The Orange Loser Authorizes Yet More Lubeless Fucking of the White Working Class

You're getting just exactly what you voted for, motherfuckers.  Don't you ever let us hear you whining about it. 

 

Charlie Pierce:

Those nice white "forgotten people" will now be free to have their pensions swindled out from underneath them by sharpies whose bonuses depend on how much money they can steal. They will find themselves paying usurious interest rates on their credit cards because of a clause written in Swedish, in .00009 point type, on the back of their monthly statement. And then, when it all comes crashing down again, they'll have to look for somebody to blame, and it won't be them, and it won't be the charlatan they elevated to the White House. And someone else will run for president, and give them the proper scapegoat, and Tom Brokaw will ask all the wrong questions of all the wrong people again.

It's morning in America.

"We've still got a long way to go to restore the sense of security"

Please, Mr. President; don't mistake this one-time deal for any actual actual willingness on the part of congressional repugs to let up one inch on their obstruction.



Full transcript here.

Where the Banksters Have to Pay Something

In the U.S. not only can't we put admitted criminal banksters in jail, we can't even make them pay their fair share in taxes.

 

But in Ecuador, President Correa passes legislation that raises taxes on financial sector to finance a "Human Development Bond" 

 

Watch the video.

"Wall Street Reform is About Making This Economy Stronger for You"

Possibly in reaction to J.P. Morgan losing $3 billion on the bank equivalent of slot machines, repugs in the Senate approved two nominees to the Federal Reserve. That makes this week's appeal from President Obama to Congress to do something slightly less than usually ludicrous.



Full transcript here:

"Everyone Should Do Their Fair Share"

You do realize, don't you Mr. President, that to repugs "everyone doing their fair share" means the non-rich supporting the rich?



Full transcript here.

Who You Gonna Call?

Again, Occupy steps up to do the hard political work no one else wants to tackle.

Digby:

OWS Gets Wonky

Here's a fascinating interview by Mike Konczal with one of the writers of the Occupy SEC comment letter that's been getting so much praise. I think it's significant for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's clear they came up with a process that worked for getting a consensus document addressing a particular issue, which is a good thing. But more importantly, this document came from Occupy Wall Street, the heart of the movement and ground zero for the 99% vs the 1% claim. Beyond the specifics, which have been received as substantive, serious and important, the significance of a successful collaboration to reform a flaw in the financial system from OWS cannot be understated. As Joe Biden would say, this is a big fucking deal.

Read the whole interview and if you haven't familiarized yourself with the document, you can read these posts by DDay, Felix Salmon, Matt Yglesias, Swampland, The Nation. It's pretty great.

Tax Where the Money Is

Conveniently, that's also where the economy-killing scams are: financial speculation.

David Atkins "thereisnospoon" at Hullabaloo:

The problem is that the bigger lack of progressive punch in the tax code doesn't apply so much to marginal rates on income (though that's certainly a factor), as it does to rates on speculative behavior. And that's where the sickness in the system lies: we have incentivized speculative behavior at the expense of slower, constructive long-term investment in stable enterprises.

The 15% capital gains rate is preposterously low; a higher rate would affect a few middle class 401K holders, but by far the most affected class would be the super wealthy. Capital gains is where they really make (I refuse to use the word "earn", as it would be a misnomer) their money. Doubling the capital gains rate to 30% would make long-term investors take a hit as well--but not as much as speculative short-term day traders. For a long-term investor, a good investment is still a good investment whether taxed at a 15% or a 30% rate. But for a speculative short-term grifter, many trades wouldn't be worth the risk at a 30% rate. And that's a good thing. If that means many day traders would have to find a different line of work, then good. Consider it a sin tax. Update: as pointed out in the comments, the capital gains rate is only for investments held over a year. Thanks for the correction.

Similarly, a transaction tax of even half a cent on each trade would go completely unnoticed by responsible long-term investors, but would do serious damage to the front-running and blatant cheating that is high frequency trading:

High-frequency techniques are used by Wall Street banks and hedge funds, but it is new independent firms that account for the bulk of this new kind of activity. Most of them were founded in the last 10 to 12 years. Many are still relatively small, employing a dozen to a hundred people, though some have as many as 250.

Trading mostly with their owners’ money, they scoop up hundreds or thousands of shares in one transaction, only to offload them less than a second later before buying more. They can move millions of shares around in minutes, earning a tenth of a penny off each share.

As a group, they earned $12.9 billion in profit in 2009 and 2010, according to the Tabb Group, a specialist on the markets.

These sorts of taxes on Wall Street behavior are not only where the money is, but also where the real impact on public policy is.

Redistributive progressive taxes on the wealthy are a good thing, but they don't really address the problem of how the great disparity in income happened in the first place. All they do is mitigate a public policy problem by treating its symptoms. Don't get me wrong: treating the symptoms is good. But it's in taxing speculative short-term gambling on Wall Street, with the aim of encouraging long-term productive investment in activity that actually creates stable jobs, that legislators can help cure the disease.

Put Wall Street Back On Its Leash: Restore Glass Steagall

Marcy Kaptur is a catholic-variety anti-choice freakazoid, but on economic issues she's an FDR Democrat to the bone.

Kaptur Urges Return to Prudent Banking Standards To Restore Integrity to the Housing Market

Speaking at a House Budget Committee hearing (June 2), Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur today blamed deregulation of the financial sector for the collapse of the housing market in the United States in 2008 ....

SNIP

"Who drove the meltdown in the housing sector?" asked Kaptur, a member of the Budget committee. "High-risk behavior in America's housing markets began during the early 1990s when deregulation of the private sector, which was pushed by some Members here in Congress, allowed the private sector to turn formerly-prudent loans into bonds, and then to securitize them into the international market in a manner that bore no relationship to their true value or to local real estate markets."

SNIP

She said deregulation, culminating in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, "unleashed the speculators" that eventually pulled the market under. She is the author of H.R. 1489, the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011, that would reinstate the provisions of Glass-Steagall legislation that prohibited banks from engaging in both commercial banking and investment banking.

"For our nation to dig itself out of the worst housing depression since the Great Depression, we must go back and unwind what happened and restore prudent standards," she said.

Her House colleagues - even most members of the Progressive Caucus, who know goddamn good and well that she's right - have not exactly been flocking to her side.

On June 15, Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) became the 15th and 16th members of Congress to sign on to the bill. Action is still pending in the U.S. Senate, which does not yet have a bill to restore Glass-Steagall before it.

No, of course it doesn't have a chance in the repug-run House, but neither does any repug legislation from the House - 99 percent of which is batshit insane - have any chance in the Democratic-run Senate.

So why not take a stand? Why not throw this in the repugs' face? Why not draw a thick, bright, heavy line between those members of Congress who put the financial security of working families and the nation's economy first, and those who put their campaign contributions from Wall Street first?

I'm looking at you, Congressman John Yarmuth, D-KY3. Your reputation as a Proud Liberal and Congressman Awesome is at stake.

Republicans Will Repeal Financial Reform

"Our economy depends on a financial system in which everyone competes on a level playing field, and everyone is held to the same rules – whether you’re a big bank, a small business owner, or a family looking to buy a house or open a credit card."



Full transcript here.

Your Stake in Wall Street Reform

"Next week, we have a chance to help lay a cornerstone in that foundation. The reform bill being debated in the Senate will not solve every problem in our financial system – no bill could. But what this strong bill will do is important, and I urge the Senate to pass it as soon as possible, so we can secure America’s economic future in the 21st century."



Full transcript here.

Expose the Trillion-Dollar Secret Giveaway to Banks

If Congress does pass a financial reform bill, the surrenders to big-money interests required to get it through are likely to be as vomit-inducing as the ones that distort the health reform bill, if not more so.

But not just because the desperately-needed consumer financial protection act is likely to be the first sacrifice.

Because President Obama is likely to pass on the best opportunity in more than 70 years to force real transparency and accountability on the Federal Reserve.

And thus fail to reveal to the public trillions of taxpayer dollars the Fed handed to private banks in secret subsidies.

John Nichols in The Nation explains:

President Obama is wrong, really wrong, about the Federal Reserve.

A remarkable left-right congressional coalition – which includes everyone from true-blue progressives like Florida Congressman Alan Grayson to bleed-red conservatives like Texas Congressman Ron Paul -– has formed to demand an end to Fed secrecy.

In particular, members of the coalition want to force the Fed to identify banks that took trillions of dollars in secret subsidies.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has taken the side of elite and irresponsible Wall Street interests, as well as Fed insiders, to oppose open discussion of what is being done behind closed doors and without congressional consent with taxpayer funds.

"When it comes to openness vs. secrecy, Wall Street vs. Main Street, taxpayers vs. the big bankers, I am sorry to say that the White House has come down on the wrong side," says Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who has long been critical of the Fed and of the bailout of big banks with tax dollars. "With growing support for this amendment from both the left and right, I hope that the administration reconsiders."

No one who knows Washington is holding their breath for Obama or Fed-friendly Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner to do the right thing.

The Fed will only be held to account if Congress acts.

SNIP

The Fed is injecting U.S. tax dollars in the accounts of big banks.
Congress has a responsibility to demand accountability, and citizens should prod senators to act by sending an "Audit the Fed" email.

Sanders is right when he says: "This money does not belong to the Federal Reserve. It belongs to the American people, and the American people have a right to know where their taxpayer dollars are going."

Read the whole thing.

Then call or email your members of Congress here.

Scared Turtle Face Surrenders; Dems Discover Power is a Useful Tool

Jesusfuckingchocolatecoveredchristonapogostick!

What have we liberals been screaming for three and a half years, Harry Reid?

The repug filibuster threat is a bluff. Call it, and the fuckers will fold.

And yea, verily, it came to pass.

Senate Republicans announced this afternoon that they will allow financial reform legislation onto the chamber floor for a debate after bipartisan talks hit an impasse.

Bullshit. They caved because the Senate Democrats ordered their caucus to spend the night on the Senate floor, taking closure vote after closure vote after closure vote until the repugs finally screamed uncle.

But I can't celebrate, because it takes every iota of control to avoid thinking about how different the world would be today if Harry Reid had starting doing this in January 2007.

How many dead bodies in a "better late than never," you cowardly waste of oxygen?

As for Mitch's new nickname, I stole it from Wonkette commenter snideinplainsight:

To me, it looks like Mitch McConnell has a scared turtle face. Does it to you?

Yes! It does! Scared Turtle Face he is, from now on.

How to Use Financial Reform to Crush Wall Street AND the Repugs

From TPM: Suddenly, repugs jump on financial reform bandwagon.

From Zandar: And Blue Dog Senator Tom Carper defects.

Doesn't anyone remember how Tom DeLay and Trent Lott used to play this game? They deliberately wrote bills to be so insanely wingnut freakazoid that no dem - not even the repug-est Blue Dog - could vote for them. Even moderate repugs - and there were a few back then - couldn't vote for them. The bills would pass by a single vote, accomplishing two things: Passage of extremely partisan bills that reached wingnut goals previously considered impossible, and cutting Democrats completely out of the legislative process.

It Worked. It worked like a charm for a decade. And it got us to this Reality-Denying Backwards World of Wingnut Freakazoid, UnConstitutional, Anti-Democratic Clusterfuck Destruction.

If the repugs really have decided they need to vote for Wall Street reform to save their electoral asses, I say Don't Let Them. Re-write the bill to make dealing in derivatives - an activity that adds literally nothing to economic or human well-being - a capital crime, punishable by death. Restore Glass-Steagall with regulatory control squared. Or cubed. Add a new income tax category for hedge-fund managers of 99.5 percent. Take away the voting rights of any financial planner/advisor who has ever knowingly steered a client to an investment that lost money.

Whatever it takes to ensure no repug votes for the bill.

Then round up every dem who has a problem with this, lock them in a teeny-tiny room with no water, no food, no toilet and no air, and don't let them out until they swear on their campaign accounts to vote for the bill.

That's how you win. And win not just the vote, not just the next 50 votes, not just the propaganda war, not just the next 10 elections, but the Battle for the Soul and the Future of the Nation and the Planet.

Stop diddle-fucking around.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Obama Calls Out Mitch on Wall Street Reform

Oh, SNAP!

"Now, unsurprisingly, these reforms have not exactly been welcomed by the people who profit from the status quo – as well their allies in Washington. This is probably why the special interests have spent a lot of time and money lobbying to kill or weaken the bill. Just the other day, in fact, the Leader of the Senate Republicans and the Chair of the Republican Senate campaign committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue.

"Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican Leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed. In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts – when he knows that it would do just the opposite. Every day we don’t act, the same system that led to bailouts remains in place – with the exact same loopholes and the exact same liabilities. And if we don’t change what led to the crisis, we’ll doom ourselves to repeat it. That’s the truth. Opposing reform will leave taxpayers on the hook if a crisis like this ever happens again."

Full transcript here.

It's a Floor Wax AND a Dessert Topping!

Obviously, repugs must stop Congressional Democrats and President Obama from achieving another great populist legislative victory as the proposed Wall Street reform bill would be.

But how to oppose something so popular among voters who will be choosing their members of Congress in a scant seven months? Lie, of course. But which lie and to whom? Tell the banksters that if they give you enough money you'll stop the legislation that would put an end to the fraud and theft? Or tell the public that if they give you enough money you'll stop the legislation that will cause even more bailouts?

Why not both?

Steve Benen explains:

Senate Republicans want to kill legislation intended to reform the way Wall Street operates, but isn't quite sure how to make this politically palatable. Americans still aren't fond of the financial industry -- its recklessness brought the global economy to its knees, and a lot of us held a grudge -- and want to see reform. The GOP wants to deny Democrats a victory and help Wall Street, no matter the costs. What to do?

The first step for Senate Republicans was to have a private meeting with elite hedge fund managers and other Wall Street executives. The second step was to make it seem like the Democratic proposal to clean up the industry is somehow pro-bailout.

Republicans spent much of the recess gaming out their strategic posture on the Democrats' push to pass a major Wall Street reform bill, and it looks like they've finally settled on one: The GOP will oppose the proposed new regulations on the grounds that they will make future bailouts of big financial institutions more likely.
SNIP

"We cannot allow endless taxpayer funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the floor this morning. "That's why we must not pass the financial reform bill that's about to hit the floor. The fact is this bill wouldn't solve the problems that led to the financial crisis. It would make them worse."

McConnell said the bill in question, authored by Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd, would "not only allow for taxpayer funded bailouts for Wall Street banks. It institutionalizes them."

Remember, it doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't have to be true. It doesn't even have to be persuasive. It just has to be repeated, endorsed by conservative media, embraced by right-wing activists whose ignorance is easily exploited, and folded into the "debate" for the American mainstream.

Remember, no matter how deferential to corporate money Democrats may become, they will never be the total whores for whatever abomination Wall Street wants that the repugs are.

Stop Pro-Wall-Street Concessions in Financial "Reform" Bill

Chris Hayes warns us about the approaching castration of proposals to re-regulate Wall Street.

With healthcare reform passed, the next big legislative battle will be over financial regulation reform. Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which the nation followed from opening to closing credits, financial reform has been running in a largely empty theater. Many reporters and citizens find themselves walking into the show two-thirds of the way through, bewildered by its complexity. But the movie's not over yet, and the ending is undetermined. So it's important for progressives to understand the essential elements of financial reform.

Here's where we are. In December the House passed a comprehensive financial reform bill, crafted mainly by Barney Frank and the Treasury. The bill gets, at best, a B-. There are some strong provisions--an independent consumer protection agency and caps on leverage--and some gaping loopholes, such as exceptions for derivatives that render the new requirements largely moot. Even after Wall Street lobbyists had nibbled and chomped through it in committee, the Financial Services Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce still opposed it, which counts as no small point in its favor. The bill passed with--surprise!--zero Republican votes.

In late March, Chris Dodd steered his own version of financial regulation reform out of the Senate Banking Committee. Several months of negotiations with Republicans made the bill weaker than Frank's bill but didn't yield any Republican votes. (Sound familiar?) The bill will now go to the floor, where it can be amended. Since almost none of the bill can qualify for the reconciliation process, passage will almost certainly require at least one Republican defection. In other words, a weakened version of the already watered-down House bill will need to be diluted even further to pass. Here's what to watch for as Republicans and self-described centrists start bringing out the fire hoses.

SNIP

There are two ways of viewing the financial crash. One way is as a technical failure with a technical solution--adjusting the mechanisms of oversight, granting regulators new abilities, making market transactions more transparent and aligning incentives in a more productive fashion. That's largely the view taken by the Obama administration, and it's the logic that suffuses much of the pending legislation. The other way to view the problem is as a fundamentally political one with a singular root cause: the banks have too much power. From this perspective, the most important result of reform would be to reduce that power, something each of the three reforms above would help do.

Progressive critics of the healthcare reform bill like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich voted for it because they were persuaded that the bill moved things in the right direction and would provide immense relief and security to millions of Americans. With financial regulation, the banks aren't holding 30 million uninsured Americans hostage. And a bill that passes but doesn't reconfigure the political economy of the financial sector stands a good chance of making things worse, allowing Washington and Wall Street to go back to the status quo with a false sense of security that the problem has been solved. At this point, I think the House bill with stronger derivatives language would clear the bar. But throughout the next few months, the most important part of the fight to watch is how the banks react as the legislation develops. If the banks aren't fighting and squealing like hell, you'll know the reform isn't worth the paper it's written on. And if you see the main industry groups actually endorsing the final product, as, say, AHIP and PhRMA did with healthcare reform, then it's time to bring those "kill the bill" chants out of retirement.

Read the whole thing.

Then tell your members of Congress you demand nothing less than real financial regulation.

Time for Leftist Populism

Since the anti-reform corporatists manufactured the teabaggers into existence last summer, the label of "populist" has been erroneously applied to the racist, know-nothing, no-nothings of the right.

But there is a huge opening for a leftist populism, especially now with health care reform behind us we're looking at new battles on financial reform, unemployment, immigration and cap-n-trade.

All of those, just like health care reform, have enormous potential to hand Democrats popular achievements that will turn into Democratic victories in November.

And all of those, just like health care reform, are endangered less by repug obstructionism than by the corporatist influence behind the administration and Congressional Democrats that prevents them from fully exploiting populist anger on the left.

In January, Digby explained the self-destructive insanity of Democrats' pussy-footing on Wall Street regulation.

It's not like the Democrats have tried in the least to make a political argument about this that made any sense. But the Republicans have, and it's a doozy. If things don't improve quickly, a lot more people are going to be listening to it.

When you have a man-made crisis (or even a natural disaster) people will always look for someone to blame. It's human nature. The out of power Republicans have a ready made boogeyman in the government, of course, to which they conveniently misdirect all the fear and anger since they are the ones who both led the charge to deregulate and profited from the excesses. The Democrats, either out of a severe case of regulatory capture or a quixotic political desire to "change the tone" and "look forward not backward" have left themselves holding the bag as the defenders of the one institution everybody now holds responsible for the mess.

For those of you who shrink from the label "populist" because the MSM uses it exclusively to describe racist mouth-breathers, Digby, in December, explained the differences in populism on the right and left.

Right wing "populism" is of a completely different form than that of the left, although it's fed by similar feelings of disenfranchisement and suspicion of elites. At the very least, lefties are not in the pockets of corporate America while they rail against the system that benefits it. I can't say the same for the right. I realize that this new populist alliance relies on the belief that left and right are now an outdated political paradigm. I just don't believe it. You can call it whatever you like, but the lines will divide up pretty much as they always have in America and liberals will have to decide who they're going to sacrifice to the cause if they want to change that. Believe me, sacrificing corporate donations won't get the job done.

The left is already philosophically consistent on the issue of big money in politics, and if they made the case straightforwardly and gained popular support, it could change the way politics are done. The populist right is incoherent. They operate on a whole other set of impulses, which almost always involve scapegoating of the other. I don't see a meaningful alliance there, although I do see how right wing populism will be very useful to the wealthy. It always has been in the past.

And there lies the opportunity for the populist left.

SteveM has been whipping this idea for months:

Seriously -- this is the opportunity to create and put forth a liberal narrative with the potential to become America's narrative. And this is the opportunity to throw sand in the gears. Grind the process of reappointing Bernanke to a halt! Be Liebermans! Be Tom Coburns! It shouldn't just be Sanders -- make trouble, make news, get America to grasp the idea that liberalism is not corporatism. America doesn't get that right now, thanks to Obama.

And:

What was needed -- and, yes, I say this all the time -- was a movement to Obama's left on health care, a large number of people supporting a far more progressive plan than was politically feasible.

But (and I say this all the time, too) we don't have a large progressive bloc in this country. We need a bigger progressive bloc. I'll say it again: we need to make more liberals.

Could Obama, as Aimai says, have "whip[ped] up popular anger" and "create[d] a groundswell for major progressive reform"? I don't see it -- not in a still-quite-Reaganite country, not even with his rhetorical gifts. (He had a huge volunteer army in '08, but I think it's far from certain that they would have all agreed on this approach.) And even if he could, he'd be the scary radical with the scary radical plan -- he'd be the Bad Left Cop and it would be up to (probably) the Blue Dogs to play the Good Cops, and we'd be pretty much where we are now.

We needed to be to Obama's left -- and we never were in sufficient numbers and with sufficient force.

I think Steve gave up too soon. We've got what the MSM is promoting as a huge liberal victory (although we genuine liberals know what a corporate-giveaway piece of shit it is), the teabaggers have been exposed as domestic terrorists, and the repugs are on the ropes.

Now is the time for leftist populists to push our advantage. Demand more than Wall Street "reform": demand re-regulation under Glass-Steagall. Restrict banks to accepting deposits and making loans, period.

Tell your elected officials, "I'm a proud liberal and this is what I demand." Tell them today.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....