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.

Read the rest of this column on Creators.com

Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read Jim Hightower’s column in your hometown paper.

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?

Read the rest of this column on Creators.com

Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read Jim Hightower’s column in your hometown paper.

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.

Read the rest of this column on Creators.com

Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read Jim Hightower’s column in your hometown paper.

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).

Read the rest of this column on Creators.com

Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read Jim Hightower’s column in your hometown paper.

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.

Read the rest of this column on Creators.com

Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read Jim Hightower’s column in your hometown paper.

Bringing a Bit of Fairness to the American Workplace

Unions. Who needs ’em? They’re so passe, so 1930s.

This is the frantic argument being pushed by corporate lobbyists who’re worried by the recent resurgence in union organizing, political punch and public support. Sure, say these corporatists, unions were needed back in the bad ol’ Depression days, when rich executives and investors treated workers with all the respect that a Kleenex gets — use ’em up, toss ’em out.

But, hey, Bucko, that was last century! We’re all in the modern global economy today, where cooperation — not confrontation — is the key. Workers are now called “associates,” and we deal with each of them as individuals in a flexible workforce willing to help top executives cut labor costs. Unions just get in the way of this, don’t you see?

This line of “thinking” was expressed a couple of weeks ago by John Engler, the former Michigan politician who’s now chief lobbyist and noted labor theorist for the National Association of Manufacturers: “In the sophisticated workplaces of the 21st century, you see management and labor often work closely together to beat the competition. When they’re doing that, the need for unions is obviated. And when management and unions are not working together, unions are not likely to succeed and not likely to survive.”

What Professor Engler is telling us is that, ergo, ipso facto and ad absurdum, he’s a gooberhead.

The need for unions is hardly obviated when worker productivity keeps rising, only to be rewarded by declining wages, elimination of health care benefits and cancellation of pensions. Meanwhile, downsizings and offshorings of American jobs are rampant, and part-time work is the new norm.

Read the rest of this column on Creators.com

Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read Jim Hightower’s column in your hometown paper.

New Hightower Lowdown available: Senators bail out banker buds but stiff workers

THE 8,000-MEMBER GREATER GRACE TEMPLE in Detroit is the home church of many autoworkers, and its Sunday service on December 7 spoke directly to their troubles. The tone was set by the choir’s opening selection, “I’m looking for a Miracle.” The Pentecostal pastor kept the spirit moving with a sermon he titled “A Hybrid Hope,” after which the congregation joined in a full-throated, hallelujah version of the gospel classic, “We’re Gonna Make It.”

For the men and women who actually do the work in automobile manufacturing (America’s quintessential industry), the only hope left for dealing with a catastrophic economic meltdown seems to be prayer. Their corporate leaders have failed them, and Congress has stiffed them. Only last month’s begrudging agreement by the White House to consider a $14 billion bridge loan for the Big Three automakers has given them any optimism as their industry limps into 2009. But the ongoing bailout battle is no longer about economics. It’s about class in America.

Republican lawmakers, backed by a raucous chorus of right-wing pundits and corporate lobbyists, have turned Motor City’s economic woes into an excuse for launching a mendacious and pernicious assault on America’s hard-working, highly skilled, unionized working families–and on the middle-class ideals that they embody.

Read the rest of this issue at The Hightower Lowdown.