Ties that bind: Obama-ClintonWH, Obama-Harvard

Change implicitly requires risk — the risk of not sticking to the status quo. While the man alone embodies plenty of differences from his 43 predecessors, it looks like much of his nominees, appointees and supporting cast are 20th Century Clintonites or Ivy-Leaugue and Harvard-types:

As Mike Allen highlights Al Kamen’s analysis:

WHO’S WHO — WashPost’s Al Kamen: “Fully 42 percent of Team Obama’s picks for Senate-confirmed positions so far worked in the Clinton administration. And if they appear to come from elite, private schools, well, they do. In fact, about one-fourth of those named so far either attended or taught at Harvard, to name just one esteemed institution. On another front, men are outnumbering women by more than 2 to 1 in the top jobs.”

More alarming is the entrenched owning class interests of the financiers and financial titans that run the Treasury Dept, Fed Banks and White House by association. In a troubling and telling article on “Obama’s Collusive Capitalism“:

The Obama policy of collusive capitalism is most evident in the financial bailout. He has placed his economic program in the hands of a man — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — who can best be called, as analyst Susanne Trimbath puts it, a “lap dog of Wall Street.” A protégé of former Treasury Secretary and Citicorp board member Robert Rubin, Geithner played a pivotal role in the original Bush bailout of the Wall Street elite…. The Geithner plan, Stiglitz noted this week in a New York Times op-ed, represents “the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves: clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets.” The winners in the plan are the top guns of the financial industry, who would welcome further government-sponsored financial consolidation. For them, this would be vastly preferable to the more democratic alternative of selling the remaining assets of the failed large firms to dispersed, healthy, usually smaller, regional institutions. Perhaps one has to start with the very obvious fact that the president — despite occasional attacks on the greed of Wall Street — did not run against the financial markets but, rather, with their strong support. As early as the 2008 Democratic primaries, noted New York Times Wall Street maven Andrew Ross Sorkin, Obama had “nailed [down] the hedge fund vote.”

What more will it take for us to realize that we don’t share many/any political or social or economic interests with these fat wallets running the Obama administration.

Keating to McCain: Till Death do Us Part

I doubt that it was meant as a marriage vow towards an unsavory marital partner. Nonetheless, it is a curious way for a banker named Charles Keating to refer to a political candidate of John McCain.

I came across this blog due to a Times (UK) article about the $50,000 in contributions bundled out of the law firm Keating founded. The Times linked to an Oct 9 Washington Times article no less, that includes a jpeg of McCain’s letter of apology on official US House letterhead that Charles keating had the gall to write on top of and send (back!) to Congressman McCain. He even starts it off with “Don’t be silly.”

An odd way of opening — is it meant to be light-hearted? collegial? or chastising?

The opening is followed by “you can call me anything. Say anything. do anything. i’m yours.”

Is that suggestive? or an absolute commitment?

***

I did a few quick inflation calculations (thanks to Inflation Calculator) of how much $166,000 of early 1980s money is worth in today’s dollar amounts. $166K from 1986 equates to $310K in 2007 (a convervative figure, as the ‘82 figure would equal $350K )

… which would have made the unname bundler out of the Keating law firm not only a Pioneer in the 2004 Bush campaign but a Super Ranger. Or the elite of the small dollar campaign contribution corralling that has arisen in the post-McCain-Feingold era.

Bailout, Round 1

Considering how fast the currents, debate and verbal assaults, and state-based reactions have been moving, I am coming to this way beyond starting time. Alas, I am just trying to make some sense of what feels like a senseless time, politically and financially. Even for me, ‘chickens coming home to roost.’

I heard on a program this evening that the initially proposed $700B would be a $2,300 burden on every man woman and child. And, I overheard last week that this contains a $7000 tax burden on every family. Those numbers are inherently wrong nor mutually exclusive. But, I’m trying to read a few trusted authorities, rather than some corporate echo chamber be it the Murdock-owned Wall Street Journal, or some overly-influenced entity that is trying to salvage the names of Morgan Stanley and their personal relationships to the banks that exist today, but may not exist a year from now.

Some of what I’ve found includes:

1) Warren Buffett — yes, of a $5B svaing grace to Goldman — “likened it to an economic Pearl Harbour” [sic]

2) William Greider’s “Paulson Bailout a Plan a Historic Swindle” in the Nation:

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims.
…. If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics– exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice. [emphasis added

3) and, Joseph Stiglitz’s “Dishonesty in the financial sector dragged us here, and Washington looks ill-equipped to drag us out“, in the UK Guardian:

The present financial crisis springs from a catastrophic collapse in confidence. The banks were laying huge bets with each other over loans and assets. Complex transactions were designed to move risk and
disguise the sliding value of assets. In this game there are winners and losers. And it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s a negative-sum game: as people wake up to the smoke and mirrors in the financial system, as people grow averse to risk, losses occur; the market as a whole plummets and everyone loses.

Financial markets hinge on trust, and that trust has eroded. Lehman’s collapse marks at the very least a powerful symbol of a new low in confidence, and the
reverberations will continue.

I intend to keep reading from whatever I can deem to be less-biased. That means:

… papers abroad that have been further from Wall Street’s KoolAid, as well as more willing to coherently address corruption, capitalism and regulation: the UK Guardian, the Financial Times (www.ft.com).
… economists who have been calling shady Wall Street for what’s it worth: like Nouriel Roubini, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.

Oh, and watching the Daily Show with John Stewart to see the insight wit that the producers over there bring to Paulson dogma, Capital Hill shananigans. Calling what is dumb dumb.

The Best Reflections on ‘what was Iowa’

Maureen Dowd said in ‘Voting for a Smile‘ how:

It was understandable that Hillary’s “Golden Girls” acolytes would freak out when they saw the throngs of young Obama hopemongers swarming the caucuses.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones’ article, written back in November ‘07, foretells some of the old-skool media-politico dynamics relevant to what was expected vs happened in Iowa:

As the 20th century progressed, American politics became increasingly organized around broadcast media. But now top-down, one-to-many communication is giving way to a very different kind of media—diffuse, participatory, individualized…. The GOP’s success in old media—think Morning in America, Pat Robertson, Willie Horton, Rush Limbaugh, Swift Boat—was essential to its ascent, while the emergent blogosphere and social networking sites play to progressive strengths. (Finally, decentralization and lack of hierarchy are an asset rather than a liability.)

And finally, I gotta give a nod to Frank Rich for his critique of not only the fear-based politics and political reporting of yesteryear, while getting that Culture (along with Charisma) is just as important if not more so policy/experience/showing strength. Ahem,

The “they” who did not see the cultural power of these men, of course, includes not just the insular establishments of both their parties but the equally cloistered echo chamber of our political journalism’s status quo.

Buy a judge? or their courtroom decisions?

NPR coverage detailing the increasing investments and competitiveness of winning the judiciary, based on a report from non-partisan group, Justice at Stake. Their 2006 report , along with a nod to a Zogby survey of business leaders, in which 79% believe that “campaign contributions made to judges have at least some influence on their decisions in the courtroom.”

As for the NPR summary, it states:

… Documenting the increasing influence of money in judicial elections, the report shows fundraising by state supreme court candidates rose in 2006, with the median being close to $250,000 per candidate. The high-water mark came in Alabama, where the total price tag for the race for chief justice was $8.2 million.

TV ads ran in 10 or the 11 states where state supreme court judges were up for election, compared to just four states out of 18 six years earlier. Average television spending hit a new record at $1.6 million per state. And business interests outspent everyone else combined — by a 2-to-1 margin.

For starters…

For starters, here are some recent stories that stoked my interest in money and politics:

Money Chooses Sides, by John Heilemann
New York Magazine, April 23, 2007.

The 2nd Quarter 2007 Political Contributions to Presidential Candidates: Mitt, Johnny “son of a millworker” Edwards, McFallin’ McCain, Rudy, Hillary, Barack et al.
from Open Secrets.org (unofficial)

“In the Money”
Washington Monthly, July 2, 2007

Moving Past Push Pins
this is a sweet online map of the places making the biggest political contributions to each presidential candidate