Corporate Power

Oh yeah...Remembering the War and Other National and Global Crises

dlindorff — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:25:56 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack
Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be
sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press
for progressive change.

We saw how the Republican attempt to derail Obama by labeling him a
“socialist” actually backfired—especially when people were reminded
that a fundamental premise of socialism is “income redistribution,” in
which some of the wealth of the rich is taken away through taxation,
and transferred through federal programs to those who are less wealthy.
Joe the Plumber was outraged, but when most Americans who were having
trouble paying for gas or making their next mortgage payment, or who
were worried that their jobs might be about to vanish, thought about
that for longer than a sound-bite, it turns out that, not surprisingly,
they decided socialism and redistribution didn’t sound like a bad or
scary idea at all.

The same can be said of labor unions. In good times, many Americans
have bought the argument that unions are just out to grab dues payments
from their paychecks. But as job security vanishes and wages languish,
people are waking up to the idea that they are simply expendable
“inputs” to employers, and that a union can help them stand up to
abusive, uncaring management. Republican propaganda about the sanctity
of “secret ballot” union elections—ironic given the GOP’s simultaneous
assault all over the country on the right to vote—fell on deaf ears.

Government itself, long a dirty word thanks to years of
conservative propaganda, aped and spread through the corporate media,
is coming back into favor, now that people see that they cannot count
on either themselves or their employers to pull them through hard
times. The idea that government can step in with things like extended
unemployment insurance benefits, food stamps, and even renegotiated
mortgages, makes people who once mocked “big government” view things a
little differently.

But this unprecedented economic crisis also poses dangers.

Because we are so obsessed with the ongoing collapse of the economy
and the gathering storm of debt, unemployment and loss of retirement
savings that it entails, it’s easy for all of us to lose sight of other
crises that demand our urgent attention and action.

Chief among these are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing threat of climate change.

The wars are not going away on their own. The Iraq puppet
government of Nouri al Maliki is close to approving a deadline for the
removal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. That is more than
three years from now—nearly as long as the US was involved in World War
II! It’s longer, even, than the absurd 16 months that Obama said it
would take for him to end the US war and occupation of Iraq during his
campaign, which was bad enough. (In the case of Afghanistan, it
represents a decade of war—as long as the Vietnam War!) The danger is
that Obama will allow that status of troops agreement with Iraq to
become his timetable for withdrawal. We have to say “No!” The Iraq War
must be ended immediately.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, is in a meltdown, and every day that US
forces operate there, the opposition to US occupation grows, simply
strengthening the Taliban. Similarly, the more the US tries to attack
Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in neighboring Pakistan, the more
opposition grows to the US in Pakistan. If we opponents of the war
allow Obama to go ahead with his plans for a larger US military force
in Afghanistan, we will end up with an even bigger and wider war in the
Middle East and Asia, with more terrorist recruits, and with whatever
remains of US funds for important domestic initiatives swallowed up by
the Pentagon and the secret intelligence budget.

Let me put this simply: Nothing progressive that has been proposed
by the Obama campaign can be achieved while the US is engaged in these
two criminal wars. No health care reform, no increase in education
loans, no early childhood education, no public works jobs programs,
Nothing.

And then there is climate change. The Obama campaign promised to
finally end eight years of a new Dark Ages, when government simply
denied science or actively attacked science, and to start taking
serious action to reduce America’s role in spewing out carbon into the
atmosphere. But you don’t hear much about that anymore. That’s because
reducing America’s carbon footprint costs serious money—money for
research into non-carbon energy sources, money for a power transmission
system to serve wind generation farms, money to develop a new
generation of non-polluting vehicles and to rebuild light rail and
inter-city rail systems. And once again, with the economy in a crisis,
and with the two wars sucking up all available tax revenues that aren’t
being given away to banks and Wall Street financial firms and insurance
companies, none of that is going to happen either, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, while the progressive folks who put their all into the
Obama campaign are reveling in his and their Election Night success,
and are now taking a breather, the forces of darkness that control the
Democratic Party (think Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Rahm
Emanuel and the whole Democratic Leadership Council), are grabbing
control of the new administration, filling the incoming Obama cabinet
with carryover hacks from the Clinton administration, even including
the Clintons themselves, and, in some cases, the outgoing Bush
administration).

This is, in other words, no time to sit back and relax, reveling in
the admittedly hard-to-believe prospect of an African-American moving
into the White House. It is a time for action and then more action.

When Barack Obama makes that dramatic walk from his Inauguration
Day speech at the Capitol building to the White House, the streets need
to be lined with protestors holding up signs calling for an immediate
end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the new Congress tries to vote for a $50 –billion or
$150-billion bail-out of the US auto industry, we need to be packing
the halls shouting it down. That money should be going only into
development of zero-emission automobiles, and it should be in the form
of voting-share equity in those companies.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my top 10 demands for action by the new Democratic government iin Washington:

1. US forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Immediately! Shift the
funds saved to reconstruction aid for those two countries and to
veterans benefits, with any extra savings going to help fund education
in poor school districts in the US.

2. Slash military spending by closing most or all overseas military
bases, by dramatically reducing nuclear forces to near zero, by
reducing the number of men and women in uniform, and by closing bases
in the US. Savings should go to shoring up the Social Security and
Medicare Trust Fund.

3. Open up the secret intelligence budget, currently running at over
$40 billion a year, and cut it, for starters, by half. Savings should
also go to the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund. (Along the way,
ban all spying on Americans, and revive the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act in full as originally written.)

4. Break up the banking and automobile industry, as well as any
other industry in which any player is so large it is able to extort
money out of the government by threatening that its failure would cause
a national economic crisis. “Too big to fail” needs to mean “too big to
be permitted to exist.”

5. Join the Kyoto Treaty, and pledge to immediately begin a campaign
to reduce US carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 or better, 2030.
Establish a crash national research program to develop carbon-free
energy sources, and provide funding for households to convert to
passive geo-thermal heating and cooling systems. Funds can come from
the unused $350-billion portion of the Paulson/Bernacke Wall Street
bailout fund. (Talk about a job-creation program, not to mention a big
whack at imported oil!)

6. Pass the Employer Free Choice Act, requiring employers to
recognize a labor union wherever a majority of the workers have signed
cards saying they want a union, and requiring those employers to
negotiate and reach an initial contract agreement within 90 days, or
under mandatory mediation.

7. Reassert the Constitutionally mandated authority of Congress by
rescinding all Bush/Cheney-era signing statements and executive orders
and declaring them, by Presidental declaration and by Joint Resolution
of the Congress, to have been invalid and unconstitutional.

8. Order the US Justice Department to investigate the actions of the
prior administration and, where crimes are discovered, to prosecute
offenders, up to and including the former president, to the full extent
of the law. This would include obstruction of justice, abuse of power,
commission of war crimes, conspiracy, fraud, bribery, war profiteering
and criminal negligence.

9. Appoint Ralph Nader as new chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, with a powerful mandate take the necessary steps to restore
competition and fairness to the nation’s media. (My pet proposal:
Establish a government loan fund to allow workers at failing newspapers
to buy their publications from the owners and to operate them as
employee-owned enterprises, on a tax-free basis.)

10. Enact a national health care program that provides health
insurance for every person in America. My choice here would be a
single-payer system—essentially an expansion of Medicare to cover
everyone, funded by progressive taxation. Failing that, a system in
which the government has an insurance program operating in competition
with the private sector, should eventually lead to a single-payer plan.
One idea: dispatch a public-citizen commission to Canada to study the
Canadian health system and report back to Congress and the White House
in 90 days.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

`Too Big to Fail' Has an Easy Answer: Anti-Trust or Public Ownership

dlindorff — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:01:19 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The one thing we are not hearing from Congress or from incoming
president Barack Obama in the current economic crisis facing the
country are the words “anti-trust” and “public ownership.”

From the moment the crisis first struck, with the near collapse of
AIG, the mantra has been that companies like AIG, Morgan Stanley,
Merrill Lynch, Citibank, etc.--and more recently General Motors Corp.
and Ford--are “too big to fail.” That is, it is argued that these
companies are so huge that if they were to collapse into the rubble
they deserve to be, it would damage the nation irreparably.

The question is, if that is genuinely the case, why were they
allowed to be that big in the first place, and why aren’t we rethinking
that policy?

It’s not as though they got that way through organic growth by
being successful at what they did. Hardly. GM was the quintessential
result of a merger of smaller automakers. Ford grew too, by acquiring
the competition, most recently Volvo. Most, if not all of those
acquisitions were first vetted and approved by the Federal Trade
Commission and found to be acceptable as a matter of economics and
public policy.

In the banking industry, which is regulated, the picture is even
worse, with the government first opening the door to the creation of
national banking companies, and then routinely approving the gobbling
up of one after another regional or even national bank by another. At
some point we reached the point where the giants in the
industry—Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo,
etc.—were able to say, when they ran into trouble, that allowing them
to fail would have dire consequences for the national economy. This
kind of extortion should never have been allowed to happen.

First of all, the argument for national banks never made sense for
ordinary people, and wasn’t necessary for large customers either. Large
corporate fundings have always been done by bank consortia, and this
could have been accomplished with the nation’s banking industry
fragmented into small state-chartered institutions. Meanwhile, small
businesses and individuals always lose when a bank is national in
scale. It is much more costly to handle the banking business of small
enterprises and individual families than it is to handle the business
of huge corporate clients, with the result that the major banks have
made it costlier and costlier for small customers to do business with
them.

The answer is clear. Bigness is fundamentally bad when it comes to
capitalism. There is a point where any company in any industry becomes
too big for it to be socially acceptable. Big companies not only
attempt to behave in a monopolistic fashion by destroying or buying up
the competition, both nationally or, as in the case of a retailer like
WalMart or a bank like Citibank, locally, using their huge financial
power to locally underprice the competition and drive them out of
business (after which they are free to gouge the local customer base).
They also ride roughshod over local political interests, demanding tax
breaks, zoning waivers, etc. This being the case, the government should
simply not be allowing corporations to achieve such scale and market
dominance.

Companies, whether banks, car makers, or media companies, should
never be allowed to grow to a point that they become “too big to fail.”
If that can be said about any company, whether because of the assets it
holds, or because of the number of people it employs, it is time to
break it up.

Think of GM. If GM were ripped up into six or seven competing
companies, it is certain that at least one of those smaller entities
would be producing electric cars by next year. The Saturn plant already
made one, the Impact, that was wildly popular (see the excellent
documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car”), and if left to its own
devices to sink or swim, could probably be cranking those out in volume
for the 2010 model year.

Some companies would certainly fail. But that’s what is supposed to happen in a capitalist system.

This piece is not meant to be a paen to capitalism. But having said
that, if you’re going to have capitalism, which is the ruling ideology
here in the US of A, you have to let it function as intended. As soon
as the government comes in and starts encouraging the establishment of
monopolies or quasi-monopolies, and preventing the failure of poorly
managed enterprises or dying industries, as it is doing in the case of
the banking and automotive sectors, it is no longer true capitalism.

That could work, too. Many democratic countries, including Japan,
Sweden, France and Germany, have the concept of shared governance of
corporations, in which large corporate entities are partially owned and
run by government, and of planned economies, in which certain sectors
are deliberately protected and promoted by government policy. The US
has moved in that direction with the investment by the government in
nine of the country’s largest banks, and in discussions to provide
$25-50 billion in financial assistance to the major US auto companies.
But in the US case, the government is studiously avoiding demanding a
role in running those companies. It is by design only a “passive”
investor.

This is the triumph of ideology over rationality and the public
interest. I recently interviewed a number of investment strategists in
the course of working on an article for an investment magazine. They
all had the same advice for worried investors: invest in shares of the
“magic nine” banks that are recipients of tens of billions of dollars
in bail-out money from the federal government. As they all point out,
the government’s stake in these banks means that they will not be
allowed to fail, and moreover, they are in a unique position to use
their flush capital reserves to acquire, at fire sale prices, the
assets of smaller banks that are being left to sink or swim in the
current credit crisis and recession. That is not a free market. It’s a
government program to reduce the competition in the banking sector and
hand all the business over to a favored few giant banks.

Now that would be okay if the government, in return for its
investment, were taking a management role in those favored banks. But
it is not. Congress, the Bush administration, and, so far at least, the
incoming administration of Barack Obama, have not been demanding a
management stake in any of the companies that are getting bail-out
funding. If the government takes ownership positions at all, it is
taking non-voting shares in those companies, solely in the hope of
someday getting some of the invested money back by selling those
shares.

This is not just a rip-off of the taxpayer. It is a craven program
to enrich big investors in the bailed-out enterprises, while putting
control of the nation’s economic destiny increasingly into a smaller
number of hands of people whose interests are not even aligned with the
national intereest (these are, after all, all transnational
corporations only nominally headquartered in the US).

There is, of course, another reason that companies should never be
allowed to become “too big to fail.” That is political clout. The US
political system is already largely an owned-and-operated subisidiary
of corporate America. When companies become as large as AIG or GM or
Bank of America, they also gain a disproportionate influence over the
political apparatus that is an order of magnitude larger than their
share of the national GDP. It’s not just that they have limitless money
to donate to political campaigns. They also, by their size, are able to
dispense political favors in virtually every congressional district,
much as the Pentagon has been doing for the past half century, and also
to threaten national havoc if they don’t get their way.

Don’t expect much in the way of scrutiny of this bailout process
from the corporate media, by the way, which has been engaged in the
same process of national consolidation for the past few decades. But
clearly, the public needs to wake up and start demanding that if our
money is going to be used to bail out these corrupt and horrifically
managed enterprises, we the people need to have a controlling interest
in running them, so that they are run in our interest. Better yet, we
should be demanding that these bumbling colossuses be broken up into
little pieces, and then left to sink or swim on their own like the rest
of us.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We Need to Demand Hearings!

dlindorff — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:03:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

We've seen what happens when Congress forgoes the time-tested
process of deliberative and investigative hearings and simply takes a
floor vote on a Bush Administration-backed measure. First there was the
October 18, 2001 resolution for use of military force against Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Because there were no hearings on that measure, its
loose, deliberately ambiguous wording has been used ever since by the
Bush/Cheney crew as authorization for their global so-called "War" on
Terror, including the claim that the president has the dictatorial
power ignore treaties, US law, and bills passed by the Congress.
Shortly thereafter, there was the Patriot Act, a compendium of
anti-Democratic measures that had failed to win passage in Congress
over the years which were cobbled together in the dead of night by
Bush/Cheney zealots and passed on a voice vote the next day by a
Congress too cowed to hold hearings on the measure. Then, in October
2002, there was the second authorization for use of military force
resolution, this time against Iraq, which has ended up miring the US in
a disastrous five-year-long war without end that has killed 4500
Americans, chewed up 40,000 more, and killed in excess of one million
innocent Iraqi civilians.

Had there been serious hearings on any of these three terrible
measures, there is a chance none of them would have passed, or that at
least, had they been passed, they would have been reworded to tie the
administration's hands. The first AUMF could have limited military
actions to attacking Al Qaeda. Period. The Patriot Act's constitutional
overrides could have been exposed early, and challenged. And the
administration's lies about the alleged threats posed by Iraq could
have been challenged in public by other witnesses, plus a clear
requirement could have been included that any attack on Iraq would need
UN authorization.

Now Congress is being pressured to pass an equally horrific bill
with no hearings. We know that 200 leading economists, including at
least three Nobel Laureates, one of them former World Bank economist
Joseph Stiglitz, are opposed to the bailout, saying throwing a trillion
dollars at Wall Street won't work and will be a waste of taxpayer money
or worse. We know that it fails to address the root problem--the
housing and mortgage crisis. We know that it could be a crippling blow
to the dollar. Yet without hearings to expose this giant scam, the only
ones getting through to members of Congress are Wall Street lobbyists,
their pockets stuffed with campaign cash.

Citizens can't even get past the Capitol switchboard, which is
jammed with angry callers trying to get through to their
representatives and senators.

The point that needs to be made is that there is no great urgency to
pass a bill. The administration's claim that the bottom will fall out
of the economy and that the country will be plunged into a depression
if the bill isn't passed immediately is nonsense. The Great Depression
took years to develop after the 1929 stock market crash.

The current market could collapse, and there'd be plenty of time to
act to revive the national economy. Meanwhile, the credit crisis, which
is serious, has been underway for months and months. It is not
something that came up last week and needs to be resolved tomorrow (as
if that were possible by the mere passing of a give-away bill). There
is plenty of time to hold the kind of hearings that will let members of
Congress, and the American public, learn about the causes of the
crisis, of its impacts, and about what the various strategies are that
might most effectively address it.

So the public demand should not be for passage of a "good" bailout
bill. It should be for a halt to this rush to passage of any bill. The
demand should be for "No Bill Without Hearings!"

So call Congress (202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498) and
tell your representative and your two senators that you don't want them
railroaded. Tell them you demand hearings before legislation. And tell
them, again, that you will vote against anyone who votes for the
current bailout for Wall Street. (Hint: If you can't get through, then
call one of their local offices, which are listed in the blue pages of
your phonebook, or go visit a local office.)

Don't forget to write letters, too, to your local paper demanding hearings and a reasoned response to the crisis, not a bailout.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Corporate Media Journalists Just Love Rich Guys

dlindorff — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:39:02 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The people who pose as journalists in today’s corporate media are
in awe and in love with the rich. How else to explain their fatuous
praise for the likes of Warren Buffett, who on one hand bets $5 billion
on Goldman Sachs shares, and on the other, posing as a disinterested
wise man and patriot, publicly advises Congress to go along with
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s
$700-$1-trillion bailout of Goldman and the rest of Wall Street?

Buffett, whatever else he is, is no fool. He looks at Goldman
Sachs, its shares knocked for a loop by the current crisis, but about
to become a merged entity—bank and investment bank combined—with
government backing to unload its bad credit risks—and he buys $5
billion worth of it, and then turns around and tells Congress to step
up and vote for a bailout which would double his money almost instantly.

What a guy! A true hero.

And then the corporate media praises the man for his “courage” and his “faith in the markets.”

But that’s only one guy. We also have the panic among Wall Street
industry lobbyists, working overtime to make sure that nobody in
Congress seriously tries to limit executive compensation in the
financial sector. As one lobbyist put it today, “If you limit the
amount a bank or investment bank can pay for talented people, they
won’t be able to hire them.”

Wait a minute. Wasn’t America famous for the “work ethic” of its
people? We’re always told that Americans want the “dignity” of a job,
and that we Americans have this wonderful “work ethic.” Give us a
job—any job—and, whatever the pay, we’ll buckle down and do it to the
best of our ability.

That apparently doesn’t apply to the upper ranks of the banking
elite, though. If they can “only” earn $400,000, instead of $40 million
a year, they’re not going to lift a goddam finger.

Smart guys like John Thain, chief of Merrill Lynch, and Kenneth
Lewis, head of Bank America, or Dick Fuld, head of now bankrupt Lehman
Brothers, would never do a lick of work in the Wall Street mines if
they could only earn a few hundred grand for their efforts. If that was
all they could earn, they’d rather stay home and clip coupons.

There’s your “work ethic” for you.

I’m not so bothered by the sloth and greed of the Wall Street
crowd. What bothers me is the respect they are treated with by the
journalists covering them.

I mean, come on. These are just greedy people who got where they
got because they went to the right schools, made the right connections,
and checked their principles and morals at the door when they entered
the building. Their sole motivation in life is making money—as much as
they can possibly hoard.

The truth is it’s pretty easy to get rich if you’re willing to
screw the public to do it, and it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s
what’s been going on with Wall Street, especially over the last two
decades of deregulated boom times.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:05:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What nobody in the corporate media is mentioning amid all the
blather about the $700-billion Paulson bailout proposal is the impact
it will have on the US dollar.

We are told that this huge gift to the financial sector—the
assumption, at top dollar, of all the bad debt they’ve piled up--will
be at taxpayer expense, but that’s only the half of it. (Really only
the quarter of it because since the US government is technically
bankrupt already, spending more than it takes in each year, all that
money will be borrowed, and will be added to the national debt, meaning
that just as the real cost of the $500-billion Iraq War is closer to $2
trillion, the real cost of the $700 billion bailout will be more like
$1.5-2.5 trillion.)

But besides the direct bill handed to taxpayers for this gigantic
con, there is the fact that adding that much to the national debt is
also going to drive the dollar down precipitously against foreign
currencies. We’re already seeing that happen, even while they’re just
talking about the bailout. The dollar is falling against all major
currencies—the Euro, the Yen, the Renminbi and the British pound. And
it will continue to fall as the details of the bailout come out.

This will add to already powerful pressures in countries like Saudi
Arabia and China, which hold huge quantities of US dollars and US
dollar-denominated debt, to shift out of dollars and into other
currencies—particularly the Euro and the Yen. Last week, an article in
China’s People’s Daily, which like Pravda in the old Soviet Union, is
the official voice of the leadership in China, called for just such a
move. Russia is also calling for an end to the dollar as the
underpinning of the global economy.

For some years now, many economists have been predicting an end to
the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but this latest plan by the
US Treasury will push such a shift forward from “some day” to “now.”

As long as the dollar has been the reserve currency—the currency in
which key commodities like gold or oil were priced, and the currency
that exporting nations stocked in their treasuries as a store of value
– it was protected against collapse. But once it loses that status,
there will be nothing to prop it up any longer, and it will quickly
slide to a value that it deserves. We got an inkling of what is going to happen today, as crude oil
prices leapt in the course of one hour by 25%, the biggest jump in the
history of the oil market. This was purely a move caused by loss of
confidence in the dollar. There was no oil supply disruption. In fact,
demand for oil has been sinking as the economic crisis grows. Oil
producers and traders simply realized that the dollar is going poof, so
they radically jacked up the cost of oil in dollars.

If you want to see what where the dollar is headed,, look to the
currencies of the debtor nations—countries like Mexico or perhaps
Mozambique. A nation that makes almost nothing, and that imports most
of its needs, cannot have a strong currency.

This might not matter much if we had a functioning domestic
economy, where people could find the goods and services they needed
without turning to sources from abroad. A big country like the US could
simply turn inward and function on by its own domestic economic
standards.

I remember back when the former Soviet Union was in a state of
economic and political free fall in the early and mid 1990s, the
currencies of the constituent countries, like Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus had had collapsed to virtual worthlessness on the international
market. A Byelorussian friend, an engineering professor from Minsk,
living and working near me in China at the time, explained that
although when he traveled the world, he felt like a pauper, things
weren’t so bad back home Belarus, where he and his family would go in
the summer. “My apartment only costs a few dollars a month to rent,” he
explained, “and our food is bought on the local market using rubles, so
it is very affordable.” The same was true for other needs, like
clothing and books for school, he explained. The only problem was
buying gas for his Russian Volga. “Gas,” he explained, “is priced as an
international commodity, so it takes me one month’s wages in Belarus to
buy the gas to drive once to and from our country dacha.”

You can start to see the problem. Since agriculture has been killed
off in most of the US, in favor of giant agribusiness enterprises
situated in the western part of the country and some parts of the
Midwest, most people elsewhere will not have local produce available,
and the cost of transporting food from California to places like New
York or Pennsylvania will be prohibitive once the dollar collapses,
since oil is priced internationally. Meanwhile, goods like TV sets,
computers, phones, cars (or at least the key components of cars),
clothing, etc., are no longer even made in the US, and will thus be
completely unaffordable. As for the service jobs that are supposed to
have replaced our old manufacturing sector, no one will be interested
in buying what they’re offering, because they’ll be scrimping just to
buy the key staples they need to survive, so of course joblessness will
soar.

Eventually, of course, entrepreneurially minded people will begin
establishing local farms again where they once flourished generations
ago, and small factories will be built to provide key essentials, but
all this will take time, and will have to cater to a market of people
operating at a much lower standard of living.

The banking sector, meanwhile, which is the proximate cause of this
monumental disaster, won’t mind any of this, for it will continue
operating on the international stage, shifting its focus to lending
money (no longer dollars, though), to growing economies in Asia and
Latin America and eastern Europe. And this is what, in truth, the
“rescue” of Wall Street is all about.

It’s not about saving Main Street, as Paulson claims. Main Street,
under the bailout, is toast. It’s about helping the banks and
investment banks and insurance companies that brought on this crisis to
ride it out in style, their astronomical losses bankrolled or absorbed
by the American public, so that they can shift their operations
overseas and continue with their rape and pillage of the global economy.

The US will be left behind, a smoking ruin, with Americans, like
Weimar Germans before them, going shopping with wheelbarrows full of
worthless green paper to exchange for a few days’ groceries.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Hang On to Your Wallet! The Government is About to Rescue Us

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:55:19 -0400

by Dave Lindorff

When the financial markets started coming undone earlier this week,
the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve stepped in, and with $85
billion of our money (actually our children's money,
since they borrowed it from China and Saudi Arabia), bought foundering
AIG, the world's largest insurance company, and assumed its colossal
pile of crap debt.

That didn't help, and the stock market crashed further, falling to
levels not seen in three years. Banks, meanwhile, stopped lending,
figuring to just hold onto their money and try to weather the crash.
The US Treasury and the Fed stepped in again, this time pumping nearly
$300 billion more of our money into foreign money markets, and getting
European and other governments to do the same in an effort to get the
credit markets open again and to stop the stock market swoon. That was
on top of some $700 billion already spent on bailouts.

It didn't work. Thursday, the markets continued to fall, well into
the afternoon, and it looked like another seriously down day. But then
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came up with a new idea. He said he
and the Bush administration were considering setting up a new agency to
assume all the bad debt of the banking sector--meaning all those bad
loans they made, and that they lured unsuspecting consumers into taking
out, by way of deceptive marketing techniques and outright fraud.

Note that we're talking about perhaps half a trillion dollars
here--of our money again. And remember, much or even most of this money
will never get repaid, and we're talking about money that could have
funded reduced class sizes in every school in America, a national
healthcare system, a crash R&D program into non-carbon energy and (not or) a strengthened Social Security and Medicare program.

The drones in the Democratic Party leadership in Congress
immediately jumped on the bandwagon, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) urging her charges to act quickly to get some kind of a bill out
there to facilitate the bail-out, which could cost anywhere from $600
billion to $1 trillion, but most estimates.

The thing to remember here is that this is not a rescue of the
little guy (though the Democrats say their rescue plan, when it
appears, will include some kind of relief for people unable to pay
their mortgages). Don't hold your breath. Odds are those people facing
foreclosure will still be unable to pay their mortgages, and besides,
there's no way there will be relief for the majority of homeowners who aren't missing their mortgage payments, but who are struggling mightily to meet them each month.

Primarily, who gets helped by this enforced taxpayer largesse are
the fat cats who own all the stock in these financial institutions, all
the executives who pay themselves outsize salaries each year for their
lousy management records, all these hotshot traders who make the deals
that later turn sour, long after they've run off to another job taking
their bonuses with them.

We ordinary people, who live from check to check, will feel the
pain of this "rescue" in the form of higher taxes in coming years, and
in a devalued dollar--because you can bet that all that money they're
printing, and all that added debt they're piling on to the mountain of
debt already out there is going to make the rest of the world pretty
queasy about holding onto dollar-denominated debt, or about buying any
more of it.

When you hear a banker say he's going to help you, it pays to hang
onto your wallet. When you hear a politician say he's going to help
you, hang onto your wallet. If they're both saying the same thing, and
especially if one of them is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, then
you better really hang on tight.

Not that that will do any good.

The real answer to this crisis is, firstly, a massive dose of
trust-busting, so that no bank or investment bank or insurance company
is so big that its failure becomes a threat to the financial system,
and thus the government has to rescue it with taxpayer money, and
secondly, a return to the era of Glass-Steagall, when it was illegal
for banks to also be in the investment banking busiiness.

All the talk of "efficiencies" and of "better service to the
customer" that has been endlessly parroted to justify mergers like
Citicorp and Travelers, or JP Morgan and Chase Bank, or now Bank of
America and Merrill Lynch is fraudulent. Just to give an example, my
bank, once known as Willow Grove Bank, a small family-owned
institution, was bought by another bank and became Willow Financial.
Almost immediately the staffing levels went down. Recently, the
combined entity, which ran into trouble, was bought by another
institution, Harleyville Bank. Now there are half as many tellers most
of the time. As one teller confided, "Every time we get bought, they
lay people off."

Of course they do. That's what mergers always do. To recoup the
costs of the merger, management cuts back on service and employment.

The truth is, for all the talk about the efficiencies of bigness,
getting a mortgage today isn't any cheaper than it was in the 1950s,
when there wasn't even any such thing as a national bank that would be
"too big to fail."

The real reason we have mega financial institutions is that mega
financial institutions pay mega bucks to managers and make mega
donations to the campaign coffers of politicians. They also get to put
some of those mega-buck managers into key advisory positions in each
administration, Republican and Democrat, to ensure that government
polices allow them to get even bigger and even richer--and to ensure
that when they screw it up, they get rescued at the taxpayers' expense.
__________________

Conservatives Want Socialism for the Rich

Bob Fertik — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:04:39 -0400

Atrios is shocked at the absurdity Of CNBC:

The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they're lamenting the possibility of more regulation... People who prattle on about "the free market" are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the "rules" had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc... etc..., did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.

So why do conservatives want to make all these crucial rules, regulations, and laws disappear? What would our financial system look like without them?

Initially, it would be pure anarchy. The world would devolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all. But that wouldn't last long; powerful warlords would quickly emerge, and then individuals would have to enslave themselves to one of those warlords to have a prayer of survival.

Is this what conservatives really want?

Perhaps some do, because they own lots of guns and think they will emerge on top in a world of anarchy.

But most of the bankers and brokers on TV are way too wimpy to survive anarchy. So what they really want is a government that (a) keeps wages as close to $0 as possible and (b) steals taxpayer money to bail corporations out of every crisis they create through their uncontrolled greed.

So the country's most powerful conservatives want Socialism for the Rich. Which raises the question: why on earth do we want conservatives to have any power at all?

America and China: Joined at the Hip

dlindorff — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:12:30 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the government now having spent over $800 billion in less than
a year shoring up tottering financial companies that had become little
more than casinos (and rigged ones at that), America is looking
increasingly like China, a country where the state has been gradually
getting out of the business of directly owning companies.

At this point, with the US government owning 80 percent of the
world’s largest insurance company, AIG, and essentially owning mortgage
firms Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as bankrupt Lehman Brothers,
and with the nation’s two largest automakers in line asking for $25
billion in government loans, one would be hard-pressed to spot the
difference between the two systems.

The essential point of commonality is that big
enterprises—especially banking enterprises—are being allowed to operate
as fail-proof yet operationally opaque adjuncts of the state. Their
business decisions—whom to lend to, what risks to take, etc.—are made
with the goal of enriching the key managers and shareholders, and
probably also key government officials and bureaucrats—with no thought
to the impact on the larger economy or the larger population of the
respective countries.

I saw this system in operation in China once when, as a reporter
for Business Week magazine based in Hong Kong, I visited the
neo-capitalist boomtown of Shenzhen, just across the LoWu creek from
Hong Kong. There I met a friend who introduced me to a former Nanjing
Law School classmate who was now a top officer in the Armed Police, an
800,000-man paramilitary unit used for putting down strikes,
demonstrations and “unrest” that essentially runs Shenzhen like a mob
family. The guy took us to a downtown skyscraper that housed a private
real estate company that, it turned out, was owned by the Armed Police
(all the company vehicles in the parking lot had the characters “Wu
Jing,” or “Armed Police” on their plates). In the lobby was a model of
a huge housing development planned and under construction, that would
become a bedroom community for Hong Kong office workers who would
commute to Hong Kong from Shenzhen. At the time, Chinese Finance Czar
Zhu Rongji had ordered a clampdown on lending to tamp down a Chinese
economy that was in danger of overheating. I asked this
soldier-entrepreneur how his company was planning on borrowing the
money it needed for this mega project, and he just laughed, saying, “We
can borrow all the money we need.” Later, my friend, wise in the ways
of the Chinese system, whispered, “When he goes into the bank to ask
for a loan, he’ll of course wear his army uniform, and what banker
would turn him down?”

How different is this, in the end, from the system that is evolving
here, where GM or Ford executives walk into the Federal Reserve, or the
Treasury Department, and demand $25 billion in loan guarantees, saying,
“Give us the money or we go under.” In China, an executive implicitly
puts a gun to the head of his government banker. In the US the
executive expressly puts an economic gun to the government banker’s
head.

So much for the free market, which now only applies to small
businesses. In America, as in China, individuals are left to sink or
swim, and private property is only private as long as the government,
or some well-connected developer, doesn’t want it. In China, if the
state decides it wants some land for a mega commercial development, it
just ejects the current residents, offers them a token sum for
resettlement, and moves in with the bulldozers. In the US, the
government does the same thing. Just ask the residents of New London,
ousted from their riverfront property on orders of the US Supreme Court
to make way for the “higher use” of a luxury hotel and commercial
development. As for that so-called “American Dream,” the family home,
as foreclosures rise to Depression Era levels, the government stands
idly by, but leaps to the aid of giant corporations that, having made
wildly risky gambles and lost, are about to go under. (In a
particularly ugly slap at the battered homeowner, the McCain campaign
in economically depressed Michigan has been gathering lists of
foreclosed properties to run against voter lists, intending to
challenge on Election Day the right to vote of anyone who offers an
address that is in foreclosure. Lose your home, in other words, and the
McCain will also try to make sure you lose your right to vote, too.)

The convergence of Chinese and US political-economic systems is
going on in other ways too. Both governments are using massive computer
systems (made in America) to monitor the Internet, with China making
use of equipment and techniques developed for them by US companies like
Google, Yahoo and Cisco Systems, and with the National Security Agency
then drawing on those techniques for use back here in America.

As we saw at the two national party conventions last month, the US
is also learning and applying the crowd-control techniques of the
Chinese government to the US where the default tactic wherever public
protest is planned is now to have police adopt a paramilitary approach
that features aggressive use of tear gas, concussion bombs, assault
rifles, house raids and preventive detention.

Another point of convergence is the concentration of power in a
secretive executive body. China, of course, has a national congress. It
meets once a year and passes carefully vetted resolutions. In recent
years, its members have occasionally raised a controversial issue, like
concerns about the environmental and human consequences of the Three
Gorges Dam, or about the role of shoddy construction in the deaths of
so many school children in the last earthquake. But it has no power and
plays no role in controlling the decisions of the true leaders of the
country.

Likewise in the US, there is a Congress, but over the last eight
years, it has ceded virtually all oversight power to the executive
branch, which treats any effort by its members to investigate or to
constrain its action with utter contempt.

Both countries promote widespread, worshipful display of the
national flag, and ritual oath-taking, as well as unquestioning
patriotism and worship of militarism.

In media too there is convergence. China has since 1949 had a
state-run media model, where all media organizations—newspapers, radio
and TV stations—are owned by the state, and function as propaganda
arms. In the US, while nearly all media organizations are privately
owned, by controlling the licensing of all electronic media, and thus
having the final say on any and all acquisition strategies, the
government has over the last 20 years or so, degraded the media to the
status of compliant servant. It is getting difficult to discern the
difference between the two models. In fact, Chinese citizens may
actually be better informed, having lived for decades under a
propaganda model, since they know that they are being lied to by their
newsmedia, whereas few Americans realize the extent to which their own
media are controlled and acting as government mouthpieces.

Fascism has perhaps been best defined as a system in which the
government and corporations merge, and in which militarism becomes a
dominant value. I have long argued that this is an apt description of
modern China. It is increasingly also an apt description of modern
America.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful

dlindorff — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:08:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I was a speaker last night at an anti-war event sponsored by the
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, Progressive
Democrats of America and Democrats For America in Lincroft, NJ, near
the shore. It was a great group of activist Americans who want to see
this country end the Iraq War, turn away from war as a primary
instrument of policy, and start dealing with the pressing human needs
of the country and the world.

Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up
during the question-and-answer session and said, “I want to get
involved in writing emails to members of Congress urging them to cut
off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that won’t I end
up getting put on a `watch list’” or something?”

I told her the short answer was yes, she probably would. In George
Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s America, no one is safe from such spying, and
even from harassment, as witness Tom Feeley, the man behind the website
Information Clearing House, who had armed men invade his house at night and threaten his wife complaining about his First Amendment-protected effort to publicize important stories on the Internet.

But I also told her that it didn’t matter. She should defend her
freedom of speech and her right to petition for redress of grievances,
just as she was defending her freedom of assembly by attending last
night’s event.

The only demonstrably true statement George Bush has made in his
sorry eight years in office is that the Constitution is “just a
goddamned piece of paper.” While it wasn’t the point he was making,
when he reportedly shouted this at a couple of Republican members of
Congress who were questioning the constitutionality of some of his
actions, he was right that the nation’s founding document is only worth
the parchment and ink it’s composed of, unless people use it and defend
it.

There is a remarkable and palpable fear abroad in this land—not a
fear of terrorism, but a fear of speaking up, a fear of being labeled
as “different” or as a “troublemaker.”
People will lean over and whisper their opinions, if they think they
are anti-Establishment, as though someone might be listening. People
write me after some of my columns run, praising me for my “courage,”
though why it should be perceived as requiring courage to merely write
something in America is beyond me.

The worst thing is that every time someone says she or he is
afraid, or acts afraid to speak or write what she or he is thinking,
five more acquaintances become equally scared and silenced.

The corollary, though, is that each time someone forgets or ignores
or rejects that fear, five people gain courage the do the same thing.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t people monitoring, and
reporting on, what we say. I know our government is busy doing that. I
assume that my Internet activities are being monitored by the National
Security Agency. I assume my phones are tapped. I assume there was some
agent or informant among the fine people at the church last night. But
these Stasi wannabes have no power if we don’t let them frighten us
into silence and inaction.

What I find discouraging is the widespread acceptance, even on the
left, of this effort to intimidate us, and the pervasive attitude of
fear that has grown up around us. I spent a year and a half living in a
truly fascistic society in China, where there are real, concrete
threats to life and liberty faced by those who stand up and say what
they are thinking, and yet sometimes I think that ordinary people I met
in China were braver about stating their minds than many, or even most
Americans are. I’m not talking here about saying things like that you
think the Post Office is dysfunctional, or that you think federal
bureaucrats are corrupt or that taxes are too high. I’m talking about
questioning the system, or challenging the war, or protesting military
spending. Chinese people would tell me all the time that the Chinese
Communist Party was a corrupt gang of thugs or that you could not get
justice in a Chinese court. Chinese people are closing down factories
that short them on their pay. They have rallied in the thousands and
burned down police stations when corrupt police have raped, killed and
then covered up the death of a young girl. They have marched in massive
impromptu protests at the theft of their homes through eminent domain.

If you want to see where we’re headed here in America, check out
the workplace. There, we Americans have, through years of collective
cowardice and unwillingness to stand together in organized labor
unions, allowed our constitutional freedoms to be almost completely
erased. Today, an American workplace is more akin to a police state
than to a democratic society. Say what you’re thinking on the job, and
you’re liable to lose it. Wear a shirt that says something the boss
disagrees with, and you either remove that shirt or you are unemployed.
Even that final refuge of free speech, the bumper sticker, can get
workers in trouble if the wrong one shows up in the company parking
lot. That loss of will and of freedom has in no small way contributed
to the loss of jobs and the decline in living standards of American
workers.

It’s time for all of us to put a stop to this creeping usurpation of our liberties.

The anxious woman who asked her question came up to me after the
meeting and said proudly that she would not be afraid, and would start
signing on to protest letter-writing and emailing campaigns.

We need lots more like her.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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This War Report Has Been Approved by Your Government

dlindorff — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:24:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any
independent American corporate news media these past few days as the
coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John
Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.

In the first case, we had the completely pointless if prurient
airing of Edwards’ sordid extra-marital affair. Pointless because
Edwards at this time is a has-been politician. If there were any point
to the coverage it should have been, as Alex Cockburn pointed out in
his journal Counterpunch,
the abject failure of those same reporters and “news” organizations to
cover the story back last fall, when it might have mattered. Back then,
when the only paper covering the story was the National Enquirer,
Edwards was still a viable candidate for the presidency, or a possible
contender for vice president again. It’s not that his personal sex-life
has any news value in and of itself. The point is that had he won the
nomination, or been picked as a vice presidential running mate, its
inevitable exposure later during the general election would have
destroyed any Democratic presidential chances. And the corporate media
knew back then all about this story. They just weren’t pursuing it (and
the current blitz of stories proves that they weren’t holding back out
of principle!).

Then there’s the Georgia war. I was stunned by the graphic
depictions of Russian brutality in Gori and other cities that were
massively bombed and shelled, with apartment buildings collapsed into
rubble, children killed, and civilians targeted. The New York Times, in
particular, had photographic images of dead Georgian soldiers, of
charred bodies, of hysterical mothers. On NBC News, Russian planes were
shown dropping their loads of bombs on apartments.

We read that President Bush condemned the Russian invasion of another nation and called for an immediate ceasefire. Yet there was not one word of astonishment or challenge from reporters or commentators or editorial writers at this stunningly cynical statement coming from a leader who himself is responsible for the blatantly illegal and much more destructive invasion of another nation. And remember, while Georgia is on Russia’s border, and was at least possibly guilty of oppressing and attacking and perhaps even killing members of the Russian minority in two of its provinces (Georgia bombed the biggest town in the secessionist province of Ossetia, killing perhaps 1000 civilians, before Russia invaded), Iraq is half a world away from America and was minding its own business, not threatening Americans in any way. Russia, thus far, has at most killed a few thousand Georgians. America has, by most accounts killed hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Iraqis, very few of them combatants.

We watch and read voluminous reports on this relatively small Russian war against its neighbor and former domestic province (Georgia was one of the SSRs in the old USSR), and meanwhile there is almost nothing being reported about the continuing five-year-old war launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. And certainly, over the course of five years we have gotten no visual depiction of that war even approaching the scenes that were on display from the front in Georgia.

Apparently, in the view of our corporate news editors and managers, it is important for Americans to fully witness the bloody horrors of war when that war is being fought by Russia, but we are to be carefully protected from seeing such things when they are being perpetrated by our own centurions. We aren’t even allowed to see the grievous injuries and death being suffered by our own troops.

And, of course, don't feel to good about the quality of the coverage of the Russian/Georgia conflict either. This too is biased. Indeed one reason we are shown all the carnage is that the US government has been backing Georgia, and there is evidence that the US even encouraged the Georgian attacks on ethnic Russians which provoked the invasion. The US also has obligingly airlifted Georgian troops back from Iraq to Georgia.

This is not news. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

American corporate news media broadcasts and articles should include
a disclaimer: “This report was approved by the media managers of the
Bush/Cheney administration.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net