Obama the Hypocrite: "Dream Bigger"

Corpocrisy: The Systematic Betrayal of American Workers

Monday, February 4, 2013 by Common Dreams

by Paul Buchheit

Free market idealists argue that capitalism works for anyone with a little initiative and a willingness to work hard. That might be true if job opportunities were available to everyone. But the facts reveal a lack of opportunity, largely because the very system of capitalism that's supposed to work for everyone is betraying its most productive members.

It's a step-by-step process of hypocrisy disguised as free enterprise:

1. Let the public pay for the research.

Since World War 2 our federal government has played the dominant role in the research of new technologies, with an emphasis on the long-term basic research that painstakingly perfects design while not yet producing revenue. Corporate R&D, on the other hand, is heavy on the profit-making late stages of development.

Government has contributed significantly to the development of today's most modern technologies. Business has taken full advantage. Even during the frenetic growth of the 1990s, industry funding for computer research declined dramatically while government research funding continued to climb. As of 2009 universities were still receiving ten times more science & engineering funding from government than from industry.

2. Use the publicly-funded technologies to double profits in 8 years.

From 2003 to 2011 total corporate profits more than doubled from $900 billion to almost $2 trillion.

A big part of that is the financial industry, which has adapted the (nationally built) Internet to fashion trillion-dollar trading schemes. Up until 1985 financial firms never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. Their share recently reached 41 percent.

3. Use the recession as an excuse to cut taxes in half.

For the twenty years prior to the 2008 recession, corporations paid an average annual rate of 22.5% in federal taxes. Since then the average has been 10%.

4. Quietly hoard all the excess money.

Anywhere from $2.2 trillion to $3.4 trillion in cash is being held by non-financial corporations, who have chosen to fatten stockholders rather than invest in new production facilities and the employees needed to make them profitable.

Once again, the financial industry leads the way. Just 12 large banks hold 69 percent of industry assets, close to $8 trillion. But they're not making their money available to consumers or small businesses. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, community banks, which hold less than one-fifth of industry assets, provide over half of all small business loans.

5. Pay existing workers what they earned in 1970.

Less, actually. Average real wages were $17.42 in 2007, down from $19.34 in 1972 (based on 2007 dollars). Wages as a percentage of the economy, at 44% of GDP, are at an all-time low.

Jobs that remain are increasingly low-wage positions. Apple is a good example of the race to the bottom for wages, with an estimated $420,000 profit per employee and a $12 per hour pay rate for its store workers.

6. Eliminate all the other people who helped increase productivity.

Not only are "job creators" failing to create jobs with their cash hoards, but they're also cutting jobs in order to 'streamline' their operations. Evidence comes from The Nation, Market Watch, and Business Insider.

-- Verizon, which made $38 billion in 2008-11 and paid no tax, cut 41,100 jobs.
-- AT&T, which made $9 billion in 20011 and paid no tax, cut 54,000 jobs.
-- Merck, which made $34 billion in 2008-11 and paid a 7% tax, cut 13,000 jobs.

Other leading job-cutters:

-- Citigroup, which made a $28 billion profit in 2010-11 and paid no tax.
-- Boeing, which made $15 billion in profits in 2008-11 and paid no tax.
-- IBM, which made $75 billion in profits in 2008-11 and paid less than 2% in taxes.
-- HP, which $40 billion in profits in 2008-11 and paid an 11% tax.
-- Pepsico, which made a $10 billion profit in 2011 and paid a 6.3% tax.
-- Proctor & Gamble, which made almost $60 billion in profits in 2008-11 and paid 11% in taxes.
-- Google, which avoided about $2 billion in 2011 taxes by shifting revenue to a Bermuda tax haven.

7. Ignore the facts.

And do nothing to address the mistreatment of American workers. CEOs, Congress, and the media are all skilled at this final step of betrayal.

Obama takes Bush’s secrecy games one step further

BY GLENN GREENWALD - SALON.com
MONDAY, MAR 26, 2012

The ACLU is suing the Obama administration under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), seeking to force disclosure of the guidelines used by Obama officials to select which human beings (both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals) will have their lives ended by the CIA’s drone attacks (“In particular,” the group explains, the FOIA request “seeks to find out when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killing”). The Obama administration has not only refused to provide any of that information, but worse, the CIA is insisting to federal courts that it cannot even confirm or deny the existence of a drone program at all without seriously damaging national security; from the CIA’s brief in response to the ACLU lawsuit:

. . .

What makes this so appalling is not merely that the Obama administration demands the right to kill whomever it wants without having to account to anyone for its actions, choices or even claimed legal authorities, though that’s obviously bad enough (as I wrote when the ACLU lawsuit was commenced: “from a certain perspective, there’s really only one point worth making about all of this: if you think about it, it is warped beyond belief that the ACLU has to sue the U.S. Government in order to force it to disclose its claimed "legal and factual bases" for assassinating U.S. citizens without charges, trial or due process of any kind”). What makes it so much worse is how blatantly, insultingly false is its claim that it cannot confirm or deny the CIA drone program without damaging national security.

Numerous Obama officials — including the President himself and the CIA Director — have repeatedly boasted in public about this very program. Obama recently hailed the CIA drone program by claiming that “we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied,” and added that it is “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on.” Obama has told playful jokes about the same drone program. Former CIA Director and current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also likes to tell cute little jokes about CIA Predator drones, and then proclaimed in December that the drone program has “been very effective at undermining al Qaeda and their ability to plan those kinds of attacks.” Just two weeks ago, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speechpurporting to legally justify these same drone attacks.

So Obama officials are eager to publicly tout the supposed benefits of the CIA’s drone programs in order to generate political gain for the President: to make him look like some sort of Tough, Brave Warrior single-handedly vanquishing Al Qaeda. The President himself boasts about how tightly controlled, precise and effective the CIA drones are. Everyone in the world knows the CIA has a drone program. It is openly discussed everywhere, certainly including the multiple Muslim countries where the drones routinely create piles of corpses, and by top U.S. Government officials themselves.

But then when it comes time to test the accuracy of their public claims by requesting the most basic information about what is done and how execution targets are selected, and when it comes time to ask courts to adjudicate its legality, then suddenly National Security imperatives prevent the government even from confirming or denying the existence of the program: the very same program they’ve been publicly boasting and joking about. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer put it after Obama publicly defended the program: “At this point, the only consequence of pretending that it’s a secret program is that the courts don’t play a role in overseeing it” – that, and ensuring that any facts that contradict these public claims remain concealed.

This is why the U.S. Government’s fixation on secrecy — worse than ever under the Obama administration, as evidenced by its unprecedented war on whistleblowers — is so pernicious. It not only enables government officials to operate in the dark, which inevitably ensures vast (though undiscovered) abuses of power. Worse, it enables the government to aggressively propagandize the citizenry without challenge: Obama officials are free to make all sorts of claims about how great and targeted the drone program is and how it Keeps Us Safe™, while simultaneously suppressing any official evidence or information that would test those claims and/or contradict them (even as some evidence suggests these assurances are false).

Worse still, it literally removes our highest political officials from the rule of law. The sole purpose of these vast claims of secrecy around the drone program — the absurd notion that they cannot even confirm or deny its existence without harming National Security — is to block courts from reviewing the legality of what they’re doing, which is another way of saying: they have removed themselves from the rule of law. Even Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith, a vociferous advocate of executive authority and secrecy powers, understands how abusive this is:

First, it is wrong . . . for the government to maintain technical covertness but then engage in continuous leaks, attributed to government officials, of many (self-serving) details about the covert operations and their legal justifications. It is wrong because it is illegal. It is wrong because it damages (though perhaps not destroys) the diplomatic and related goals of covertness. And it is wrong because the Executive branch seems to be trying to have its cake (not talking about the program openly in order to serve diplomatic interests and perhaps deflect scrutiny) and eat it too (leaking promiscuously to get credit for the operation and to portray it as lawful).

Indeed, one of the worst abuses of the lawless Bush presidency was that Bush officials repeatedly invoked secrecy powers (the State Secret privilege) to shield their most controversial and lawless programs from judicial review: warrantless eavesdropping, rendition, and torture. One of the earliest alarms about what the Obama presidency would be was when the Obama DOJ told courts early in 2009 that it would continue to assert those same radical secrecy claims: thus telling courts that the very programs which candidate Obama long denounced as illegal were now such vital State Secrets that courts must not risk their disclosure by adjudicating their legality. Beyond Obama’s decree that the DOJ must not investigate Bush-era crimes, that was the instrument used by Obama to shield Bush’s criminal policies from judicial challenge: through Kafkaesque claims of secrecy whereby programs that everyone in the world knows exist were Too Secret even to let courts examine. In sum, there is only one place in the entire world where these policies of warrantless eavesdropping, rendition, torture, and CIA drones cannot be discussed: in American courts, when it’s time to review their legality and/or allow its victims to vindicate their legal rights.

Now, in this ACLU/FOIA case, the Obama administration is taking these warped secrecy games one step further. They boast publicly about the programs to lavish themselves with praise, only to turn around once they’re sued in court and insist that the programs are too secret even to acknowledge. So extreme is the fixation on secrecy from the "Most Transparent Administration Ever™" that they are routinely reduced to this type of self-parody; behold how they are insisting in response to a separate FOIA lawsuit from The New York Times that they cannot even confirm or deny the existence of the OLC memo which authorized the assassination of Anwar Awlaki — even though the NYT reported on its contents. More amazingly still, the Obama administration continues to insist that they cannot confirm or deny the memo’s existence even after Eric Holder talks about the memo in a Senate hearing.

This would be laughable if it were not so destructive. It results in the government’s most consequential actions being completely shielded not only from public scrutiny, but also from the rule of law. It enables the most powerful political officials to inculcate the public with claims about their actions while preventing any form of checks and suppressing any contrary information. It literally means that the Obama administration is able to conduct multiple secret wars around the world, ones conducted by drone attacks, the very existence of which they refuse to acknowledge. And it is yet another way the Obama presidency is cementing the worst abuses of the Bush presidency: the very same ones he so inspirationally vowed to reverse.

UPDATE: Just this weekend, The Washington Post published a lengthy, glowing profile of the anonymous CIA official who oversees the CIA drone program. We learned how the drone program has slain countless Al Qaeda leaders with such precision and force: the same program the Obama administration insists cannot be acknowledged without seriously harming national security. Given that claim, will the anonymous officials who enabled this hagiography by talking to the Post about this glorious official and all that the drone program has accomplished be prosecuted under espionage statutes? Yes, that question is rhetorical, and further highlights how severely secrecy powers are manipulated and exploited by this administration.

Who Will Liberate America?

Obama, the Human Rights Hypocrite
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination.

One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights.

Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prison sites are other places to which Washington brings human rights. Obama, who has the power to murder American citizens without due process of law, is too powerless to close Guantanamo Prison.

He is powerless to prevent himself from supplying Israel with weapons with which to murder Palestinians and Lebanese citizens to whom Obama brings human rights by vetoing every UN resolution passed against Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Instead of following Washington’s human rights lead, the evil Chinese invest in other countries, buy things from them, and sell them goods.

Has any foreign dignitary ever raised “a sensitive human rights issue” with Obama or his predecessor? How is the world so deranged that Washington can murder innocents for years on end and still profess to be the world’s defender of human rights?

How many people has China bombed, droned, and sanctioned into non-existence in the 21st century?

Will Syria and Iran be the next victims of Washington’s concern for human rights?

Nothing better illustrates the total unreality of life in the West than the fact that the entire Western world did not break out in riotous laughter over Obama’s expression of his human rights concern over China’s behavior.

Washington’s concern with human rights does not extend as far as airport security where little girls and grandmothers are sexually groped. Antiwar activists have their homes invaded, their personal possessions carried off, and a grand jury is summoned to frame them up on some terrorist charge. US soldier Bradley Manning is held for two years in violation of the US Constitution while the human rights government concocts fabricated charges to punish him for revealing a US war crime. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is harassed endlessly with the goal of bringing him into the human rights clutches of Washington. Critics of Washington’s inhumane policies are monitored and spied upon.

Washington is the worst violator of human rights in our era, and Washington has only begun.

Who will liberate Americans from Washington’s clutches?

Repulsive Democrat Hypocrisy

And this would be one of myriad reasons why I'm not a Democrat or Republican. I believe certain things that neither party supports, or if they SAY they do, they really don't, like shutting down Guantanamo. Obama has so many broken campaign promises, how can you trust him?--jef

WEDNESDAY, FEB 8, 2012 
BY GLENN GREENWALD - Salon.com

(updated below)

During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.

The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.

Repulsive Democrat hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:

Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.

The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained the breakdown on these questions and wrote today:

The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

One of the very first non-FISA posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention was this one from January, 2006, entitled “Do Bush Followers have an Ideology”? It examined the way in which the Bush-supporting Right was more like an “authoritarian cult” rather than a political movement because its adherents had no real, fixed political beliefs; instead, I argued, their only animating “principle” was loyalty to their leader, and they would support anything he did no matter how at odds it was with their prior ostensible beliefs. That post was linked to and praised by dozens and dozens of liberal blogs: can you believe what authoritarian followers these conservatives are?, they scoffed in unison. Here was the crux of my argument:

Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush. . . .

People who self-identify as “conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That “conservatism” has come to mean “loyalty to George Bush” is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. . . .

And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

As this post demonstrates, long before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I considered blind leader loyalty one of the worst toxins in our political culture: it’s the very antithesis of what a healthy political system requires (and what a healthy mind would produce). 

One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded, reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.

The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support the views of the majority as expressed by this poll should never be listened to again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies).

One final point: I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving. (Exactly as they planned it when Obama became "their guy."--jef)

UPDATE: The Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy documents how much public opinion has changed on these issues under (and as a result of) the Obama presidency: “under the leadership of a President who campaigned with the promise to close the facility, . . . support for the detention center may be at its highest level ever.”

MSNBC's O’Donnell blasts hypocrisy of marijuana prohibition

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The Four Great Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal

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“We have, in this deal, declared that we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all political incumbents are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Re-nomination, re-election, and the pursuit of hypocrisy.

“We have superceded Congress to facilitate 750 billion dollars in domestic cuts including Medicare in order to end an artificially-induced political hostage crisis over debt, originating from the bills run up by a Republican president who funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to the military-industrial complex by unfunded, unnecessary, and unproductive wars, enabled in doing so by the very same Republican leaders who now cry for balanced budgets – and we have called it compromise.

“Where is the outrage to come from? From you!

“It will do no good to wait for the politicians to suddenly atone for their sins, they are too busy trying to keep their jobs to do their jobs. It will do no good to wait for the media to remember its origins as the free press, the watchdog of democracy envisioned by Jefferson, they are too busy trying to get exclusive details about how exactly the bank robbers emptied the public’s pockets to give a damn about telling anybody what they looked like or which way they went. It will do no good to wait for the apolitical public to get a clue, they can’t hear the clue over all the scandal and chatter and diversion and illusion.

“The betrayal of what this nation was supposed to be about did not begin with this deal and it surely will not end with this deal. There is a tide pushing back the rights of each of us and it has been artificially induced by union bashing and the sowing of hatreds and fears and now this evermore institutionalized economic battering of the average American. It will continue and it will crush us because those that created it are organized, and unified, and hell-bent. And the only response is to be organized, and unified and hell-bent in return.

“We must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960s and the 1970s, and we must protest this deal and all the goddamn deals to come in the streets. We must rise, nonviolently, but insistently. General strikes, boycotts, protests, sit-ins, non-cooperation, takeovers. But modern versions of that resistance, facilitated and amplified by a weapon our predecessors did not have: the glory that is instantaneous communication.

“First you’ve got to get mad! I cannot say to you meet here at this hour or that one, and we’ll peacefully break that back of government that exist merely to get its functionaries re-elected. But I can say that the time is coming for the window for us to restore the control of our government to ourselves will close, and we had damn well better act before then because this deal is more than a tipping point from where the government goes from defending the safety net to gutting it. This is wrong!”

Too Big to Fail, Too Conflicted to Govern

Shameless on the Hill
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER

At a hearing on Capitol Hill this week on "too big to fail" banks, both corporate parties were posturing.

Strutting their stuff.

Ripping into each other.

But the reality?

When push came to shove, both didn't have the guts to do the right thing to prevent another bailout.

That would be – limit the size of the big banks so that they are no longer "too big to fail."

"Too big to fail" means exactly that.

The banks are too big to fail.

If they fail, we must bail them out.

Or the economy goes down in a spectacular flameout.

The six biggest banks in America?

Wells Fargo.

Citibank.

Bank of America.

JP Morgan Chase.

Morgan Stanley.

Goldman Sachs.

Together, they control assets equal to about 65 of GDP.

Twenty years ago, that number was about 15 percent of GDP.

The hearing yesterday was held by a House Financial Services Committee subcommittee chaired by Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia).

Before the hearing got started, Public Citizen was passing out a letter calling on Capito to formally disclose that her husband now works for one of the those too big to fail banks – Wells Fargo.

She has so far refused to do so.

But the conflicts on the committee on both sides of the aisle are deeper than the horse crap at the back of any barn in Capito's Second Congressional District of West Virginia.

True, the Republican side is marinated in Wall Street cash.

Just as an example, Capito's number one contributor over her career is from another one of the too big to fail banks – Citibank.

But the Democrats are marinated in Wall Street cash too.

And therefore the hypocrisy on the Democratic side is as deep – maybe deeper – than the conflicts.

The best in show winner for posturing was Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-NY).

Gutierrez used his five minutes to rip into the Republicans for being the party of Wall Street.

He ended pointing at his Republican colleagues and saying – "You should just tell people you're for big banks and make it clear and simple."

Then he got up and left.

Didn't want to contemplate of the hypocrisy of it all.

But Congressman Brad Miller (D-North Carolina) was shameless.

Miller understands – as does almost everyone on the committee – that the way you deal with the problem of too big to fail banks is to limit their size so that they are no longer too big to fail.

There actually was a vote on the Senate side in 2008 on an amendment – the Brown-Kaufman amendment – that would have done the trick.

Miller introduced a similar amendment in the House.

Miller put it this way:

"Senator Kaufman introduced an amendment on the Senate side that failed, that would limited the overall size of those -- of banks to 2 percent of the GDP. That's still like a $300 billion company. That's a pretty big -- pretty big bank, big enough to do pretty much anything, but it would have required that the six biggest firms be broken up into more than 30 banks."

"No Republican support for that law," Miller said. "I introduced the idea on the House side, but the fight was really over on the Senate side."

What is Congressman Miller not telling us?

He is not telling us that the Brown/Kaufman amendment was defeated by President Obama and his Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner.

Neil Barofsky, who was the Special Inspector General for the TARP, told Corporate Crime Reporter last week that the Brown Kaufman amendment would have passed had the Obama administration gotten behind it.

Instead, Treasury Secretary Geithner lobbied against the bill.

"The reason it didn't pass was because the Treasury Secretary lobbied individual Senators to convince them to vote against this bill," Barofsky said.

And what is the result of that vote?

"The largest banks are now 20 percent larger today than they were going into the crisis," Barofsky said. "They are systemically more significant, they are bigger, they are more important. And we just haven't seen the political or regulatory will to take on the fundamental problems that are presented by these institutions."

"Standard and Poors recently put the U.S. government's credit rating on watch. And one of the things they talked about was the contingent liability to support our financial institutions. And they estimated that the up front costs of another bailout could be up to $5 trillion."

"And when you think about the focus on our budget issues, our deficit and our debt – what happens with the next crisis and we have to come up with another $5 trillion to bail out our system once again?"

"It's a terrifying concept. One of TARP's biggest legacies is that it emphasized to the market that the government would not let these largest banks fail. And we haven't done anything to address this problem. So, we are going to be right back where we were in late 2008 – if not in a worse position."

The Two-Tiered Justice System: An Illustration

Friday, April 15, 2011 by Salon.com
by Glenn Greenwald

 

Of all the topics on which I've focused, I've likely written most about America's two-tiered justice system -- the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world's largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by "two-tiered justice system" -- and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law -- that it's impossible for me not to highlight it.

The article's headline tells most of the story: "In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures." It asks: "why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?" And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was "certainly illegal and clearly criminal" and that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."

Despite that clarity and abundance of the evidence proving pervasive criminality, it's entirely unsurprising that there have been no real criminal investigations or prosecutions. That's because the overarching "principle" of our justice system is that criminal prosecutions are only for ordinary rabble, not for those who are most politically and financially empowered. We have thus created precisely the two-tiered justice system against which the Founders most stridently warned and which contemporary legal scholars all agree is the hallmark of a lawless political culture. Lest there be any doubt about that claim, just consider the following facts and events:

When Bush officials were revealed to have established a worldwide torture regime (including tactics which Obama's Attorney General flatly stated were illegal) and spied on Americans without the warrants required by law (which Obama himself insisted was criminal), what happened? This, from The New York Times, January 11, 2009:

And when Spanish prosecutors decided, in light of Obama's refusal, that it would criminally investigate the torture by American officials to which its citizens were subjected by the U.S., what happened? This, from Mother Jones, December 1, 2010:

When telecoms get caught participating in Bush's illegal eavesdropping program in violation of multiple federal statutes, what happened? This, from TPM, February 12, 2008:

And that, in turn, led to this, from The New York Times, June 3, 2009:

And when the CIA got caught destroying videotapes of its "interrogation" sessions with accused Terrorists even in the face of multiple court orders directing that they preserve such evidence -- acts which even the establishment-serving, rhetorically restrained co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission strongly suggested constituted "obstruction" of justice -- what happened? This, from Politico, November 9, 2010:

And when it came time to decide what to do with one of the most brazen and egregious lawbreakers in the financial world -- former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, whose fraud was so glaring that he was one of the very few to suffer any consequences (forced to pay a paltry $40 million out of his $500 million fortune) -- what happened? This, from AP, February 10, 2011:

All of that stands in the starkest possible contrast to how ordinary Americans -- especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities -- are treated by this same "justice system": with incomparably harsh and merciless punishment. From The New York Times, April 23, 2008:

The virtually full-scale immunity now vested in political and financial elites stands in just as stark contrast to the treatment received by those who reveal wrongdoing, corruption and illegality by those elites -- from The New York Times, June 11, 2010:

And, from CBS News, March 11, 2011:

And this overflowing forgiveness and generosity toward elites stands in starkest contrast to foreign nationals accused of Terrorism, who are literally rendered non-persons and denied all rights - from The Washington Post, March 11, 2011:

And, from the ACLU, September 15, 2009:

In a 1795 letter, George Washington vowed that "the executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity." Thomas Jefferson -- in an April 16, 1784, letter to Washington -- argued that the foundation on which American justice must rest is "the denial of every preeminence." It's literally difficult to imagine how we could be further away from those core principles. That the culprits who caused one of the worst financial crises in modern history have been fully shielded from the consequences of their acts -- set along side the torturers and illegal eavesdroppers who have been similarly protected -- illustrates that quite compellingly.

Ron Paul on MSNBC Critical of those who fight building the NYC Mosque

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