Can we have less "lesser"

Good candidates are running across the country, and pretty much every Democrat is better than his or her opponent. But the national leadership has not crafted a compelling program comparable to the New Deal or the Great Society (to say nothing of MAGA). They haven't even tried, the closest thing being the proposal to use the tax cut to pay teachers, a pr stunt not a program.

Many of the most compelling candidates (in Texas, Florida and Georgia, for example) owe little or nothing to the national party. In many cases, the "great candidates" the DNC and DCCC did recruit are ex-military and veterans of the security state apparatus, which means they will not be of great help in turning swords into plowshares, an essential project if we are to find solutions to our festering problems in such areas as poverty, infrastructure, housing, education, and health care.

When Republicans got the polls, they know what they're going to get, as awful as that is. The same cannot be said for Democrats, who once again are being asked to vote against rather than for something. Will the Democrats as a party fight for infrastructure spending, progressive taxes, Medicare for All, a living wage and universal basic income? Who can say? Are they going to take on the military-industrial giants and the security state? Not likely, but who really knows.

The House and maybe the Senate are at stake; it would be helpful to know what the stakes really are.

And, parenthetically, in a census year, the outcomes in races for governor mansions and state legislatures will determine the makeup of the House for at least a decade.

Big problems require big solutions

A confused and befuddled Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, grasping at straws, have a formulated a nearly perfect compression of their tired lesser-of-two-evils rhetoric -- "A Better Deal," promoting the new slogan under the misapprehension that it's bad marketing instead of bad politics that's the cause of their electoral headaches.

The road to capitalism triumphant is pocked by financial crises: 1819, 1837, 1857, 1884, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987, 2008... 

But what accounts for that long break after WWII, 30 years of widespread prosperity and economic growth? 

One key factor, besides sizable opportunities in the construction industry afforded by worldwide devastation, is that during these decades banks were severely regulated, capital movement was constricted, exchange rates were limited.

In judging the seriousness of the Democrats in the months ahead, their willingness to rein in the financial giants will be key. Other vital issues -- infrastructure, empire, jobs, climate change, affordable universal education and health care -- cannot be addressed by a party still afraid to pursue any policy that might inconvenience rich people.

We need a new era of big government to address big problems. More than a Better Deal, we need a Big Deal.

Occupy 2011: Links

Occupy Worldwide: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Together, Occupy D.C., Occupy Oakland, Occupy Chicago, Occupy Boston, Occupy San Francisco , Occupy Los Angeles

The Financial Mess: Self-regulation is a joke

Damage from the bursting of the housing bubble was vastly compounded by an industry-wide conspiracy of Wall Street bankers to create a market for worthless financial products, in particular collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

According to the non-profit investigative news organization ProPublica, when faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- "hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand," buying and trading their own products to crank up an assembly line that in a prudently regulated economy would have been flagged to a stop.

As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created -- and ultimately provided most of the money for -- new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.

Individual instances of these questionable trades have been reported before, but ProPublica's investigation, done in partnership with NPR's Planet Money, shows that by late 2006 they had become common industry practice.

In the last years of the boom, CDOs had become the dominant purchaser of CDOs and CDO slices, in deals organized by the banks themselves that largely replaced legitimate investors like pension funds. For example, "[i]n the last two years of the boom, nearly half of all CDOs sponsored by market leader Merrill Lynch bought significant portions of other Merrill CDOs."

ProPublica also found 85 instances during 2006 and 2007 in which two CDOs bought pieces of each other's unsold inventory. These trades, which involved $107 billion worth of CDOs, underscore the extent to which the market lacked real buyers. Often the CDOs that swapped purchases closed within days of each other, the analysis shows.

There were supposed to be protections against this sort of double dealing, of course. The CDOs were overseen by managers who, though selected by the banks, were legally bound to protect the interests of the CDOs. Paid by the CDOs, not the banks, the "independent" managers were supposed to serve as a bulwark against self-dealing by the financial institutions, the only ones with even an inkling of how the complex and virtually unregulated mortgage bonds worked.

It rarely worked out that way. The managers were beholden to the banks that sent them the business. On a billion-dollar deal, managers could earn a million dollars in fees, with little risk. Some small firms did several billion dollars of CDOs in a matter of months.

Unfortunately for us, nothing in the Wall Street-dominated federal financial reforms will prevent it from happening again. What a laugh.

The rest of the story: Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis by Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger (ProPublica 2010-08-27).

See, also: Wall Street's Big Win by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone 2010-08-04); Misnamed Financial Services “Reform” Bill Passes, Systemic Risk is Alive and Well by Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism 2010-07-26).

Saturday Catchup: Sauce for your weekend

"But if 'global war' isn’t the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves’ worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they’re rational actors — that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires — who respond to the set of incentives that they find before them. The tools of analysis are realism, rational choice, game theory, decision theory: clinical and bloodless modes of thinking. That approach, along with these scholars’ long immersion in the subject, can produce some surprising observations." -- Terrorism Studies: Social scientists do counterinsurgency by Nicholas Lemann (The New Yorker 2010-04-26)

"I have been openly critical of the US military's role in world affairs for several years now, and in the responses from soldiers and their supporters I have noticed a common theme: I should be respectful, I am told, because the military is defending my 'freedom.' This is not an overly brusque summarization - I have not heard an elaboration on this claim. Everyone should be grateful for the sacrifices of the US military, from the Iraqis and Afghans to US citizens, because without the exact current formulation of the US military, a nebulous and shadowy enemy will step forth to threaten my personal freedom or safety. So the story goes. Because you military men and women believe you are doing this for me, I am formally asking you to stop." -- A Plea to the US Military and Its Enforcers by Ian G. Anderson (truthout 2010-04-30).

One benefit of working at Google was the once or twice a week visits to the office by writers promoting their latest books. Here, for example, is Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explaining how economic policy became dysfunctional in what might be described as the Robert Rubin Years.
Reading list:
Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz
The Stiglitz Report: Reforming the International Monetary and Financial Systems in the Wake of the Global Crisis by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"It is a shame that Congress is moving forward with financial regulations that do not eliminate the heads-bankers-win, tails-taxpayers-lose mentality that has driven most of the bailouts during this sorry episode. Companies that are too mighty to fail must be broken up. And incentives in the nation's regulatory system that reward size with subsidies should not be enshrined into law. They should be eliminated. Only then will America be safe from toxic banking practices and the burdensome rescues they require." -- Do You Have Any Reforms in Size XL? by Gretchen Morgenson (New York Times 2010-04-23).

"Democrats know exactly how politically dangerous it is to raise funds on Wall Street right now. But they're doing it anyway. Both parties, in fact, know the risks and are choosing to take the hit rather than forgo the cash. This isn't because they love being attacked or even think that the toxicity of Wall Street is overstated. It's because, to use a metaphor that's in vogue right now, our system of campaign finance turns politicians into vampire squids wrapped around the wallets of the rich, relentlessly jamming their blood funnels into anything that smells like money." -- Democrats, Republicans just can't quit Wall Street money by Ezra Klein (Washington Post blog 201-04-30).

Thomas Jefferson on Lloyd Blankfein: "I have ever believed that had there been no Queen, there would have been no [French] revolution. ... Her inordinate gambling and dissipations ... her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine ... and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will forever stain the pages of modern history." --  Goldman Sachs: The Marie Antoinette of Our Time! by Leslie Griffith (Reader Supported News 2010-04-30). Interesting take. The French didn't sit still for it. Will we?

Music break: Mississisppi John Hurt's Pay Day performed by Joe Bad XAnd here's the original.

“What we’re seeing affecting the press is part of a general trend in freedom around the world. It’s often press freedom that is the first to come under attack, and then that spreads to other freedoms more generally.” -- Karin Deutsch Karleker, managing editor, Freedom House global press freedom study. Press freedom falls around the world by Howard LaFranchi (Christian Science Monitor 2010-04-29). There are bright spots regarding press freedom, but there's been an overall decline for eight straight years, according to a new report. Other political and social freedoms may be waning, too.

They told us the World Wide Web would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong. Think Again: The Internet by Evgeny Morozov (Foreign Policy 2010-May/June). Alas, a networked world is not inherently a more just world. It's still going to take politics.

"What conclusion are we to draw from the fact that the richest and most powerful nation and most technologically advanced capitalist country cannot come up with the resources necessary to fund its educational system? This is not a technical problem, or even a financial one. It's political." -- The Looming Educational Catastrophe is Scary. Indeed. by Carl Bloice (BlackCommentator.com 2010-04-29)

SNCC "built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural co-operatives. It gave the movement for women's liberation new energy. It inspired and trained the activists who began the 'New Left.' It helped expand the limits of political debate within black America, and broadened the focus of the civil rights movement. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of Blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself." -- Julian Bond at the 50th birthday party of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We'll Never Turn Back - SNCC 50th Anniversary Celebrates Vanguard Role In Battles for Democracy by Carl Davidson (Portside.org 2010-04-26).

"Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs": On the final edition of his PBS "Journal," Bill Moyers holds long conversations with Texas populist Jim Hightower and novelist-essayist Barry Lopez. Here is the transcript.

If you're the person who has not yet seen what has to be the weirdest SNL video ever, this is for you:

Speaking of weird, "newspapers are full of the latest priestly sex abuses. This is an on going story. Within the last year, mass scandals have erupted in Brazil, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria. and the United States. Figures from the John Jay School of Criminal Justice estimate that since 1950, an estimated 280,000 children have been sexually abused by Catholic Clergy and deacons. How has this happened? Why does it continue? Pedophilia certainly is a familiar problem for the Catholic Church. Father Thomas Doyle, a priest, and Richard Sipes and Patrick Wall, former monks, wrote that the Catholic Church has recognized the problem of abuse by priests for 2,000 years. Their acclaimed book, Sex, Priests and Secret Codes was based on the Church’s own documents." -- Priests & Pedophilia: What Authoritarian Religion, Families & Schools Have Wrought by Harriet Fraad (AlterNet/Tikkun Daily 2010-04-30).

And, finally, plug in your earphones, 'cause here's a video of the greatest local rock band from my college years:
Although it can't match the energy of their live performances, The Remains by Barry & The Remains belongs in every basic rock 'n' roll collection as a remarkable milestone from a lost era. Or is that a lost milestone from a remarkable era?  Whatever.  The mid-sixties were a great time for rock and roll. And as I said at the time, there was lot more going on than the British invasion.

Finance Reform: What A Progressive Victory Would Look Like

Ending Corporate Welfare To Help Regular Americans

"Yesterday was actually big victory for progressivism. Not in health care, but in student loan reform. Finally, a wasteful and worthless corporate welfare program was eliminated. The taxpayer dollars that were being thrown away on private profits will now be redirected to help low income students attend college and pay down the debt. This is what progressive victories look like."

The rest of the story: What Progressive Victory Looks Like: Ending Corporate Welfare To Help Regular Americans by Jon Walker (FireDogLake 2010-03-26)

See, also: Clunker Healthcare Bill Protects Private Insurers Damages Democracy by Billy Wharton (ConterCurrents 2010-03-25)

For all you -- you know, metaphorical -- ukulele players

“A prosperous country should not just be prosperous for the people like me who are wired a particular way at birth (no credit to me) but I happen to know something about capital allocation and that wasn’t, you know, instead I could have been wired, you know, so I was, I don’t know, a great ukulele player. But there’s no money in that." -- Warren Buffett