tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6 2008-10-03T16:03:48Z Movable Type Enterprise 1.52 tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3745 2008-10-03T16:03:30Z 2008-10-03T16:03:48Z

The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair - stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial...

David Sirota The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair - stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror. As a financial crisis became a political panic, capitalism murdered democracy (ironically, while pursuing a vaguely socialist bailout). Only, unlike a typical horror story, the dead body wasn't hidden, it was dumped in the nation's public square. The fiasco started, like most, with unreasonable demands. Under threat of financial meltdown, capitalism's corporate lobbyists asked our democracy to forsake its usual deliberations and hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money in less than a week. Many were surprised when democracy responded with such valiant defiance. As television screens split between the floors of the stock exchange and the House of Representatives, lawmakers initially voted with their constituents and against the bailout. That's when this husband-and-wife argument escalated into a grisly crime of passion. CNN's Ali Velshi frothed that "the banks and the companies don't care about the intricacies" of democratic deliberations. A CEO angrily told CNN that "the money is being held hostage to the political process" - as if government resources are rightfully Wall Street's. And as the Dow tanked, the Chamber of Commerce threatened retribution against recalcitrant lawmakers. The final deathblow came from TINA, shorthand for "There Is No Alternative" - the motto that Margaret Thatcher used to peddle her corporatism, and that Washington and Wall Street used to promote theirs. Whether it was a Barclays Capital executive telling reporters "there is no choice" or Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., insisting that "this needs to be done and it needs to be done right away," responsibly democratic prescriptions were pulverized by capitalism's deranged mantra of inevitability and urgency. To even mention, as economist Dean Baker did, that the taxpayer giveaway could exacerbate the crisis was to risk flogging by columnists like Tom Friedman. The sycophantic flat-earther vilified bailout opponents (i.e., most Americans) as mentally incapacitated deadbeats who "can't balance their own checkbooks." By the time the fight hit Congress' upper chamber, senatorial morticians were embalming democracy's corpse. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid permitted consideration of just one alternative, and he rigged parliamentary procedure to guarantee its defeat. Yet, if capitalism took democracy's life through a perverse legislative process, then it robbed its grave with the bailout bill's substance. American democracy is defined by vesting government power in systems and rules, not in individuals and whims. We have been, as John Adams wrote, "an empire of laws, and not of men" - until now. Instead of responding to this meltdown by updating regulatory institutions or investing in job-creating infrastructure, the bailout proposes giving one unelected appointee - the Treasury secretary - complete authority to dole out $700 billion to bank executives, with little oversight. And here's the scary part: That lurch toward dictatorship was motivated not just by crony corruption, but also by a deeper ideological shift. We now face market forces uninhibited by democratic governance - Chinese dictators and Saudi princes can move trillions of dollars without so much as a press release. This bailout, marketed as a speed enhancer, is an attempt to discard democracy's checks and balances and pantomime that kind of autocracy. While our political culture still required a public sales job (thus, the fearmongering), the bill's czarism aims to permanently euthanize democracy in the name of improving our capitalism's global agility. In that sense, this week's spousal killing wasn't random. It was the beginning of a systematic assault on our Constitution and a radical departure from Franklin Roosevelt's original covenant - a dangerous "new deal" we must say "no deal" to. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3738 2008-10-01T22:36:11Z 2008-10-01T22:39:18Z

Michael Gerson BOSTON -- In the gospel according to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, "there are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises." Suddenly, we are all pragmatists, trying to dig our way out of the Wall Street...

Ellen Goodman http://workingforchange.com Michael Gerson BOSTON -- In the gospel according to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, "there are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises." Suddenly, we are all pragmatists, trying to dig our way out of the Wall Street rubble with whatever tools are at hand. Well, there is some truth in that. But I think we are still capable of emotional multitasking, holding anger in one hand and fear in the other while grasping for a solution. I also think it is possible, maybe imperative, to exhale some outrage. In this case, some moral outrage at the sudden, convenient collapse of the ideology of personal responsibility. For decades now the mantra of personal responsibility has kept a lock on our imaginations. And our political dialogue. I saw it back in the 1990s, when we ended welfare for better and for worse with something called the Personal Responsibility Act. More recently, I've heard conservatives resist the morning-after pill on the grounds that it would foster irresponsible behavior. When Hollywood puts sex and violence on television and Madison Avenue sells junk food, we expect parents to -- guess what -- exercise their responsibility. In the economy even more than the culture, personal responsibility has been a best-seller. We were told by conservatives and free-market holy rollers that markets were smart and governments were dumb, that the government was the problem not the solution. So when credit cards come through the mail, college freshmen are expected to just say no. When poor people were wooed and seduced by subprime mortgages, they are the ones dubbed irresponsible. Over time, the same rhetoric justified a huge shift in economic risks of the average citizen. In the name of the ownership society, many pensions became 401(k)s while health insurance costs moved from employer to employee. All of these risks were covered like a bad bet by the idea that people could take better care of themselves. The ownership society turned into the everyone-on-your-own society. Three years ago, Congress passed a law making it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. Just six months ago, Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary who now wants to be Czar, insisted the government actions to prevent mortgage foreclosures would "do more harm than they would do good." But now, as Jacob Hacker, the author of "The Great Risk Shift," puts it, we are seeing that "the rhetoric of personal responsibility stops at the edge of the market." This is by no means the first time that this administration has shattered the moral cover story. Consider the lame duck who reappeared on the national stage this week, sounding less like a president than as a press secretary for Paulson. He will leave without an iota or admission of guilt for the Iraq War, for the mushroom cloud warnings, the pre-emptive strikes against nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The man who divided the world into good and evil has never taken that famed responsibility for the original sin of the war. The other bookend on the Bush years is this meltdown of epic proportions. We are bailing out the institutions that operated what Warren Buffett once called the financial weapons of mass destruction. Only this time, the mushroom cloud -- the threat of an economic catastrophe -- may be real. Personal responsibility? "I share the outrage," says Paulson. But in his original three-page fix-it manual there was a paragraph that lit up like neon. The secretary who asked for all the power to "take such actions as the secretary deems necessary" also asked for protection from any oversight or review. Personal responsibility? The titans coming to Congress with cups in their hands and the economy in the balance were not too embarrassed to fight against caps on their salaries. What exactly do we have here? Socialism for the rich? I expect that there will be some pretty little salary caps put on the heads of CEOs, and taxpayers will get some equity in companies. We will get tighter regulations in return for our $700 billion. And some change ... of "People today are more concerned about big insecurity than big government," says Hacker. The ownership society is quickly becoming the security society. But the money that should go to funding our future? It's on a mission to rescue our economy from the reckless ideologues of "personal responsibility." tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3737 2008-10-01T22:33:26Z 2008-10-01T22:35:00Z

How dare you throw that tea in Boston Harbor! Such is the anti-democratic arrogance of the fearmongering pundits and politicians who tell us if we taxpayers don't instantly give the Wall Street banking bandits a $700 billion bailout, then we...

Robert Scheer http://workingforchange.com How dare you throw that tea in Boston Harbor! Such is the anti-democratic arrogance of the fearmongering pundits and politicians who tell us if we taxpayers don't instantly give the Wall Street banking bandits a $700 billion bailout, then we are destroying America. Instead of applauding representatives from both parties who, for once, heeded the public rather than the fat cats, the established pundits blasted those who dared get out of line. It was a time for some of the best commentators to fail and, much as I hate to admit it, for Lou Dobbs -- and even Newt Gingrich -- to shine. Dobbs called it correctly: The sky is not falling, there is time for reasoned debate, and why isn't the public being listened to? Gingrich put it best when he said short-circuiting serious congressional oversight over an enormous transfer of taxpayer dollars to an industry is "un-American." Others, with whom I typically am in far greater agreement, just rolled over to give the bankers what they demanded. "When Madmen Reign" was the headline on a column by Bob Herbert in The New York Times, absolving the Democrats from any responsibility for the crisis despite a willingness of that party's leadership in the past to vote for key legislation proposed by what he condemns as the "anti-regulation, free market zealots" of the Republican Party. Both parties betrayed the principles of a true free market -- remember the invisible hand of Adam Smith where no market player could influence price? -- in favor of the concentrated power of oligopoly to control everything. Those Republicans who dared to vote, this time, against the demands of the Wall Street power brokers were derided by New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks as the "Revolt of the Nihilists." While suddenly embracing President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as the positive alternative to nihilist behavior, Brooks ignored Roosevelt's main achievement, which was to put the public interest before that of the Wall Street titans. Wasn't it nihilistic when Congress, led by Republicans but supported by key Democrats, including then-President Bill Clinton, shredded the protections put into place by Roosevelt to control an ever-avaricious banking industry? Anyone who has bothered to study that history knows that Sen. John McCain was deeply involved in the push for rampant deregulation, and his choice of former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, the principle author of the decisive deregulation legislation, to co-chair the McCain presidential campaign mocks McCain's attempt to blame the crisis on everyone but himself. The Democrats, however, also are culpable, and it was sickening to watch Clinton on "The Daily Show" getting away with blaming a crisis he helped create on overexcited home purchasers. I don't blame "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart for not knowing enough about the subject to challenge Clinton on his own fervent support of deregulation, but it is disappointing that Paul Krugman, one of the nation's sharpest commentators and an economist, should also miss that point. Indeed, in his column for The New York Times castigating McCain for his connection to Gramm, Krugman said voters should be reassured that Barack Obama has Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to turn to for advice on how to handle this mess. Rubin, the former head of Goldman Sachs, worked as hard as Gramm to pass the legislation his Wall Street buddies wanted. Rubin then returned to Wall Street as a honcho at Citigroup, the first company to successfully exploit the new legislation's nefarious loopholes. As for his perspicuity, it was as recently as January of this year that Rubin termed the financial meltdown a normal phase of the business cycle. Back in the spring, two months after Rubin's "what me worry?" silliness on the economy, Obama gave a brilliant speech on Wall Street's problems at the same venue, Manhattan's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in which he singled out the legislation that Rubin had gotten Clinton to sign as central to the problem. Obama should stick with the wisdom of a community organizer from the tough side of Chicago: Fight the bankers who swindle unsuspecting homeowners, and restore the bailout provision that Democratic leaders had proposed but then abandoned -- stop the home foreclosures by empowering bankruptcy court judges to force a renegotiation of terms. Any bailout worthy of support should put the endangered homeowner first, not the bankers who swindled them. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3730 2008-09-29T23:30:47Z 2008-09-29T23:31:32Z

Debate over how to resolve the nation's financial emergency is taking a salutary direction for the moment, as politicians of both parties refuse to be herded by the Bush White House into a ridiculous $700 billion swindle. Before Congress approves...

Joe Conason http://workingforchange.com Debate over how to resolve the nation's financial emergency is taking a salutary direction for the moment, as politicians of both parties refuse to be herded by the Bush White House into a ridiculous $700 billion swindle. Before Congress approves such a stunning expenditure to save the undeserving hides of the super-rich, they may at least create provisions for independent oversight, new regulation, public equity and homeowner relief. There is one more thing that should not be neglected, however. Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute, imprison and ultimately deter the criminals responsible for this disaster. From the bottom-of-the-barrel bucket-shop mortgage salespeople, who sought inspiration and technique from the movie Boiler Room, to the geniuses who packaged those bad and often fraudulent loans into bad paper for sale to major banks, investment houses and insurance companies, literally thousands of crooks are out there. Unless we find a way to bring them to justice--starting at the top, by the way--then the "moral hazard" inherent in any bailout will become even more acute. Anyone who doubts that massive fraud is at the center of this crisis hasn't been reading between the lines. While much coverage in the business press has focused on tick-tock accounts of the final days of the big investment houses or the vagaries of the roiling market, there is no shortage of stories showing how we got into this morass. The simple version of this decentralized criminal conspiracy can be summarized as follows: Mortgage lenders handed out loans to unqualified borrowers and sometimes tricked them into signing agreements they could not fulfill. Those same companies and others then marketed those loans with false assurances of their soundness to convince investors to buy them. Some of those investors then resold the packages of crap mortgages to other investors both here and abroad. Among the miscreants implicated in these activities were many with actual criminal records, whose entry into the mortgage industry was in no way hindered by the state regulatory agencies. They proceeded to amass fortunes large and small, using the same techniques familiar from previous financial scandals--pressurized sales techniques; targeting of the weak, elderly and insecure; outright fraud, forgery and deception. Which of the participants knew what was going on here? Which of them merely failed to perform any due diligence before passing along undue risk to the individual investors, pension funds and others to whom they owed fiscal prudence? Which companies and executives actively encouraged thievery, and which simply looked away while they booked big profits? Those are the questions that must be sorted out by competent judicial authorities if we are ever to establish the rule of law in our markets. The F.B.I. is currently investigating more than 20 lenders, including the defunct Indymac, but there is much more to be done--and at the moment, the prosecutors seem to have set their sights too low. Someone with prosecutorial authority and resources should scrutinize the major players at UBS, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and all the rest. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley law was meant to discourage this kind of financial chicanery by major firms. Now is the time to apply its criminal sanctions to those who flouted the law. State authorities, whose years of incompetence and negligence led directly to the debacle, cannot be trusted to enforce the law now. In Florida, for example, which has suffered the worst of the national epidemic of mortgage fraud, the state regulators were recently found to have permitted thousands of brokers with criminal records--including actual bank robbers!--to enter the marketplace. The best estimate is that up to 25 percent of the mortgages recorded in the Sunshine State over the past few years were tainted. Now, as the federal government prepares to take many or most of those bad loans off the books of the geniuses who bought them, what will prevent additional massive fraud? Only the threat of enormous fines and years of imprisonment can prevent these crimes from being repeated, at our expense. During the final decade of the last century, the nation spent well over $100 million on special prosecutors to investigate trivial and nonexistent offenses by public officials. We should be prepared to spend many times that amount in the years to come to get to the root of this gigantic scam, both to punish and to deter. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3721 2008-09-26T15:06:49Z 2008-09-26T15:07:14Z

When I worked for then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the late 1990s, Washington was in the panting throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned my boss's opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress....

David Sirota When I worked for then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the late 1990s, Washington was in the panting throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned my boss's opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that a few years later, our country would become the globe's newest U.S.S.R.: The United States Socialist Republic. Yes, a red flag is rising over the Capitol, only the laborer's hammer and sickle has been replaced by a baron's top hat and monocle. America is Amerika, and throughout Washington a socialist rallying cry echoes: Politicians and lobbyists of the world unite! -- unite to rescue Wall Street capitalists with a $700 billion taxpayer bailout. Though socialism seems new in the U.S., it isn't. Using public resources and government power to control the economy is as Amerikan as the Pentagon and the Patent Office. And the problem is not socialism itself, but our uniquely destructive version of it. Amerika's is not the democratic socialism of many countries. Ours is kleptocratic socialism -- the objective is theft. Unlike European comrades, our socialists rarely mandate returns on taxpayer investments. The same 19th century socialism that gave the Mountain West to railroad companies became a 20th century socialism subsidizing oil and drug industry profits. Now, our 21st century socialists propose giving financial industry con men the national credit card, confirming Marx's theory that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. Bolivian socialists nationalize to combat wealth stratification, remove greed from human necessities like energy, and allow the public to own the means of producing valuable commodities. Amerika's socialists nationalize to preserve inequality and force the public to own the means of worthless production. Most recently, taxpayers' $85 billion will purchase bankrupt AIG and its means of producing paper, all to let speculators continue profiteering off the human need for housing. Close a factory in socialist Denmark, and workers get immediate government help, along with their free health care. Shutter one in Ohio, and workers get nothing, except politicians saying their jobs are never returning and national health care is "unaffordable." But if investment banks teeter, those same politicians quickly find billions for bailouts. Of course, socialist revolutions can share key traits. Many feature aspiring dictators like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs banker. He is pushing Hugo Chavez-style legislation demanding totalitarian authority to spend the $700 billion "without limitation" or "review by any court of law or any administrative agency." And surprise -- Paulson's scheme would enrich his Goldman Sachs pals. Amerika, like other socialist nations, also has its share of faux converts and unconvincing agitprop. John "I am fundamentally a deregulator" McCain has suddenly gone French, embracing regulation with the zeal of a beret-wearing Parisian reciting "Das Kapital" in a left bank coffeehouse (call him Monsieur Jean McCain, s'il vous plait). CNBC's Larry Kudlow justifies kleptocratic socialism by absolving the financial elite and blaming the meltdown on that all-powerful Poor People Lobby, which he claims is "forcing banks to make low-income loans." And New York Times' columnist David Brooks, long the ruling class's Minister of Propaganda, applauds the "public spiritedness" of Paulson's "Progressive Corporatism." As this socialist uprising intensifies, the most prominent counterrevolutionary is none other than Sanders. Now a senator, he is calling for both re-regulation and a millionaire surtax to pay for the bailout and avoid adding its full cost to the national debt. "The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush's economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout," he said. Once the federal government's only (admitted) socialist, Sanders is evidently its only fiscal conservative, too. It's time Amerika listened to this original visionary. David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was just released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota. COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3719 2008-09-25T16:55:35Z 2008-09-25T17:07:47Z

Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head...

Robert Scheer http://workingforchange.com Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of our economic meltdown. What arrogance for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- who the year before President Bush appointed him treasury secretary was paid $16.4 million for heading the company that did as much as any to engineer this financial travesty -- to now insist we must blindly trust him to solve the problem. Paulson is demanding the power to act with "absolute impunity," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who admonished the treasury chief, "After reading this proposal, it is not only our economy that is at risk, Mr. Secretary, but our Constitution as well." Clearly, it's a vast improvement to have Dodd in the chairman's seat of the Senate Banking Committee, asking the right questions, rather than his predecessor, Texas Republican Phil Gramm, who presided over the committee in the years when the American economy, long the envy of the world, was viciously sabotaged by radical deregulation legislation. Gramm, whom Sen. John McCain backed for president in 1996, pushed through the financial market deregulation that has brought the American economy to its knees. Maybe this time Congress won't give the financial moguls everything they want, including a bailout for foreign-owned banks like Swiss-based UBS, where Gramm now hangs out as a very well paid executive when he's not advising the presidential campaign of McCain, his old buddy and partner in crime. Oops, sorry, no crimes were committed because the deregulation laws Gramm pursued and McCain faithfully supported decriminalized the financial scams that have proved so costly. Just check out the language of Gramm's pet projects, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. By preventing mergers between the various branches of Wall Street, the former act reversed basic Depression-era legislation passed to prevent the sort of collapse we are now experiencing. The latter legitimized the "swap agreements" and other "hybrid instruments" that are at the core of the crisis. The legislation's "Legal Certainty for Bank Products Act of 2000," Title IV of the law -- a law that Gramm snuck in without hearings hours before the Christmas recess -- provided Wall Street with an unbridled license to steal. It made certain that financiers could legally get away with a whole new array of financial rip-off schemes. One of those provisions, summarized by the heading of Title III, ensured the "Legal Certainty for Swap Agreements," which successfully divorced the granters of subprime mortgage loans from any obligation to ever collect on them. That provision of Gramm's law is at the very heart of the problem. But the law went even further, prohibiting regulation of any of the new financial instruments permitted after the financial industry mergers: "No provision of the Commodity Exchange Act shall apply to, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission shall not exercise regulatory authority with respect to, an identified banking product which had not been commonly offered, entered into, or provided in the United States by any bank on or before December 5, 2000. ..." Even some Republicans on the Senate committee expressed exasperation Monday with the swindles that they had voted for with such enthusiasm in the past, as well as with giving Wall Street yet another blank check. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., condemned Paulson's proposal as an effort to "take Wall Street's pain and spread it to the taxpayers." He added, "It's financial socialism, and it's un-American." He's wrong on that last point, for what is proposed is not the nationalization of private corporations but rather a corporate takeover of government. The marriage of highly concentrated corporate power with an authoritarian state that services the politico-economic elite at the expense of the people is more accurately referred to as "financial fascism." After all, even Hitler never nationalized the Mercedes-Benz company but rather entered into a very profitable partnership with the current car company's corporate ancestor, which made out quite well until Hitler's bubble burst. Smell a rat if Congress approves the Paulson plan without severely curtailing CEO pay and putting a freeze on the mortgage foreclosures that are threatening to destroy the homes of millions of Americans. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3695 2008-09-19T14:19:54Z 2008-09-19T14:20:18Z

Old Milwaukee beer's slogan -- "It just doesn't get any better than this" -- should be Barack Obama's after-hours toast these days. He faces a Republican Party that built a house-of-cards economy -- constructed with paper by speculators betting against...

David Sirota Old Milwaukee beer's slogan -- "It just doesn't get any better than this" -- should be Barack Obama's after-hours toast these days. He faces a Republican Party that built a house-of-cards economy -- constructed with paper by speculators betting against inevitable collapse. With recession looming, his opponent is a guy who admits "economics is not something I've understood as well as I should" -- a career politician who famously helped campaign donors intimidate regulators during the Savings & Loan scandal. Yet, Obama probably isn't drinking to anything lately, as Reuters' poll shows John McCain leading on economic issues. The numbers are tragic but predictable. Until this week, Obama largely avoided the contrasting FDR-style populism the nation wants and the moment demands. For example, instead of endorsing forceful re-regulation months ago when the financial meltdown commenced, Obama responded with a vague white paper that not only offered few hard-hitting prescriptions, but denigrated key Depression-era regulations. Likewise, despite slipping in the industrial heartland, Obama has muted his criticism of NAFTA. Indeed, one Obama adviser last week called trade only "an issue of symbolic importance." Another said that far from opposing a controversial NAFTA expansion into Colombia as promised, the candidate now wants "to make it possible." The self-defeating behavior reflects both money and orthodoxy. Obama has raised $9.8 million from investment houses (more than McCain). For economic advice, he relies on people like Bob Rubin - the NAFTA architect who gutted market regulations as Bill Clinton's treasury secretary and who then tried to rustle up government favors for Enron as a $17-million-a-year executive at Citigroup, a bank embroiled in today's implosion. Under such influences, Obama sends Wall Street hints that his "change" mantra might be empty rhetoric. This month, his adviser Cass Sunstein told The New Republic's Establishment readership that the senator is merely "a minimalist." In a recent New York Times interview, Obama himself reiterated his loyalty to free-market fundamentalism, even as it birthed the current emergency. Discerning whether cash crafted or rewarded these statements is less important than Obama eschewing the populism that could undermine the Royalist Right and fix the economy. And the GOP is filling the resulting void. Sans aggressive opposition, McCain likens himself to Teddy Roosevelt and pledges support for tighter regulation -- hoping America forgets his Keating Five past and March declaration that, "I'm always for less regulation." His surrogates, meanwhile, are on the cultural offensive. Even as they endorse the crony communism of Bear Stearns bailouts, conservatives are using Obama's community organizing experience to depict him as an inner-city black socialist -- a caricature invoking the geography, ethnicity and ideology that Republicans regularly rely on to prompt white backlashes. Regrettably, the underlying elitism charge may stick -- not because of Republicans' dishonest rationales, but because Obama confirms the attack's grounding in a different truth. Polls show majority support for tougher regulation and fair trade reforms -- the very agenda opposed by the Washington and Wall Street elites who populate Obama's kitchen cabinet. The Democratic candidate's "minimalism" therefore isn't a desire to "accommodate, rather than to repudiate, the defining beliefs of most Americans," as Sunstein sententiously claimed. It is fealty to elites rather than the public -- the dictionary definition of elitism. Certainly, Obama's is a less pernicious elitism than McCain's billionaire tax breaks -- and the Illinois lawmaker's sharper speeches and new ads this week might indicate an authentic shift. But if they don't and the elitism reappears, Obama could stunt real reform and lose a seemingly un-losable election. "[Americans] crave someone who will be their pocketbook champion," writes Bob Kuttner, author of the book "Obama's Challenge." "If swing voters don't get that clear message from the Democrat, they will turn to the maverick patriot who did hard time in Hanoi." David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was just released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota. COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3687 2008-09-18T01:24:42Z 2008-09-23T19:13:06Z

BOSTON -- What finally sent her over the top was the poster. There was Sarah Palin as Rosie the Riveter, flexing her biceps under the motto: "We Can Do It!" The image was the same on the T-shirt my friend...

Ellen Goodman http://workingforchange.com BOSTON -- What finally sent her over the top was the poster. There was Sarah Palin as Rosie the Riveter, flexing her biceps under the motto: "We Can Do It!" The image was the same on the T-shirt my friend had left over from the primaries. But with a crucial difference. "They've Photoshopped Sarah over Hillary. And women are falling for this!" she bellowed into my voice mail, closing with an epithet that would never have been permitted by her feminist spell check. This certified member of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits is not the only one who has moved into a state of disbelief. If 17 percent of Hillary supporters have moved with enormous fanfare to McCain-Palin, how many more have turned their disappointment into high dudgeon? There is the divinity school professor Wendy Doniger, who blogged that Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman," a biological fact best left to a medical school professor. There is the admirable playwright Eve Ensler, who put aside her distaste for "raging at women" to call the choice of Palin "insidious and cynical" and "antithetical to feminism." There are the readers in my inbox who echoed this sentiment: "Frankly I think the Republicans have found themselves a good ol' boy and she happens to wear a skirt." Three weeks after the nomination of the Candidate from Nowhere, one week after the robo-interview with Charlie Gibson and days after the "Saturday Night Live" skit, there is still a flood tide of women choking on the possibility that Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah Palin. At the same time, there are snarky charges of "hypocrisy" and sneers at "sisterhood" from the right. Ah yes, sisterhood. As this mind-boggling, gender-bending campaign races on, women are indeed bumping up against the warm fuzzy limits of female bonding. Again. So for both those who dispute Sarah Palin's chromosomes and those who cry hypocrisy, a brief pause. It's time to remember the suffragists who worked their whole lives to win the vote for women, believing that their vote could change the country. And then despaired of those women voting just like their conservative husbands. It's time to recall the civil wars of the second-wave feminists and the mommy wars of today. Solidarity is not forever, it's not even for high school. During this primary, Democratic women were often divided by generation. Many edgy conversations and strained family dinners took place between older women supporting Hillary and younger women supporting Obama. Mothers thought daughters had abandoned the women's movement. Daughters told mothers they'd been liberated to vote for the person, not the gender. Now, with enough suddenness to cause whiplash, many of these mothers have taken up the cry of their daughters: "I want a woman in the White House, but not (BEG ITAL)this(END ITAL) woman." Republicans are fighting for admission credentials to the sisterhood. The first Republican woman on the national ticket brings something else new to politics, says Kathleen Dolan, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. Since the majority of women are Democrats, as are the majority of female candidates, women aren't routinely asked to choose between their party and gender, their issues and identity. "For the first time in a national election," Dolan says "women are being asked to cross party lines to vote their gender." Much of the dismay for those who saw Hillary push the female limits is seeing a conservative benefiting, so far, from the old stereotype of women politicians as change agents and moderates. In a Newsweek poll, 60 percent of the targeted white women voters either believe Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere or "don't know." Nearly 50 percent think her opposition to abortion is less extreme than it is or "don't know." Less than a third know she supports teaching creationism alongside evolution. So how to lower the dudgeon? How to save some heat for the man who chose Palin? When you meet "Hunter Chicks 4 Palin," breathe deeply and, OK, read their lipstick: Women are not a monolith. We are divided by age, race, marital status, class ... and convictions. After all, Sarah Palin may yet be the fulfillment of an old feminist prophecy that Texan Sissy Farenthold once described with her tongue firmly planted in her cheek. We will have achieved equality the day mediocre women take their place beside mediocre men. Check that one off the to-do list. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3686 2008-09-18T01:22:12Z 2008-09-18T01:24:34Z

Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising "tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings; no special interest giveaways?" Just how dumb do they think we are?...

Robert Scheer http://workingforchange.com Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising "tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings; no special interest giveaways?" Just how dumb do they think we are? Seriously, 20 minutes of Google searches should be sufficient to convince all but the dimwits among us that McCain has been a master of the special interest giveaways to Wall Street that enabled this meltdown. Duh, he voted for abolishing all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat. The two main bills accomplishing that, which McCain enthusiastically supported, were the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm is former Sen. Phil Gramm, chair of the Senate Banking Committee when he acted as chief sponsor of both pieces of legislation. The same Gramm that McCain picked to co-chair his presidential campaign. Gramm proved an embarrassment when he cavalierly insisted there was no real crisis but only the panic of "whiners," but even on Monday, as his "crisis" ad ran, McCain, in person, was still denying that there was one. "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," he told NBC's Matt Lauer, as two more of the nation's most venerable financial institutions crashed and the stock market shed more than 500 points. When a perplexed Lauer asked McCain to square his optimism with his own ad's use of the "crisis" word, McCain came to his senses and, discovering his inner Karl Marx, said he hadn't been speaking of the bankers but rather "that the workers of America are the fundamentals of the economy." OK, but never heard that from him before, as he consistently carried water for the bankers going back to his supporting role in the savings and loan scandal, a harbinger of the consequences of a severely deregulated financial market that McCain still favors. Nor did he worry then about the workers who lost their savings while McCain's wife made a million in profit from her deal with Charles Keating, the banker for whom McCain lobbied. Even on Tuesday, while McCain suddenly was thundering against the "unbridled corruption and greed that caused the crisis on Wall Street," he still did not urge anything more stringent than convening a national commission. Barack Obama has been way ahead of McCain in grasping the severity of the problem and back in March offered a scorching criticism of the deregulation mania, in particular the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law that allowed the stockbrokers, insurance companies and banks to merge for the first time since the 1930s, ushering in this era of irresponsibility. But that was in the primaries, and now he has turned for advice to Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who both served as treasury secretaries in the Clinton administration and talked the president into signing that wretched legislation. As recently as Jan. 31, Rubin, by then Citigroup's executive committee chair was, like McCain until Tuesday, still in denial on the meltdown, insisting it was merely "all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption." Fortunately at that time, he was an adviser to Hillary Clinton and remained so past March 27, when Obama delivered his main economic speech blaming the Gramm deregulation that Rubin had helped make law for the meltdown. Referring to the repeal of the Depression-era regulations Obama stated all too correctly: "Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one -- aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner-take-all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy." Not devastating for Rubin and Citigroup, where he went to work, which was a leader in that $300 million lobbying effort and the first huge beneficiary of the new law, which permitted a merger with Travelers Insurance that previously had been illegal. So, yes, there is a world of difference between Obama and McCain on the main issue that now challenges the American way of life, where people's homes, retirement, kids' college education and all other dreams are threatened by a mindless deregulation led by the Republicans but which too many influential Democrats supported. What Obama needs to do, both to win and to help save the country, is denounce the whole lot of those scoundrels from both parties and rediscover his populist voice. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3680 2008-09-16T22:13:40Z 2008-09-16T22:14:26Z

With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government. Only six months ago, he assured the Wall Street Journal that he is...

Joe Conason http://workingforchange.com With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government. Only six months ago, he assured the Wall Street Journal that he is generally opposed to regulation, but today he is ready to control executive compensation, defend 401k accounts from corporate predators, and impose renewed federal oversight of errant markets. This populist rhetoric sounds strange, especially when emitted by a politician whose circle of advisers include former Senator Phil Gramm, vice president of the scandal-tainted Union Bank of Switzerland, and John Thain, chief executive of the firm formerly known as Merrill Lynch. But when facing the angry voters who have watched their savings evaporate, the conservative Republican more hopes to sound more like a liberal Democrat again. He wants to blur the differences between himself and Barack Obama on fundamental economic philosophy. But there is one critical issue where the Arizonan has established a record that cannot be escaped so easily. Senator McCain wants to privatize Social Security. It is a stance he has repeatedly taken over the past ten years in recorded votes, interviews, speeches, and documents. It is also a position that he will deny in this campaign. In fact he tried to deny it at a June town hall meeting in New Hampshire, when he declared, "I'm not for, quote, privatizing Social Security. I never have been. I never will be." But the contrary evidence is overwhelming. As long ago as 1998, several years before the Bush administration sought to promote privatization, he voted to partially replace Social Security with private accounts. He included privatization in the economic platform of his 2000 presidential campaign. He spoke out in support of the White House's ill-fated push for privatization during the spring of 2005. And when that plan started to sink into oblivion, despite an advertising and public relations budget that exceeded $50 million, he tried to save it. Senator McCain was still pushing the Bush plan earlier this year, when he needed to persuade his own party's ultra-rightists to accept him as their nominee. During the same interview when he told the Journal editors that he generally opposes regulation, he explained his plan to "reform" Social Security. "I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it," he said, "along the lines that President Bush proposed." Obviously such remarks no longer serve Senator McCain's political purposes, and certainly won't attract voters, who never liked the Bush plan -- and probably like those ideas even less as they watch the market ravage their pension funds and equity accounts. Listening to the Republican nominee promise this week to "protect "their retirement accounts, they might wonder how he will do that when so much of the value of those accounts has disappeared already. They might also wonder what would happen to the elderly and other beneficiaries of Social Security if the privatizers like him had succeeded in consigning their future to the same Wall Street sharks he now denounces for their greed and irresponsibility. For Senator Obama, this moment presents a crucial opportunity to draw the most important distinctions between himself and his opponent as well as between Democrats and Republicans. By going after Senator McCain on Social Security, he can assure those Democrats with the deepest doubts about him - older white working-class voters - that he is on their side and can be trusted to understand their concerns. And of course the Social Security theme fits well with the broader Obama indictment of Senator McCain as an echo of the President's failed policies - because on this issue, that he is exactly what he has done, not only this year but for many years. More broadly, Senator Obama needs to convince voters that he has a program to address the economic crisis - and tell them why Democratic solutions are not only in their interest but in the national interest. This is a chance for him to explain how progressive solutions work - how shared prosperity made America strong and productive during the century when we became the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. He should place responsibility for stagnation and decline where it belongs - on the Republican policies that have created staggering inequality. And he should emphasize that by every measure, Democratic administrations over the past hundred years have achieved measurably more economic success than Republican administrations - not only with better budgeting and fairer taxation, but even in the growth of equity values. Stock prices rise when a Democrat is president. The history is so clear that it is hard to understand why any investment banker or broker votes Republican. But then we've learned lately that they aren't necessarily so smart, after all. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3665 2008-09-12T14:51:01Z 2008-09-12T14:51:20Z

Let's say that you enjoyed watching last week's Republican National Convention on television. Let's say you drank in the almost uniformly white faces and the regimented revivalism, you clapped when speakers belittled Barack Obama's work organizing impoverished communities, indeed, you...

David Sirota Let's say that you enjoyed watching last week's Republican National Convention on television. Let's say you drank in the almost uniformly white faces and the regimented revivalism, you clapped when speakers belittled Barack Obama's work organizing impoverished communities, indeed, you cheered with Rudy Giuliani's zinger, "Drill, baby, drill!" Let's further stipulate that you were not at all discomfited by the convention's incessant "Country First" mantra that defines loyalty to America as lockstep fealty to the Republican Party. Let's say -- for sheer argument's sake, of course -- all of this is true. What, then, of the substance? Stripping away the partisanship, passion and propaganda, what about the veracity of the claim that the GOP puts this country first? Well, let's just say it's a little dicey. On national security, the Republican Party advocates continuing to force thousands of young Americans to risk life and limb refereeing Iraq's civil war. Though the party's slogan hearkens back to conservatives' "America First" isolationism, the GOP nonetheless supports spending $12 billion a month on the war -- money needed at home. Same story on economics. In 2004, the Republican White House called outsourcing "a plus." In 2006, the Republican commander-in-chief okayed the sale of critical infrastructure to foreign dictators. And today the Republican presidential nominee is demanding more NAFTA-style trade pacts that eliminate American jobs. This, says the GOP, is putting our country first. But who is the "country"? According to the Census Bureau, it will soon be mostly non-whites. That is, the demographic groups who the alleged "country first" party regularly disparages, whether Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) yearning for a return to segregation, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) scapegoating Latinos, Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) celebrating Japanese internment, President Bush genuflecting to Bob Jones University's white supremacists, or Ronald Reagan echoing bigoted rallying cries at the scene of Mississippi race murders. Maybe, you insist in your post-convention fervor, I just don't get it. Maybe "country first" really does mean refereeing foreign civil wars, spending billions overseas while cutting domestic programs, exporting jobs and bashing ethnic groups that will soon comprise the majority of the nation. But I don't think so. More likely, Republicans have simply taken the famous parable to heart -- the one about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels. As a political strategy, it's not stupid. Following the Bush-DeLay-Abramoff era, many Americans rightly think Republican politicians are scoundrels. And so those politicians are trying to make sure "this election is not about issues," as John McCain's campaign manager said this week, but about a hideous hypernationalism only Joe McCarthy could love. Employing flag pins, war stories and Bible-thumping social conservatism, former P.O.W. McCain and Christian fundamentalist Sarah Palin hope their red-white-and-blue phantasmagoria will hypnotize America into voting Republican. Such desperation leads to seeming incoherence at times. For instance, when anti-war protestors at the GOP convention demanded lawmakers actually put country first by bringing the troops home, Republican delegates responded like an entranced mob of cultists, mindlessly chanting "U.S.A." Then again, in the Karl Rove age, every televised scene -- no matter how absurd -- is part of sculpting an election victory with a mallet of jingoism and a chisel of intolerance. On the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, the Republican convention reminds us of what Barry Goldwater suggested 44 years ago: Terrorists are not the only ones who believe extremism is "no vice." And, as the old aphorism warns, when the most virulent extremism attacks our country, it won't be shrouded in Islamic fatwas - it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. Sadly, the when is now. McCain is the flag, Palin is the cross -- and Americans will have to decide whether we believe their zealotry puts country first. David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was just released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota. COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3663 2008-09-11T17:59:20Z 2008-09-11T18:00:09Z

BOSTON -- Who would have dreamed that a hockey mom could produce such a bounce? I didn't even think the puck was supposed to get off the ice. But now that so many women have skated over to her side,...

Ellen Goodman http://workingforchange.com BOSTON -- Who would have dreamed that a hockey mom could produce such a bounce? I didn't even think the puck was supposed to get off the ice. But now that so many women have skated over to her side, allow me another metaphor. Sarah Palin is the Zamboni of this campaign. This hockey mom rolled onto the ice, did a couple of turns around the rink and managed to clear off all the nasty old Republican detritus. She gave the Grand Old (Boy) Party a new image, or at least a new surface. Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. They ran an entire convention on Marilyn Quayle's line that "Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women." Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: "To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave." Hey, wasn't that our line? Weren't the Neanderthals who wanted women to stay in their traditional roles these same conservatives? Suddenly, we are watching the parade of the flip-floppers, patriarchs with pedicures. Who can forget James Dobson, who blamed the decline and fall of morality on "working mothers and permissiveness," and told us that real women "are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership." He now says "I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer. " Who can forget Phyllis Schlafly who said the "flight from home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman." She now says that "I think a hardworking, well-organized CEO type can handle it very well." Who can forget Pat Buchanan, scriptwriter of the culture wars? He now says, "For heaven's sakes, I mean, can't you have a traditional woman who is also a -- you know, a beauty queen and is a governor? What's the matter?" Who can forget all this? I'll tell you who can forget: Everyone! Sarah the Zamboni has cleared the ice of this pesky historical memory. Mind you, sexism is still alive and well, although it is enchanting to watch the same folks who criticized Hillary supporters for whining take off after the media for vetting. Back when a Hillary hater asked McCain "How do we stop the bitch?" John responded "Excellent question!" Now his campaign says it's "offensive and disgraceful" of Obama to use the word "lipstick." How do you spell chutzpah? Nevertheless the good news for this cockeyed optimist is that Sarah Palin has made it politically incorrect to criticize working mothers. The mommy wars wage on in playgrounds and the blogosphere, but among candidates and in politics, working moms are the demilitarized zone of the cultural battleground. There is, however, another divide between left and right that has reappeared with the governor's star turn. It's the difference between those who think a woman can have it all as long as she can do it all ... by herself. And those who think that it is neither wimpish nor whiny to push for some help. The Emergence of Sarah Palin is actually the Return of Supermom. Mother of five, moose killer and marathoner, she was back at work three days after her son's birth, juggling a BlackBerry and a breast pump while making Helen Reddy look like a slacker. Call her a role model or a parody, but the fresh face of 2008 looks like the exhausted face of the 1980s. The conservative virtue of Sarah Palin's life is that she doesn't need anything from anyone outside the family. She isn't lobbying for, say, maternity leave, equal pay or universal pre-K. Let alone universal health insurance. Or college tuition breaks, especially for that soon-to-be-teen-mom and her soon-to-be husband. Compare this to the actual Wal-Mart mom juggling day care fees and gas bills, fantasizing about a job with benefits and the flexibility to be home when the kids are sick. Somehow the original women's movement slogan, the personal is political, has been turned on its head. It's more fun to talk about the candidate's family and eyeglasses than Iraq and the recession. If Bush was the guy you wanted to have a beer with, Palin is the gal you want to go to aerobics with. The political is waaay too personal. So let us applaud the way Sarah Palin has pushed the working mother out of the firing line of the culture wars. But what about those family issues flattened by Sarah Zamboni? tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3661 2008-09-11T17:06:02Z 2008-09-11T17:07:48Z

Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation's mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain's excuse? Both act as if the financial...

Robert Scheer http://workingforchange.com Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation's mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain's excuse? Both act as if the financial meltdown of the U.S. economy has nothing to do with the policies of the political party they represent -- but she at least may not know any better. Distracted momentarily from her campaign revelries of maverick opposition to the "bridge to nowhere," which she had supported until it became a public relations debacle, and congressional earmarks for which she, as a small-town mayor, had hustled piggishly at the federal trough, Palin made the mistake of dealing with an unscripted subject. Referring to the government's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin opined that the two had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers," displaying abysmal ignorance of the fact that only now will those privately owned banks become a huge taxpayer obligation, as the federal government takes them over. Nor can the meltdown of home values be traced to those two beleaguered institutions, because they did not make the original subprime mortgage commitments. The housing bubble was the result of the Ponzi-scheme antics of those other financial entities: commercial banks, stockbrokers and hedge funds, which were allowed in a GOP-deregulated market to get into the "swap" business. Through the rampant reselling of loans, the obligation to collect on a loan was divorced from the act of selling it in the first place, so who cared if the recipient of the loan was not at all qualified or the appraisal of the property value was inflated, as long as the paper was traded away, or insured, before the moment of foreclosure? As with any Ponzi scheme, the perps, who included the legislators as well as the bankers who exploited the loopholes they provided, expected to bail long before the bubble burst. The role of the legislators, Republican-led but with far too many Democratic running dogs, was critical to the success of the scam. The mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector were made legal only as a result of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, pushed through Congress just hours before the 2000 Christmas recess. Gramm, until recently co-chair of the McCain campaign, also had co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law in 1999 with President Bill Clinton's signature. That gem, which Gramm had pushed for years with massive financial industry lobbying, destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies. Those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community, and no wonder we have witnessed an even more rapid and severe meltdown in housing values than during the Great Depression. Not surprisingly, Gramm was rewarded for his service upon retirement as a senator and as head of the Senate Banking Committee with a top position at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which is close to drowning in the subprime mortgage nightmare he helped create. These folks have no shame, as was evidenced when the senator's wife, Wendy, was named a director of Enron, whose roiling of the energy market had been made possible only through yet another provision of Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act. While neophyte Palin can claim ignorance of such matters, that would be particularly difficult for McCain, who as a senator consistently lined up with Gramm in his deregulation crusade. Clearly McCain had not learned much from his previous involvement with the savings-and-loan debacle about the risks to consumers in unregulated banking. McCain served as chair of Gramm's abortive 1996 presidential campaign, and Gramm returned the favor, providing critical support for McCain with the hard-line Republican base, including the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. It was assumed in the business press that Gramm was the front-runner to be treasury secretary in a McCain administration. Gramm left his role as the top economic person near McCain only after he made an embarrassing statement blaming the current economic downturn on "whiners," an awkward reference to the victims of his disastrous legislation. Amazingly, the turmoil in the housing market, which has led to the socializing of the nation's revered homeownership market in a massive expansion of the role of big government, has apparently not troubled McCain's conservative supporters. As I said, ignorance is bliss, and evidently not just for the newbie Palin. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3652 2008-09-09T19:46:17Z 2008-09-09T19:48:07Z

Michael Gerson BOSTON -- You gotta love this campaign. No sooner does the curtain come crashing down on one climactic moment than up it goes on another. The Democrats choose NoDrama Obama and the channel switches to Soap Opera McCain....

Ellen Goodman http://workingforchange.com Michael Gerson BOSTON -- You gotta love this campaign. No sooner does the curtain come crashing down on one climactic moment than up it goes on another. The Democrats choose NoDrama Obama and the channel switches to Soap Opera McCain. You want change? I'll show you change: Introducing Sarah Palin, a running mate as unfamiliar as the tundra. Talk about rolling the dice. The idea was to connect to the Hillary supporters. These women, dismayed by the idea that the experienced female was passed over for a fresh male face, were supposed to be won over by a patently inexperienced female fresh face. Never mind that this feisty working mom leans -- no, falls -- right on social issues. You go, Clara Thomas. Oops, I mean you go girl. The Straight Talk Express twisted itself into a pretzel trying to defend her qualifications to be commander in chief. More to the point, the mother of five had a personal story meant to capture the imagination of the American people, whose minds were beginning to wander ominously to such non-entertaining narratives as the Iraq War and the economy. Not that I don't find the Sarah Palin story engaging. Mom to mayor to governor to veep nominee? There's one woman who didn't have trouble raising her hand in class. There's one woman who didn't think she had to be twice as good as a man to run. Be careful what you wish for. I shifted into high dudgeon over the Sexism in the Media, Part II, the blogcreeps and cablescum sneering at her beauty queen bio and her working mom credentials. Then along came the news that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol was pregnant. Immediately, the 'family values' folks who have fashioned a political wedge out of moral judgments began insisting that anyone who remarked on this baby bump was an insensitive invader of privacy. What did James Dobson of Focus on the Family say? This teen pregnancy showed that "she and her family are human." Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council praised Bristol for "choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation." A spokeswoman for the Campaign for Family Values called the Palins "an American family out there living out their values." Meanwhile Obama himself, the son of an 18-year-old mother, said strongly that "People's families are off limits and people's children are especially off limits." Well, OK. But let's not forget that it's the right wing that made social issues into a political issue. The right wing decided that pregnancy was not a matter of private decision-making but a harsh and unrelenting political battle. Sarah Palin had her youngest child after a prenatal test showed he had Down Syndrome. But she doesn't believe that other women should be allowed to make their own choice. The Palin's daughter got the "news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned." But her mother opposes sex education programs that go beyond abstinence only. McCain, an unrelenting opponent of abortion, was once asked whether the government should provide contraception and replied, "You've stumped me." The Republican platform is not similarly stumped with its implacable opposition to every abortion and it's renewed "call for replacing 'family planning' programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior." Pregnancy is indeed private. Decisions are to be discussed and determined in a family. But the party meeting in St. Paul, Minn., would put decisions about pregnancy in the hands of the government and replace sex information with disinformation. No, you don't have to pass judgment on a 17-year-old to pass judgment on these unrelenting policymakers. As for the candidate as mother, is it beyond the pale to wonder whether Sarah Palin and her husband should have thought first of shielding their pregnant daughter from a media lens that they know will focus on the baby bump and a marriage that will take place during a national campaign? Has the candidate who mocked Obama for his celebrity status, comparing him to Paris Hilton, created the newest Jamie Lynn Spears? I remember way back when the late Elizabeth Janeway, a doyenne of the women's movement, imagined the first woman president. She would be a vice president picked for "balance" and elevated by fate to the Oval Office. More to the point, Janeway fantasized archly and knowingly, she would be a conservative Republican who believes in the status quo. Sarah Palin? So far, she looks like a Bridge to Nowhere. tag:action.credomobile.com,2008:/commentary//6.3639 2008-09-04T17:17:45Z 2008-09-04T17:19:53Z

Welcome to the People's Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state's Republican governor. That's $22,400 for a family of seven, like...

Robert Scheer http://workingforchange.com Welcome to the People's Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state's Republican governor. That's $22,400 for a family of seven, like Palin's. Since 1982, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenues from state lands, has paid out a dividend on invested oil loot to everyone who has been in the state for a year. But Palin upped the ante by joining with Democrats and some recalcitrant Republican state legislators to share in oil company windfall profits, further fattening state tax revenue and permitting an additional payout in tax funds to residents. No wonder she is popular with voters in a state whose residents pay no income or sales taxes but are blessed with state coffers rolling in cash at a time when all other states are suffering. Indeed, when the oil companies pay more taxes to the state of Alaska, they get to write that off against their federal tax obligation, leaving the rest of us to make up the shortfall. The state of Alaska owns most of the oil-producing land and has been getting upward of 85 percent of its budget from the oil companies that lease the fields, even before Palin helped increase the state's cut. While other states fire schoolteachers because of the economic downturn, Alaska has, as Palin indicated in accepting McCain's offer to join him on the GOP ticket, more money than it knows what to do with. In a display of plucky arrogance at her coming-out press conference, Palin boasted deceptively that if Alaskans wanted that infamous bridge to nowhere, "we'd build it ourselves." She originally had supported having U.S. taxpayers finance that boondoggle before McCain and others in Congress blasted it. Not that I blame Palin for wrangling for her state a bigger cut of oil company windfall profits -- it's just not an option that will work wonders for states without oil. Of course, we can remedy that by having a federal windfall profits tax of the sort that Barack Obama dared propose, and which McCain and his fellow congressional Republicans have managed to quash. Their argument, rejected quite pointedly by Palin for Alaska, is that it would discourage oil companies from investing in increasing oil field yields. McCain derided Obama's call for the windfall profits tax, saying it would "increase our dependence on foreign oil and hinder exactly the same kind of domestic exploration and production we need." I am far more interested in how McCain handles the contradiction between his and Palin's position on windfall oil profits than whether he properly vetted her on her family values commitment to the abstinence-only teenage sex education program. Why is it a good thing for the folks up in Alaska to get a cut of exorbitant oil company profits, but not the rest of us, if we are all part of one nation? Didn't taxpayers from the lower 48 states buy the place from the Russians? Isn't it our federally collected tax dollars that have been subsidizing Alaska more lavishly than any other state, both before and after the bonanza of oil? And subsidizing Alaska mightily, despite the state's enormous oil revenue. Just witness the success of Palin, who as mayor of the hamlet of Wasilla hired a big-time lobbying firm intimately connected with the state's now-indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and thus obtained $27 million in federal earmarks during her tenure. As The Washington Post calculated in a devastating report on Mayor Palin's assault on the federal treasury, her home town of Wasilla (with 6,000 inhabitants in 2002 when she was mayor) received $6.1 million, or $1,000 per resident in earmarks -- almost as much as Boise, Idaho, got this year with a population that is 30 times larger. It obviously helped to have Alaska's now-indicted senator as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And despite McCain's claims that Palin has distinguished herself by breaking with Alaska's discredited Republican establishment in February, the governor sent Stevens a request for $200 million to support various state projects. With representatives like that, it's no wonder that Alaska, despite its oil boom, is still at the top of states subsidized by federal dollars, receiving $1.84 back from Washington for every $1 that Alaskans pay in federal taxes. (California receives 78 cents for every $1.) Unfortunately, looking to Palin for advice on helping the rest of us during the oil crunch, as McCain has promised, is a bit like asking a Saudi oil minister or Russia's Vladimir Putin to provide a model for our nation's economic woes. They hardly feel our pain at the pump.