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Today Blue America is hosting an old friend here at Crooks and Liars, Representative Paul Hodes. Paul first came onto our radar in 2006 was he was campaigning-- successfully, as it turned out-- against entrenched incumbent Charlie Bass in New Hampshire. Blue America endorsed him and has been gratified to see him consistently standing up for working families in the House of Representatives. He was one of the Democrats who put his foot down and refused to vote for the Wall Street bailout, TARP. He believes, firmly, that the government has to watch out for Main Street and for American consumers by reigning in the excesses of Wall Street. "I voted against the Wall Street bailout because I didn’t believe we should bail out the big banks while middle class families are hurting across America. I'm working-- fighting-- for tougher regulations on credit card companies, mortgage lenders, and big Wall Street banks so Wall Street’s greed will never be able to hurt middle class families again." When AIG's irresponsibility, unregulated avarice and gambler's instincts got them in trouble and they came looking for money from the government, it was Rep. Hodes who pointed out that to American taxpayers AIG "stands for arrogance, incompetence and greed."
Today, he's asked us to let our readers know that he'd like anyone who was considering donating to his campaign during this live blogging session, instead donate to the No on 1 campaign in Maine. Paul isn't a frightened, mealy-mouthed congressman tiptoeing around equality with a "separate but equal" non-solution for marriage rights. You don't hear him talking about domestic partnerships. He favors equal rights under the law for all couples regardless of gender. "The legislation passed in New Hampshire," he reminds us, "will ensure that all Granite Staters have equal rights under the law. And the law is consistent with the spirit of New Hampshire expressed in our state motto ‘Live Free or Die.’ Marriage equality gives equal justice to New Hampshire residents. I will continue to work for those same principles as a US Senator and I am a proud co-sponsor of the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act."
Please join us in the comments section below and let's talk with Paul about why he's demanding a timeline in Afghanistan and a public option in the health care reform bill-- and anything else you'd like to ask someone who's been serving in the House and wants to move over to the Senate.
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From Charlie Rose on PBS, Andrew Ross Sorkin discusses his new book Too Big to Fail. I highly recommend watching the entire interview if you've got an hour to spare. Wall Street has not learned their lessons even after as Sorkin puts it "they saw the world was about to fall off of its axis".
ANDREW SORKIN: And part of the thing that’s so interesting about them is they really were thinking ahead. It’s remarkable, at least to me, a board meeting in
Moscow in June -- not in September, in June -- where they are talking...
CHARLIE ROSE: Goldman Sachs.
ANDREW SORKIN: A Goldman Sachs board meeting where they were talking about whether they need to become a bank holding company. Do they need deposits?
At one point they talk about whether they should buy -- are you ready for this -- AIG for the deposits, because they’re thinking if the future keeps going this direction where you need deposits and you need to be the equivalent of a bank holding company, maybe we should buy a company like that. Obviously it doesn’t go anywhere.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is there anything wrong with the fact that when AIG got all that TARP money they had to -- they paid out about $12, $13 billion to Goldman Sachs as a counterpart.
ANDREW SORKIN: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time asking that question and tracing those two days. And I hope when you read it you really get to feel like you’re there and understand and appreciate what was going on.
And just to give it a little perspective, it really had happened now 24 hours after Lehman and Merrill had gone down, or Merrill had been sold to Bank of America.
The decision to give AIG $85 billion happened in the course of -- the first meeting was 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and by noon they decided to do it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Why did they do it?
ANDREW SORKIN: I think they saw the world was about to fall off of its axis. And, in fact, probably -- we were really quite close. And that would have been a very difficult decision.
Now, what they didn’t do was sit around the table, the conversation that we’ve had since then and say "Do you really need to pay out the full amounts to these banks? Could we give them a hair cut?"
CHARLIE ROSE: It was what, $40, $50 million?
ANDREW SORKIN: An extraordinary amount of money to banks throughout the world. And what if we’d gone into restructuring and said we’re not going to give you all this money? They didn’t have time to do that. They never really thought through that process. That never came up.
I mean, the funny and sad part about this entire book is many of the conversations -- the time, the amount of time that they are talking and thinking about these issues are much shorter than the amount of time we’ve been sitting and talking around this table now.
CHARLIE ROSE: How do you explain? Because they didn’t have time?
ANDREW SORKIN: There was no time. They were moving from meeting to meeting. They were running. They were racing. It really is -- it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint. And they’re running out of their minds.
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(Above video clips supplied by Overture Films)
I went to see a preview of Michael Moore's new film: Capitalism, A Love Story at the Bruin Theater in Westwood last week with Howie and Digby and it was a very fun night.
Moore has an incredible sense of humor and it always translates well into his movies and Capitalism is no different. He makes you laugh throughout his new project with images of the Roman Empire to satirical caricatures of Bush and AIG, but then he can also make you cry a second later, which makes his movies all the more powerful. When you see people holding camcorders while the eviction police are breaking down their doors to remove them your heart cries out.
We know that Wall Street and the mortgage industry pulled a monster con game on Americans and the result was that hard-working families lost their most prized position and that is the message at the heart of his movie. What good is "Capitalism" if it can't fill the basic needs of our people? How has it served America? Not how has it served the top 1% wealthy population, but the remaining 99% of the country that is driven by the messaging that you too can become rich and famous if you just work hard enough.
Ahhh, The American Dream.
What Moore believes is that capitalism is an absolute failure and is actually evil because at its heart, it's missing a moral core. The core comes back to the American worker. Does capitalism translate into the kind of America his father was part of while he grew up in Michigan? A place where a person could work hard, earn enough to raise the family and then retire with a pension? To Moore, the answer proves it has been a failure. He doesn't say he wants socialism to take hold, but I thought he was arguing for a sort of Constitutional Capitalism since he liked Capitalism back in the days when he father was able to prosper working at one company his entire life. Corporations should have to take care of their employees just like they do their profits. An equal partnership, so to speak. Is it possible? Moore thinks the system has become too corrupted, too evil to succeed in delivering the promise of a good life for the vast majority of the country.
Corporations are beholden to their stock holders and must maximize profits at all costs, regardless of how that affects their workers. So, even if GM records a huge profit for a particular year, they could then cut thousands of workers from the company the following year just to increase profits. Destroying cities and people's lives in the process don't factor in even when there has been no financial shortfall for them. To Moore that is the real evil and the way he sees it, it may be too late to fix.
He attacks Wall Street and Congress and all the players you think he would over the bailouts and then he asks the viewer to come up with a solution to the problem as he sees it.
Can America survive without Capitalism? Where do we go from here? There is much to see in this new flick and much to like. The one thing that he does is also give his audience plenty to think about.
It's nice to know that as Americans struggle with unemployment and lack of health insurance, at least one worthy group of lads are doing well!
American International Group is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.
The troubled insurance giant has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.
Uh, hon? We don't care if the Pope himself blesses you. We're not going to be happy about this. Nope.
The request puts the administration's new compensation czar on the spot by seeking his opinion about bonuses that were promised long before he took his post.
AIG doesn't actually need the permission of Kenneth R. Feinberg, who President Obama appointed last month to oversee the compensation of top executives at seven firms that have received large federal bailouts. But officials at AIG, whose federal rescue package stands at $180 billion, have been reluctant to move forward without political cover from the government.
"Anytime we write a check to anybody" it is highly scrutinized, said an AIG official, who declined to speak on the record because the negotiations with Feinberg are ongoing. "We would want to feel comfortable that the government is comfortable with what we are doing."
I don't know about you, but I'm not feeling all that comfortable with this.
The payments coming due next week include $2.4 million in bonuses for about 40 high-ranking executives at AIG, according to administration documents from earlier this year. Though the actual sum may have changed since then, the payments are much smaller than those that caused the upheaval in March.
To those of us who are lucky enough that they're still employed, I'll bet they're thinking about that past ten years of one- and two-percent raises, wondering how to get on that magical merry-go-round. Dream on!
From Ring of Fire and GoLeftTV, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Matt Taibbi on the bank bailout mess and the bipartisan blame for deregulation that led to the financial meltdown:
The stimulus packages and bailouts that the government has been a little too willing to hand over to our financial industries have not only given these giants more cash in their pockets, but they've also given these companies unprecedented power over our federal government. No other industry has been able to show up in Washington and get a blank check with no oversight, which really shows just who is in charge in our nation's capitol. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of Air America's Ring of Fire talks about this shift in power with Rolling Stone political correspondent Matt Taibbi.
Last night, before select audiences in places like Los Angeles and Chicago out to see other films, Michael Moore played a special trailer for his new movie about the financial meltdown. But this wasn't just any trailer:
Hi, I’m Michael Moore. Instead of using this time to tell you about my new movie I’d like to take a moment and ask you to join me in helping our fellow Americans. The downturn in the economy has hurt many people, people who have had no choice but to go on government assistance. Yet our welfare agencies can only do so much. That’s why I’m asking you to reach into your pockets right now and lend a hand. Ushers will be coming down the aisles to collect your donations for Citibank, Bank of America, AIG, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and a host of other needy banks and corporations. Won’t you please give generously? Now, I know what you’re thinking - I already gave at the bailout. And I know you did, but even if you’ve given in the past, give some more. It will make you feel… good.
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A pretty good barometer of Republicans' utter desperation these days is just how farflung from reality their attempts to characterize President Obama are getting to be.
Newt Gingrich, who's clearly preparing for a 2012 White House run, was interviewed yesterday on Fox by Greta Van Susteren. Gingrich has been trying desperately to smear Obama as a weak leader, while cozying up to the GOP's tea-bagging populist wing.
So he hit on a way to hit both sweet spots in one swell foop: Smear Obama as an incipient authoritarian.
The subject was Obama's press conference earlier this week. First in the order, of course, he had to blame Obama's popularity on the media: "I think the Washington White House press corps has taken such a pathetic dive with this president that they ought to just be part of his PR firm!"
But then he there was this exchange:
Van Susteren: Well, you know, Fox News Channel got, quote, punished -- Fox News Channel didn't get a question the other night -- Major Garrett, our White House correspondent -- because the Fox broadcast, not the Fox News Channel, but the Fox broadcast decided not to air the press conference.
Gingrich: Right. Which should tell all of you about the abuse of power inherent in this administration. They now control General Motors, they basically control Chrysler, they control Citibank, they control AIG, and they are prepared to punish people.
I think that's very dangerous, to have a president who thinks he should get up in the morning and punish Americans. You know, appease foreigners, bow to the Saudi king, embrace the Venezuelan dictator, and punish Americans? I think that's a very dangerous attitude.
Gingrich is clearly counting on the public to be like Fox News anchors: They have a convenient case amnesia about the previous eight years of wiretapping, screw-the-public Republican rule.
But notice the underlying meme here: Obama is an incipient dictator who will punish his enemies and rule with an iron fist. Which, of course, is exactly what we're hearing from the growing militia contingent.
We read that you have chosen to accept President Obama's ban on fundraising from PACs and lobbyists, but only for June 18 -- the day he headlines a fundraiser for you.
This isn’t just hypocritical -- it defies common sense that you'd think the public would believe this was a principled stand against special-interest influence.
For 364 days a year, your rules would allow members of Congress to leave a hearing about regulating Wall Street and then walk straight to the DSCC and DCCC offices to “dial for dollars” from Wall Street lobbyists who want more bailout money and less accountability to taxpayers. Most Americans would find that conflict of interest repulsive.
We call on you to ban PAC and lobbyist contributions 365 days a year, just as President Obama did.
This is actually the least you could do to take on special-interest influence.
Will the DSCC and DCCC reject donations from executives of bailout recipients such as AIG, the way you did for Enron? Will you require candidates you support to publicly endorse the real solution to special-interest influence: public funding of congressional elections?
The public is tired of political gamesmanship. Please recognize that your “one day of reform” is absurd on its face and, if left standing, an embarrassment to your organizations. We urge you to announce a 365-day ban of PAC and lobbyist contributions – at a minimum.
The Feds are closing in on a criminal fraud case against Joseph Cassano, reports ABC News, which tracked down the former AIG Financial Products czar wearing blue spandex and a sheepish expression outside his home in London. And before you wonder why a Brooklyn College educated swaps dealer with a name like Joe Cassano lives in London again, the answer is probably "taxes" -- and decimating taxes, it may not shock you to know, is fast emerging as the cornerstone of the AIG business model.
An ABC News investigation found that Cassano set up some dozens of separate companies, some off-shore, to handle the transactions, effectively keeping them off the books of AIG and out of sight of regulators in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, are the star witnesses on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as Congress continues to examine the government’s bailout and oversight of the American International Group (and, of course, those bonuses)
Is that the insane Michelle Bachmann I see asking questions? Barney Frank slapped her down over the use of her time. Didn't she just say that this:
"I’m a foreign correspondent on enemy lines and I try to let everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefarious activities that are taking place in Washington."
She's channeling her inner Glenn Beck and reaching out to the right wing militias.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner today told Congress the administration will seek unprecedented power to seize non-bank financial companies whose collapse could jeopardize the economy, a move Geithner said would have allowed the government to bail out insurance giant American International Group at a far lower cost to taxpayers.
...Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) seemed inclined to support Geithner's request, saying the government should have the same power over all financial services firms as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation does over banks.
"Banks also failed in 2008 . . . But the fact is that we have in place mechanisms . . . that contained the damage," Frank said. " . . . We need to give somebody, somewhere in the federal government. . . the power to do what the FDIC can do with banks.
They didn't have this particular Schoolhouse Rock when I was a kid, although my dad would have loved for us kids to see this one as much as we saw Conjunction Junction. In the '90s, the Schoolhouse Rock makers realized they had neglected an important part of American life and made videos covering borrowing money, budgeting, paying taxes, the stock market and even the national debt. Personally, I think they need to update it again and cover the loophole that allows corporate execs to pocket seven figure bonuses while bilking the average Joe out of what little life savings he is able to put away. Luckily, Brand New Films thought so too, and created "Larry the Loophole". Doesn't have the musical hooks of Schoolhouse Rock, but what it lacks in snappy music, it gains in honesty.
ABC's "This Week" - Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Susan Collins, R-Maine; Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.; Jared Bernstein, chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - Austan Goolsbee, member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Govs. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., and Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif.
NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Joe Klein, Kathleen Parker, Katty Kay, Mark Whitaker. Topics: Can President Obama control growing populist anger over the bad economy? Is your daily newspaper dead? Meter Questions: After the outrage over AIG bonuses, can Obama still accomplish most of what he wants? YES: 9 NO: 3; Does President Obama bear some responsibility for the sinking stock market? YES: 7 No: 5
CNN's "State of the Union" - Christina Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill.; Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H; Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich.
CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Eliot Spitzer talks to Fareed Zakaria about the economic crisis and the scandal that led to his own resignation as Governor of New York State. Spitzer conducted his own in-depth investigation of AIG when he was attorney general of New York State and says that while so much attention is focused on the AIG bonuses, we might be missing even bigger problems.
CNN's "Reliable Sources" - (per Twitter) Will be joined by Steve Croft, fresh from interview with Barack Obama. Expect to discuss Obama's Leno appearance, AIG bonuses, economic situation.
"Fox News Sunday" - Romer; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.; Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.; Pete Souza, White House photographer.
While the American International Group comes under fire from Congress over executive bonuses, it is quietly fighting the federal government for the return of $306 million in tax payments, some related to deals that were conducted through offshore tax havens.
A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.
A.I.G. is effectively suing its majority owner, the government, which has an 80 percent stake and has poured nearly $200 billion into the insurer in a bid to avert its collapse and avoid troubling the global financial markets. The company is in effect asking for even more money, in the form of tax refunds. The suit also suggests that A.I.G. is spending taxpayer money to pursue its case, something it is legally entitled to do. Its initial claim was denied by the Internal Revenue Service last year.
The House passed a bill on Thursday that would impose punishing taxes on big employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers.Democrats pressed for the quick action. "The American people demand protection and that's what we're doing today," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
--
A tax expert said there is plenty of precedent for levying punitive taxes on behavior that lawmakers find objectionable. Robert Willens, a corporate tax lawyer in New York, cited the steep excise taxes levied on money paid to firms to keep them from launching hostile takeover bids, known as "greenmail." "You can write very narrowly tailored laws," Willens said. "And they can do it for bonuses already paid."
Republicans as usual cried about the measure as was evident by Crying John Boehner who called it a political circus. I'm sure Limbaugh and Beck will tell their audiences that President Obama will be taxing right wing talk show hosts next.
And Chris Dodd was wrong in the way he handled the bonus issue. Everyone is blaming the economic team, but he should never have misled CNN and the public by declaring he had nothing to do with it. No matter what happened. He waffled his way through the questions Blitzer and Bash asked him about his flip flop. I'm sorry, that wasn't good. All he had to do was say he was looking into it when asked about it a few days ago. I like Chris Dodd a lot and I'm not blaming him personally for the problem, but he did not distinguish himself the last couple of days.
UPDATE: The golden boy, Eric Cantor voted for the bill while Crying Boehner didn't and it received a lot of Republican support. Almost 50% of House Republicans voted for the bill.
The bill passed on a 328-93 vote. In the end, 243 Democrats and 85 Republicans supported the bill, while six Democrats and 87 Republicans opposed it.
Here's the Roll Call vote results and you can see how many Republicans voted with the AIG's of the world. And how can we forget that virtually every single Republican-- including, of course, those currently screaming the loudest, have been harsh critics of every effort to limit executive compensation for companies taking TARP money.
David Shuster talks to Barney Frank about the AIG hearing today and the bonuses that the public is worked up over. Frank believes that we should bring a shareholders lawsuit to recover the money.
I'm not happy about AIG handing out these bonuses either but in the bigger scheme of things wonder how much of this is a distraction when compared to the billions that have been paid out to these companies that has not been accounted for. This gives the GOP something to howl over and pretend they care about taxpayers after eight years of them using our government as their feeding trough.
