You will be shocked, shocked to hear that a Blue Dog Democrat who made a career out of undermining his own party is sucker-punching them on his way out. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana abruptly announced this week that he would not seek reelection in November. Bayh's departure is ratcheting up insecurity in the Democratic caucus at the very moment they need to take decisive action to pass health care reform.
Bayh could easily have won a third term, but it's unclear whether any other Democrat can hold the seat. To add insult to injury, Bayh waited until 24 hours before the filing deadline for Democratic primary candidates, sending Indiana Dems scrambling to find a candidate to run in his place. Bayh's tardiness was calculated. Since no Democrats were ready to file by the deadline, the Indiana Democratic establishment will get to handpick Bayh's successor.
In a call with state Democratic officials, Bayh said his abrupt departure is for the best, as Evan McMorris-Santo reports for TPMDC. According to Bayh, he's doing the party a favor by sparing them a contentious primary process. Thanks a lot.
What does this mean for health care reform?
What does Bayh's departure portend for health care reform? Monica Potts of TAPPED argues that replacing a conservative Democrat like Bayh with a moderate Republican won't make that much difference. Bayh was never a reliable Democratic vote.
But Tim Fernholtz of TAPPED dismisses this view as naive. Fernholtz predicts that, for all of Bayh's faults, the senate will be much worse without him: "In essence, the difference between this insubstantial Hoosier and, say, GOP hopeful Dan Coats, is simple: You can buy off Bayh." Bayh voted for health care reform and the stimulus, no Republican, no matter how "moderate" is going to vote that way.
Anyone who expects a moderate Republican from Indiana to support any part of the Democratic agenda is deluded. On the other hand, the Senate Democrats already passed their bill, their only remaining task would be to pass a "fix" through budget reconciliation to make changes in the legislation that would be acceptable to the House. Of course, reconciliation will be a bitter political fight. One wonders whether the demoralized Senate Democrats will have the stomach for it.
About that health care summit...
Note that congressional Republicans have yet to commit to attending the "bipartisan" health care summit that they called for. Christina Bellatoni of TPMDC reports that yesterday White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wondered why the Republicans were for the summit before they were against it:
"Right before the president issued the invitation, the-the thing that each of these individuals was hoping for most was an opportunity to sit down on television and discuss and engage on these issues. Now, not accepting an invitation to do what they'd asked the president to do, if they decide not to, I'll let them leap the-leap the chasm there and try to explain why they're now opposed to what they said they wanted most to do," Gibbs said.
Busting the filibuster
On the bright side, the Democrats still have a sizable majority in the Senate, with or without Bayh. Republicans would have to beat all 10 vulnerable Democratic incumbent senators in the next election in order to regain control of the Senate. The more immediate threat to health care reform and the Democrats' ability to govern in general is the institutional filibuster. Structural reform is needed to break the impasse. Lawyer and author Tom Geoghegan talks with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on strategies for busting the filibuster.
Public option resurfacing
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that four senate Democrats have thrown their lot in with progressives clamoring for a public option through reconciliation. Sens. Sherrod Brown (OH), Jeff Merkley (OR), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Michael Bennet (CO) argue for the public option in an open letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid. The letter reads:
There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach - its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option....
Big pharma's lobby
That's nice, but let's not forget who's really in charge. In AlterNet, Paul Blumenthal recaps the sorry history of collusion between the White House, the pharmaceutical lobby group PhRMA, and the Senate. According to Blumenthal the White House steered pharmaceutical lobbyists directly to Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the powerful Finance Committee, who was entrusted with crafting the White House's favored version of health care reform.
Abortion and health care reform
As if we didn't have enough to worry about, Nick Baumann of Mother Jones notes that the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is making abortion is an obstacle to passing health care reform through reconciliation. The NRLC is insinuating that Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his coalition of anti-choice Democrats will vote against the Senate health care bill because it it's slightly less restrictive of abortion than the bill the House passed. The good news is that it's procedurally impossible to insert Stupak's language into the Senate bill through reconciliation. The bad news is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) needs every vote she can get to pass the Senate bill and anti-choice hardliners could be an obstacle.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.
The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court's hubris in no uncertain terms:
The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.
Citizens United and the financial crisis
How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.
But over the past few decades, we've watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.
The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:
Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.
The bank lobby and the AIG bailout
In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets-if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.
CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG's betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.
"The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout ... is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government," Hiar writes. "The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG-including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing."
The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.
With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.
Redefining corruption
So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn't just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined "corruption" to give corporations-and anyone else-greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:
The most important line in the decision ... was this one: "ingratiation and access ... are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.
Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt-Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay's legislative agenda. The court's ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay's corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.
"Tom DeLay's view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,," Gibney says. "I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision."
Why citizens need to speak out now
So what can we do about this? As GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court's recent decision.
If you liked the bank bailouts, then there's plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn't, then it's time to speak up.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Unemployment figures in the U.S. are staggering: The official rate stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. A broader measure that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for work is at 17.5%. That's a full-blown economic emergency.
But, as Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, President Barack Obama's response to the unemployment crisis has not matched the urgency of his response to the crisis on Wall Street. This isn't just unfair, it's bad economics.
"It's important to understand that the economic crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a function of a shaky financial system but of a crash in consumption that's come along with the evaporation of $14 trillion worth of the wealth of American families," Holland writes.
Widespread joblessness can be every bit as damaging to the economic structure as a financial crisis. When people are out of work, they buckle down on household expenses. When several million people cut back at the same time, the economic machine grinds to a halt. If people are not buying and selling stuff, the economy isn't working.
As Mary Kane explains for The Washington Independent, about 40% of families don't have enough money to cover expenses through a three-month stretch of unemployment-even if one member of the household is receiving unemployment benefits. Kane highlights a Brandeis University study that reveals the haggard state of the American household and the unfair distribution of wealth along racial lines. A full 66% of African-American and Latino families can't afford three months without work. At a time when 5.6 million workers have been jobless for at least six months, the study highlights just how dire finances have become for many households.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses potential labor market remedies with economist Dean Baker and The Nation's John Nichols. Baker suggests a work-share arrangement, in which employers cut back on their workers' hours to allow more people to work. To prevent losses for households, the government would step in and pay for the shortfall in hours. Employers would have more part-time jobs available, but the government would make sure everyone was paid as if they were working full-time. Baker also endorses a public jobs program, which he says could be especially useful in cities like Detroit and Cleveland that have been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn.
Nichols highlights the political consequences of failing to fix the unemployment mess. Unemployment directly affects the lives of voters. If widespread joblessness persists through November 2010, Democrats will net huge Congressional losses. If Obama thinks it's hard to garner bipartisan support for his legislative priorities now, imagine a few dozen more Republican obstructionists.
It's not that Obama failed to respond to the unemployment crisis. He did. That's what the stimulus package was all about. Today's 10.2% unemployment is a catastrophe, but it would be more like 12% without the stimulus package. But, given the seriousness of the issue, Obama is not giving unemployment enough attention.
In fact, Obama's economic priorities are a mirror-image of his campaign promises, as Robert Scheer argues in both a column for TruthDig and an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! After talking tough about reining in recklessness on Wall Street and making the financial system more accountable, Obama has hired many of the very policy makers who pushed through the deregulatory agenda back in the 1990s. Top Obama administration officials like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Gary Gensler and Neal Wolin helped make this mess in the first place.
"This is not a minor criticism," Scheer says. "I think the guy is betraying his own presidency."
Obama's timid efforts to rein in Wall Street and heal the ailing job market are setting the stage for a political disaster. If Obama and Congressional Democrats can't take strong action to fix the economy, they will find themselves with much narrower majorities next November. The economy, and the public institutions that support it, are supposed to work for everyone, not just the financial elite.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
After several prominent members left the Chamber of Commerce over its prehistoric climate change policies, the organization appeared to do an about-face on its climate stance during a press conference on Monday. Sound too good to be true? It was. Members of the Yes Men, a group of satirical, anti-corporate activists, posed as Chamber of Commerce officials and held a fake press conference claiming that "There is only one sound way to do business: That's to support a strong climate-change bill quickly, so that this December in Copenhagen, President Obama can lead the entire business world in ensuring our long-term prosperity." In reality, the Chamber has not changed their climate stance and continues to oppose climate change legislation. The Yes Men's stunt is just one more in a chain of hoaxes this Autumn, including a boy in a balloon, death panels on health care reform, and recent allegations that radical Islamists are using interns to infiltrate Capitol Hill.
The political disease that turned the Republican Party of Eisenhower into Rush Limbaugh affects Democrats and even their progressive allies and critics in almost exactly the same way, and it's just as senseless to pretend that the Left is magically immune to our cultural disintegration as pretending that Democrats and Republicans don't catch the same kind of swine flu.
This proposition is easy enough to illustrate with the progressive icon Amy Goodman, who has already over-ruled a whole bevy of state and federal judges and only accidentally aligned herself with the United States Supreme Court in the case of Troy Davis.
Ms. Goodman's "brief" for Troy Davis is a fun-house mirror-image of David Addington and John Yoo arguing for extra-legal detention and torture of suspected terrorists "for the higher good," and I am also in favor of "the higher good" and would be happy to substitute my own plausible arguments about "the higher good" not only for our system of criminal justice but even more so for our foreign policy and national security apparatus.
But unfortunately my idea of "the higher good" isn't quite universal, and when David Addington and John Yoo and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush decide to substitute their idea of "the higher good" not only for my idea of "the higher good, but also for the rule of law, I want to appeal to something besides an infinite variety of interpretations of "the higher good," and what might that be?
Common sense? Kant? Jesus? Confucius? Chairman Mao? Zeus? Ahura Mazda? Lao-Tzu? The Prophet Mohammed? Ayatollah Khamenei? The Pope? The Southern Baptist Convention? Saint Paul? John Rawls? Bertrand Russell? Albert Camus? Sartre? Socrates? Kierkegaard? Arne Næss? Jonathan Edwards? John Winthrop? Moses? Isaiah? St. Francis of Assisi? Mary Baker Eddy? Fidel Castro? Pol Pot? Lenin? Marx? Adam Smith? Brigham Young? Martin Luther? Gandhi? Shabbetai Tzevi? Al Mahdi? Krishna? Abraham Lincoln? Baha'u'llah? The Bab? The Dalai Lama? Max Weber? Mahavira? Savonarola? Albert Schweizer? Osama bin Laden? Jerry Falwell? Leo Tolstoy? Martin Luther King? John Calvin? Adolf Hitler? Martin Buber? Billy Graham? Ronald Reagan? Li Hongzhi?
Amy Goodman?
Anyone who doubts that Amy Goodman wants to do the right thing is probably insane, but she doesn't make much more of a case for Troy Davis than John Yoo and David Addington made for torture and the "unitary executive," and the first block of testimony Ms. Goodman presents in favor of retrying Mr. Davis is just a rant by his sister Martina Correia, beginning with a discussion of the witnesses against her brother who have subsequently recanted their testimony...
"These people were easily manipulated. They built this case around Troy with no physical evidence, no DNA. And what they did is they ran on the excitement and the adrenaline that we have to get somebody for this police officer's murder, we have to appease community. And, you know, it got to the point where they were attacking so many black men that it's like any black man will do. And when Sylvester Coles came and pointed at Troy, everything dropped, and they just built a case around Troy."
Leaving aside Ms. Correia's correct assertion that no DNA evidence connected her brother with a shooting in a parking lot, we arrive at her analysis of police psychology...
...we have to get somebody for this police officer's murder, we have to appease community.
Ms. Correia would have to be a very gifted telepath indeed to see so clearly into the souls of all the detectives investigating the murder of their brother office Mark MacPhail, but apart from serving as the source of any number of sad jokes, the only real question about Ms. Correia's testimonial is...
Why did Amy Goodman publish so much nonsense by a supremely prejudiced witness who had even accompanied her accused brother when he fled the jurisdiction of the shooting to avoid prosecution?
I don't care.
The middle-brow Ms. Goodman's appeal to her middle-brow audience has just about the same cultural depth as the plastic Burger King who attracts a susceptible demographic into the parking lot where this whole mess began...
But behind Ms. Goodman's shallow but probably righteous outrage about the apparently "innocent" Troy Davis, the same systematic disrespect for the rule of law, which only recently expressed itself in a flood of Leftist support for the Honduran dictator-in-the-making Manuel Zelaya, who was busy enforcing his own idea of "the higher good" in contravention of the Supreme Court, Congress, Attorney General, federal elections commission and constitution of Honduras...
The same systematic disrespect for the rule of law now resurfaces all over the American Left as it proclaims its superior perspicuity about guilt and innocence above all courts and legal procedures.
So many witnesses who apparently gave false testimony in a capital murder case, for reasons known only to themselves, have now recanted their criminal misrepresentations, once again for reasons known only to themselves, and Ms. Goodman provides a brilliant specimen of so many bums and liars...
Jeffrey Sapp is typical of those in the case who recanted their eyewitness testimony. He said in an affidavit:
"The police ... put a lot of pressure on me to say 'Troy said this' or 'Troy said that.' They wanted me to tell them that Troy confessed to me about killing that officer ... they made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear."
The police wouldn't leave him alone! Or so he claims, and it's a very slender claim to justify false testimony against a man who was on trial for his life.
Did they beat you, Mr. Sapp? Were you water-boarded, Mr. Sapp? Did they threaten you with life in prison, Mr. Sapp?
Or was it just the inconvenience of multiple interrogations which produced your false testimony against a man who was on trial for his life?
So now another zephyr has blown Mr. Sapp across the street to the side of "innocence," and if yet another little wind blows him back to guilt again, shall we also ignore merely procedural prohibitions against double jeopardy and try Troy Davis again, and again and again as the trash who testified against him blows back and forth in obedience to a breeze which they alone can feel?
But Amy Goodman quotes Mr. Sapp with the same unquestioning credulity as if she were quoting Abraham Lincoln.
Ms. Goodman has reserved her indignation for Justice Antonin Scalia, with his mysterious scare-quotes in a dissenting opinion which Amy Goodman cannot fathom!
"This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."
Why would Scalia quote "actually," and why would I likewise enclose "innocence" in the same alienating punctuation, (almost) wherever it appears in this essay? Is there suddenly something strangely questionable about the meaning of "innocence" and even "actuality?"
Yes.
The whole history of Roman and Anglo-Saxon criminal law is nothing but a long and incomprehensibly complicated process for defining guilt and innocence, and the climax of every criminal trial which ever reached a verdict was one determination or the other, guilty or innocent.
What else can it possibly mean to declare that a human being is guilty or innocent of a crime, except that he or she has been fairly tried and convicted in a court of law?
But now we declare our superior wisdom over so many generations of judges and legislatures, and install a "higher meaning" of guilt and innocence... a higher meaning which derives from more trust-worthy agencies than the courts, and more trust-worthy agents than judges and juries, and those new and unimpeachable agents and agencies of justice will be...
Amy Goodman and NPR? Pope Benedict XVI, President Jimmy Carter, the NAACP and Amnesty International, and whichever other previously unacknowledged legal authorities or organizations of well-meaning lawyers and NGO's just happens to be on our side in the case of Troy Davis?
Criminal law is an instrument for determining guilt and innocence analogous to the analytic apparatus for determining chemical composition which has evolved over three hundred years of scientific chemistry, and when that apparatus apparently malfunctions, where shall we appeal to correct it?
Shall we look around for yet another psychic like Martina Correia, someone supposedly as gifted at guessing chemical composition as Ms. Correia claims to be adept at reading the souls of detectives?
Or are we obliged to content ourselves with recalibrating our usual instruments or rechecking our measurements with brand new instruments of exactly the same or a slightly improved design, and if we cannot find a flaw in the procedure, what then?
Shall we call our mystery metal "gold" based on the well-meaning intervention Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI, and when another ex-President like George W. Bush and a Pope more like Alexander VI intervene in our lab and call all the silver in our pockets dross, to which higher authority will we appeal?
Now our mob supports Zelaya, and our favorite ex-President supports Troy Davis, but when another mob turns around on us, where can we appeal, when the law was already superseded by psychics and radio personalities, Popes and ex-Presidents?
AMY GOODMAN: What happened in those first 100 days? In fact, Roosevelt wasn't Roosevelt at the very beginning, the Roosevelt we know of the New Deal. It took tremendous pressure from within his cabinet. Of course, they were people he appointed. Adam Cohen, the editorial writer for the New York Times, has a very important book coming out on exactly what happened in those hundred days. But, Bob Kuttner, you also write about it... how people struggled within the administration, like Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, who became his vice president, Harry Hopkins, the social worker, and how they beat out the more conservative forces.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, and they had two things on their side. They had reality on their side. If Roosevelt didn't become bolder, he would have been Hoover all over again. They also had social movements. And if you look at the great presidents-Lincoln, Roosevelt, the Johnson of the civil rights, not the Johnson of Vietnam-you had the abolitionist movement, you had the industrial labor movement, you had, of course, the civil rights movement.
And I think there's going to be a tug-of-war inside the administration. And the really interesting question is, what is going happen to the youth movement that became an Obama movement that I think needs to become its own movement for social change, not simply Obama groupies.
A continuing, quasi-controlled police riot has been unfolding for several days in Minneapolis. The arrest of Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman is merely the most visible example. Here's a video of Goodman's arrest:
The soundtrack of this convention so far is helicopter noise, kind of like the final scenes in Goodfellas. Amy Goodman has apparently been arrested (video is here), and the police are detaining lawyers and medics as well as people doing actual property damage.
The spin operation is starting, though calling it spin really does a disservice to the term. I just got back from a press conference with Mayor Chris Coleman (no relationship to Norm Coleman) and the chief of police, John Harrington, in which Harrington lauded the heroism and professionalism of the police department in the face of mass criminal behavior. The event included every stupid police press conference cliche, from stuttering overly bureaucratic excuses to sycophantic journalists asking about damage estimates and calling him 'chief' to get his attention to heroic uniformed sternly worded descriptions of frightening protesters throwing rocks at officers. The end literally was the PR officer walking out of the room in a dramatic huff.
The city is on ridiculous lockdown, with humvees in the streets, officers patrolling with shotguns and machine guns, and the national guard out. I expected Harrington to announce that he has not yet ascertained the identity of the Batman but that he is working hard and the city of Gotham is safe. Video soon, and a full set of pictures is here.
Yesterday, both Amy Goodman (Democray Now!) and Bill Moyers had David Cay Johnston on to talk about his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill). This is a book about Reagan's real legacy--or one of them, anyway. (9/11, obviously, was another.) And while I would disagree with Obama's characterization that Reagan was really the prime mover involved, he was most definitely the front man, which is why it is impossible for many high-information activists to go quietly with the idea of sweeping it all under the rug.
From Democracy Now!:
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was struck, listening to the program from Kenya [previous segement], where they talked about the president and his power to give money to people, give land, and that's why many people identify with it. We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs-a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden-that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I was struck-you have numerous chapters in the book on the various aspects of this transfer, but I was especially struck by your material on the New York Yankees and Steinbrenner and Joyce Hogi, who you mention in the book, who I know well, and this whole issue of sports teams across America and how the public is subsidizing them. Could you elaborate on that part of it?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Sure. George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.
That last part is the real killer--Guiliani gave the Yankees and the Mets $50 million of taxpayer money to lobby against the taxpayer's own public interest.
