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Q: How to get label's text by HTTP handler (.ashx) in repeater control I have a label within a <table> in a repeater. I have an HttpHandler named "NameShow.ashx" to return the "name" as "text/plain" by passing an "id" to the handler.
I want to retrieve the "name" (similar to retrieving "image" from handler).
Here is my  code:
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text='<%#""NameShow.ashx?id="+Eval("id") %>'>
</asp:Label>

I am getting the text of this label as ->> NameShow.ashx?id=123
Please help in finding where I am doing mistake.
Here is my Haldler code.
using System;
using System.Web;
public class NameShow : IHttpHandler {
public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context)
{
    string strid = context.Request.QueryString["id"];
    long pro_id = int.Parse(strid);

    string name = DBHelpername.name(pro_id);

    context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";
    context.Response.Write(name);
}

public bool IsReusable {
    get {
        return false;
    }
}

}
Here is my DBHelper code:
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Data.SqlClient;

/// <summary>
/// Summary description for DBHelpername
/// </summary>
public class DBHelpername
{
    public DBHelpername()
    {
        //
        // TODO: Add constructor logic here
        //
    }
    public static string name(long id)
    {
        SqlConnection connect = new SqlConnection
             ("Data Source=DELL-36B3EF6E9F;Integrated Security=True;Initial Catalog=pool");
        connect.Open();
        SqlCommand sc =
           new SqlCommand("SELECT name FROM Profile WHERE profile_id=" + id + "", connect);
        SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(sc);
        DataSet ds = new DataSet();
        da.Fill(ds);
        string nameret = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0][0].ToString();
        return nameret;
        connect.Close();
    }
}

A: If you are not married to the idea of using an HTTP Handler, then I suggest making a method in your .aspx page's code-behind that does the same logic your handler is doing minus the content-type stuff, like this:
protected string GetName(int pro_id)
{
    return DBHelpername.name(pro_id);
}

Now in your markup you can use this method, like this:
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text='<%# GetName((int)Eval("id")) %>'>
</asp:Label>

A: <%# new System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString("http://www.yoursite.com/NameShow.ashx?id="+Eval("id"))) %>

Something like this may work, although you might need to re-think your approach as you are going do a http request for each item in your repeater - and that isn't going to scale well! It looks like this is all in one application/website, so can you not call the code that looks up the name in the codebehind of this page?


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Buddy Roemer Struggles to Become Visible
March 26th, 2012 Posted in Uncategorized
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His crusade against corruption in politics has made him the invisible Presidential candidate. The mainstream news media have no interest in him. His anti-status quo message is probably the reason why. Andrew Kreig of Washington's Blog reported that Buddy Roemer appeared with reformed ex-convict / former lobbyist Jack Abramoff before a cozy, standing-room-only audience of 120, convened on March 22 by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic. For those unfamiliar with Buddy Roemer, Kreig provided this summary of the candidate's background and political perspective:
"I don't think the answer is the Republican Party," said the former two-term governor of Louisiana, who became a Republican in 1991 and returned to politics last year after a 16-year absence. Earlier, he served four terms as a Democratic congressman beginning in the 1980, running unopposed in his last three races.
"And," he continued, "I don't think the answer is the Democratic Party." He says both parties are controlled by special interests and political action committees (PACs), whose checks he has refused to take since his first race three decades ago.
The big knock on Roemer is that he lacks high poll numbers and name recognition, doubtless because GOP debate-organizers excluded him. Yet he was doing better in certain key criteria than some other candidates invited repeatedly for nationally broadcast debates. Roemer concluded that his basic problem was that GOP chieftains did not want him to describe his reform message.
Therefore, Roemer's campaign is now focused on winning the Americans Elect nomination to be on the November ballot in all 50 states. Then he wants 15% support in poll numbers so he will be included in debates with the Democratic and Republican nominees.
On December 12, I discussed some of the criticism directed at Americans Elect. Most notably, Richard Hansen, a professor at the University of California at Irvine Law School, wrote an essay for Politico, which was harshly critical of Americans Elect. Professor Hansen concluded the piece with these observations:
But the biggest problem with Americans Elect is neither its secrecy nor the security of its election. It is the problems with internal fairness and democracy. To begin with, according to its draft rules, only those who can provide sufficient voter identification that will satisfy the organization – and, of course, who have Internet access – will be allowed to choose the candidate. These will hardly be a cross section of American voters.
In addition, an unelected committee appointed by the board, the Candidates Certification Committee, will be able to veto a presidential/vice presidential ticket deemed not "balanced" – subject only to a two-thirds override by delegates.
It gets worse. Under the group's bylaws, that committee, along with the three other standing committees, serves at the pleasure of the board – and committee members can be removed without cause by the board. The board members were not elected by delegates; they chose themselves in the organization's articles of incorporation.
The bottom line: If Americans Elect is successful, millions of people will have united to provide ballot access not for a candidate they necessarily believe in – like a Ross Perot or Ralph Nader – but for a candidate whose choice could be shaped largely by a handful of self-appointed leaders.
Despite the veneer of democracy created by having "delegates" choose a presidential candidate through a series of Internet votes, the unelected, unaccountable board of Americans Elect, funded by secret money, will control the process for choosing a presidential and vice presidential candidate – who could well appear on the ballot in all 50 states.
Roemer's ability to survive this questionable nomination process is just the first hurdle. Even if he wins that nomination, he will be confronted by critics of Americans Elect to defend that organization's controversial nomination procedure. Nevertheless, if none of his opponents from that nomination campaign step up to oppose the result, Roemer might just breeze through any questions concerning that issue.
One interesting way to get a look at Buddy Romer is to read his Twitter feed – (@BuddyRoemer). Roemer's staff members occasionally post tweets about such subjects as the candidate's desire to restore the "Made in America" label so that consumers would have the choice to buy products from manufacturers who employ their neighbors. Here are some of Buddy's own tweets:
If Santorum and Gingrich don't get the GOP nomination, will they return to lobbying? Or keep their records clean for 2016?
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder." – George Washington
RT "@maximosis: The more people wake up from their tacit acceptance of the corporatocracy, the more apparent these abuses will become."
"The people do not control America, the big checks do."
From 1998-2010, the Financial, Insurance, Real Estate sectors spent $6.8 BILLION in lobbying & campaign donations.
Millions $$ in earmarks go to top Congressional campaign donors. Here are some striking examples >>http://thelobbyisteffect.com/2012/02/28/earmarks-are-a-microcosm-of-how-government-works/ #corruption
At his campaign website, supporters are encouraged to post tweets to Romer's Twitter feed in addition to making contributions within the self-imposed, $100 limit. At the "Blog" section, there are links to videos of the candidate's television appearances. A visit to the "Issues" section of his website will reveal Roemer's position on banking reform:
As a small business banker, Buddy Roemer is proud to have chosen smart investments that kept his bank on solid footing while others were taking bailouts from the government to remain solvent. Banking is too important to be left to the bankers, but Buddy recognizes that regulation of the industry must be a fine balance between too much and too little.
That sure sounds better than Romney's "regulations kill jobs" theme and Obama's track record of giving the banks everything they want, with revolving doors connecting the West Wing to Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
The big question will be whether (as the Americans Elect nominee) Romer could accumulate the support from 15% of poll respondents so that he could participate in the Presidential debates with Obama and Romney. It sure would be interesting to see him on the stage with those two. The public might actually take interest in the process.

2012 Presidential campaign, @BuddyRoemer, American voters, Americans Elect, Andrew Kreig, balanced ticket, banking, banking reform, Buddy Roemer, campaign donations, Candidates Certification Committee, centrist blog, Citigroup, Committee for the Republic, Congressman, corporatocracy, criticism, democracy, Democratic Party, earmarks, fairness, financial sector, George Washington, Goldman Sachs, GOP, insurance sector, Internet votes, Jack Abramoff, John T Burke Jr, lobbying, lobbyist, Louisiana, made in America label, manufacturers, maximosis, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, non-partisan, PACs, political action committees, Politico, President Obama, Presidential debates, professor, real estate sector, reform message, regulations kill jobs, Republican debate, Republican Party, Richard Hansen, Rick Santorum, secrecy, self-appointed leaders, Twitter, unelected committee, University of California at Irvine Law School, voter identification, Washingtons Blog, West Wing
More Scrutiny For An Organization Called Americans Elect
December 12th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
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On July 25, I explained that the Republi-Cratic Corporatist Party was being threatened by a new, Internet-based effort to nominate a presidential ticket, which would be placed on the 2012 ballot in all fifty states. Last summer, that organization – Americans Elect – described itself in the following terms:
Americans Elect is the first-ever open nominating process. We're using the Internet to give every single voter – Democrat, Republican or independent – the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012. The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates. And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state.
We have no ties to any political group – left, right, or center. We don't promote any issues, ideology or candidates. None of our funding comes from special interests or lobbyists. Our only goal is to put a directly-nominated ticket on the ballot in 2012.
The goal of Americans Elect is to nominate a presidential ticket that answers to the people – not the political system. Like millions of American voters, we simply want leadership that will work together to tackle the challenges facing our country. And we believe a direct nominating process will prove that America is ready for a competitive, nonpartisan ticket.
Since that time, there has been a good deal of scrutiny focused on Americans Elect. Justin Elliott recently wrote a comprehensive piece for Salon, highlighting the numerous sources of criticism targeting Americans Elect. Mr. Elliott provided this summary of the controversies surrounding the organization:
The group is hoping to raise $30 million for its effort. It has already raised an impressive $22 million as of last month. So where is all that money coming from? Americans Elect won't say. In fact, the group changed how it is organized under the tax code last year in order to shield the identity of donors. It is now a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" group whose contributors are not reported publicly.
What we do know about the donors, largely through news reports citing anonymous sources, suggests they are a handful of super-rich Americans who made fortunes in the finance industry. (More on this below.) But it's impossible to fully assess the donors' motives and examine their backgrounds and entanglements – important parts of the democratic process – while their identities and the size of their donations remain secret.
Americans Elect officials often tout their "revolutionary" online nominating convention, which will be open to any registered voter. But there's a big catch. Any ticket picked by participants will have to be approved by a Candidate Certification Committee, according to the group's bylaws.
Among other things this committee will need to certify a "balanced ticket obligation" – that the ticket consists of persons who are "responsive to the vast majority of citizens while remaining independent of special interests and the partisan interests of either major political party," according to the current draft of Americans Elect rules. Making these sorts of assessments is, of course, purely subjective.
Jim Cook of Irregular Times has been keeping a steady watch over Americans Elect, with almost-daily postings concerning the strange twists and turns that organization has taken since its inception (and incorporation). Mr. Cook's December 11 update provided this revelation:
The 501c4 corporation Americans Elect is arranging for the nation's first-ever privately-run online nomination of candidates for President and Vice President of the United States in 2012. As with any other corporation in the United States, it has a set of bylaws. On November 18, 2011 the Americans Elect corporation held an unannounced meeting at which it amended its previous bylaws.
A month later, Americans Elect has not posted changes to the bylaws, or posted any notice of the changes, on its website for public review. Furthermore, Americans Elect has generally made it a practice to post its documents as images that cannot be indexed by search engines or searched by keyword. For these reasons, Irregular Times has retyped the bylaws into an easily searchable text format, based on a pdf file submitted to the Florida Secretary of State on November 22, 2011. You can read the full text of the amended bylaws here.
Just a day earlier (on December 10) Jim Cook had been highlighting one of the many transparency controversies experienced by the group:
On the Americans Elect's "Candidates" web page it rolled out last month, various numbers were tossed up without explanation. A reference to a wildly error-prone slate of candidates' supposed policies drawn up by Americans Elect contractor "On the Issues" appeared next to various politicians' names, but the actual calculation by which Americans Elect came up with its "National Match" for each politician has never actually been published. I'll repeat that in bold: Americans Elect's system for calculating its numerical rankings of politicians was never shared with the public.
Another problem for Americans Elect concerns compliance with its bylaws by individual directors, and the lack of enforcement of those bylaws, as Cook's December 9 posting demonstrates:
She's done it five times before; this is the sixth.
The Americans Elect bylaws are very specific, as an Americans Elect Director, Christine Todd Whitman is not supposed to "communicate or act in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for President or Vice President at any time before the adjournment of the online nominating convention of Americans Elect."
But here she is this week nevertheless, appearing on national television via FOX News to communicate in favor of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman . . .
The bylaws say that when the neutrality provision is violated, there must be some sort of sanction. But Christine Todd Whitman is getting away with it again and again and again where the whole country can see it. Is the Americans Elect corporation inclined to follow its own rules? If not, how much trust should we place in it as it gets ready to run its own private presidential nomination in less than five months' time?
Richard Hansen, a professor at the University of California at Irvine Law School, wrote an essay for Politico, which was harshly critical of Americans Elect. He concluded the piece with these observations:
Forget about Tom Friedman's breathlessly-enthusiastic New York Times commentary from last summer, gushing praise on Americans Elect. It's beginning to appear as though this movement is about to go off the rails, following the Cain Train into oblivion.
2012 Presidential election, 501c4 social welfare group, amended bylaws, Americans Elect, Americans Elect Director, balanced ticket obligation, ballot access, board of directors, bylaws, Cain Train, Candidate Certification Committee, candidates, Christine Todd Whitman, controversy, corporation, criticism, delegates, democracy, Democrat, directly-nominated ticket, directors, draft rules, financial industry, Florida Secretary of State, Fox News, Independent, internal fairness, Internet, Internet access, Internet votes, Irregular Times, Jim Cook, John T Burke Jr, Jon Huntsman, Justin Elliott, lobbyists, national match, national television, neutrality provision, New York Times, nonpartisan ticket, numerical rankings, online nominating convention, open nominating process, political system, politicians, Politico, President of the United States, professor, Ralph Nader, Republi-cratic Corporatist Party, Republican, Richard Hansen, Ross Perot, Salon, sanction, secrecy, secret money, self-appointed leader, special interests, standing committees, super-rich Americans, transparency, University of California at Irvine Law School, Vice President of the United States, voter identification, voters
Obama Backpedals To Save His Presidency
November 10th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
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President Obama's demotion of his Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, has drawn quite a bit of attention – despite efforts by the White House to downplay the significance of that event. The demotion of Daley is significant because it indicates that Obama is now trying to back away from his original strategy of helping Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. This move appears to be an attempt by Obama to re-cast himself as a populist, in response to the widespread success of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In September of 2010, I wrote a piece entitled, "Where Obama Went Wrong". Despite the subsequent spin by right-wing pundits, to the effect that voters had been enamored with the Tea Party's emphasis on smaller government, the true reasons for the mid-term disaster for the Democrats had become obvious:
During the past week, we've been bombarded with explanations from across the political spectrum, concerning how President Obama has gone from wildly-popular cult hero to radioactive force on the 2010 campaign trail. For many Democrats facing re-election bids in November, the presence of Obama at one of their campaign rallies could be reminiscent of the appearance of William Macy's character from the movie, The Cooler. Wikipedia's discussion of the film provided this definition:
In gambling parlance, a "cooler" is an unlucky individual whose presence at the tables results in a streak of bad luck for the other players.
The American people are hurting because their President sold them out immediately after he was elected. When faced with the choice of bailing out the zombie banks or putting those banks through temporary receivership (the "Swedish approach" – wherein the bank shareholders and bondholders would take financial "haircuts") Obama chose to bail out the banks at taxpayer expense. So here we are . . . in a Japanese-style "lost decade". In case you don't remember the debate from early 2009 – peruse this February 10, 2009 posting from the Calculated Risk website. After reading that, try not to cry after looking at this recent piece by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture entitled, "We Should Have Gone Swedish . . ."
Back in December of 2009, Bill Daley – a minion of The Dimon Dog at JPMorgan Chase – wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, which resonated with Wall Street's tool in the White House. Daley claimed that Obama and other Democrats were elected to office in 2008 because voters had embraced some pseudo-centrist ideas, which Daley referenced in these terms:
These independents and Republicans supported Democrats based on a message indicating that the party would be a true Big Tent — that we would welcome a diversity of views even on tough issues such as abortion, gun rights and the role of government in the economy.
All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party's most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, Obama was pre-disposed to accept this rationale, keeping his policy decisions on a trajectory which has proven as damaging to his own political future as it has been to the future of the American middle class.
On November 8, Jonathan Chait wrote a piece for New York magazine's Daily Intel blog, wherein he explained that the demotion of Bill Daley revealed a "course correction" by Obama, in order to a pursue a strategy "in line with the realities of public opinion". Jonathan Chait explained how the ideas espoused by Daley in his 2009 Washington Post editorial, had been a blueprint for failure:
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. In the most recent NBC/The Wall Street Journal poll, 60 percent of Americans strongly agreed with the following statement:
The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.
At the website of economist Brad DeLong, a number of comments were posted in response to Jonathan Chait's essay. One can only hope that our President has the same, clear understanding of this situation as do the individuals who posted these comments:
Full Employment Hawk said:
. . . The defeat of the Democrats was due to the fact that the Obama administration did too little, not because it did too much.
Daley's view that it was because the moderately progressive policies of the Obama administration were too far left for the center was totally wrong. And listening to Daley's advice to further shift from job creation to deficit reduction was a major blunder that reinforced the blunder of the first two years of dropping the ball on making the economy grow fast enough for the unemployment rate to be coming down significantly by the time of the Fall election.
In reply to the comment posted by Full Employment Hawk, a reader, identified as "urban legend" said this:
Obama should have been making the point over and over and over and over that getting more money into the hands of more Americans — principally right now by creating jobs — is the most pro-business stance you can take. Continuing to let the 1% dictate everything in their favor is the most anti-business thing you can do. We are the ones who want demand to rise for the goods and services of American business. Right-wingers don't care much about that. What they do care about is maintaining their theology against all the evidence of its massive failure.
At Politico, Jonathan Chait's essay provoked the following comment from Ben Smith:
It is entirely possible that no staff shift, and no ideological shift, can save Obama from a bad economy. You don't get to run controlled experiments in politics.
But it does seem worth noting that this argument pre-dates Daley: It's the substance of the 2008 debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama, with Clinton portraying Obama as naive in his dream of bipartisan unity, and the Republicans as an implacable foe. It's the Clinton view, the '90s view, that has prevailed here.
Indeed, it would be nice for all of us if Obama could get a "Mulligan" for his mishandling of the economic crisis. Unfortunately, this ain't golf.
2010 campaign, American middle class, Barry Ritholtz, Ben Smith, Big Tent, Bill Daley, bipartisan unity, Brad DeLong, Calculated Risk, Chief of Staff, Corporate America, course correction, Daily Intel, deficit reduction, Democratic Party, Democrats, economist, economy, Full Employment Hawk, golf, government, Hillary Clinton, independents, Jamie Dimon, Japanese-style lost decade, John T Burke Jr, Jonathan Chait, JPMorgan Chase, liberals, Main Street, Mulligan, NBC Wall Street Journal Poll, New York Magazine, Obama Administration, Occupy Wall Street, Politico, Preisdent Obama, pseudo-centrist ideas, Republican leaders, Republicans, right-wing pundits, Swedish approach, tax breaks, taxpayer-funded bailouts, Tea Party, The Big Picture, The Cooler, The Dimon Dog, The Washington Post, urban legend, Wall Street, We Should Have Gone Swedish, Where Obama Went Wrong, White House, William Daley, William Macy, zombie banks
Charade Ends For Pseudo-Populists
October 6th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
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The Occupy Wall Street protest has exposed the politicians – who have always claimed to be populists – for what they really are: tools of the plutocracy. Conspicuously absent from the Wall Street occupation have been nearly all Democrats – despite their party's efforts to portray itself as the champion of Main Street in its battle against the tyranny of the megabanks. As has always been the case, the Democrats won't really do anything that could disrupt the flow of bribes campaign contributions they receive from our nation's financial elites.
The "no show" Democrats reminded me of an article which appeared at Truthdig, written by Chris Hedges, author of the book, Death of the Liberal Class. In his Truthdig essay, Chris Hedges emphasized how the liberal class "abandoned the human values that should have remained at the core of its activism":
The liberal class, despite becoming an object of widespread public scorn, prefers the choreographed charade. It will decry the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or call for universal health care, but continue to defend and support a Democratic Party that has no intention of disrupting the corporate machine. As long as the charade is played, the liberal class can hold itself up as the conscience of the nation without having to act. It can maintain its privileged economic status. It can continue to live in an imaginary world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness and irrelevancy of the liberal class are not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the indignities of the corporate state. And this is why liberals are rightly despised by the working class and the poor.
If it had not been obvious before the 2010 elections, it should be obvious now. Back in July of 2010, I was busy harping about how the Obama administration had sabotaged the financial "reform" bill:
As I pointed out on July 12, Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute documented the extent to which Obama's Treasury Department undermined the financial reform bill at every step. On the following day, Rich Miller of Bloomberg News examined the results of a Bloomberg National Poll, which measured the public's reaction to the financial reform bill. Almost eighty percent of those who responded were of the opinion that the new bill would do little or nothing to prevent or mitigate another financial crisis. Beyond that, 47 percent shared the view that the bill would do more to protect the financial industry than consumers.
Both healthcare and financial "reform" legislation turned out to be "bait and switch" scams used by the Obama administration against its own supporters. After that double-double-cross, the liberal blogosphere was being told to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain".
In an earlier posting, I discussed the sordid efforts of the Democratic-controlled Senate to sabotage the financial reform bill:
The sleazy antics by the Democrats who undermined financial reform (while pretending to advance it) will not be forgotten by the voters. The real question is whether any independent candidates can step up to oppose the tools of Wall Street, relying on the nickels and dimes from "the little people" to wage a battle against the kleptocracy.
Since the Occupy Wall Street demonstration has gained momentum, a number of commentators have analyzed the complicity of hypocritical Democrats in ceding more unregulated power to the very culprits responsible for causing the financial crisis. The most important of these essays was an article written by Matt Stoller for Politico. Stoller began the piece by debunking the myth that the cancer known as "financial deregulation" was introduced to the American system by the Reagan administration:
Like President Bill Clinton before him, Obama and his team believe in deregulation and are continuing a "let them eat cake"-style social contract that solidified during Ronald Reagan's presidency. As this contract has fallen apart, so has the strong coalition behind Obama's presidency.
We haven't seen a challenge to the bank-friendly Democratic orthodoxy for 40 years. The progenitor of this modern Democratic Party was Jimmy Carter. Though Reagan and Clinton helped finish the job, it was Carter who began wholesale deregulation of the banking industry – as Jeff Madrick details in his new book, "The Age of Greed."
In signing the landmark Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, which lifted usury caps, Carter said, "Our banks and savings institutions are hampered by a wide range of outdated, unfair and unworkable regulations."
Stoller provided some hope for disillusioned former supporters of the Democratic Party by focusing on three Democratic state attorneys general, who have been investigating possible fraud in the securitization of trillions of dollars of mortgages. Matt Stoller referred to these officials – Eric Schneiderman of New York, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Beau Biden of Delaware – as the "Justice Democrats". As Stoller observed, a number of other officials have been influenced by the noble efforts of these Justice Democrats:
There are other politicians following this path. Jefferson Smith, an Oregon state representative now running for mayor of Portland, successfully fought legislation to make foreclosures easier in that state. Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen in North Carolina took on banking interests by fighting foreclosure fraud. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings has been dogged in his investigations of mortgage servicers.
It should not be surprising that these officials have been getting quite a bit of pushback from their fellow Democrats – including Delaware Governor Jack Markell as well as a number of high-ranking officials from the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless.
When the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, what little coverage it received from the mainstream media was based on the "giggle factor". With the passing of time, it becomes increasingly obvious that the news media and our venal political leaders are seriously underestimating the ability of the "little people" to fight back against the kleptocracy.
2010 elections, Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless, banking industry, Beau Biden, Bill Clinton, Bloomberg National Poll, Bloomberg news, campaign contributions, Catherine Cortez Masto, Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, Democratic state attorneys general, Democrats, Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, Elijah Cummings, Eric Holder, Eric Schneiderman, financial crisis, financial deregulation, financial elites, financial reform bill, fraud, Governor Jack Markell, investigations, Jeff Madrick, Jeff Thigpen, Jefferson Smith, Jimmy Carter, John T Burke Jr, Justice Democrats, Justice Department, kleptocracy, little people, Main Street, Matt Stoller, Mike Konczal, mortgage servicers, North Carolina, Obama Administration, Occupy Wall Street, Oregon, plutocracy, Politico, populists, President Obama, Reagan Administration, Rich Miller, Roosevelt Institute, securitization of mortgages, Senate, The Age of Greed, Treasury Department, Truthdig, Wall Street
GOP Unable To Wash Away Santorum
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After his disappointing loss to Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Straw Poll, Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty officially withdrew from the 2012 Presidential campaign. Pawlenty finished third with 14% of the votes. Bachmann picked up 28% and Congressman Ron Paul was right behind her with 27%. Despite the fact that Rick Santorum finished fourth with a paltry 9.8%, the Pennsylvanian has not discussed abandoning his own Presidential bid.
Santorum has not held public office since his humiliating defeat in the 2006 election, at which point he lost his Senate seat to Democrat Bob Casey, Jr. by a 59%-41% margin – the worst defeat for an incumbent Senator since 1980. One might assume that such a bidetory washout would forever purge Santorum from that zone within the Beltway. Nevertheless, Santorum apparently believes he will have greater success with a national campaign in post-Tea Party America.
Strangely enough, Santorum's fourth-place finish in the Ames Straw Poll is being spun as a victory. Dan Hirschhorn reported for Politico that Santorum's fourth-place showing helped grease the candidate's fundraising efforts:
Still underfunded, the campaign enjoyed its strongest overnight online money haul in the hours after the straw poll, and is planning to step up its fundraising efforts in Pennsylvania, his financial home base after two Senate terms.
Nevertheless, as Daniel Larison discussed in The American Conservative, Santorum's fourth-place finish was solely a result of the candidate's persistent, lingering presence in Iowa:
The reality is that Santorum has been living and campaigning full-time in Iowa for weeks, he ought to be rallying social conservatives to him in much larger numbers than he does, and his fourth-place finish out of a field of six direct competitors is confirmation that his campaign is going nowhere. Beating out Herman Cain and Thad McCotter on the ground does not mean much at all. His presidential bid has always seemed to be a vain effort to re-fight the battles of his failed 2006 re-election campaign.
Michael Falcone of ABC News observed that Santorum "has been languishing near the bottom of national polls". The question remains as to whether a candidate, whose agenda is so tightly focused on conservative "values voters" could gain momentum in a campaign dominated by financial issues. As George Will pointed out, Santorum has repeatedly emphasized that "… America's debt crisis is, at bottom, symptomatic of a failure of self-control …"
Dan Hirschhorn noted at the conclusion of his Politico report, that Santorum's "end game" remains a mystery. I suspect that Santorum's true objective could be to secure the number two place on the Republican ticket as the GOP's Vice-Presidential candidate.
It's reasonable to assume that the presence of Santorum on the back end of the Republican ticket could provide their campaign with a frothy mixture of enthusiasm, including support from social conservatives who would not otherwise vote for a less-polarizing Presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, Santorum continues to swim upstream, while jumping down the throat of the hard right's newest rising star, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who refused to advocate a relativistic interpretation of the Tenth Amendment. Governor Perry provided this response to Santorum's blast:
"You either have to believe in the 10th Amendment or you don't," Perry told reporters after a bill signing in Houston Wednesday. "You can't believe in the 10th Amendment for a few issues and then [for] something that doesn't suit you say, 'We'd rather not have states decide that.'"
You can probably see the problem exposed by this dust-up. If the Republican Party can't wash out Santorum, the remaining GOP Presidential hopefuls will begin to appear liberal.
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Hillary Throws A Tupperware Party
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While reading through Saturday's Links at the Naked Capitalism website, I came across a posting by Jane Hamsher entitled, "Hillary Clinton Hosts 'Iraq Opportunities' Party For War Profiteers". I was reminded that a war, initiated under the pretext of finding Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", was really all about creating "Iraq Opportunities". Using the "good cop / bad cop" routine, the "bad cops" of our One-Party System (the "Republican" branch of the Republi-cratic Corporatist Party) promoted a war, which the "good cop" Democrat branch of the Republi-cratic Corporatist Party claimed it was "forced" to support. Just because Saddam wasn't really stockpiling any weapons of mass destruction, doesn't mean we can't find any "Iraq Opportunities".
Sure, there's been a "changing of the guard" since the Iraq war began, but a look at the guest list for Hillary's "Iraq Opportunities Party" will reveal the identities of some corporations, which expect to benefit from the expenditure of human lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars on the Iraq war effort. Of course, Halliburton and KBR were invited to send some partygoers to the fete. But don't forget – the Obama Administration has been in charge for over two years . . . so Alex von Sponek of Goldman Sachs was on the guest list. As you can imagine, a Tupperware Party just wouldn't be a Tupperware Party without a representative from Tupperware in attendance. Accordingly, Rick Goins, the company's CEO, received an invitation.
News of this event confirmed my worst suspicions about the Iraq war. I wasn't simply reacting to what Jane Hamsher had to say about Hillary's Tupperware Party:
As Congress launches a bipartisan PR campaign to stay in Iraq forever, the White House throws a corporate looting party.
Ben White of Politico described the event as an expansion of Wall Street's tentacles:
FIRST LOOK: WALL STREET IN IRAQ? – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Deputy Secretary Tom Nides (formerly chief administrative officer at Morgan Stanley) will host a group of corporate executives at State this morning as part of the Iraq Business Roundtable. Corporate executives from approximately 30 major U.S. companies – including financial firms Citigroup, JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs – will join U.S. and Iraqi officials to discuss economic opportunities in the new Iraq.
While most of us have been conditioned to think of the Iraq War as a product of the neoconservative agenda, several commentators have discussed the role of neoliberalism as a motivator for the invasion of Iraq. In a great essay entitled, "On Neoliberalism", Sherry Ortner of the Anthropology Of This Century website, discussed the role of what Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, called "disaster capitalism" in bringing us to that moment of "shock and awe":
If social or natural disasters do not offer themselves up, Klein shows convincingly that they will be manufactured, the war in Iraq being the latest case in point. Let us follow the Iraq war thread into David Harvey's 2007 book, A Short History of Neo-Liberalism, where it is his opening example. Like Klein, Harvey sees "the management and manipulation of crises" (p. 162), whether floods, wars, or financial melt-downs, as part and parcel of establishing the neoliberal agenda. And like Klein, he provides abundant evidence to show that the war in Iraq was a crisis manufactured to "impose by main force on Iraq… a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation"(p. 7).
Harvey offers a clear definition of neoliberalism as a system of "accumulation by dispossession," which has four main pillars: 1) the "privatization and commodification" of public goods; 2) "financialization," in which any kind of good (or bad) can be turned into an instrument of economic speculation; 3) the "management and manipulation of crises" (as above); and 4) "state redistribution," in which the state becomes an agent of the upward redistribution of wealth (159-164 passim).
Harvey places particular emphasis on the last point, the upward redistribution of wealth. He takes issue with other writers who argue that the enormous growth of social inequality since the beginnings of neoliberalization in the 1970s is an unfortunate by-product of what is otherwise a sound economic theory. Instead Harvey sees the vast enrichment of an upper class of capital owners and managers at the expense of everyone else as an intrinsic part of the neoliberal agenda: "Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project." (p. 16).
The only real surprise to me was the revelation that the elite "upper class of capital owners and managers" likes to attend Tupperware parties.
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Troublesome Creatures
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A recent piece by Glynnis MacNicol of The Business Insider website led me to the conclusion that Shepard Smith deserves an award. You might recognize Shep Smith as The Normal Guy at Fox News. In case you haven't heard about it yet, a controversy has erupted over a 20-minute crank telephone call made to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by a man who identified himself as David Koch, one of two billionaire brothers, famous for bankrolling Republican politicians. The caller was actually blogger Ian Murphy, who goes by the name, Buffalo Beast. In a televised discussion with Juan Williams concerning the controversy surrounding Wisconsin Governor Walker, Shep Smith focused on the ugly truth that the Koch brothers are out to "bust labor". Here are Smith's remarks as they appeared at The Wire blog:
It's all political isn't it? Isn't it just 100% politics? … Have you looked at the list of the top 10 donors to political campaigns? Seven of those 10 donate to Republicans. The other three that remain of those top 10, they all donate to Democrats and they are all unions. Bust the unions, it's over … . And this started when? It started with the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers were organizing…
I'm not taking a side on this, I'm telling you what's going on … The facts! But people don't want to hear the facts … let them get angry, facts are troublesome creatures from time to time. The Koch brothers, and others, were organized to bust labor, it's what big business wants to do … this isn't a new concept. So they gave a bunch of money to the governor's campaign. The governor's campaign is over. Now, away we go! We're going to try to bust this union up, and that's what they're doing … this is political and everyone in the middle is a pawn.
Those "troublesome creatures" called facts have been finding their way into the news to a refreshing degree lately. Emotional rhetoric has replaced news reporting to such an extreme level that most people seem to have accepted the premise that facts are relative to one's perception of reality. The lyrics to "Crosseyed and Painless" by the Talking Heads (written more than 30 years ago) seem to have been a prescient commentary about this situation:
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Budgetary disputes are now resolved on an emotional battlefield where facts usually take a back seat to ideology. Despite this trend, there are occasional commentaries focused on fact-based themes. One recent example came from David Leonhardt of The New York Times, entitled "Why Budget Cuts Don't Bring Prosperity". The article began with the observation that because so many in Congress believe that budget cuts are the path to national prosperity, the only remaining question concerns how deeply spending should be cut this year. Mr. Leonhardt provided those misled "leaders" with the facts:
The fundamental problem after a financial crisis is that businesses and households stop spending money, and they remain skittish for years afterward. Consider that new-vehicle sales, which peaked at 17 million in 2005, recovered to only 12 million last year. Single-family home sales, which peaked at 7.5 million in 2005, continued falling last year, to 4.6 million. No wonder so many businesses are uncertain about the future.
Without the government spending of the last two years — including tax cuts — the economy would be in vastly worse shape. Likewise, if the federal government begins laying off tens of thousands of workers now, the economy will clearly suffer.
That's the historical lesson of postcrisis austerity movements. The history is a rich one, too, because people understandably react to a bubble's excesses by calling for the reverse. When Franklin Roosevelt was running for president in 1932, he repeatedly called for a balanced budget.
But no matter how morally satisfying austerity may be, it's the wrong answer.
Leonhardt's objective analysis drew this response from Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism:
Did a memo go out? Leonhardt almost always hews to neoclassical orthodoxy. This is a big change for him.
Those "troublesome creatures" called facts became the subject of an opinion piece about the budget, written by Bill Schneider for Politico. While dissecting the emotional motivation responsible for "a dangerous political arms race where the stakes keep escalating", Schneider set about isolating the fact-based signal from the emotional noise clouding the budget debate:
Many of the programs targeted for big cuts by the House Republicans have a suspiciously ideological tinge: Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Protection Agency, funds to implement the new health care reform law, National Public Radio, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, President Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps program, money for a White House climate change czar. The Washington Post calls the House budget "an assault on bedrock Democratic priorities.''
The public is certainly worried about the deficit. But do people believe the deficit is a crisis demanding immediate and radical action? That's not so clear.
In a Pew Research Center poll taken this month, the public was split over whether the federal government's priority should be reducing the deficit (49 percent) or spending to help the economic recovery (46 percent). What economic issue worries people the most? Jobs tops the list (44 percent). Fewer than half that say the deficit (19 percent).
Yes, there is an economic crisis in the country. The crisis is jobs. So Republicans have to argue that spending cuts will create jobs — an argument that mystifies many economists.
Let's hope that those "troublesome creatures" keep turning up at debates, "town hall" meetings and in commentaries. If they cause widespread allergic reactions, let nature run its course.
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2010 Jackass Of The Year Award
January 3rd, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
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Once again, the moment has arrived for TheCenterLane.com to present its Jackass of The Year Award. Our 2010 recipient is Alaska's Senatorial candidate, Joe Miller.
Joe Miller's campaign to defeat Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska's 2010 Republican Primary got a big boost when Governor Sarah Palin decided to leave office to become a full-time celebrity. Palin's decision was immediately criticized by Senator Murkowski. Palin responded to the criticism by endorsing Murkowski's opponent in the Republican Primary: Joe Miller. Miller then won the support of the Tea Party Express, who – according to The Washington Post – spent more than $150,000 on pro-Miller television and radio ads during the week before the primary. In addition to the mobilization of the Tea Party activists, Miller benefited from an initiative on the Alaska Republican Primary ballot requiring parental consent before a girl aged 17 or younger could receive an abortion. Alaska's most conservative voters were out in force on Primary Day. The Washington Post article highlighted some of Miller's positions that helped him curry favor with Alaska's "hard right" voters:
He has called for phasing out Medicare and Social Security, as well as eliminating the Education Department because it is not mandated in the Constitution.
Never mind the fact that neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security has been mandated by the Constitution. The "lack of a Constitutional mandate" litmus test is only applied to those bureaucracies considered repugnant to Joe Miller.
Because the deadline for filing as an "Independent" candidate on Alaska's November (general election) ballot had already expired by the August 24 primary, it was necessary for Lisa Murkowski to run as a "write-in" candidate in order to retain her Senate seat.
During the course of the ensuing campaign, Miller's foolishness provided the news media with plenty of entertainment. Despite Miller's rhetoric, which called for limited government and fiscal restraint, Anne Applebaum of Slate recalled that Miller's background became an issue in the campaign, since it was so inconsistent with that of a Tea Party hero:
During the course of the campaign, it also emerged that he had once collected farm subsidies; that his wife had once collected unemployment benefits; and that his family had received state health benefits.
Upon hearing that Murkowski would not abandon her quest to retain her Senate seat after her Republican Primary defeat, Mr. Miller immediately made a foolish statement, which he attempted to blame on an unidentified staffer. Jim Carlton of the Washington Wire blog provided this quote of the now-infamous message sent out from Joe Miller's Twitter account:
"What's the difference between selling out your party's values and the world's oldest profession?" said the message under Mr. Miller's Twitter address early Friday.
Mr. Miller said the tweet was sent by a staffer who was temporarily manning his account. He added that the remark was aimed not at the senator herself, but at suggestions that Alaska's Libertarian Party might allow Ms. Murkowski to run under its banner in November if she ends up losing to him in a final count of absentee ballots.
He blamed the tweet on "poor judgment" by the unidentified staffer, who he "relieved of his duties." He said he quickly removed the message from his Twitter feed.
If Miller had not already done enough to alienate female voters — his Halloween-themed campaign ad, likening Lisa Murkowski to a witch, immediately drew the ire of the New Agenda website, which embedded a YouTube feed of the ad in this posting.
The most infamous event of Miller's campaign occurred on October 17, when Tony Hopfinger, editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was handcuffed by Miller's private security guards, when he attempted to interview the candidate at the conclusion of a "town hall" meeting at the Central Middle School in Anchorage. The incident caused Miller to become the butt of many jokes on national television.
Hopfinger was attempting to question Miller about an incident that had become the subject of an e-mail that had originated a few days earlier from Mike Rostad, a Republican activist in Kodiak, Alaska, based on a discussion between Rostad and Miller's father, Rex Miller. The Anchorage Daily News provided this report:
Joe Miller was a part-time Fairbanks North Star Borough attorney in 2008 when he led an attempt to oust state Republican Party chief Randy Ruedrich. Rostad wrote in the email that Rex Miller told him there was a poll being conducted during that effort against Ruedrich. Rostad wrote that Rex Miller told him what happened:
"One noon hour, on his own time at the borough, Joe participated in an online poll voting against Randy. He used four office computers in the office to do it, thinking this was his chance to boost numbers to get rid of Randy. He emptied the cache files on the computers so the users wouldn't know what he had done. When the users asked what had happened to their caches, (Miller) admitted to what he did. He was reprimanded and docked in pay for several days, but was not suspended or fired.
Miller's improper computer use as a part-time attorney for the Fairbanks North Star Borough has been an ongoing controversy, which was the subject of this December 31 article from the Anchorage Daily News.
The handcuffing of Tony Hopfinger was not the only misstep by Joe Miller's campaign on October 17. Shira Toplitz of Politico reported on October 29 that the Murkowski campaign was running an ad, critical of two October 17 blunders:
The same night as the incident with the journalist, Miller told an audience that if "East Germany could, we could" secure the borders of the country — a controversial statement that Murkowski also uses in the new spot.
"Joe Miller's answer to illegal immigration: Use East Germany as an example," continues the narrator. "Exactly what kind of America does Joe Miller live in? . . ."
Miller had nobody else to blame for his stupid remark exalting East Germany as a model for border security.
Once it became obvious that Lisa Murkowski made history as the first write-in candidate to win a Senate election since Strom Thurmond in 1954, Joe Miller took his battle to the courts. He initially filed an action in Federal Court, although U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline stayed proceedings pending resolution of the dispute in the State court, where the action should have been brought. Once the case was filed in the State Court, Judge William Carey dismissed the suit and it was appealed directly to the Alaska Supreme Court. U.S. News reported that when the ballots were still being counted, the Miller camp was determined to turn the election into a spelling bee:
Shortly after the second day of write-in ballot counting began on Thursday, a Miller observer challenged a vote for Murkowski that appeared to have her name spelled and printed correctly, though the "L" in "Lisa" was in cursive handwriting. Later, at least 10 ballots in which Murkowski's name appeared readable were challenged, including one in which the vote read: "Lisa Murkowski Republican."
Miller's campaign said observers are simply challenging votes that don't meet the strict letter of the law — including those with minor misspellings of Murkowski's name or those with legibility or penmanship issues.
In addition to the "spelling bee" demand, Miller also attempted to pursue a claim of misconduct by election officials amounting to election fraud. The Christian Science Monitor provided this report on Judge Carey's dismissal of that count:
"Nowhere does Miller provide facts showing a genuine issue of fraud or election official misfeasance," Carey wrote. "Instead, the majority of the problematic statements included in the affidavits are inadmissible hearsay, speculation, and occasional complaints of sarcasm expressed by [elections] workers. Nothing rises to the level showing genuine material facts of fraud."
The stupidity of Miller's "spelling bee" requirement became more apparent once the Alaska Supreme Court was asked to reverse the dismissal of that claim. During oral arguments, Justice Dana Fabe directed a Why are you here? question to Miller's attorneys. Here's how that moment was described by KTUU News:
With unofficial results showing Miller behind Murkowski by 10,328 votes, or 2,169 when ballots challenged by Miller observers are excluded, Justice Dana Fabe asked Miller's legal team what — if any — impact the court's decision would have on the outcome of the election.
"Even if you win on this argument and every one of the challenged ballots is set aside, it makes no difference in this count, and it makes no difference in the outcome of this election unless you win on one of your other counts — isn't that correct?" Fabe said.
In other words: even if the contested ballots were not counted in accordance with the guidelines advanced by Miller's legal team – Miller still would have lost by over two thousand votes!
So seriously: What was the point of filing suit? Was Miller hoping to get some sort of deal from the Republican Party for conceding defeat? His lawsuit was as idiotic as his entire campaign had been. As late as December 27, Miller was vowing to continue his battle in the Federal Court to contest the election result. Nevertheless, as Miller should have learned at Yale Law School, the pursuit of such a specious claim in a Federal Court, would likely result in rather expensive sanctions against Miller and his attorneys under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, once his case was inevitably dismissed. If that concern had not been enough to motivate Miller to abandon his Federal suit, it should have been enough to convince Miller's attorneys that the game was finally over. Miller ultimately conceded his defeat in the election on December 30, although he never made a concession call to Lisa Murkowski. He explained that he had not made the call because he did not have Murkowski's phone number.
Joe Miller may not have won the election to the United States Senate — but he did win the 2010 Jackass of The Year Award from TheCenterLane.com. Congratulations, Jackass!
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Where Obama Went Wrong
September 27th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
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One could write an 800-page book on this subject. During the past week, we've been bombarded with explanations from across the political spectrum, concerning how President Obama has gone from wildly-popular cult hero to radioactive force on the 2010 campaign trail. For many Democrats facing re-election bids in November, the presence of Obama at one of their campaign rallies could be reminiscent of the appearance of William Macy's character from the movie, The Cooler. Wikipedia's discussion of the film provided this definition:
Barack Obama was elected on a wave of emotion, under the banners of "Hope" and "Change". These days, the emotion consensus has turned against Obama as voters feel more hopeless as a result of Obama's failure to change anything. His ardent supporters feel as though they have been duped. Instead of having been tricked into voting for a "secret Muslim", they feel they have elected a "secret Republican". At the Salon.com website, Glenn Greenwald has documented no less than fifteen examples of Obama's continuation of the policies of George W. Bush, in breach of his own campaign promises.
One key area of well-deserved outrage against President Obama's performance concerns the economy. The disappointment about this issue was widely articulated in December of 2009, as I pointed out here. At that time, Matt Taibbi had written an essay for Rolling Stone entitled, "Obama's Big Sellout", which inspired such commentators as Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns to write this and this. Beyond the justified criticism, polling by Pew Research has revealed that 46% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans incorrectly believe that the TARP bank bailout was signed into law by Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush. President Obama invited this confusion with his nomination of "Turbo" Tim Geithner to the position of Treasury Secretary. As President of the Federal Reserve of New York, Geithner oversaw the $13 billion gift Goldman Sachs received by way of Maiden Lane III.
The emotional battleground of the 2010 elections provided some fun for conservative pundit, Peggy Noonan this week as a result of the highly-publicized moment at the CNBC town hall meeting on September 20. Velma Hart's question to the President was emblematic of the plight experienced by many 2008 Obama supporters. Noonan's article, "The Enraged vs. The Exhausted" characterized the 2010 elections as a battle between those two emotional factions. The "Velma Moment" exposed Obama's political vulnerability as an aloof leader, lacking the ability to emotionally connect with his supporters:
The president looked relieved when she stood. Perhaps he thought she might lob a sympathetic question that would allow him to hit a reply out of the park. Instead, and in the nicest possible way, Velma Hart lobbed a hand grenade.
"I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm an American veteran, and I'm one of your middle-class Americans. And quite frankly I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are." She said, "The financial recession has taken an enormous toll on my family." She said, "My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed."
What a testimony. And this is the president's base. He got that look public figures adopt when they know they just took one right in the chops on national TV and cannot show their dismay. He could have responded with an engagement and conviction equal to the moment. But this was our president — calm, detached, even-keeled to the point of insensate. He offered a recital of his administration's achievements: tuition assistance, health care. It seemed so off point. Like his first two years.
Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast provided the best analysis of how the "Velma Moment" illustrated Obama's lack of empathy. Where Bill Clinton is The Sorcerer, Barack Obama is The Apprentice:
Does Barack Obama suffer from an "empathy deficit?" Ironically, it was Obama who used the phrase in a 2008 speech when he diagnosed the United States as suffering from the disorder. In a plea for unity, candidate Obama said lack of empathy was "the essential deficit that exists in this country." He defined it as "an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."
And at a 2008 rally in Westerville, Ohio, Obama said, "One of the values that I think men in particular have to pass on is the value of empathy. Not sympathy, empathy. And what that means is standing in somebody else's shoes, being able to look through their eyes. You know, sometimes we get so caught up in 'us' that it's hard to see that there are other people and that your behavior has an impact on them."
Yes, President Obama, sometimes that does happen. Take a look in the mirror. Nothing brought this problem into relief like the two Obama supporters who confronted the president at a recent town hall meeting expressing total despair over their economic situation and hopelessness about the future. Rather than expressing empathy, Obama seemed annoyed and proceeded with one of his unhelpful lectures.
One former Emoter-in-Chief, Bill Clinton, told Politico last week, "[Obama's] being criticized for being too disengaged, for not caring. So he needs to turn into it. I may be one of the few people that think it's not bad that that lady said she was getting tired of defending him. He needs to hear it. You need to hear. Embrace people's anger, including their disappointment at you. And just ask 'em to not let the anger cloud their judgment. Let it concentrate their judgment. And then make your case."
Then the kicker: "[Obama has] got to realize that, in the end, it's not about him. It's about the American people, and they're hurting."
The American people are hurting because their President sold them out immediately after he was elected. When faced with the choice of bailing out the zombie banks or putting those banks through temporary receivership (the "Swedish approach" – wherein the bank shareholders and bondholders would take financial "haircuts") Obama chose to bail out the banks at taxpayer expense. So here we are . . . in a Japanese-style "lost decade". In case you don't remember the debate from early 2009 – peruse this February 10, 2009 posting from the Calculated Risk website. After reading that, try not to cry after looking at this recent piece by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture entitled, "We Should Have Gone Swedish . . ." :
The result of the Swedish method? They spent 4% of GDP ($18.3 billion in today's dollars), to rescue their banks. That is far less than the $trillions we have spent — somewhere between 15-20% of GDP.
Final cost to the Swedes? Less than 2% of G.D.P. (Some officials believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated).
In the US, the final tally is years away from being calculated — and its likely to be many times what Sweden paid in GDP % terms.
It has become apparent that the story of "Where Obama Went Wrong" began during the first month of his Presidency. Whoever undertakes the task of writing that book will be busy for a long time.
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The Smell Of Rotting TARP
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I never liked the TARP program. As we approach the second anniversary of its having been signed into law by President Bush, we are getting a better look at how really ugly it has been. Marshall Auerback picked up a law degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University in 1983 and currently serves as a consulting strategist for RAB Capital Plc in addition to being an economic consultant to PIMCO. Mr. Auerback recently wrote a piece for the Naked Capitalism website in response to a posting by Ben Smith at Politico. Smith's piece touted the TARP program as a big success, with such statements as:
The consensus of economists and policymakers at the time of the original TARP was that the U.S. government couldn't afford to experiment with an economic collapse. That view in mainstream economic circles has, if anything, only hardened with the program's success in recouping the federal spending.
Marshall Auerback's essay, rebutting Ben Smith's piece, was entitled, "TARP Was Not a Success — It Simply Institutionalized Fraud". Mr. Auerback began his argument this way:
Indeed, the only way to call TARP a winner is by defining government sanctioned financial fraud as the main metric of results. The finance leaders who are guilty of wrecking much of the global economy remain in power – while growing extraordinarily wealthy in the process. They know that their primary means of destruction was accounting "control fraud", a term coined by Professor Bill Black, who argued that "Control frauds occur when those that control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a 'weapon' to defraud." TARP did nothing to address this abuse; indeed, it perpetuates it. Are we now using lying and fraud as the measure of success for financial reform?
After pointing out that "Congress adopted unprincipled accounting principles that permit banks to lie about asset values in order to hide their massive losses on loans and investments", Mr. Auerback concluded by enumerating the steps followed to create an illusion of viability for those "zombie banks":
Both the Bush and Obama administration followed a three-part strategy towards our zombie banks: (1) cover up the losses through (legalized) accounting fraud, (2) launch an "everything is great" propaganda campaign (the faux stress tests were key to this tactic and Ben Smith perpetuates this nonsense in his latest piece on TARP), and (3) provide a host of secret taxpayer subsidies to the systemically dangerous institutions (the so-called "too big to fail" banks). This strategy is the opposite of what the Swedes and Norwegians did during their banking crisis in the 1990s, which remains the template on a true financial success.
Despite this sleight-of-hand by our government, the Moment of Truth has arrived. Alistair Barr reported for MarketWatch that it has finally become necessary for the Treasury Department to face reality and crack down on the deadbeat banks that are not paying back what they owe as a result of receiving TARP bailouts. That's right. Despite what you've heard about what a great "investment" the TARP program supposedly has been, there is quite a long list of banks that cannot boast of having paid back the government for their TARP bailouts. (Don't forget that although Goldman Sachs claims that it repaid the government for what it received from TARP, Goldman never repaid the $13 billion it received by way of Maiden Lane III.) The MarketWatch report provided us with this bad news:
In August, 123 financial institutions missed dividend payments on securities they sold to the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. That's up from 55 in November 2009, according to Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.
More important — of those 123 financial institutions, seven have never made any TARP dividend payments on securities they sold to the Treasury. Those seven institutions are: Anchor Bancorp Wisconsin, Blue Valley Ban Corp, Seacoast Banking Corp., Lone Star Bank, OneUnited Bank, Saigon National Bank and United American Bank. The report included this point:
Saigon National is the only institution to have missed seven consecutive quarterly TARP dividend payments. The other six have missed six consecutive payments, KBW noted.
The following statement from the MarketWatch piece further undermined Ben Smith's claim that the TARP program was a great success:
Most of the big banks have repaid the TARP money they got and the Treasury has collected about $10 billion in dividend payments from the effort. However, the rising number of smaller banks that are struggling to meet dividend payments shows the program hasn't been a complete success.
Of course, the TARP program's success (or lack thereof) will be debated for a long time. At this point, it is important to take a look at the final words from the "Conclusion" section (at page 108) of a document entitled, September Oversight Report (Assessing the TARP on the Eve of its Expiration), prepared by the Congressional Oversight Panel. (You remember the COP – it was created to oversee the TARP program.) That parting shot came after this observation at page 106:
Both now and in the future, however, any evaluation must begin with an understanding of what the TARP was intended to do. Congress authorized Treasury to use the TARP in a manner that "protects home values, college funds, retirement accounts, and life savings; preserves home ownership and promotes jobs and economic growth; [and] maximizes overall returns to the taxpayers of the United States." But weaknesses persist. Since EESA was signed into law in October 2008, home values nationwide have fallen. More than seven million homeowners have received foreclosure notices. Many Americans' most significant investments for college and retirement have yet to recover their value. At the peak of the crisis, in its most significant acts and consistent with its mandate in EESA, the TARP provided critical support at a time in which confidence in the financial system was in freefall. The acute crisis was quelled. But as the Panel has discussed in the past, and as the continued economic weakness shows, the TARP's effectiveness at pursuing its broader statutory goals was far more limited.
The above-quoted passage, as well as these final words from the Congressional Oversight Panel's report, provide a greater degree of candor than what can be seen in Ben Smith's article:
The TARP program is today so widely unpopular that Treasury has expressed concern that banks avoided participating in the CPP program due to stigma, and the legislation proposing the Small Business Lending Fund, a program outside the TARP, specifically provided an assurance that it was not a TARP program. Popular anger against taxpayer dollars going to the largest banks, especially when the economy continues to struggle, remains high. The program's unpopularity may mean that unless it can be convincingly demonstrated that the TARP was effective, the government will not authorize similar policy responses in the future. Thus, the greatest consequence of the TARP may be that the government has lost some of its ability to respond to financial crises in the future.
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There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing "That's Entertainment!"
Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen.
If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now.
The film involves a couple, He and She, whose infant child falls out a window and smashes to the pavement while they are making explicit love. They feel devastating grief. He, a psychologist, takes She off medications, and they go to live in their secluded hideaway in the forest, a cottage named Eden.
He subjects her to probing questions and the discussion of the Meaning of it All, which must affect her like a needle stab to an inflamed tooth. He is quite intelligent and insightful, and brings passive aggression to a brutally intimate level. Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she drills a hole through his leg and bolts a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive. I won't mention two gruesome scenes involving the genital areas.
What does this metaphor (with a Prologue, an Epilogue and Four Chapters) mean? The dinner conversations all over town must not have been appetizing. Some read it this way: Perhaps the world began with man evil instead of good, guilty instead of innocent. That the Garden of Eden was visited by the Antichrist, not the Lord. That man's Original Sin was not eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but not vomiting forth knowledge and purging himself.
All for this will be discussed at great length. What can be said is that von Trier, after what many found the agonizing boredom of his previous Cannes films "Dogville" and "Manderlay," has made a film that is not boring. Unendurable, perhaps, but not boring. For relief I am looking forward to the overnight reviews of those who think they can explain exactly what it means. In this case, perhaps, a film should not mean, but be.
You see strangely assorted films all in a row here. The first eight Cannes films I've seen have been: (a) a Pixar animated comedy about a man who ties balloons to his house and floats into the rain forest; (b) a film about the young love of the doomed John Keats; (c) a devastating African-American drama about an abused fat girl; (d) a Korean film about a mother defending her dim-witted son against a murder charge; (e) a Filipino film with 45 minutes of an impossible-to-see, too-loud-to-listen to kidnapping; (f) a Hong Kong film about a French chef's violent revenge; (g) a French bourgeois family drama about a bankrupt movie producer, and (h) "Antichrist." First thing tomorrow, the new Almodovar film, about a film director who loses his eyesight and the love of his life. At least there will be Penelope Cruz to look at, if only he could see her.
Cannes has always cast a wide net. It was here I first began to learn more about violent Asian films that were not "chop-socky" trash but in fact polished genre exercises with their own auteurs. After seeing my first Takeshi Kitano film in the awesome Lumiere, I began to suspect he might become one of my favorite directors. The legions of Western fans for Hong Kong films, in particular, may have Cannes to thank.
Speaking of Western fans, this morning I saw a classic Western named "Vengeance." There were certain parallels with Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven;" it had gun-slingers striding down streets deserted by the townspeople, and a score (guitars and lonely flutes) that Sergio Leone might have envied. Was this film set in Durango or Tombstone? No, it was set in modern-day Macao, the Las Vegas of China. Was the hero played by Eastwood? No, he was played by the 65-year-old Johnny Hallyday, known as "the French Elvis." Who was the hero of this Western? Was he named Slade or Cain or Shane? No, he had a good French name, Costello. Who was the film directed by? Johnnie To, who has also made "The Heroic Trio," "My Left Eye Sees Ghosts," "Running on Karma," and 46 other films since 1986.
This was really a good film. The plot is off the shelf: Costello's family is murdered, and he vows revenge. But the twists, now, that's where the pleasure comes. And the acting, dead serious and low key, but with some jovial fat men allowed. And a stunning visual sense. And pacing that made it compulsively watchable--just the curative for me after the previous evening's excruciating "Kinatay."
This is not the place for my review. Let me just mention two details. If you know Johnny Hallyday, picture him standing over a dying crime boss in the street. He has plugged him with about a dozen rounds. And before firing a final fatal round, he thoughtfully and quite seriously observes, "that's your coat."
And then imagine a gunfight in a vast open field, seen from a high angle. Three men surrounded by enemies. The field containing for some reasons tightly-compacted bales of waste newsprint, almost as high as a man. The three in the center using three bales as cover. The dozens around advancing in a wall of forward-tumbling bales, and firing from behind them. Words do not convey the macabre visual effect of this scene.
The film involves professional killers quite prepared to sacrifice their lives for their values. No, not for their criminal code. For their deep human values. They are craftsmen who respect their work. They will perform it well and faithfully even if the man who hired them knows nothing of it, and is away playing with some little children on the beach. These are values that could come from...a Western. And recall that the Western began with Greek drama.
Lars von Trier's Antichrist - Official Trailer from Zentropa on Vimeo.
Johnny Hallyday in the "Vengeance" trailer.
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