Author: Matt Browner Hamlin

http://holdfastblog.com

Lambert Strether on the attacks on the Occupy movement

Lambert Strether has a guest post up at Naked Capitalism that looks at the violent raid on Occupy Wall Street and how the movement has responded to coordinated attacks on it from around the country. Lambert is an old hand in the lefty blogosphere and has always brought an incredibly rich moral perspective to his writing. This post is no different.

Whatever. Because a library is more than its holdings. As soon as Zuccotti Square was re-occupied, Occupiers began immediately began to self-organize the library again. Here’s the library at 7:00AM today. And here’s the address where you can send donated books.

And that’s the story: Occupier self-organization. Self-organization is how the Tahrir Square organizers beat Murbarak’s baltigaya, and self-organization is how the Occupiers will beat the 1%. Because look what Bloomberg bulldozed: Not only a library, but:

None of what Bloomberg bulldozed was or is about violence. All of those institutions are about solidarity, people helping people. (For the homeless or the hungry, these institutions are helping people who can’t get help anywhere else.) Perhaps that’s really what Bloomberg didn’t like?

Lambert goes on to make the point that it is these institutions of human support which are what makes the Occupy movement powerful. He notes that it is because of this power that mayors representing the 1% around the country have violently displaced Occupy encampments, using the same tired lies of uncleanliness and dangerous violence near the encampments. Never mind that these encampments are rigidly clean and that the incidents of violence haven’t actually be related to the Occupations at all.

As the frequency and violence with which local governments are trying to destroy the Occupy movement increases, the power of this movement only becomes more clear. Yesterday, following the eviction of Liberty Square, a number of people pointed out that this harsh eviction, done in the dead of night with no warning or humanity, would actually add fuel to the growing Occupy movement. Fortunately for organizers, November 17th (tomorrow) is a major national day of action. I expect whatever turnout would have happened without the eviction of Liberty Square will be substantially bigger, especially in New York City, as a result of this reckless crackdown. Generally speaking, putting out fires is hard to do when you’re using gasoline instead of water.

Newt Gingrich earned $1.6m+ from Freddie Mac

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Rut-roh. Bloomberg is reporting that Newt Gingrich “made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac.” Gingrich worked with Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2002, as the housing bubble was beginning to rapidly expand.

What’s remarkable about this is that Gingrich viewed Freddie Mac as a vehicle for the Republican Party to gain support from the Hispanic community.

“I spent about three hours with him talking about the substance of the issues and the politics of the issues, and he really got it,” said Delk, adding that the two discussed “what the benefits are to communities, what the benefits could be for Republicans and particularly their relationship with Hispanics.”

This pretty strongly undercuts some of the political arguments waged by pro-bank Republicans who seek to blame the GSEs for inflating the housing bubble. Gingrich was pushing them to do it to help Republicans! It makes Gingrich’s call for Barney Frank to be jailed – instead of banksters – for the financial collapse even more insane.

And while Gingrich has claimed that he advised Freddie Mac that they were creating a housing bubble, Bloomberg reports, “None of the former Freddie Mac officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Gingrich raised the issue of the housing bubble or was critical of Freddie Mac’s business model.”

Oh Newt, I have a feeling that it’s going to be fun having you near the top of the polls.

Billionaire Bloomberg violently evicts Occupy Wall Street from Liberty Square


In the middle of the night last night, Mayor Bloomberg had the NYPD violently evict Occupy Wall Street from Liberty Square. The police used physical force, including sonic weapons and pepper spray, to force protesters out. They destroy the 5,000 book library. They destroyed tents and tarps that people have been living in. They arrested reporters and prevented news helicopters from flying to cover the violent eviction.

The latest statement from Occupy Wall Street shows their commitment to keep the Occupy movement moving forward:

Last night, billionaire Michael Bloomberg sent a massive police force to evict members of the public from Liberty Square—home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months. People who were part of a dynamic civic process were beaten and pepper-sprayed, their personal property destroyed.

Supporters of this rapidly growing movement were mobilized in the middle of the night, making phone calls, taking the streets en masse, and planning next steps. Americans and people around the world are appalled at Bloomberg’s treatment of people who peacefully assemble. We are appalled, but not deterred. Liberty Square was dispersed, but its spirit not defeated. Today we are stronger than we were yesterday. Tomorrow we will be stronger still. We are breaking free of the fear that constricts and confines us. We occupy to liberate.

We move forward in the grand tradition of the transformative social movements that have defined American history. We stand on the shoulders of those who have struggled before us, and we pick up where others have left off. We are creating a better society for us all.

Occupy Wall Street has renewed a sense of hope. It has revived a belief in community and awakened a revolutionary spirit too long silenced.

Join us as we liberate space and build a movement.

The fight isn’t over and the Occupy movement will only grow stronger from here.

Already a judge has ordered protesters to be allowed to return to Liberty Square. Bloomberg, to this point, hasn’t complied with the order, denying its existence in a press conference this morning. Clearly the billionaire mayor is going all-in to protect his friends on Wall Street and the 1%. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Bloomberg comes out of this as anything other than a disgraced stooge for Wall Street.

…Also, the photo above is from Canal Street and 6th Street, where Occupy has taken a new park, which is privately owned by Trinity Church.

Banks still adding new fees to customers

Originally posted at AMERICAblog

There was a lot of rightful celebration when Bank of America and other major banks were forced to drop planned debit card fees following major protests from the Occupy Wall Street movement and other community groups. But, not shockingly, the major banks are still finding ways to squeeze money out of customers. The New York Times has a report at the more subtle ways banks are using to extract more wealth from the 99%. Citing the need to make up billions of dollars in lost overdraft penalties and swipe fees that were eliminated by Congress, banks are trying to make up the difference in other areas.

For consumers, the result is a quiet creep of new charges and higher fees for everything from cash withdrawals at ATMs to wire payments, paper statements and in some cases, even the overdraft charges that lawmakers hoped to ratchet down. What is more, banks are raising minimum account balances and adding other new requirements so that it is harder for customers to qualify for fee waivers.

Even the much-maligned debit usage charges have effectively been bundled into higher monthly fees on checking accounts. Bank of America abandoned its $5 a month debit card usage fee in late October amid a firestorm of criticism. Yet, it more quietly raised the cost of its basic MyAccess checking account by more than $3 a month earlier this year. Monthly maintenance fees now run $12 a month, up from $8.95.

The Times’ report notes that Senators Dick Durbin and Jack Reed are pushing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to have banks “adopt a more consumer-friendly disclosure form, akin to the nutrition label on food packaging, for all the fees attached to a checking account.” This is a pretty good idea, in that it would make decision making by consumers easier. But the whole problem consumers are facing today is that they already have accounts with banks and the banks are changing the fee structure on them. While the Move Your Money campaign is a great start, it’s also clear that a complete banking shift isn’t the same thing as switching from Frosted Flakes to Cheerios.

Most importantly, what’s clear is that when you fight the big banks, you can win, but no win is final. Stopping the $5 debit card fee was a great victory for the Occupy movement and consumer advocates, but it’s hardly the whole war. Banks will keep trying to extract every penny possible from consumers in the absence of regulation which prevents them from doing it and regulators committed to enforcing the regulations. Consumers need to stay wary and consumer advocates have to keep fighting back against bank greed. As the banks continue to find new and innovative ways to screw their customers, credit unions will keep gaining customers as people stand up and say, “Enough!” To put it differently, the more banks abuse their customers, the more the market will speak and tell them that this is not a behavior consumers are interested in supporting.

A Millenial loses faith in the Boomer generation

This piece by Thomas Day in the Washington Post about how the Penn State child sex cover-up is the final straw for one Millenial in terms of his loss of faith in his parents’ generation. It’s incredibly damning, going beyond the failure to protect children to the failure to grow the economy, build our infrastructure, and create promise and hope for the Millenial generation.

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us — at the orders of our leader — to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

The times following September 11th called for leadership, not reckless, gluttonous tax cuts. But our leaders then, as now, seemed more concerned with flattery. Then -House Majority Leader and now-convicted felon Tom Delay told us, “nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.” Not exactly Churchillian stuff.

Those of us who did enlist were ordered into Iraq on the promise of being “greeted as liberators,” in the words of our then-vice president. Several thousand of us are dead from that false promise.

The indictment goes on, but the point is clear. Now is the time for Millenial leadership. In fact, I think we’re seeing an attempt of that through the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is seeking to throw out the power structures created by elites, for elites alone.

The world that emerges as my generation takes the reins could be radically different from the one created by our parents’ generation. It has to be, for as Day notes, the great things built by our grandparents have been neglected or deliberately torn down. If we are to ever have the strength, the hope, and the possibilities of generations past, we have to change course and it’s going to have to be the Millenial generation which stewards this change.

Sell Taiwan for Debt Forgiveness?

Paul Kane must have been wearing a pair of bad idea jeans when he penned his op-ed in the New York Times calling for the US to trade Taiwan to China for $1.14 trillion in debt forgiveness by the Chinese government. Kane thinks that the US’s commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by China is a vestige of the Cold War that should be left behind, in exchange for the Chinese government forgiving all the US debt they currently hold. Kane is worried that debt is a drag on our economy, though he just asserts this without evidence beyond a quote from retired Admiral Mike McMullen asserting the same.

Debt hawkishness is bad enough. It’s infected elite discourse and genuinely prevented actual steps that would create jobs and right the economy from being enacted. But debt hawkishness paired with the idea of selling out an ally democracy? This is just a horrible idea and one that I hope finds no traction in political discourse.

Konczal on Obama, spending, & Klein’s apologia for economic failures

Mike Konczal has a good post looking at Ezra Klein’s recent apologia for President Obama’s stewardship of the economy. Konczal goes back to the President’s 2010 State of the Union speech:

It’s clear from the speech: President Obama announced the freeze and veto threat, and didn’t sound alarm bells, because he believed that the potential risks associated with not signaling to the bond market that deficit reduction was coming outweighed the reality of high unemployment and trying to expand the deficit immediately. 20+ million people not finding full-time work with certainty is bad, but just the possibility of the confidence fairy getting angry is far worse.This stands in for policy more generally, and it leads directly to all the failures of Grand Bargains and two-deficits cartwheels when it came to plans for dealing with the unemployment crisis. It splits the party between those who have to argue for bond vigilantes and those who have to argue against. The deficit hawkery negates the most powerful market indicator we have for what the government should do – the interest rate. This approach puts boundaries on the range of acceptable ideas on what can be done for the economy – and places getting stimulus out the door through discretionary spending, outside of Congress, out of bounds. And meanwhile current interest rates have never been lower – they are negative in real terms for 10 years out. This was exactly the wrong call to make in early 2010. [Emphasis added]

I think Konczal is exactly right in his critique of the 2010 State of the Union, and the policy decisions which followed from it.

But it’s not just that the President was wrong as we look back almost two years later. It’s that he was clearly wrong at the time. Plenty of people have been accurately describing the depth of the economic challenges facing us. Hell, Duncan Black has probably posted a couple hundred times over the last three years about the high unemployment, the lack of action, and the groundless fear of the bond vigilantes. The President and many of his advisers simply are not listening.

Rick Perry’s real disaster

In last night’s debate, Rick Perry had a big gaffe while trying to name three federal agencies that he would flat-out cut if elected President. He was quick to name Education and Commerce, but couldn’t remember the third one over the course of over 50 seconds. The EPA was suggested to him by his colleagues on stage, but he said, no, that’s not it.

Not shockingly, the immediate reaction and early reports was that this gaffe would likely be fatal for Perry. He couldn’t remember three things despite a minute to get the third one and help from his colleagues on stage (he later said it was Energy). Yes, this was undoubtedly a failure in execution of the highest order.

But as Matt Stoller was quick to point out on Twitter, the thing that was crazy about this debate moment wasn’t that Perry couldn’t remember three things, it’s that he was proposing destroying the Commerce, Education, and Energy Departments and no one was challenging him on what this would actually mean for the country or the people who worked there.

[View the story “@matthewstoller” on Storify]

Stoller’s right that these serious questions are being completely glossed over by the reaction to the gaffe. How Perry thinks we would fund the maintenance and security of our nuclear arsenal is a big deal. Cutting funding for children with special needs would be a huge tax on parents. These are big questions.

It’s common that those of us in the liberal blogosphere remark on the vapidity of the DC press corps. But looking at Twitter, many Democratic operatives and liberal bloggers were just as fixated on the gaffe and not the insanity of Perry’s ideas. I’m just as guilty of that as anyone. And this is a real problem, not just with the press, but with American political culture.

These are serious times and the level of debate should be high and serious. Parts of the CNBC debate, especially on the exposure US banks have to European debt and rapidly increasing risk, were both important and enlightening. It turns out Jon Huntsman is strongly against the continued existence of Too Big To Fail institutions. Unfortunately many of his opponents think that we can ignore Europe and not expect to be affected by what is happening in the Eurozone. The degree of dangerous ignorance emanating from the stage was so thick that even the CNBC moderators pushed back on it, to an extent. The Republican candidates’ responses to these immediate questions are much more relevant that what agencies they pledge to eliminate or what they would do if Obamacare was repealed. The economic crisis facing Europe will almost certainly be playing itself out a year from now, in some form or another, and it will almost certainly be an immediate, major US public policy issue long before then (actually, it is now). The insanity of most of the panels’ answers to questions about the ongoing financial crisis is far more important and more dangerous than the inability of one demagogue to effectively utter his demagoguery.

Bill Daley and post-partisanship

Jonathan Chait has a piece at NYMag.com looking at how White House Chief of Staff is being forced into a diminished role following less than a year on the job. Chait theorizes that this is because Daley pushed a governing framework that is unpopular.

the interesting legacy of Daley’s tenure is not his mechanical performance. It’s that he conducted an experiment based on the Washington elite view of the Obama presidency. That view, shared by business leaders, centrist pundits, and other elites, holds that Obama’s main problem has been excessive partisanship, liberalism in general, and hostility to business in particular. In December, 2009, Bill Daley wrote a Washington Post op-ed endorsing precisely this analysis. After the midterm elections, Obama – pelted by Daley-esque complaints – appointed Daley chief of staff. “His moderate views and Wall Street credentials make him an unexpected choice for a president who has railed against corporate irresponsibility,” reported the Post. Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove, and FedEx CEO Fred Smithraved.

Daley, pursuing his theory, heavily courted business leaders. He made long-term deficit reduction a top priority, and spent hours with Republican leaders, meeting them three-quarters of the way in hopes of securing a deal that would demonstrate his centrism and bipartisanship. The effort failed completely.

The effort failed because Daley’s analysis — which is also the analysis of David Brooks and Michael Bloomberg — was fatally incorrect. Americans were not itching for Obama to make peace with corporate America. Americans are in an angry, populist mood — distrustful of government, but even more distrustful of business.

Chait goes on to provide numerical evidence that Americans are not looking for pro-business governance right now, nor are they looking for cooperation with the GOP. As a result, Chait says, Daley is being pushed out, his ideas disproved by the results.

This all may be true. Daley’s arrival in the White House certainly increased the Obama administration’s ties to Wall Street and major corporations. He also seems to have presided over a period of concerted attempts to work hand in hand with the Republican Congress. But it’s not as if the White House wasn’t already heavily partnered with big business and Wall Street. It’s not as if the Obama administration hadn’t already spent the better part of two years trying to pass bipartisan legislation, despite having congressional majorities that did not require this.

Moreover, while a Chief of Staff has serious influence over the course an administration’s political and policy actions, those decisions only move forward if the President is on board for those decisions. Daley’s crime doesn’t seem to be wrong in the eyes of the President about reaching out and doing work alongside business and Republicans. It’s that he actually failed to do it well. Throw in the mix that Daley had genuinely bad relationships with Democrats on the Hill and a penchant to give up too much information to both reporters and Republicans, and it seems clear that he just wasn’t an effective operative.

If Chait is right, we’ll see the President and his re-election campaign push for aggressive, populist, anti-Wall Street messaging. But I think it’s more likely that we see from Obama what we saw in 2008 and what we’ve seen almost without interruption since he assumed office: a desire to be a post-partisan president, to cast a pox on both Republican and Democratic houses for failure to get things done, and a refusal to criticize the Masters of the Universe who wrecked our economy and are still stealing peoples’ homes. In such a scenario it will become clear that Daley’s role wasn’t diminished because his worldview was proven incorrect and therefore ineffective; it will instead be clear that Daley lost stature because he didn’t get things done, period.

Chait is right that “Americans are in an angry, populist mood — distrustful of government, but even more distrustful of business.” But I don’t think that fact is going to dissuade President Obama and his staff that being soft on business, covering up Wall Street crime, and consistently producing Republican solutions to the problems we face is an incorrect course for the administration to be on.