How Many Congressmembers Will Their Reactionary Stand On The Minimum Wage Cost The GOP In 2014?

Wednesday we talked a little about the longstanding Republican Party obsession with opposing minimum wage bills and statutory increases. Steven Dennis at Roll Call also took up the GOP obsession with the minimum wage, but from a different perspective. He was looking at how their knee-jerk opposition to the modest increase President Obama suggested in the State of the Union, could lead to congressional defeats for them next year. Boehner took the bait by immediately attacking the proposal in the tired and ineffectual language conservatives have used against it since the 1930s. Exactly what Obama could have programmed him to do!

As the president and his fellow Democrats look for popular wedge issues in their effort to hold on to the Senate and their long-shot bid to retake the House in 2014, the debate could prove a useful cudgel regardless of whether the policy becomes law.

The White House is clearly eager for the fight; the administration put out extensive documentation on the minimum wage proposal and contends that it will not harm job creation and will boost the take-home pay for nearly 15 million people.

And Obama reiterated the push to increase the minimum wage Wednesday in a post-State of the Union speech in North Carolina.

“I believe we reward effort and determination with wages that allow working families to raise their kids and get ahead,” he said. “And that’s part of the reason why I said last night that it’s time for an increase in the minimum wage, because if you work full time, you shouldn’t be in poverty.”

Unions and senior Democrats predictably cheered, but Republicans and their allies panned it.

...“The simple fact is that millions of hardworking American families are being squeezed while they watch Republicans protect tax breaks for CEOs to get even richer,” said Emily Bittner, spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “In this country, we believe that anyone who works hard shouldn’t also have to struggle to pay their rent, their utilities or their grocery bills-- but tea party House Republicans and Speaker Boehner seem to care more about millionaires than hardworking families.”

...The last time the parties tangled over the minimum wage, it ended up as a staple of Democratic messaging heading into the party’s 2006 takeover of Congress.

The fight to increase the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage was used by Democrats to bash Republicans as beholden to the wealthy-- especially after then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., tied an increase to an estate tax cut and refused to decouple the issues.

Democrats, in turn, came out against any increases in congressional pay until the minimum wage went up.

...In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie recently vetoed an effort to raise that state’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour and tie future increases to inflation, according to news reports. Christie offered instead a $1 increase to $8.25 over three years. New Jersey Democrats are now looking to put a minimum wage increase on the ballot for voters this fall.

The New Jersey newspaper The Record reported the ballot measure has Republicans worried about spillover effects on other races and the potential for the business community to divert its resources to fighting the referendum.

Instead of worrying all the time, perhaps Republicans should get on the right side of history and do what's right for the country for a change. There are a number of House and Senate races where a raging battle over the minimum wage could provide the extra oomph the Democrats need to dislodge anti-working family Republicans. In the Senate, obviously not subject to sleazy gerrymandering operations, a minimum wage battle could help save endangered Democratic incumbents Mark Pryor (AR), Kay Hagan (NC), Tim Johnson (SD), Mary Landrieu (LA), Al Franken (MN) and Max Baucus (MT) while damaging GOP incumbents Susan Collins (ME)-- who will be vilified by teabaggers if she supports it and castigated by moderates and independents if she sticks with the GOP-- and Miss McConnell (KY). It would certainly come into play in the Massachusetts special election (if Republicans manage to find a candidate) and in Iowa and could even help tip the balance in Georgia.

In the House, there are a number of mainstream conservatives in swingy districts who could find themselves in the same kind of situation Susan Collins finds herself in. Their districts will strongly support raising the minimum wage (including moderate Republicans and independents) while the hard right base will go bonkers. Particularly at risk are non-Confederate Republicans like Tom Reed (NY), Chris Gibson (NY), Mike Kelly (PA), Paul Ryan (WI), Jeff Denham (CA), John Kline (MN), Bill Johnson (OH), Rodney Davis (IL), Dan Benishek (MI), Buck McKeon (CA), Mike Coffman (CO), Kerry Bentivolio (MI), Tim Walberg (MI), Michael Grimm (NY), Keith Rothfus (PA), Joe Pitts (PA), Jackie Walorski (IN), Joe Heck (NV), Chris Collins (NY), Scott Garrett (NJ), Lee Terry (NE), David Joyce (OH), Steve Daines (MT), Jon Runyon (NJ), Scott Tipton (CO), Sean Duffy (WI) and Larry Bucshon (IN). Those are all Republican incumbents who had close calls in 2012 who represent districts that would favor raising the minimum wage. Even some southerners like Tim Griffin (AR), Vern Buchanan (FL), Scott Rigell (VA), Robert Pittinger (NC), Dan Webster (FL), John Mica (FL), Tom Rice (SC), Steve Southerland (FL) and Robert Hurt (VA) could find themselves in a dangerous bind if they vote against a minimum wage increase-- and all of them, given the opportunity, will.

And it goes further. There are a number of superficially entrenched Republicans in deep red, one-party districts who have to worry about a primary no matter what they do. Last cycle, one of the most effective SuperPACS for defeating corrupt incumbents was the Texas-based Campaign for Primary Accountability. They went after Bachus and forced him to spend over a million and a half dollars defending himself against an onslaught from other Republicans. He managed to win-- but with only 59%. This week the Campaign for Primary Accountability announced they are targeting Bachus, a Wall Street whore who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, again. In announcing their plans to take on Bachus, one of the main financiers behind the PAC, Leo Linbeck III, said that "The electoral system has shielded lawmakers from competition in more than four out of five congressional districts. We’re committed to giving citizens a true choice, and the information and tools they need to participate in the primary-- where the actual decision is made." The PAC has pointed out that Bachus uses his committee chairmanship "for personal benefit" and that he has "received huge campaign donations from giant financial service companies that did business before" the House Financial Services Committee.

Spencer Bachus has been clinging to his seat tighter than a tick for 22 years. His district takes in the Birmingham suburbs and central Alabama, but the way Spencer Bachus sees it, he really represents Wall Street.

Spencer’s taken advantage of his position on the House Financial Services Committee to buy and sell stock options coinciding with major policy announcements and industries with business before his congressional committee. He sold short after a closed door briefing on the impending financial meltdown in 2008. Congress had to rewrite the rules on insider trading after that stunt.

Following the meltdown, Spencer voted to bail out his Wall Street banker friends with your taxpayer dollars, the same bankers who give him millions of dollars in campaign contributions. The same bankers that drove Birmingham and Jefferson County into bankruptcy with a crooked bond deal.

When November rolls around, Spencer doesn’t need to campaign-- he’s usually re-elected with 95% of the vote. That’s when he has a challenger at all.

But in 2012, the party almost ended for Bachus, thanks to a primary challenger and CPA. Despite spending over $1.5 million in the primary-- outspending all his challengers and CPA better than 4 to 1-- Bachus only got 58% of the vote, an all-time low.

Just over 100,000 people voted-- only a third of those who cast ballots in the general election. All it takes is a few more people casting a ballot in the 2014 primary, a serious challenger-- and it’s bye bye Bachus.

A Bachus vote against the minimum wage-- count on it-- will further mark him as someone who only works for Wall Street and for the interests of his wealthy campaign contributors and against the people he represents. With an operation like the Campaign for Primary Accountability spending serious money against him, and making his defeat plausible, it gives voters another reason to vote against him. I suspect that Bachus will be just one of many entrenched Republicans in the same situation.

Last year the Campaign for Primary Accountability was, like Blue America, in the trenches replacing corrupt conservative hack Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA) with a forward-thinking progressive and supporter of the legitimate aspirations of ordinary American working families, Matt Cartwright. This week, Cartwright was on the floor of the House disparaging Republican attempts to shove failed European Austerity schemes down the throats of the American people. Take a look:

Is The U.S. #1 In Insider Trading? Egypt Makes A Move

Romania beats us out for the worst hunger among children, but just barely

We all want this country to be great-- although over on the plutocratic right, they define "this country" in more exclusionary terms than normal people do. I don't think rightists, for example-- and particularly not the Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand variety-- give two hoots that the U.S. now ranks second worst in childhood poverty of any countries in the developed world. And they count Romania-- the one we beat-- as part of the "developed world," which is kind of spurious to begin with. Even economic "basketcases" like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Ireland are doing better, in fact much better, than we are. (At least "we" in the inclusive meaning. I'm sure they're not doing as well as the Romney family and the families of Romney donors.)

Out of the 35 wealthiest countries analyzed by UNICEF, only one, Romania, had a child poverty rate above the 23 percent rate recorded in the U.S. The rate is based on the definition of relative poverty used by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which states a child is living in poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and compensation, is less than 50 percent of the median disposable income for the country in question.

Over in the U.K., which is also doing quite a bit better than the U.S. in this area, The Independent pointed out that "The Government's spending cuts will have a 'catastrophic' effect on British children... endangering their future health, education and employment."

I could be wrong about this-- I could be looking at it through the lens of youthful idealism-- but when I was a kid, one place where the U.S. seemed to have excelled beyond most other countries was in its abhorrence of corruption. And when I was a kid, I started tramping around the world. I remember marveling at how incredibly corrupt day to day life was in Asia. You even had to bargain with the stamp seller at post offices in India! Later I realized the corruption in the Third World was more up front and out in the open. Here it is more hidden and quasi-subtle, or, at least, less in your face. I've always said the richer someone is the more likely they are to be a grasping, avaricious crook. So why not rich countries too? Is that what we're #1 in? Corruption?


Let's take a very easy-to-understand aspect of corruption: insider trading. Here's how the SEC defines it (officially):

Illegal insider trading refers generally to buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security. Insider trading violations may also include "tipping" such information, securities trading by the person "tipped," and securities trading by those who misappropriate such information.
Examples of insider trading cases that have been brought by the SEC are cases against:

• Corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation's securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments;

• Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

• Employees of law, banking, brokerage and printing firms who were given such information to provide services to the corporation whose securities they traded;

• Government employees who learned of such information because of their employment by the government; and

• Other persons who misappropriated, and took advantage of, confidential information from their employers.

Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.

Members of Congress, for example, shouldn't be doing it, especially not Members who are on Committees dealing with non-public information. But that's exactly what House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus was routinely doing until he was called out on it-- he won reelection is a backward. low-info Alabama district anyway-- and that's exactly what House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon has been doing. McKeon isn't representing a backward Alabama district, however, and he's likely to be defeated in his reelection bid in November. The news on Insider Trading this week didn't come from corrupt congressmen like Bachus and McKeon. Bachus's case is still pending before the House Ethics Committee-- and McKeon is also up on charges in front of that committee, although most likely on other unrelated corruption charges involved with bribe-taking from Countrywide. The big news on insider trading came from Egypt, where it's become convenient for the ruling elite to crack down on two of Hosni Mubarek's sons.

Prosecutors charged Gamal and Alaa Mubarak, the imprisoned sons of former President Hosni Mubarak, with insider stock trading on Wednesday, just two days before both men are expected to hear the verdict in a criminal trial charging them with corruption during their father’s three decades of rule.

State television reported that the Mubarak brothers and seven other men, including the co-chief executives of Egypt’s most prominent investment bank, were charged with obtaining over $400 million through corrupt practices in relation to the 2007 sale of Al Watany Bank. Gamal and Alaa have been in prison since last spring.

The new charges against Mr. Mubarak’s children, once untouchable jet-setters, are another episode in the former ruling family’s fall from grace. Gamal Mubarak, 48, was once widely expected to inherit the presidency after his father’s death. Alaa, 49, is a once-prominent businessman who kept a low public profile.

And when will it become convenient from the ruling elite here to prosecute such crimes? Never... well, never unless the current ruling elite is replaced and it can happen before a new ruling elite is corrupted and gets ossified.

GOP Congressional Primary Cannibalism

Yesterday, Inside-the-Beltway Republican-leaning trade publication, Politico, ran an interesting post with an even more interesting title, 5 Most Vulnerable House Incumbents. They probably should have worked the word "primary" into the title though because, as it turns out, that's what the post is about. I was getting ready to laugh in their faces for excluding the races where Republican corruptionists-- take Buck McKeon (R-CA) and "Mikey Suits," AKA- Michael Grimm (R-NY)-- are self-destructing and getting ready to hand red seats over to Democrats. And I was fuming about their coverage of the Upton race which doesn't even mention Democrat John Waltz. Then I realized it's all about primaries and I calmed down. I'm calm now. In fact, now I'm kickin' back and down-right enjoying what Alex Isenstadt had to say.

As you know if you hang out at this blog at all, we're no friends of GOP corruptionist and right-wing ideologue Spencer Bachus of Alabama. Just last week we took at look at his tendency to trade on insider information-- and as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, that's a big deal. Outrageously, Boehner has refused to ask him to step down from that perch while he's being investigated by the House Ethics Committee. Would we like to see him out of Congress? Of course. What red-blooded American wouldn't? But Politico, I'm afraid was being a little optimistic in their assessment. Isenstadt seems to suggest his March 13 primary could be his last hurrah.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Office of Congressional Ethics had opened an investigation into whether the 64-year-old Financial Services Committee chairman had engaged in insider trading-- a potential violation of Securities and Exchange Commission and House rules.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Bachus, who next month will defend in a GOP primary the seat he has held for nearly two decades.

The revelation has created a wide opening for Bachus’s lead Republican opponent, state Sen. Scott Beason, who took a not-so-veiled shot at Bachus on his website late last week: “If I’m elected, my No. 1 priority is going to be to serve the people in my district. I will not be a puppet for those who want to manipulate the system for their own ends.”

Bachus has typically cruised to reelection in the Birmingham-based 6th District, but he appears to understand the challenge ahead. The Alabama Republican has already hit the air with TV ads calling himself “Alabama’s conservative champion” who “doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks the walk.”

Beason faces high hurdles. The state senator didn’t launch his campaign until January-- giving him relatively little time to compete with the congressman and his formidable $1.4 million war chest. Beason will also need to address the controversy over his role during a 2011 gambling corruption probe, when he wore an FBI wiretap and was recorded calling African-American casino-goers “aborigines.”

Teabaggers and Club For Growth types are trying to knock off Tim Murphy (R-PA), whose 94.5 lifetime GOP score on crucial votes apparently isn't fascist-friendly enough for them, even though he's in a swing district. They're trying to replace him with a far right extremist, Evan Feinberg, in the April 24th primary.

The anti-tax Club for Growth has dropped into the district, slamming Murphy in TV ads as a labor-aligned liberal who supports earmarks, and the tea party-aligned FreedomWorks has endorsed Feinberg. GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma have suggested they may support Feinberg, who formerly served as an aide to both senators, as well.

...Murphy, who has a spot on the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, has also received backup from the American Chemistry Council, which in December, took the unusual step of purchasing a $500,000 TV ad buy praising the congressman.

But the race that interested me most was the Michigan primary where right-wing fanatic Jack Hoogendyk is challenging Boehner crony and House Energy and Commerce Committee chair, plutocrat Fred Upton again. This one is the most interesting to me because it's a seat that a strong Democrat could certainly win. And Blue America is backing a strong Democrat there, John Waltz. In 2010 Upton won just 57% of the vote against Hoogendyk even though he swamped him in campaign cash. This time, though, the Club for Growth is airing TV spots hammering Upton for his voting in favor of Bush's bankster bailout. Take a look:



And here's another ad Club for Growth is running against him. Upton, loaded with corporate cash and Chamber of Commerce ads, is expected to win again (unfortunately; Hoogendyk would be a snap for Waltz to send to the bottom of the sea). But we're hoping that the bloody primary will turn off enough Republicans to help Waltz win in November. If the DCCC would support him with funding, it would be a breeze. He's a grassroots progressive so, of course, they won't. He has, however, already raised more money than any other Democrat who has run against Upton. Obama won 57% of the vote in 2008 and has already invested heavily for 2012. Upton, whose family shipped all the jobs in the district overseas (he's an heir to the Whirlpool fortune), is extremely unpopular with both the right and the left; he has no base outside of his countryclub cronies and a bunch of lobbyists. It's interesting to see that only a week after Fred Endorsed Romney, Mittens support in Michigan has collapsed-- losing every county in MI-6 in the latest PPP poll. Whomever comes out of the tea party primary in August will be badly bloodied and positioned far to the right with just a little over two months to bring it back to down to Earth for General Election voters.

Waltz is a blue collar Navy veteran, a populist who's beliefs were shaped by growing up in a union household-- his father was a UAW member for thirty years. This, of course, is not something the DCCC leadership under corporate shill Steve Israel could or would ever understand.

Why Do GOP Criminals Spencer Bachus And Buck McKeon Still Have Their Committee Chairs?

Boehner (r) with Ethics Committee miscreants McKeon & Bachus

Many people recall the pre-ethics circus Hastert and DeLay ran when they controlled the House. It was a free-for-all that featured a series of scandals involving corrupt Republican congressmen and lobbyists, some of whom got away with it-- like Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Ken Calvert (R-CA), and Duncan Hunter (R-CA)-- some of whom were defeated at the polls or pressured out of Congress-- like John Doolittle (R-CA), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Rick Renzi (R-AZ), Dick Pombo (R-CA)-- and a precious few of whom went to prison, namely Duke Cunningham (R-CA) and Bob Ney (R-OH)... not to mention Jack Abramoff. Nancy Pelosi was propelled into the Speakership, moved quickly to institute serious ethics reforms (watered down-- as all progressive reforms are watered down-- by the whining and carping of Blue Dogs), and actually got tough with Democrats who thought they could emulate Republicans.

In 2010 the GOP took over again, with one of the most outrageously corrupt Republicans in contemporary history, John Boehner, in charge. Boehner vowed a get tough policy on corruption inside his caucus. All talk-- and the Republican House caucus is as riven with corruption as it was when DeLay was running the show. Boehner has failed miserably when it comes to removing his top lieutenants from positions of power when they're caught red-handed with-- as Rev. Al puts it-- with the blueberry smeared all over their faces. Last week the House Ethics Committee officially opened an investigation into the corrupt behavior of House Armed Services Chairman, Buck McKeon. He took a massive bribe from Countrywide, engages in insider trading and extorts money out of defense contractors and weapons manufacturers by funneling large sums through his wife's state Assembly campaign. But Boehner hasn't seen fit to make him step down from the armed Services perch from which he is running his criminal operations.

Yesterday it was announced another grievously and notoriously corrupt Republican chairman, Spencer Bachus (R-AL) of the House Financial Services Committee is, like McKeon, under formal investigation by the House Ethics Committee. And, like McKeon, Boehner is letting him keep his gavel. Remember how fast Pelosi took Charlie Rangel's away, even when his accusations weren't nearly as serious as the ones against McKeon and Bachus? Bachus was buying and selling stock options based on non-public insider information "while overseeing the nation’s banking and financial services industries."

The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative agency, opened its probe late last year after focusing on numerous suspicious trades on Bachus’s annual financial disclosure forms, the individuals said. OCE investigators have notified Bachus that he is under investigation and that they have found probable cause to believe insider-trading violations have occurred.

The case is the first of its kind involving a member of Congress. It comes at a time of intense public scrutiny of congressional ethics, with the House passing legislation Thursday to tighten rules against insider trading by lawmakers. The impetus for the legislation, a version of which passed in the Senate a week earlier, came from a “60 Minutes” report and a book mentioning Bachus’s trades, Throw Them All Out, by Peter Schweizer.

...In recent years, Bachus has made numerous trades, some of them coinciding with major policy announcements by the federal government and industries under his congressional oversight, according to a review of his financial disclosure forms by the Washington Post.

Most of his investments are for less than $10,000, and almost all involve options rather than stock purchases. The options allowed Bachus to buy or sell stocks at certain prices in the future-- betting that the value of those stocks will rise or fall.

A Fidelity brokerage statement Bachus submitted for 2008 shows that he made $30,474 in short-term investments, many of them bought and sold in a matter of days, sometimes during the same day.

The former member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee made several options bets on railroads. While President George W. Bush’s fiscal stimulus bill was being crafted in summer 2008, Bachus bet that the stock of Burlington Northern Railroad would rise, and he cashed out that July for a $16,588 profit. In August, he made the same bet but lost $2,900.

On Sept. 18, 2008, at the height of the economic meltdown, Bachus participated in a closed-door briefing with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. At the time, he was the highest-ranking Republican member of the Financial Services Committee. According to a book Paulson would later write, the topic of the meeting was the high likelihood of decline across the entire economy if drastic steps were not taken.

The next day, Sept. 19, Bachus traded “short” options, betting on a broad decline in the nation’s financial markets, and collected a profit of $5,715. Also that day, he cashed out options in which he had bet that General Electric stock would rise, and collected a $12,713 profit, before GE’s stock price started to tumble, the Post found.

Bachus-- and McKeon-- worked with Eric Cantor this week to water down the STOCK Act meant to prevent abuses. Instead it now protects some of the worst types of abuses. After it passed Thursday, McKeon was quick out of the box to claim credit for a major reform (having joined every Member of Congress but two to vote for the now nearly worthless bill). Lee Rogers, the reform-minded progressive challenging McKeon for the new 25th CD, saw right through his ploy. Here's what he told voters in Simi Valley, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley district yesterday:

Today a weakened version of the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act passed the House of Representatives, despite the 93 to 6 vote on the stronger STOCK Act in the Senate. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) was highly critical of the House version calling it “astonishing and extremely disappointing.”

The House version makes trading by lawmakers and key staffers subject to the same rules that affect everyone else. But unlike the Senate bill, it does not make transparent the process of trading on “political intelligence”, which is information from the government officials leaked to the traders which can affect the market. The Senate bill called for these intelligence gatherers to register like lobbyists before they can talk to government officials so that the public is aware of who they are and what information they are obtaining. The House leadership also removed a provision that cracks down on officials guilty of taking actions on the job to benefit themselves.

Before the changes, the House version had 300 co-sponsors, a passable majority, but the Republican leadership acted alone to block voting on the bill and amend it to remove the Senate provisions.

Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon, in a House leadership position, did not co- sponsor the stronger STOCK Act, which received support from a bipartisan group of 300 lawmakers, but supported the weaker version which passed. Today an online blog, Down With Tyranny, raised questions about past stock trades by McKeon. They highlighted 4 mutual funds that McKeon sold in 2008, two valued between $15,000 and $50,000 and 2 valued between $1,001 and $15,000. The funds had a sharp decline immediately after McKeon sold them and eventually lost 50% of their values.

McKeon stated today in a press release, “The American people have grown weary of Washington because they have come to believe that Washington operates on a different set of rules than those of American families and businesses.” McKeon’s own actions have helped to solidify this mistrust in Washington. He obtained a VIP mortgage from Countrywide. He uses his campaign funds to enrich his family members. He uses his defense industry connections to fill the coffers of his wife’s campaign and now he seems to have benefited from “perfect timing” when selling his stocks.

If you'd like to help Lee Rogers clean up Congress by replacing McKeon-- Alabamaians have no such option when it comes to Bachus, it being a one-party state with corruption thoroughly enshrined in the political culture-- you can contribute at the Blue America ActBlue page here.

"60 Minutes" goes after (legal) congressional corruption, and even targets a fair number of Republicans!

Contrary to the impression given by the presentation of this report on the "60 Minutes Overtime" webpage, tonight's report actually targeted a bunch of crooked Republicans before giving Nancy Pelosi attention (including a shockingly hacked video clip).

by Ken

It was only by accident that I stumbled onto Steve Kroft's report on tonight's edition of 60 Minutes (it's supposed to be here on the website, but I haven't been able to bring the page up -- is everybody trying to load it?). Once upon a time -- a long, long-ago time -- 60 Minutes was weekly "must" viewing, when the broadcast actually seemed focused on holding members of the political establishment to account for their deeds. Now it seems safely enmeshed in the Village media machine, seemingly aimed mostly aimed at paying tribute to that establishment, with occasional reference to wrongdoing that the system miraculously manages to self-correct.

It was just a couple of minutes after 7pm ET, and I'd just remembered to flip to channel 2 to see whether this was a week when CBS had a football game running long, thereby pushing back the network prime-time schedule and wreaking havoc on my scheduled recording of tonight's episode of The Good Wife. By the time what seemed like a 20-minute block of commercials ended, I saw that no, 60 Minutes was indeed on the air, and Steve Kroft was about to report a story that actually grabbed my attention: on what would be considered insider trading for anyone but congressmen, who are exempt from any such legal inhibitions, and other forms of more or less legal self-enriching congressional chicanery.

The clip above is from the "60 Minutes Overtime" webpage, which also features this text report:

November 13, 2011 6:46 PM

Questioning Pelosi: Steve Kroft heads to D.C.

By Overtime Staff

"Nobody would talk to us." That's what 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft says happened when he tried to get members of Congress to talk about "insider trading" on Capitol Hill.

It turns out that it is not illegal for member of Congress to make stock trades using inside information they learn while working on legislation, and Steve had some questions about some specific stock trades.

Since nobody involved would give him an interview, Steve had to find other ways to get some answers. As you'll see on Overtime this week, Steve looked for some lawmakers at their homes, attempted to track others down in their offices, and finally ended up asking questions at press conferences held by Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner.

"You don't like to do that stuff," Kroft tells Overtime producer David Rubin. "But on the other hand, if they don't want to talk to you and they don't want to give you an interview, and they are in powerful positions and play a prominent role in the story that you're doing, then you feel like sometimes you've got to do it."

Steve's 60 Minutes piece, Insiders, was produced by Ira Rosen and Gabrielle Schonder.

When the report itself (which is supposed to be available online here, though I haven't been able to get anything to load; too much traffic following the broadcast of the report?) began, I was a little nervous, because Steve Kroft made clear that the 60 Minutes it was coordinated with an investigation into personal wealth accumulation by members of Congress during their service spearheaded by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution -- you know, "the conservative Hoover Institution," at Stanford University (Howie passes on a Media Matters report, about which more later, which notes that Schweizer is the editor-in-chief of one of right-wing superloon Andrew Breitbart's websites) -- making it sound to the underinitiated as if fighting congressional corruption is a conservative or Republican cause. The reality is that the brazenness of congressional Republicans is the leading cause of the extent, indeed the institutionalization of congressional corruption.

Which is not, let me hasten to add, to deny the extent of Democratic congressional corruption, which we have covered pretty extensively here at DWT. But let's not kid ourselves as to the affiliation of the pioneers and grand masters of the field, the visionaries who have led the way for their fellows -- of, yes, both parties. It's one of the few areas in which Congress can be seen to be functionally bipartisan.

But to get back to the 60 Minutes report, when it got down to cases my apprehension was alleviated somewhat. From what we were shown on-air, Peter Schweizer seems to have done some actual hard-headed investigating. For the record, the first subject of his investigation, and the most egregious case we were presented with, was one of the House's most expert balancers of ultra-extreme right-wing ideology and ultra-extreme personal profiteering, the singularly repellent Spencer Bachus, a longtime DWT fave, and attention was then directed to financial funny business attributed to Republican former Speaker "Planet Denny" Hastert and present Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner, before moving on to Democratic then-Speaker (now House Minority Leader) Nancy Pelosi.

IT COULD BE COINCIDENCE THAT ON THE "60 MINUTES
OVERTIME" WEBSITE THE FEATURED TARGET IS PELOSI

As you can see above, the "Overtime" Web report is headed "Questioning Pelosi: Steve Kroft heads to D.C.," and at the top only Pelosi is pictured.

Well, no, I don't think it's a coincidence at all. Yes, the text mentions "Sunny John" Boehner as well, but not Spencer Bachus or "Planet Denny" Hastert. And it sure looks like the offender "caught" by 60 Minutes is Pelosi.

Which is indeed how the Right-Wing Lie Machine is already spinning the report. (Here's the shocked "REVEALED" report on Andrew Breitbart's right-wing lie-o-rama.) And that Media Matters report I mentioned above includes a pre-air comment from Pelosi, as well as documentation of an earlier, debunked Peter Schweizer smear of Pelosi, along with a link to a YouTube version of Kroft's press-conference Q&A that's shockingly, astoundingly different, more substantive than the eviscerated version aired by 60 Minutes aired. (The aired version, by hacking out nearly all of Pelosi's answer to Kroft's question, makes it sound as if she simply ducked the question, which is an out-and-out lie. Does CBS News have an ombudsman?) Media Matters also goes into much detail about the right-wing history and associations of Peter Schweizer and his associates.

In the 60 Minutes report's defense, it devoted significant air time to an interview with former Washington State Democratic Rep. Brian Baird, talking about his long-standing, futile effort to get Congress to enact some sort of legal bar to insider trading by its members, which never attracted more than six co-sponsors.

It would be a shame if the substance of the report were allowed to be overshadowed by the corrupt-wingnut spin. But I suppose it wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened. The Lie Machine knows its business. And certainly nobody who's in, or who has friends (or contacts) in, Congress has any interest in furthering the real story.

Still, it was nice to hear it surface just a bit.

#

How Spencer Bachus Sold His Own Constituents To J.P. Morgan

No one ran against Spencer Bachus last year. No one ran against him in 2008 either. Nor in 2006. Not in 2004 either. And it isn't because he's a good congressman; he isn't. He won his seat in 1992, defeating conservative Democrat Ben Erdreich, after a severe gerrymander that basically removed all the African-American voters in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa from what became the second reddest district in America-- 78% for Bush in 2004 and 76% for McCain in 2008. The district is 97% white -- in a state where 30% of the people are African-Americans. Jefferson County has more people than any other county in Alabama, close to 670,000 and almost 40% of the are African-Americans. They're all neatly in the 7th CD. The County bucked the rest of Alabama and voted for Barack Obama over McCain with 52%... but not the lily white suburban parts of the county that are the heart of Bachus' district, the 6th.

Earlier this year we covered the Jefferson County/J.P. Morgan sewer scandal-- when we saw that the shameless banksters at J.P. Morgan were threatening to sue the county for taking bribes... from J.P. Morgan. As we saw at the time, it's a case of corrupt politicians and corrupt banksters working hand in hand to rip off the people, screwing it up, and turning on each other. Everyone deserves exactly what they get, especially the teabagging imbeciles who elect these kinds of civic leaders-- and particularly Spencer Bachus, who's taken more in legalistic bribes from Wall Street, banking interests and insurance interests than any other member of the House of Representatives, save notoriously corrupt bankster stooges Eric Cantor and Charlie Rangel-- $4,808,139 so far-- and he works hard for the money. In fact, remember how Bachus thrilled his bankster buddies when as incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he insisted that federal lawmakers and regulators exist to serve the banks? "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," he exclaimed proudly.

This week Matt Taibbi took to the pages of Rolling Stone to bring everyone up to date on the way Bachus' pals at J.P. Morgan are ripping off Bachus' constituents in Jefferson County.

It has been established in various courts that bank officials literally bribed Jefferson County Commissioners to refinance using outrageously expensive interest rate swap deals, but despite a number of convictions of local pols like former Commissioner Larry Langford (who got 15 years for accepting bribes), Jefferson County will still be stuck paying this tab for the next gazillion years.

All of which sucks, of course, but the news keeps getting worse. The House Financial Services Committee has just voted to delay the scheduled implementation of reforms in the Dodd-Frank bill that would limit the ability of banks to pull Jefferson-County style scams in the future. Among other things, the new rules would have required banks to act in the best interests of their clients, and disclose daily pricing information about swaps, making it harder for banks to gouge clients.

In Jefferson County, the Alabamans were massively overcharged by Chase and other banks in large part because interest rate swaps, unlike, say, stocks, are not traded on open exchanges, so nobody knows how much they really cost. The situation is similar to what sports betting would be like if casinos did not publish the point spreads. If you walk into a casino the day before the Super Bowl and you're told the spread is Green Bay -6, you might think you're getting a good deal-- but the actual spread might be nine or ten points. Wall Street is making a killing similarly overcharging states and cities and counties (and even countries like Greece) for interest-rate swaps, regularly stealing half a touchdown here and there in these billion-dollar finance transactions.

The Dodd-Frank bill, ball-less as it mostly was, did have a few provisions in it that would have tightened up the rules governing such derivative transactions. But the House Financial Services Committee voted to stall implementation of these new rules until September 12th, at the very least. The cruel irony here is that the Committee is chaired by... Jefferson County's own congressman!

That's right: Alabama Republican Spencer Bachus, who up until recently was sounding like a real critic of these banking practices. This was Bachus a few years ago, making his own casino comparison:

When you have a county or city that is basically unsophisticated dealing with Wall Street professionals it's very similar to a person walking into a casino where the house always wins. Simply, the county and the Wall Street firms gambled with ratepayers money. While interest rates were low in the beginning, things ultimately blew up when the auction rate securities market collapsed.

That was then. Now, Bachus is the driving force behind this latest move to delay reforms. Wonder why? Just look to see who happens to be the top contributor to Bachus's campaigns for his career: J.P. Morgan Chase. Bloomberg elaborated on Bachus's ties to Wall Street, describing him as the third-biggest recipient of Wall Street cash in the House:

During his two decades in Congress, Bachus-- like Frank, his predecessor as chairman-- has nurtured ties to Wall Street donors who have poured cash into campaign chests of both Democrats and Republicans. He has received more than $7.1 million from political committees of finance, real estate and insurance companies and their employees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that tracks campaign donations. That’s more than any House member since 1989 aside from the Republicans’ two top leaders, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

If you read the whole Bloomberg piece you'll see other villains here, including Barney Frank and Michelle Bachmann(who is seeking to have all of Dodd-Frank overturned). But Bachus is the big story here. Here you have a congressman who represents a district that just happens to be the most conspicuous group of Main-Street victims of predatory banking practices in all of America-- and even he can't find a way to man up and do the right thing for his voters.

The other angle here is how finance reform inevitably gets whittled down into nothing. Dodd-Frank to begin with was maybe a ten-percent reform effort; the finance lobby killed about 90 percent of the real stuff before it even got voted on. The ten percent that did make it into "law" was still in limbo, as it always is after such laws are passed, while regulators hammered out the actual procedures for implementing the new legislation. These rulemaking processes inevitably take place in conference sessions heavily attended by industry stooges and lobbyists, with reform advocates seldom having even one or two voices at the table. You can count on another five percent disappearing in that process, if not more.

And now here comes the way to deal with the last five percent: stall. When all else fails, go into the four-corner offense and wait out the public. They will eventually forget, or else the political winds will change. It's really a beautiful demonstration of political organization and willpower-- too bad it's, you know, evil. All this for a new sewer!

So far, the Democrats have no candidate to run against Bachus... again.

There's A Way For The Idle, Parasitic Rich To Make A Contribution To Society-- They Could Pay Their Fair Share And Stop Cheating

Wednesday Wall Street shill Spencer Bachus of Alabama, who's accepted $4,644,824 in direct legalistic bribes from the financial companies he's supposedly helping to regulate, gaveled to session a meeting of his House Financial Services Committee with the express purpose of putting together a bill to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Remember, that bureau was created-- Republicans and conservative Democrats squawking the whole time-- in the wake of the Great Recession caused by predatory and abusive Wall Street practices. The idea was clearly to put a cop on the beat standing up for consumers in the financial marketplace, something anathema to GOP/Randian Law of the Jungle ideology, where the strong-- and predatory-- prosper while the unwary and meek get chewed up and spit out.

Bachus' own bill, HR 1121, would gut the bureau’s authority by making it easy for the other, more bankster-dominated, regulators to overturn its actions, while Sean Duffy's bankster-friendly proposal (HR 1315) seeks to limit the authority of the CFPB, and delay the July 21 transfer date of powers to the CFPB until a director is confirmed by a Senate in full obstructionist and filibuster mode. Yesterday Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of more than 250 national and state organizations working together for strong Wall Street reform, issued a statement warning the public of what Spencer and his cronies are up to-- and why it's so dangerous.

With more than 13.5 million Americans still out of work, the high cost of failing to establish fair and reasonable rules of the road for the financial sector is devastatingly clear. Unfair and reckless conduct by financial special interests cost Americans more than 8 million jobs, hundreds of billions in taxpayer funded bailouts, more than $8 trillion lost in home values and retirement savings, and millions of foreclosures.
 
The American public wants and needs an effective Consumer Bureau to prevent rip-off financial products laden with tricks, traps, and hidden fees. Abusive financial products take tens of billions of dollars a year out of our pockets, sending them to feed the inflated bonuses of a handful of Wall Street CEOs.
 
The leadership of the House Financial Services Committee has made no secret of the fact that they oppose the CFPB. For example, Rep. Neugebauer, chairman of the subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, said directly, “I don't like them.” Chairman Bachus said “my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” It certainly serves the financial special interests to disarm the CFPB.
 
The American public wants an end to shady business practices, and overwhelmingly supports the CFPB and Wall Street reform. Members of Congress should stand with consumers and reject these proposals to weaken the CFPB.

Meanwhile, Republicans, when they're not consumed with plotting for the shutdown of government altogether, have been busy pushing Paul Ryan's "cause," his dystopian Randian vision of a darker, meaner unlivable America, one that yesterday's NY Times summed up like this:

If the House Republican budget blueprint released on Tuesday is the “path to prosperity” that its title claims, it is hard to imagine what ruin would look like. The plan would condemn millions to the ranks of the uninsured, raise health costs for seniors and renege on the obligation to keep poor children fed. It envisions lower taxes for the wealthy than even George W. Bush imagined: A permanent extension for his tax cuts, plus large permanent estate-tax cuts, a new business tax cut and a lower top income tax rate for the richest taxpayers.

Ahhh... yes, the richest taxpayers (or, as is often the case, tax avoiders), the fatcats for whom deluded teabaggers serve as faithful, if unwitting, foot soldiers. Republican policy, much of it embraced by conflicted conservative Beltway Democrats, is predicated on lessening their "burden." Monday that isn't what Robert Reich was recommending, not if this country is going to prosper.

The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.

Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma-- even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget-- it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)

Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.
It’s just the opposite for super rich.

The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010-- $135 billion. That’s up 5.7 percent from 2009.

Yet, remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted. From the 1940s until 1980, the top tax income tax rate on the highest earners in America was at least 70 percent. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Now it’s 35 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II.

The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. Capital gains-- comprising most of the income of the super-rich-- were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.

If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.

If we also cut what we don’t need (corporate welfare and bloated defense), taxes could be reduced for everyone earning under $80,000, too. And with a single payer health-care system-- Medicare for all-- instead of a gaggle of for-profit providers, the nation could save billions more.

Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case regardless of where the tax rate is set. That’s why the government should aim high. (During the 1950s, when the top rate was 91 percent, the rich exploited loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent-- still substantial by today’s standards.)

And yes, some of the super rich will move their money to the Cayman Islands and other tax shelters. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship, and those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

But don’t the super-rich have enough political power to kill any attempt to get them to pay their fair share? Only if we let them. Here’s the issue around which Progressives, populists on the right and left, unionized workers, and all other working people who are just plain fed up ought to be able to unite.

Besides, the reason we have a Democrat in the White House-- indeed, the reason we have a Democratic Party at all – is to try to rebalance the economy exactly this way.

All the President has to do is connect the dots-- the explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of vital public services for the middle class and the poor.

This shouldn’t be difficult. Most Americans are on the receiving end. By now they know trickle-down economics is a lie. And they sense the dice are loaded in favor of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and their corporations, now paying a relative pittance in taxes. 

UPDATE: The Republican Party's Manufactured Budget Crisis

The GOP is so hysterical that the multimillionaires who finance their political careers haven't gotten big enough tax breaks that they are demanding endlessly increasing cutbacks... more and more and more-- purprose being, obviously, to cripple government entirely, especially when it comes to the programs conservatives have always hated, like protecting workers, minorities, women, consumers... In Ohio, John Kasich's predatory budget is even forcing the closure of his own daughters' schools! What the debate-- really more like a hostage situation with the GOP threatening to kill the whole economy and the Democrats in Stockholm Syndrome mode-- over shutting down the government comes down to this morning is that the craven, conflicted, cowardly Democrats have already given in to the GOP on absymally bad cutbacks for the future of the country and the lives of ordinary working families, paired with trillions right into the pockets of the rich. A handful of real progressive excepted, satisfied that they don't have to stand up like men and fight, in the Democrats' minds "the only sticking point left is an extreme policy measure that would cut off funding to women’s health centers that provide services like cancer screenings. A government shutdown would be devastating to our economy, middle class families, and our troops. Republicans should not shut down the government over ideological issues around women’s health centers. The Tea Party may be cheering for a shutdown, but the American people are not. By a 25 point margin, Americans say they want their representatives to compromise rather than force a shutdown. The margin is even wider among Independents-- 66 percent to 30 percent." When will Democrats learn that appeasing bullies and fascists never works? NEVER.

Krugman, who has made it clear he thinks Paul Ryan is nothing but a hollow flim flam man and a shill for the rich and powerful who finance his career, shows why his budget proposal is not serious but a combination of cruel and ludicrous, a point Rep. Jerry Nadler made to the Congressional Progressive Cause earlier this week:



ANOTHER UPDATE: I Was Wondering Why Elizabeth Warren Hasn't Said Anything

She did today: “This is precisely the goal of the forces at work to politicize the CFPB’s funding. If they succeed, the beneficiaries will be some of the same institutions that precipitated the financial crisis... In the guise of greater accountability, it would be possible to restructure the new consumer agency to make it less-- not more-- likely to achieve its stated goals."

The Ruling Elites Bought Themselves A Cycle And Now They Want To Squeeze All They Can Out Of Their Investment

Mark Kirk isn't a teabagger. They don't even like him. He's a relatively refined and mainstream kind of guy... in a conservative kind of way. And he's gay, although afraid to admit it publicly and tightly locked in the closet. And, unlike the neanderthals, who Michael Bloomberg was wailing about in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Mark Kirk certainly does know how to read and does know where China is. He even crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats late in September when they passed a bill opposing Chinese currency manipulation-- and against Boehner, Cantor, Dreier, Ryan and the rest of the Republican House leadership. Bloomberg, who fancies himself the anti-Teabag independent and reasonable moderate who should be president, endorsed Kirk last month and has a history of contributing to his campaigns going back to Kirk's first (unsuccessful) try for the Senate.

Visiting China this week, Bloomberg, NYC's globalist, multinational mayor, growled about congressional attempts to prevent China from illegally dumping solar panels into the American market with the express purpose of driving U.S. firms out of business. “If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate-- they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.” Former Rep. Robert Wexler, then a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, made the same observation in his book, Fire Breathing Liberal, about Know Nothing members of Congress, including members of his committee, for whom not having a passport-- or even eating "foreign" food-- was a badge of honor. Wexler endorsed Charlie Crist for the open Florida Senate seat and Crist lost to one of the bunch of Know Nothings Bloomberg was whining about, Marco Rubio, who's waltzing into the Senate-- and, many fear, the national stage-- after a 49% win, Crist and Kendrick Meek splitting the non-teabaggy vote.

Bloomberg's push to make the GOP more mainstream saw him endorsing Michael Castle in Delaware, who famously lost the Republican nomination to a former witch and anti-masturbation candidate, and Mark Kirk in Illinois. His Illinois candidate, Mr. Kirk, won, thereby helping to empower the provincial Know Nothings like Rubio, Ron Johnson (WI), Mike Lee (UT), Richard Burr (NC), Pat Toomey (PA) and Jim DeMint (SC). Bloomberg is no teabagger; he really is an enlightened mainstreamish kind of conservative. He's pro-choice, pro-gay... But, when push comes to shove, he a billionaire corporatist, one of them, not one of us. Robert Reich's blog yesterday dealt with America's two economies and why one is recovering and the other isn't. Bloomberg's-- the Big Money economy "comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives"-- is just fine, thanks to Bernanke's zero interest rate policies and money-printing mania: free money, as Patti Smith sang, but not for us; for them.

Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They’re merging and acquiring other companies.

And they’re going abroad in search of customers.

Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They’re selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America’s biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.

So don’t worry about America’s Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America’s largest corporations are heading upward.

But there’s another American economy, and it’s not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.

Last Friday’s jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That’s better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.

Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force-- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job-- we’re down about 22 million.

Or to put it another way, we’re still getting nowhere on jobs.

One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn’t working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.

And that means the bills aren’t getting paid.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans-- 53 percent-- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.

Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.

And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can’t refinance their homes. They can’t get home equity loans. Banks don’t want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.

And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren’t so sure. The economy has been so bad they’re angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

If a modern day Madame DeFarge happens to come across this blog, allow me to point cher Thérèse in the direction of Alabama Republican Spencer Bachus, who will replace Barney Frank as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in Janvier. Bachus plans to use his committee to attempt to roll back-- or at least cripple-- the Wall Street reforms that passed last year. He owes them that... at least. The next chairman has raised $6.1 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, with more than $1.1 coming in this election cycle alone. Over his career, Bachus has pulled in $1.2 million from commercial banking donors, and another $1.1 million from those representing the securities and investment industry. And you know what... he's not waiting 'til January to get busy paying back the Big Money economy Reich was talking about above.

The corrupt Alabama Wall Street shill, who claims the Volcker Rule, meant to curtail dangerous gambling and expansionist proclivities of barely regulated banks, insists, rather speciously, that it actually curtails job creation. He sent a letter to Geithner, who agrees with him anyway, about not enforcing it. But on Friday the two senators who wrote the provisions, Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Carl Levin (D-MI), sent a letter of their own. And theirs', unlike Bachus', instructed regulators to follow the law. Merkeley's office pointed out in a press release to Oregon media that "despite recent comments from some who opposed reform of the high-risk trading that contributed to the collapse of the American financial system, strong regulations are essential to preventing future boom and bust cycles that jeopardize the financial stability of American families."

“Now that Congress has passed and the President has signed into law the strongest protections for our financial system in 75 years, we look to you to follow the statutory intent to eliminate high risk and conflict-ridden activities at banks, and limit them at systemically significant non-bank financial firms,” the senators wrote.

“The Merkley-Levin provisions on proprietary trading and conflicts of interest, often called the Volcker Rule, offer key measures to address these issues. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) study will hopefully recommend vigorous enforcement of them and provide guidance to agencies on how to ensure their effective implementation. Financial firms must not be allowed to rely on implicit or explicit government support, through access to the Federal Reserve discount window, FDIC deposit insurance, or other taxpayer- financed mechanisms, to place bets where heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.”

In closing, I'd like to recommend an interview by Jan Frel with historian Lawrence Goodwyn, author of The Populist Movement, a condensed version of his harder to find Democratic Promise. Right at the outset, he tells Frel that he "underestimated the capacity for sheer greed that drives American banking. The evidence is compelling that a great many people within the financial community acknowledge no limits because they have a seriously atrophied loyalty to American society as a whole. I speak here of the cornerstone of the American democratic experiment itself: the sense that a majority of us have had-- have always had-- that we are in this thing together. Bankers are not with the rest of us on this. Perhaps they never have been. All exceptions freely conceded, but the general reality still holds: they are killing the promise of this republic." That certainly validates my own experience with that... sector.

The sequence of events is not debatable: 1) In 2001 Republicans inherited Clinton's hard-earned "balanced budget." 2) They immediately moved to dismantle it by generating a trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich. No more balance in the budget. 3) The GOP then added in a war against the threat of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist because the "evidence" concocted by Dick Cheney was fraudulent. Another trillion more or less. 4) En route, they tossed in a prescription drug benefit that added more trillions, conceivably forever-- or until we get the public option, whichever comes first. 5) An additional inheritance from Clinton was the culmination of the relentless conservative-championed campaign for "financial deregulation" sanctioned by Alan Greenspan, the old Fed chairman, and buttressed by the Milton Friedman-inspired balderdash trumpeting the emergence of a "rational market." (For reasons that have always escaped me, the latter piece of puffery found a home in the American economics profession.) 6) As a sendoff for his final days, Bush's Secretary of Treasury and his Federal Reserve Chairman found themselves saddled with the inevitable post-regulation financial crisis that (inconveniently enough) could no longer be postponed until after the 2008 election. The $800 billion or so embedded in the Toxic Assets Relief Program was the result.

...Over the past 30 years, the percentage of the national wealth held by the top 1 percent of the population has gone from 9 percent in 1976 to 28.9 percent in 2007. Quite soon this pampered one percent, heavily concentrated in the financial sector, will own one-third of all the wealth in the country. They do especially well in times of severe popular stress, whether these depleting moments are called depressions, recessions or downturns. "Bubbles" can also be counted on to afford opportunities for rapacious plunder, though in advanced capitalist countries, housing bubbles have provided especially lucrative terrain. Democracy as we know it cannot survive this maldistribution of the fruits of the labor of the toiling millions whose belief in the country make America what it is.

It gets better and better and I really recommend you read the whole thing, especially if you'd like to know why there's been so little deviation since Obama won in 2008 from the disastrous Bush years "on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country."

Eric Cantor & Spencer Baucus Give It To Ron Paul-- Without Lube

It was a little complicated following the intricacies of the last minute-- PLANNED last minute-- voting in the House last week. No one is ever going to persuade me that Pelosi and Hoyer and the rest of the Democratic leadership didn't confront the fact that they couldn't find enough votes to support Obama's Afghanistan war supplemental without domestic funding (since Democrats would desert) or with domestic funding (since Republicans would desert) so that they took the trickery route, confusing everyone into voting for a Rule that, in effect, authorized the war spending. Really disgusting!

But there was another vote I couldn't understand, Wednesday's GOP Motion to Recommit the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (HR 4173). What tipped me off that something was amiss was that aside from the usual cast of reactionary Blue Dogs crossing the aisle and voting with the Republicans, a couple of reform-minded Democrats who are very much in favor of Wall Street reform-- Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Paul Hodes (D-NH)-- each of whom turned around and voted for the bill's passage a few minutes later, voted to recommit. I think I understand it now. It was another move by the transpartisan ruling elite getting it two most loyal handmaidens, in this case, Eric Cantor (R-VA), who's taken $4,148,935 from the Finance Sector, and Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who's taken $4,338,674-- to make sure the weaker Audit the Fed language in the Senate bill would win out over the much stronger House language that Ron Paul was behind.

Remember, there were nearly 150 Democratic co-sponsors and just about every single Republican-- even opponents like Cantor and Bachus-- paying it lip service. So when it was announced that HR 4173 would be coming for a vote, Cantor and Bachus called Boehner at his tanning salon and told an aide they wanted to pull a fast one on Ron Paul and all the Paulistas who were ruining Cantor's latest parlor game: You Cut. The Paulistas have been flooding the voting with audit the Fed demands, driving Cantor bonkers. So, without informing Ron Paul-- let alone the 150 Democrats who co-sponsored it-- Cantor and Bachus introduced the Motion to Recommit with an instruction to put the House language back in the Wall Street Reform. And then they proceeded to vote on it without a debate or even an announcement of what it was.

Hodes and Grayson figured it out but Hoyer was definitely working and-in-glove with Cantor, Boehner and Bachus to get rid of the language that would have allowed audits going forward, not just audits looking backward (which is what the Senate passed). But no one else did. It explains why every single Republican voted for the motion, as they always do, but that the Democratic co-sponsors, for the most part didn't. Had Cantor allowed Ron Paul to introduce it or had Bachus mentioned what was in the motion, it would have been easy to find another 14 Democrats to vote YES. But that isn't what anyone wanted. So instead we get this bizarre vote with 21 conservative, mostly Blue Dog, Democrats voting, as they always do, with the GOP-- plus the two reformers, Grayson and Hodes. It failed 198-229, despite virtually the whole country-- and most Members of Congress-- wanting it to pass.

Mr. Magoo (R-AL) Can't Remember Who's On His "List" Of 17 Socialists In The House-- But He Knows There's One In The Senate-- And Unveils The Name

When we first brought up Alabama-based corporatist Spencer Bachus a few weeks ago, we mentioned that, although he is firmly entrenched in one of the deepest red and most politically backward congressional districts in America-- AL-06, which has been carefully gerrymandered to avoid Africa-America neighborhoods of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and gave 78% of its vote to Bush in 2004 and 76% to McCain last year-- Bachus is the #1 Republican recipient of legalized bribes from the FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) sector. Why would they give him $3,789,474, far, far more than the average member of the House? From his perch as the ranking Republican on the Financial Services Committee, charged with overseeing the regulation of those industries, he has led a largely successful battle to make sure there would be no effective regulation whatsoever, not of the banksters and not of insurance and real estate crooks who have cost the taxpayers over a trillion dollars as a direct result of Bachus and his fellow advocates of unbridled "free' markets-- free to plunder the public.

Still, $3,789,474 is an awful lot of loot for one congressman. Was he forced to solicit so much money shady lobbyists and drooling avaricious banksters and usurers because of the tough nature of how competitive his re-election bids have been? Actually, not. Bachus didn't have an opponent in 2008. Nor in 2006. He didn't have one in 2004 and in 2002 and 2000 there were just a couple of Libertarians-- Terry Reagin and Holden McAllister who each managed to draw a small handful of votes after spending so little money that neither was required to file a report with the FEC. And it doesn't look like Bachus, no matter how badly he represents average working families back in Alabama, has anything to fear in the future either. His politically dysfunction district was just rated by Cook to be even less competitive than it has been. The PVI of this Limbaugh-worshipping suburban district went from an already prohibitive R+25 in 2008 to a whopping R+29, tied with Mac Thornberry's trashy TX-13 as the least competitive reactionary district in America-- beating out Nathan Deal's KKK bastion in GA-09. So what does Bachus do with all the millions of dollars in bribes he gets from the special interests?

Well... we know he doesn't use it to hire good researchers. Last week, channeling a bizarro amalgam of one fascist and one neo-fascist-- Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN)-- Bachus was running around central Alabama claiming he has "a list" of 17 members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are... SOCIALISTS! He may well have believed no one outside of a bunch of yahoos at a GOP meeting in Jefferson County would have ever heard of his demagoguery but it leaked out to the press and he was forced to answer the question: who are the 17 House members he claims are on his list? Successfully drawing attention away from his shameful-- and starring-- role in the financial meltdown, Bachus finally pointed to his former House colleague-- voters have since promoted him to the U.S. Senate because of the outstanding job he did in countering extremists and shills like Bachus: Bernie Sanders.

Oddly, yesterday's Washington Post pointed out that the only "socialist" Bachus could name is someone whose anti-credit card rip-off bill he once signed onto as a co-sponsor.

Sanders, who considers himself a Democratic Socialist (not affiliated with the Socialist Party) declined through his spokesman to comment on Bachus's once warm embrace.

"What with the recession and all the unpleasantness on Wall Street, I don't want to gang up on the capitalists," Sanders' communications director, Michael Briggs, said wryly.

We're still awaiting comment from Bachus's office.

Doug Thornell, a spokesman for Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, says of Bachus's socialist counting hobby: "With all the challenges we face, it's stunning this is what Republicans are talking about. They sound like a broken record of GOP low points [by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann] from the 2008 campaign."

Will Starting An Organic Garden Be Dangerous For Michelle Obama?

Spencer & Joe, Republicans with secret lists of reds

I'm reading this engrossing book by Russ Baker right now, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I'm always up for a good anti-Bush read. I guess if I had known the book was an attempt to connect George H.W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination I wouldn't have read it. I never read conspiracy theory books. So I'm really glad I didn't know. He's got me convinced-- convinced that at the minimum there was a conspiracy at the highest level in the U.S. power elite... and I still have a couple hundred pages to go. I'm not ready to review the book yet but I'm mentioning it today because I want to refer back to something I blurted out, in parenthesis, yesterday:

We voted for "change," right? And Obama wants "change," right? And even if the filibuster-mad obstructionists in the Senate can stop every single thing he tries, there seems to be something at work for the status quo even more venal and deadly dangerous than the tactics employed by McConnell, Kyl, Cornyn, Burr, Coburn and Isakson. Reading between the lines at Glenn Greenwald's Salon post this week, you can detect a mighty powerful CIA might resistant to any kind of substantive change. (And these are, after all, the forces that got away with assassinating John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, a President and a senator running for president.)

Obama's going to have to act fast, act smart and be lucky to not wind up like the Kennedys and Paul Wellstone. I think-- or at least I want to think, he's being pretty courageous so far. The post went on to talk about all the vested interests-- and the members of Congress they own-- lined up against change: banksters, war contractors, the "health care" industry, the Israel lobby, and AgriBusiness. In fact, the post was mostly about AgriBusiness' determination to maintain a very costly-- costly for the tax payers-- status quo.

This morning I definitely do not mean to suggest that the non-organic food industry is going to knock off Michelle Obama. I just want to use their expression of selfish ire as an example of what the president has to go through with this whole Change Agenda thing. It all started when the First Lady very publicly planted an organic garden on the White House grounds to help promote the idea of eating fruits and vegetables and to help young people understand that not all foods come processed in a Mickey D Styrofoam container. Chemical companies-- the ones that poison most food grown in this country with cancer-causing sprays and stuff-- are furious and "worried it may plant a seed of doubt in consumers’ minds about conventionally grown crops." The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) wrote her a letter insinuating she's anti-poor people for extolling the virtues of organic over conventional.

MACA is Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont Crop Protection and they're fuming that she won't be using any chemicals on her crops. (I'm not making this up.)

The group is worried that the decision may give consumers the wrong impression about conventionally grown food.

“We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents,” the letter states. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.”

My friend Jill at La Vida Locavore published the entire letter-- and puts it in perspective. It's very hard going up against vested interests, particularly vested interests with lots of money and power.

And, remember, these people bought the mass media. They get their message across. Yesterday Karl Rove, instead of sitting in a court trying to persuade a jury not to lock him up for the rest of his life, was oozing his poison and twisted deception on the editorial pages of the Republican Party's Wall Street Journal. The director of the Pew Poll that Rove cites as the basis for his thesis-- that Obama is the most divisive president in 4 decades (something repeated by another Bush Regime insider, Michael Gerson, also an exemplar of truthfulness and trustworthiness-- claims that Rove and Gerson are full of shit, and purposely so.

Along the same lines, Missouri's most corrupt political hack, Roy Blunt, who's running for the GOP Senate nomination, is also twisting reality beyond recognition, claiming Bush was actually a regulator and warned us about mortgage deregulations. Since Blunt voted for every single deregulation that every came up since he was elected, I guess he wasn't paying attention-- just like all the rubber stamp Republicans. It gets worse.

A few weeks ago we made the point that the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus (R-AL), is a shill for banksters and a horses' ass. He also seems to have decided that his career path will now follow that of disgraced and deranged alcoholic Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).

Not too long ago, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was on Hardball, calling for the media to investigate her Congressional colleagues to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America." Well, it turns out that someone has taken up Bachmann's call on a proactive basis! His name is Spencer Bachus and he has made a list -- a secret list! -- of the socialists in the House of Representatives. Or so he told the Birmingham News. Who are the seventeen socialists? That's the secret part, apparently.

It just goes on and on. But the public doesn't seem to be buying in-- at least not yet. Obama has sky high approval ratings (72% in New York State and even 57% in Missouri and 56% in Kentucky, 2 states he lost last year) and the whole country seems to hate the Republican congressional caucus and their obstructionist leaders. In fact one of the obstructionists, Jim Bunning (R-KY) has the lowest approval ratings ever recorded for a sitting U.S. Senator (28%). And although North Carolina obstructionist Richard Burr hasn't fallen quite as low as Bunning yet, his chances of winning re-election will now depend entirely on how badly the Democrats pick an opponent for him.