Go Greeks!

With the utter failure of democracy to (1) rein in financial markets worldwide thus generating an ongoing economic catastrophe or to (2) force the perpetrators of these financial shenaningans to share in the burdens of repairing the damage, only direct action is left. Bravo to the people of Greece for pouring into the streets Egyptian-style and refusing to allow their country to be swallowed up by the banker squids.

It has been evident even to a casual outside observer such as myself without the benefit of a PhD in economics that the Greek economy could never escape from the country’s insane debt. This crushing burden, roughly similar to the permanent debt peonage forced on black sharecroppers in the post-bellum South, was built up through a combination of local fecklessness and international collusion by French, German and British banks aided, need we add, by the scam-artistry of Goldman Sachs.

In his annals of Alexander the Great’s conquests around the Mediterranean and beyond, Arrian relates how the invading Macedonian hordes would lay siege to a resisting city, slaughter its defenders and carry off its treasures. That’s pretty much what the European Central Bank has in mind for Greece today—its latest ‘solution’ to the debt trap is for virtually any Greek public asset of value to be sold off to privateers, all while no bondholder forfeits a single centime. If that doesn’t pay the bills, perhaps the ECB could arrange for surviving Greeks to be sold into slavery.

We have seen this all before. Latin America was forced into a similar process of wealth transfer through debt, which only ended when the endless extraction became untenable and destabilizing. The process included lengthy and complex negotiations in which all parties, including creditors, had to agree to give up something. But the European Union, whose 27 members cannot decide what size table to sit around, shows no signs of finding its way toward a solution of this sort.

The banksters raise a great hue and cry about the horrors of default—that Greece simply declare itself incapable of paying out on its sovereign bonds—but this outcome seems to me highly desirable to inject a bracing dose of reality into the conversation, even or especially if it collapses a French bank or two. There is much talk of a Lehman Brothers-style crisis, a meltdown and all the rest, and in a highly leveraged, unregulated financial system run by devious gangsters, severe instability is always a possibility.

But the alternative is to allow the obscenely wealthy to keep shifting the burden of their incompetence onto the state (i.e. taxpayers) indefinitely while any gains accrue only to them. Elections, which result in a back-and-forth between members of the political class all in thrall to these banker gangs, are irrelevant. It’s time for the pitchforks, come what may.

Decline

Goody, goody, we’re now set for 18 months of mindless posturing pretending to be a political debate. The Republican challengers launched the festivities with their pre-New Hampshire reality series complete with ‘this or that’ questions like, [Do you prefer] Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash? Not one presidential contender drove a truck through the huge opportunity to briefly impersonate an adult and say, ‘That question is silly and beneath the dignity of the office to which I aspire’.

Not that one of these bozo bipeds couldn’t end up in the Oval Office. The excessive confidence of the Obamaoids is fading in inverse proportion to the stickily high unemployment figures and Obama’s caving to the banksters in March of 2009 is now proving deadly just as dissidents warned at the time. Instead of taking the historic opportunity to pull the financier-rentier class back in line and subordinate it to the working economy, Obama and his A-team of enablers (Geithner, Summers and the rest) handed them the store in exchange for promises to bring back productive employment. That hasn’t worked out.

So now we have the prime-time spectacle of demented goofballs like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann actually saying true things, like broken clocks that are correct twice a day. When Obama makes happy-talk by calling employment problems a mere ‘bump in the road’, Mitt (the Hair) Romney can score easy points with his ad of depressed workers taking issue with that rather heartless statement. By refusing to place blame on the perpetrators of economic catastrophe with his disastrous let’s-hold-hands-and-sing bipartisan fantasy, Obama now has to shoulder sole responsibility for the current state of affairs.

A large portion of the finance/economy blogosphere, which I enjoy reading as a curious consumer, has been on Obama’s ass for his entire term for excessive optimism, dissembling and delight in the cozy confines of the banksters’ back pockets. As Yves Smith lays out today in a full airing in her blog Naked Capitalism,

‘Obama’s repudiation of his campaign promise of change, by turning his back on meaningful reform of the financial services industry, in turn locked his Administration into . . . working fist in glove with the banksters, supporting and amplifying their own, well established propaganda efforts.

‘Thus Obama’s incentives are to come up with “solutions” that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry’s goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress’.

The depressing part of the story is that Smith is quoting herself, having written that in March of 2010, and the takeover of our productive economy by the cash-extraction industry has only gotten worse in the year since. Despite the wall of liquidity being thrown at the TBTF banks, lending is sluggish, small businesses (the ones that create most employment) are squeezed and the underlying balance sheets remain dangerously shaky.

If a major new upheaval occurs, which is likely with the Europeans’ problems and the still-untapped sewer of legal fraud lying beneath the nation’s foreclosure industry, the bank behemoths will be back at the government warehouse demanding more.

Based on past performance, Obama would respond to a new Wall Street crisis by giving the banks everything they ask and then politely inquiring if they feel better now, thereby providing a new opportunity for corporate shills like Romney, Bachmann and Pawlenty to charge forward as defenders of the little guy.

These are the unsavory choices provided by our creaky democracy today.

Live by the soundbite. . .

There is a story about Anthony Weiner’s role in the legislation providing medical assistance for 9/11 first responders, the so-called Zadroga bill, that provides a neat counterpoint to the circus he’s now starring in. Weiner is famous for going ballistic and blasting the Republicans from the well of the House when they cynically blocked the measure as needless gummint spending.

Weiner cleverly channeled the frustration many of us felt at the time at the gigantic targets the forces of reaction were providing but at which no Democrats, including especially one B. Obama, would take aim. He directly shamed and smacked the GOP in a way only the Limbaugh-driven Republicans dare to do in our sado-masochistic political culture.

One can opine on whether or not this take-no-prisoners tactic was correct or wise—I personally thought it long overdue. But the incident shows how Weiner’s combative posture as a free-lance hot dog (sorry, couldn’t resist) worked, how his willingness to elbow his way into the scoring zone made him a love/hate object. He reportedly didn’t contribute much to the collegial process involved in constructing the Zadroga bill and left what New York colleague Jerold Nadler called ‘thousands of hours’ of negotiations to others. But when the opportunity arose for a devastating soundbite, Weiner had the killer instinct to snatch it. So it was Weiner on the morning news shows battling the Republican dragon, not Carolyn Maloney, Nadler or other NY pols you’ve never heard of.

It’s an effective way to get ahead, and Weiner distinguished himself among the crowd by his full-frontal attacks. Given Democratic spinelessness and their eagerness to please the very right-wingers who disdain them, he provided welcome relief. But when you alienate friends and enemies alike by shoving everyone aside en route to the cameras, it’s got to be pretty lonely when the cameras are not showcasing your opinions but rather your pants down around your ankles.

Law for all

Whole cities in Mexico can’t hire a police chief because he (or she in a few cases) will be promptly sliced and quartered by the drug traffickers and the pieces placed on the town battlements for all to see. That is, unless he is willing to accept a huge bribe to look the other way and help keep out the competition. Hm, that’s a tough one: would you like 20 thousand dollars or to have your nuts doused in alcohol and set on fire?

We may shudder at these stories of awful things occurring far away, but the protection of what we enjoy as a modicum of rule of law closer to home is also under sustained assault, albeit on a far lesser scale. General indifference to lawful/lawlessness is a deeply-held biped trait, as far as I can tell, unless and until said injustice touches one personally as the torture debate has re-proven. But there are a few faint signs of resistance that are encouraging.

Here in New York we are regularly witness to all sorts of police misconduct, which just as regularly results in no punishment for the official perps. However, the latest scandal involving ticket-fixing threatens to do the boys in blue some serious damage, not because any one is particularly surprised or even incensed at the practice, but because it finally undermines a precious enforcement commodity—trust.

A Bronx jury recently acquitted a guy [above] charged with drunk driving after learning that the charging officers regularly fixed traffic tickets for their friends. So much for the ticket-fixing = ‘professional courtesy’ theory bruited about by defenders of the practice—a jury quite reasonably concluded that if police can make a legitimate charge go away with a wave of the wand, they could also drum up an illegitimate one for someone they don’t like quite as well.

Some of the juror comments were devastating: ‘completely corrupt’; ‘They have no integrity’. ‘They don’t even deserve a badge’. This development must be sending chills up and down prosecutorial spines all over town. How easy it will be for defense lawyers to discover that the testifying cop has engaged in this routine practice and blow virtually any case out of the water?

The Daily News says the Bronx DA’s office is frantically offering plea deals to keep ticket-fixing cops off the stand. At least one murder case has been lost over the suddenly un-credible cops problem.

It is also no accident that surprising love-bomb from a jury occurred in the Bronx, a majority black and Hispanic district. That’s where the youngsters bear the brunt of the city’s 600 thousand annual ‘stop and frisk’ actions in which cops since Giuliani have been permitted to harass minority men relentlessly as part of the over-played ‘broken windows’ theory of crime prevention. One result is that the city has racked up vast numbers of marihuana arrests, which saddle minority youth with a criminal record for life.

One lesson, if anyone at NYPD is in the mood for higher ed, seems to be that official impunity, two-tiered justice and effective policing don’t really mix.

You da Man

I do not care about Anthony Weiner, his career or his dick. But there is something breathtakingly insane and yet utterly predictable about all three.

There is a certain kind of alpha male attracted to the modern political game—neurotically ambitious, chronically sleep-deprived and disagreeably fixated on winning, whatever that might mean at a given moment. They’re the kind of guys who are comfortable on the cable news scream-shows and also fanatically dedicated to the gym, which they shoehorn into their 20-hour days.

Weiner is a good exemplar of this class of weirdos who now run our lives. They also appear very frequently in the Obama White House, and no doubt in the prior version as well. They are usually dangerously pumped up (note how Weiner accented his firm man-titties for the camera), overworked and either constantly on the verge of hysteria (Rahm Emanuel) or so eerily self-controlled you suspect they are part Vulcan (Geithner). These are the guys capable of designing an education advocacy program with the perverse, twisted title, ‘Race to the Top’, suggesting that they think the main reason to learn things is to show off to everyone how superior you are. The Weiner debacle illustrates something not often acknowledged among us: THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THEM.

It’s easy to suppose how the disease progresses among these types: they have early successes, are smart and aggressive, learn ruthlessness and are attracted to others like themselves, which reinforces their worst tendencies. They achieve a measure of status and suddenly are surrounded by people sucking up to them (sometimes literally), thereby convincing them that their original intuition—that they are extremely special—is correct. From there it’s a quick slide down the psychological precipice to sensations of invincibility, hubris and catastrophe.

Despite the finger-pointing at Weiner for not knowing how to reel it in, our culture reinforces this profile and constantly rewards those who fit it. We pretend to think we find them appalling when for the most part we can’t imagine being dominated by anyone else.

DoJ pursues Edwards, forgives Yoo

Which is worse? Funneling campaign money to your secret floozy to keep the news of your love-child out of the news? Or torturing people?

The Obama Justice Department has shown itself quite zealous in putting the screws to a political nobody who came dangerously close to making Sarah Palin vice president. (Imagine if his sexual peccadilloes had emerged after he had become the nominee.) He is a thoughtless, irresponsible, narcissistic human being as fully outlined and described in excruciating detail by his former top aide, Andrew Young, in The Politician.

That said, I find it morally loathsome that the Justice Department should dash after this guy with a felony indictment when it is itself criminally eager, on the express order of President Obama, to ‘put the past behind us’ on the systematic torture regime created by the Bush-era criminals. It says something, had we need of further proof, about who the real enemies of this White House are: liberal Democrats who stray out of line.

Torturers and their ilk are okay.

Employment sucks

The country’s latest jobless figures are out confirming the uneasy buzz in the econ/finance pages that the supposed ‘recovery’ that has made bankers (but few others) so happy may be sputtering out. Job creation totaled a pathetic 54,000, not nearly enough to absorb the new workers entering the force. Obama’s re-election mantra for disaffected supporters like me will be all about how ‘change’ takes time, so don’t be so whiny. But what if change is indeed happening but in the wrong direction?

Obama refused to countenance a New Deal-style public works or job-creation program when he was freshly in office and could have jammed something through over the howls of outrage from rich white guys. Our prez consistently has caved to the deficit panic people who hate his guts and allowed well over a million jobs (1.3 million according to this guy) to disappear in the government sector as state after state hits the fiscal wall. Sharp spending cutbacks at a time of diminishing demand used to be considered dumb policy, something that fatally discredited Herbert Hoover and aggravated the 1930s Depression. But oddly, it’s back.

Meanwhile, Europe is also in the grips of the new financial oligarchy, now doctoring periphery countries like Ireland, Greece and Portugal with the same poison that was once forced down the collective throat of people in Uruguay, Indonesia and Zambia: slash government spending, privatize everything, drive the powerless into abject poverty and declare the economy ‘healthy’. It’s working about pretty much as well now as it did in the 1970s. Britain’s recovery from the recession is now in doubt, and the debt-peonage being shoehorned into the defenseless Greek islands is a scandal. The new measures will guarantee that holders of German and French bank bonds will cream off any surplus produced by workers there for the foreseeable future.

I don’t read anything in the economics pages that suggests the people in charge really think any of this will work to restore economic health. But I gather that that is not really the goal—rather, the IMF-OECD-Treasury-Goldman fino-political bankopoly is determined to keep the cash flowing into its bottomless pockets at whatever cost necessary. We are witnessing a class war waged by experts with Barack O as Confuser-in-Chief.