Our Newest Senator
Ladies and Gentlemen of Illinois, we present you with your new junior senator:
If that doesn’t make you proud enough, take a look at the memorial he has already erected … to himself:
That’s right. That is a tomb the new senate appointee had built to praise and celebrate his own achievements. His ego and his self-love are that, um … monumental.
The Don Of Pay-To-Play Politics
Blago, bow down to "The Don."
While the venal and unrepentant doofus Rod Blagojevich is being pilloried by the national media and portrayed as the second coming of Boss Tweed, the sick, graft-ridden carnival that is our pay-to-play political system continues unabated around the country.
Case in point: another heavyweight official in big state government, the former president of California’s state Senate, Don Perata. AKA: The Don.
Until he was termed out this year, Perata was the second most powerful man in California behind Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. During his long political career, he’s always been notorious for his creative interpretation of campaign finance laws. In fact, the FBI has been trying to nail his slippery behind for years. But in the waning days of his reign in Sacramento, as he reluctantly prepared to leave office, the Don managed to outdo himself.
Perata maintains a so-called “leadership” political action committee. Over the years, he’s used this legalized slush fund to extract millions from major donors like Pacific Gas and Electric, Disney, and the state prison guards’ union so that he could spend those riches on things like:
- A failed recall campaign against one of his political enemies.
- A failed ballot initiative to extend term limits so that career politicians (like himself) in the state could cling to office a little longer.
- Another failed ballot initiative to allow state lawmakers (like himself) to continue drawing their own legislative districts every ten years.
But all of these blatantly self-serving expenditures were nothing compared to his swan song. From the SF Chronicle political blog:
… earlier this month Perata moved $400,000 from Leadership California, a committee he controls and serves as treasurer, to his legal defense fund. This comes on top of a similar $1.5 million transfer he made in November
So, for those of you scoring at home, Perata spent decades in public office shaking down big donors to fund his pet political campaigns. Now, he’s managed to shift a huge chunk of that dubious cash over to his “legal defense fund” so that he can fight charges that he … shook down big donors to fund his pet political campaigns. After all, lawyers ain’t free. And someone’s got to pay for Don’s shenanigans. Why not the same companies and kingmakers that have been paying for the best government they could buy all these years?
To top it all off, Perata pulled this last minute, multimillion dollar prestidigitation while he was still the subject of an active FBI investigation. Oh, and he’s not letting little annoyances like term limits or looming corruption charges end his political career. This is The Don we’re talking about! He’s already laying the groundwork to run for mayor of Oakland.
Blagojevich who?
Who Says Main Street Isn’t Getting A Bailout?
This should now read: "We'll be taking your money anyway ... and lending it back to you!"
This is for all you whiners out there hating on Hank Paulson and the federal government for throwing trillions at Wall Street and billions at Detroit.
Relax! The Washington bailout bonanza is going to trickle down to you. You’re going to get a cut of the spending spree Uncle Sam is taking out on his no-limit Mao Zedong Visa. It’s just going to come as it always does–funneled through the coffers of a politically-connected corporation, in this case the brand, spanking new Bank of General Motors.
From the NY Times:
GMAC, the automobile financing company, said Tuesday morning that it would immediately resume financing to a wider range of car buyers, a day after the Treasury Department injected billions of dollars into the lender.
GMAC said in a statement that it would modify its credit criteria to include financing for customers with a credit score of 621 or above, a significant expansion of credit compared with the 700 minimum score put in place two months ago.
You see? Who says our government isn’t bailing out Main Street? Of course, we don’t get a check in the mail or anything. Who do we think we are, a Goldman Sachs executive or something? No. The benefit we will reap from our own tax dollars, and our children’s tax dollars, is … the privilege of taking out more debt to buy more inefficient, foreign-oil dependent jalopies from Detroit.
What’s that? You just lost your job? Your credit cards are already maxed out? You can barely make the mortgage every month? So what! What you really need is a new Hummer! Or how about that Suburban you’ve been eyeing? You might as well buy them. Your tax dollars are not only being spent to fight wars in the Middle East to secure the oil to run them, that money is now being used to make sure you qualify for a loan even if you’ve lost your job, your credit cards are maxed out, and you can barely make the mortgage! That’s your bailout, the right to go deeper into debt for more junk you don’t need. Get it while the deals are hot!
It’s really quite simple. We find ourselves in the midst of an economic meltdown, caused in large part by too much cheap debt being handed out by too many corporations to too many people who couldn’t afford to pay it off. So naturally, the solution to the problem is to use public money to subsidize more cheap debt, so that corporations crippled by lending to people who couldn’t afford to pay off their debt can … lend money to more people who probably won’t be able to afford to repay the loans! What could go wrong with that brilliant plan?
Really. This is the best our leaders can come up with. This is the best they can offer. Talk about subprime thinking …
UPDATE: Wall Street loves Washington’s gas-on-a-burning-house, bailout via more cheap debt solution. As of this writing, the Dow has gained over 100 points. GM: up 6%. Happy days are here again! Our “free markets” just can’t seem to get enough of our new command economy!
Straight Talk On The Economy–From Half A World Away
Finally, a writer at a major media outlet speaks the plain truth about our wretched economy. Too bad this clear-eyed journalist lives halfway around the globe in India. From The Hindu:
Things are not as bad as they seem for the U.S. economy. They are worse. As the data flow in, even estimates for earlier months have been revised sharply upwards. The September job loss figure was recorded as 159,000 two months ago. The Bureau of Labour Statistics now says the figure is 403,000. The first figure for October was 240,000 jobs lost. Now it is 320,000 … If Barack Obama’s plan to create 3 million jobs over the next two years works, it would still barely recover those that vanished over the previous two.
…
Meanwhile, the emphasis right through has been on bailing out the financial giants. (An Institute for Policy Studies report notes that the U.S. and European governments are set to spend 40 times more to rescue financial firms than to fight climate and poverty crises in the developing world.) And yet, daily, new scandals emerge from Wall Street.
But our favorite section comes near the end. After describing the crimes of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and questioning how the government and financial media could have allowed such a two-bit charlatan to purloin billions in plain sight, the author of the piece (one P. Sainath) turns to another of our pet subjects here at Captive American–the misplaced fury over Rod “I want to make money” Blagojevich:
However, there is far more passion generated over the obnoxious Governor of Illinois who tried to sell the Senate seat that Mr. Obama vacated - for personal benefit. Governor Blagojevich’s action is neither new to Chicago, nor huge. It is a petty deal by a petty person, reeking of low corruption in high places. The energy it generates, though, is like focusing on the local pick-pocket when grand larceny proceeds next door.
When it comes to the day-in-day-out business of our pay-to-play government, Blagojevich is certainly the political equivalent of a pickpocket. And compared to the trillions Wall Street has siphoned from investors’ wallets, and is currently siphoning from the national treasury, Bernie Madoff’s massive swindle looks like a purse-snatch at a bank heist. And yet, our domestic media treats these two clowns like they were the Leopold and Loeb of our political and economic misery.
Oh well, at least we can count on the South Asian press to tell us the real story …
Elitists Welcome
Caroline Kennedy is certainly a member of the elite. But not the kind of elite we need in government.
Columnist Tunku Varadarajan over at Forbes.com says Caroline Kennedy is the least objectionable candidate for Hillary Clinton’s senate seat. While we don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion, we concur with much of his reasoning, especially when it comes to the scourge of the career politician:
Democratic apparatchiks are questioning, openly, her “qualifications,” a word that ought to be used sparingly in political jousts, given the only “qualification” most politicians can boast these days–and boast they do, with a brazen circularity–is their time spent in politics.
Professional politicians would profess the following: I deserve political office because I’ve held office before; and, before that, spent many years pushing and shoving my way through a throng to get to political office; and, before that, many years aspiring and plotting to reach the starting point where the throng gathers to battle for office.
To prove this excellent point, Varadarajan could easily cite our recent study on the House of Representatives. We found that the average representative in the House has spent more than half of his or her adult life in government office. And nearly a quarter of the House’s membership worked as political staffers before becoming professional politicians themselves.
Varadarajan goes on to make a persuasive case for returning control of our government to the most qualified, most successful citizens in the country, people who have proven themselves outside the realm of politics:
American politics is now too much the playground of the professional politician, the elected “salaryman”; it has too few members of the elite who enter politics in pursuit of the public good, and who can afford to mold their politics to the dictates of their conscience.
These are all good points, to be sure. But where we differ with Varadarajan is over the definition of the word “elite.”
There is no doubt that our government is being eaten out from the inside by lifetime politicians. These leeches on the body politic have no real-world experience and, thus, no clue as to how lead us out of the many crises they themselves have created. The solution is to bring new blood to Washington, to elect people who have run something in their lives besides campaigns for office. In short, we urgently need the best and the brightest from the private sector to answer the call to serve again. That is the kind of “elite” we should be seeking out to send to Congress. And Caroline Kennedy is not a member of that exclusive club.
Besides her pedigree, Kennedy is in line for the Senate for two reasons: her ability to raise money and her knack for political patronage. Her supporters point to the millions she has pulled in for charity and act like that somehow qualifies her to govern the most powerful country in the world. Meanwhile, her critical endorsement of Obama during the Democratic primary has definitely given her major leverage over the party and the new administration.
Worst of all, she’s lobbying for the job by calling herself a “loyal Democrat.” Great. Just what we need. Another blindly partisan legislator with a 98 or 99% party-line voting record.
Even though she hasn’t yet served a day in office, Kennedy is already acting like a career politician. If she does wind up winning the appointment, she’ll obviously fit in just fine on Capitol Hill. And that’s exactly why she shouldn’t be sent there.
Sifting Through The Ashes Of The Crash
Michael Lewis has a new book out. With Panic–The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, the author of Liars Poker and Moneyball has turned his attention to the phenomenon of the financial crash. Today’s New York Times features a review by Daniel Gross. The most intriguing aspect of the book is its archeological excavation of enthusiastic, bubble-blowing media stories that predated recent economic calamities. Like this one:
A single entry from the Irvine Housing Blog, which shows how a person in January 2005 bought a $1.157 million house with $270 down, refinanced with a funky teaser-rate mortgage and then proceeded to open up a $491,000 home equity line of credit by 2007, neatly encapsulates the lunacy.
Lewis also digs up various sober, thoughtful post-mortems from the mainstream press after the boom times went bust. But, as Gross notes in his review, these same sage-sounding media outlets are the biggest cheerleaders of the collective delirium during the good times, and they are all too willing to pick up their pom-poms again and whip up the next speculative frenzy once the hangover wears off:
… the same business publications that do such a great job of dissecting the bubbles once they’ve popped are the same ones that help promote and sustain the next one.
This passage reminded us of a certain video compilation we posted several weeks ago, and dubbed “A Time Capsule of Economic Stupidity.” If you missed it the first time around, take a look at how popular business media figures, drunk on the high times and low interest rates of the housing boom, reacted to someone who didn’t buy into the hype:
PS: Lewis wrote a great feature article on the financial crisis for Portfolio’s December issue as well.
Road Hogs
President-elect Obama’s stimulus plan could wind up proving the old saying, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Literally.
Obama has touted his potentially trillion dollar spending spree as a rare win-win initiative. It will put people to work, he says, thus staving off the looming Great Depression II, while also modernizing our dilapidated transportation infrastructure. But a funny thing could happen on the way to the green energy revolution. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, is planning to funnel the cash through the states, with–surprise, surprise–almost no oversight on how it is spent. And it looks like most of the states can’t wait to blow their shares of the stimulus bonanza on the same kinds of shortsighted highway projects that got us hooked on foreign oil in the first place. From Bloomberg:
… much of the stimulus spending may promote urban sprawl while scrimping on more green-friendly rail and mass transit.
“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”
Obama Reality Check - Transparency Edition
Obama: my lawyer says I'm in the clear. Case closed!
During the campaign, John McCain released his medical records–all 1500 pages of them. His opponent, then Senator Obama (a longtime smoker) gave the general public … a 276 word “summary” of his health status written by his own doctor. Now, Obama has decided to let his own lawyer reassure us that he is in good moral and legal health, as well. From the LA Times:
The Barack Obama presidential transition office today finally released its own report on its own internal investigation of its own contacts with legally challenged Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And you’ll be comforted to know the Obama folks found no impropriety whatsoever by Obama folks.
…
According to the report by Greg Craig, an incoming White House attorney, Obama personnel had numerous contacts with the governor’s office but no one ever suspected that Blagojevich, who’s been under federal investigation for three years now, was doing anything wrong.
Several weeks ago, we wrote about the controversy surrounding Obama’s place of birth. As we said at the time, we did not necessarily believe that he was unqualified to serve. We simply wondered why he would allow the questions to linger by sharing everything but his actual birth certificate with the public. If he could put out copies of the document and statements from the Hawaii health director, why not simply produce the real thing? It reminded us of the way he released, or didn’t release, his medical records.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, it seemed like he was asking us to trust him but not to verify his claims. Now we have yet another “trust but don’t verify” moment from our new president. That makes three by our count in less than a year–and he isn’t even in office yet.
The outgoing administration had a lot of trust but don’t verify moments over the last eight years. Trust us to keep you safe, they told us, but don’t ask how we’re doing it. Trust us, we don’t torture. Trust us we don’t spy on American citizens, or ship suspected terrorists to secret prisons, or cherry pick intelligence to justify an illegal war. Trust us, Iraq has WMD. Trust us, Wall Street needs almost a trillion dollars in taxpayer money right now or we’re all going to be eating baked beans out of cans by next week. (We could go on, but we’ve got Christmas dinner to cook in a couple of hours …)
We’re not equating the scope and magnitude of Obama’s less than forthcoming attitude with Bush’s full blown fetish for secrecy, not to mention his numerous out and out prevarications. But then again, like we said, Obama’s not even in office yet. And, by all indications, he definitely appears fond of Dick Cheney’s “need-to-know” communication style with the American public.
Maybe Obama should issue a statement of some kind to reassure us that he really isn’t as secretive and non-transparent as he seems. Let’s just hope he doesn’t ask his own psychiatrist to write it.
Senator Chris Dodd Still Thinks We’re Stupid
Rod Blagojevich tried to sell a senate seat. Chris Dodd (above) used his seat in the Senate to reap thousands of dollars in discount mortgages and still refuses to tell the truth about it. Can someone explain the difference please?
Several months ago, we wrote about Senator Chris Dodd and his sweetheart mortgage deal with subprime loan giant, Countrywide Financial. Dodd is the chair of the Senate Banking Committee. The Banking Committee was one of the main governmental bodies that could have done something about the subprime loan fiasco before it wrecked our financial system. For good measure, Dodd compounded his original negligence by acting as a prime architect of the Wall Street bailout. We all know how well that’s worked out.
Anyhow, Dodd promised to release details of his mortgage deal shortly after the story of its existence broke. That was in June. In case you haven’t hung your Christmas stockings or lit your Menorah yet, it’s now the December. The end of December. But Dodd still hasn’t kept his word. And it appears he doesn’t plan on keeping his word and coming clean anytime soon. From the Connecticut Post:
Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., was asked Monday about releasing the particulars of his alleged special mortgage rate treatment from Countrywide Financial, a company that has been heavily criticized in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Dodd sidestepped the issue, as he has done on several other occasions.
“It’s Christmas [time],” a reporter noted to Dodd after his Westport meeting Monday with union leaders in Westport, asking him for the mortgage details.
“I didn’t quite think of Christmas in this way,” Dodd responded, adding that the information would be coming, but refused to say when.
(h/t: instapundit)
What does Dodd mean exactly with that last quote? That reporters shouldn’t interrupt his Christmas celebrations with nagging little matters like telling the truth to the people that elected him?
Most importantly, why is this only a regional story, and a minor one at that? Why is this not a Blagojevich-level scandal? Think about it: a sitting senator pockets what amounts to tens of thousands of dollars, not in cash but in discounts that are the same as cash, from a major corporation he is charged with overseeing, then refuses to release the details of the deal. How is that any better than a sitting governor shaking down contractors and corporations for campaign contributions or auctioning off a senate seat to the person who can benefit him the most?
Oh, that’s right. Dodd’s case is just business as usual in Washington. And Blago … well, he used bad words, we guess.
Dispatches From Cuba — Part One
By: Lee Brandenburg, founder and publisher of Captive American.com
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, I thought I’d jot down a few reflections from my dealings with that beautiful country. A couple years ago, I wanted to find out how this little island off the coast of Florida called Cuba could survive in spite of all our country’s deranged policies and dirty tricks. So I went down there to look around.
What I found was a population of beautiful people who love Americans but hate our government. I also found Cuban society to be a living history of U.S. foreign policy for the past 50 years, embodying everything I’ve been talking about, from all the screwed up laws America enacts, to the all the dirty dealings our leaders would just as soon stay buried. As it turned out, I also attended the last May Day speech Fidel Castro will probably ever deliver to his people.
My friend Matt Isaacs and I walked into Revolution Square with a Havana-bred architectural expert who has since succeeded in getting the hell out of Cuba. We walked for what seemed like miles along streets lined with hundreds of buses delivering government workers as well as paisanos from the provinces. Whether they’d wanted to come or not, there they were, expected to participate dutifully in the annual May Day celebration.
Even before the sun rose, the multitudes, 500,000 strong, crowded the Plaza de Revolución. A huge police force encircled the crowd, knee boots polished to a gleam in the hazy tropical light, and their olive uniforms contrasted with the countless red shirts worn dutifully by people in the crowd. Looking around, we saw these policemen everywhere, even up on the roofs of the buildings ringing the square, where we could glimpse just their heads and the tips of their rifles.
All eyes were on the stage up front, all the citizens careful not to attract the attention of the plainclothes policemen circulating in their midst. This annual event, after all, has its roots in violent clashes between the common people and the establishment. Anyone acquainted with the history of the May Day celebration knows it springs from the Haymarket demonstrations in 1886 in which as many as fourteen agitators were killed at the hands of Chicago police. (I always had the impression that the call for help in a disaster was related to May Day, but the call actually comes from the French word, Venez M’aider!, “Come help me.”)
When Fidel finally got up to speak, I could catch only a few words, having flunked Spanish in high school. I was, however, able to discern a lot of “Bush” and a lot of “Norté Americanos” in Fidel’s ranting. At that moment, I finally realized the key role Mr. Bush and our other former Presidents have played in Castro’s longevity.
American citizens are the only people barred from going to Castro’s country. By maintaining these stupid non-travel laws and the misguided national embargo, U.S. presidents have kept American faces off the street, allowing Fidel to continue painting us the devils of the north (and his people, though they love Americans when they meet them, have no choice but to pledge allegiance to his anti-Americanism). Until the U.S. drops the travel ban, we can’t very well expect the Cuban perspective to broaden much. But our leaders have stubbornly continued to give Fidel every right to lay the blame of his own failed policies entirely on us, policies that only starve this wonderful island and its 11 million people of possibility.
PS: Last week, the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva called on the U.S. to end the embargo on Cuba.
