Fighting Back in America’s 30-Year Class War

David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this conservative and rather-professorial columnist for The New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag with disappointment — you can practically hear the tsk-tsks and the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When most commentators on the right see things that offend them, they get snarling mad; Brooks gets sad.

What saddened Brother Brooks this time was Barack Obama’s budget. In a recent column, he noted that the $3.6 trillion total is “gargantuan” (we columnists are paid to make keen observations like that), but what really upset him was that the tax burden to finance universal health care, energy independence and other big initiatives in Obama’s budget “is predicated on a class divide.”

With heavy sighs, Brooks expressed great despair that “no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people,” adding with a tsk-tsk that “all the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.”

Leaving aside the fact that such things as health-care coverage for every American and a booming green energy economy will benefit the rich as well as the rest of us, Brooks’ column was echoing a prevalent theme in all of the right’s attacks on Obama’s economic proposals: Class War! Indeed, the Times’ columnist even suggested (sadly) that Obama’s budget was fundamentally un-American: “The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment,” he sniffed.

Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good history book (Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” would be an eye-opening place to start). While our schools, media and politicians rarely mention it, America’s history is replete with class rebellions against various moneyed elites who act as though they’re the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a bunch of fire hydrants.

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Interview with Hightower in Buzzflash

There’s a fabulous interview on Buzzflash with Hightower that we couldn’t be prouder of– check it out:

Jim Hightower’s Tips on 21st Century Populism, and Obama’s Rare Opportunity — A BF Interview

BuzzFlash is a big Hightower fan. We’ve heard him speak several times and Jim’s got more Texas one-liners than LBJ after downing a bottle of Scotch, although we don’t suspect Hightower is a drinking man. He’s just a down home populist in a Twitter age. Not that Jim doesn’t know how to make an excellent use of the Internet to get his message across.

[…]

BuzzFlash: First off, as a native Texan, you must be celebrating George W. Bush’s return to your home state.

Jim Hightower: We’re all so very excited. He’s in his little ghetto in Preston Hollow and we’re totally sure that he’ll not be bothering us here in Austin or any other part of Texas.

BuzzFlash: What happened to his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford?

Jim Hightower: He keeps insisting that he’s going to go back and forth to it pretty much as he did during the Presidency. His ranchero, as I call it, is a curious ranch in the sense that it has no cattle on it. That’s kind of rare in Texas to have a ranch but no livestock whatsoever on it. And in fact, of course, he built that in 1999 when Karl Rove was trying create an image for him as the cowboy president. But Laura doesn’t like the ranch, so I don’t think he’s going to be spending a lot of time there either. Maybe he’ll spend time at the library, I guess, reading his book.

Read the rest of this interview on Buzzflash!

Ending the Culture of Executive Entitlement

I don’t mind losing when we lose, but I hate losing when we win.

One big reason that Barack Obama now occupies the big chair in the Oval Office is that he embraced the public’s rising indignation at the blatant greed of Wall Street bankers, striking the proper populist tone in last year’s presidential election. After all, these slick financial elites crashed our economy, yet they kept enriching and pampering themselves, even as taxpayers were being forced to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at their failing institutions.

Having won and taken office, Obama proceeded to rip right into the bankers’ shameless avarice, denouncing their “culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else.”

Great stuff! Go get ’em, Barack!

A week later, however, the president’s treasury chief, Timothy Geithner, rolled out the administration’s plan to add more than a trillion dollars to the ongoing Wall Street bailout, and — Holy William Jennings Bryan — Obama’s populist bark had been reduced to a puppy whimper! It seems that Geithner and Obama’s top economic advisor, Lawrence Summers — both of whom have long been cozy with the very same greed-headed bankers who caused the financial mess we’re in — had been cooing into the president’s ears about the “danger” of “harshly” punishing executives and “spooking” private investors.

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Eye on Congress: Who didn’t vote for their own raises

Here are the 35 lawmakers that voted against giving themselves a raise in January ’09:

Hear the Whine of Wall Street’s Latest Tune

Listen intently, and you can hear the faint music of the band coming from over the hills. Their drums are pounding out a steady cadence, the bagpipes are wheezing mournfully, and the fifes are trilling plaintively. Coming straight at you, it’s The Musicale Marching Pity Corps from Wall Street!

This big banker band — including a line of baton-twirling lobbyists and a chorus of right-wing talk show yakkers — is on the march because Obama and other dastardly Democrats have proposed to cap the outrageous pay, bonuses and perks that bailed-out Wall Streeters keep grabbing for themselves. The band’s whining refrain (note: You might want to reach for your hankie before reading this) is that these princes of high finance are being picked on.

Yes, trumpet the bankers, we make a lot of money, but we deserve it, and the system cannot function without such rewards for us. Indeed, sniffs a Wall Street consultant, “taxpayers should want banks to retain the cream of the crop.” Uh, sir — wouldn’t that be the same cream that has soured America’s entire financial system?

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The Troubling Ethics of Timothy Geithner

In describing a suspicious character who had visited his home, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Average Americans today might need to be counting their spoons, because President Obama and the Congress have visited Timothy Geithner upon us. He’s the new treasury secretary, our nation’s top financial official, whose duties include handling the ongoing Wall Street debacle.

Not only has Geithner felt it necessary to talk insistently about his honor, but Obama and assorted members of Congress have also felt compelled to assure us that Tim really is an honest guy. It’s a bit like hanging a sign on the Treasury building declaring, “Honest Tim’s Used Bailouts.”

What forced this rash of testimonials to Geithner’s integrity is that, in a 2006 audit, the IRS found that he had failed to pay his Social Security and Medicare taxes for 2003 and 2004. Oops, my bad, said Geithner at the time, ponying up $16,732 for back taxes and interest.

But — oops, again — when he was being vetted for the Treasury job last November, it turns out he’d also dodged these same payroll taxes in 2001 and 2002. He conveniently failed to volunteer these earlier violations to the auditors in 2006. Nailed by the presidential vetters, Geithner sheepishly rushed out another belated payment to the IRS, this one totaling $25,970.

“It was an innocent mistake,” Obama quickly asserted when the transgression became public: “Careless and avoidable, but unintentional,” insisted the perpetrator himself. “A lot to do about nothing,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, dismissively.

Well, plenty of people do make mistakes on their tax forms, or even occasionally try to scoot by Uncle Sam without paying the full due bill. But none of these folks was nominated to run the agency that includes the IRS! And none of them has worked in key positions at the Treasury under three presidents, been a major official at the International Monetary Fund or headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the past five years, as has Geithner.

What we have here is a treasury secretary with what The New York Times called “a cavalier attitude” toward paying his own taxes, thus tainting his ability to command respect from us hoi polloi.

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Bush Speaks

“So long,” sang Woody Guthrie, “it’s been good to know you.”

I’m humming that tune as George W., rides off into the sunset — just an old cowpoke headed back home to his Texas spread. No, he’s not headed to that hokey ranchette in Crawford that Karl Rove insisted he buy in 1999 to spiff up his image as a “Western guy” running for president. (Bush’s “ranch,” by the way, is so hokey that he has no livestock on it! He literally is all hat, no cattle.) Instead, George is retiring to a posh $2 million house in one of Dallas’ wealthiest cul-de-sacs, where he’ll fit in quite comfortably with such upscale neighbors as T. Boone Pickens and Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks.

Of course, most Americans don’t care where he goes, as long as he’s gone. But I have to concede that, as a columnist who got a lot of mileage out of him, it was good to know him. It’s going to seem strange to have a president who is able to speak in complete sentences, containing verbs and everything. Where’s the fun in that?

So, already feeling nostalgic for the steady flow of gaffes and goofs from Bush’s mouth to our ears, it seems appropriate to send him off with a retrospective of some of his best insights, in his own words:

On what an outraged public should do in response to the 9/11 attacks on our country:

“Go shopping” (2001).

On his role as president:

“I’m the person who gets to decide, not you” (2002).

“I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best” (2006).

“I really appreciate the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce for giving me an opportunity to explain why I have made some of the decisions I have made. My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions” (2007).

“I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions” (2009).

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Put the Bite Back in Our Financial Watchdog

After Bernard Madoff confessed in December to looting some $50 billion from investors through a long-running, widespread Ponzi scheme, Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., complained that this massive fraud “fell through the cracks of our regulatory system.”

Indeed it did, but let’s be blunt — there are now a lot more “cracks” than “system” in America’s financial regulatory apparatus.

It’s not like Bernie was running some intricate, obscure and novel type of investment finagling. It was a Ponzi scheme — one of the oldest and simplest hustles that exists. And Madoff’s version of it not only was the biggest in history, but also one of the most glaring, having prompted plenty of formal complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is supposed to be the public’s watchdog against such ugliness.

But the dog didn’t bark, much less bite, even though SEC enforcement officials have received numerous credible and specific allegations about Madoff’s shady doings. One of the most prominent complaints came in a 2005 letter from a well-known securities executive, Harry Markopolos, who titled his missive so boldly that even the most obtuse regulator couldn’t have mistaken the message: “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud.”

Hello … Anyone home? No. Again and again, the SEC either conducted no investigation into the complaints or only a cursory one, even exonerating him in a 2007 case based on “facts” that were supplied by a helpful concerned citizen: Madoff himself!

The real story of the Madoff mess is not him, but the mess — the fact that under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush there has been a deliberate, fantasy-based defanging of our financial watchdog. The fantasy is that in the laissez-fairyland of deregulation, bankers and brokers can be trusted to do what’s right.

This faith-based regulatory philosophy was enthusiastically embraced by a panelist at a 2004 session convened by the SEC to promote further deregulation of Wall Street firms: “You really have to start with the assumption that most of us in this industry really have their client’s interests, you know, coming first.”

That panelist was Bernard Madoff.

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