Fixing The Interest Rate Mess-- Bernie + AOC vs Biden + GOP

"Today’s loan sharks wear expensive suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions of dollars in total compensation by charging sky-high fees and usurious interest rates."
-Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

This morning must have been horrible for Status Quo Joe. He had to bite his tongue as Bernie and AOC went on the offensive with their new consumer-protection proposal, the Loan Shark Prevention Act, that targets the people and industries that have underwritten Biden's entire slimy career as a devoted servant to the banksters. The AOC/Bernie bill would cap interest rates on all consumer loans at 15%, effectively eliminating the payday loan industry and save Americans significant money on their credit card debts. Biden is generally considered the credit card industry's #1 political ally and he's was serving their interests before AOC was born!

The usury cap has been introduced by Bernie for over a decade but Republicans, working with slimy corrupt Democrats like Biden, have managed to kill it each time. Remember, banks borrow from the Fed at a 2.5% rate and their credit cards charge as much as 23%, sometimes more when they are branded with department stores and airlines. Payday charge annual rates as high as 667%, so this would be curtains for them. Politicians like Biden and the GOP in general will squeal like stuck pigs that the effect of the proposal would be to reduce access to credit for low-income families, since they have to turn to the modern day loan sharks because of poor credit.

The hope is that revived postal banking (which ended in 1967)-- being pushed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie and even a confused Wall Street ally like Kirsten Gillibrand-- will thrive in the space occupied by payday lenders.

Wednesday, Norman Solomon wrote what many low-info Democrats don't want to hear: Joe Biden Might as Well Be a Republican. Why? "Recent criticism of Joe Biden," he wrote, "for praising Dick Cheney as 'a decent man' and Mike Pence as 'a decent guy' merely scratches the surface of what’s wrong with the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. His compulsion to vouch for the decency of Republican leaders-- while calling Donald Trump an 'aberration'-- is consistent with Biden’s political record. It sheds light on why he’s probably the worst Democrat running for president."

After several decades of cutting corporate-friendly deals with GOP legislators-- often betraying the interests of core Democratic constituencies in the process-- Biden has a big psychological and political stake in denying that the entire GOP agenda is repugnant.

At the outset of his Senate career, Biden lost no time appealing to racism and running interference for huge corporate interests. He went on to play a historic role in helping to move the Supreme Court rightward and serving such predatory businesses as credit card companies, big banks and hedge funds.

Biden’s role as vice president included a near-miss at cutting a deal with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to slash Medicare and Social Security. While his record on labor and trade has been mediocre, Biden has enjoyed tight mutual alliances with moneyed elites.

The nickname that corporate media have bestowed on him, “Lunch Bucket Joe,” is wide of the mark. A bull’s-eye is “Wall Street Joe.”

With avuncular style, Biden has reflexively used pleasant rhetoric to grease the shaft given to millions of vulnerable people, suffering the consequences of his conciliatory approach to right-wing forces. Campaigning in Iowa a few days ago, Biden declared that “the other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition.” But his notable kinship with Republican politicians has made him more of an enabler than an opponent. Results have often been disastrous.

“In more than four decades of public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party,” HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter recounts. Biden often teamed up with Senate Republicans to pass bills at the top of corporate wish lists and to block measures for economic fairness.

...Opposing measures for racial equity and economic justice, Biden’s operational bonds with GOP leaders continued. Carter reports that “on domestic policy-- from school integration to tax policy-- he was functionally allied with the Reagan administration. He voted for a landmark Reagan tax bill that slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and exempted many wealthy families from the estate tax on unearned inheritances, a measure that cost the federal government an estimated $83 billion in annual revenue. He then called for a spending freeze on Social Security in order to reduce the deficits that tax law helped to create.”

Biden came through for corporate power again in November 1993 when he joined with 26 other Democrats and 34 Republicans to win Senate passage of NAFTA, the trade agreement strongly opposed by labor unions and environmental groups. In mid-1996, when Congress approved President Clinton’s “welfare reform” bill, Biden helped to vote the draconian measure into law. It predictably had devastating effects on women and children.

Throughout the 1990s-- from tax-rate changes that enriched the already-rich to deregulating banks with repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to loosening government curbs on credit default swaps-- Biden stood with the Senate’s Republicans and the most corporate-aligned Democrats. Carter sums up: “Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during the Clinton years. . . . Biden voted for all of it.”

Biden led the successful push to pass the milestone 1994 crime bill, engaging in racist tropes on the Senate floor along the way. By then, he had become a powerful lawmaker on criminal-justice issues.

In 1991, midway through his eight years as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden ran the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas that excluded witnesses who were prepared to corroborate Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment. “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights,” feminist author Rebecca Traister writes.

Early in the new century, Biden wielded another weighty gavel, with momentous results, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2002, congressional Democrats were closely divided on whether to greenlight the invasion of Iraq, while Republicans overwhelmingly backed President George W. Bush’s mendacious case for invading. Biden didn’t only vote for the Iraq invasion on the Senate floor in October 2002. Months earlier, he methodically excluded dissenting voices about the looming invasion at key hearings of the Foreign Relations Committee.

While his impact on foreign policy grew larger, Biden’s avid service to financial giants never flagged. One of his top priorities was a crusade for legislation to undermine bankruptcy protections. Biden was a mover and shaker behind the landmark 2005 bankruptcy bill. Before President Bush signed it into law, Biden was one of just 14 out of 45 Democratic senators to vote for the legislation.

The bankruptcy law was a monumental victory for credit-card firms — and a huge blow to consumers, including students saddled with debt. As happened so often during Biden’s 36 years in the Senate, he eagerly aligned himself with Republicans and a minority of Democrats to get the job done.

Now, running for president, Biden has no use for candor about his actual record. Instead, he keeps pretending that he has always been a champion of people he actually used his power to grievously harm.

In ideology and record on corporate power, the farthest from Biden among his competitors is Bernie Sanders. No wonder Biden has gone out of his way to distance himself from Sanders while voicing high regard for the wealthy. (I was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and continue to actively support him.)

Biden’s ongoing zeal to defend and accommodate Republicans in Congress is undiminished, as though they should not be held accountable for President Trump even while they aid and abet him. Days ago on the campaign trail-- while referring to Trump-- Biden asserted: “This is not the Republican Party.” And he spoke warmly of “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

All in all, it’s preposterous yet fitting for Joe Biden to claim that Republicans like Dick Cheney and Mike Pence are “decent.” He’s not only defending them. He’s also defending himself.

Who Would Jesus Waterboard? Overcharge? Deny Love?

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Jesus, when he got to town, basically say that his New Covenant would supersede the Old Testament, replacing the vengeful, jealous, petty god of the Jewish nomadic tribes with a more enlightened, loving, empathetic god? And yet today's so-called hard right Christians seem to ignore Jesus in all ways other than fetishism-- certainly ignoring his words-- and instead just hearken back to the Old Testament. Jesus didn't talk about gays or abortions; he talked an awful lot about opening one's heart to the poor. And what about that whole scene in the Temple with the money changers? Can that be interpreted by every Republican "Christian" senator as a way of justifying a vote against Bernie Sanders' bill to rein in usury?

Self proclaimed Christian bigots seem to never be on Jesus' side. They defended slavery. They defended racism. They defend aggressive war, imperialism, and even torture. They managed to turn that whole shtick about the rich man and the camel, Heaven and the eye of a needle on it's head until obscene wealth and corruption became-- in their gated world, defined by their media as the world-- the ultimate sign of god's grace.

Jesus never said "boo" about gays-- unless you want to count general stuff like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "Love one another." But yesterday when New Hampshire Governor John Lynch had no choice but to face up to the fact that both houses of his state legislature had passed marriage equality, he refused to sign the bill unless it is changed to "protect" religion and "religious" people. He'll sign the bill after throwing a sop to Jesus-hating bigots. Thus speaketh Lynch:

This morning, I met with House and Senate leaders, and the sponsors of this legislation, and gave them language that will provide additional protections to religious institutions.

This new language will provide the strongest and clearest protections for religious institutions and associations, and for the individuals working with such institutions. It will make clear that they cannot be forced to act in ways that violate their deeply held religious principles.

If the legislature passes this language, I will sign the same-sex marriage bill into law. If the legislature doesn’t pass these provisions, I will veto it.

The publisher of Satan's longtime media outlet in the state of New Hampshire went bonksters on Lynch this morning:

It is obvious from his statement Thursday afternoon that Gov. John Lynch has made a calculated political decision on the gay marriage bill. Whether or not the Legislature goes along with the changes he seeks, and we think it will, the fact is that Lynch has decided that politics wins over principle.

Hack Republican politicians, like John Sununu, are using the marriage equality bill as an opportunity to spread discord and stir up confusion, hatred and divisiveness. Sununu accused Lynch of trying to "wiggle out of his commitment to traditional marriage.... Once again, Gov. Lynch has discovered a way to be against something and for it at the same time. I wish he would spend as much time trying to cut spending in the budget as he obviously has trying to find a way to straddle the same-sex marriage issue."

So once the legislature makes the changes and Lynch signs the bill, that'll be six states where marriage is not criminalized between two people of the same gender. Don't count on North Carolina being the next. Here's a letter a reliable source gave me yesterday. It was sent to a gay constituent of homophobic Blue Dog Mike Mcintyre (who was one of only 17 Democrats to vote with most Republicans against-- not marriage equality but hate crimes). Yes, that's correct, Mike McIntyre who calls himself a Christian and calls himself a Democrat and whose own brother is rumored to be gay, is in favor of hate crimes.

Dear Friend:

Thank you for contacting me regarding your concerns about hate crimes legislation. I appreciate your thoughts on this measure, and I share your concerns.

On April 29, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. I opposed this bill because of my concern that it would be tantamount to "thought crime" legislation. Any American found guilty of a hate crime would face punishment above and beyond the original offense. Please be assured that I will continue to oppose hate crimes legislation that would unfairly elevate a special category of crime victims above others who suffer equally violent crimes and would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and religious freedom.

Thank you for contacting me about this important issue. I will continue to be a strong voice for you in Washington. If you would like to receive my periodic e-newsletter, visit my website at http://www.house.gov/mcintyre/

Sincerely,


Mike McIntyre
Member of Congress

Ironically, with Senator Richard Burr's approval ratings showing he's probably unelectable, the Democrats' surest bet, Attorney General Roy Cooper, withdrew from consideration today. That leaves the homophobic, reactionary Blue Dog McIntyre as the probable choice of the North Carolina Democratic Establishment.

Important anti-right-wing Jesus quotes that went into the writing of the above post:

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven"

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

"What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul."

"Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

"Love one another!"

"Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be the sons of God."

“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Voting Against Truth In Lending Means You Favor Untruth In Lending? Loan Sharking? You Hate Jesus?

GOP is the party of usury-- Why do they hate Jesus?

Last night the Senate continued debating H.R. 627, Carolyn Maloney's Truth In Lending Act, which already overwhelmingly passed the House and is being stalled in the Senate by a gaggle of corrupt senators who have been bought-off by the heavy spending banksters. First up today was an idiotic amendment the banking industry wrote for David Diapers Vitter (R-LA) to present which only managed to draw 28 votes, all of them from corrupt banking industry shills like Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $5,013,778), Dick Shelby (R-AL- $4,384,492), John Cornyn (R-TX- $4,314,592), John McCain (R-AZ- $32,423,813), Richard Burr (R-NC- $2,447,672), Jon Kyl (R-AZ- $3,708,608), Chuck Grassley (R-IA- $2,223,630), Jim DeMint (R-SC- $2,073,034), and Johnny Isakson (R-GA- $3,341,524).

That was followed by an amendment offered by Bernie Sanders (I-VT)-- with the backing of co-sponsors Tom Harkin (D-IA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jesus Christ-- opposing usury. The banksters have way too much power in the Senate, as Durbin pointed out last week when he actually said they "own this place," and the amendment failed 60-33, every single Republican (except Grassley) voting for usury and against God. They were joined by loathsome Jesus-hating/bankster loving Democrats like Max Baucus (D-MT- $4,633,243), Evan Bayh (D-IN- $3,987,896), Arlen Specter (D-PA- $5,753,310), Tom Carper (D-DE- $2,160,628), Kay Hagan (D-NC- $537,145), Mark Warner (D-VA- $2,431,066), Mary Landrieu (D-LA- $2,399,134), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR- $1,671,292), Ben Nelson (D-NE- $2,667,406), and Mark Pryor (D-AR- $1,321,948), who only got as far as the talking snake part of the Bible. Needless to say, the corrupt Democrats were joined by the corrupt independent, Joe Lieberman (CT- $9,981,924) who is completely owned by the banksters.

Carl Hulse put it another way in the NY Times, pointing out that consumers are increasingly pissed off how the credit card companies are gouging customers with impunity. Sanders bill sought to cap rates at 15% and even that modest reform failed.

Sanders said the card companies and banks were engaged in conduct that could get others hauled into court. He said one-third of all credit card holders are paying interest above 20 percent and as high as 41 percent.

“When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available,” said Mr. Sanders, who noted credit unions are limited to 15 percent. “They are engaged in loan-sharking.”

After the effort failed, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the Democratic chairman of the banking committee, proposed that the Federal Reserve be asked to provide an analysis of how Congress could rein in interest rates.

Senators said they hoped to finish up the credit card bill as early as Thursday, coinciding with a town hall meeting by President Obama on credit card issues in New Mexico.

UPDATE: Which Senators Got The Gold Stars Yesterday?

With banksters getting billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts and using significant portions of that to bribe and lobby members of Congress to allow them to continue their policies of usury these were the 33 members of the Senate willing to vote against them. If your senator isn't on this list, you should demand to know why.

Mark Begich (D-AK)
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
Roland Burris (D-IL)
Ben Cardin (D-MD)
Bob Casey (D-PA)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Chris Dodd (D-CT)
Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Russ Feingold (D-WI)
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Tom Harkin (D-IA)
Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
John Kerry (D-MA)
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Herb Kohl (D-WI)
Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Carl Levin (D-MI)
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Bob Menendez (D-NJ)
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Harry Reid (D-NV)
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Mark Udall (D-CO)
Tom Udall (D-NM)
Jim Webb (D-VA)
Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Could The Bible Have Saved Us From This Time Of Troubles? Sure... Or Hammurabi's Code

When activist/author Tom Geoghegan was running for Congress he came out to L.A. for a question and answer session with West Coast bloggers at BraveNewFilms. I was struck by the man's capacity to consistently refuse to fall into any boxes that trap even the most well intentioned political leaders. Tom is used to setting the agenda, not following someone else's. It's why so many of us supported his quixotic bid to capture a Machine-oriented Chicago seat held consecutively by three of the most disreputable characters in contemporary American politics: Dan Rostenkowski, Rod Blagojevic and, worse by far, Rahm Emanuel. And of all the outside-of-the-box formulations Tom laid on us that day, none made a greater impression than a discussion of usury.

When Obama was taking questions at his town hall meeting in Orange County last week, someone asked him about out-of-control interest rates. Obama isn't as hawkish on this as Geoghegan, but, clearly, he's thought about it. His comment pointed to a study by the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, Elizabeth Warren.

[S]he made a simple point… if you bought a toaster, and the toaster blew up in your face, there would be a law, a consumer safety law, that would protect you from buying that toaster. But if you get a credit card that blows up in your face, that starts off at zero-percent interest… and suddenly, it’s 29 percent; and if you’re late two days, suddenly you just paid another $30-- well, somehow that’s okay.

I think generally having some consumer safety, some consumer protection around credit cards, is important.

Geoghegan will tell you just how important in the new issue of Harper's Magazine-- How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed The Economy. It was for this kind of thinking I thought it was so important to elect a man of Geoghegan's intellect to Congress.

According to a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune last June, the number of collection cases before the circuit court of Cook County came to over 130,000. That’s double the number of cases in 2000, and well before the meltdown: obviously the number is even higher now.

...And then there are the home foreclosures, some 44,000 of them in 2008. The number of collection and foreclosure cases in this one county-- 174,000-- is equal to the total number of people in three entire Chicago wards: every man, woman, and child. I stress “child” in particular, since the banks give out credit cards like candy.

Yes, 174,000 cases-- and that was before the economy tanked. These are not old-fashioned collection cases either. Typically, the banks are enforcing arbitration awards handed down by “private arbitrators” who more or less work full time for the banks. So the banks can sue anyone anywhere in any court in America without having to provide a witness or prove a case.

The pain of all this may get much worse. If deflation comes (even in a mild form), it means each dollar of debt will be harder to repay. That’s why populists in the 1890s took up their pitchforks: deflation made it increasingly difficult to pay off the principal on their loans. But at least in the time of William Jennings Bryan, they were only paying back at 5 percent. While we deflate, credit-card holders will be paying off at rates of 20 percent to 35 percent, and 1890s-type deflation would make the rate feel more like 35
percent to 50 percent.

What’s the worst of all the legal changes that fill up collection courts? There are so many, but I’d pick the legalization of usury. It’s the form of deregulation that not only drove us into debt but also sped up the loss of the manufacturing jobs that created our middle class-- that, in short, brought about our current Time of Troubles.

...Some people still think our financial collapse was the result of a technical glitch-- a failure, say, to regulate derivatives or hedge funds. All we need is a better chairman of the SEC, like brass-knuckled Joe Kennedy, FDR’s first pick. It’s personnel-- it’s Senator Gramm’s fault. Or it’s Robert Rubin’s fault.

In fact, no amount of New Deal regulation or SEC-watching could have stopped what happened. Hedge funds in themselves did not cause Wall Street to collapse. Some New Deal–type regulation was actually introduced in recent years, but it failed to do much: think of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, which made CEOs swear an oath that their financial statements were not fraudulent. No, the deregulation that led to our Time of Troubles was of a deeper, darker kind. The problem was not that we “deregulated the New Deal” but that we deregulated a much older, even ancient, set of laws.

First, we removed the possibility of creating real, binding contracts by allowing employers to bust the unions that had been entering into these agreements for millions of people. Second, we allowed those same employers to cancel existing contracts, virtually at will, by transferring liability from one corporate shell to another, or letting a subsidiary go into Chapter 11 and then moving to “cancel” the contract rights, inluding lifetime health benefits and pensions. As one company after another “reorganized” in Chapter 11 to shed contract rights, working people learned that it was not rational to count on those rights and guarantees, or even to think in these future-oriented ways. No wonder people in our country began to live for the moment and take out loans and start running up debts.

And then we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter’s term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school. That’s when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.

Here’s what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn’t innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs. All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor, and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it’s just the banks.

And Geoghegan's solution to all this? His plan? A state owned bank in every state; a cap on interest rates (9%); public guardians on the Boards of Directors that the government has bailed out; a bail out by banks of unconscionable, usurious consumer debt; and "injecting equity directly into the accounts of working people rather than into banks."

The best way to do this is to announce a plan to raise the gross replacement rate of Social Security from 44 percent to something closer to 65 percent, which is still short of the rate in many European social democracies. We can afford this as much as or more than they can.

Like I said, Tom thinks outside the box. It's exactly what we need in this country-- a lot more Tom Geoghegans and a lot fewer Tom Prices, Tom McClintocks, Tom Coles and Tom Coburns. Meanwhile, at least a more prosaic congressional mind, NY Representative Carolyn Maloney's, has come up with the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights which would, among other things, "ban unfair interest rate increases on existing balances and prohibit 'double cycle' billing-- a practice in which credit card issuers charge interest on debt that has already been paid during the previous billing cycle." Last time the bill came up (September 23rd, 2008) it passed overwhelmingly, 312-112, with 84 Republicans abandoning their corrupt leadership to cross the aisle and vote with all the Democrats except one, Blue Dog corporatist Stephanie Herseth Sandlin. It then died in the Senate. Unless Evan Bayh's anti-Obama bloc wants to commit mass suicide-- an attractive idea-- by crossing the aisle to the Republican side on this one, it will pass if it comes up in the current session.