Hold Fast

Yesterday I was somewhat sour on the chances of the mortgage fraud task force that Eric Schneiderman will co-chair of succeeding in producing positive results. I think the reasons for caution remain, but David Dayen reports on a number of new facts which could make positive outcomes much more likely. In short, Dayen and his sources suggest that, first, Schneiderman’s entry into the task force was in no way dependent on his assent to a national settlement deal – he still opposes it. Second, Schneiderman’s role in the task force has been constructed to allow maximum flexibility for him to pursue what he thinks is the most fecund avenue for bank prosecutions – the fraud connected to the creation of residential mortgage backed securities (recall that it is securitization fraud which created the need to cover up such frauds through ongoing robosigning criminal behavior). Third, Dayen’s sources say if he can’t get prosecutions out of this task force, Schneiderman “walk away in the most showy, public manner possible, letting everyone know who was responsible for the lack of prosecutions.”

Other positive things worth noting include that Delaware AG Beau Biden remains committed to conducting his own prosecutions and remaining outside the settlement, while California AG Kamala Harris’s office reiterated her opposition to the current settlement as “inadequate.” While there were many positive statements from liberal groups yesterday, Color of Change and Russ Feingold’s Progressives United put out much more skeptical statements. And the New York Times published an editorial where they demanded a meaningful investigation that finally, at long last, held banks accountable for their behavior.

In short, the conditions for success may be better than they first looked, but people are going to be watching this task force closely to see if it actually produces prosecutions of banks and bank executives at a high level. This should be clear relatively quickly, given the voluminous evidence of bank fraud and other criminal behaviors. Hopefully we don’t have to wait long for this new initiative to produce results – and if they are not forthcoming, then we will know that our initial fears were realized.

I’d really like to be enthusiastic about the announcement of a new federal investigatory task force looking at the foreclosure crisis. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, much like Elizabeth Warren, has done enough to show his commitment to holding Wall Street accountable for their crimes to trust that his motives are good and his decisions should be trusted. Schneiderman was effectively the first statewide elected official to champion investigating foreclosure fraud, robosigning, and securities fraud in connection to the housing crisis. His leadership is largely responsible for forestalling any bad settlement. That credit means something in my eyes and so I am willing to trust that he and his staff truly believe that the resources and power that come from working on a federal task force will allow him to do even more to hold banksters accountable for breaking the law.

All that said, there are real questions about what bringing Schneiderman into the fold will actually do. Will there be quick indictments of senior level bankers? Or will the composition of the task force prevent Schneiderman from leveraging power in a constructive way? Abigail Field was the first to note how weak the composition is, identifying major problems with Schneiderman’s co-chair and beyond:

Schneiderman isn’t chairing anything. He’s Co-Chairing. That’s a huge difference. If he’s Chair he’s in charge. If he’s Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Four people, starting with Lanny Breuer. That’s unacceptable.

The reason we want Schneiderman in charge of prosecuting is because Breuer, who heads the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, hasn’t done his job. If he had pursued these prosecutions we’d have a lot more justice in this country right now than we do. Why has Breuer failed to go after the people who committed “misconduct and illegalities that contributed to both the financial collapse and the mortgage crisis”? Is it because he’s an ex- (and likely future) Covington & Burling partner? Doesn’t matter. His track record speaks for itself. There is only one reason to have him co-chair with Schneiderman, and that’s to rein Schneiderman in.

Schneiderman’s also got to contend with Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s top law enforcer. Khuzami’s SEC can be called aggressive only when measured against Breuer’s Criminal Division. Having Khuzami on the committee gives the weak-enforcement lawyers two people to Schneiderman’s one. And Khuzami is deeply conflicted because he was Deutsche Bank’s CDO lawyer in 2006 and 2007, peak shadiness times.

David Dayen points out another complication relating to another member of the task force, Tony West, assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Division: he’s the brother-in-law of California AG Kamala Harris. Harris is currently sitting on the outside of the bank settlement talks and is the subject to a full-court press by the Obama administration to get back on board. Given that West has no real experience with financial fraud, it’s hard to view his appointment to this task force as anything other than a cynical vehicle to put even greater pressure on Harris.

There’s a petition on Whitehouse.gov to get Breuer, Khuzami and West removed from the task force. For what it’s worth, if the administration wanted to strengthen their commitment to this investigation even more, they would replace those three with people like Nevada AG Catherine Cortez Masto, former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky, or even a prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald. These are people who, like Schneiderman, have shown real commitments to investigation and accountability in their jobs.

The whole point of raising these concerns is to help set the table to enable Schneiderman to succeed. If this committee ends up being a paper tiger, its creation will have served to disempower one of the few advocates for real investigations and accountability out there.

David Dayen raises another important and problematic consequence of the President putting Schneiderman on this task force:

More important, this announcement has collapsed the unified wall of objection on the left to a settlement. And I mean COLLAPSED. Just a day ago, activists were getting in the face of their AGs, warning them of the dangers of a weak settlement that provides little in the way of relief to homeowners. Now I have dozens of press releases in my inbox from liberal groups offering huzzahs to the President for this wonderful investigatory panel.

…

Only this isn’t a victory at all, at least not yet. Schneiderman may be trying to work from within, but he’s saddled with a panel full of co-chairs tied to banks with a history of obstructing accountability. The united front of Justice Democrats has been nicked. Kamala Harris, facing enormous pressure to go along with the settlement (she remains opposed at this point), now must contend with being the main big-state holdout AND having a family member co-chairing the investigation panel!

This is a classic Obama move, putting a threat or a rival inside the tent. It happened with Elizabeth Warren and David Petraeus and Jon Huntsman, and it’s happening again. It divides the coalition against a weak settlement, which will at the least shut down state and federal prosecutions on foreclosure fraud and servicing issues. It puts hopes in yet another investigation, one with little chance for success.

There is a real chance that Dayen is right. Of course, the best way to be proven wrong will be if this task force has teeth and starts producing indictments quickly. A good place to start, as Field notes, would be the 18 violations of the Servicemembers’ Civil Relief Act which JP Morgan Chase admitted to in congressional testimony – each violation representing a wrongful foreclosure of a service member. These are criminal misdemeanors with up to a year in jail per offense which have never been prosecuted. It’s a softball, but speedy indictments for these crimes would be a sign that the task force is going to, at long last, serious about investigating bankster criminality.

Originally posted at AMERICAblog

Yesterday I posted on the news of a pending settlement between the federal government, some state Attorneys General and the nation’s five largest banks around robosigning and other foreclosure fraud issues. The deal looked really bad and there was strong opposition coming not only from large progressive organizations, but a core of Justice Democrat AGs. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Iowa AG Tom Miller, who’s lead the settlement talks, met yesterday in Chicago with Democratic AGs and their staffs, ostensibly (based on reports citing Donovan and Miller’s offices) to finalize a deal. Surprisingly, no deal was reached and Miller’s office put out a statement saying, “We have not yet reached an agreement with the nation’s five largest servicers, and we won’t reach a settlement any time this week.” This is a huge victory for the officials, citizens, and organizations who have been pushing to stop a bad deal from moving forward.

Not surprisingly, though, the New York Times is reporting today that a deal is “inching closer.” This despite the fact that yesterday’s meeting in Chicago was allegedly going to result in the approval of a finalized deal. The Times does look at some of the numbers in the deal and how much aide it would conceivably bring to underwater homeowners and to those people whose homes were fraudulently stolen from them by banks using false documentation. The second number, according to the Times, is $1,800 per stolen home, which isn’t much more than two months’ rent for most people as compensation for their entire house being stolen. David Dayen looks at the aid that underwater homeowners would get and notes:

I would add that underwater borrowers with a second lien, like a home equity line of credit, owe more like $84,000 on average. So this barely gets them back a quarter of their equity, and the second will probably remain untouched (because that’s on the bank’s books, usually, even though it’s worthless).

Given that the single largest predictor of foreclosure is if a home is underwater, aid which keeps a home substantially underwater is not aid at all. At best it’s kicking the can down the road. These realities are no doubt part of the reason that there hasn’t been a deal yet, no matter how badly the Obama administration and Tom Miller want their to be a deal. As a result, I doubt that the President will mention anything in connection to the bank settlement talks in tonight’s State of the Union address, though I find it hard to believe that there won’t be some mention of the foreclosure crisis and how the administration hopes to deal with it in 2012.

I know it’s gauche for progressives to care about silly things like the rule of law, transparency, and opposing torture or war crimes, but nonetheless it’s worth pointing out Glenn Greenwald’s look at three parallel cases which demonstrate the sad state of equal justice in America today. Greenwald puts side by side the case of the Obama Department of Justice’s prosecution of charges for an accused leak related to water boarding against CIA agent John Kiriakou, the dismissal of US citizen Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for the torture he face while in US detention without habeas corpus rights, and the settlement of a punishment deal for a Marine sergeant who gave orders which lead to 24 Iraqi civilians to be killed in Haditha. Greenwald looks at these cases and notes:

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

It’s hard to disagree with Greenwald’s assessments of the state of play in American justice. It’s equally hard to not recognize that what Greenwald is describing is functionally identical under the Obama administration as it was under the Bush administration, excepting that Obama has been more aggressive in prosecuting whistleblowers than Bush ever was.

There is nothing that requires the Obama administration behave in this way. While his flip-flop from promising to filibuster FISA to voting in favor of its passage gave some indication that Obama was not trustworthy on civil liberties, Obama nonetheless campaigned on a platform which highlighted transparency and restoring the rule of law as landmarks of what his administration would look like. After all, we were often reminded, he was a constitutional law professor. The gap between what was promised and what we have received in these matters is sadly wide and does not look to be diminishing, but increasing.

Andrew Sullivan had a piece in The Daily Beast last week which got a lot of coverage and sparked a great deal of debate about how to assess the Obama presidency. In short, Sullivan thinks Obama’s governance style is one which may not please either liberal or conservative partisans, but will wear well and includes a number of accomplishments which will appeal to less strongly partisan voters.

Sullivan has long been an Obama supporter and much of the piece reads similarly to past arguments in favor of Obama’s governance. Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic had what I think is the best take down of Sullivan, which focuses more on the weakness of Sullivan’s argument in that Sully looks only at what Obama’s “dumbest critics” have said about him, not the ones who are making valid and true points. Friedersdorf’s piece is worth reading in full, so I won’t spend time rehashing it here.

But what I do think is worth discussing is that Sullivan’s analysis is driven by the fact that Andrew Sullivan is a socially-liberal conservative. So when Sullivan writes:

To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider.

The “moderate liberalism” Sullivan describes is actually what most liberals would call conservativism. In the piece, Sullivan actually repeatedly makes the point that Obama was doing the right thing by pushing conservative policies on a number of key issues.

On taxes:

You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition.

On deficits:

[Obama's] spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

On health care:

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them.
…
It is, dare I say it, conservative.

In passing, Sullivan also comments on Obama’s conservative education policy:

Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to experiment.

On foreign policy:

Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms. By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.

On all of these important issues, Sullivan describes Obama as taking conservative positions. So it’s no wonder why the conservative Sullivan is happy with the President. What Sullivan does not prove effectively (and this is really where Friedersdorf is worth reading) is why Obama’s conservativism should produce enthusiasm from liberals.

There’s lots of talk about the pending deal between what used to be 50 state Attorneys General and the nation’s five largest banks around what started out around robosigning, but seems to have expanded to broadly include foreclosure fraud and securities fraud. It looks like the Obama administration is on the verge of announcing a deal with some number of state AGs, a handful of regulatory bodies, and the nation’s five largest banks. There’s a meeting today between HUD officials and an undisclosed number of Democratic AGs or their staffs. Liberal groups are pushing to make this as strong as possible, with lots of activity from New Bottom Line, Color of Change, MoveOn, Rebuild, and many blogs who have been covering this crisis for years. The expectation is that the Obama administration wants to announce this deal in connection to Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

A couple pieces worth highlighting are by Simon Johnson at Politico and Van Jones and George Goehl of NPA at Huffington Post. Johnson makes a strong case against a quick, small settlement (that is, what we are now looking at), noting that “If there is a settlement after all the facts are known, the amount involved would likely be far greater than what is now on the table for robo-signing. Jones and Goehl likewise outline the principles for what a deal would have to do to actually be helpful to homeowners.

But if you’re wondering what the reported terms of the deal actually mean and if this is something which should be supported by Democrats or liberals or anyone else, I highly recommend you read Yves Smith’s post from this morning at Naked Capitalism. There are lots of reasons in my mind to oppose the deal as it’s been reported, but perhaps none greater than this:

The story did not outline terms, but previous leaks have indicated that the bulk of the supposed settlement would come not in actual monies paid by the banks (the cash portion has been rumored at under $5 billion) but in credits given for mortgage modifications for principal modifications. There are numerous reasons why that stinks. The biggest is that servicers will be able to count modifying first mortgages that were securitized toward the total. Since one of the cardinal rules of finance is to use other people’s money rather than your own, this provision virtually guarantees that investor-owned mortgages will be the ones to be restructured. Why is this a bad idea? The banks are NOT required to write down the second mortgages that they have on their books. This reverses the contractual hierarchy that junior lienholders take losses before senior lenders. So this deal amounts to a transfer from pension funds and other fixed income investors to the banks, at the Administration’s instigation. [Emphasis original]

I’ve yet to see an explanation of why transferring money from public workers’ and retirees to major banks is a good idea. There are other large, constitutional issues at play regarding how this deal mandates the breaking of contracts (which again is OK, it seems, as long as it is to benefit major banks), which Smith outlines in her post.

Unless and until the banks are forced to pay legal, economic, social and political costs in connection to their foreclosure fraud and securities fraud schemes, there’s no reason to expect them to treat homeowners an better and there’s no reason to expect that a similar crisis will not happen again in a few years’ time. Of course, a deal like this being driven by the Obama administration clearly belies the notion that there would be any meaningful federal investigation by law enforcement with an eye towards criminal prosecution. The only hope for criminal prosecution is with a handful of Justice Democrat AGs (Eric Schneiderman in New York, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, Beau Biden in Delaware, and Kamala Harris in California, to name a few). These investigations become even more critical in the face of a deal that would dramatically curtail the banksters civil liabilities. If you can’t change their behavior by forcing a huge cost for their crimes, putting executives in jail becomes even more important as a means of stopping this from happening again in the future.

One can only hope that AGs continue to balk at the deal being pushed by the Obama administration to forestall them from moving it forward. We should know in the next 36 hours whether or not this will happen as described.

Take action here.

Freddie De Boer:

I could never vote for Ron Paul, for a thousand reasons. I have been arguing against many of his policies and the worldview that generated them for the entirety of my adult life. But I have to value his voice in the national debate because almost no other national political figures will raise these issues at all. I would love if these issues were being expressed by politicians and pundits who combined them with righteous views on domestic policy. But here, too, mainstream progressivism deserves a great deal of blame. Left wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich have embraced discussion of foreign policy and civil liberties, and for their trouble they have been dismissed as unserious by the self-same progressives who now dismiss Ron Paul’s ideas. For far too long, mainstream progressives have signaled their “seriousness” precisely by denying the validity of people like Kucinich or Sanders, so taken with some bizarre definition of the reasonable that they effectively silence the leftist non-interventionists they say they want. If you want left wing criticism of our militarism and surveillance state, stop ridiculing those who express it.

The notion that there is something less disqualifying about support for murder and oppression than support for regressive and racist policies cannot stand scrutiny. The right to not be killed precedes all other rights. It is the foundation on which all other rights rest. What value can any rights have if they are not protected by a right to not be killed? Freedom of expression is no solace to a corpse. Likewise, what value do other rights have if those rights are not protected by rights of the accused? There is no value in freedom of assembly or religion if you can be thrown into a cage without a trial where you can invoke those rights. The right to protest has no meaning if the executive can respond to that protest by killing you without accountability, legal challenge, or review. Civil liberties are not merely right on principle. They are the necessary bedrock on which all conduct in a free society must rest.

I think this is right, though it’s worth noting that freedom to eat in restaurants regardless of race or freedom to make choices about one’s own body or freedom to marry whoever one is in love with are also questions of civil liberty. But yes, it’s hard to enjoy these liberties if you’re dead.

De Boer expands on the question of propriety of criticism, which I have looked at throughout this debate.

The whole argument has revealed American progressives at their absolute worst: incurious about the bad consequences of their positions; totally convinced that righteousness in intent can only lead to righteousness in effect; preemptively contemptuous of criticism from the left; dismissive of arguments that they themselves made under the last administration; and ultimately just as partisan as the conservatives they railed against three short years ago.

I want those who profess belief in liberalism and egalitarianism to recognize that they are failing those principles every time they ignore our conduct overseas, or ridicule those who criticize it. What I will settle for is an answer to the question: what would they have us do? If you can’t find it in you to accept our premises, at least consider what you would do if you did. For those of us who oppose our country’s destructive behavior, there is no place to turn that does not result in ridicule. Every conceivable political option has not only been denied by establishment progressives, but entirely dismissed. The idea that one should criticize the President from the left is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. The notion of primarying President Obama is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. The idea of supporting a candidate from a different party is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. Every conceivable path forward, for those of us who demand change in our conduct overseas, is preemptively denied. I want my country to stop killing innocent people. What am I supposed to do?

This earnestness of this objection to the two party straightjacket that many progressives find themselves in is powerful. There are strong pressures from conservatives of both parties to make their ideas normative and marginalize actual liberal politicians. Sadly this is often adopted by ostensible liberals as well (as De Boer reminds us with reference to Sanders and Kucinich). In the eyes of political partisans, there is just no appropriate way for objections to be noted, outside of the Democratic Party’s own processes (excluding primaries) or private, off-the-record meetings with administration officials.

This is the heart of the tension within the American left today. I see it as very much tied to the duel problems of the Democratic Party being the sole instantiation for affecting progressive change and the failure of the Democratic Party and its leaders to map their ideological goals onto liberalism. In the absence of a political party which can stop us from killing innocent people, as De Boer asks, what options are there? What is appropriate? Or will the desire to confront these policies and the leaders who enact them meant to fail to find any outlet, as something which must be forced back into the closet where we can wear its shame in private? I don’t have a solution to the incuriousness of our citizenry, let alone of Democratic partisans. But I don’t see an alternative to continuing to raise these issues over the objections of pearl clutchers who want to silence criticism from the left.

Tim Wise is one of the most dynamic and smart anti-racism theorists out there. I deeply respect his work, which is why I have a lot of trouble with his latest post, going after Glenn Greenwald and others on the liberal side of the aisle for discussing the positive aspects of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.

Wise frames his piece by describing an anti-war, anti-Wall Street national politician who also has problematic views about race. While many people familiar with the Ron Paul debate would assume that’s who Wise is describing, Wise reveals he’s actually been talking about David Duke all along. Wise sees this point as a striking victory against liberals who think Ron Paul’s policies on war and peace, civil liberties, and torture are laudable.

Yes, that David Duke: former head of the nation’s largest Ku Klux Klan group and lifelong neo-Nazi, who once said Jews should go into the ashbin of history, and that it would be possible to do what Hitler did, even in America, if white supremacists could just “put the right package together.”

But ya know that whole racist thing doesn’t matter, right? Because he’s against wiretapping.

Make no mistake, Wise offers up truly devastating arguments against the straw men he’s set up to deconstruct. The problem is, no one of any note, particularly not Glenn Greenwald, have taken the positions that Wise is arguing against.

First, the relevance of Ron Paul as a foil to current American policies regarding who we go to war with, who we drop bombs on, who we imprison and torture indefinitely, who we spy on and who we throw in jail is not that he opposes current US policies in these areas. No, Paul’s relevance is that as a candidate for President, he is talking about them and influencing national debate through the microphone afforded by his candidacy.

David Duke, on the other hand, is not a presidential candidate. It’s not as if the liberals discussing Paul set out to proactively find a racist, homophobic politician who wants to destroy social services but is good on civil liberties and ended up landing on Ron Paul arbitrarily. Ron Paul is relevant because of his candidacy. David Duke is no more relevant in the context of these policies than Cornel West or Rachel Maddow. This is not about a search for a dream presidential candidate, it’s about looking at what the existing presidential candidates are saying and assessing them accordingly. To wit, Jon Huntsman wants to break up the too big to fail banks, investigate robosigning, and punish banks for foreclosure fraud. Huntsman is wrong on lots of other issues, but his stance as it relates to Wall Street is notably to the left of not only his Republican opponents, but President Obama. This has been observed by many of the people who are favorably discussing aspects of Ron Paul’s candidacy (see Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism for one example).

The other relevant point is the continued insistence by critics of those on the left who say good things about parts of Ron Paul’s platform that such criticism is tantamount to endorsing Ron Paul for President. Wise unfortunately falls squarely in the absolutist camp here too:

And please, Glenn Greenwald, spare me the tired shtick about how Paul “raises important issues” that no one on the left is raising, and so even though you’re not endorsing him, it is still helpful to a progressive narrative that his voice be heard. Bullshit. The stronger Paul gets the stronger Paul gets, period. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger libertarianism gets, and thus, the Libertarian Party as a potential third party: not the Greens, mind you, but the Libertarians. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger become those voices who worship the free market as though it were an invisible fairy godparent, capable of dispensing all good things to all comers — people like Paul Ryan, for instance, or Scott Walker. In a nation where the dominant narrative has long been anti-tax, anti-regulation, poor-people-bashing and God-bless-capitalism, it would be precisely those aspects of Paul’s ideological grab bag that would become more prominent. And if you don’t know that, you are a fool of such Herculean proportions as to suggest that Salon might wish to consider administering some kind of political-movement-related-cognitive skills test for its columnists, and the setting of a minimum cutoff score, below which you would, for this one stroke of asininity alone, most assuredly fall.

Obviously this is just getting nasty at this point. Like many critics of Greenwald, Wise is setting out his own boundaries for what acceptable debate for liberals is and isn’t shy about refereeing the boundary lines. Saying anything nice about any Republican, let alone a libertarian with crazy followers, is tantamount to being one of those crazies. The lack of willingness to discuss the issues at hand is truly startling. It’s almost as if this is an area where honest debate and honest listening is impossible.

What’s most frustrating, again, is that the discussion Greenwald and Stoller are trying to have is about real policies held by real presidential candidates. Neither have endorsed Paul. They’re discussing what is actually happening now and the policy debate that these candidacies raise. The scorn which is thrown their way is monumental and a sign of the incapacity of some people to actually listen to what’s being written.

Wise closes with a rejoinder that if you’re not happy with Obama, it’s because the left has insufficiently organized to produce good results. Presumably this is meant to inoculate the President from criticism from the left, as it’s all our fault that he’s using drones to kill children in Pakistan and Afghanistan or start wars without congressional approval in North Africa.  While I certainly agree that progressives and populists need to be in the street creating change through organizing and through protest, I’m not sure what Wise thinks these critics of Obama are responding to. Greenwald and Stoller and many others who are discussing aspects of Paul were some of the earliest and strongest supporters of Occupy Wall Street, as well as some of the most consistent advocates for continued resistance to American policies of indefinite detention, surveillance, and war — policies which were widely protested when Bush did them, but are now only rarely organized against by the left as there is a Democrat in the White House. That is, the people Wise thinks he is attacking are the ones who have been consistently doing exactly what he is urging them to do.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I don’t support Ron Paul’s candidacy. I won’t vote for him or any other Republican. But with no primary challenger to the President raising questions about American policies of war and peace, civil liberties, the rule of law or drug policy, I’m glad that Ron Paul is raising these issues. It’s a stain on American liberalism that we are in a position where the purported political party of the left is getting out-shined by a racist, homophobic radical on values that should be core to liberalism. In a dream world, someone like Cornel West or Rachel Maddow or Stephen Lerner or any number of truly liberal figures would be running for President and could be raising these issues. But that’s not the world we live in, any more than the one where David Duke is currently a candidate is.

The half-hour documentary on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, When Mitt Romney Came To Town, is a huge story this week. Watch it – it’s devastating and the interviews of workers who lost their jobs after Romney’s Bain came in and broke their companies are heart-breaking.

“When Mitt Romney Came To Town” is the product of a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC, but both Gingrich and Rick Perry have been hammering Romney over his job-destroying ways at Bain for a while now. What’s incredible to watch is two 1%-coddling politicians adopt the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement to wage attacks on Romney. What’s even more incredible is to watch these attacks explode the internal contradictions of the Republican Party.

On the one hand, you have Fox News’ Eric Bolling treat accusations against Romney and Bain as an attack on capitalism itself. Rush Limbaugh has likened Gingrich to Fidel Castro for his attacks. Likewise the right wing US Chamber of Commerce is calling for a halt to attacks on private equity. On the other hand, conservative icon Bill Kristol has criticized those reflexing defending Bain and Romney as “silly“. You even have Sarah Palin saying Romney should back up his claims that he created a 100,000 jobs in his tenure at Bain.

What’s most remarkable, though, is that this debate isn’t happening at Occupy encampments, but on Fox News and The Weekly Standard (well, presumably folks at Occupy are talking about the destructive thievery of Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital). I don’t think any of us knew that the GOP had this sort of rhetoric in it! The reality is, of course, that they don’t. This is pure politics, as Robert Reich notes, otherwise Gingrich and Romney would be making some sort of prescription of how they would stop the newly-discovered evils of private equity and Wall Street greed. Reich writes:

Is Newt proposing to ban leveraged buyouts? Or limit the amount of debt a company can take on? Or prevent financiers – or even CEOs and management teams – from taking a public company private and then reselling it to the public at a higher price?

None of the above.

Rick Perry criticizes Romney and Bain pushing the quest for profits too far. “There is nothing wrong with being successful and making money,” says Perry. “But getting rich off failure and sticking someone else with the bill is indefensible.”

Yet getting rich off failure and sticking someone else with the bill is what Wall Street financiers try to do every day. It’s called speculation – and at least since the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act, investment bankers have been allowed to gamble with commercial bank deposits, other people’s money.

So is Perry proposing to resurrect Glass-Steagall? Not a chance.

This is politics, plain and simple. Romney’s opponents are making a last, desperate plea to knock him off of the winner’s podium. Had they made this case for the better part of the last year and had they backed it up with prescriptions to stop companies like Bain Capital from committing these crimes against American workers, they may have even succeeded in defeating Romney. While it’s certainly possible that these attacks can gain traction against Romney, neither Gingrich nor Perry are credible messengers. Reich concludes that, “the only serious question here is what kind of serious reforms Obama will propose when, assuming Romney becomes the Republican nominee, Obama also criticizes Bain Capitalism.” I think that’s right, though it remains to be seen if Obama splits off the path being set by faux populists Gingrich and Perry.