#OccupyWallStreet: The precursors to the occupations?

I was just reading Christina Romer’s very well-done piece in Sunday’s New York Times, making the case that announcing nominal GDP targeting should be the Federal Reserve’s next policy move (I encourage you to read the article for the details).  Here’s the key section I’d like to highlight:

HOW would this help to heal the economy? Like the Volcker money target, it would be a powerful communication tool. By pledging to do whatever it takes to return nominal G.D.P. to its pre-crisis trajectory, the Fed could improve confidence and expectations of future growth.

Such expectations could increase spending and growth today: Consumers who are more certain that they’ll have a job next year would be less hesitant to spend, and companies that believe sales will be rising would be more likely to invest.

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Though announcing the new framework would help, it probably wouldn’t be enough to close the nominal G.D.P. gap anytime soon. The Fed would need to take additional steps. These might include further quantitative easing, more forceful promises about short-term interest rates, and perhaps moves to lower the exchange rate. Such actions wouldn’t just affect expectations; they would also be directly helpful. For example, a weaker dollar would stimulate exports.

How many of you reading this article feel that our government is “willing to do whatever it takes” to get us out of this persistent unemployment crisis, with all of its attendant suffering and economic misery?  I’d bet not a one of you – I certainly don’t think our government is trying its best to fix things.  Of course, it depends on how one defines “government” I suppose, but if you initially think of our elected branches, since we voters have the most direct control over the executive and the legislative, then no, the “government” in that sense is definitely not working on our behalf! 

And really, how ridiculous is it that the government of the wealthiest country that has ever existed can’t even act in a coordinated manner to stem the suffering of a massive segment of its population?  Or perhaps even more sinister, it appears that the government won’t act to stem the suffering.  Our elected officials have abdicated virtually any and all responsibility until after November 2012 in order to best position themselves politically and rhetorically for the electoral battles to come.  Sure the President is still hammering away on his newfound populist message, his “jobs proposal,” and is taking actions on behalf of homeowners, student loan borrowers, and prescription drug patients, among others, but let’s be honest folks, his track record on the “following-through-on-populist-sentiments” score ain’t that great…(see option, public for an example).

So now we face the absurd reality that the Federal Reserve, the quasi-governmental entity that is perhaps the least-democratic, most-opaque, and most removed from the basic economic reality of most Americans is being pushed to solve our jobs crisis through pure monetary policy.  The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of preserving price stability as well as maintaining full employment, and the main critique of the Fed for many years has been that it has focused virtually exclusively on the former (in the form of interest rate targeting) while wholly neglecting the latter.  Despite the fact that it has been broadly apparent that allowing interest rates to rise somewhat would facilitate the creation of more jobs, the interest rate hawks within the Fed have consistently put a stop to any of those practices, warning of mythical “bond vigilantes” who will decide that US Treasuries are no longer worth investing in if the interest rate rises even a smidge, despite massive evidence to the contrary.  (The counterpoint, of course, is that investing in Treasuries represents the safest investment one can make in the troubled and volatile world markets, as while the state of the US debt and economy overall might cause debt holders concern if the rest of the world were in better shape, the relative position and strength of the US economy in the current world economy makes it a better investment vis a vis other sovereign bonds.)  But I digress.

Why are people occupying so many public spaces in so many cities across the United States and abroad?  I think it is precisely as a response to the massive systemic failure we’ve witnessed at all levels of our government to actually make a positive impact on the vast majority of Americans’ lives.  This is not to say that Americans en masse are waiting for government aid or action or anything like that, rather that the silliness we are witnessing playing out on Capitol Hill and in the White House, the constant tit-for-tat, is leading Americans to see their government as willfully sitting on its perfectly-capable hands, rather than deigning to lift a finger to tilt the scales of justice even minutely back on their side. 

A significant portion of these Occupiers likely played a large role in electing President Obama in 2008 – the sense of triumph in that election was not simply due to the historical nature of electing the first African-American president, but because Obama appeared to represent a turn of the page, or perhaps, a close of the book, from the utter depredation of the Bush Administration, hollowed out to a shell of itself in the end due to its sheer lack of competence.  Post-Katrina America had scars, deep scars affecting the national sense of whether the government was truly acting in our interests or not if it could bungle emergency management so completely. 

Obama represented a shift towards competence, towards smart folks who looked at the data to get things done and make decisions…and yet, after the health care debate, the pyrrhic victory of an apparent giveaway to the health insurance industry, combined with the Wall Street-friendly nature of the new Administration, and the declaration that many of the high-level prosecutions that many desired for actors both inside and outside of government were to be strictly off-limits by Obama and Attorney General Holder marked a certain continuity between the Bush and Obama Administrations: elites are coddled, bailed out, and constantly regaled, no matter their transgressions.  The little people, the 99%, have no place in this insular Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon calculus.

The election of Obama, in this narrative, represents not the shift, the hope, the change that people were hoping for, but the continuation of the perpetual insult to the nation’s sense of values and fairness – an insult that, prior to the rise of the Occupy movement was largely undefined and nameless for many Americans.  Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, the death of the public option, no Wall Street prosecutions, no torture prosecutions, warrantless wiretapping, unmanned drone strikes on countries and civilians we aren’t at war with, wars that are declared against enemies that are largely undefined…whose heads roll for any of these awful decisions? 

The failure of our institutions, and the growing widespread understanding of that fact, as I alluded to a few weeks ago, and more obliquely, in the title of my last blog post “Don’t think it’s not bipartisan, it is,” is profoundly bipartisan.  It had to be to manifest itself so clearly to so many at just this point in time.  Just as you would likely not have a Tea Party had John McCain won, the nature of the Occupy movement, if it were to exist in an alternate world under a McCain Administration, would be very different to what we see today.  It took the failure of Obama, the landslide-elected change agent to bring justice, to bring accountability to the corrupt elites of this country, for the Occupy movement to spring up.  In this case, perhaps the Change that is thus far unrealized will be the catalyst for the realization of the true Change, whatever that may be. 

The bipartisan failure is a wholesale indictment of the entire construct of democracy in this country, and has likely soured many in the Millenial generation on the act of voting itself.  Perhaps democracy, as it is now constructed, is not in fact the method for enacting the change we wish to see in the world?  Could it be that the leverage points upon which the entrenched interests and powers can bring their influence to bear on candidates and nominating parties in our democratic system are simply too numerous and too porous?  The vast constellation of special interests funding candidates these days ensures the ascendance of a certain type of candidate: one who must be conversant in the ways of money, though preferably not “of” money (they’re easier to control with the promise of high-paying post public service jobs, you see) and who have hewn lines that conform to the dominant economic and social memes of the day, thus ensuring the continued preservation of the entrenched classes.  Any “change” will thus be marginal, minimal, the scraps thrown to those too poor to afford their own public affairs divisions or hired-gun lobbyists to press their case in the halls of power. 

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter whether Obama speaks the right words, or even whether he follows through on his newly populistic leanings with actual substantive legislative victories; the narrative is no longer his to drive, nor is it the GOP’s or the Tea Party’s.  They are reacting, all of them.  Consider:

Occupy Wall Street has already achieved a stunning victory – a victory that is easy to overlook, but impossible to overstate. In just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs -- and especially jobs with decent benefits -- spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families' debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point.

To borrow the loosely defined terms that define the Occupy movement, these ordinary citizens have shifted the conversation away from what the “1 percent” -- the corporate right and its dedicated media, network of think-tanks and PR shops -- want to talk about and, notably, paid good money to get us to talk about.

What were you reading about daily in the newspapers as recently as 6 weeks ago?  Austerity austerity austerity.  What did the Occupy movement bring to the table?  Non-manufactured talking points that actually speak to people.  Something you can bring home to your family and discuss at your kitchen table as a concept that everyone understands, intuitively.  Fair wages, decent jobs, non-criminal banks, supporting your neighbors and your community.  These are American values, no matter what the cable news pundits say who myopically search for the “demands” of the Occupy movement despite the hundreds and thousands of protest signs shouting demands right at them. 

People want a fair shake, for themselves, their children, their coworkers, their neighbors, their fellow churchgoers.  That’s pretty much all I’ve come up with, at the end of the day, and it’s pretty simple.  How we get to the fair shake for all is the more complicated problem.

The foreclosure fraud mess – a day of reckoning at last?

The foreclosure fraud case is one of the BIG stories I’ve been trying my best to follow lately.  We learned today that all 50 state Attorneys General have opened an investigation into mortgage industry practices:

The state attorneys general are looking at allegations some banks did not properly review files or submitted false statements to evict delinquent borrowers from their homes during a foreclosure crisis that is one of the most visible wounds of the 2007-2009 recession.

"We are in the fourth year of a housing and economic crisis that was brought on by lax practices of the mortgage lending industry," Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said in a statement.

"The latest allegations of corner-cutting and slipshod paperwork are troubling, but perhaps not surprising."

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The states are investigating the use of "robo-signers" -- people who sign hundreds of affidavits a day -- by banks and companies that collect monthly mortgage payments. It is alleged they did not properly review the documents they were signing.

"What we have seen are not mere technicalities, as some suggest," Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray said.

So if there was systematic fraud perpetrated throughout the mortgage lending industry, one would hope we’d finally see some of these scoundrels locked up for awhile. 

Incidentally, one of the last times that all 50 state Attorneys General agreed to pursue a coordinated investigation, guess what the alleged crime was?  Predatory lending.  And guess who took the lead in making the public case for the investigation – then-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer.  Spitzer came out swinging against the mortgage lending industry and the banks at large in a February 14, 2008 Washington Post piece that is worth excerpting from at length (but well worth a read in its entirety):

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

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Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules. (emphasis mine)

The Bush Administration intervened to stop the states from investigating and enforcing their own predatory lending laws, which I think just might qualify as an egregious breach of the sacredness of “states’ rights” in GOP doctrine, eh?

But as we all now know, hubris brought Spitzer’s gubernatorial reign down (but he’s not out, have you seen him on CNN recently?) with the high-priced call girl scandal he was ensnared in just a few weeks after he wrote his Valentine’s Day article.  Let me make a quick aside at this point and say in no uncertain terms that I am not arguing that what Spitzer did was by any means acceptable.  Now, that being said, could there be any coincidence between his article broadcasting the Bush Administration’s outrageous actions on behalf of predatory lenders and his being outed as a john?  Let’s look a bit further:

Spitzer's fall was all the more stunning because he had been elected in November 2006 with 69 percent of the vote, the most ever in a New York gubernatorial race, and some Democrats even said he could possibly become the country's first Jewish president.

But his life and career began unraveling last week, when federal agents, acting on wiretaps, busted a high-class New Jersey-based prostitution ring, called Emperors Club VIP, and arrested four people. The criminal complaint listed an anonymous "Client 9," who was heard calling the escort service to arrange for a call girl named "Kristen" to meet him for a Feb. 13 tryst at Washington's Mayflower Hotel.

The client allegedly paid for the woman's train fare from New York to Washington and $4,300 for a two-hour session. Law enforcement sources confirmed this week that Client 9 was Spitzer.

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There are also questions about the identities of the other wealthy clients of the Emperors Club VIP. The criminal complaint unsealed last week made reference to 10 clients without naming them; only Spitzer has been identified as Client 9. (all emphases mine)

Interesting that Spitzer was the only client whose name was leaked identified to the press, especially because he was later cleared of all charges:

The details of Mr. Spitzer’s financial transactions — how he took money from his personal accounts and sent it to the prostitution ring’s front company, QAT International — were always the crucial questions in the case. Prosecutors, from the start, were trying to determine whether there was ample evidence to charge Mr. Spitzer with a crime called structuring, which makes it illegal to conduct financial transactions in a way intended to conceal their source and purpose.

Michael Horowitz, another former chief of the public corruption unit in Manhattan, said that it was rare for prosecutors to pursue a structuring charge without a substantive underlying crime like money laundering or drug trafficking. He suggested that a prostitution case, which the government was unlikely to prosecute anyway, was not enough to undergird a structuring charge. (emphasis mine)

So the government knew that Spitzer’s crimes were not going to lead him to prison, and yet it is uncommon for sitting politicians involved in sex scandals to be forced out of office, look at South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, US Senator from Nevada John Ensign, and US Senator from Louisiana David Vitter (who was also caught in a prostitution scandal – the DC Madam case).  None of them were forced out of their jobs; do the rules bend when Republicans are involved, or was Spitzer more the exception to the rule in being forced out?  And why does it appear that some people in high places decided to drop the axe on Spitzer to muzzle him just after he publicly charged that the Bush Administration aided and abetted predatory lenders?

That line of questioning leads us back to the now-unfolding foreclosure fraud situation, explained in great detail here by Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute.  The banks, as we all are well aware, benefited from a massive infusion of taxpayer largess in the form of the bailout (TARP) of October 2008 (remember it was Bush’s bailout folks, no matter what the Tea Party may wrongly claim) and that the bailouts served to rehabilitate a good chunk of the banks’ balance sheets.  But the banks still were forced to contend with the problem of widespread despair in the housing markets, and with the fact that many of the houses that they owned were, in fact, overvalued assets due to the nationwide plunge in home values. 

Because the banks have gotten “too-big-to-fail” (which is what necessitated the bailouts in the first place) as I’ve discussed in a previous posting at length, the government has continued to help prop the banks up, lest the entire financial apparatus collapse entirely.  Programs such as the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that are ostensibly designed to incentivize banks to help homeowners renegotiate their mortgages on more favorable terms, have been shown to serve the banks’ interests entirely.  From a report by Steve Waldman on a meeting Geithner and other top Treasury officials had with financial bloggers over the summer:

The conversation next turned to housing and HAMP. On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those. (all emphases mine)

There you go, policymakers playing kabuki with taxpayers in order to help keep the banks who got us into this mess alive…what a grotesque situation!

And yet, after all of this has happened, some are saying, like former financial executive RJ Eskow, that the foreclosure fraud scandal may just show that the emperor (the banks in this case) has no clothes:

The foreclosure fraud scandal is a big deal (or a big "effin'" deal, as Joe Biden might say). But its real significance is an even bigger deal. Foreclosure fraud is one domino, and if it falls others will follow. The result could be an end to the "invisible bailout" -- the one you never hear about, the one that forces millions of people to subsidize bad lending practices in order to prop up Wall Street.

The invisible bailout is the reason why the government isn't pushing to freeze foreclosures. If the foreclosure process is halted and lending practices are thoroughly investigated, it might eventually force bankers to own up to their own lawlessness -- and write down billions of dollars in artificially inflated assets. How are they going to pay themselves record bonuses if that happens?

This is where it gets really ugly – our somewhat/perhaps/maybe/kinda recovering economy could well be plunged into another, perhaps deeper financial downturn if widespread fraud is in fact found among the banks’ mortgages.  If nobody knows who rightfully holds the title to a home, how could they possibly know its market value?  The entire financial system has been rebuilt (if one could even call it that) after the 2008 financial crisis on a foundation of nearly worthless and potentially fraudulent mortgages, and “irresponsible homeowners” have been to blame for not only their own troubles, but those of the entire financial system.  Eskow continues:

Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz, who also bears the distinction of having been correct about the housing bubble, thinks it's time for the banks to write down the excess value of these loans. As Stiglitz observes, that will be painful for the banks in the short term, although it would be "nothing in comparison to the suffering they have inflicted on people throughout the rest of the global economy."

But the administration's reluctant to do that. That's why we heard such tepid remarks from the White House about the foreclosure fraud scandal over the weekend. If the foreclosure fraud issue is pursued too aggressively, it throws 41% of all expected housing sales into question. It raises even more questions about the ownership of millions of loans in good standing, potentially giving homeowners leverage to renegotiate based on the actual market value of their homes. And it reopens the issue of "writedowns."

Illegal submission of foreclosure documents was part of a larger cover-up. People need to be arrested for it -- but that, of course, would open up a larger can of worms. The legal process could very well reveal the extent of the title problem, as well as other potentially widespread criminal practices.

So there you have it folks, the states are now going after the big Wall Street fish again, perhaps following up on the forestalled investigations they were set to launch back in 2003 when all of this mortgage madness could have been nipped in the bud.  In case you are in any doubt about just what was produced by the collusion between government and Wall Street, Ezra Klein interviewed financial analyst Janet Tavakoli last week, and here’s her response when being asked what this all means for the banks (after calling this crisis “the biggest fraud in the history of the capital markets”):

When we had the financial crisis, the first thing the banks did was run to Congress and ask for accounting relief. They asked to be able to avoid pricing this stuff at the price where people would buy them. So no one can tell you the size of the hole in these balance sheets. We’ve thrown a lot of money at it. TARP was just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve given them guarantees on debts, low-cost funding from the Fed. But a lot of these mortgages just cannot be saved. Had we acknowledged this problem in 2005, we could’ve cleaned it up for a few hundred billion dollars. But we didn’t. Banks were lying and committing fraud, and our regulators were covering them and so a bad problem has become a hellacious one. (emphases mine)

As Eskow said above, the bankers just want to make it seem that they’ve actually produced some semblance of profits for their shareholders so they can continue to collect their exorbitant bonuses.  That greed leads the bankers to convince regulators to help them avoid realizing the losses they should rightfully incur for such terrible investments.  That dynamic then leads to continued uncertainty in the market, which causes the banks not to lend to businesses, individuals, or even to each other. Greed has never run so rampant in the streets, and it is now manifestly clear that it is the greed of the privileged few that is genuinely handcuffing any sort of economic recovery for the rest of us.  Government regulators have bought into this system for years – when Eliot Spitzer began to make a stink, he was publicly disgraced and muzzled quickly, lest his accusations about the rotting core of the financial system lead people to look too closely so that the house of cards fell. 

Government has been complicit in this scheme since day one, which is the real reason none of the fraudsters have been put in prison yet – the circle would likely extend too widely and might ensnare some of those who are supposed to be on the “good” team.  We can’t have change in this country until we have an honest accounting of the mistakes of the past, and I surely hope that the state Attorneys General are allowed to run their investigations as they see fit, with no White House interference.  The President’s actions in confronting this crisis, including the actions of his deputies, will show just how committed to change he really is. 

On the events at the Lincoln Memorial today

There was no irony:

Palin, the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2008 and a potential White House contender in 2012, and Beck repeatedly cited King and made references to the Founding Fathers.

Cited King? 

Palin likened the rally participants to the civil rights activists from 1963. She said the same spirit that helped them overcome oppression, discrimination and violence would help this group as well.
"We are worried about what we face. Sometimes, our challenges seem insurmountable," Palin said. "Look around you. You're not alone."

Yes, those Tea Partiers must overcome the terrible unjust yoke of white privilege and better-than-average personal wealth in order to take back America!  Because the fact that between 78,000 and 96,000 more-conservative-than-your-average-Republican (oh, excuse me, independents, some) largely rode public transit to a national park while being protected by Park Rangers and local first responders to exercise their First Amendment rights clearly shows that their freedoms (as typically white, upper-middle-class, over the age of 50, married folk) are being impinged upon mercilessly. 

When did white people become the underclass?  When did white conservatives of better-than-average means begin to feel their staggering hegemony over our economy (and hence, our media, and hence, our society) slip from their grasp?  Are they worried that, horror of horrors, some of the economic and racial inequalities that have plagued our society from its inception might be even slightly realigned during the course of the Obama Administration? 

The ever-present cries of “wealth redistribution” are nothing more than dog whistles during a period of historically low tax rates, designed to gin up old reptilian-brain images of the mythical welfare queen who somehow manages to not only live and feed her child(ren) off of the hundreds of dollars a week that welfare provides, but to save up enough for a Cadillac.  Only if an entire segment of the voting population had absolutely no connection to the rampant destitution of inner city life in this country could they be hoodwinked so badly…and Reagan’s folks made the correct political calculation, one that resonated so deeply with the ids of white America that Newt Gingrich trotted out the same specter again to further cut the legs out from single mothers of a minority background everywhere with welfare reform.  Family values:

A recent study by the Children's Defense Fund reveals that the number of children in single-mother families living in extreme poverty went up 27 percent in the first year after welfare reform legislation was enacted. "Extreme poverty" is defined as income less than half the federal poverty line -- or less than $6,401 a year for a family of three. Reports from the states show a significant number of former welfare recipients who have subsequently been unable to buy food, pay rent or keep up with their utility bills.

 

And then ACORN.  Somehow a group that seeks to get low-income voters registered and to their polling places on Election Day “stole the election”? 

With more than 450,000 member families nationwide — 14,000 in Florida — ACORN is a grass roots advocacy group focused on health care, wages, affordable housing and foreclosure.

Hmm, seem like pretty decent folks to me.

This year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.
That's enough to give headaches to election officials and to provide ammunition to Republican activists.

 

You see, the only way the other side won’t call foul, is as long as all of those poor people living on the margins of society don’t show up to claim their constitutionally-mandated right to cast a vote in an election.  If they do, well, they’ll make sure they have to jump some hurdles to do it:

 

Because the only way to really ensure the continued hegemony of our economic overlords (and to further reduce the 16.6% average tax rate of the 400 highest-earning folks in America, who earned at least $139 million each in 2007 – the average tax rate of the same group was a slightly more conscionable 30% in 1995) is to keep the underclasses poor, disillusioned and without a solid stake in society.  Because if they were to gain a stake in society, then they might become afraid of losing it, and that might drive them to do the one thing that makes all American (wo)men equal: vote. 
And so I come to the question of the week, and perhaps of the entire Obama Administration: did you read the New Yorker article? 

In April, 2009, Melissa Cohlmia, a company spokesperson, denied that the Kochs had direct links to the Tea Party, saying that Americans for Prosperity is “an independent organization and Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” Later, she issued a statement: “No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.” David Koch told New York, “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”

At the lectern in Austin, however, Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement, joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!”  She explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channeled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”

 

You see, when average Americans say they’re going to “take back America” they may very well be truly concerned citizens upset about the way our country is going (or they might be part of the 18% of Americans who are wrongly convinced that our President is a Muslim…well which is it, did he have a pastor who preached that dangerous Christian “black liberation theology,” that was fanned into a fury by his primary and general election opponents, or did he not?  The “liberal” American media is having such a field day painting the man and his family as “Other” they’re mixing their memes up) but when one of the richest men in America has one of his loyal puppets saying the same thing, well, that just means they want a more malleable person in the White House, one who won’t try to do more than give lip service to reforming the financial markets and the tax code…their guy didn’t win last time.  Hence why you have these whining billionaires who have gotten so used to running the show in D.C. to their liking that now they’re throwing tantrums publicly about the prospect of their marginal tax rates being returned to where they were under Clinton.  They looted and stole from us, and their hubris made what was already a bad economic situation even worse in the end.  Worker productivity has steadily risen for years, and yet our wages have remained essentially flat:

 

But it serves the financial titans of the world very well to have those of us who constitute the “other 95%” bickering amongst ourselves, responding to race-baiting and baseless rumor and innuendo with rage and disgust while they make off like the bandits they are.  While we bicker, the moneyed class of tax evaders have convinced the political class (through strategic, bipartisan campaign donations, surely) that a deficit commission is what is needed right now, despite the fact that weak consumer demand is the true driver of this recession, and cutting spending is the exact opposite way to deal with that problem, unintuitive as that may sound when compared to one’s household budget.  What are the aims of this deficit commission?  Well, one of the most prominent members, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who is regarded as a “serious thinker” amongst the Republicans on budget issues, has a Roadmap for getting our country onto a sustainable fiscal path.  That Roadmap would increase taxes on the bottom 90% of the population, while slashing taxes for the top 10%, slash and/or privatize entitlements, and would lead to rapidly ballooning deficits along the way.  Sounds swell.  The other big news out of the deficit commission this week that you may have heard is that one of the co-chairs, Alan Simpson, former Senator from Wyoming, referred to Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits (sic).”  Simpson has made no secret of his distaste for Social Security, despite the fact that it remains the sole remaining income for many Americans whose other retirement savings have been wiped out by the stock market crash.  I know that on a personal level I certainly hope to have Social Security waiting for me when I retire, as subjecting the entirety of my savings for my golden years to the vagaries of the constantly-manipulated stock market is not something I’m terribly interested in doing. 

And so, my final plea to the world is this: don’t let yourself be hoodwinked!  Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes!  If you’re vaguely upset about what’s happening in the world and you have the urge to do something about it, I beg of you, turn off Fox News, turn off your TV entirely, and read a newspaper, any paper, or get your news online, say from a news aggregator like Google News, which collects the news feeds from many different sources and presents them for you…as for the reason you feel upset, fearful, angry generally, but without a particular direction except at our President and anything remotely “liberal” or “progressive,” ask yourself what are your specific concerns?  What policies that have been passed are you upset about?  Why?  Does your response use the word “mandate” in it?  Well I suggest you read up on what else the various laws have in them, as in regards to the health care reform bill, there’s a reason it was 2000+ pages long – it achieves quite a lot of stuff, none of which involve “death panels,” for the record.  Here’s the perfect example of how Fox News hoodwinks its viewers, knowingly, and with virtual impunity:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Parent Company Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

 

The overlords keep things purposely vague, so that those who take their marching orders from FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity are more open to malleability.  For instance, if the Tea Partiers are so angry about the bank bailouts, why, when a coalition of unions, the unemployed, and small business owners very publicly protested on Wall Street earlier this year, no Tea Party members showed up?  Could it be that such a display by the Tea Party would have been against the interests of those who fund their Astroturf grassroots rallies?  Steve Benen of Washington Monthly continues the theme:

MOVEMENTS ARE ABOUT SOMETHING REAL…. I tried to keep up on today's festivities at the Lincoln Memorial, but as the dust settles, I find myself confused.

For a year and a half, we've seen rallies and town-hall shouting and attack ads and Fox News special reports. But I still haven't the foggiest idea what these folks actually want, other than to see like-minded Republicans winning elections. To be sure, I admire their passion, and I applaud their willingness to get involved in public affairs. If more Americans chose to take a more active role in the political process, the country would be better off and our democracy would be more vibrant.

But that doesn't actually tell us what these throngs of Americans are fighting for, exactly. I'm not oblivious to their cries; I'm at a loss to appreciate those cries on anything more than a superficial level.

This is about "freedom."

Well, I'm certainly pro-freedom, and as far as I can tell, the anti-freedom crowd struggles to win votes on Election Day. But can they be a little more specific? How about the freedom for same-sex couples to get married? No, we're told, not that kind of freedom.

<snip>

Labor unions created a movement. Women's suffrage was a movement. The fight for civil rights is a movement. The ongoing struggle for equality for gays and lesbians is a movement. In each case, the grievance was as clear as the solution. There was no mystery as to what these patriots were fighting for. Their struggles and successes made the nation stronger, better, and more perfect.

The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something. The fact that it's not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn't a good sign.

 

Bob Herbert is right, America is better than this.  As Dr. King himself said 47 years ago (yesterday):

 

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

 

Who brings soul force to the Tea Party?  What in their message is not divisive and mean-spirited?  What raises us up to our truer calling of brother and sisterhood if Mrs. Palin slants all of her messages only to “real Americans”?  What if the majority of Americans view the night that President Obama was elected, not as the beginning of a slide into national dishonor, as the Beck/Palin worldview appears to believe, but as the heretofore unparalleled peak of our country’s national honor?  Would that shared sense not speak of the better angels among us?

Turn off these merchants of hate and division, and ask yourself what you fear, and why, and be honest about it.  All I’m saying is, if you’re upset and want to vote all the bums out this November (and please, do vote!) at least do it because you’ve come to your own conclusions and done your own research, not because your vote suits the agendas of those running the show from behind the curtain.

Brokering dialogue with the Tea Party

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Last week was my spring break from UCLA, and instead of going to a tropical locale with umbrella drinks, I decided to get a jump on earning course credits and learn new skills through taking a class on public mediation.  For those of you not familiar with mediation as a form of dispute resolution, the basic concept is that two parties (referred to as "disputants" in our training course) will agree to meet with a neutral mediator, and the mediator will work to facilitate a dialogue between the disputants to foster an understanding of each other's interests between them.  The mediator will attempt to structure the dialogue so that the disputants can come to a resolution between each other that is mutually agreeable, not a resolution that is imposed by a judge  or arbitrator, as in other dispute resolution approaches.

The key aspects of the mediation strategy are in active listening, where the mediator seeks to give full attention to each disputant to hear their side of the story, and then, through active listening, to discover what each disputant's interests are.  "Interests" in a dispute can range from the purely economic, as in unpaid wages owed a worker, to the purely emotional, as when a person feels disrespected by his/her spouse.  Mediation is an attempt to deal with not only surface-level concerns, such as money issues, but the deeper feelings that may lie underneath those issues that conspire to prevent the disputants from reaching a mutually satisfactory resolution.  In mediation lies the idea that conflicts can be an opportunity for greater understanding and better relationships between individuals, not just power struggles where the winner takes all.

When I entered the class, I figured that I would simply learn some new skills for conflict resolution, skills that would be especially handy for me since I am a person who fears conflict with others.  What I discovered, however, was a new approach towards dialogue and communication, and a new framework through which to view political and policy debates.  By attempting to "hear" the other's concerns - to not judge the other immediately, but to give them an opportunity to feel heard and respected - I found that the disputants would be able to give voice to the feelings underlying their side of the dispute.  Once the two parties' emotions were acknowledged, resolution became more possible.

Since President Obama's inauguration, and especially with the raucous health care reform town hall meetings last August, I have been troubled by the rise of the Tea Party movement in American politics.  Beyond the basic inconsistencies of the Tea Partiers' main messages (if they're so concerned with government spending, where were they during the 8 years of the Bush Administration's unprecedented deficit-spending?  If they're so concerned with increasing taxes, why are they protesting when the Obama Administration just gave tax cuts to 95% of Americans (okay, maybe 92%)?  If they're worried about Big Government, why didn't we hear a peep out of them when President Bush presided over the largest expansion of government since the days of FDR?) I have puzzled over what is uniting all of these generally white, older, lower- to middle-class conservatives in such strident opposition to a government that is seeking to make their lives better.  Are they just mad that "their guy" lost the election?  It's doubtful that such resentment would still sustain such a large movement a year and a half after the election ended.  Are they all just racist?  I have to admit that I've certainly thought and expressed that belief in recent months, but again, it's hard to believe that such a large swath of the population would be motivated solely by racial issues.  No, I believe that race plays a significant role, but it's something more subtle than that.

Yesterday, a classmate forwarded me a link to a post by Steve Benen of Washington Monthly magazine that helped to clear up my thinking on the Tea Partiers and their sympathizers across the country.  Benen discusses a fascinating Dallas Morning News article profiling a family that is suffering under the strain of breast cancer, unemployment, and high out-of-pocket health care expenses; in other words, exactly the kind of family that the health insurance reform bill is intended to help.  But the family opposes the health reform bill, fearing government inefficiency and death panels, which Benen states

...makes the response all the more fascinating. Amy Townsend appears to have heard the right-wing propaganda, and seems inclined to believe it. "Every government program," she told the paper, "none of them work very well." 

The Townsend family is, however, currently getting by on unemployment benefits (a government program), and is holding onto some coverage through COBRA (another government program), which they can afford thanks to federal subsidies (through another government program). 

The point isn't to mock the Townsends or to question their judgment. The point is to appreciate the power of conservative political rhetoric in 2010. Many of those who stand to benefit from a stronger safety net have been led to believe they want a weaker one. Many of those who'll finally be able to get better care under a health care system that's been screwing them over have been convinced that they won't, or can't, benefit from reform.

There's a lot to unpack here.  I have thought a lot about an idea that many Democrats subscribe to (and that Benen represents well here), which is that the GOP convinces people through "rhetoric" or "propaganda" to vote against their own "interests," as if their interests are strictly economic in nature.  It's an essentialist argument on its face, that people can be defined solely by their economic concerns, and it gives credence to the widespread conservative critique of liberal conceit; that liberals believe they "know" another person's interests better than the people themselves do.

My contention is that the Tea Partiers are protesting mainly against the "face" of the government that is supposed to represent them, and the changing of American culture that has been going on for decades, but the evidence of which had been remarkably suppressed by the Bush Administration and its overwhelmingly white male leadership (with the notable exceptions of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, of course).  Now we have not only a black President, but a female Speaker of the House, female Secretary of State, black Attorney General, Asian-American Secretary of Energy, etc.  This is not the government that many Americans are used to, and I think that, while one can call the Tea Partiers' reactions "racism" (and I certainly have!) I have come to believe, as noted above, that it's more subtle than that.  People feel that their government no longer represents them - they can no longer "see themselves" in the government, and they can't trust those "other people" to handle their tax money, help them afford health care, protect them from terrorism, etc.  As noted above, the vast majority of Tea Partiers are conservative and white, and would likely not vote Democratic anyways.  But then watching Fox News increases peoples' levels of fear and distrust by Fox speaking directly to their feelings of being unsettled with the "new order" running the government, and telling them that those feelings are widespread and that people should act on those feelings rather than hearing what the other side actually has to say.

So all this to say that I think that people also have an "interest" in feeling that their government represents them and their interests, and that speaking to their intellects, rather than their gut feelings of disorientation, will not ultimately be very productive for Democrats.  While this family in the article quoted may be going directly against their own economic interests, they are choosing instead to act on their interest in being represented by a government they "recognize," I suppose.  I'm not at all trying to justify the Tea Partiers, and I certainly do believe there is a strong racist element in the Tea Party movement, I've just been trying to imagine what it is that people react to so viscerally, and these last few paragraphs are what I've come up with thus far.

So how does one have a productive dialogue with the other side?  I'm not really sure yet, but through my basic studies of mediation I came to this point in my understanding of the Tea Party movement, and I believe that mediation represents a potentially useful tool for engaging in that dialogue.  How one engages a national dialogue is far beyond me, but I believe that initially at least it comes down to showing respect on an individual level, and an understanding that another's experience of the world is not your own.  So if you encounter a person who holds diametrically opposite views to your own, and there is not a fear of physical violence ensuing between you, I'd say take a moment to really listen to their concerns, you might be surprised what they tell you.

I plan to revisit this topic in future posts, and I'm in the process of formulating a major research project for next year that just might involve mediation...stay tuned.  In the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about the power of engaged dialogue, take a look here.