ImpeachBush

Obama the neo-con is no longer in the closet

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:20 GMT

for those of us who've been waiting for obama to rip off his mask and reveal his true self, andrew levine, writing in counterpunch, claims that has now happened...

[W]ith what remains of organized labor finally beginning to fight back, and with the Occupy movements of last fall getting ready to burst forth again, American politics is no longer just an electoral circus in which two semi-established parties huckster their offerings to “moderate” voters. Because Democrats and Republicans are beholden to the same interests and because there are few differences between them that are not merely stylistic or cosmetic, our electoral politics has long been mainly of sociological or even clinical interest; what called for an explanation was why two such likeminded parties became so polarized, why they couldn’t “all just get along.” Now we have more important things to concern us; real politics is back.

But Obama is still relevant, especially in an election year, when our media can be counted on to work overtime covering every facet of the horse race, while ignoring matters of graver consequence. It is therefore timely to reflect on the trajectory of Obama’s governance to this point, and on one rather startling development in the Obama story that has emerged in recent weeks – his newfound willingness to trumpet neoconservative ideas.

Obama, or at least the Obama of term one, will be remembered, above all, for disappointing the hopes of the constituencies that put him in office. He will also be remembered not just for having raised the level of ambient hypocrisy, but for the audacity with which he talks the talk, while walking a very different walk. The more Obama waxes ‘populist,’ the better the rich do, and the more corporate criminality flourishes. The more he speaks of peace, the more the drones fly, and the more his very own Murder Incorporated (Navy Seals and the rest) spread murder and mayhem.

He gets away with it, in large part, because he’s good at fooling some of the people all of the time – not all liberals, but a sizeable number of them. Once it becomes clear to all that the Republicans will nominate their least scary contender, expect those liberals to make fools of themselves big time. No longer can they make a case for Obama by playing up the absurdity of a Trump or Cain or Bachmann presidency. Soon, they won’t have Newt Gingrich to kick around any more either. Expect Rick Santorum too to go the way of what Google says he is — unless, as in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, Romney again miscalculates and underspends.

[...]

But Obama’s readiness of late to signal approval for neoconservative ideology marks a new departure. What makes it all the more astonishing is how unnecessary it is. It is not as if anything is changing at the policy level. In deeds, not words, Obama has always been a practicing neocon; from Day One he could justifiably have declared “we are all neoconservatives now.” But he had too much sense to do anything of the sort — then.

[...]

Unless we have all been wrong about how smart Obama is, it could hardly be because he finds neocon musings intellectually engaging. And we can only hope that he isn’t testing the waters, seeing how much liberals of the Obama-is-the-best-of-all-possible-presidents school will accept. The most likely explanation is that, with an election coming, this is a calculated move on Obama’s part to close what space there is that separates him from Romney, the better to capture the rightward veering center.

Whatever the cause, there are indications of late that Obama has taken on board Kagan’s main contention – that American power is not in decline; that, quite the contrary, we are on the threshold of another glorious American century. The plain implication is that there is no hard crash in the offing, and therefore no need for the empire to change course. American world dominance isn’t over yet, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. And for this, the argument goes, the world can only be grateful.

[...]

But until now he has at least tried to be discreet about it; he was just a closet neocon. Now that is changing. Is it because he feels that the pressure to go to war against Iran is becoming irresistible, and that the wisest course for him, in an election year, is: if you can’t beat them, to join them? All that is clear for now is that the neocon con is back, and that it is happening not just in the Romney campaign – and, for what difference it makes, also in Gingrich’s and Santorum’s — but also, blatantly, at Obama’s instigation.

at least perhaps now, we can step away from the cognitive dissonance that has plagued those of us who have continued to cling to the "hope and change" mantra...

AT THE BREAK

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:28 GMT

by Vincent F. A. Golphin

It’s America, half time,
split between two determined tribes
vie for the hearts and minds of the crowd,
in a widely watched game
half-time America
phrase born in a bid for profit
praise for a dream gone wild
seized by prophesy
best described in dreary terms
a fight, struggle, challenge
between the US we’ve seen
and the US that’s yet to be
half-time America
crowds shudder in the pull
towards the desires that haunt
dreams - prosperity and peace -
and a past where the few
possessed the Dream in comfort
anxious from the first half
America in half time wonders
at what can happen next
hopes the next round
has quarterbacks who lead
not team players who
fumble and falter through plans
maybe there is no such thing as
someone who can lead US
down time’s rich green carpet
as individuals merge into a body,
team, for an advance into the unseen
inch by yard, year by year
players fall and sacrifice
to push toward victory
the prize that bends all efforts
out of the morass
of despair, greed and violence
down the way toward
the end that seems so far,
yet looms beyond reach,
every game’s goal, an end
America pushes
into the second half
faces the fate of inevitable choices
renewal or repeat.

Vincent F. A. Golphin writes and lives in Western, New York. His latest work is 10 Stories Down (FootHills Press), poems inspired by two, six-month stays in China. His poetry, fiction and essays have also appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Washington Living, Upstate New Yorker, The Southern Quarterly, Reporter Magazine, Drylongso, Fyah, MentalSatin, Pinnacle Hill Review, Invisible Universe, Bridges, Ishmael Reed's Konch Magazine, New Verse News, and UpandComing Magazine.
_____________________________________________________

Thursday Stuff

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:31 GMT

This combines Black History Month with more bad conduct from the banksters, though we can do something about it…

…and kudos to Ron Johnson (the good one) of J.C. Penney for standing up here (along with Ellen DeGeneres)…

…and in a related story, I’d been so preoccupied with the utterly manufactured “issue” of contraception offered in health insurance for Catholic institutions (I’m sure more screeching drivel on this subject from Christine Flowers will attack our sensibilities on this tomorrow) that I’d forgotten about Prop 8 in California…

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... from Jack Black

…and happy 70th birthday to Carole King.

Yves Smith: top 12 reasons why the mortgage deal stinks

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:08 GMT

jumping to the closing line, "...this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me"... we knew that, though, didn't we...?

yves smith writing in naked capitalism...

1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.

3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.

4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.

5. The enforcement is a joke. The first layer of supervision is the banks reporting on themselves. The framework is similar to that of the OCC consent decrees implemented last year, which Adam Levitin and yours truly, among others, decried as regulatory theater.

6. The past history of servicer consent decrees shows the servicers all fail to comply. Why? Servicer records and systems are terrible in the best of times, and their systems and fee structures aren’t set up to handle much in the way of delinquencies. As Tom Adams has pointed out in earlier posts, servicer behavior is predictable when their portfolios are hit with a high level of delinquencies and defaults: they cheat in all sorts of ways to reduce their losses.

7. The cave-in Nevada and Arizona on the Countrywide settlement suit is a special gift for Bank of America, who is by far the worst offender in the chain of title disaster (since, according to sworn testimony of its own employee in Kemp v. Countrywide, Countrywide failed to comply with trust delivery requirements). This move proves that failing to comply with a consent degree has no consequences but will merely be rolled into a new consent degree which will also fail to be enforced. These cases also alleged HAMP violations as consumer fraud violations and could have gotten costly and emboldened other states to file similar suits not just against Countrywide but other servicers, so it was useful to the other banks as well.

8. If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.

9. There is plenty of evidence of widespread abuses that appear not to be on the attorney generals’ or media’s radar, such as servicer driven foreclosures and looting of investors’ funds via impermissible and inflated charges. While no serious probe was undertaken, even the limited or peripheral investigations show massive failures (60% of documents had errors in AGs/Fed’s pathetically small sample). Similarly, the US Trustee’s office found widespread evidence of significant servicer errors in bankruptcy-related filings, such as inflated and bogus fees, and even substantial, completely made up charges. Yet the services and banks will suffer no real consequences for these abuses.

10. A deal on robosigning serves to cover up the much deeper chain of title problem. And don’t get too excited about the New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware MERS suits. They put pressure on banks to clean up this monstrous mess only if the AGs go through to trial and get tough penalties. The banks will want to settle their way out of that too. And even if these cases do go to trial and produce significant victories for the AGs, they still do not address the problem of failures to transfer notes correctly.

11. Don’t bet on a deus ex machina in terms of the new Federal foreclosure task force to improve this picture much. If you think Schneiderman, as a co-chairman who already has a full time day job in New York, is going to outfox a bunch of DC insiders who are part of the problem, I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you.

12. We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.

As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.

repeating myself from the previous post, it's sad, so very sad...

Robert Scheer: Our elections are a hoax

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:55 GMT

so very, very sad...

robert scheer writing in truthdig...

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year’s presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party’s super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign’s decision to seek super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined “Another Campaign for Sale.” The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” Obama said then. “They should be decided by the American people.” But sadly, as the Times editorial noted this week, “On Monday, the President abandoned that fundamental principle and gave in to the culture of the Citizens United decision that he once denounced as a ‘threat to our democracy.’ ”

[...]

Once again he has failed to take that case for economic justice to the American people and instead validated the Republican assault on what remains of our democracy.

and, with breakneck speed, we are headed to yet another presidential election where the choices are not really choices at all... i'm both angry and embarrassed that i actually thought 2008 presented a choice... silly me...