Duck’s lame more of same ─ 112th morphs into 113th Congress

Citizens United
v.
Federal Election Commission

Besides a hangover, what follows frenzy?

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

 “Progress Waddles forward: Risks and Opportunities in the Lame Duck Session” [Public Citizen’s Claypool] “U.S. elections leave House and Senate balance nearly unchanged” [WSWS’s Martin]

The 112th Congress this coming Tuesday begins its “Lame Duck” Session offering Americans an inkling of whether the 113th Congress will match its predecessor’s plague of rabid tribalism: “partisan obstructionism.”

Citizen beware

“

Lame duck lawmakers,” Rick Claypool writes, “are notoriously unpredictable. They no longer need to worry about raising money for reelection so they are freer to stand up to corporate lobbyists and other moneyed interests; however, because they are not seeking reelection, they are also less accountable to their constituents. Even worse than that:

They are vulnerable to offers of cushy jobs at lobbying firms where former lawmakers all-too-often receive six-figure salaries in exchange for doing Corporate America’s bidding and perpetuate Washington’s ‘revolving door’ problem.

The 112th Congress’s lame duck session, scheduled to extend from November 13 through December 14, “is fraught with opportunities and threats,” Claypool says; and Public Citizen has laid out its positions for and against critical issues and action.

For forty years Public Citizen has been standing up to corporate power and holding government accountable.

Public Citizen supports

Final passage of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (H.R. 3289, S. 743)

The Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act (H.R. 3313, S. 1787),  a tiny (0.03 percent) tax on Wall Street’s risky high-speed speculation, to help stabilize the financial system and raise more than $350 billion over 10 years

An end to taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuel corporations

Laying groundwork for major reform in the 113th Congress to fight corporate money flooding and de-legitimizing U.S. elections

Top priorities include restoring accountability and transparency with the DISCLOSE Act and Shareholder Protection Act, an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose political spending; continuing to grow support for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Public Citizen opposes

Any attempt to cut or weaken Medicare, the popular and successful program providing universal healthcare for seniors [the qualifying age for Medicare should actually be lowered, not raised, so that everyone can benefit from this single-payer system]

The Independent Regulatory Agency Analysis Act (S. 3468), which would give Wall Street-friendly members of any White House administration the power to impede independent regulators such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Bills that would deregulate parts of the derivatives market: H.R. 1838 would explicitly allow bailouts for bad swap deals while H.R. 3283 would remove U.S. regulations for U.S. swaps conducted abroad

An attempt to give banks legal immunity ─ even when they push predatory loans they know consumers will not be able to pay back

An attempt to undermine patients’ rights by letting the medical industry go virtually unpunished when patients are harmed or killed by the industry’s negligence or recklessness.

A

 fter the frenzy, what?

What will the 113th accomplish when winning the White House outstripped resources to win the Congress, a resulting situation that, according to Patrick Martin’s article today at the World Socialist Web Site, “perfectly suits the right-wing purposes of the reelected Obama White House to have a Republican-controlled House serve as its political partner and, in the face of opposition from below, give the Obama government an excuse to ─

Cut social programs cuts,

Hand out tax breaks to corporate America,

Continue militarism and attacks on domestic and international human and democratic rights

Bipartisan hold to status quo, leveraged against “We the people”

P

opular sentiment, Martin writes, played little role in the 2012 U.S. elections outcome, which were dependent largely on which of two domineering political parties controlled a U.S. state’s redistricting process ─ the power to draw district boundaries, and thus rig election results.

U.S. House ─ November 6’s vote did little to change the picture in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans will hold a sizeable majority: once all the seats are decided, perhaps 235-200.

U.S. Senate ─ The two-seat gain in the U.S. Senate “shifts the Democratic caucus further to the right ─ as many of the victorious Democratic candidates openly rejected liberalism and pledged themselves to fiscal austerity and bipartisan collaboration with the Republicans: among them

Indiana’s conservative Democrat Joe Donnelly and Maine’s Independent expected to vote with Democratic Party Augus King

Incumbents Jon Tester (Montana), Dianne Feinstein (California), Bill Nelson (Florida), Robert Casey (Pennsylvania), Tom Carper (Delaware), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Claire McCaskill (Missouri)

Newcomers Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota) and Tim Kaine (Virginia)

Sources and notes

“Progress Waddles forward: Risks and Opportunities in the Lame Duck Session” (Citizen Vox, Rick Claypool), November 9, 2012, http://www.citizenvox.org/2012/11/09/progress-waddles-lame-duck-risks-opportunities/

Citizens United

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions.

The decision reached the Supreme Court on appeal from a July 2008 decision by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

The nonprofit group Citizens United [had] wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts in apparent violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act or ‘BCRA’). In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that portions of BCRA §203 violated the First Amendment. Wikipedia

Rick Claypool

Rick Claypool is an online organizer in Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. Before joining the staff at Public Citizen, he assisted with outreach and organizing at a grassroots anti-hunger organization in Pittsburgh, wrote advocacy and investigative stories for an alternative newsweekly in Toledo, Ohio;  and in northwest Ohio, he taught courses in cultural theory and analysis. http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=2875

Although contributors to PC’s blog are staff members of Public Citizen, their views are their own, “those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of Public Citizen.”

Public Citizen

Public Citizen is a national nonprofit organization that has been standing up to corporate power and holding government accountable since 1971. It fights for:

Openness and democratic accountability in government

Right of consumers to seek redress in the courts

Clean, safe and sustainable energy sources

Social and economic justice in trade policies

               

Strong health, safety and environmental protections

Safe, effective and affordable prescription drugs and health care

Public Citizen, http://www.citizenvox.org/about-2

“U.S. elections leave House and Senate balance nearly unchanged” (Patrick Martin, November 10, 2012, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/nov2012/cong-n10.shtml

Profile briefs

Joe Donnelly: elected as a Democrat to the One Hundred Tenth Congress and to the two succeeding Congresses (January 3, 2007-present); was not a candidate for reelection to the House of Representatives but was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 2012 for the term ending January 3, 2019, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000607

Angus Stanley King Jr.: fills the seat vacated by retiring Senator Olympia Snowe, elected in 2012 to the U.S. Senate as an independent representing Maine; widely expected to caucus with the Democratic Party. King served as Maine’s 72nd Governor (1995 to 2003). Wikipedia

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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Four more years’ YWC cliché, E. coli”

Re-reporting, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett

“Yes we can” brings you the same ole pandering, purposely clueless, precedent-keeping status quo
The citizens can judge if they will

Only a fool believes — or an astute person is unprincipled enough to peddle such nonsense — that regulation off shores jobs and destroys financial sectors, sustains polluted air and unclean water and tainted or otherwise unsafe food.

Public protections have been grossly inadequate in the past several years, Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman wrote in mid January. Under-regulation and corporate disregard of safety rules have resulted in multiple salmonella and E. coli outbreaks, a flood of lead-tainted toys, a massive and environmentally devastating oil spill, deadly mine disasters and the collapse of our economy — costing eight million U.S. jobs.

“We need to focus most urgently on fixing these problems and others,” Weissman says, not cutting back, conducting internal reviews, creating red tape, and further burdening agencies already overworked and under-resourced.

President Barack Obama’s January opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal “adopts business and right-wing think-tank talking points about the harms of regulation and urges ‘balance’ in achieving the right amount of regulation. This, Weissman says, “is the wrong way to think about regulation, and it is the wrong direction for the American people.

Markets cannot function without proper regulation. That means businesses cannot function without proper regulation.

We do not need a ‘balance’ between regulation and the free market. We need effective regulations that foster the right types of markets.”

The current U.S. president in a long line of presidents is deliberately, calculatedly, clueless, pandering to corporate while pushing broad sectors of the American people [the country, its union, its institutions] more deeply into danger, despair and disaffection.

In this year’s State of the Union address, amidst much pandering and the usual pathetic platitudes and clichés (not a syllable on employment/unemployment, poor/poverty, environmental health), the U.S. president self-identifies as the cunningly clueless figure most people by now know him to be. Like his presidential predecessors (now members of his cabinet and inner circle) who “felt your pain” and sold you out, subliminally telling you “you’re on your own,” the president said — as if you did not know — “The competition for jobs is real.” How astute is that? And —

“None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from.” This is a leader without vision — a regressive in a requisite era of “progress.”

Is the choir this Sunday singing “four more years” of this “yes-we-can”?

Somehow, I doubt it.



Sources and notes
Public Citizen President Robert Weissman wrote on January 18, 2011, “Obama’s new approach to regulation is misguided” Instead of fewer, “we need stronger controls over big business, ” Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen, January 18, 2011,
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=3258

“Unprecedented bailouts, Outlandish bonuses, Token regulation, Too big to fail getting even bigger, The global economy sacrificed to feed a boundless greed,” these, according to Public Citizen, are the destroyers of quality — a quality of life the Same Ole Washington barons persist in imposing on people’s lives.

Public Citizen for nearly four decades has championed citizen interests before Congress, the executive branch agencies and the courts. The group has successfully challenged abusive practices of the pharmaceutical, nuclear and automobile industries; and has led the charge against undemocratic trade agreements that advance the interests of mega-corporations at the expense of citizens worldwide. Public Citizen is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with two offices in Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas, https://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=2306

Remarks by the President in State of Union Address, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary, For Immediate Release January 25, 2011, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union-address

Also: CounterSpin, January 28-February 3, 2011, “Laila El-Haddad on Palestine Papers [and] Robert Weissman on Obama and Big Business,” http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4241


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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
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Americans for financial reform call home now

Re-reported, excerpted, compiled and edited by Carolyn Bennett

Greed and recklessness on Wall Street caused a

global financial crisis and recession

putting millions out of their jobs and homes.

It is time to hold

banks and financial corporations

accountable.

Public Citizen fighting for

strict new safeguards to

protect consumers, investors, and workers.

Wall Street has spent tens of millions of dollars to kill reform. Wall Street likes the status quo. Thousands of bankers and lobbyists are roaming the Capitol’s halls, trying to convince your senators that reform is bad for America.

Public Citizen, the Americans for Financial Reform coalition, and thousands of concerned Americans are flooding the Senate with calls. Call your senators toll-free at (866) 544-7573. Tell them your story and make sure they pass real financial reform!

Senators need to hear the real American story ─ from YOU now! Tell your senators to vote to hold Wall Street accountable!

• Tell members of all parties you support the American Financial Stability Act of 2010. Stop blocking the bill! End back-room deals.

• Urge them to pass the American Financial Stability Act of 2010 with strengthening amendments and vote ‘No!’ on any anti-consumer (big bank-loophole) amendments.

• Break up the banks

Banks too big to fail are too big to exist.

Together with preserving preventative measures already in the bill that limit the giant financial firms’ risk, the bill should be amended also to limit financial firms’ size.

• Defend the consumer protection agency in the bill

Make it stronger and independent to protect consumers by policing credit card companies, mortgage companies and predatory lenders’ unfair and deceptive practices.

• The Federal Reserve has failed consumers repeatedly

It is the wrong place to house an effective watchdog with teeth.

• Executive pay and bonuses must be reined in to end the perverse incentive to gamble with investor and taxpayer dollars.

Amend the bill so that corporate officers are paid for long-term performance ─ not short-term illusions.

• Clamp down on the trade in exotic financial instruments such as derivatives, the instruments that threw AIG into crisis and required $180 billion in taxpayer bailout funds.

At a minimum, all such instruments must be traded openly on exchanges, backed by sufficient collateral.

Giant financial institutions should never again come to the government to make good on debts these institutions cannot pay.

Compelling evidence in the news
New evidence emerges that U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs’ senior executives made money by betting against risky mortgages as the U.S. housing market collapsed. Emails released by a U.S. senate subcommittee on Saturday reveal executives boasting about the money the firm was making as the market collapsed in 2007.

As the housing bubble burst, Goldman Sachs and a few powerful hedge funds took short positions on the market, which are bets that the market will go down.

Many of those bets required other investors to bet the market would rise, and when the market went bust, people with short positions, like Goldman Sachs, made money on their bets.

One of those bets is at the heart of civil fraud charges the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed against Goldman this month. The SEC alleges Goldman misled two investors who bought a complex mortgage-related product crafted in part by Paulson and Co, a New York hedge fund led by billionaire John Paulson [“Goldman ‘boasted as market crashed,’” http://english.aljazeera.net/business/2010/04/2010424214714529166.html].

A February 28, 2010, Sunday Times profile said John Paulson made a “big initial score betting against American mortgages” then “widened his net, betting against big banks and other financial institutions. His fund made $1 billion (£656m) by shorting UK banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and HBOS, all of which had high exposure to the mortgage market.” [“John Paulson: The man who made $4bn from the sub-prime bubble,” http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article7043775.ece

World stock markets fall sharply after rating agency Standard and Poor’s downgrades Greece’s credit rating to junk status. Portugal’s debt was also downgraded [http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/04/2010427184857184164.html].

Call your senators toll-free

(866) 544-7573

National Call-In for Real Financial Reform

http://www.citizen.org/call-for-financial-reform