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Miracles do happen: bought and paid for politicians looking at a financial transactions tax

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Sometimes the stars align, and what once seems far fetched suddenly becomes possible. For years people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman have been recommending a financial transactions tax. It brings in immense amount of revenue, discourages useless and non-productive speculation, and has negligible impact on people who are buying stocks for actual investment. Since it makes so much sense, it has of course been a non-starter, except, curiously, Britain has had one for years, and it has worked well.

Now, according to the Times, even the corporate puppets are starting to talk about it:

Driven by populist anger at bankers as well as government needs for more revenue, the idea of a tax on trades of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments has attracted an array of influential champions, including the leaders of France and Germany, the billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, former Vice President Al Gore, the consumer activist Ralph Nader, Pope Benedict XVI and the archbishop of Canterbury.

…

The Robin Hood tax has also become a rallying point for labor unions, nongovernmental organizations and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which view it as a way to claw back money from the top 1 percent to help the other 99 percent. Last month, thousands of demonstrators, including hundreds in Robin Hood outfits with bright green caps and bows and arrows, flooded into southern France to urge the leaders of the Group of 20 nations to do more to help the poor, including passing a financial transactions tax.

Oddly enough, according to the article, the British PM seems to feel that such a tax would destroy the financial sector in London, even though they’ve had a fairly large tax on certain transactions for more than a century. One would think if the tax were going to drive traders from London it would have done so already.

The Obama White House, predictably, prefers to talk about a more ineffective, politically less appealing approach, which is equally impossible to get through Congress at the present time. Why appeal to your base when you can waste time trying to satisfy people who will never even accept your legitimacy? Maybe it has something to do with all those Wall Street dollars the Obama campaign is raking in.

Still, it’s good to see that this idea is gaining traction. It may be that it has high profile advocates, but for my money, it would never have come up for discussion had the Occupy movement never taken place. It’s amazing what a bunch of kids in tents and a few cops with a liberal supply of pepper spray can do.

Filed in Economics, Politics | | Comments (0)

Willard’s Massachusetts coverup

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

It’s actually hard to make the argument that anything could make Mitt Romney look worse, so lets just say that the latest revelation about his preemptive coverup of his record in Massachusetts is getting even more interesting. I give him credit for the gambit, by the way. Most politicians wait until they’re accused of something before they start covering it up, but Willard realized that by that time it’s too late.

As most people know, at the end of Romney’s tenure in Massachusetts, when he declined to face the voters wrath and seek a second term, his aides all developed a strange yet burning desire to own the hard drives in their state computers. Not the computers mind you, just the hard drives.

Turns out that there were some other computer shenanigans going on.

Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret, Reuters has learned.

The move during the final weeks of Romney’s administration was legal but unusual for a departing governor, Massachusetts officials say.

…

The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials.

In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost – $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state’s freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run.

As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor’s office was an additional $97,000.

The article doesn’t say whether the computers in question contained the hard drives that the governor’s lackeys were so anxious to purchase. If they did, then one must ask how the state was in a position to sell portions of leased equipment, and whether the sale of the hard drives is what led to the termination of the old lease.

You have to wonder, too, whether the computer deal is an example of Romney’s much touted business acumen at work and whether we can expect more deals like this should he become president. The deal was good for business, or one business, at least, but not so good for the state. A great deal for Romney too, who got to show his contempt for the people of Massachusetts and make them pay for his pleasure.

Filed in Republican Corruption | | Comments (0)

Tip of my hat

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Never let it be said that I don’t give credit where credit is due, though I suppose sometimes I don’t. But I want to do so today, to Commissioner of Consumer Protection William Rubenstein. 
 
I happen to represent a tenant’s association at a mobile home park. The tenants have found themselves in a dispute with the park owner. There’s no need here to go into the details. The DCP regulates mobile home parks. Being unable to get anywhere with the park owner’s lawyer, and hoping to avoid litigation, I contacted the department to see if it could be of assistance. 
 
I’ve been doing consumer work, in greater or lesser concentration, for more years than I care to admit, but I’ll do so anyway:35. Good lord, can I really be that old? Anyway, I have had many occasions to contact DCP, usually without much of a response. In this particular case I was asking only whether the department would entertain a complaint. 
 
I was more than surprised to get an email from one of the lawyers at DCP inviting my clients and me to meet with the Commissioner to discuss our problem. We met with him today, and he proposed what I believe was a practical solution to the problem. He may or may not get co-operation from the park owner, but that’s not the point. There was nothing about this issue that was qualitatively different than the types of problems I’ve written to DCP about on the past. In fact, my clients had contacted DCP about this issue when the last governor was in office, (what was her name?) without much response. The fact that the Commissioner took the time to meet with us and offer to deal with the issue was extraordinary. I have never had anywhere near that kind of response to any complaint I’ve made in the past. Of course, we’ve had Republicans protecting us consumers for the past 16 years (20 if you count Weicker) so we’ve grown used to a certain measure of benign neglect. 
 
And lest anyone think he did it because he was dealing with a world famous blogger-well, I didn’t use my nom de plume, so that doesn’t explain it. 

Filed in Local issues | | Comments (0)

Glass have empty, or glass half full?

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Sometimes it takes an act of bigotry to see how far we’ve come. A church in Kentucky took what its members no doubt thought was a perfectly reasonable racist action recently: 

When Stella Harville brought her black boyfriend to her family’s all-white church in rural Kentucky, she thought nothing of it. She and Ticha Chikuni worshiped there whenever they were in town, and he even sang before the congregation during one service.

 
Then, in August, a member of Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in Pike County told Harville’s father that Chikuni couldn’t sing there anymore. And last Sunday, in a moment that seems from another time, church members voted 9 to 6 to bar mixed-race couples from joining the congregation.

 

Actually, it’s hard to believe she thought nothing of it, but lets not interrupt the story. No doubt much to his surprise, the act of bigotry set off a firestorm, and the pastor had to backpedal, complete with the now standard denial that acts of religious bigotry don’t mean the religious are bigots:

“We are not a group of racist people,” said Keith Burden of the National Assn. of Free Will Baptists. “We have been labeled that obviously because of the actions of nine people.”

Not really just nine. You really have to count the abstainers, who in a situation like this must be accorded fellow traveler status. There were about 40 people there, so more than half didn’t vote. No doubt the nine active racists are simply stunned at any implication that they are racists, as the prime mover, former pastor Melvin Thomas explains:

“I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil” about a race, Thompson said last week in a brief interview. “That’s what this is being portrayed as, but it is not.”

Certainly not. It’s something else, though nobody can quite put a finger on what it actually is.

For myself, I think this is a glass half full event. Churches are the last bastions of governmentally sanctioned racism in this country. (It often seems that religion has a monopoly on bigotry and ignorance, but that’s not true. See, e.g., the Republican Party and Fox News) The First Amendment probably requires that the government keep hands off, so only social pressure can bring this sort of thing to an end. The fact that this church is scrambling to reverse itself speaks volumes about how far we’ve come. I doubt they’d have felt the need even 10 years ago, and I’m sure the event would have passed unnoticed 20 years ago. Prior to that, there’s a good chance the church would have been driven out of town if it had allowed mixed-race couples.

We’ll know we’ve almost made it when we hear a similar story coming out of Alabama.

Filed in American Life, Religion | | Comments (0)

Stephen Colbert exposes Siri’s bias

Friday, December 2, 2011

Monday I get my new iPhone 4s. I’m going back on my work plan, which I left because I couldn’t stand the Blackberry I was issued a few years ago, and I could get the iPhone relatively cheaply on a family plan. But now that Verizon has the iPhone, I can get one for free, so I’m going all out. 64GB, with a built in personal slave assistant.

Unfortunately, my wife tells me that I am not allowed to program Siri to call me “lord and master”, “Sire”, “your majesty”, or any other term of respect. This seems grossly unfair to me. After all, what fun is a personal assistant if you can’t exploit her?

But, as Stephen Colbert illustrates here, she has her dark but hilarious side.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Conservative Siri
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive
Filed in Video | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, December 2, 2011

Well, this is something completely different. Glenn Hardy is a local guy, who many years ago had the misfortune of trying to teach our kids to play the piano. Alas, he had no success in inspiring them to fall in love with the instrument, though they can both play tolerably and both went on to dabble in the guitar, the youngest even joining a band briefly. Glenn is well known hereabouts. Some time ago he played gratis at one of our Democratic fundraiser and we have a couple of his CDs. Here he’s playing a medley, with some Gershwin-you can’t go wrong with Gershwin-mixed in.

Filed in Music, Uncategorized | | Comments (1)

A Meta-scam

Thursday, December 1, 2011

My first reaction upon reading the following, was that no one could possibly be stupid enough to fall for it. Then I reflected that I live in a country in which half a dozen scam artists are running for president, and it’s considered normal. The full text of an email I just received:

SCAMMED VICTIM/US$1,000,000.00 BENEFICIARIES.REF/PAYMENTS CODE: 06654
$1,000,000.00.

ATTENTION SIR/MADAM,

CBN./UNITED NATIONS 2011 SCAM VICTIMS COMPENSATIONS PAYMENTS.

This is to bring to your notice that we are delegated from the United Nations &
Central Bank to pay 150 scam victims US$1,000,000.00 (ONE MILLION UNITED STATES
DOLLARS) each. You are listed and approved for this payment as one of the
scammed victims to receive this amount, get back to us as soon as possible for
immediate payment of your US$1,000,000.00 compensation payment.

On this faithful recommendation, we want you to know that during the last U.N.
meeting held at Abuja-Nigeria, the world was alarmed at the extent of losses
incured by victims of the Nigerian scam artists who operates in various
networks all over the world. In other to compensate victims, the U.N Body in
conjunction with the Nigerian Government is now paying 150 victims of these
operation US$1,000,000.00 each in accordance with the U.N. recommendations.

Due to the corrupt and inefficient Banking Systems in Nigeria, the Payments are
to be supervised by the ‘United Nations Officials and the Central Bank of
Nigeria, as the corresponding paying banks are Skye Bank of Nigeria Plc and
the World Bank, London Branch. According to the number of applicants at hand, 114
Beneficiaries has been paid, half of the victims are from the United States,
we still have more 36 left to be paid the compensation of US$1,000,000.00 each.
Your particulars was mentioned by one of the Syndicates who was arrested.

You are hereby warned not to communicate or duplicate this message to him For
any reason what so ever as the U.S. secret service is already on trace of the
other criminals. So keep it secret till they are all apprehended. Other victims
who have not been contacted can submit their application as well for scrutiny
and possible consideration. If you have already been notified of this payment
programme previously, do proceed with your claim as required.

As directed by the Global Settlement Committee, You can receive your
compensations payments via any of this payment Options you may Choose:
(A.) CERTIFIED CHEQUE (B.) ATM CARD PAYMENTS (C.) WIRE TRANSFERS.

We shall provide you with more details as soon as we hear from you.

Yours faithfully,

Mr. Watana Pravit
SCAMMED VICTIM/ REF / PAYMENTS CODE: 06654 US$1,000,000.00

Filed in Grifters | | Comments (0)

Corporate crime

Thursday, December 1, 2011

I don’t necessarily vouch for every statistic in this article, but the basic point appears to be indisputable: Merck  marketed a drug knowing full well that it was a clear and present danger to people with heart conditions, and as a result, thousands of people died, and just as predictably, no one was punished:
 

Some 3,000 Americans died in the attack on the World Trade Center. The murders perpetrated by Merck executives were not as dramatic, obviously, but were every bit as intentional. An early clinical trial had alerted them to the fact that Vioxx caused coronary damage. Their response was to exclude from future trials anyone with a history of heart trouble!

Once Vioxx was approved, Merck spent more than $100 million a year advertising it. (You may still remember the tune to “It’s a beautiful morning…”) Merck execs continued to ignore and suppress indications that their new blockbuster was causing strokes and heart attacks. Sales hit $2.5 billion in 2003. And when brave Dr. Graham first presented his irrefragable evidence to an FDA advisory committee in February 2004, Merck argued that the “unique benefits” of Vioxx warranted its remaining on the market. The FDA committee voted 17-15 to keep it available with a black box warning. Ten of the 32 committee members had taken money from Merck, Pfizer or Novartis (which were pushing drugs similar to Vioxx) as consultants. If these MDs had declared their conflicts of interest, Vioxx would have been pulled from the market by a vote of 14-8. By buying an extra seven and a half months, Merck made an extra billion or two, and killed 6,000 more Americans.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

We get letters

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

I got a fundraising email from Senator John Kerry, late of the Super Committee where he was purportedly one of the Democrats ready to throw us under the bus to achieve a pundit approved “deficit reduction” package that would sacrifice Medicare and Social Security in return for the promise from Republicans that they would think about having rich people make sacrifices one of these days.

 

But I digress.

 

Kerry is shilling for money for Senate Democrats, and he has this to say:

 

If Republicans held the Senate right now, just imagine what we’d be watching: Passage of the Ryan Plan, Bush-era efforts to privatize Social Security, and more tax cuts for billionaires while the middle class would be left holding the bag.

 

And make no mistake: That’s exactly what will happen if Republicans take the Senate in 2012.

 

Truly a depressing forecast, though in truth not much different than what he was rumored to be prepared to do himself. But  more depressing is that Kerry is probably right, even though the chance of Republicans reaching the magic 60 required of Democrats is basically zero.

 

For what Kerry is saying by implication is that Democrats will not engage in tit-for-tat. No obstructive filibusters from them, just to save Medicare or Social Security. That would be irresponsible. Now, one could argue that he is exaggerating a bit for the sake of raising money, and that Democrats would indeed step up and prevent passage of destructive legislation, as the Republicans did with constructive legislation. Were Mitch McConnell to make a similar appeal, we all know that threats he would cite, such as taxes on millionaires, or clean air and water, would never really be allowed to come to pass. But I refer anyone with any such illusions about the Democrats to those portions of the Bush years when the Democrats were in the minority. For that matter, look at the way Bush rolled over them when they re-took the majority. Harry Reid was ostensibly in charge when Bush got immunity for the telecoms, if memory serves.

 

Now, if Obama is beaten, the Democrats will have an excuse for their inability to filibuster, because odds are that the first thing the Republican Senate majority would do is change the rules to prevent them from retaliating for years of Republican obstructionism. Unless, of course, they make the calculation that they can bully the Democrats into not filibustering, which they might rightly feel they can do.  But if Obama wins – and the specter of a Gingrich or Romney presidency is making even me enthusiastic about re-electing him – and the Republicans take the Senate, there’s even odds that the Democrats will allow the Republicans to push anything they want through Congress, leaving it to Obama to veto the worst stuff.  Whether he will is another question, for if the Republicans win the Senate Obama will take it as a message from the American people to once again dance to the Republican tune, as he has done with such good results for the past two years. Never mind that should the Republicans capture the Senate, those seats they hold will probably still represent only a minority of actual Americans (given how the Senate is chosen under our increasingly archaic constitution). It will be our solemn duty to deal with them in good faith, despite their demonstrated unwillingness to reciprocate. It is depressing indeed to think that in the best case scenario, that’s the best  we can hope for.

 

So, I’m of two minds about Kerry’s appeal. Sure, I don’t want the Republicans to take over the Senate, although I’m not precisely sure why. But I also don’t want my money going to people like Ben Nelson, who felt it was wrong to use the filibuster, until Obama was in office, when he changed his mind and used it against a president of his own party.

 

Better to pick and choose. Don’t give to the DSCC. Give to ActBlue.

Filed in Democrats | | Comments (0)

Corporate Welfare on the grand scale

Monday, November 28, 2011

Must reading at Bloomberg, about the extent to which the Fed subsidized the too big to fail banks back at the time of the crash, putting to rest the oft told lie that many of these banks didn’t want the Feds money and paid it back as soon as they could. The amount of the bailout was staggering, more than enough to have financed a real stimulus package that, along with nationalizing those very banks, would have gotten us on the road to a real recovery:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

On a personal level I was truly gratified to read that Wells Fargo was among the banks on the dole:

The six — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley — accounted for 63 percent of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment- services firms, the data show. By comparison, they had about half of the industry’s assets before the bailout, which lasted from August 2007 through April 2010. The daily debt figure excludes cash that banks passed along to money-market funds.

Why do I care about Wells Fargo, in particular? Well, back in real time I posted something unflattering about Wells Fargo, about which I received 6 comments, all defending Wells Fargo, some claiming the bank only took the money because the government asked it to do so. To put things in perspective, that’s six more comments than an average post gets, or, stated as a percentage, that’s ?% more than the typical post gets. It was all highly suspicious and certainly looked like the Wells Fargo was scouring even the internet backwaters to defend itself.

I must take issue with one thing in the article, which I think is misleading, though not intentionally so:

Employees at the six biggest banks made twice the average for all U.S. workers in 2010, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics hourly compensation cost data. The banks spent $146.3 billion on compensation in 2010, or an average of $126,342 per worker, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s up almost 20 percent from five years earlier compared with less than 15 percent for the average worker. Average pay at the banks in 2010 was about the same as in 2007, before the bailouts.

This is in the context of alleging that the banks have only gotten bigger with more outsize pay packages, both of which may be true. But using an “average” figure likely understates the problem. As with society at large, the likelihood is that the increases in pay are going to the top echelons at the banks, and that if you took the median figure for the employees, it likely falls far below that $126K figure. That only make sense because you can pack a lot of “average” pay packages into one CEO package, meaning a whole lot of employees have to be below average in order to yield the average figure. (As has often been pointed out, if Bill Gates walks into a bar the average net worth of the people in the bar skyrockets, but none of the other bar patrons feel suddenly enriched) The average pay at these banks is higher than the national average, quite likely, because the financial industry is the only industry in this country that the financial industry hasn’t destroyed, so it’s where the money is. There’s more to spread around among the (yes, I’m going to say it) top 1%. It’s not right to imply that the tellers, security guards, etc., at these banks are cashing in.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)