Obama Appointments

Obama Must Toss the Bums Out of Treasury, End the Wars and Start Leading

dlindorff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:13:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the
White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con
men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they
have been giving him since last January has left the country still
mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending
and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of
bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to
fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has
turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China
off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s
fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not
that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover
started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of
the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of
worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to
date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales
crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions
of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local
projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as
a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the
same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are
inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one
million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200
billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to
mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half
actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread
evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his
Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to
initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their
money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the
bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The
country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried about
deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to
Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over
there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four
million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from
history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far
off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I
was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are
mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union
friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their
heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist friend,
retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to
Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting
Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly
Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in
Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed,
the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop
listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your
friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and
daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs
program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s
get the country moving forward again.
__________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Dark Days But a Ray of Hope for Embattled Workers

dlindorff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:29:33 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the
labor movement by giving up the so-called “card-check” feature of the
embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the “reform”
legislation that has been billed as labor’s “number one issue” much
less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by
party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back
EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to
join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement
with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in
union-organizing drives.

But largely unnoticed by the corporate media, there has been some
really important good news for working people and the labor movement:
the appointment of three people to fill the long-vacant empty seats on
the five-member National Labor Relations Board, which has the ultimate
job of adjudicating issues under the National Labor Relations Act.

The Bush administration had basically gutted the NLRA by simply
failing, since 2007, to fill the three seats that had been emptied as
prior board members’ five-year terms had expired. This had left the
NLRB with only two members, one a Democratic, pro-labor appointee, and
one a Republican pro-management appointee. Since these two members
would vote on opposite sides of most issues, the only issues they ended
up issuing decisions on were 400 particularly egregious cases, where
they could both agree—and most of those are still in legal limbo since
they have been challenged in court on the basis that board rules
require a three-member quorum.

The Obama administration, in April, announced three new
appointments to fill the vacant seats...

For the rest of this story, please go to:
www.thiscantbehappening.net
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Southern Senator Risks Republican Party's Future in Supreme Court Hearings

fast2write — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:31:00 -0400

Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama, little known to the country, will lead the charge against Obama's Hispanic nominee, Sonia Sotomayor of New York
by Glynn Wilson
When the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes Monday, July 13 to begin advise and consent hearings on President Barack Obama's first nominee to the United States Supreme Court, potentially the first Hispanic on the court, the American people will learn all there is to know about Sonia Sotomayor, an appeals court judge from New York who will most likely be confirmed to replace Justice David Souter. But they may not know a thing about the senator, Jefferson "Jeff" Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama, who is expected to enter the national limelight for the first time as the lead inquisitor in her confirmation, who faces grave political risks for his party if things are mishandled and go wrong. Read the full investigative news feature here...

Sotomayor's Problem isn't being Too Latina; It's Having Hung with White Suits Too Long

dlindorff — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:16:48 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t know at this point whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a good choice for Supreme Court Justice or a bad one.

She certainly is a lousy judge for writers and other creative
people, having ruled (and been overruled by an appellate court and
then, when that reversal was upheld, by the US Supreme Court in a case
called New York Times Inc. v. Tasini) that the Times and periodical
publishers could reprint, without any additional compensation, any
freelance works they contracted on the basis that they had a general
copyright on each entire issue they publish.

And she appears to have rarely met an insurance company that she
didn’t feel was more deserving of court succor than any insured person
suing an insurer. In a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer,
reporter Joseph N. DiStefano quotes an insurance attorney named Randy
Maniloff as saying that in cases involving insurance companies and
insurance policyholders “It’s insurers by a landslide.” Such a
pro-corporate position would put her in league with the
Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court, and would be consistant
with her pro-corporate stance vis-à-vis writers and artists and
copyright law. (In fairness, Sotomayor did rule against an insurance
firm and in favor of a policyholder’s family in 2005.)

Having said that Sotomayor shows a disturbing pro-corporate stance
in her past rulings, I have to say that the freak-out on the right over
Sotomayor’s comments regarding the impact of her being female and
Latina on her decisions as a jurist is the height of nonsense and
hypocrisy. To watch them frothing, you would think that she was a
latter-day William O. Douglass, which is hardly the case.

What Sotomayor said that has the right in a lather was:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn't lived that life.”

She made that comment at a lecture in Berkeley in 2001, but it came following this earlier statement:

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or
cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will
make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has
often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will
reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure....that I
agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted,
there can never be a universal definition of wise…”

She went on to note:

“Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and
Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race
discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever
upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”

The point is, as long as we have an unequal society, in which some
people are denied equal treatment because of race or religion or
gender, and we clearly have that type of society in America today, the
people from those discriminated-against groups are bound to see the
world in a different way than do most white males.

But the elite—the white male editors and TV commentators, the white
male politicians, and the white male public—don’t see their own
decisions as rooted in their white male expereience. They see their
experience as being “normal” and “unbiased.” It is, to them, only
others who are not “normal” like them who are biased, or or who are
carrying some kind of chip on their shoulders.

What Sotomayor was saying at Berkeley was simply a fact of life: as
a Latina woman, and hopefully as a women who grew up in a poor,
working-class, fatherless family, she is going to view the world
differently than the white male and even black male or white female
colleagues who currently constitute the members of the US Supreme
Court. If this were not so, there would be no need to have women on the
court at all, or African Americans.

That is obviously ridiculous.

White upper-class males on the court for a century saw nothing
wrong with slavery being inflicted on black people, nor did they see
anything wrong with denying the vote to people who didn’t own property.
White males on the court for a century and a half saw nothing wrong
with women not having the vote. For two centuries they saw nothing
wrong with white governments using Jim Crow laws to prevent blacks from
voting, either. (Many of them still see nothing wrong with such legal
obstructionism.)

There are plenty of reasons to oppose President Barack Obama’s
appointment of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court—she is not a particularly
profound Constitutional scholar and she has a record of accommodating
corporate interests at the expense of individuals—but her acknowledging
that being female and Latina may have a positive impact on her judicial
decisions is not one of them.

If she is confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice later this year, as
appears likely, one can only hope that she will allow her decisions to
be informed by that background, and that she will not just become
another one of “the boys” on the bench.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Workers Always Lose, Even in Rescue Operations

dlindorff — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:20:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What’s wrong with this picture: Four groups invest in a company.
One group puts in a 55% investment, a second puts in a 20-35%
investment, a third puts in an 8% investment and a fourth goes in for
2%. The group putting in the 20-35% stake gets three seats on the
company’s nine-member board of directors, which will be appointing the
new company’s management team. The group investing 8% gets four board
members, and the group investing 2% gets 1 seat. Finally, the group
that will hold the majority stake in the company, 55% of the shares,
gets…the one remaining seat on the board.

Why would anyone buy a majority stake in the company and accept
only a 1/9 representation on the board, and thus virtually no say in
the selection of management or in management decisions?

The answer is that that particular shareholder is the unionized
workforce of the company—in this case Chrysler Corp. One seat is all
the workers were offered in the Obama Administration-brokered deal.

Under the plan worked out by the White House, Chrysler management,
Fiat and the company’s lenders, Fiat, the Italian automaker, will take
a stake of somewhere between 20-35% of the bankrupt American automaker,
getting a third of the board for its efforts. The US government, which
has provided and will continue to provide billions of dollars in loans
and guarantees to underwrite the rescue plan, will get an 8% ownership
but an outsized four members on the board in return, and Canada, for
just a 2% stake, will also get one seat on the board.

Logically, Chrysler workers, who will be covering half of the
company’s $10 billion obligation for retiree health care (putting their
own future health care at risk should the venture fail), and who have
agreed to significant cuts in wages, benefits and work rules that had
been negotiated over years of struggle, should clearly be getting five
of the seats on the board and the right to name the company’s new
management team, but that would smack of socialism, apparently.

Imagine workers actually being in charge! Preposterous, right?

Of course, if you step back a minute and think about it, it was
corporate managers, put in place by boards of directors who represent
the elite of the Wall Street investment crowd, who have run most
American companies, and indeed the whole US economy, into a ditch.
These supposedly smart folks with their fancy MBAs and PhDs and law
degrees have outsourced jobs, pillaged the environment, destroyed
communities, piled on debt, failed to modernize and invest in R&D,
laid off highly skilled workers in favor of lower paid, less skilled
workers, poisoned and injured their own workforces, made stupid
acquisitions motivated by a desire to aggrandize more power or more
market share, rather than to achieve real synergies, and have pilfered
corporate resources to boost their own undeserved obscene levels of
compensation.

How, on reflection, could a worker-run company—and I mean a real worker-run
company where the board is in the hands of the workers, and the workers
chose and hire and fire the managers—do any worse than what we’ve seen
over the last decade?

There is an irony here. Corporate lobbyists have been battling
against the Employee Free Choice Act, a labor law reform bill in
Congress which would eliminate the need for workers to go through a
supervised secret-ballot election in order to win representation of a
union at their workplace, substituting the requirement that organizers
simply obtain signed cards calling for a union from a majority of the
workers at a workplace. The corporate argument against this reform is
that it violates the “sanctity” of “one person, one vote”.

And yet, here we have not only a much larger number of people—the
27,000 unionized workers at Chrysler—but also the holders of a much
greater number of shares than everyone else combined, getting only a
tiny fraction of the vote. That glaring inequity doesn’t seem to bother
the corporate elite and their elected servants in Washington one bit.
And it’s actually even worse than it looks on its face. Chrysler’s
unionized workers don’t even have a direct vote to control their own
shares, which are actually controlled by a trust fund headed by a group
of “independent” trustees not chosen by the workers. (“Independent”
means “not controlled by the workers.”)

Chances are, if Chrysler were really placed in the hands of its
workers, it would be a great success. Workers, after all, need to think
long term. Their key motivation is to have a company that will provide
them with jobs and wages until retirement, and with a decent, secure
retirement pension for the rest of their lives. That is exactly the
kind of motivation that we should have in our companies, and in our
corporate management suites.

It is not what we have right now.

As a long-time business journalist, I can tell you that you would
have to search long and hard to find a management in American business
that is thinking even five years ahead. One or two years would be more
common, and plenty are focused on the short end of that span.

A genuinely worker-run Chrysler would not be putting golden
parachutes in the contracts it offers to new top managers, nor would it
be giving them annual performance bonuses. It would not be paying those
managers 50-200 times what an assembly-line worker makes. It would not
be making gas-guzzling SUVs and high-end sports cars. Instead of trying
for quick sales of high-priced vehicles aimed at boosting earnings for
the next quarter, it would be designing and making cars that Americans
need, and that would propel the company’s sales and earnings for
decades to come.

Actually, we’ve been here before. When Chrysler almost went belly
up the last time, back in the economic crisis of 1979, it was rescued
with a $1.5-billion government loan. At that time, the workers, then
three times more numerous, also took pay cuts and benefit cuts, and in
return were given a seat on the corporate board, held by then UAW
President Douglas Fraser (who died last year at 91), but no real say in
management. Fraser’s appointment—the first ever of a union executive or
representative to a corporate board—was seen as a shocking development,
but he was never more than a token. The company’s management, headed by
Lee Iacocca, proceeded to ignore the 1973 gas crisis and its early
warning about the need for energy-efficient cars, which were in any
event fueling the import surge of cars from Japan and elsewhere, and
went off in the direction of short-term gain, building vans and trucks,
and paving the way for Chrysler’s next crisis in the 1990s, when it
ended up being taken over for a song by the private equity group
Cerberus, then by Germany’s Daimler, finally ending with the current
near-death experience.

Odds are, had Chrysler been worker-run back in 1979, the company would be in a wholly different place today.

The trouble is that what is deceptively called “worker-ownership”
here in America, with the exception of some very small companies and
co-operatives, is in reality just a carefully circumscribed rip-off
scheme, in which workers surrender their assets and swallow pay raises,
and maybe get a token representative on the board, but end up being
systematically excluded from any significant role in managing “their”
company, which is actually run by a board composed of the agents of
banks, institutional investors and other owners.

The only difference this time around is that the governments of the
US and Canada will now have majority control of Chrysler’s board.
Perhaps the board members appointed by those two public investors will
act more in the interests of the workers at Chrysler, and in the
long-term interest of both Chrysler and of the two countries, the US
and Canada. But given that President Obama has put this nation’s
economic management in the hands of the very people who helped bring
the US economy to its knees, and that Canada is currently being run by
a conservative prime minister, the odds of this happening seem pretty
slight.
_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist (and is webmaster
of a worker-owned and run blog called ThisCantBeHappening.net). His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama Fills Vacancy for First Dog

Bob Fertik — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:37:52 -0400

President Obama has filled the vacancy for First Dog by nominating Bo, a 6-month-old Portuguese water from Senator Ted Kennedy.

Malia Obama and Sasha Obama are expected to offer expert testimony to the Senate on his unique qualifications for this important position, as soon as they complete their vetting [ugh].

Washington wags [double ugh] are wondering if Senate Republicans will wage a cani-buster [triple ugh] to block the appointment, but most observers believe their bark is worse than their bite [ok you can shoot me now].

President Obama Should Fire John Brennan

Bob Fertik — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:31:55 -0400

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff says AG Eric Holder wants to "release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects." So what's the problem?

U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell has broken loose over this," said the official.

Holy hell? No, un-holy hell, particularly for those who mourn the crucification of Jesus.

Brennan, of course, is protecting the un-holy Torturers at the CIA. But he is really protecting the men who ordered them to torture - Dick Cheney and George Bush. As Scott Horton writes,

Brennan is a protege of former CIA director George Tenet and although he expressed some reservations about waterboarding, he was a defender of other Tenet-era torture programs. Now ensconced as a senior counterterrorism advisor, he has become the principle advocate of the “don’t look back” mantra with respect to the misdeeds of the Bush years. And in this, Brennan’s principal concern is the protection of Brennan and Tenet–but in the process he has emerged as Dick Cheney’s clear champion.

Dick Cheney shoud not have a "champion" in the Obama Administration - he should have a full-time Special Prosecutor dedicated to enforcing every single law that Cheney broke.

Call the White House at 202-456-1414 and urge President Obama to Fire John Brennan.

History Lesson: And These Are the People We Expect to Fix Things Now?

dlindorff — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:03:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

George Santayana once famously said, “Those who cannot learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.” But what about those who don’t just
ignore history, but who hire and take counsel from those who committed
historic follies in the past?

Back in November 1999, Congress passed legislation pushed by then
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), rescinding the Depression-era Glass-Steagall
Act. The measure, backed by the Clinton administration, and
overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (90-8) and the House (362-57),
opened the way for banks to merge with investment banks and insurance
companies, and led directly to the current financial cataclysm.

A report on that Congressional action written by reporter Stephen
Labaton and published in the New York Times on Nov. 5, 1999 under the
headline “Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws,” includes some remarkable quotes from key players in that sellout to the financial sector.

Here’s Larry Summers, a chief architect of the current financial
industry multi-trillion-dollar bailout giveaway being orchestrated by
the Obama administration, where he serves as director of President
Obama’s National Economic Council:

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed
financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a
system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better
enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

And here’s what Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), awash in Financial
industry campaign donations but currently in high dudgeon over the Wall
Street’s bonus payments to executives, speaking about the ’99 measure
eliminating Glass-Steagall:

''If we don't pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt
or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the
world. 'There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is
to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.”

The article quotes the Clinton administration and Summers’ Treasury
Department as predicting that revoking Glass-Steagall and permitting
banks to expand into investment banking and insurance would save
consumers “$18 billion a year” through economies of scale—a figure that
seems rather quaint as taxpayers now pony up trillions of dollars to
rescue those same institutions. (The article notes that critics of
deregulation argued that even those paltry savings, probably
overstated, would flow to financial sector investors, not to consumers.)

The old Times clip (brought to my attention by alert
veteran radical writer and activist Bert Schultz of Philadelphia), does
highlight a couple of prophetic heroes, too.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), one of seven Senate Democrats who voted against revoking Glass-Steagall, said:

“I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not
have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past,
and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010. I wasn't
around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was
here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of
savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to
forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''

And then there’s the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), who died in a
tragic and still unexplained plane crash during his campaign for re-election in 2002. Congress, he
said, seemed:

“…determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.
Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound
banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis.
Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by
insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of
several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring.
Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without
putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

For the record, also voting against Glass-Steagall repeal in the
Senate were lone Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, and six other
Democrats: Barbara Boxer (CA), Richard Bryan (NV), Russ Feingold (WI),
Tom Harkin (IA), and Barbara Mikulski (MD). 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans
and 1 independent voted against the measure in the House.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a key player in the current bailout
scheme, isn’t mentioned in the Times article about Glass-Steagall, but
at the time was a protégé of Summers, working as undersecretary of the
treasury for international affairs.

While they are thankfully well out of the loop in the current
scramble in Washington to both reverse the economic collapse
and try and help financial companies and financiers profit from it,
it’s worth reading too in this 10-year-old clip what Phil Gram and then
Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE and now embattled president of the New School in
New York City) had to say about ending Glass-Steagall.

Sen. Gramm:

'The world changes, and we have to change with it. We have a new
century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the
same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the
Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the
government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have
decided that freedom is the answer.''

And then Sen. Kerrey, with a line that should probably be etched someday on his tombstone as his most memorable line:

“The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown.”
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama's Moment is Passing Quickly

dlindorff — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:28:05 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The actions of Obama's Chief Financial Adviser Larry Summers and
his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in permitting the payment of $165
million in bonuses to AIG executives (Summers, according to the Wall Street Journal, actually pressed Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT, to secretly remove a bar to the
payment of such bonuses from the bailout bill) and storm of public
outrage that has followed public disclosure of those payments, provides
President Obama, whose administration is stumbling badly on many
fronts, to turn things around and avoid political disaster.

He should promptly demand Geithner's and Summers' resignations, and
should also fire the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy (as 80% owner of AIG, the
US has the power to do that anytime). It would also be a good idea at
the same time to fire the CEOs of all the leading banks that are at
this point surviving on government bailouts.

This would allow Obama to correct the fundamental mistake he made
during the transition period following the November election in
installing a bunch of Clinton-era economic advisors and Bush holdovers
to be his economic team.

The US economy is in disastrous shape, and it is going to take new
ideas, and people untarnished by the last 30 years of deregulatory
excess and unsavory links to Wall Street, to rescue it. Obama has no
shortage of good people to turn to: Nobel economist and NY Times
columnist Paul Krugman, former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph
Stiglitz and economist James Galbraith all spring immediately to mind
as people who could offer new and better approaches to addressing both
the immediate crisis and the longer-term challenge of restoring the
health of the nation's economy, and of making it work for everyone,
instead of just the wealthy few.

Of course, it could be that Obama is really not interested in
radically changing the US economy, and its financial system. He has
certainly accepted the tarnished coin of the Wall Street establishment
during his campaign, and could simply be doing their bidding, but one
has to operate on the hope that this is not the case. After all, the
Obama campaign also raised an unprecedented amount of cash from
ordinary folks, and if money is influence, he owes those little people
big time.

In any event, it seems clear that if this president who spoke
during his campaign of "hope and change" continues to cater to the
bankers and the corporate interests that want to see no major revamping
of the economic system and the regulatory apparatus, he is headed for a
one-term presidency--and a sad and failed one at that.

The voters who sent Obama to Washington have been willing to extend
him the benefit of the doubt, even when he made his almost uniformly
lousy cabinet picks. They were willing to grant that he had been handed
a disastrous situation by the last administration.

But as each week passes, the disaster becomes less Bush's and Cheney's, and more Obama's.

The same can be said of Obama's other big crisis: the two endless
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, Obama has largely retained and
accepted the advice of the same people who helped run these huge policy
disasters during the Bush/Cheney years, and is buying the basic
assumptions of those two wars. He is most certainly not
ending the Iraq conflict, and is now talking about leaving as many as
50,000 US troops in Iraq for years--as many as were in Vietnam in the
fall of 1965. He is reportedly talking about doubling the number of
troops in Afghanistan to over 60,000, and about expanding the war into
Pakistan, and not just the tribal areas, but Baluchistan province, a
heavily populated part of that country. This latter decision, which
could lead to an explosion in Pakistan, and the collapse of the central
government, could lead to an huge demand for more US troops in the
area--perhaps hundreds of thousands more--and even to India's entry
into the conflict.

This is as outrageous and doomed a strategy as is his economic
program of trying to salvage the nation's zombie banks while
nickel-and-diming a "stimulus" program for ordinary people.

He should seize the moment of s**tcanning his corrupt and inept
economic team to also sack his military advisers, including Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and his Centcom commander David Petraeus, and
bring in people who will tell him how to get the US out of both
conflicts pronto.

If he fires and replaces his economic and military teams, and
announces both a quick end to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the
immediate break-up of the country's big failed national banks and
financial institutions, he has a chance to become a great president. If
he does not, it is as predictable as the rising of the seas that his
presidency will be a failure. We are nearing a point where the American
public is going to lose patience with the half measures, the continuing
pouring of national treasure down the twin sinkholes of the failed
financial institutions and the two endless wars in the Middle East, and
the tone-deaf behavior of cabinet secretaries and advisors who don't
have a clue about how average Americans are living these days.

This is President Obama's moment for action. Firing Geithner and Summers would be a good start.

Americans should make an effort to let President Obama know that
they want more than token stimulus programs. (Just consider this: official unemployment is now 8.1 percent, but only 4.1% of American workers are able to collect unemployment benefits, and meanwhile, real unemployment is closer to 18 percent. That's a lot of hurt, and not a lot of help.)

A good idea would be to join a march on the Pentagon set for this Saturday, March 21, and a two-day program of demonstrations against Wall Street set for April 3 and 4 in New York City.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now
available in collector's edition from ThisCantBeHappening.net).
Lindorff's work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net