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Grifter leeches, long may they live

Friday, July 22, 2011

Today I got a mailing from Americans for Sarah, A Project of Justice PAC. I hate to admit it, because now my wife will have a comeback when I start kidding her about all the right-wing mailings she’s been getting lately. I like to think that some devious left wing mail order person is selling our names to these right wing groups, just to make them spend money.

But, I digress before I even start.

The interesting thing about Americans for Sarah is that, apart from trying to collect money using her name, it appears to have no actual connection to Sarah Palin. She isn’t, after all, running for president, and the letter I got never really says that she is, and certainly doesn’t state that the group has her blessing to trade off her brand. No, this is just a group that wants me to know that they think Sarah would make a peachy president, specially cuz she drives freedom hating liberals crazy, and they’d like everyone to send them money so they can help her win the Republican nomination that she hasn’t been seeking.

Now, has the world seen the like of this before? Here we have a bunch of grifters leeching off a grifter in whose name they claim to be acting, and it’s all perfectly legal, as far as I can see.

Well, all in all, I say go to it. This is a phenomenon that affects the right wing more than the left (though who knows, maybe Colbert is going to let me down). A few years ago I posted (and don’t ask me to find it) about a group of political consultants who specialized in raising money for no-hope GOP candidates, which candidates got a tiny sliver of the money that was raised. Looks like Americans for Sarah is doing those groups one better, in that it is apparently going to keep every penny, depriving Sarah of sucker cash that rightfully (or wrongfully, depending on your perspective) belongs to her, and every dime sent is one less that can be sent to Michelle, Hermann, or the other crazies that are actually in the race.

My wife takes her petty revenge on the right wing fundraisers by sending the postage paid envelopes back empty. Alas, Americans for Sarah is wise to that gambit. Grifters they may be, but stupid they’re not. If you want your freedom, you have to pay postage.

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I’m a hero

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Someone told my wife that my name appeared on the crawl as one of Colbert’s heroes, in recognition of the fact that I ponied up some money for his Super-PAC. She figured that we’d have it on tape, as I record Colbert every night for our viewing next day, but alas, that was not the case last night, for my only Lion upgrade glitch was EyeTV’s refusal to launch. (Of course, I upgraded first thing, not for me to wait until the glitches are ironed out)

Thanks to a sharp eyed friend, I do have proof of my status, as you can see here. I am actually quite hopeful that Colbert can air some clever ads that will expose Republican perfidy, as he does so well on his show. Certainly the Democrats seem incapable of doing so.


By the way, for any die hard PC fans out there, I solved the Lion glitch in time to tape the repeat at 7:30 tonight

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What did we do to deserve this?

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

I now officially resent the fact that I am going to have to vote for Obama in 2012. I have tried, out of respect for some that I love, to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this tears it:

President Obama announced his support Tuesday for a deficit-reduction plan drafted by a bipartisan Senate group known as the “Gang of Six.” The lawmakers’ proposal promises to reduce the deficit by $3.7 trillion.

The plan, once thought to be too ambitious and too vague to consider seriously, proposes cutting spending, overhauling entitlement programs such as Medicare, revising the tax code and revisiting Social Security.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the lead authors of the plan, said they were surprised by the level of support they received from members of both parties. And with the debt-ceiling deadline looming just two weeks out, the plan may be Washington’s best opportunity for compromise.

As Dean Baker explains it in a post entitled Peter Peterson Promises to Give Up His Social Security in Exchange for Tens of Millions in Additional Tax Breaks:

Okay, that’s not true. Peter Peterson has not promised to give up anything, but he will stand to gain tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in additional pocket change over the next decade thanks to the Senate Gang of Six’s new tax breaks.

In case you missed it, this is how leaders in the Senate reduce the deficit these days. Give more tax breaks to the Peter Peterson and other Wall Street types and then turn around and cut Social Security and Medicare for ordinary working people. For the Senate’s Gang of Six (Democrats Kent Conrad, Dick Durbin, and Mark Warner, and Republicans Tom Coburn, Saxby Chambliss, and Mike Crapo) the biggest problem facing the country was the rich did not have enough money and ordinary working people have too much. Their deficit reduction plan is a big step forward toward addressing this imbalance.

Bad politics and bad policy, all in one big steaming pile of ****.

Meanwhile, Mr. “Yes we can” is lecturing his former followers. It seems that, in reality, no we can’t, and we shouldn’t even try. Read Digby on that here.

The sad truth is that Obama is not playing 19 dimensional chess here. He is looking after his own interests, but in the process he’s taking down the middle class and his own party. It would be a kindness to believe that he’s as naive as Tom Tomorrow portrays him here:

Only a Republican could go to China, and only a Democrat can destroy Social Security and Medicare. Obama has taken aim at both. The Republicans will play along and take electoral advantage of the betrayal. It’s time for some serious pushback from the real Democrats in the House and Senate, but don’t hold your breath.


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Wildlife sighting

Sunday, July 17, 2011

While putting the final touches on my previous post (which I was writing out on my patio) what should come walking through my yard but a coyote. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to get the camera on my Ipad going, he had skedaddled over the road and into a neighbor’s yard, so no footage.

This is the second time a coyote has walked through our yard in the daytime while we were outside quite near it. I made eye contact with this one and I could see that he had no interest in getting to know me better. Being without pets at the moment, we are unlikely to be directly impacted by their predations. In fact, my wife pointed out that the chipmunks that were once so abundant and bold-they would run under our patio table while we were sitting at it- appear to have disappeared. Yes, they’re cute, but when they start residing under your house they are definitely imposing on your good will. So, perhaps we owe the coyotes for their disappearance, in which case I must tender them my thanks.

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Pity the flimflammed rich

Sunday, July 17, 2011

This is one in which I have a hard time picking sides:

Ray Haarstick is an engineer and businessman who founded a company that makes software for private equity firms. He has zero fear of complex financial deals.

Yet the Waltham businessman said he felt duped after he bought a $1.4 million condo from insurance giant American International Group at Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont and began receiving bills totaling $65,000 a year for condo services and fees.

“I’m a finance guy – people hire me to do extraordinary things with spreadsheets and databases,’’ Haarstick said. “I don’t make mistakes with my finances, but we were completely flimflammed on this.’’

Haarstick’s story is perhaps a metaphor for the recent financial crisis in which AIG played a key role: Smart, knowledgeable people were lured into investments they did not completely understand, and got burned. In the run-up to the crisis, AIG sold complex financial instruments that ensnared the global financial system, and almost brought it to the point of collapse.

In this case, the financial instruments were 500-plus page documents that committed owners to pay much higher fees than expected. Many of the homeowners are savvy and sophisticated buyers, including a former Citibank executive, a former senior vice president of the Duane Reade drugstore, and a powerful real estate investor.

On the one hand, you have AIG, a criminal enterprise that helped bring down the world economy. On the other hand you have “sophisticated” investors, among whom was a Citibank executive who may very well have been a co-conspirator with AIG.

The “financial instruments” at issue were, no doubt, impenetrable, much like the credit card contracts the rest of us have no choice but to accept, peddled by people like…why, here I go after that Citibank guy again.

When I started out as a lawyer I represented poor people in consumer cases. What I wouldn’t have given for the ability to defend a case based on the fact that my clients couldn’t understand the contract. Here’s what I would have heard, precisely what AIG is saying now:

Last week, AIG through lawyers for its subsidiary Chartis asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit calling the claims “flimsy.’’ Describing the plaintiffs as a group of highly educated buyers, AIG said in court documents that if the homeowners disagreed with the terms, they could have refused to sign the agreement or refused to close on the properties. They also could have sought to amend the terms and consulted lawyers.

“What they could not do,’’ AIG said, “is what they are doing now – agree to the document’s terms and then, because of buyer’s remorse, sue three years later claiming a ‘fraud’ on the basis that the document was hard to comprehend before they agreed to it.’’

Unless I could prove that a poor person’s contract broke some positive law (e.g., Truth in Lending, Home Solicitation Sales) I would get precisely nowhere by claiming that my client couldn’t understand the contract. That was pretty much a given, since they were written in such a way that only a lawyer could understand them, and even for us it was often an effort. And lets not even get into the fact that millions of middle class homeowners currently being foreclosed don’t get to argue that they didn’t understand that they were being flimflammed when they bought their homes. So long as the deal was all spelled out in impenetrable prose they have nothing to complain about.

So, this is bit of a test case. Do rich people who don’t understand contracts deserve more sympathy than poor people with the same problem? Are the rich different than you and me? I suppose they could argue that if they couldn’t understand the contract it was per se fraudulent, since only a deliberate and cleverly constructed fraud could get past their ultra-sophisticated understanding of high finance, while you can throw anything at the little people. This is a tricky one, to be sure, but don’t be surprised if some variant of that works for them.

Well, good luck to those rich folks. If my sympathy is with anyone, it’s with them. Some of them might actually be useful members of society. Whatever happens in this case, the story itself proves, once again, the proof of Woody Guthrie’s observation:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

The men that use six-guns tend to get a lot less for their efforts, and usually serve a lot more time than their ink slinging competitors. In fact, when it comes to the guys with the fountain pens, the sheriff always seems to have other things to think about.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 15, 2011

For my little sister


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Art on Groton Bank returns

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Our friend Audrey Heard is no longer running the show, but Art on Groton Bank goes on. Besides checking out the art you can hike to the top of the newly re-opened Monument. It takes place at Fort Griswold State Park this Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

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This is what we’re up against

Thursday, July 14, 2011

I’m sitting in my office around noon today, and I get a call. We operate rather democratically at my firm. My calls aren’t screened and I never know in advance who’s calling.

The caller is a man who doesn’t give his name until I ask. He begins by saying something to the following effect: I’m on disability and President Obama says we may not be getting our social security checks. Can I sue the Federal government?

No doubt this call was funneled to me because I do Social Security work. Something in the guy’s voice tells me: “tea party”, but one must not make assumptions, and after all, it’s an interesting question, at least theoretically, given the 14th Amendment. There are practical problems with tha approach, however, so I start to suggest he call his Congressman, but since Joe Courtney is as innocent as a lamb in this particular story, I instead suggest that he call the Republican party, at which point he tells me that it’s the Democrats who are doing this.

Intuition confirmed.

So I ask: Do you get your news from Fox?

Intuition confirmed yet again.

Needless to say the conversation went downhill fast from there. I suggested, among other things, that he might want to get his news from someone other than the propaganda arm of the Republican party and then gave him a bit of a lecture about debt ceilings, but I knew he was impervious.

I won’t be taking his case.

This is what we are up against. This person, and all the people at the senior citizens/disabled complex he purported to speak for, is completely dependent on government checks, including benefits from what is probably the government program to which the term “socialistic” is most applicable. Yet he believes every lie he hears on Fox, spoon fed by people who dream of eradicating the very program on which he depends. Just further proof of the stupidification of the nation.


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A new meaning for centrist

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

According to the headline in today’s Day, Obama is staking out a centrist position in the ginned up “debt crisis”. Given that he is proposing Medicare cuts opposed by the vast majority of Americans, and that even Olympia Snowe can’t support them, we must conclude that the term “center”, at least in politics, has a new definition: a point somewhere between Ayn Rand and the ever rightward shifting status quo.

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In which I (sort of) defend Michelle Bachman

Monday, July 11, 2011

Michelle Bachmann is taking a little bit of heat for the rapidity with which she signed that Family Values oath, with its statement that black families were better off under slavery, and for her general propensity to compare everything she doesn’t like to the imposition of slavery:

– Health Reform: In a 2009 speech in Colorado, Bachmann railed against health care reform. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass.” Claiming that many Americans already pay half their income to taxes, she said, “This is slavery…It’s nothing more than slavery.”

– National Debt: In January, Bachmann offered her now infamous take on American colonial history in which she declared that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Bachmann then framed her speech as an argument against the “slavery” of the national debt. “It is a slavery, it is a slavery that is a bondage to debt and a bondage to decline,” she said. “It is a subservience of a sovereign people to a failed, self-selected elite.”

Well, I maintain that the criticism is misplaced. Bachmann is simply following a long American tradition of white folks complaining about their own prospects of being reduced to slavery, even while they themselves held men and women in bondage. And it’s hard to ever find an example where the evil complained of comes close to the evil with which it’s compared.

To pick a couple of examples from fairly respectable sources. Here’s Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 29, writing about the necessity of a well regulated militia:

If there should be an army to be made use of as the engine of despotism, what need of the militia? If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition, for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course, but to the seat of the tyrants, who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined intrenchments of power, and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people?

Even Tom Paine, in the very first paragraph of the American Crisis, accuses the British Parliament of turning white Americans into slaves:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

These are relatively mild examples, to which I confine myself through laziness and the difficulty of finding others by googling (search terms too common-these came easily be searching e-books). Anyone who has read much history is well aware that the Americans of the revolutionary period routinely accused the British of trying to enslave them, and, worse than that, after the revolution Southern slaveholders accused the people of the North of trying to do the same to them, and there are probably hundreds of examples of members of the elite complaining that this or that action of the state threatened them with slavery. All this without a hint of shame or, seemingly, any recognition of the hypocrisy of the words coming from the mouths of slaveowners or their enablers. Certainly the British didn’t miss the contradiction during the revolution.

So, as I say, Michelle is just following a long and ignoble tradition. She walks in the footsteps of some giants, and many pygmies.

Afterword: I can’t put this on-line without coming to Tom Paine’s defense a bit, since, of all the founders, he was the most actuated by pure principle. He was always and vociferously anti-slavery, but even he, apparently, could see his way clear to comparing a (relatively) mild injustice to an unspeakable evil.

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