the third time in a week, underscoring the imperative for him and his party to strike a more populist tone, especially after the Republican victory Tuesday in the Massachusetts Senate race.

In announcing his proposals Thursday at the White House, Mr. Obama said if the financial industry wanted a fight over new restrictions, it was a fight he was ready to have.

The new approach was welcomed by the White House political team and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and delivered by a less enthusiastic economic team on orders last month from Mr. Obama.
It was also a victory for Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman and outside adviser to Mr. Obama.

Until Thursday, when he stood beside the president at the White House announcement of the new policy, Mr. Volcker truly had been on the outside of administration decision-making. And, in frustration, he had been increasingly vocal about the need for the administration to clamp down on what he described as the casinolike operations at the big banks that nearly destroyed the financial system in the first place.
In adopting the tougher line, Mr. Obama set aside a more limited approach to regulation that had been championed since last year by his economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

Yet even Mr. Geithner of late has been moving toward a tougher stance on Wall Street, in part out of anger that big banks, having ridden a taxpayer bailout back to comfortable profitability, are now rewarding themselves with big bonuses and fighting harder in Congress against the administration’s initiative to tighten regulation of the financial system.

The issue reignited speculation, common in the administration’s early months, that Mr. Geithner and perhaps Lawrence H. Summers, the senior White House economic adviser, were not long for the Obama world given broad public perceptions that they remained too close to the financial industry.

But numerous administration officials said that both men had earned the trust and confidence of Mr. Obama, who believed they had not received credit for stabilizing a financial system that by all accounts was on the verge of collapse when the president took office.

His pique on that score came through in his televised interview with ABC News on Wednesday, after the loss in Massachusetts, even as Mr. Obama empathized with Americans’ anger about the bailout effort, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, that he inherited from George W. Bush.

“Now if I tell them, ‘Well, it turns out that we will actually have gotten TARP paid back and that we’re going to make sure that a fee’s imposed on the big banks so that this thing will cost the taxpayers not a dime,’ that’s helpful,” Mr. Obama said. “But it doesn’t eliminate the sense that their voices aren’t heard and that institutions are betraying them.”

To change that, he added, “We’re about to get into a big fight with the banks.”
That fight is sure to continue testing Mr. Geithner, as well as Mr. Summers and lesser-known members of the economic team who are seen by others in the West Wing as politically tone-deaf. Yet Mr. Geithner, in an interview, said he foresaw no problems.

“Just because things seem populist doesn’t mean they’re not the right thing to do,” he said.

The administration’s new tack suggests just how much big banks have miscalculated Americans’ intensified resentment against the bailout — anger stoked by persistent high unemployment, banks’ stinginess in lending to small business and the revival of Wall Street’s bonus culture.

They have become the perfect foil for the White House as it tries to lead the Democratic Party out of its post-Massachusetts morass — and to change the channel from the seemingly unending debate over health insurance. As the White House hopes to define the fight, the enemy is not big government but big money.

One problem for the Obama team, as some Congressional Democrats lament, is that its moves of late look poll-driven and overly reactive to the Democrats’ implosion in the Bay State race. To be sure, worse for the White House than Scott Brown’s win is the fact that the Republican won as an agent of change just as Mr. Obama did in 2008 — only this time, of course, the change was not from Bush administration policies but from Mr. Obama’s.

Despite the timing, however, all three of Mr. Obama’s recent policy stands have been in the works for some time. That is not to say they were not politically motivated; for some months, the administration has been concerned about Mr. Obama’s slipping support in the polls and many Americans’ perception of his administration as too cozy with Wall Street.

The president’s proposal last week for a tax on about 50 of the nation’s biggest banks to recoup any losses from the bailout began taking shape at the Treasury last August for inclusion in the budget that Mr. Obama will send to Congress in February, administration officials said.

Aside from its value as a way to raise $90 billion over 10 years, a time frame in which Mr. Obama is eager to cut deficits, the bank tax helped mute long-running criticism of Mr. Geithner for his opposition last summer to European leaders’ calls for taxing bank bonuses and transactions.

Earlier this week, with action heating up in the Senate over legislation for regulating banks, administration officials spread the word that Mr. Obama’s proposal to create an independent consumer protection agency was “non-negotiable.” Industry lobbyists have made killing the agency a priority, while liberal groups have made its creation a test of Mr. Obama’s leadership.

Mr. Obama personally weighed in with a lengthy meeting at the White House on Tuesday with the panel’s chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut.

Until now, the president has had a low profile on the banking bill, though the House debated its version most of last year before passing it in December.

Some Democrats complain that the White House was too absorbed by the health care issue, but they acknowledge the banking issue was widely seen as an insider’s game over arcane issues like derivatives trading that have little resonance with the public.

Now that has changed. As Thursday’s call for new bank limits showed, the president personally is taking the lead as First Populist.

“Never again,” he said, “will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”

[WeAreLove]

With all due respect sir, i can hardly believe you don't see major propaganda for what it is. Obama is facilitating the rape of America, not defending her. Of course he has to cry crocodile tears about the latest outrage, that's his job as chief corporate mouthpiece. And the so-called "limits" on banks/corporations now are insulting, meaningless and irrelevant, after handing over the treasury and giving Bush a free ride for doing the same thing. It's like pretending to lock the vault door after holding it open to enable the robbers escape. It costs him nothing to pretend to put his foot down now, the treasury is empty, there's just about nothing left to steal. We now have the greatest debt the world has ever seen. His job now is to try to keep the public pacified. Please wake up.

I'm glad to say, in my opinion, the battle appears to be joined.

Mr Obama has found is backbone at long last (right after he saved the world's economy from disaster).
...

[Larry Robinson]

This decision puts one more nail in the coffin of democracy.

NY Times editorial:

The Court’s Blow to Democracy


Published: January 21, 2010


With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.


Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.

[Hotspring 44]

“Never again,” he said, “will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”

I will believe that only after I see it!

["Mad" Miles]

For those not familiar with the history of how Supreme Court "rulings" led to the establishment of corporations as having the rights of individual persons under the U.S. Constitution, I recommend this.

It is an interesting and disturbing history. And it is not covered in the California State Curriculum Standards for Social Science / History!

Now you'll know what the "End Corporate Personhood" movement is all about.

And why the latest decision by the Supremes is no surprise.

Yeehaaa!

"Mad" Miles

[WeAreLove]

Quote:

Barry wrote:

“Never again,” he said, “will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”

Hotspring wrote: "I will believe that only after I see it!"

Not even naive and gullible Americans would fall for another mountruous *bailout* under that guise again, but it doesn't matter, they've already cleaned the cupboard bare.

Over the last ten years we have witnessed the greatest theft in human history, and those responsible are running Obama's economic team.

["Mad" Miles]

This just in from Jim Hightower,

Last September, I wrote The Hightower Lowdown about how the Roberts' Court could throw out over 100 years of campaign finance law.
Remember their names: Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.
Yesterday, from within the dark isolation of the Supreme Court, these five men pulled off a black-robed coup against the American people's democratic authority. In an unprecedented perversion of judicial power, this court cabal has decreed that corporations have a free-speech "right" to dip into their corporate coffers and spend unlimited sums of money to elect or defeat candidates of their choosing.
Corporate interests already had too much money power over our political system. No other group in America comes anywhere near the spending clout that this relatively small clutch of wealthy special interests wields over our elections and government. So it's ludicrous for anyone – much less Supreme Court judges – to argue that the corporate voice is a victim of political "censorship." This is not merely judicial activism, it is judicial radicalism.
Thomas Jefferson warned about the dangerous rise of corporate power, declaring that must "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations." Today, I'm sure that founding patriots like Jefferson are not simply spinning in their graves at the Supreme Court's surrender to this aristocracy – they're trying to claw their way out of their graves to throttle all five of the traitors.
We MUST fight back. Many good groups are working on this issue, and we all have to get involved to fight against this corporate take over of our political system. Public Citizen has a petition we can sign. Common Cause is asking us to contact your congressperson and make sure they have signed on to the Fair Elections Now Act. I mentioned other good groups that are working on this issue. Get in touch with them. Let's fight the good fight... and win! Onward!

[WeAreLove]

I'm so glad Obama's gettin' tough now!

New bank rules unlikely to hurt big institutions

NEW YORK – President Barack Obama's latest broadside against big banks may have more bark than bite.

Obama's plan to limit banks' size and risky trading has spooked investors, but analysts say it would have only marginal effect on institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup — and would be hard to enforce. And it's not clear the rules would reduce taxpayers' risk of having to bail out another big bank.

New bank rules unlikely to hurt big institutions - Yahoo! News