Author: Matt Browner Hamlin

http://holdfastblog.com

Ron Paul and The Propriety of Criticism

There’s been a recent debate in the progressive blogosphere, elevated out of numerous conversations on Twitter, about Ron Paul, which have in turn surfaced major questions about what it means to be a liberal in America today and how ideological views are expressed in the electoral context. These are hard questions, in part because so many people have invested their ideological hopes into political parties and individuals who don’t actual map well onto activists’ beliefs. Confronting the notion that your efforts to achieve the change you want in the world have not succeeded because you saw the vehicle as a politician who just doesn’t believe the same things as you is hard. When it’s extended beyond an individual to major swaths of one of our two political parties, it gets even harder to confront.

While there are many different facets of the debates that are being surfaced around Ron Paul, I see there as two primary thrusts to this conversation.

The first is that President Obama has not governed along the lines that he campaigned on (or, more accurately, as many of his progressive supporters expected him to campaign on – expectations built through Obama not being truthful and supporters believing what they wanted to believe). As Glenn Greenwald points out, some of Obama’s largest failings from the left have been in relation to his continuation of George Bush’s surveillance state, his codification of indefinite detention, his gross expansion of executive powers through things like assassinating an American citizen with no due process, and conducting a war in Libya that expressly lacked Congressional approval. This has included a war on whistleblowers which would make any Republican authoritarian proud. Additionally, Obama has stocked his administration with Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy and has coddled Wall Street while failing to help the 99% crushed by this collapse. Taylor Marsh details Obama’s (and the Democratic Party’s) failures to protect women’s rights, notably around Plan B. These are major failings. The President, ostensibly the largest representative of liberalism in America (by virtue of the Democratic Party’s past association with this set of ideas), is advancing radically conservative policies that were routinely decried by liberals when George Bush was responsible for them.

The second is that Ron Paul is a major party presidential candidate who occupies a very similar space as liberals on issues of war, surveillance, civil liberties and drug policy. These are not positions being advocated by any other Republican candidate and they are, as we saw above, not positions held by Barack Obama. Paul does not necessarily arrive at these positions through the same logical argument as most liberals – he opposes large-scale military spending not because he is a pacificist, but because he wants a tiny government. Matt Stoller has the definitive piece on the tensions Ron Paul creates for liberals, especially regarding the split between Ron Paul on foreign policy and Ron Paul on domestic and economic policies.

What’s remarkable to me is the extent to which any approving citation by liberals like Greenwald or Stoller of Ron Paul’s notably good positions on foreign policy and the drug war is how reflexively they get accused of supporting Ron Paul or condoning of Paul’s reprehensible racist newsletters. Greenwald goes so far as to spend eight paragraphs explaining and predicting how frequently people make tribal responses to any criticism or support of a given pol, thereby assuming statements like “Ron Paul is to the left of Obama on surveillance,” means “I support Ron Paul over Obama.” Nonetheless, that’s exactly the sort of response Greenwald received (as we see with tweets from these prominent liberal bloggers).

The mere mention of an alternative to Obama, be it a primary challenge, a third party challenge, a Republican to his left on many issues or whatever else, simply causes fits. It’s remarkable to watch, especially as it relates to positions where Obama has been unquestionably not what the Democratic Party has sold us for the last eighty years. This isn’t to say that Ron Paul is better than Obama or someone all liberals should vote for. As Greenwald frames it, it’s about making a choice as to where ones priorities are. Do you care about war and peace? The drug war? Well then Obama might not be the right person for you. But if you care about social programs and a government that provides services, Ron Paul is undoubtedly not the right person for you. Greenwald writes:

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:

Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.

Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

This is really tough stuff that’s hard to confront. Tom Watson makes a strong case against Ron Paul that’s worth reading, in that it mostly stays away from the ad hominem demonization and makes the case about Watson’s priorities.

As for me, I think I’m in a pretty similar place as Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who tweeted: “I have big problems w/Ron Paul on many issues.But on ending preemptive wars & on challenging bipartisan elite consensus on FP, good he’s in.” This also seems to be the position of Greenwald and Stoller. It doesn’t make a political statement of support (in my case, there is none) but acknowledges the value of having someone saying these things with a national microphone.

Stoller writes about his experience working with Ron Paul’s congressional staff while he worked for Alan Grayson. Paul has been a part of some strange bedfellows work with liberal Democrats – stuff that is really important and valuable and cannot be easily dismissed by any intellectually honest observer, like auditing the Fed. What Paul shows in his work on the Hill on these issues and what he shows as being a voice for anti-war, pro-civil liberties positions which are not held by any other major presidential candidate is that there is a rupture in the political spectrum as aligned by the Republican and Democratic Parties. There is no clean left/right breakdown in the parties. Rather, both parties are conservative and elite serving. Paul offers the rare example of the possibility trans partisan agreement, something that used to be common in American politics. For example, liberal northern Republicans worked towards a civil rights bill for years with liberal Democrats before it finally passed. It is entirely possible for people of different political parties to agree and work together on one issue and disagree vehemently on other issues. That this is considered complicated or controversial is fairly mind-boggling. Tribalism and fealty to party have made this less common and less possible, as we see by the angry reactions to liberals saying good things about some of Ron Paul’s positions.

But what makes me particularly mad is the notion that speaking approvingly of a politician who is anti-war, anti-surveillance state, and pro-civil liberties, while also seeking to reduce the power of the elite-serving Federal Reserve is something that is simply improper for liberals, especially when a Democrat sits in the White House. This is offensive in the highest degree and the responses to Greenwald and Stoller in particular rise to the level of attempted silencing of dissent. It simply doesn’t do to support the protest movements of the Egypt and Tunisia, while opposing protests against similar problems in the United States. Or to put it differently, you can’t be an honest supporter of Occupy Wall Street if you oppose criticizing the President on issues of war, surveillance, civil liberties, and Wall Street power.

And though no one mentioned in the post has yet come out in political support of Ron Paul, so what if they do? Who has standing to tell an anti-war activist that they can’t support the individual they deem to be the most anti-war person running for President? Certainly not people who condoned the President’s unauthorized war in Libya. As for me, I’m in a similar place to Taylor Marsh, who described her vote as “up for grabs.” I don’t know who is out there to grab my vote, but voting for Barack Obama again doesn’t sound so appealing to me. But neither does voting for Ron Paul, whose stances on most domestic issues are anathema to my liberalism. There’s a beautiful option available to all Americans: writing in the person they want to vote for. While I don’t know yet who I will vote for, the idea of writing someone in is certainly an option for me. Oh and before anyone objects that this would cost Democrats the election, I live in Washington DC, which tends to go 90% for the Democratic candidate. First, my vote is not crucial in any game theory of how the election will play out and second, it’s my vote, thank you very much.

There is a real debate to be had about the direction of the Democratic Party and how liberalism can best be served in American politics. But I’m getting really tired of people preaching about what is and is not appropriate criticism of the President, what is and is not helpful (to what and who, I don’t know), or who liberals can say nice things about. If Occupy Wall Street is an indication of anything, it’s that our current political and economic structures are broken. We need new solutions and I find it hard to believe that the new solutions will exist on the clean, partisan lines that currently exist. That means there are openings for trans-partisan organizing where we work with the people and organizations who agree with us on a particular issue. As Stoller notes, sorting out “the contradictions of modern liberalism” is going to be a tough process and debates like the one that is catalyzing around Ron Paul should become more common. And that’s fine by me.

Moral Hazard

Matt Taibbi:

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

Stoller on Obama, Wall Street, and Fraud

Matt Stoller has another great piece in Politico on the criminal behavior of the mortgage industry and the failures of the Obama administration to prosecute these crimes.

President Barack Obama has argued, as recently as last Sunday on “60 Minutes,” that what happened on Wall Street wasn’t criminal. “Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street,” the president told Steve Kroft, “in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn’t illegal. That’s exactly why we had to change the laws.”

Obama is wrong. Fraud was illegal before the crisis; it’s illegal now. The Servicemember Civil Relief Act was signed in 2003. So it was already on the books. During the savings and loan crisis, the George H.W. Bush administration sent about 3,000 white-collar criminals to jail. This administration has yet to send one.

And it is for lack of trying. Attorney General Eric Holder and his network of U.S. attorneys haven’t brought one criminal suit on illegal military foreclosures or foreclosure fraud. There have been enough books and investigations revealing rampant criminality in the housing bubble and now in foreclosure crisis. Yet Holder’s DOJ is still settling with banks to let them off the hook for illegal foreclosures on active duty troops.

Stoller goes on:

The housing bubble, in other words, was not just due to tragic herding behavior. It also involved the financial sector’s aggressive responses to democratic attempts to rein in creditor abuses. Now Ally, a bank 74 percent owned by taxpayers and controlled by the administration, is continuing this abusive trend.

Turning our markets into playpens for predatory behavior didn’t happen overnight, and it will not be fixed overnight. But until we have public servants strongly focused on justice for all, we can expect the crime spree to go on. After all, what we’re all learning is that, at least for large banks, crime pays.

It’s really hard to properly capture how great the failure of the Obama administration to hold banks responsible for breaking the law is to changing bank behavior and helping homeowners today.

Sen. Cantwell demands DOJ investigate foreclosure fraud before a settlement

Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) issued a blistering letter calling on the Department of Justice to investigate big banks for fraudulent foreclosure practices before agreeing to any settlement deal which would grant them immunity for these practices. In her letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Cantwell writes:

I am concerned that recently reported settlement proposals will effectively absolve these financial institutions of substantial civil and criminal liability in one of the largest alleged fraud schemes during the financial crisis. Specifically, I am concerned that the proposed settlement includes a release from liability that may be far too sweeping, does not adequately compensate victims, does not require enough of banks to reform the system that led to the crisis in the first place, and is being made before all the facts are known and without the backing of a full inquiry into the size and scope of the alleged fraud.
…
Without a thorough investigation, it is impossible to truly estimate just how pervasive the defects in the foreclosure and securitization process are. Continued reports of wrongful foreclosures, forged documents, and an inability of servicers and banks to prove chain of title and the legal right to foreclosure, raises the very alarming possibility that these defects were endemic to the mortgage servicing industry across the country. The sheer magnitude of the potential fallout from these defects demands that we undertake a full investigation to uncover the true scope of wrongdoing before providing blanket immunity to the perpetrators.

I am also concerned that reports of a settlement in the range of $20 billion, as recently reported, may not adequately compensate the victims of the foreclosure crisis. As a result of the pump-and-dump scheme perpetrated by the nation’s largest banks that inflated – and burst – the housing bubble, an estimated 14 million Americans are underwater, owing $700 billion more on their homes than those homes are worth. A $20 billion settlement is woefully inadequate to compensate the wrongfully evicted or homeowners struggling to stay in their homes. Much more should be required of banks to provide meaningful help underwater homeowners and compensate foreclosure fraud victims.

Boom goes the dynamite.

Washington is an important state in the context of the foreclosure crisis and the ongoing settlement talks between AGs and banks. Washington’s Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna is running for governor and has long been viewed as being a potential get for people trying to stop a bad deal. McKenna’s Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race is Congressman Jay Inslee. Inslee has made stopping a bad settlement a major campaign issue and is collecting signatures on a petition against the rumored deal. Inslee is trying to wedge McKenna – either by making him look like a tool of the banksters or forcing him to do the right thing and help his constituents who were defrauded of their homes by the banks. It looks like Cantwell is aiding Inslee in that squeeze play, but the politics are really secondary to the potential outcome. Simultaneously, we are seeing another major politician standing up to the banks and demanding a halt to the consideration of a bad settlement deal. This is a very good thing.

The decline of the Iowa caucus

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Ari Melber has a very thoughtful piece at The Atlantic on the chances that the 2012 Republican presidential election could signal the end of the Iowa caucus as a major component of the primary process. Traditionally campaigns skipped Iowa at their own peril. But this cycle both Romney and Gingrich have functionally ignored the state until the end, relying on earned media coverage over traditional field organizing. Melber reports:

With the exception of Rick Santorum, whose underdog campaign arranged 227 events in all 99 counties, the contenders have simply declined to flood the state with staff or appearances. Rick Perry has spent just 17 days on the ground. Mitt Romney, who is playing down expectations, limited himself to eight days.

The newest “front-runner,” Newt Gingrich, has racked up 50 days in the state, but unlike years past, Gingrich’s appearances are far more ceremonial than organizational. After mass resignations this summer, he had literally no Iowa office or staff until last week. The campaign just opened one office in Urbandale, an affordable suburb of Des Moines, and hired about five local staff.

Gingrich’s phantom front-runner model is evident in the latest polls, which show him leading among potential Republican voters — even though only about 10 percent of them have actually heard from his campaign. That is under half the contact rate for the Bachmann and Paul Campaigns. It also trails the pace last cycle, when top campaigns had dozens of field offices and hundreds of staff in the state.

The notion that Iowa caucus goers will make the decision to support candidates that they haven’t had a chance to meet and talk with is anathema to the mythology of the first in the nation caucus. Melber floats an idea which I think could have traction, namely that Iowa caucus-goers could still reward an underdog who spent significant time in the state, like Ron Paul.

I’d hazard that any Iowa Republicans who want to keep their state’s campaign mythology in tact should be very hesitant to reward campaigns which have functionally ignored the state. Only Iowa and New Hampshire voters get real attention from candidates during the presidential primary process. While there are obvious problems with having two lily white states play this role, this is also a role that is culturally embedded in the states’ self-identity. Having lived in New Hampshire during the 2000 primary and worked on a presidential campaign, traveling extensively through both states in 2007-2008, I’ve seen first hand how rigorous these citizens can be in their scrutiny of candidates. The idea that campaigns have finally evolved to the point where media coverage and TV ads can replace actual conversations between voters and candidates is troubling and sad. If they were getting replaced by dedicated voters in California or South Carolina, that’d be one thing. But they’re getting replaced by Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews. No matter how little you think of Iowa and New Hampshire’s historic lock on attention from presidential campaigns, you can’t think that Blitzer and Matthews is an improvement.

Rakoff ruling a victory, but it’s not pepper spray

Metaphor fail:

This time it is the Wall Street bankers and not the Occupiers who are getting hit with pepper spray.

The spray comes straight from the laser printer in the chambers of a federal judge, Jed Rakoff, in New York. The victory that Rakoff gave to the Occupy Wall Street movement Monday came from the federal courthouse — not far from Zucotti Park, the lower Manhattan headquarters of OWS.

I agree with Jonathan Macey that Judge Rakoff’s rejection of the piddling SEC settlement with Citigroup was a big victory. But it wasn’t a physical assault on Citigroup. It didn’t violate their rights nor did it violate due process. It was done entirely within the confines of the law.

Macey goes on to write:

It is a significant victory for the ideals of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. And it just might be the first step on to restoring accountability to both Wall Street and the SEC.

I think this could be the case, though while Rakoff and the Occupy movement have expressed shared values, I would not attribute Rakoff’s anger at being treated like a dunce by the SEC and Citigroup to be caused by Occupy. No, Rakoff is an actual sheriff on the beat, who still cares about the rule of law and making sure that government regulators aren’t working for the company’s they are tasked to regulate.

Shifting narrative as Gingrich overtakes Romney

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Jon Ward at Huffington Post has a fantastic piece on the shifting political narrative that has happened while Newt Gingrich has overtaken Mitt Romney for the lead in the Republican presidential primary. At issue is while Romney has been running on a platform of inevitability, large swaths of the GOP base have chosen instead to be drawn to anyone who isn’t him. That has allowed the space to exist for an alternative to come forward. In this moment of the campaign, that alternative is Gingrich. Ward writes:

Yet as the Romney campaign has fought with the White House, Gingrich has developed a head of steam. He is now leading Romney in national polls, as well as in Iowa surveys, and got a big boost Sunday in New Hampshire when the Manchester Union Leader endorsed him.

Romney’s image, meanwhile, has taken some hits for running the misleading ad, and his criticism of Gingrich’s position on immigration provoked ridicule from Rush Limbaugh of Romney’s own muddled and confusing past statements on the issue. There are lingering questions about how much Gingrich’s softer tone about how to deal with undocumented immigrants may hurt him in Iowa, but so far he appears to have weathered the storm rather well, especially given how badly Texas Gov. Rick Perry was hurt by his stumble on the issue.

We are only weeks away from the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. There’s still a lot of politicking to be done, positive ads to air, and likely even more negative ads. The field operation of each campaign will be put to the test in the next two months. And finally we’ll be able to move away from scandal and gaffe driven horse race polling and into actual democracy. We will begin to have a picture of whether or not Romney can win the nomination on a mantle of inevitability or someone like Gingrich will carry the Not Mitt banner to victory.

Until then, the analysis of the race as provided by Ward will remain one of the best. Romney by no means has this locked up and I think we’re in for a whirlwind couple of months.

Programmed mortgage servicer fraud

Matt Stoller at New Deal 2.0 writes about how mortgage servicing companies are programming fraud into their software to ensure they extract the maximum amount of money from homeowners and force them into foreclosure. Long quote:

And what happens when this kind of fraud goes unprosecuted? It continues, even today. The same banks that ran the corrupt home mortgage securitization chain are now committing rampant fraud in the foreclosure crisis. Here’s New Orleans Bankruptcy Judge Elizabeth Magner discussing problems at Lender Processing Services, the company that handles 80 percent of foreclosures on behalf of large banks (emphasis added):

In Jones v. Wells Fargo, this Court discovered that a highly automated software package owned by LPS and identified as MSP administered loans for servicers and note holders but was programed to apply payments contrary to the terms of the notes and mortgages.

The bad behavior is so rampant that banks think nothing of a contractor programming fraud into the software. This is shocking behavior and has led to untold numbers of foreclosures, as well as the theft of huge sums of money from mortgage-backed securities investors.

Here’s how the fraud works: Mortgage loan notes are very clear on the schedule of how payments are to be applied. First, the money goes to interest, then principal, then all other fees. That means that investors get paid first and servicers, who collect late fees for themselves, get paid either when they collect the late fee from the debtor or from the liquidation of the foreclosure. And fees are supposed to be capitalized into the overall mortgage amount. If you are late one month, it isn’t supposed to push you into being late on all subsequent months.

The software, however, prioritizes servicer fees above the contractually required interest and principal to investors. This isn’t a one-off; it’s programmed. It’s the very definition of a conspiracy! Who knows how many people paid late and then were pushed into a spiral of fees that led into a foreclosure? It’s the perfect crime, and many of the victims had paid every single mortgage payment.

And still there are no criminal indictments of banksters for foreclosure fraud, no indictments of servicers for institutionalizing fraud, just silence as banks steal peoples’ homes.