This corruption in Washington is smothering America's future

How do you regulate banks effectively, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? Obama now faces two paths – the Clinton road, or the FDR highway.

Johann Hari [print_link]

Joe_Lieberman_official_portrait_2

This week, a disaster hit the United States, and the after-shocks will be shaking and breaking global politics for years. It did not grab the same press attention as the fall of liberal Kennedy-licking Massachusetts to a pick-up truck Republican, or President Obama’s first State of the Union address, or the possible break-up of Brangelina and their United Nations of adopted infants. But it took the single biggest problem dragging American politics towards brutality and dysfunction – and made it much, much worse. Yet it also showed the only path that Obama can now take to salvage his Presidency.

For more than a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger the investment bankers by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease oil companies by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and the American Way. If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror.

Representative Alan Grayson says: “It basically institutionalises and legalises bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don’t… You won’t even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It’ll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft.”

To understand the impact this will have, you need to grasp how smaller sums of corporate money have already hijacked American democracy. Let’s look at a case that is simple and immediate and every American can see in front of them: healthcare. The United States is the only major industrialised democracy that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all its citizens. The result is that, according to a detailed study by Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year. That’s equivalent to 15 9/11s every year, or two Haitian earthquakes every decade.

This isn’t because the American people like it this way. Gallup has found in polls for a decade now that two-thirds believe the government should guarantee care for every American: they are as good and decent and concerned for each other as any European. No: it is because private insurance companies make a fortune today out of a system that doesn’t cover the profit-less poor, and can turn away the sickest people as “uninsurable”. So they pay for politicians to keep the system broken. They fund the election campaigns of politicians on both sides of the aisle and employ an army of lobbyists, and for their part those politicians veto any system that doesn’t serve their paymasters.

Look for example at Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists, and he has blocked any attempt in the Senate to break the stranglehold of the health insurance companies and broaden coverage.

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash – and so you have to serve corporate interests. Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it’s not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country’s laws. Not metaphorically; literally. The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer. The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: “The banks own the Senate,” so they had to obey.

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you re-regulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved. So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it. The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are “persons”, so they have the “right” to speak during elections. But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator. This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not “persons” under the constitution deserving basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a “persons” than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.

Obama now faces two paths – the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to serve the corporate interests totally. He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s. Some of Obama’s advisers are now nudging him down that path: the appalling anti-Keynesian pledge for a spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests – but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded. He switched course. He turned his anger on “the malefactors of great wealth” and bragged: “I welcome the hatred… of the economic royalists.” He put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. He said: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas.” But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn’t yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the US until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists – but that’s only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue. If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the court tried to stymie the new deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratising the Land of the Fee (CRCT).

None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama funks this challenge, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay – and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

. Hari describes himself as a “European social democrat”, who believes that markets are “an essential tool to generate wealth” but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions or they become “disastrous”. While we have absolutely no faith in “social democratic” or “liberal” solutions to capitalism, nor the beneficence of “free markets”, we published this essay because it presents a good sketch of the current American crisis.




'Hardball' & Dumbed-Down US Politics

MEDIA CRITTERS WATCH—

January 19, 2010
‘Hardball’ & Dumbed-Down US Politics
By Robert Parry
From Consortium News

This past week, grappling with the twin top stories of Haiti’s earthquake tragedy and the Massachusetts Senate race, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews personified the strange mix of puffed-up self-importance and total lack of self-awareness that has come to define America’s media punditocracy.
During “Hardball” programs of recent days, Matthews has veered from pontificating about how the killer earthquake in Haiti might finally cause its people to get “serious” about their politics to explaining how Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley deserves to lose, in part, because she called ex-Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling “a Yankees fan.”
Not only did Matthews’s remarks about Haitian politics reflect a profound ignorance about that country and its history, but he seemed blissfully clueless about his own role as a purveyor of political trivia over substance in his dozen years as a TV talk-show host in the United States, as demonstrated in his poll-and-gaffe-obsessed coverage of the important Massachusetts Senate race.
Indeed, Matthews may be the archetype of what’s wrong with the U.S. news media, a devotee of conventional wisdom who splashes in the shallowest baby pool of American politics while pretending to be the big boy who’s diving into the deep end.
When the United States most needed courageous journalism in 2003, Matthews hailed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, declaring “we’re all neocons now” and praising the manliness of President George W. Bush’s flight-suited arrival on the USS Abraham Lincoln to celebrate “mission accomplished.”
And today, if Matthews’s interest in political “hardball” were genuine not just an excuse to position himself as a relentless front-runner he might have used some of the hours devoted to the Haitian crisis to explain how real “hardball” politics works. He also might have discussed the true merits and demerits of Coakley and her Republican rival, state Sen. Scott Brown, not just the atmospherics of their campaigns.
Instead, regarding Haiti, Matthews detected a silver lining in the catastrophe that may have killed more than 100,000 people. He said the horrific event might finally cause the people there to cast off their supposedly frivolous attitude toward politics.
In a stunning display of racial and historical tone-deafness, Matthews compared Haiti’s alleged political fun-and-games with those of Louisiana in its supposed tolerance of corrupt machine politicians who left New Orleans vulnerable to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Whether he intended it or not, there was the creepy implication that descendants of African slaves were at fault for their own suffering in both cases.
While not quite as weird as the remarks by right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson blaming the earthquake and other natural disasters that have hit Haiti on the Haitians supposedly striking a two-century-old deal with the devil to drive out their French slaveowners Matthews’s commentary may have been even more troubling since it reflected a more mainstream U.S. media viewpoint.
Haiti’s History
Matthews might have shown a touch of seriousness himself by examining some of the real history that has put Haitians in their wretched condition. He might have talked about the ruthless efficiency of the 18th Century French plantation system that literally worked enslaved Africans to death for the enrichment of the pampered French aristocracy.
Or he might have delved into the hypocrisy of French revolutionaries (and some of their U.S. sympathizers, like Thomas Jefferson) for advocating equality for all while rejecting freedom for African slaves; or Haiti’s remarkable slave rebellion that defeated Napoleon’s army and how that victory forced Napoleon to sell the Louisiana territories (ironically to President Jefferson).
Or Matthews might have taken the story through the 19th Century, describing how the hostility of France and the slave-owning United States combined to devastate Haiti’s hopes for a better future. The French used military coercion in 1825 to force Haiti to agree to indemnify France 150 million francs (about $21.7 billion in today’s value) while the United States embargoed Haiti and denied it diplomatic recognition until the U.S. Civil War in 1862.
Or the “Hardball” host could have described how bloody U.S. military interventions in the early 20th Century were rationalized to “restore order” but in reality protected American economic interests. U.S. Gen. Smedley Butler later wrote of his role in crushing a popular Haitian uprising as making Haiti “a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”
Matthews also might have explained how the United States backed the brutal Duvalier family dictatorships from 1957 to 1986 when Haiti was considered a frontline state against Washington’s Cold War fear that Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba might spread across the Caribbean.
Or how Haiti’s nascent moves toward democracy through the elections of popular ex-Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide were undermined by Republican distaste for “liberation theology,” which called on the Church to follow Jesus’s teaching and align itself with the poor versus the rich, a position that the Reagan administration viewed as akin to communism.
Aristide’s elections were overturned by coups in 1991 (during George H.W. Bush’s presidency) and in 2004 (with George W. Bush in the White House) while the U.S. government either tacitly or directly sided with the coup plotters.
In 1993, when Democratic President Bill Clinton was seeking to restore Aristide to office, I was in Haiti working on a PBS “Frontline” documentary. Part of my job was to spend time with operatives of right-wing paramilitary groups supporting the dictatorship of Gen. Raoul Cedras.
Some of these operatives told me about faxes and other messages they were receiving from Republicans in Washington advising them how to frustrate Clinton’s initiatives for restoring Aristide to power. Those efforts, in fact, were turned back by a violent confrontation at the Port-au-Prince docks when the USS Harlan County tried to land, humiliating Clinton and the United States.
Now, that was real “hardball” politics: Republicans undercutting the foreign policy of a sitting U.S. President to make him look ineffectual and feckless.
A year later, Clinton saw no choice but to oust Cedras through a U.S. military invasion. Aristide was restored to the presidency but his final months in office were tightly restricted with him serving primarily as a figurehead.
When Aristide was elected again in 2001, he faced renewed hostility from the Haitian elite and from the second Bush administration, which helped engineer his removal from office in 2004, airlifting him against his will to the Central African Republic.
Yet, Chris Matthews summed up this extraordinary history as a situation in which the Haitian people just didn’t take their politics seriously enough.
Massachusetts Follies
Days later, without a blush for any inconsistency, Matthews was discussing the pivotal Massachusetts Senate race in the most frivolous terms, dividing his coverage between the latest poll numbers and commentary over the campaign gaffes of Democratic candidate Martha Coakley.
Beyond noting the obvious impact on health-care legislation, Matthews shed little light on the experience and policy positions of the two candidates. Instead, watchers of “Hardball” got to hear Coakley’s brief confusion over Schilling’s allegiance in the Yankees- Red Sox rivalry and learned that Scott Brown is a photogenic guy who travels around in a truck.
Matthews dispensed with the serious stuff. He had little interest in mentioning Coakley’s history as an effective prosecutor, her central role in winning settlements from contractors of Boston’s infamous Big Dig project and from Wall Street firms that engaged in deceptive practices, including $60 million from Goldman Sachs to settle allegations that it promoted unfair home loans.
Coakley also backs President Barack Obama’s decision to try some terrorism suspects in civilian courts and his proposed tax on financial institutions to recoup taxpayers’ assistance that bailed the banks out of the crisis of 2008, two of Obama’s positions that Brown opposes.
Plus, Coakley has taken some more progressive stances than Obama, opposing his troop build-up in Afghanistan and seeking to overturn the federal legal definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
For his part, Brown favors more Reagan-Bush-style tax cuts, supports the near-drowning interrogation method called waterboarding, and opposes same-sex marriage, even voting for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.
However, Matthews’s “Hardball” was more absorbed by the populist celebrities that have stumped with Brown, including Schilling, Massachusetts football hero Doug Flutie and actor John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Clavin in the TV show about a fictional Boston bar, “Cheers.”
As the U.S. government sinks further into dysfunction incapable of addressing the nation’s worsening economic and social crises as it wallows in a debt deeper than any Third World country could dream of, historians may look back on some of the empty-headed commentary of programs like “Hardball with Chris Matthews” for clues as to why the United States failed.
Author’s Website: http://www.consortiumnews.com
Author’s Bio: Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

Dateline: January 19, 2010

By Robert Parry [print_link]

[quote]

Instead, regarding Haiti, Matthews detected a silver lining in the catastrophe that may have killed more than 100,000 people. He said the horrific event might finally cause the people there to cast off their supposedly frivolous attitude toward politics.

Matthews might have shown a touch of seriousness himself by examining some of the real history that has put Haitians in their wretched condition. He might have talked about the ruthless efficiency of the 18th Century French plantation system that literally worked enslaved Africans to death for the enrichment of the pampered French aristocracy.

A year later, Clinton saw no choice but to oust Cedras through a U.S. military invasion. Aristide was restored to the presidency but his final months in office were tightly restricted with him serving primarily as a figurehead.

When Aristide was elected again in 2001, he faced renewed hostility from the Haitian elite and from the second Bush administration, which helped engineer his removal from office in 2004, airlifting him against his will to the Central African Republic.

Massachusetts Follies

Days later, without a blush for any inconsistency, Matthews was discussing the pivotal Massachusetts Senate race in the most frivolous terms, dividing his coverage between the latest poll numbers and commentary over the campaign gaffes of Democratic candidate Martha Coakley.

Plus, Coakley has taken some more progressive stances than Obama, opposing his troop build-up in Afghanistan and seeking to overturn the federal legal definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

For his part, Brown favors more Reagan-Bush-style tax cuts, supports the near-drowning interrogation method called waterboarding, and opposes same-sex marriage, even voting for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.

http://www.consortiumnews.com




Mass. Mayhem: The Democrats' Debacle and the Perfect Moment for Party Progressives

There is no home for progressives in the Democratic Party.

January 19, 2010
Mass. Mayhem: The Democrats’ Debacle and the Perfect Moment for Party Progressives
By Dave Lindorff
By Dave Lindorff
The media punditry, corn-fed on conventional wisdom, are all atwitter about Tuesday’s Democratic debacle in Massachusetts, saying the trouncing of the Democratic candidate for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, by upstart State Senator Scott Brown means Democrats in Congress should abandon plans to push through a House-Senate compromise health bill, and instead just go with the Senate’s version of health “reform” legislation, thus circumventing a certain Republican filibuster attempt.
Brown campaigned promising to be the “41st vote” to kill the Obama health bill.
The Senate bill, remember, is the dreadful health bill version that outlaws abortion coverage for anyone getting subsidized insurance, and that taxes the hell out of health insurance benefits that are the mainstay of many middle-income and working-class families, not to mention mandating that people with low incomes spend significant assets they don’t have to buy lousy insurance they may not want or need. As bad as the House version is, the Senate bill is even worse.
It is a crummy bill, cobbled together from bits and pieces of self-serving elements submitted by health industry lobbyists, who have spent the last year swarming over the Senate like ants and maggots over a fetid, unrecognizeable lump of roadkill.
The call for the House to adopt the Senate plan, so as to avoid a filibuster, is advice that would doom the Democrats in 2010. While that might well be a good thing, given the sorry excuse for an alternative to the Republicans that the Democrats have become, I would argue that the time is right for the small rump of Democrats who are still progressives to take a stand.
Why?
Because they have the power to drive a stake through the corporatists who run the Democratic Party, and who have been working assiduously for decades to neuter the party and especially its progressives caucus. If progressive members of the House simply refuse to vote for the Senate version of the health bill, it cannot go forward.
The reason President Barack Obama’s health plan, the president’s and the Democratic Party’s support have all cratered even in that most emblematic Democratic state of Massachusetts is not that Republicans are resurgent. It is not even that unaffiliated voters have turned from Obama, though certainly some have. It’s that Democrats have become disgusted with the man they turned out for so enthusiastically in November 2008, with his “plan” for health “reform,” and with the party that they gave such a resounding victory to in Congress that same election and in 2006.
Democratic voters–especially liberal Democrats–are rightly feeling punked. Even those who did hold their noses and voted for Coakely in Massachusetts, were not doing it with any enthusiasm, and certainly weren’t hustling their friends and coworkers to vote along with them.
And the Obama/Democrat health care reform sellout is only one of their complaints. There is also the Obama cave-in to Wall Street, and his enormous escalation of the Afghanistan War, his failure to restore Constitutional government, and his wishy-washy efforts on climate change. And of course there’s the willing complicity of the Democrats in both houses of Congress.
It’s funny to recall that a year ago, it was common to hear pundits pronouncing the death of the Republican Party. Now, it appears that it is actually the Democratic Party that is headed for history’s dumpster–with President Obama and the party’s corrupt hack leadership in Congress in the driver’s seat of the careening truck.
Coakley was true to form as the party’s standard-bearer in this collapse. Even as her candidacy was heading for the rocks, instead of campaigning hard for the state’s liberal base, she headed off on January 12, just a week ahead of the special election, to pander to lobbyists from the health industry and collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bribes from them. No wonder her base deserted her or just stayed home!
Hell, if I were in Massachusetts, I’d vote have for Coakley’s GOP opponent. The former Cosmopolitancenterfold model may be just a buffer version of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but at least he has vowed, if elected, to kill the Senate health bill.
For that alone he deserved progressive Democrats’ support.
The Mass. mayhem proves that Democrats in Congress area headed for a historic and well-earned rout this November. Progressive Democrats in House and Senate should be cutting themselves loose as soon as possible from this sinking ship and following the lead of Vermont’s independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. There is no home for progressives in the Democratic Party. They now have a historic opportunity to send the corporatist Democrats off to their well-deserved demise, while forging the Congressional core of something new: a true progressive opposition party representing America’s working people.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Author’s Website: www.thiscantbehappening.net
Author’s Bio: Dave Lindorff’s writing is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books (“This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy” and “Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal”). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, May 2006).

January 19, 2010 [PRINT_LINK]

By Dave Lindorff

scott_brown_ap

Winner Scott Brown: the Ken Doll type with the faux populist rhetoric. But he may end up, unwittingly, doing everyone a favor.

It is a crummy bill, cobbled together from bits and pieces of self-serving elements submitted by health industry lobbyists, who have spent the last year swarming over the Senate like ants and maggots over a fetid, unrecognizeable lump of roadkill.

[quote]

The call for the House to adopt the Senate plan, so as to avoid a filibuster, is advice that would doom the Democrats in 2010. While that might well be a good thing, given the sorry excuse for an alternative to the Republicans that the Democrats have become, I would argue that the time is right for the small rump of Democrats who are still progressives to take a stand.

Why?

Because they have the power to drive a stake through the corporatists who run the Democratic Party, and who have been working assiduously for decades to neuter the party and especially its progressives caucus. If progressive members of the House simply refuse to vote for the Senate version of the health bill, it cannot go forward.

____________________

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






The American ruling class


The American ruling class
6 February 2009
On Wednesday President Barack Obama announced measures that purport to restrict executive compensation to $500,000 at financial institutions receiving billions in government assistance. The figure does not include stock options, which could be redeemed after financial firms pay back loans from the federal government. Nor does it apply to the original recipients of tens of billions in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money.
The measures are essentially a public relations exercise. Their aim is to provide political cover for a new and even larger Wall Street bailout, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will unveil next week.
Yet the discussion that has emerged in the wake of Obama’s announcement sheds light on the domination of government by a tiny financial elite and the increasingly threadbare pretense of democracy in the US. This financial aristocracy, the episode reveals, is a power to be approached on bended knee.
The media have responded to Obama’s proposal of a $500,000 limit on executive compensation, which would affect only a handful of firms, as though this were a severe and astonishing punishment. Yet the figure represents approximately 12 times the annual salary of the typical worker. To the majority of the population, a salary of a half million dollars is a staggering amount of money.
Obama’s servility before the financial aristocracy was summed up by the reassurances he gave it in announcing his limits on executive pay. “This is America,” Obama said. “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.”
Such a vision of America is at odds with both its present circumstances and its history, which has been characterized by deep democratic and egalitarian traditions that date back to before the Jeffersonian democracy of the early Republic. And while liberals are busy attempting to equate Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the latter, in the midst of the Great Depression, attempted to capitalize on the tremendous contempt for the rich in the population at large by regularly issuing bromides against the “money changers.”
Indeed, Obama’s obsequiousness stands in sharp contrast to the anger of the working masses, who find it incomprehensible that the same executives who are responsible for ruining the economy and squandering trillions in taxpayer money are now presented with pay “limits” of a half million dollars. Workers are wondering why there haven’t been criminal indictments and television scenes of handcuffed executives frog-marched from their offices.
But on Wall Street, $500,000 is considered a pittance. The New York Times reports that executives felt cheated by taking home “only” $18 billion in collective bonuses in 2009. “I feel like I got a doorman’s tip, compared to what I got in previous years,” an investment banker with Citigroup told the Times.
The Financial Times reported on Wall Street’s opposition to the largely token measures. “Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a ‘brain drain’ from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye,” it wrote. “Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money.”
“‘The cap is a lousy idea,’ complained one top Wall Street executive. ‘If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?’”
Andrew Ward, a University of Georgia professor and specialist on corporate boards and management, told the Financial Times that executives could respond to Obama’s measure by calling his bluff—refusing to allow their firms to accept a bailout that would in any way limit their personal enrichment. “One of the potentially unintended consequences is that executives might try and hold off asking for government assistance until it is too late,” Ward said.
Media and academic figures who have tried to argue that the massive pay packages of the Wall Street executives are somehow legitimate, or even rational, succeed only in revealing the rot that characterizes intellectual life in the US. Their central argument—that the same CEOs who have driven their companies and the economy as whole into the ground are worthy of remuneration in the tens of millions—is so absurd it is almost an embarrassment to answer.
The immense power of the financial elite is revealed by the case of Bernard Madoff, the investor who squandered more than $50 billion in wealth in a giant Ponzi scheme. While working class Americans are arrested and spend years in prison for far lesser offenses, Madoff remains ensconced in his Manhattan penthouse.
For nearly a decade, a whistleblower named Harry Markopolos, who had uncovered Madoff’s scheme, attempted to draw the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal regulatory agency ostensibly tasked with policing the securities and stock industries. Instead, the SEC ran interference for Madoff. Rather than being applauded for his efforts, Markopolos feared for his safety. “We knew that he was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse,” he said.
The social psychology and physiognomy of the financial elite—with its wealth, special privileges and its control over the organs of public opinion—resembles nothing so much as a modern aristocracy.
Any discussion of a rational attempt to find a solution to the economic crisis runs immediately into the ferocious opposition of this elite. Similarly, in the 18th century the aristocracy of the French ancien regime precipitated a financial crisis through its avarice and wars. When the aristocracy convened the Estates General in 1789, it was to demand that the Third Estate, the commoners, bail the aristocracy out of the crisis of its own making. But the monarchy and nobility refused to cede a bit of its power and privileges. This set the stage for the great French Revolution.
The odious subjective characteristics of the US financial aristocracy—its greed, arrogance, stupidity and decadence—are themselves deeply rooted in objective historical developments, the social expression of an underlying economic process. The rise of this narrow social layer with its obscene levels of accumulation is inextricably bound up with the decline of American capitalism in the world market and the gutting of its domestic industrial base. Indeed, what makes the whole process so filthy, what imparts to it such a decadent and repulsive character, is the degree to which this wealth is unconnected to any progressive economic process. It is in every sense destructive and reactionary.
In an earlier period of history the US had its “robber barons,” such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. As brutal and greedy as these men were, their wealth was bound up with the creation of enormous industrial empires. The latter-day robber barons of Wall Street, on the other hand, have made their billions from the destruction of the industry and productive capacity built up over decades.
The staggering wealth accumulated in the top one percent of American society over last 25 years is directly bound up with the deterioration of the economy, the decline of industry and the impoverishment of the working class. The enormous personal fortunes of the elite have been built up on hedge funds, the leveraging of debt and other forms of financial speculation. This has entailed an enormous transfer of resources out of manufacturing and into finance, and out of the working class and into the pockets of those who have played the critical role not only in destroying living standards, but in setting the stage for the present disaster.
The fortunes that grew on this basis at a certain point assumed a dynamic of their own. Their sheer scale assumes a malignant character that becomes an insurmountable obstacle to any rational policy coming from within the confines of bourgeois politics.
It follows that there is no solution to the crisis without a direct and massive assault on social inequality, and thus the wealth and privileges of the financial and business aristocracy. This cannot be carried out by pressuring the Democratic Party. The Obama administration’s meager rules on executive pay shows that it will not consider any policies that even hint at the redistribution of wealth.
The American political elite, Obama included, is tied by a thousand strings to the financial aristocracy. The Obama administration is populated by individuals who have parlayed their political positions into lucrative positions in finance. Virtually the entire cabinet fits this billing—not only Tom Daschle, the former senator who withdrew his nomination for the Secretary of Health and Human Services amidst revelations that he had withheld tens of thousands in taxes owed on payments he received from his corporate sponsors.
Yesterday it came to light that Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, took home more than $1 million last year through payments from corporations for consulting, speaking appearances and through his membership on corporate boards. He was paid handsomely for speeches by financial firms that have since collapsed, including $56,000 by Merrill Lynch and $28,000 by Wachovia. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have also used their political connections to make millions from the same financial elite that would ostensibly be targeted by Obama’s rules on executive pay.
Obama knows very well that when he leaves office he will be able to make millions of dollars, as Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, and countless other leading politicians have done. Nor would this be a departure for Obama, whose career was taken into hand early on by leading financial and political figures in Chicago.
The subordination of the whole of society to the financial aristocracy is most clearly expressed in the massive bailout of Wall Street. Its political representatives, Democrats and Republican alike, hand over trillions to the biggest banks, while providing no provisions for the masses of people who have lost their jobs and homes.
Millions of workers who voted for Obama are now coming face to face with the fact that his administration will defend the interests of the financial elite every bit as ruthlessly, if with a slightly different presentation, as the Bush administration.
The solution to the economic crisis is not a technical question but a social, political and revolutionary settling of accounts, and a historical necessity. At a certain point in the late 18th century, it became necessary for the oppressed classes of France to rise up and destroy the power and privileges of the nobility. In the America of the 1860s, the only resolution to the “irrepressible conflict” was the destruction of the “slave power” in the South.
At this point it is necessary to destroy the political and economic power of the financial aristocracy. A resolution to the economic crisis can only begin with an independent mass movement of the working class that aims to break the political stranglehold of the financial elite over society; the development, to be blunt, of a revolutionary movement.
Tom Eley
The banks and socialism
14 January 2010
In the midst of the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression, the major US banks are about to announce multimillion-dollar year-end bonuses for their top executives and traders. Bankers are able to resume full tilt their mad pursuit of personal enrichment due to the plundering of the treasury carried out for the sole purpose of bailing out the “financial wizards” whose speculative practices precipitated the crisis.
This is a global phenomenon. In all the major centers of world capitalism, the financial elites are emerging from the economic wreckage stronger and more powerful than ever, and are dictating the terms of their own enrichment to servile governments.
In the US, Goldman Sachs is expected to announce bonuses totaling more than $20 billion, about the same amount as California’s state budget deficit. One analyst estimates that the average Goldman bonus will approach $600,000, and that some executives may take home more than $10 million. It is anticipated that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley will together pay out $90 billion in 2009 executive compensation, with more than half in the form of bonuses.
In a transparent attempt to preemptively divert and contain public outrage, President Obama will announce on Thursday a proposal to put in place a surtax on 20 banks that received funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). According to the administration, this would raise $120 billion over ten years—not much more than the five biggest banks will pay their executives for 2009 alone.
The surtax proposal comes together with another public relations stunt—the hearings held this week by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the toothless body set up for the purpose of whitewashing the criminal activities of the bankers.
Whatever the precise details of “Obama’s gentle bank tax,” as the Wall Street Journal calls the measure, it can be said with certainty that it will result in no significant penalty for Wall Street. The proposal will be blocked or watered down to the point of irrelevance by a Congress comprised of politicians who depend on campaign contributions and other bribes from the very banks they purport to regulate. Such has been the fate of the much-vaunted proposals for pay restrictions, the bank regulatory overhaul, credit card “reform,” and Obama’s so-called housing rescue.
The response of the princes of Wall Street to even the slightest encroachment on their right to salaries hundreds of times greater than those of mere mortals is to bristle with indignation.
Much like the powdered wig-bedecked aristocrats of the French Ancien Regime, these modern-day lords and ladies insist on their unchallengeable right to unlimited personal enrichment. “I am a little tired of the constant vilification of these people,” an indignant JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said this week of the furor over bonuses. “I don’t think it’s just whining,” another unnamed executive said of the bankers’ protestations. “There are legitimate liquidity issues that people have.”
These are people who produce nothing of value. Unlike the captains of industry of an earlier period—associated with names such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Edison and Ford—whose enormous personal wealth was bound up with the creation of vast industrial empires, today’s robber barons have made their fortunes through parasitic financial operations bound up with the destruction of industry and a relentless attack on the living standards of the working class.
In the midst of soaring foreclosures and growing hunger and poverty, the financial elite flaunts its wealth. “As traders and investment bankers near the finish line of what looks like a boom year for pay, some are spending money like the financial crisis never happened,” the Wall Street Journal recently reported. “From $15,000-a-week Caribbean getaways to art auctions to $200,000 platinum wrist watches…signs of the good life are returning.” New York’s elite real estate brokers are “outright giddy” over the bonuses, which will “boost sales, particularly in the $2 million to $5 million range.”
More than a year after the near-collapse of the US and world economy at the hands of the bankers, nothing has been done to reform the financial system. Nobody has been held accountable. On the contrary, the banks have exploited the crisis of their own making to make more money than ever, and the government, the courts and the media have revealed themselves as mere handmaidens of what can rightly be called a financial aristocracy.
This demonstrates that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite and its unbounded pursuit of personal enrichment are not mere excesses or aberrations of an otherwise rational and healthy system. These characteristics are rooted in the very nature of capitalism as it limps into the 21st century.
It is not a question of “reforming” the US and global banking system. The death grip of the banking elite over the wealth of society must be smashed. The answer to the plundering of society by the financial aristocracy is the expropriation of the bankers, the nationalization of the banks and finance houses, and their transformation into public trusts under the democratic control of the working population.
The alternative to the tyranny of the bankers is socialism, i.e., the abolition of private ownership of the banks and the major industries and the replacement of the capitalist market with rational planning and democratic control, geared to social need, not private profit.
The books of the banks must be opened to public inspection, and all predatory and illegal activities prosecuted. The ill-gotten wealth of the financial elite should be seized and used to meet pressing social needs—health care, education, housing, jobs.
This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in the US and internationally, a struggle against the Obama administration and the two parties of US big business, and the formation of a workers’ government.
This is the program of the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party.
Tom Eley

Dateline: 6 February 2009  [print_link]

TAKE ONE: ANTECEDENT

Henry_Kravis

Leveraged Buyout (LBO) king Henry Kravis, speaking to fellow investors. Billionaire Kravis is emblematic of today's financial oligarchy, the true rulers of the USA. The shenanigans of this crowd were portrayed in the film BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, written by two crack Wall Street Journal reporters.

O N  W E D N E S D A Y  President Barack Obama announced measures that purport to restrict executive compensation to $500,000 at financial institutions receiving billions in government assistance. The figure does not include stock options, which could be redeemed after financial firms pay back loans from the federal government. Nor does it apply to the original recipients of tens of billions in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money.

The measures are essentially a public relations exercise. Their aim is to provide political cover for a new and even larger Wall Street bailout, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will unveil next week.

Yet the discussion that has emerged in the wake of Obama’s announcement sheds light on the domination of government by a tiny financial elite and the increasingly threadbare pretense of democracy in the US. This financial aristocracy, the episode reveals, is a power to be approached on bended knee.

The media have responded to Obama’s proposal of a $500,000 limit on executive compensation, which would affect only a handful of firms, as though this were a severe and astonishing punishment. Yet the figure represents approximately [only] 12 times the annual salary of the typical worker. [Of course] to the majority of the population, a salary of a half million dollars is a staggering amount of money.

Such a vision of America is at odds with both its present circumstances and its history, which has been characterized by deep democratic and egalitarian traditions that date back to before the Jeffersonian democracy of the early Republic. And while liberals are busy attempting to equate Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the latter, in the midst of the Great Depression, attempted to capitalize on the tremendous contempt for the rich in the population at large by regularly issuing bromides against the “money changers.”

Indeed, Obama’s obsequiousness stands in sharp contrast to the anger of the working masses, who find it incomprehensible that the same executives who are responsible for ruining the economy and squandering trillions in taxpayer money are now presented with pay “limits” of a half million dollars. Workers are wondering why there haven’t been criminal indictments and television scenes of handcuffed executives frog-marched from their offices.

But on Wall Street, $500,000 is considered a pittance. The New York Times reports that executives felt cheated by taking home “only” $18 billion in collective bonuses in 2009. “I feel like I got a doorman’s tip, compared to what I got in previous years,” an investment banker with Citigroup told the Times.

The Financial Times reported on Wall Street’s opposition to the largely token measures. “Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a ‘brain drain’ from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye,” it wrote. “Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money.”

“‘The cap is a lousy idea,’ complained one top Wall Street executive. ‘If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?’”

Andrew Ward, a University of Georgia professor and specialist on corporate boards and management, told the Financial Times that executives could respond to Obama’s measure by calling his bluff—refusing to allow their firms to accept a bailout that would in any way limit their personal enrichment. “One of the potentially unintended consequences is that executives might try and hold off asking for government assistance until it is too late,” Ward said.

Media and academic figures who have tried to argue that the massive pay packages of the Wall Street executives are somehow legitimate, or even rational, succeed only in revealing the rot that characterizes intellectual life in the US. Their central argument—that the same CEOs who have driven their companies and the economy as whole into the ground are worthy of remuneration in the tens of millions—is so absurd it is almost an embarrassment to answer.

The immense power of the financial elite is revealed by the case of Bernard Madoff, the investor who squandered more than $50 billion in wealth in a giant Ponzi scheme. While working class Americans are arrested and spend years in prison for far lesser offenses, Madoff remains ensconced in his Manhattan penthouse.

For nearly a decade, a whistleblower named Harry Markopolos, who had uncovered Madoff’s scheme, attempted to draw the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal regulatory agency ostensibly tasked with policing the securities and stock industries. Instead, the SEC ran interference for Madoff. Rather than being applauded for his efforts, Markopolos feared for his safety. “We knew that he was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse,” he said.

The social psychology and physiognomy of the financial elite—with its wealth, special privileges and its control over the organs of public opinion—resembles nothing so much as a modern aristocracy.

Any discussion of a rational attempt to find a solution to the economic crisis runs immediately into the ferocious opposition of this elite. Similarly, in the 18th century the aristocracy of the French ancien regime precipitated a financial crisis through its avarice and wars. When the aristocracy convened the Estates General in 1789, it was to demand that the Third Estate, the commoners, bail the aristocracy out of the crisis of its own making. But the monarchy and nobility refused to cede a bit of its power and privileges. This set the stage for the great French Revolution.

The odious subjective characteristics of the US financial aristocracy—its greed, arrogance, stupidity and decadence—are themselves deeply rooted in objective historical developments, the social expression of an underlying economic process. The rise of this narrow social layer with its obscene levels of accumulation is inextricably bound up with the decline of American capitalism in the world market and the gutting of its domestic industrial base. Indeed, what makes the whole process so filthy, what imparts to it such a decadent and repulsive character, is the degree to which this wealth is unconnected to any progressive economic process. It is in every sense destructive and reactionary.

In an earlier period of history the US had its “robber barons,” such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. As brutal and greedy as these men were, their wealth was bound up with the creation of enormous industrial empires. The latter-day robber barons of Wall Street, on the other hand, have made their billions from the destruction of the industry and productive capacity built up over decades.

The staggering wealth accumulated in the top one percent of American society over last 25 years is directly bound up with the deterioration of the economy, the decline of industry and the impoverishment of the working class. The enormous personal fortunes of the elite have been built up on hedge funds, the leveraging of debt and other forms of financial speculation. This has entailed an enormous transfer of resources out of manufacturing and into finance, and out of the working class and into the pockets of those who have played the critical role not only in destroying living standards, but in setting the stage for the present disaster.

The fortunes that grew on this basis at a certain point assumed a dynamic of their own. Their sheer scale assumes a malignant character that becomes an insurmountable obstacle to any rational policy coming from within the confines of bourgeois politics.

It follows that there is no solution to the crisis without a direct and massive assault on social inequality, and thus the wealth and privileges of the financial and business aristocracy. This cannot be carried out by pressuring the Democratic Party. The Obama administration’s meager rules on executive pay shows that it will not consider any policies that even hint at the redistribution of wealth.

The American political elite, Obama included, is tied by a thousand strings to the financial aristocracy. The Obama administration is populated by individuals who have parlayed their political positions into lucrative positions in finance. Virtually the entire cabinet fits this billing—not only Tom Daschle, the former senator who withdrew his nomination for the Secretary of Health and Human Services amidst revelations that he had withheld tens of thousands in taxes owed on payments he received from his corporate sponsors.

Yesterday it came to light that Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, took home more than $1 million last year through payments from corporations for consulting, speaking appearances and through his membership on corporate boards. He was paid handsomely for speeches by financial firms that have since collapsed, including $56,000 by Merrill Lynch and $28,000 by Wachovia. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have also used their political connections to make millions from the same financial elite that would ostensibly be targeted by Obama’s rules on executive pay.

Obama knows very well that when he leaves office he will be able to make millions of dollars, as Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, and countless other leading politicians have done. Nor would this be a departure for Obama, whose career was taken into hand early on by leading financial and political figures in Chicago.

The subordination of the whole of society to the financial aristocracy is most clearly expressed in the massive bailout of Wall Street. Its political representatives, Democrats and Republican alike, hand over trillions to the biggest banks, while providing no provisions for the masses of people who have lost their jobs and homes.

Millions of workers who voted for Obama are now coming face to face with the fact that his administration will defend the interests of the financial elite every bit as ruthlessly, if with a slightly different presentation, as the Bush administration.

The solution to the economic crisis is not a technical question but a social, political and revolutionary settling of accounts, and a historical necessity. At a certain point in the late 18th century, it became necessary for the oppressed classes of France to rise up and destroy the power and privileges of the nobility. In the America of the 1860s, the only resolution to the “irrepressible conflict” was the destruction of the “slave power” in the South.

—Tom Eley

TAKE TWO:

The banks and socialism

Dateline: 14 January 2010

In the midst of the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression, the major US banks are about to announce multimillion-dollar year-end bonuses for their top executives and traders. Bankers are able to resume full tilt their mad pursuit of personal enrichment due to the plundering of the treasury carried out for the sole purpose of bailing out the “financial wizards” whose speculative practices precipitated the crisis.

This is a global phenomenon. In all the major centers of world capitalism, the financial elites are emerging from the economic wreckage stronger and more powerful than ever, and are dictating the terms of their own enrichment to servile governments.

In the US, Goldman Sachs is expected to announce bonuses totaling more than $20 billion, about the same amount as California’s state budget deficit. One analyst estimates that the average Goldman bonus will approach $600,000, and that some executives may take home more than $10 million. It is anticipated that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley will together pay out $90 billion in 2009 executive compensation, with more than half in the form of bonuses.

In a transparent attempt to preemptively divert and contain public outrage, President Obama will announce on Thursday a proposal to put in place a surtax on 20 banks that received funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). According to the administration, this would raise $120 billion over ten years—not much more than the five biggest banks will pay their executives for 2009 alone.

The surtax proposal comes together with another public relations stunt—the hearings held this week by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the toothless body set up for the purpose of whitewashing the criminal activities of the bankers.

Whatever the precise details of “Obama’s gentle bank tax,” as the Wall Street Journal calls the measure, it can be said with certainty that it will result in no significant penalty for Wall Street. The proposal will be blocked or watered down to the point of irrelevance by a Congress comprised of politicians who depend on campaign contributions and other bribes from the very banks they purport to regulate. Such has been the fate of the much-vaunted proposals for pay restrictions, the bank regulatory overhaul, credit card “reform,” and Obama’s so-called housing rescue.

The response of the princes of Wall Street to even the slightest encroachment on their right to salaries hundreds of times greater than those of mere mortals is to bristle with indignation.

Much like the powdered wig-bedecked aristocrats of the French Ancien Regime, these modern-day lords and ladies insist on their unchallengeable right to unlimited personal enrichment. “I am a little tired of the constant vilification of these people,” an indignant JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said this week of the furor over bonuses. “I don’t think it’s just whining,” another unnamed executive said of the bankers’ protestations. “There are legitimate liquidity issues that people have.”

These are people who produce nothing of value. Unlike the captains of industry of an earlier period—associated with names such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Edison and Ford—whose enormous personal wealth was bound up with the creation of vast industrial empires, today’s robber barons have made their fortunes through parasitic financial operations bound up with the destruction of industry and a relentless attack on the living standards of the working class.

More than a year after the near-collapse of the US and world economy at the hands of the bankers, nothing has been done to reform the financial system. Nobody has been held accountable. On the contrary, the banks have exploited the crisis of their own making to make more money than ever, and the government, the courts and the media have revealed themselves as mere handmaidens of what can rightly be called a financial aristocracy.

This demonstrates that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite and its unbounded pursuit of personal enrichment are not mere excesses or aberrations of an otherwise rational and healthy system. These characteristics are rooted in the very nature of capitalism as it limps into the 21st century.

It is not a question of “reforming” the US and global banking system. The death grip of the banking elite over the wealth of society must be smashed. The answer to the plundering of society by the financial aristocracy is the expropriation of the bankers, the nationalization of the banks and finance houses, and their transformation into public trusts under the democratic control of the working population.

The alternative to the tyranny of the bankers is socialism, i.e., the abolition of private ownership of the banks and the major industries and the replacement of the capitalist market with rational planning and democratic control, geared to social need, not private profit.

The books of the banks must be opened to public inspection, and all predatory and illegal activities prosecuted. The ill-gotten wealth of the financial elite should be seized and used to meet pressing social needs—health care, education, housing, jobs.

This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in the US and internationally, a struggle against the Obama administration and the two parties of US big business, and the formation of a workers’ government.

Tom Eley

(NOTE: This is also the program of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and the Socialist Equality Party. At TGP we often post pieces authored by members of the WSWS.  This does not signify a formal affiliation. We simply look without prejudice for the best socialist and progressive analyses and refuse to participate in sectarian squabbles.)




Democratic Presidential Bush Enablers Rehabilitate Criminal Bush

SPECIAL—

Democratic Presidential Bush Enablers Rehabilitate Criminal Bush

By Rob Kall, Editor, OpedNews
Now, Obama not only fails to prosecute Bush, who should have been impeached, but for the infamy of Nancy Pelosi, but he honors and glorifies Dubya, sharing the podium with him.
I imagine it will not be long before Obama gives Bush some sort of official honor as well.
For shame!!

(Eds.)

By Rob Kall, Editor, OpedNews [print_link]

OBAMA AND CLINTON , book-ending the war and constitutional criminal Bush, giving him respectability, even honor, as Clinton and Bush are announced as jointly working to help Haitians. It’s a good cause, but ends up conferring respectability upon a man who should be treated as a pariah.

Now, Obama not only fails to prosecute Bush, who should have been impeached, but for the infamy of Nancy Pelosi, but he honors and glorifies Dubya, sharing the podium with him.

I imagine it will not be long before Obama gives Bush some sort of official honor as well.

For shame!!

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), and President of Futurehealth, Inc.