Bush Era Financial Scandals Still Have Plenty Of Legs

Another absolutely direct legacy of Republican economic policies and conservative political ascendancy: so far this year 72 banks have failed, costing the taxpayers of this country $16.58 billion. But watch the shiny object over there making strange noises and drooling on herself. And the latest bank to fail, Alabama-based Colonial Bank, was raided last week and is being investigated for criminal accounting irregularities.

A friend sent me a blurb from yesterday's NY Post: "Harry Markopolos -- the whistleblower on Bernie Madoff who proved to be much smarter than the SEC -- says there are evildoers out there who will make the Ponzi scum "look like small-time." Markopolos gave a speech to 400 of the faithful at the Greek Orthodox Church in Southampton and predicted major scandals will soon be revealed about the unregulated, $600 trillion, credit-default swap market. 'To put it in simple terms, it is like buying fire insurance policies from five different insurance companies on your neighbor's house and then burning down the house,' he said."

I have no reason to believe that the criminal activities at Colonial Bank and the criminal activities Markopolos is describing in relation to the very shady credit-default swap market are related directly. How they are related, however, is by the excesses of purposefully unregulated, market-worshipping predatory capitalism foisted on society by... predatory capitalists via the media outlets and politicians they own (and the 'tards who get suckered in by the combination). As president of a division of AOLTimeWarner, I ran a large corporation. As part of the massive rip-off that was the Bush Era, the CEO and his cronies pillaged the company and absconded with as much as $6 billion, leaving the company, essentially, well down the road to failure and bankruptcy. It is an extremely convenient and self-serving tenet of conservatism that government can't do anything right. [Please see update below.] Government may indeed get things wrong-- especially government run by conservatives themselves, as the Cheney-Bush Regime just proved-- but government is not necessarily less competent than private industry. And the motivation of selfish and unbounded enrichment is not a tenet of government, the way it is of predatory capitalism.

Let me turn to the book I've quoted from so much this summer, Mike Lux's The Progressive Revolution:

The only big arguments remaining for conservatives are their old standbys, fear and the contention that government doesn't work, for which, ironically, their own failures provide the most powerful evidence. In fact, ever since the Katrina disaster, conservatives have said that what Katrina proves is that government is incompetent. They cynically use their own ineptitude to argue their philosophical point. When your most powerful argument is your own incompetence, you don't have a very strong hand.

One of the overarching themes in the teabagger demonstrations is that government can't get anything right. They are demonstrably wrong and simply mouthing propaganda from the self-serving corporatocracy. If you want to look for society's villains, regulators under Bush's conservative and purposely incompetent government may not have found Bernie Madoff stealing billions from investors, but it wasn't government stealing the billions. Like in the case of Colonial Bank unfettered greed is what has brought our economy to its knees, not Big Government.


UPDATE: Government Can't Do Anything Right

Have you ever argued with a dittohead or brother-in-law about this oft-repeated canard. This sweet refutation came in the mail this morning. Pass it along if you'd like:

This morning you were awoken by your alarm clock (powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy). You then took a shower (in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility). After that, you turned on the TV (to one of the FCC regulated channels) to see what the national weather service (of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) determined the weather was going to be like (using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). You watched this while eating your breakfast of (US Department of Agriculture inspected) cereal and taking your blood pressure medication (which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration).

At the appropriate time (as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory), you get into your (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved) automobile and set out to work (on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation), possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel (of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency), paying in cash (legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank). On the way out the door you deposit any mail you have to be sent out (via the US Postal Service) and drop the kids off at (public) school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work (thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), enjoying another two meals (which again do not kill you because of the USDA), you drive your (NHTSA) car back home (on the DOT roads), to your house (which has not burned down in your absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department).

You then log on to the internet (which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) and post on www.freerepublic.com, www.redstate.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

The only reason government doesn't work is because conservative Republican administrations defunded and/or patronage staffed them with people with ties to special business interests: to wit the last FDA, Dept of Interior and Agriculture under Bush. No one seems to have a problem with pumping over $500Bil to the Defense Department, which last I heard is a socialized entity.

Right Wing Economic Orthodoxy Brings Death And Destruction To Africa

For over a hundred years the American Republican Party has embodied right wing economic fundamentals-- basically, the Law of the Jungle. One of its premises is that business regulations just hamper economic development and personal freedoms and that it's all so unnecessary because everything rights itself in the end without government intervention.

So, for example, if an airline company, eager to fatten the bottom line-- and make the managers wealthier-- starts cutting back on "needless" maintenance procedures and, as a result, its planes start falling out of the sky, investors-- and eventually perhaps even informed consumers ("informed" being key here)-- will not want anything to do with the company. Meanwhile unregulated insurance companies, or even the semi-regulated ones we have now, won't suffer unduly because no one will force them to pay for the hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Hey, a plane falling out of the sky? What could be more an act of God rather than an act of GOP? Just ask Donald Trump.

Anyway, I dare anyone to find a more fitting place to set the Law of the Jungle into stone than Nigeria, an authoritarian hellhole beloved of plutocrats and wingnuts the world over. Right now, by chance, I'm reading a powerful and brilliant book, cleverly disguised as spoof, by investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, Turkmeniscam-- How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship. And the key isn't Stalinist really, but "dictatorship." The model for the entire Inside the Beltway lobbying "industry" and how it sanitizes even the world's most despicable regimes-- for a price-- is Ivy "Poison Ivy" Lee, "the father of modern public relations," whose most notorious crusade was favorably influencing American public opinion on behalf of Big Business and their pals, the Third Reich.

This kind of endeavor is completely bipartisan, I'm afraid, with Democrats proving themselves not one bit more ethical or less morally bankrupt than Republicans. There are a quarter-million parasites working in this criminal sector, and it isn't one likely to be hit by layoffs, neither by the economy nor by the ascension of Democrats to power. And among the most beloved and well-served clients are brutal, oil-rich fascist regimes in Africa, particularly Equitorial Guinea and Nigeria, two of the most corrupt places on earth.

Improved technology has improved oil production in sub-Saharan Africa, but the boom there has bred massive government corruption. "Global oil is a mixed picture, predominantly negative, and African oil is the most negative of all the stories," David Gordon, head of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, said at an energy conference... Gordon, who had recently traveled to Nigeria, said that the consensus among people he spoke with was that the country would have been better off if its oil had been left in the ground. That is a reasonable conclusion when one considers that Nigeria had exported more than $200 billion worth of oil during the last few decades but the overwhelming majority of its people live in poverty.

Extremely well paid lobbyists, devoid of any sense of moral bearing whatsoever, have set out to create an image of a vibrant free economy coming along just swimmingly. And it's a very deceptive image indeed that these politically connected slimebags have concocted. A month after a gaggle of lobbyist-paid opinion-making junketeers returned from Lagos singing the praises of Nigeria's vicious Orwellian dictatorship-- of which one wrote that there is "no evidence of a dictatorship"-- their hosts hanged a well-known democracy advocate, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight other would be reformers. Meanwhile, despite "no evidence of a dictatorship," there were no elections in that country until after the dictator, Sani Abacha, died one evening in 1998 while enjoying two prostitutes. The average Nigerian subsists on $1 per day.

So... Nigeria, 2008. Like corrupt, bribe-loving politicians in Chicago, Houston or anywhere else-- and particularly "free market" fanatics and die-hard rightists-- the Nigerians aren't keen on meaningful regulatory agencies. Republican Party polemicists should go live there. Their "free market" fanaticism has been so successful that yesterday the news across Africa was about dozens of children who have died because of unregulated pharmaceuticals. In one case, infants were given anti-freeze by their parents, said parents thinking they were administering teething medicine to their babies. It was pure, unadulterated poison under the consumer-friendly name MyPikin.

Probably no one-- at least no one who hears about this tragedy-- will buy MyPikin in the future, proving, presumably, how wonderfully the "free market" works. And the company executives may be fined. No businessmen nor their political enablers, however, were lined up against any walls and shot.

Most counterfeit drugs come from those burgeoning exemplars of "free market" greed and selfishness capitalism, China and India. Their counterfeit pharmaceutical exports will reach $75 billion by 2010, worth 50 percent more than Bernie Madoff swindled under the benign good graces of Bush's toothless, Nigerian-style regulatory agency in charge of protecting the public from ruthless predators like him and his friends and family. No one has been put up against any walls and shot in that case either, but Madoff is reported to be under electronic survellance and under house arrest in his $7 million dollar Manhattan apartment.

And SEC chief Cox and Bush and the bureaucrats in charge of preventing this sort of thing? They're shocked and dismayed... and unpunished.

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