How Tim Geithner Gets $200,000 a Pop to Chat With Big Banks

Plutocracy servant Tim Geithner. Any surprise that Obama and Bush appointed this toady to high positions?

Plutocracy servant Tim Geithner. Any surprise that Obama and Bush appointed this toady to high positions and that now the same rotten establishment is paying him handsomely for essentially bullshit lectures?

Cashing in on the speaker circuit the minute you leave office is a well-traveled road in Washington. In recent decades, the number of speaking bureaus has mushroomed, and the negotiations often start even before the office is vacated. As Puff Daddy once sang, “It’s All About the Benjamins [3].”

Some former “public servants” hop on the gravy train by taking up lobbying. But the speaker circuit is getting to be just as lucrative.

 

When they’re not pushing a discredited austerity agenda that harms the public and enriches the financial sector and the wealthy, Erskine Bowles (former White House chief of staff) and Alan Simpson (former senator from Wyoming) get their bread buttered on the speaker circuit to the tune of $40,000 a hit.  (David Dayen notes [4] that this is three times the amount that recipients of Social Security can expect in retirement per year.) Who is paying them? Behemoth banks like Bank of America and Manhattan investment groups, naturally.

Former president Bill Clinton blows right past Bowles and Simpson, raking in an estimated $106 million [5] in speaking fees since leaving office, with individual payouts ranging from $28,000 to an eye-popping $750,000. Citigroup, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman have paid him up to $425,000 [6] a pop just to talk the sweet language of bank-friendly capitalism.

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has wasted not a moment to shove his snout in the financial sector speaking-engagement trough. Geithner’s bank-centric worldview dominated the White House in the aftermath of the financial crisis, doing untold damage to ordinary Americans. As renowned economist Simon Johnson has explained [7],  “Geithner came to stand for providing large amounts of unconditional support for very big banks…” at the New York Federal Reserve and continued this pattern in Washington. He favored unqualified assistance to troubled banks rather than throwing out incompetent managers and directors or working to change harmful policies. The fact that we still have dangerous Too-Big-to-Fail banks on our hands is part of his dismal legacy.

The banking world is very grateful for Geithner’s championing of their interests over the public’s. Just six months after he left the Treasury in January, it has showered Geithner with cash. Deutsche Bank lavished [8] him with $200,000 to speak at a conference in June. Private equity groups are also shoveling over piles of dough: Blackstone and Warburg Pincus paid [9]  Geithner $100,000 each for recent speaking engagements.

Here’s betting your local PTA can’t quite pony up those fees.

Bribery, corruption, and using one’s office for private financial gain are nothing new in politics, but we are reaching a fevered pitch that may end up outdoing the days of 19th century robber barons. Last year, the U.S. ranked #19 on Transparency International’s list of countries [10] according to how clean the political system is perceived to be, just above Chile. Singapore, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan all ranked higher. The reason why the U.S. is slipping in the rankings? The tsnunami of money in politics, of course.

There’s an old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Maybe that’s why Geithner’s theme song has always been, “I Left My Heart at Citigroup [11].”

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/geithner-speaking-fees


How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states

What began as a means of retaining individual freedom can now be used by smaller states to fend off the ambitions of larger ones

A telecommunications station in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

‘Africa is coming online, but with hardware supplied by China. Will the internet be the means by which Africa continues to be subjugated into the 21st century?’ Photograph: Mao Siqian/Corbis

The original cypherpunks were mostly Californian libertarians. I was from a different tradition but we all sought to protect individual freedom from state tyranny. Cryptography was our secret weapon. It has been forgotten how subversive this was. Cryptography was then the exclusive property of states, for use in their various wars. By writing our own software and disseminating it far and wide we liberated cryptography, democratised it and spread it through the frontiers of the new internet.

The resulting crackdown, under various “arms trafficking” laws, failed. Cryptography became standardised in web browsers and other software that people now use on a daily basis. Strong cryptography is a vital tool in fighting state oppression. That is the message in my book, Cypherpunks. But the movement for the universal availability of strong cryptography must be made to do more than this. Our future does not lie in the liberty of individuals alone.

Our work in WikiLeaks imparts a keen understanding of the dynamics of the international order and the logic of empire. During WikiLeaks’ rise we have seen evidence of small countries bullied and dominated by larger ones or infiltrated by foreign enterprise and made to act against themselves. We have seen the popular will denied expression, elections bought and sold, and the riches of countries such as Kenya stolen and auctioned off to plutocrats in London and New York.

The struggle for Latin American self-determination is important for many more people than live in Latin America, because it shows the rest of the world that it can be done. But Latin American independence is still in its infancy. Attempts at subversion of Latin American democracy are still happening, including most recently in Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador and Venezuela.

This is why the message of the cypherpunks is of special importance to Latin American audiences. Mass surveillance is not just an issue for democracy and governance – it’s a geopolitical issue. The surveillance of a whole population by a foreign power naturally threatens sovereignty. Intervention after intervention in the affairs of Latin American democracy have taught us to be realistic. We know that the old powers will still exploit any advantage to delay or suppress the outbreak of Latin American independence.

Consider simple geography. Everyone knows oil resources drive global geopolitics. The flow of oil determines who is dominant, who is invaded, and who is ostracised from the global community. Physical control over even a segment of an oil pipeline yields great geopolitical power. Governments in this position can extract huge concessions. In a stroke, the Kremlin can sentence eastern Europe and Germany to a winter without heat. And even the prospect of Tehran running a pipeline eastwards to India and China is a pretext for bellicose logic from Washington.

But the new great game is not the war for oil pipelines. It is the war for information pipelines: the control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland. The new global treasure is control over the giant data flows that connect whole continents and civlisations, linking the communications of billions of people and organisations.

It is no secret that, on the internet and on the phone, all roads to and from Latin America lead through the United States. Internet infrastructure directs 99% of the traffic to and from South America over fibre-optic lines that physically traverse US borders. The US government has shown no scruples about breaking its own law to tap into these lines and spy on its own citizens. There are no such laws against spying on foreign citizens. Every day, hundreds of millions of messages from the entire Latin American continent are devoured by US spy agencies, and stored forever in warehouses the size of small cities. The geographical facts about the infrastructure of the internet therefore have consequences for the independence and sovereignty of Latin America.

The problem also transcends geography. Many Latin American governments and militaries secure their secrets with cryptographic hardware. These are boxes and software that scramble messages and then unscramble them on the other end. Governments purchase them to keep their secrets secret – often at great expense to the people – because they are correctly afraid of interception of their communications.

But the companies who sell these expensive devices enjoy close ties with the US intelligence community. Their CEOs and senior employees are often mathematicians and engineers from the NSA capitalising on the inventions they created for the surveillance state. Their devices are often deliberately broken: broken with a purpose. It doesn’t matter who is using them or how they are used – US agencies can still unscramble the signal and read the messages.

These devices are sold to Latin American and other countries as a way to protect their secrets but they are really a way of stealing secrets.

Meanwhile, the United States is accelerating the next great arms race. The discoveries of the Stuxnet virus – and then the Duqu and Flame viruses – herald a new era of highly complex weaponised software made by powerful states to attack weaker states. Their aggressive first-strike use on Iran is determined to undermine Iranian efforts at national sovereignty, a prospect that is anathema to US and Israeli interests in the region.

Once upon a time the use of computer viruses as offensive weapons was a plot device in science fiction novels. Now it is a global reality spurred on by the reckless behaviour of the Barack Obama administration in violation of international law. Other states will now follow suit, enhancing their offensive capacity to catch up.

The United States is not the only culprit. In recent years, the internet infrastructure of countries such as Uganda has been enriched by direct Chinese investment. Hefty loans are doled out in return for African contracts to Chinese companies to build internet backbone infrastructure linking schools, government ministries and communities into the global fibre-optic system.

Africa is coming online, but with hardware supplied by an aspirant foreign superpower. Will the African internet be the means by which Africa continues to be subjugated into the 21st century? Is Africa once again becoming a theatre for confrontation between the global powers?

These are just some of the important ways in which the message of the cypherpunks goes beyond the struggle for individual liberty. Cryptography can protect not just the civil liberties and rights of individuals, but the sovereignty and independence of whole countries, solidarity between groups with common cause, and the project of global emancipation. It can be used to fight not just the tyranny of the state over the individual but the tyranny of the empire over smaller states.

The cypherpunks have yet to do their greatest work. Join us.



Who Needs the US? And Who Doesn’t?

OpedNews.com

President Morales.

President Morales.

The countries, companies and organizations that need us need a rogue nation that does bad things. That is, I am sad to say, what the US has become.

After his plane was forced to land in Vienna, because France, Spain, Germany and Portugal were told that Edward Snowden was on board, Evo Morales concluded that the USA had been behind his mistreatment.

Morales, the president of Bolivia, has claimed that the US was behind the pressure to not allow his plane, leaving a Moscow conference, to fly over their territories. In response, Morales has said that he’s considering closing the US embassy in Bolivia, ” “We do not need the embassy of the United States.”
[pullquote]I’ll throw in Cuba too. Cuba is the kind of country the USA needs to become if it is to survive and evolve past the unsustainable, materialistic, consumption monster it currently is.[/pullquote]

The Guardian reported that Morales said,

“Being united will defeat American imperialism. We met with the leaders of my party and they asked us for several measures and if necessary, we will close the embassy of the United States,” Morales said. “We do not need the embassy of the United States.”

That got me thinking. Who DOES need the USA? What nations need the USA. First are the authoritarian dictators who we prop up, like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Then there are the fundamentalists supporting Arab Potentates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates. We have a long history of standing with tyrants, helping them fight against rebels who wish to free their nations.

Then, what organizations need the USA?
First, there are the multinational corporations and the globalization organizations that have been created to increase their power– like WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, the World Bank, and soon to be shoved down our throats, TPP. These organizations have become as powerful in their relations to us as the nations we used to consider our most important allies.
Next, there is Israel, a nation that has absorbed tens of billions of our dollars while costing us dearly in terms of our relationships with much of the Arab world. Israel is more of a friend to Republicans than to America. We’ve seen that repeatedly over the years. It’s odd, because 75-80% of Jews vote Democratic. You’d think there’d be more room for the US to put pressure on this friend who needs us. But that’s not happening… because politically, there are almost no differences between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to Israel. It’s sad. There are many Israelis who don’t like the way things are. A huge percentage of them protested just last year. Maybe, at some point the Israelis who protested will join the Egyptians and Turks as part of the Middle East summer.
Then there’s Al Qaeda. They definitely need us. Look at the rebels in Syria and we see them getting military aid, in public, in addition to who knows how much has been funneled through secret channels. And then there’s that whole recruiting thing. Imagine how minor and small Al Qaeda would be by now if the US hadn’t made them the heroes of the Arab World. I’m sure there are hundreds of millions among the 1.6 billion Muslims who see Al Qaeda as heroic resisters of American imperialism and colonialism.
Who doesn’t need the USA?
We can start with Evo Morales and Bolivia and a number of the South American nations with democratically elected leaders– Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay. Egypt doesn’t need us. The signs opposing the US and Obama were out in full force as the massive march that ousted president Morsi exploded upon Cairo. The US mainstream media refused to show them.

SS&SS
Ironically right wing Breitbart, seized the anti-Obama aspect of the signs in an article, Media buries Egyptian loathing of Barack Obama, but didn’t get that the people were attacking Obama as a fascist, not as a Democrat.
I’ll throw in Cuba too. Cuba is the kind of country the USA needs to become if it is to survive and evolve past the unsustainable, materialistic, consumption monster it currently is.
Most of Europe doesn’t need us. The BRIC countries– Brazil, Russia, China and India are needing us less and less, except in that the US has become a huge customer for their goods and services.
Perhaps our grand old allies– Germany France, UK, Australia– need us.  We have similar politics and systems that have been allowed to be corrupted by corporations.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Evo Morales shutting down the US embassy in Bolivia. The US is out of control, or, more accurately, out of citizen control, no longer accountable and just about fully in the hands of corporatists, with corporatist Barack Hussein Obama at the corporate helm.
These countries, companies and organizations that need us need a rogue nation that does bad things. That is, I am sad to say, what the US has become.  Obama hopes to take TPP live this fall. He continues to appoint more and more foxes to guard our hen houses. The Democrats and their media enablers– CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, almost all the people on MSNBC– keep helping Obama.
It’s ironic. We the people of the United States need people like Evo Morales and Ed Snowden. We sure don’t need more militarized police and more financialized government agencies headed by banksters and finance thugs.
Just to wrap up, I’m pasting in this excerpt from my interview with Noam Chomsky last fall.

Rob Kall: The US has a standard operating procedure when one of its dictators gets in trouble?  Could you describe that?

Noam Chomsky: Well, it’s happened so many times it takes real effort not to see it.  So, let’s take, just in recent years, Somoza and Nicaragua.  It was the Carter administration,  which is, you know, maybe the most human rights oriented administration. They supported Somoza right to the end after his troops literally had killed maybe forty thousand people.

The US continued to support him when the business world turned against him, and it was going to be impossible to support him any longer.  The Carter administration tried to rescue the remnants of the regime, even rescue the hated National Guard, and move them elsewhere, and then try to reconstitute them.  And then Reagan came along and was forced to essentially reconstitute them and overthrow the new government.  That’s Somoza.  A couple of years later, Duvalier in Haiti, another favorite dictator, came under internal threat.  Again, the US supported him (this is Reagan now) to the bitter end.  Finally the army turned against him, and then the Reagan Administration flew him out of the country with half the country’s treasury on an air force plane, to Paris.  Marcos, in the Philippines, about the same time, same story. Mobutu in the Congo, Suharto in Indonesia.

I mean this is just retainment. “If you have a favorite dictator, support him for as long as possible.  If it becomes impossible, send him off somewhere, and essentially try to reconstruct the old system.”  That’s pretty much what happened in Egypt.  The Obama administration supported Mubarak to the very end, practically the last minute, and finally even the army turned against him, and they realized they’ve got to ditch him.  So, they sent him off to Sharm El-Sheikh, and since then have been trying to reconstruct a regime that would somehow follow the same Neoliberal policies.  You know, they don’t control everything, but that’s certainly what they are trying to influence.  And, in the countries that really matter to the west, the oil dictatorships that the US has supported, the dictatorships have really harshly repressed any significant effort at reform, and the US has backed them all the way.  France did the same in Tunisia, which was its dependency.  They supported the dictator Ben Ali up to the point where it is becoming a joke, even after people were demonstrating, wildly demonstrating, in the streets.  But that’s exactly the way powerful systems act.

It shouldn’t surprise us.  No system of power wants Democracy.  It is a threat to its interest.  I mean, of course they’ll all talk about democracy, but you know everybody talks about democracy; Stalin talked about it, the Japanese Fascists talked about it, you know, everyone says democracy is great, but systems of power are not going to like it, because it erodes their power.  I mean, it is as simple as that. And, the evidence for it is just overwhelming.

Submitters Bio:

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and website architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), and publisher of Storycon.org, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and an inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com



A New Beginning Without Washington’s Sanctimonious Mask

By Paul Craig Roberts 

Snowden served humanity by revealing that the Washington Stasi was violating the rights of “every citizen in the world.” Snowden merely betrayed “some elites that are in power in a certain country,” whereas Washington betrayed the entire world.

Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Patiño: “Snowden served humanity by revealing that Washington was violating the rights of every citizen in the world…He merely betrayed some elites that are in power in a certain country, whereas Washington betrayed the entire world.”

It is hard to understand the fuss that Washington and its media whores are making over Edward Snowden. We have known for a long time that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying for years without warrants on the communications of Americans and people throughout the world. Photographs of the massive NSA building in Utah built for the purpose of storing the intercepted communications of the world have been published many times.

It is not clear to an ordinary person what Snowden has revealed that William Binney and other whistleblowers have not already revealed. Perhaps the difference is that Snowden has provided documents that prove it, thereby negating Washington’s ability to deny the facts with its usual lies.

 

Whatever the reason for Washington’s blather, it certainly is not doing the US government any good. Far more interesting than Snowden’s revelations is the decision by governments of other countries to protect a truth-teller from the Stasi in Washington.

Hong Kong kept Snowden’s whereabouts secret so that an amerikan black-op strike or a drone could not be sent to murder him. Hong Kong told Washington that its extradition papers for Snowden were not in order and permitted Snowden to leave for Moscow.

The Chinese government did not interfere with Snowden’s departure.

The Russian government says it has no objection to Snowden having a connecting flight in Moscow.

Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño responded to Washington’s threats with a statement that the Ecuadorian government puts human rights above Washington’s interests. Foreign Minister Patiño said that Snowden served humanity by revealing that the Washington Stasi was violating the rights of “every citizen in the world.” Snowden merely betrayed “some elites that are in power in a certain country,” whereas Washington betrayed the entire world.

With Hong Kong, China, Russia, Ecuador, and Cuba refusing to obey the Stasi’s orders, Washington is flailing around making a total fool of itself and its media prostitutes.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been issuing warnings hand over fist. He has threatened Russia, China, Ecuador, and every country that aids and abets Snowden’s escape from the Washington Stasi. Those who don’t do Washington’s bidding, Kerry declared, will suffer adverse impacts on their relationship with the US.

What a stupid thing for Kerry to say. Here is a guy who once was for peace but who has been turned by NSA spying on his personal affairs into an asset for the NSA. Try to realize the extraordinary arrogance and hubris in Kerry’s threat that China, Russia, and other countries will suffer bad relations with the US. Kerry is saying that amerika doesn’t have to care whether “the indispensable people” have bad relations with other countries, but those countries have to be concerned if they have bad relations with the “indispensable country.” What an arrogant posture for the US government to present to the world.

Here we have a US Secretary of State lost in delusion along with the rest of Washington. A country that is bankrupt, a country that has allowed its corporations to destroy its economy by moving the best jobs offshore, a country whose future is in the hands of the printing press, a country that after eleven years of combat has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban is now threatening Russia and China. God save us from the utter fools who comprise our government.

The world is enjoying Washington’s humiliation at the hands of Hong Kong. A mere city state gave Washington the bird. In its official statement, Hong Kong shifted the focus from Snowden to his message and asked the US government to explain its illegal hacking of Hong Kong’s information systems.

China’s state newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote: “The United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries’ networks. . . The world will remember Edward Snowden. It was his fearlessness that tore off Washington’s sanctimonious mask.”

China’s Global Times, a subsidiary of The People’s Daily, accused Washington of attacking “a young idealist who has exposed the sinister scandals of the US government.” Instead of apologizing “Washington is showing off its muscle by attempting to control the whole situation.”

China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that Snowden’s revelations had placed “Washington in a really awkward situation. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that Russia’s sympathy is with Snowden, not with the amerikan Stasi state. Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said that it was unrealistic to expect the Russian government to violate law to seize a transit passenger who had not entered Russia and was not on Russian soil. RT’s Gayane Chichakyan reported that Washington is doing everything it can to shift attention away from Snowden’s revelations that “show that the US has lied and has been doing the same as they accuse China of doing.”

Ecuador says the traitor is Washington, not Snowden.

The stuck pig squeals from the NSA director–”Edward Snowden has caused irreversible damage to US”–are matched by the obliging squeals from members of the House and Senate, themselves victims of the NSA spying, as was the Director of the CIA who was forced to resign because of a love affair. The NSA is in position to blackmail everyone in the House and Senate, in the White House itself, in all the corporations, the universities, the media, every organization at home and abroad, who has anything to hide. You can tell who is being blackmailed by the intensity of the squeals, such as those of Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Mike Rogers (R, MI). With any luck, a patriot will leak what the NSA has on Feinstein and Rogers, neither of whom could possibly scrape any lower before the NSA.

The gangster government in Washington that has everything to hide is now in NSA’s hands and will follow orders. The pretense that amerika is a democracy responsible to the people has been exposed. The US is run by and for the NSA. Congress and the White House are NSA puppets.

Let’s quit calling the NSA the National Security Agency. Clearly, NSA is a threat to the security of every person in the entire world. Let’s call the NSA what it really is–the National Stasi Agency, the largest collection of Gestapo in human history. You can take for granted that every media whore, every government prostitute, every ignorant flag-waver who declares Snowden to be a traitor is either brainwashed or blackmailed. They are the protectors of NSA tyranny. They are our enemies.

The world has been growing increasingly sick of Washington for a long time. The bullying, the constant stream of lies, the gratuitous wars and destruction have destroyed the image hyped by Washington of the US as a “light unto the world.” The world sees the US as a plague upon the world.

Following Snowden’s revelations, Germany’s most important magazine, Der Spiegal, had the headline: “Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself From America.” The first sentence of the article asks: “Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.”

Der Spiegal continues: “We are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching. On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.”

There is little doubt that German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich has lost his secrets to NSA spies. Friedrich rushed to NSA’s defense, declaring: ”that’s not how you treat friends.” As Der Spiegal made clear, the minister was not referring “to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying. Friedrich’s reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power–and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent–either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians–Germany’s included–prefer to grin and bear it.”

It is extraordinary that the most important publication in Germany has acknowledged that the German government is Washington’s puppet state.

Der Spiegel says: “German citizens should be able to expect that their government will protect them from spying by foreign governments. But the German interior minister says instead: ‘We are grateful for the excellent cooperation with US secret services.’ Friedrich didn’t even try to cover up his own incompetence on the surveillance issue. ‘Everything we know about it, we have learned from the media,’ he said. The head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was not any more enlightened. ‘I didn’t know anything about it,’ he said. And Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was also apparently in the dark. ‘These reports are extremely unsettling,’ she said. With all due respect: These are the people who are supposed to be protecting our rights? If it wasn’t so frightening, it would be absurd.”

For those moronic amerikans who say, “I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t care if they spy,” Der Spiegal writes that a “monitored human being is not a free one.” We have reached the point where we “free americans” have to learn from our German puppets that we are not free.

Here, read it for yourself: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/europe-must-stand-up-to-american-cyber-snooping-a-906250.html

Present day Germany is a new country, flushed of its past by war and defeat. Russia is also a new country that has emerged from the ashes of an unrealistic ideology. Hope always resides with those countries that have most experienced evil in government. If Germany were to throw off its amerikan overlord and depart NATO, amerikan power in Europe would collapse. If Germany and Russia were to unite in defense of truth and human rights, Europe and the world would have a new beginning.

A new beginning is desperately needed. Chris Floyd explains precisely what is going on, which is something you will never hear from the presstitutes. Read it while you still can:http://www.globalresearch.ca/follow-the-money-the-secret-heart-of-the-secret-state-the-deeper-implications-of-the-snowden-revelations/5340132

There would be hope if Americans could throw off their brainwashing, follow the lead of Debra Sweet and others, and stand up for Edward Snowden and against the Stasi State.http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=167695

About Dr. Paul Craig RobertsPaul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.


Daily Kos diarist criticizes Obama and survives…tenuously

Prefatory note by Patrice Greanville

BO: The Untouchable.

BO: The Untouchable.

Anyone halfway familiar with the topography of American political blogs soon recognizes that the gianormous Daily Kos is, by its own admission, little more than an appendage for the Democratic Party establishment, a rich platform for apologetics of the centrist kind, beginning with the man (still) in vogue, Barack Obama. Make any criticism of the current POTUS, let alone a systematic analysis of his betrayals, and all hell is guaranteed to break loose, with all the poisonous, snide and often condescending fury that mainstream liberals are capable of mustering, which, incidentally, is plenty. Take it from me, it’s not an edifying experience. That is one of the many reasons I give this opinion tent a wide berth.

Irrevocably centrist

“Kossacks” tipify the extremists of the center who see nothing wrong with ganging up on Republicans, low-hanging fruit when it comes to picking off scumbags, criminals, and assorted enemies of the people, not to mention that GOPers often waste no time disguising where their true allegiances lie (remember Texas rep Joe Barton abjectly apologizing to BP for being brought to task in the wake of the Gulf fiasco?), while giving a glowing pass to Democrats, in the name of LOTE or whatever other nincompoop reason they manage to contrive.

This is the kind of mind that endorses Rachel Maddow, and her MSNBC confreres’ brand of self-inflicted half-blind journalism; that applauds the likes of Jonathan Alter and Bill Maher’s ludicrous shilling for Obama, and that is ready with invective for anyone who should deviate too far from electoral politics as usual, all this while the world is literally going to hell on account of massive misleadership or (as is the case with the salvation of numerous species) no leadership at all. Meantime, as the examples of Chris Hedges (who even wrote a book about the subject, pronouncing liberalism dead), Michael Hastings, Matt Taibbi, Rob Kall, Michael Green and others indicate, intelligent, principled liberals are abandoning the DLC catechism of permanent obeisance to corporate power in increasing numbers, and moving sharply leftward in what is becoming an embarrassing show of rejection of the American establishment’s chief legitimacy instrument.

DK however retains considerable traffic and commands attention. Like a slowly melting berg, it can still do some damage. That’s why some people take a deep breath and stick around. Their thankless (but politically important) job is to inject solid information and mature perspectives into a large audience that could prove critical in eliminating the Democratic Party as the eternal lesser evil option, and provide some rectification to the self-indulgent dreck that passes for commentary on the site.  A few days back, Tony Wikrent, who uses the handle NBBooks, posted an excellent essay that quickly caused some turmoil.  The snide comments soon arrived, but also some simply memorable defenses.  This is the kind of post that almost redeems the Daily Kos.  (See it all below). I’m not sure what political space Wikrent occupies. My hunch is that he’s currently in the left-liberal trench, still in the ranks of the Democratic party, albeit quickly losing trust.  A final point: Although we do not agree entirely with the author’s positions, his was a brave post and deserves recognition. —PG

PS/ Don’t miss the comments [selection] at the end of the piece. One, I believe, sums up the situation particularly well.

______

WED JUN 19, 2013

Obama did not save the economy. Social Security did.


Some Kossacks are getting pretty upset that more and more of us are coming to the realization that President Obama is a corporatist shill who has done very little to help improve the economic situation for working Americans. There is a recommended diary as I write that asserts “Obama SAVED the US Economy” and argues that it was Obama’s “massive stimulus and jobs package that rescued this country from Soviet-style collapse.”

In a word: bullshit.

It was Social Security — an “automatic stabilizer” that was created to help remedy the First Great Depression — that saved the U.S. economy. Along with a few other “automatic stabilizers” that were created in the same era, such as unemployment insurance and food stamps.

Even before Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were a few economists who warned that we needed a stimulus package that was over $1 trillion. And the thing about those economists is that they were the very few and very rare economists who had been correct about the Wall Street bubble economy of the 1990s and 2000s and who explicitly identified the housing mortgage securities market as being the probable fuse for a coming financial collapse, such as Tom Palley, Joe Stiglitz, James Galbraith, and Michael Hudson.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was estimated to be $787 billion at the time of passage, later revised to $831 billion between 2009 and 2019, according to Wikipedia. Of that $831 billion, $288 billion, or a full third, went to “tax relief” which even conservative economists like Mark Zandy admitted provides the least amount of stimulus bang for the buck. Only $144 billion went to assist state and local governments, $111 billion to infrastructure and science, and $43 billion to energy. A mere ten percent,  $81 billion, went to programs that directly assisted the most needy and most destitute of our fellow citizens.

But, let’s be generous and say that Obama’s vaunted stimulus provided $543 billion to actually stimulate the economy  (that’s $831 billion, minus the $288 billion wasted for useless “tax relief.”

By contrast, Social Security paid out $557.2 billion in benefits in 2009;  $577.4 billion  in 2010; and $596.2 billion in 2011. (See 2012 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of The Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds.” United States Social Security Administration, April 25, 2012, page 241.)

That’s $1.73 trillion in Social Security benefits in three years.

That’s what saved the economy, not Obama’s relatively paltry $543 billion. Say another $600 billion for 2012, and you’re looking at over $2 trillion in Social Security benefits over four years. What do you think would have happened without that  $2 trillion in Social Security benefits? What if there had not been the New Deal legacy of Social Security — that no conservative ideologue could stop, obstruct, or derail — to act as an automatic stabilizer for the economy?

Then we’d be looking at a “Soviet-style collapse.”

And now the economic dolt we have as a President wants to impose a cut in the one automatic stabilizer program that was most responsible for saving his sorry excuse for a Presidential administration?

At this point, anyone who believes it was Obama’s stimulus program that saved the U.S. economy is such an imbecile and simpleton on real economics that it borders on moral turpitude.

 

There were some other claims in that recommended diary that defy belief. The U.S. a leader in “clean energy technologies”? Really? I want to see what moron put together a report laying out that fanciful claim. As the MIT Technology Review article on the April 2012 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?”, the U.S. is leading the world in the amount of money invested in clean energy technologies. So what? The U.S. is the world’s biggest economy. As the MIT Technology Review article noted, the U.S. is lagging in getting new technologies into production and to market.

Saving the auto industry, is one thing Obama can take credit for. But read the inside account of the debate between Obama’s advisers (such as that provided by Ron Suskind in Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President), and it was a very close thing. Had one particular adviser not interjected a crucial argument — “How will it look if we let hundreds of thousands of auto workers lose their jobs, while we hand hundreds of billions of dollars over to save Wall Street bankers?” — it could easily have gone the other way. In the end, the decision was made because of the damn optics, not because Obama and his economics team had any real sense of the economic struggles and everyday life of working Americans.

People who defend Obama at this point, I dismiss as people who are comfortably ensconced in nice, middle class professional jobs. The professional class. They are complete and I am coming to believe, nearly irredeemable idiots on questions of economics.

You want a good litmus test to judge someone on economics? Ask them what they think of free trade. And if they say they are opposed to it, ask them what specifically are they going to do to put that opposition into effect.

I was part of a radical splinter group that tried to confront the UAW leadership on its support for Bill Clinton’s NAFTA. (I write “Bill Clinton’s” because though it was formulated and negotiated under Papa Bush, Bill Clinton took full ownership of it.) So if you want to know what went wrong with organized labor in the 1980s and 1990s, I think I can tell you.

They forgot what it was like being poor.

And that’s exactly the problem with Obama and those who don’t see what a disaster his economic policies have created out here in flyover country. From what I can sense, anyone who fails to distance themselves from Obama’s economic record is going to get creamed in 2014.

That does not mean that people are going to embrace the Republicans. Most people know that the Republicans have been obstructionist dickheads. They laugh bitterly about how comical is the Republicans knee-jerk opposition to anything Obama. But they also laugh bitterly when they see Wall Street banks and oil companies making record busting profits, while they search desperately for a job that pays more than nine or ten dollars an hour.

I think the political answer lies in a full-throated attack on the money power and a remorseless repudiation of all Democrats beholden to that power. The first candidate that declares war on Wall Street, with a viable plan for restoring the primacy of Main Street, wins.

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SELECT COMMENTS (good, bad and mediocre)—

  • * [new]  This DIARY is excusing Republican behavior? (108+ / 0-)

    A big part of why we’re all in this fucked up mess is that the president you are intent on running interference for spent virtually his entire first term excusing Republican behavior.

    President Obama rescued their sorry asses time after time after time. A political party that an ever growing majority of the people had come to recognize as bad actors was rehabilitated as responsible governing partners by this cynically manipulative or hopelessly naive president. (Pick either. For whatever reason, Obama breathed new life into these destructive fucks, and for THAT history will judge him harshly.)

    WTFWJD? LOTE? I sincerely doubt that.

    by WisePiper on Thu Jun 20, 2013 at 12:37:32 AM PDT

    [ Parent ]

  • * [new]  President Obama has … (40+ / 0-)

    … managed to negotiate the Republican Congress into the worst poll ratings in the history of Congress. At the same time, he has ended DADT, provided a stimulus that revived the economy, got us out of one war, is moving us out of another, destroyed terroism’s worst actors, come out in support of marriage equality, saved the automobile industry, helped to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, jump-started health care reform, slapped down billions of dollars of money spent against him in two elections, has changed a million regulations dealing with such diverse topics as emissions standards to mortgage lending, settled a  multi-billion dollar case with banks, and on and on and on.

    Oh, and did I mention, while the President was accomplishing all of that, it is the Tea Party GOP that has ended up with the worst polling in history? He’s given you, if you are the least bit interested, an opportunity to help rid Washington of the Republican economic saboteurs ruining our economy and our discourse. You never seem interested in that, though, but I thought I’d bring it up.

    The fact that you’d come in to defend this drooling-and-yet-still-somehow-shrieking diary says a lot about you. On a final note, thanks for the rational words, NedSparks! I enjoyed reading them.

    I would tip you, but the man took away my tips.

    by Tortmaster on Thu Jun 20, 2013 at 01:26:42 AM PDT

    [ Parent ]

    • * [new]  All true. (52+ / 0-)

      But, objectively speaking — many Democrats thought they were voting for the anti-Bush.

      They really thought the wars would end, the killing would stop, the bankers and war criminals would be spanked, education would get on the right foot, the middle class would stop being crushed, Social Security would stop being threatened, and many other good-government things people fantasize about.

      I have never blamed President Obama because I don’t believe that presidents have much power at all. But, I can see why people feel frustrated or disillusioned.

      I can empathize with disappointment based on unrealistic expectations.

      Denial is a drug.

      by Pluto on Thu Jun 20, 2013 at 01:43:08 AM PDT

      [ Parent ]

      • * [new]  I knew he wasn’t a liberal. (14+ / 0-)

        He campaigned on focusing on Afghanistan, for one thing. People heard what they wanted back in ’08. And now their sad that all those things they imagined aren’t true. But he’s still doing a decent job, under the circumstances. Reality based community? As if.

        Welcome To The Disinformation Age!

        by kitebro on Thu Jun 20, 2013 at 03:52:26 AM PDT

        [ Parent ]

        • * [new]  Step 1: Order us to vote for the lesser evil (32+ / 0-)

          Step 2:  Mock us when we remind you that the evil remains.

          There are several variations of this but they all include ordering the DFH to fall in step and march off to the polls and then ridiculing us after the election for voting against our beliefs.

          I’m coming to the place where it’s more fun to be ridiculed for actually voting for something I believe in.

    •  

    •  AKA (1+ / 0-)

      SHUT UP!!! SHUT UP!!! SHUT UP!!! SHUT UP!!!

      Evidence that contradicts the ruling belief system is held to extraordinary standards, while evidence that entrenches it is uncritically accepted. -Carl Sagan

      by RF on Thu Jun 20, 2013 at 08:42:03 AM PDT

      [ Parent ]

      •  Mentioned Republicans in maybe 35 words and (75+ / 0-)

        spent hundreds of words criticizing the President. Didn’t discuss how Bush wrecked the economy in the first place. No, he blamed Obama, didn’t talk about how Bush placed two wars on America’s credit card and didn’t even put them in his budget. No, blamed Obama. Didn’t talk about how the Republican congress won’t pass jobs bill after jobs bill after jobs bill…. No, blamed Obama. Doesn’t talk how Republicans don’t even want to raise the minimum wage, for working people….No, blame Obama. Doesn’t talk about Republicans want to sabotage the healthcare law so that people will have to force to do without healthcare….No, blamed Obama.

        What does this say? This is excusing Republican behavior, this is showing how hatred of Barack Obama is the most important thing for some of these people. When someone can ignore the really hurried despicable behavior of Republicans who are against women’s’ rights,  gay rights, the rights of the poor, against the environment, and this individual comes on a website to call Barack Obama all kinds of dirty names….. This individual is disingenuous at the very least and I have to wonder if this realy Rhince Prebus….

         

        by NedSparks on Thu Jun 20, 2013 at 12:12:33 AM PDT

        •  Actually, I read through all the comments (56+ / 0-)

          and I think the responses to this diary fit the description of ‘hijacking a diary.’ Any time anyone wants to do a hit job on a posting that criticizes Obama, they line up the same people to ridicule and taunt the writer.

          Just look at the names, and think about the number of times you have seen them swoop in together to attack a diary that they dislike. It’s not about making a cogent argument, it’s about shutting down the diary.