Crime of the Century

Robert Scheer's Columns

Crime of the Century

Posted on Jul 6, 2012

AP/Mark Lennihan

Robert E. Diamond Jr., newly resigned as the CEO of Barclays.

By Robert Scheer

Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.

Caught as the proverbial deer in the headlights, Barclays Chairman Robert E. Diamond Jr. resigned this week and offered a plaintive defense to the British Parliament that he learned only recently that his bank was manipulating the index on which so large a part of international trade is based. That is plausible only if we assume he was paid $10 million a year to be deliberately ignorant. The Wall Street Journal had exposed this scandal fully four years ago but his bank continued to participate in it nonetheless.  

“Study Casts Doubt on Key Rate” was the headline on the May 29, 2008, investigative report, which concluded: “Major banks are contributing to the erratic behavior of a crucial global lending benchmark, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.” Even then, according to the report, it was known that the Libor rate was being manipulated “to act as if the banking system was doing better than it was at critical junctures in the financial crisis.”

Fast-forward four years to Diamond’s testimony before Parliament this week in which the CEO claimed his recent discovery of a pattern of interest manipulation by Barclays had made him “physically sick.” Who was to blame? According to the executive, subordinates acting behind his back.

The American-born banker, who has dual citizenship in the United States and Britain, is well versed in financial chicanery, having started by putting together derivatives packages at Credit Suisse First Boston back in 1996. He was compelled under parliamentary questioning Wednesday to admit that “I can’t sit here and say no one in the industry [knew] about the problems with Libor. There was an issue out there and it should have been dealt with more broadly.” 

He couldn’t deny widespread chicanery within his bank because, as in the collapse of Enron a decade ago, investigators had uncovered an email record of market manipulation so glaring that if the top executives were unaware, it was because they didn’t want to know.  

As The New York Times editorialized: “The evidence, cited by the Justice Department—which Barclays agreed is ‘true and accurate’—is damning. ‘Always happy to help,’ one employee wrote in an email after being asked to submit false information. ‘If you know how to keep a secret, I’ll bring you in on it,’ wrote a Barclays trader to a trader at another bank, referring to their strategies for mutual gain. If that’s not conspiracy and price-fixing, what is?”

The U.S. Justice Department made a deal with Barclays, and although it may prosecute some individuals in the scam, it agreed not to go after the bank itself. “Such an agreement makes sense only if that cooperation will allow prosecutors to nail other banks that have been involved in setting the rates, including potential cases against Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC ... ,” the Times editorial said.

Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were reported by The Wall Street Journal years ago to be suspected of rigging the Libor interest rate. The leaders of those banks, despite such media exposure, clearly remained confident enough to continue on their merry way.

The sad reality is that they will probably get away with it. The world of high finance is by design as obscure and opaque as the bankers and their political surrogates can make it, and even this most recent crack in their defense of deception will soon be made to go away.

Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.” Keep up with Robert Scheer’s latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/robert_scheer.

The Elite Coup is Complete (Part 2)

The Elite Coup is Complete (Part 2)

by Robert Hunziker / July 5th, 2012

The thirty-year bloodless coup, taking over America, conducted by the political, academic, and financial elite is a fait accompli as evidenced by the failure to charge anybody for the horrendous, and well documented, criminality behind America’s housing/financial bust of 2008 as described in “The Elite Coup is Complete,”  June 27th, 2012.

Now, for the next step, a leader is needed to implement the final stages of the coup, and all signs point directly at the U.S. presidential election scheduled for November 6th.  This election will likely be the crowning stroke for plutocratic America.

Aside from known political leaders, like President Reagan and Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, for over three decades now, the elites have been led by shadowy, amorphous figureheads that are as perplexing to understand as the Smoking Man in The X-Files TV series, meaning: Things happen to advance the elite’s interests, but, often times, nobody knows how, or by whom. However, now that the elites have completed their coup, they need to elect a leader who understands the business culture of High Net Worth Individuals, which is defined by Forbes Magazine as somebody worth over $30 million, and Mitt Romney qualifies eight times over. This article intends to explore the workings behind the scenes to assure his victory.

There are approximately 300 million television sets in U.S. households and, on average, people watch TV four hours per day; it is a way of life in America, and repetitively, it reinforces messages with images and sound bites. In that regard, and with unlimited amounts of money for political advertising now available, America is about to experience its first-ever presidential election competing for airtime with televangelists.

The question is: Will the political tide turn to a new presidency in 2012 based upon television ads? If the recent Wisconsin recall vote is a prognosticator, which vote included a flawed candidate (Republican Gov. Scott Walker) who overcame a 10-point deficit in the polls as the first governor in U.S. history to withstand a recall vote, the answer is a resounding yes, without a doubt. The Wisconsin experience is proof positive.

Henceforward, ever since the Citizens United decision, the august Supreme Court justices have done more than toss a bone (a very big bone indeed) to wealthy political interests; they have ‘branded’ media as the Tammany Hall of America’s political future. No doubt, Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity and author, or co-author, of 11 books, including The Buying of the President series, will now write a new book, but his research efforts will be a real pain in the gluteus maximus because the Citizens United decision forces him to wear a miner’s hard hat with an attached lamp now that politics have gone deep underground within labyrinthine tunnels that are almost impossible to navigate, thus, bringing forth a new democracy for a new age, redefining democracy, the institution, as purely a tool of ‘who has the most money’ like never before. Henceforth, elections are won as reliably as “throwing a fight” in Las Vegas, circa the1950s.

To understand the challenge for Lewis’ new book, consider the struggle as described by OpenSecrets,  which is the database for the pre-eminent investigative body, Center for Responsive Politics, Washington, D.C., that follows money in politics. They have an on-going strategy; i.e., “Shadow Money Trail,” to locate and catalog contributions to politically active nonprofit organizations that are not required to disclose their donors to the public. Since the Citizens United ruling, OpenSecrets’ experience in discovering information has been similar to traveling in a maze that leads from one dead end to another.

Nevertheless, the Shadow Money Trail has already unearthed some juicy information, but trying to understand the serpentine flow of the various relationships they uncovered gives rise to a migraine headache because: One 501(c)(4) gives funds to another 501(c)(4) and, in turn, to others, and others, and to others to the point where the layers make it nearly impossible to connect the dots {501(c)(4)s are tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations that must operate exclusively to promote social welfare in order to retain their special IRS status and not violate the law.}* An example of a registered 501(c)(4) is Center to Protect Patient’s Rights (“CPPR”) out of Arizona, a secretive well-funded group that masquerades as an organization concerned about health care but which, in reality, funnels money to other secretive groups that spend millions on TV adds attacking Democrats running for the House and Senate. It is entirely possible, and probable, the only patients they protect are right-wing-leaning politicians.

* In 2010, Senate Republicans filibustered, and prevented, a vote on a bill, the DISCLOSE ACT, passed by the House that addressed identification of donors of 501(c) (4) s.

CPPR provides grants to clusters of well-known conservative groups that also operate under 501(c)(4)s classified as “social welfare” groups like American Future Fund, which is based in Iowa. They run hard-hitting ads against Democrats across the country. In turn, American Future Fund funds other hard-hitting 501(c)(4)s, and those recipients fund other funds. You get the picture; however, organizations that have nothing to hide do not need to funnel money from one shadowy group to another to another, leaving “social welfare” in the dust and creating a daisy chain whereby it is impossible to connect the dots. Somehow, this interminable Alice in Wonderland fable never reveals who’s behind the curtain. On the surface, the whole affaire appears so blatantly contrived it stinks like putrid fish in the hot sun! These are grownups playing Ring Around the Rosie.

The executive director of CPPR is Sean Noble of Arizona, a PR/Political consultant and former GOP chief of staff to former Republican Rep. John Shadegg (AR). Noble takes no salary from CPPR, but his firm, Noble Associates, is paid $340,000 for management services. Wow! These people cannot get past the concept of shuffling money from one fund to another fund; everything is shifty!  Sean is also director of a robo-calling service (talk about symbiotic businesses!) called DC London Inc., probably referencing a direct connection to Rebekah Brooks. According to Politico, Noble is a Koch operative. CPPR’s stated mandate is: “…educating the public on issues related to health care with an emphasis on patient’s rights.” Ahem!

This is where the IRS enters the picture because, according to Reuters as of June 29, 2012, the IRS is investigating such groups to determine whether their fundraising or advertising runs afoul of tax law. Here’s the issue in a nutshell: Super PACs, which must disclose their donors, operate independently from campaigns but may release ads that boost or attack specific candidates. Whereas tax-exempt groups qualifying under the U.S. tax code as, for example, “social welfare” groups, which are 501(c)(4)s, are allowed to keep their donors private (secretive) as long as most of their money is spent on so-called “issue ads.” Unlike regular political ads, such ads cannot use a candidate’s name or likeness and are supposed to be used to educate the public on broad issues or positions. There’s a lot of gray area within that mandate, and here’s guessing the law may be violated via convoluted relationships! But, nobody will know for sure until the IRS investigations are completed after the upcoming elections.

Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (America’s most powerful Republican political force) is another beneficiary of CPPR.  The names of these groups that play Ring Around the Rosie are always couched in patriotism or social welfare; e.g., 60 Plus Association, Americans for Job Security, US Health Freedom Coalition, Americans United for Life Action (who came up with this one?), Freedom Vote, and Concerned Women 4 America (honestly, these are not fictitious names). The list goes on, and on, with rah-rah all-American-sounding names for organizations that, in reality, conduct operations like 1930s Brown Shirt cells opaquely operating in dark shadows. One has to wonder who they think they are fooling (hopefully, not the IRS), but yet, this is the problem; they are fooling a lot of people! The entire affaire has the odor of impish pranksters, and oh, please… the names of the groups are so embarrassingly phony, trite, spurious, and juvenile, but regardless, and herein lay the ugly truth: Their efforts do influence voters in a very profound way. Just ask Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose transparent (“legal”) funding groups outspent his Democratic challenger 2-to-1. But, the tentacled non-reporting groups attached to CPPR spent who knows how much? Nobody will ever know, but according to Mike McCabe of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, “We have a level of outside interference in this election that the state has never seen before.” (Sources claim Walker outspent his opponent 7-to-1.)

This type of stealthy underground, behind-the-curtain politicking carries a particular stench unique to weak-kneed minions that grovel at the feet of insipid moguls. Herein one sees the unseemly underbelly of this upcoming political campaign. One would think the disgust amongst voters would register a strong backlash, but then again, the voters do not know who is behind which curtain… connecting the dots is such a problem. Governor Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin proves this in spades.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy: One year ago, 54% of Wisconsinites disapproved of Walker’s job performance. Over the following months, “Walker spent unprecedented sums on a seamless eight-month public relations campaign that dwarfed the television expenditures of his opponent.”

Here’s how Walker did it, as one example: Walker went on air in November 2011 (seven months before the June 2012 recall) with an ad featuring “Kristi,” a high school teacher who effectively frames the issue. “In my opinion, it feels a little bit like sour grapes,” says Kristi with a killer Wisconsin accent, “It feels like — we didn’t get our way, we want to change the outcome.” This message was hammered, and hammered, again, and again, with dark money ads in the final weeks of the election by an unknown group with unknown donors called Coalition for American Values (here we go again with another immature name), featuring actors who “did not vote for Walker,” but brought the message that recalls “are not the Wisconsin way.” Since Coalition for American Values files as a 501(c)(4), the question for the IRS is: Does Kristi’s ad represent money spent for “social welfare” purposes and/or was spending for her ad disproportionate to spending on actual “social welfare” campaigns conducted by Coalition for American Values?

The Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (here’s another one of those infantile-sounding organizational names, transparently phony and stupid… oh please!) also spent serious money with an intensive ad campaign attempting to convince Wisconsinites that Walker’s budget cuts were working…not! (See: “Will Gov. Scott Walker Ever Come Clean on Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit?”) Eventually, the Koch’s alone would outspend the democratic candidate $10 million to $3.9 million, or over 2:1.

Well… now that the Walker test case was so unbelievably successful, there’s no guessing what happens in the general election coming up in four short months, but the writing is on the wall. If a flawed candidate like Walker can win by coming back from 10 points down in seven months, then just imagine what the underground propagandists can do for Governor Romney, whose race against President Obama is already looking like a photo finish!

With Romney in control, one day it’ll be repeal of Obama’s health care plan, the next day putting people to work on the Keystone XL Pipeline (to read about America’s most under-reported oil spill, Google: “Observer Michigan oil spill”), and followed the next day with carte blanche fracking all across the land to achieve energy independence by forcing/blasting carcinogens deep underground to pressure the release of oil or gas from centuries-old tight formations in the general vicinity of America’s underground fresh water aquifers.

All of this begs the question: What safeguards will be exercised or will the Romney team follow the path of least resistance so characteristic of the Right, eliminating federal governmental regulations, a 100% laissez faire economy with self-regulating private enterprise. This is the mantra of all of the above-mentioned funding groups, but look at what happens when they are regulated…   BP/Gulf of Mexico!

• Read Part 1 here.

Robert Hunziker, a former hedge fund manager, is a professional independent negotiator for worldwide commodity actual transactions and a freelance writer for progressive publications as well as business journals. Mr. Hunziker earned an MA degree in economic history at DePaul University/Chicago, and he resides in Los Angeles. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

This article was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2012 at 8:01am and is filed under Capitalism, Corporate Globalization, Elections.

The Elite Coup is Complete

The Elite Coup is Complete

by Robert Hunziker / June 27th, 2012

The American plutocratic revolution is now complete. The proof is: There are no criminal charges for the housing bust and financial meltdown of 2008. Starting with Reagan in the 1980s, as of today the Right has won their decades-long overthrow for complete control of America. An elite corps of wealthy now run the country. Their bloodless rebellion, a coup d’etat whereby the Left was nullified by a tripartite (bankers, academia, and politicians) cabal’s tour de force, is a sharp contrast to the old-fashioned traditional bloody coup d’etats we’re accustomed to in South America; e.g., the Chilean September 1973 military coup against President Allende conducted by ultra right wing General Pinochet, who, after bombing the presidential palace, massacred the Left (See the film Missing, by Costa-Gavras, Universal Pictures, 1982.). Of course, Pinochet’s old-fashioned coup had the advantage of speed and efficiency, completed within hours, whereas America’s bloodless coup took decades to accomplish, but on the other hand, America has not yet condoned military occupation on domestic soil.

The proof of a successful coup by the plutocratic elite is everywhere on display because it is absolutely remarkable how much we know about their unethical and/or criminal behavior behind America’s 2007-08 financial meltdown without knowing what to do about it!

As Charles H. Ferguson, winner of the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Inside Job, says, “There is overwhelming evidence of massive criminal behavior” in the 2007-08 real estate bust and financial meltdown, but nobody has been charged with a crime. This, in part, is why his recently published Predator Nation, Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (Random House, 2012) footnotes/documents the virulent combination of unchecked greed and criminal behavior behind the financial collapse of 2008. Ferguson identifies leading bankers, academics, and politicians who collaborated to pillage the American public. The book has been called a “roadmap for prosecution,” naming the culpable, stating the crimes, referencing laws that were broken.

How this tragedy occurred right under the country’s collective noses is a lengthy and nefarious story. Charles Ferguson’s new book covers this story with remarkable detail. Ferguson’s diatribe is laced by a book cover depicting a one hundred dollar bill folded into the image of a hand, flipping the bird, an obvious reference to the perpetrating financial, political, and academic elite’s haughty attitude towards the general public, emphasizing the dauntless, depraved lawlessness behind their theft committed in broad daylight. And, part of Ferguson’s thesis is exactly that; i.e., criminal acts led to, and were the cause of, one of history’s worst financial meltdowns. He also paints the picture of how America has been hijacked by a financial elite, an oligarchy that operates at the expense of the entire American population: “The financial sector is the core of a new oligarchy that has risen to power over the past thirty years, and that has profoundly changed American life.”

Ferguson’s ingenious work is, without a doubt, on target because we, as a nation, know it is true. Not only have oodles of articles and books already flushed out this repugnant story but intuitively, the citizens of the country know it is true because of how the disaster came down; namely, governmental policy and Wall Street chicanery turned the housing industry into a gigantic Las Vegas craps table and dispensed free playing chips to beginners. Millions of unsuspecting Americans bought into this deal-of-a-lifetime, and when the house of cards tumbled, unsuspecting American taxpayers rescued the culprits, but the bankers already tucked away gargantuan fees.

We also know it is true because it happened in broad daylight, right before our eyes, caught on camera was the U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, on one knee before a stern-faced, but dismayed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pleading congressional approval for $700 billion (taxpayer funds) to bail out his buddies (so sorry Richard S. Fuld, Jr., CEO, Lehman Brothers, no jerks allowed.) Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve turned the SWIFT international wire system white hot, spreading trillions of US Dollars around the globe to foreign banks and multinational corporate interests in order to keep the worldwide ship of state afloat, and surrounding these horrifying events, the housing market crumbled apart like broken tinker toys, credit dissipated, and Wall Street crashed with the durable S& P Index registering a nasty, and ominously devilish, 666 low print early in March 2009.

As of today, people who are not normally schooled in the language of the Wall Street know names of people and of programs, like Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman, Freddie Mac, credit default swaps, and derivatives. Wall Street and big banks are the butt ends of crass jokes on late night TV, and inequality of income/wealth has never been so obvious. According to a recent Survey of Consumer Finance by the Federal Reserve, median family net worth fell 40% from 2007 to 2010. Meanwhile, according to Forbes Magazine, billionaires and multi-millionaires set all-time records. The discrepancy between Middle America and Wall Street has never been so radiantly exposed, and the general public has finally learned how Wall Street makes a killing off their backs. Most likely, Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein, whose firm bet against (short sales) toxic securities they sold to other institutions, would not survive a stroll down Main Street in certain parts of the country.

The American public is overly informed about how and why one of the most corrupt and stupidest-ever financial schemes body-slammed the world economy, but as Charles Ferguson astutely declares, “Nobody has gone to jail” (poor ole Bernie Madoff must feel like he’s carrying the burden for everybody.)  Mortgage brokers, Wall Street investment bankers, commercial bankers, credit rating agencies, accountants, and politicians are complicit in the world’s biggest-ever ponzi scheme, taking advantage of the entire population of the country and sticking it to foreign banks/institutions by selling them toxic housing securities. The pure ugliness, brazenness, and gall of the perpetrators is enough to turn one’s stomach. As for CEO Fuld, he was attacked shortly after it was announced Lehman was bankrupt: “He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold.” (The Telegraph, October 7, 2008.)

According to Ferguson, there is overwhelming public evidence in (1) lawsuits, (2) depositions, (3) government investigations, and (4) whistleblowers of highly illegal conduct in the housing bubble and financial crisis. There is a staggering amount of evidence that CEOs of Wall Street firms, like Lehman Brothers, were warned that their financial controls were inadequate and their accounting was wrong, or to put in it in plain English: ‘their books were cooked’. A prime example is a memo warning to top Lehman executives by Senior Vice President Matthew Lee, “I feel it is my ethical and legal responsibility to point out to you that there are billions of dollars of unjustified assets on our balance sheet.” (To see the memo, Google: “Matthew Lee and Lehman.”) A month later Lee was dismissed from the firm and the CEO of Lehman continued to stand by the firm’s financial statements even though warned of extreme problems, inaccuracies, and overstatements; e.g., ‘Repo 105’ transactions artificially boosted the firm’s balance sheet by $50 billion! This is illegal corporate behavior of the first order, but where are the criminal charges?

Furthermore, according to Ferguson, “Over the last thirty years, in parallel with deregulation and the rising power of money in American politics, significant portions of American academia have deteriorated into ‘pay to play’ activities. The sale of academic expertise for the purpose of influencing government policy, the courts, and public opinion is now a multibillion-dollar business,” academia has become embedded within the finance industry and its greatest apologist, Exhibit A, is Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary, former President of Harvard, former Head of the Council of Economic Advisors, former Mister Everything Economics, a proponent of the deregulation of financial services; i.e., elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept commercial bankers out of the risky securities business ever since 1933, stating, when significant parts of Glass-Steagall were overturned: “With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21stCentury.”  Thus, Summers was directly behind the entire meltdown, but as a highly endorsed hedge fund/banking consultant raking in millions, before and after his stint with Clinton, he had to follow his true conscience; i.e., benefactors, and push to kill the 1933 Act, which successfully, and responsively, protected bank depositors from risky commercial bank shenanigans for over 60 years.

Summers is the one who dressed down Raghuram Rajan (Finance Professor, University of Chicago; Chief Economist IMF), who presented a paper about credit default swaps at the Federal Reserve Jackson Hole 2005 Conference, Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier? accusing firms of “goosing up returns” with latent risk, which proved to be precisely what cratered A.I.G., asking the prescient question: “If firms today implicitly are selling various kinds of default insurance to goose up returns, what happens if catastrophe strikes?” Rajan’s critique was thoughtful, balanced, and very obviously on point; it is indeed a sad commentary that Summers immediately stood up, lambasting Rajan and calling him a “Luddite,” but on the other hand, since Summers planned to be or was/is in the pockets of hedge funds and Wall Street, he flippantly overlooked the most obvious of dangers to the entire financial system in concert with the “profits now” mentality that bends to Wall Street’s every wish.

The real mystery is how and why they get away with it when their crimes and/or despicable ethical behavior prove so hideous… and so obvious, and thus, many astute progressive mouths dropped wide open with dismay when President Obama insanely appointed Summers as the Director of the National Economic Council, which only goes to prove what a tight clique exist amongst academia, politicians, and Wall Street whereby bad judgment and/or unethical practices are overlooked in favor of companionship-to-profits.

Nobody has gone to jail and as Ferguson explained in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, “There is overwhelming evidence of massive criminal behavior.” Ferguson says: “the American people need to take their country back.” He suggests some kind of nationwide movement but without stating specifics. Indeed, the stench of the entire cabal, including academia, politicians, Wall Street, and rating agencies is so loathsomely squalid, and rotten to the core, it would not surprise if perpetrators are dragged into the streets in the middle of the night, stripped naked, tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, assuming some daring citizens become so fed up with the ‘system’ they take matters into their own hands.

Otherwise, and because nobody has been criminally charged, one can bitterly assume the country is now firmly in the hands of a wealthy elite, including academicians who, similar to guns for hire, will say or publish anything for a buck. With 20/20 hindsight, it is now clear the citizenry of the country cannot trust, but also cannot do anything about (other than revolt in the streets), the tripartite cabal that stole their country in broad daylight right under their noses. And, really…  isn’t it a crying shame the intelligentsia, who we trust to educate our society, is so deeply involved… but… come to think about it, they probably saw what happened to their colleagues in Chile under Pinochet, concluding life is much better, and easier, when one is part of the Inside Job.

By definition … if no criminal charges are filed, the coup is complete.

Robert Hunziker, a former hedge fund manager, is a professional independent negotiator for worldwide commodity actual transactions and a freelance writer for progressive publications as well as business journals. Mr. Hunziker earned an MA degree in economic history at DePaul University/Chicago, and he resides in Los Angeles. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

This article was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under Banks/Banking, Book Review, Chile, Corruption, Finance, Housing.

8 Ways America's Headed Back to the Robber-Baron Era

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Erik Loomis

8 Ways America's Headed Back to the Robber-Baron Era

We are recreating the Gilded Age, a period when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions and engaging in open corruption.

July 3, 2012  |  

 

 

 

Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90 years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by slashing services to the poor.

We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times.

With Republicans more committed than ever to repealing every economic gain the working-class has achieved in the last century and the Democrats seemingly unable to resist, we need to understand the Gilded Age to see what conservatives are trying to do to this nation. Here are 8 ways our corporations, politicians and courts are trying to recreate the Gilded Age.

1. Unregulated Corporate Capitalism Creates Economic Collapse

In the late 19th century, corrupt railroad capitalists created the Panic of 1873 and Panic of 1893 through lying about their business activities, buying off politicians and siphoning off capital into their own pockets. Railroad corporations set up phony corporations that allowed them to embezzle money from the railroad into their bank accounts. When exposed, the entire economy collapsed as banks failed around the country. The Panic of 1893 lasted five years, created 25% unemployment, and was the worst economic crisis in American history before the Great Depression.

In the early 21st century, the poorly regulated financial industry plunged the nation into the longest economic downturn since the Depression. Like in the Gilded Age, none of the culprits have served a day in prison.

2. Union Busting

In the Gilded Age, business used the power of the state to crush labor unions. President Hayes called in the Army to break the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; President Cleveland did the same against the Pullman strikers in 1894.
Today’s corporations don’t have to use such blunt force to destroy unions, but like in the past, they convince the government to do their bidding. Whether it is holding up FAA renewal in order to make it harder for airline employees to unionize, Republican members of the National Labor Relations Board leaking material on cases to Republican insiders, or governors Scott Walker and John Kasich seeking to bust their states’ public sector unions, not since before the Great Depression has the government attacked unions with such force.

3. Income Inequality

Today, we have the highest levels of income inequality since the 1920s and the gap is widening to late 19th century levels with great speed. In those days, individuals like John D. Rockefeller had more money than the federal government, while the majority of Americans lived in squalor, poverty and disease.

In the Progressive Era, we started creating laws like the federal income tax, child labor laws and workers’ compensation to begin giving workers a fair share of the pie. For decades, labor fought to increase their share and by the 1970s, had turned much of the working class into the middle class. Today, that middle class is under attack by a new generation of plutocrats who wish to recreate the massive fortunes of the Gilded Age.

4. Open Purchase of Elections

In 1890, copper magnate William Clark paid Montana lawmakers $140,000 to elect him to the U.S. Senate. While most plutocrats did not share Clark’s interest in being politicians, they ensured their lackeys would serve in office, often by offering corporate stock to politicians. Disgusted by this corruption, America in the Progressive Era of the early 20th century created a number of reforms, including the 17th Amendment that created direct elections of senators, as well as a 1912 Montana state law limiting corporate expenditures in politics.
Beginning with the Citizens United decision and continuing with the recent overturning of that 1912 law, the Supreme Court has allowed corporations and wealthy plutocrats to buy elections openly once again.

5. Supreme Court Partisanship

In the Gilded Age, the Supreme Court interpreted laws not as to the intent of the lawmakers, but to promote business interests. It refused to enforce the 14th Amendment to stop segregation, but it did create the idea that a corporation was a person with rights. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was intended to moderate monopolies; the Supreme Court only enforced it against unions since organized labor “unfairly restrained trade.”

Today’s Supreme Court has resorted to this aggressively partisan stance. The Court is fine with the open flouting of the 4th Amendment, allowing strip searches of middle-school girls if they’re suspected to be carrying drugs, but creates a grotesque expansion of the 14th Amendment in the Citizens United decision. Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia just took the opportunity in a Supreme Court dissent to lambast his colleagues for striking down much of the Arizona anti-immigration law by approvingly citing 19th-century laws in the South that limited the movement of African Americans.

6. Violations of Civil Liberties

In the late 19th century, civil and military authorities looked down upon protesting citizens. Widespread violations of civil liberties took place when Americans protested for almost any reasons, whether it was labor unions, political gatherings in Washington, D.C., or African Americans organizing to protect themselves from white supremacists. Police shot strikers and thugs and mobs murdered organizers.

Today we are seeing a growing recreation of this society with no respect for civil liberties. The use of police violence against Occupy protesters, like the pepper-spraying of nonviolent activists at the University of California-Davis did spawn some outrage. But in the aftermath of the PATRIOT Act, the authorities have tremendous power to suppress protest and are not afraid to use it against peaceful citizens.

7. Voter Repression

The Gilded Age saw the rolling back of Reconstruction, with black people unable to vote in the South due to the grandfather clause, poll taxes, literacy tests, and threat of violence. Conservative extremists have chafed at black people voting ever since the civil rights movement ended segregation.

Today, voter ID laws and voter roll-purging seek to limit black voting again. Florida Governor Rick Scott hopes to purge enough black people from the voting rolls to swing the Sunshine State to Mitt Romney this fall, while a lawmaker in Pennsylvania openly said the Keystone State’s recently passed voter ID law would do the same. Even more shocking, the recently released Texas Republican Party platform has a plank calling for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed in the wake of police beatings of civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama.

8. Anti-Immigration Fervor

In the Gilded Age, Americans feared the millions of people coming from eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia to work in the nation’s growing economy. Fearing these immigrants would never assimilate, Americans looked to bar their entry. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and continuing through the Immigration Act of 1924, the country slowly closed its doors to the world’s tired and hungry.

Today’s immigrants face an increasingly militarized border, states like Arizona trying to usurp federal immigration policy, and increased numbers of deportations. Conservatives fear the changes Latinos could bring to the United States and talk about English-only laws and the evils of bilingual education. They also recognize the likelihood of Latinos voting for the Democratic Party in coming decades and thus use the same kind of voter repression strategies that target black voters.

The Gilded Age was a horrible time and I fear the nation slipping back into this hell of poverty, violence and hate. I believe that young people largely reject the extremist agenda that is hurtling us through a time machine to the bad old days of the 1890s, but they don’t have the power right now. Republicans know the demographics do not favor them and are trying to fix the game through voter suppression, packing the courts with extremists, and concentrating wealth and power so they can control politicians and the media.

During the Gilded Age, people throughout society began organizing for reform: labor unions, farmers, middle-class reformers. After 1900, this organizing paid off as government began passing reforms to alleviate the most extreme problems of the Gilded Age. Child labor laws, worker compensation for injuries at work, government regulation of the railroads, and the direct election of senators all took power away from corporations and put it back in the hands of the people. It wasn’t perfect, but it started the social reforms that created the American middle-class.

Like in the late 19th century, we need to take back our country from corporate control. We need to create well-paid jobs in the United States, revitalize the labor movement, and pass legislation to respect civil liberties, give undocumented immigrants legal status, and ensure that voting rights laws are enforced. Like our ancestors, we can fix these problems. First we need to recognize that the 1% has declared war upon the middle class and then we can start organizing to create the better tomorrow we crave.  

Erik Loomis is a professor of labor and environmental history and a blogger at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Welcome to Plantation America

AlterNet.org

VISIONS  

AlterNet / By Sara Robinson

Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

America didn't used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we're headed that way now. How did that happen?

June 28, 2012  |  

 

 

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty

Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite -- and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.
For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.
As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.
Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.
When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.

The Battle Between the Elites

Since shortly after the Revolution, the Yankee elites have worked hard to keep the upper hand on America's culture, economy and politics -- and much of our success as a nation rests on their success at keeping plantation culture sequestered in the South, and its scions largely away from the levers of power. If we have to have an elite -- and there's never been a society as complex as ours that didn't have some kind of upper class maintaining social order -- we're far better off in the hands of one that's essentially meritocratic, civic-minded and generally believes that it will do better when everybody else does better, too.
The Civil War was, at its core, a military battle between these two elites for the soul of the country. It pitted the more communalist, democratic and industrialized Northern vision of the American future against the hierarchical, aristocratic, agrarian Southern one. Though the Union won the war, the fundamental conflict at its root still hasn't been resolved to this day. (The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means.) After the war, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview -- even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.
Ironically, though: it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. According to Lind, it was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country's major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal -- and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt -- fatally loosened the Yankees' stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, these post-war Southerners and Westerners drew their power from the new wealth provided by the defense, energy, real estate, and other economic booms in their regions. They also had a profound evangelical conviction, brought with them out of the South, that God wanted them to take America back from the Yankee liberals -- a conviction that expressed itself simultaneously in both the formation of the vast post-war evangelical churches (which were major disseminators of Southern culture around the country); and in their takeover of the GOP, starting with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964 and culminating with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.

They countered Yankee hegemony by building their own universities, grooming their own leaders and creating their own media. By the 1990s, they were staging the RINO hunts that drove the last Republican moderates (almost all of them Yankees, by either geography or cultural background) and the meritocratic order they represented to total extinction within the GOP. A decade later, the Tea Party became the voice of the unleashed id of the old Southern order, bringing it forward into the 21st century with its full measure of selfishness, racism, superstition, and brutality intact.

Plantation America

From its origins in the fever swamps of the lowland south, the worldview of the old Southern aristocracy can now be found nationwide. Buttressed by the arguments of Ayn Rand -- who updated the ancient slaveholder ethic for the modern age -- it has been exported to every corner of the culture, infected most of our other elite communities and killed off all but the very last vestiges of noblesse oblige.

It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard's description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We're now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.
Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.

The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy -- without ever being held to account.
The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.
The military -- always a Southern-dominated institution -- sucks down 60% of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.

Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.

Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.
We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation -- in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.

Elites who dare to argue for increased investment in the common good, and believe that we should lay the groundwork for a better future, are regarded as not just silly and soft-headed, but also inviting underclass revolt. The Yankees thought that government's job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.

The rich are different now because the elites who spent four centuries sucking the South dry and turning it into an economic and political backwater have now vanquished the more forward-thinking, democratic Northern elites. Their attitudes towards freedom, authority, community, government, and the social contract aren't just confined to the country clubs of the Gulf Coast; they can now be found on the ground from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And because of that quiet coup, the entire US is now turning into the global equivalent of a Deep South state.

As long as America runs according to the rules of Southern politics, economics and culture, we're no longer free citizens exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we've always understood them. Instead, we're being treated like serfs on Massa's plantation -- and increasingly, we're being granted our liberties only at Massa's pleasure. Welcome to Plantation America.

 

Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates.

Moyers: How the 1% Is Buying Our Democracy

AlterNet.org

BillMoyers.com / By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Moyers: How the 1% Is Buying Our Democracy

A handful of very rich people plan to buy our elections. What happened to our democracy?

June 15, 2012  |  

 

 

 

If you’re visiting a candidate this summer and looking for a thoughtful house gift, might we suggest a nice super PAC? Thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, they’re all the rage among the mega-wealthy. All it takes is a little paperwork and a wad of cash and presto, you can have, as The Washington Post describes it, a “highly customized, highly personalized” political action committee.”

It’s easy — super PACs come in all amounts and party affiliations. You don’t have to spend millions, although a gift that size certainly won’t be turned aside.  Cable TV tycoon Marc Nathanson got a super PAC for his friend, longtime Democratic Congressman Howard Berman from California, and all it cost was $100,000. Down in North Carolina, Republican congressional candidate George Holding received a handsome super PAC that includes $100,000 each from an aunt and uncle and a quarter of a million from a bunch of his cousins. Yes, nothing says family like a great big, homemade batch of campaign contributions.
You can start a super PAC on your own or contribute to one that already exists. Super PACs are available for every kind of race – presidential, congressional or statewide. But there are other ways you can help buy an election. Look at the Wisconsin recall campaign of Republican Governor Scott Walker. At least fourteen billionaires rushed to the support of the corporate right’s favorite union basher. He outraised his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by nearly eight to one. Most of his money came from out of state. More than $60 million was spent, $45 million of it for Walker alone.

Here are just a few of the satisfied buyers:

Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks contributed more than half a million dollars on Scott Walker’s behalf. Her late husband built ABC Supply, America’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing, windows and siding.  Fearful the United States might become “a socialistic ideological nation,” she’s an ardent foe of unions and, in her words, “taxing job creators.” True to her aversion to taxes, she paid none in 2010, despite being worth, according to Forbes magazine, about $2.8 billion.

Before he launched his crusade against the collective bargaining rights of working people, Governor Walker had a conversation with Diane Hendricks, in which she asked, “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions… and become a right to work [state]? What can we do to help you?”

Walker replied, “We’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”
And so he did.

Walker also hauled in checks for nearly half a million from the Texas oligarch Bob Perry. He made his fortune in the home building business and is best known nationally for contributing four and a half million to the Swift Boat campaign that smeared the Vietnam War record of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry back in 2004.

In Texas, Bob Perry is known for his cozy relationship with the state’s Supreme Court.  He once gave money to every one of its nine elected judges.  And guess what?  Those same nine judges later overturned an $800,000 judgment against his building company for faulty construction.  Bob the Builder, who’s naturally eager for help in the cause of tort reform — that is, making it hard for everyday people to sue corporations like his for malfeasance — has so far given four million to the pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, and millions to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC.

Then there’s casino king Sheldon Adelson, who gave Scott Walker’s cause $250,000. That’s a drop in the old champagne bucket compared to the $21 million Adelson’s family gave to the super PAC that kept Newt Gingrich in the race long after the formaldehyde had been ordered.  According to The Wall Street Journal, Adelson did not long mourn Gingrich’s passing, and has now given at least $10 million to the Restore Our Future super PAC supporting Romney. By all accounts, what he expects in return is that his candidate hold unions at bay and swear that Israel can do no wrong.

Next up on Scott Walker’s list of beneficent plutocrats: Rich DeVos, owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team and co-founder of the home products giant Amway, which, thanks to Republican leaders in Congress, once shared in a $19 million tax break after a million-dollar DeVos contribution to the Republican Party.  He’s a long-time member of the secretive Council for National Policy, a who’s who of right-wing luminaries.

Let’s not forget cowboy billionaire and born again Christian, Foster Friess, Rick Santorum’s moneyman, who told us about the good ol’ days when women would “use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” And Louis Moore Bacon, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Moore Capital – which in 2010 was fined $25 million for attempted commodities manipulation. A big backer of Romney, he, too came to Walker’s aid in Wisconsin.

So did Dallas oil and gas wildcatter Trevor Rees-Jones, who’s given millions to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, in anticipation of another administration as friendly to taxpayer subsidies for big oil as the Rove-Bush White House. Last year, Rees-Jones’ company, Chief Oil, and a partner sold to Chevron nearly a quarter million acres in northeast America’s Marcellus Shale – the epicenter of the raging controversy over fracking. Estimated price: one billion dollars.
We could go on and name more, but you get the picture. These are the people who are helping to fund what the journalist Joe Hagan describes as a “tsunami of slime.” Even as they and their chosen candidates are afforded respectability in the value-free world of plutocracy, they can hide the fingerprints they leave on the bleeding corpse of democracy in part because each super PAC comes with that extra special something every politician craves: plausible deniability. When one of their ads says something nasty and deceitful about an opponent — when it slanders and lies — the pol can shrug and say: “Not my doing. It’s the super PAC that’s slinging the mud, not me.”

And that’s how the wealthy one percent does its dirty business. They are, by the way, as we were reminded by CNN’s Charles Riley in his report, “Can 46 Rich Dudes Buy an Election?” almost all men, mostly white, “and so far, the vast majority of their contributions have been made to conservative groups.”  They want to own this election.  So if there are any of you left out there with millions to burn, better buy your candidate now, while supplies last.

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers is the host of “Moyers & Company,” airing weekly on public television. Check your local listings. More at www.billmoyers.com

7 Plutocrats That Bankrolled the GOP Primary -- and What They Want in Return

AlterNet.org

Hightower Lowdown / By Jim Hightower

7 Plutocrats That Bankrolled the GOP Primary -- and What They Want in Return

Our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of the nation's most obscenely wealthy.

June 9, 2012  |  

 

 

 

Leave it to Bill Moyers, one of America's most useful citizens, to sum up our country's present political plight in a succinct metaphor: "Our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. These kings are multibillionaire, corporate moguls who by divine right--not of God, but [of the Supreme Court's] Citizens United decision--are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh."

Pricey, indeed. In its disgraceful, democracy-crushing judicial edict of January 2010, the Court took the big advantage that America's corporate elite already had in politics--and super-sized it. This is the first presidential election to be run under the rigged rules invented by the Court's five-man corporatist majority, and even though voting day is months away, we can already see the results of the thuggish power they bestowed on the moneyed few.

In this year's Republican nominating contests, a new, supremely-authorized critter not only arose, but instantly became the dominant force in the game, allowing a handful of extremely wealthy players to shove their selfish agenda ahead of all other interests in the election process: SuperPACs! These are secretive money funnels that various political partisans have set up to take advantage of the Court's implausible finding that the Constitution allows corporations and super-rich individuals to put unlimited sums of money into "independent" campaigns to elect or defeat whomever they choose. (I should note that the justices' ruling was a model of fairness in that it also allows poor people to put unlimited amounts of their money into SuperPACs.)

These new entities amassed and spent vastly more than the campaigns of the actual candidates. Nearly all of this SuperPAC cash was used to flood the airwaves with biblical levels of nauseatingly negative attack ads, further debasing our nation's democratic process. Thanks for that, Supremes.
The Court's surreal rationale for allowing this special-interest distortion of elections was that SuperPACs would be entirely independent from the candidates they back. In his Citizens United opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy blithely wrote: "We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."
Wow, if ignorance is bliss, he must be ecstatic! Not only are SuperPACs and candidates tighter than the bark on a tree, but allowing unlimited special-interest money into campaigns is inherently corrupting.

Of course, these justices knew what they were doing: enthroning the wealthiest Americans, not merely to reign supreme over the political process, but also to control government. In a nation of 313 million people and an electorate of 217 million, fewer than a hundred über-wealthy individuals and corporations (a tiny fraction of a fraction of even the 1 percent) shaped the GOP presidential debate and nomination to their personal benefit.

While the conventional media dwelled on such sideshows as the snarling nastiness among some of the candidates and whether or not Romney could get any love from the GOP's hard-right, Bible-pounding, social-issues faction--the million-dollar-plus givers to the SuperPACs were having one-on-one conversations with each candidate "in quiet rooms" (as Mitt Romney so-genteelly put it). There, they flexed their enormous money muscle to make certain that the core Republican agenda would be their own, squarely-focused on the narrow economic, financial, environ- mental, governmental, and international interests of the 0.01 percent.

As of May 4, this corporate clique had poured an unprecedented $94 million into the SuperPACs of the leading five GOP contenders (with $52 million of that going to Renew Our Future, Romney's money funnel). This firepower was all the more potent because it was targeted at only the few thousand voters in each state who participated in the caucuses and primaries. And it bought just what the moneybags wanted--the lockstep commitment by all contenders that--no matter how they might differ on abortion, gay-bashing, and such--they would govern according to the Holy Kochian vision of a regulation-free, union-free, tax-free America. Thus, no matter which horse any of the multimillionaires and billionaires bet on, they would cash-in as winners, for this tiny group now owns one of America's two major parties (and, yes, often rents the other).
The result is a suicidal diversion of our country's political process from addressing the urgent needs of the majority (and of the country itself). Instead, the presidential and congressional debate has wandered down the rabbit hole into the Mad Hatter's tea party, where the number one political priority is to protect and extend the wealth and power of the privileged class! There's an old-time word for this: plutocracy. Throughout our nation's history, that word has been an expletive, an anti-democratic abomination. Astonishingly, however, it's back with a vengeance. We see in Congress, in numerous state governments, in the media establishment, in corporate-funded academia, and now in the race for president an all-out push to ennoble rank plutocrats as "job creators," to emasculate the people's authority to control the narcissism of the rich, and to make American citizens swallow the lie that corporations are "people" with a constitutional right to purchase our democracy.

SuperPACs are only Wave One of the financial tsunami sweeping over America's politics this year. Wave Two, also authorized by Citizens United, will be even larger, for it allows Fortune 500 giants to siphon as much money as they want directly out of their corporate vaults and pour it into campaigns--while keeping the sources of the money secret from voters. These totally secret, corporate political funds are laundered through outfits organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code as (WARNING: The following fact is so stupefying that it can cause temporary insanity in sensible people) non-profit "social welfare organizations" engaged in charitable work! Never mind that the welfare of the plutocracy is the cause being served by this perverse philanthropy.
At present, the largest of these is Crossroads GPS, created by the noted political altruist and GOP hatchet man Karl Rove. It alone expects to raise $240 million from undisclosed corporate interests and spend nearly all of it on venomous attack ads to defeat Barack Obama this fall. You'd need more than a GPS to find all the sources of Crossroads' cash, but it's known that nearly 90 percent of the $77 million it raised in the last six months of 2011 came from a couple of dozen donors chipping in from $1 million to $10 million each.

Name that plutocrat!

If they're trying to purchase our elections, shouldn't we at least know who they are? At your service! In this issue of the Lowdown, we'll focus on the check writers fueling the SuperPACs, giving you a snapshot of the biggest of these heavy hitters, including indi-cations of what they want for their generosity. Let's start with the "Super-Duper Seven." Of the $94 million amassed by SuperPACs backing the major GOP wannabes (Romney, Santorum, Paul, Gingrich, and Perry), nearly half came from these seven men:

Sheldon Adelson, $21.5 million. "I'm against very wealthy people attempting to influence elections," Adelson asserted in Forbes magazine in February, "But as long as it's doable, I'm going to do it." Nice code of ethics there: It's wrong, but count me in. One of the 10 richest billionaires in our country, this 78-year-old longtime funder of Republicans and the ultra-right literally built his fortune on gaming the system. He now reigns over the Las Vegas Sands Corporation that runs luxury casinos in the US and China's special administrative region, Macau.
By the grace of Citizens United, America has Adelson to thank for Newt Gingrich's preposterous presidential run this year, for he single-handedly kept the insufferable blowhard in the race by dumping a stunning $21.5 million into Gingrich's Winning Our Future SuperPAC. He said he was willing to put down $100 million on the Newt to win the nomination, but alas, the candidate was so pompous and unpleasant that few people besides Sheldon found him appealing.
It's not that Adelson was in a swoon over Gingrich --rather, he knows from experience that the former Speaker would do some heavy lifting for him if he won. In the mid-1990s, Gingrich went to Nevada to support the casino boss in a fight to weaken unions, and he later helped move a bill in Washington that was beneficial to gaming moguls. He also became an ardent advocate of Adelson's rabid right-wing embrace of Israel's most fanatical nationalistic factions. In turn, Adelson has been a reliable donor over the years to various branches of Dr. Newt's Snake Oil Emporium. He is quite fluent in quid pro quo, and he certainly could use a trusted consigliere in the White House these days, for his gaming conglomerate is under scrutiny by two federal agencies over accusations that it bribed its way into China.

Newt's gone, but Adelson is not. He's expected to appear on Romney's list of super-givers, and he suggests that next he will funnel untold sums of money into an anti-Obama "(c)(4)," such as Rove's Crossroads GPS.

Harold Simmons, $5.2 million. An 80-year-old multi-billionaire based in Dallas, this hardcore rightist is both a corporate buccaneer and political profiteer, often combining the two to line his own pockets. A sterling example of this was his investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Rick Perry's gubernatorial runs. Then, with a grateful governor in power, one of Simmons' corporate entities, Waste Control Specialists, applied in 2004 for the permit to build and run the state-authorized nuclear waste dump. After studies and hearings, however, scientists at the state environmental agency nixed WCS's West Texas site, for it endangered the invaluable Ogallala freshwater aquifer. Out of the blue, though, the agency's executive director (appointed by Perry) nixed the scientific nix, formally recommending to the agency's commissioners (appointed by Perry) that they approve the WCS application for the license, which they did. The director has since resigned his state position to become a lobbyist--for WCS.

Simmons was all over the GOP primary contests this year, betting on various candidates as one after another surged in the polls. He put a million bucks behind Perry, $1.1 million behind Gingrich, $1.2 million behind Santorum, and presently has $800,000 on Romney. But his favorite role is political assassin-- he bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's untruthful ambush of John Kerry's campaign in 2004, and he was the sole funder of a nasty PR attempt in 2008 to tie Obama to a former radical from the 1960s. "If we had run more ads," Simmons later bemoaned to the Wall Street Journal, "we could have killed Obama."

He's trying harder this year, having already put $12 million into a Karl Rove SuperPAC that's presently softening up Obama with a series of early attack ads.
Bob Perry, $4.1 million. Even though they're unrelated, this 79-year-old Houston homebuilding tycoon is nonetheless Gov. Rick's "daddy," having fathered his gubernatorial career with a big infusion of money and nurtured it with more cash over the years than anyone. And when daddy calls, Rick jumps. For instance, after Texas homeowners began filing mold-related lawsuits against Perry Homes and other builders in 2003, the furious billionaire got his boy to pass a law that shunted aggrieved consumers away from the courts into a new regulatory agency called the Residential Construction Commission. This body was such an industry-controlled sham that it even embarrassed the Texas legislature, which dismantled it in 2009.

In the current campaign, Perry dropped a token $100,000 into Rick's 2012 presidential flop, before putting $4 million into Romney's SuperPAC. In addition, Perry has been a longtime deep pocket for Karl Rove's right-wing rampages and other extremist political ventures, including being top donor to the 2004 "Swift Boat" ad blitz and--no surprise--then giving $500,000 to Wisconsin's autocratic, anti-worker governor, Scott Walker. Rove's Obama-bashing SuperPAC has already banked $2.5 million from Perry for this year's election mischief and will likely be blessed with much more.

Next comes a covey of four SuperPAC donors of at least $2 million each:

Peter Thiel, a one-time Wall Street derivatives trader who later founded and was CEO of PayPal Inc., as well as being an early investor in Facebook. This internet billionaire has long been involved in anti-government ideological groups, including such Koch-funded operations as the Federalist Society and the Pacific Research Institute. He has become the best pay pal by far of Ron Paul's Endorse Liberty SuperPAC, filling it with $2.7 million.

William Doré, chieftain of Doré Energy, his eponymous oil & gas corporation based in Louisiana. A newcomer to the big-game safari of national politics, the 69-year-old near-billionaire got turned on by Rick Santorum's religio-politico crusade, putting $2.25 million into the donation plate of his Red White and BlueSuperPAC.

Foster Friess, a multimillionaire stock speculator (Brandywine Fund) who moved to Wyoming because of its regulatory leniency and tax-friendliness to the wealthy. This vain and boorish 71-year-old has been a major donor to Christian, Republican, and radical right causes (including at least a million bucks to Koch fronts and campaigns), and he helped fuel Santorum's SuperPAC with $2.25 million this year.

Steven Lund, the former president of Nu-Skin, a Utah-based vitamin-supplement-ointment direct marketer that has a history of legal problems over accusations that it is a pyramid scheme. He turns out to be the secret source of two, separate million-dollar donations to Romney's SuperPAC, one listed as coming from "F8 LLC" and the other from "Eli Publishing." While both "companies" reported that their business address was "Suite #420" in a Provo office building, there is no such suite, nor do the companies exist. Lund says he used the fake storefronts because he didn't want to draw attention to himself.

Thanks a million!

Of course, in our Brave New SuperPAC Democracy, you don't have to give two-to-20 million dollars to be considered a valuable citizen--as little as $1 million can buy you some influence in your government!

One group that is buying heavily into Romney's Restore Our Future SuperPAC is a band of citizens that feels the government is inattentive to their needs: Wall Street bankers. Hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin issued the group's poignant cry for justice: "I think [the wealthy] actually have insufficient influence [in Washington]. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system [must] protect the system."

Accordingly, this patriot of plutocracy has put just over a million into Romney's fund and another million into Rove's SuperPAC.

These one-percenters understand that Restore Our Future is a code--meaning their future--not yours and mine--and the SuperPACs' biggest source of cash is from the high-rollers of high finance. Mitt is, after all, one of them, and he has taken a blue-blood oath to "protect the system" of rigged rules, lax regulation, and extraordinary tax breaks that create their wealth.

This is what it means to let unlimited special-interest money gush into American politics--it dethrones democratic rule, corrupts government, increases both wealth disparity and social injustice, and destroys essential public trust in our society's commitment to fairness. SuperPACs are but one of the pipelines allowing corporate money to drown America's historic ideal of egalitarian self-government. The secret (c)(4) corporate "charities," the corporate "bundlers" who collect billions for the candidates' campaigns, the myriad fundraising committees run by both political parties, the sham "foundations" that permit corporate favor-seekers to make tax-deductible donations to elected officials--these and all other channels of private purchase must be capped if America is ever to have a government of, by, and for the people.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.