OWS When The Bullet Hits The Bone

#OWS - WHEN THE BULLET HITS THE BONE

No matter how you feel about America’s unprecedented and inexcusable economic catastrophe, you have to give credit where credit is due.

The American investment banking industry, by completely anesthetizing the entire Federal regulatory apparatus, succeeded in establishing themselves as the most successful financial criminals in human history.

That’s a big accomplishment. But then, they were just following a well-worn path.

American investment bankers succeeded in manufacturing fake products that looked like real securities, and were rated AAA every single time by famous rating agencies they had succeeded in corrupting. Today, 93 % of AAA rated mortgage-backed securities are now junk status. It was easier to order an AAA rating on a securities issue in NY then it was to order dim sum, and it still is.

Geniuses.

These bankers cleaned out major players in the investment community all over the world, particularly pension funds, which required the AAA rating. What is truly astonishing is that they achieved the heretofore impossible. They cleaned out the European Central Bank and the mighty German Bundesbank.  No one has ever cleaned out the Bundesbank, in a thousand years.

Then, history’s most successful financial criminals succeeded in stampeding a terrified and wholly uninformed U. S. Congress to prop up their banks, after they blew them out. Not one of them ever went to jail, and the amount of money they walked away with is so large no qualified observer has even bothered to estimate its size. And, they virtually train wrecked the five trillion dollar a year American economy in the process.

Referring to a class of business people as criminals is strong stuff, but then I wasn’t the first, and I won’t be the last. The President of the United States was first.  

When Barack Obama said publicly on television at the height of the financial meltdown, that American investment banks were selling worthless securities in Europe, much of the world was shocked. What he was saying was these bankers knew what they were selling was worthless when they were selling them, and that makes them criminals.

They are criminals, but they are geniuses, and in the great tradition of the Texas wealth culture, anything you get away with is good. Problem is, the culture is bad for everyone else.

The rest is well worn and known only too well. The Republican geniuses in the Bush administration timed the collapse perfectly, to explode in the faces of the new administration and still give them a little time to shape the crowning achievement in the entire story. An astronomical bail out for the banks, with no strings attached. When Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson took a three-page document to Congress begging for the bailout, the last two lines were utterly astonishing.

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

More genius at work. Take the entire world wide investor community for more than they have ever been taken for before, get the government to cover you when you blow up your bank, then ask them not to send you to jail if you happen to, let us say, misplace some of the bailout money, or, let us say, direct a big chunk to your former investment firm even if it was Goldman Sachs.

I’m sure, sitting on some smelly old couch, at least one Mob boss must have marveled at the chutzpah that took.

Here is another eye-popper. What were the bankers involved in when the whole scam blew up? Trying to convince the American people, Via George Bush, to allow them to manage Social Security assets. Remember that? George Bush conducting town hall meetings to sell this plan? Bets vary on how long it would have taken Goldman Sachs and the others to loot these funds, but it doesn’t matter. For once, Americans saw them, and their political component, The Republican Party, for what they are. Rapacious, duplicitous, criminals. Bush’s plan to “privatize” Social Security failed, way before the masks came off.

California was lucky in a sense to see the future before it happened. California was one of the first victims of the corporate criminal/Republican political facilitator paradigm.  When Bush stacked the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency with a notorious Republican political hack, the way was opened for Kenneth Lay, and Enron’s genius criminals to game the electric power industry in the world’s seventh largest economy, virtually loot their way to immense wealth, dramatically affect the state’s economic health, and in the end help install a Republican Governor. And they established another little hat trick that became central to the mortgage backed securities scam years later.

They corrupted one of the largest and most respected accounting firms in the world Anderson Consulting, to hide their debt, cook their books and do their lying. The accounting world was aghast when the Federal government shut Anderson down, one of the venerable 7 accounting sisters of Wall St.  

This paradigm worked perfectly, and it was repeated over and over in many other sectors of the American economy, including: health care, pharmaceuticals, finance, mortgage lending, student loans, etc. They even went so far as to scam American soldiers in wartime, by allowing casinos on bases and prescribing dependence inducing drugs to men in the war zones.

This unholy alliance of a major political party, The Republican Party, with master corporate criminals resulted in a virtual ant trail of men who trooped to the Bush White House and John McCain’s office, looted entire industrial sectors and mostly walked away. But then financial racketeers are very familiar with John McCain. Just ask Charles H. Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan debacle.

None of the vast corporate crime wave in America would be possible without these critical political components.  Automatic political cooperation in the Bush White House, in the Republican side of Congress and in key regulatory agencies worked together to disable regulatory controls, and anesthetize policy enforcement. These political components are absolutely essential to racketizing any sector in the economy, and particularly the financial industry.

The party of choice not only for this corporate crime wave but for all the others, has been, and is, The Republican party.  The party of the corporate crime wave, the party of manufactured wars, the party of lies, the party of absurdly high military budgets, the party of “independent contractors” to wage war, and the party of ruinous public debt.

A new and rapidly expanding debate on income equality has begun, with the arrival of the recent Congressional Budget Office report on worldwide income equality. As expected, America has one of the worst ratios among any of the western democracies, and is slightly ahead of the great Kleptocracy of Russia.

This inexcusable outcome is actually somewhat new. Prior to 1980, income was far more equitable in this country, and what happened, what played a very significant role in this dramatic shift was the election of a succession of right wing administrations, particularly the Bush Administrations, who perfected and enshrined the paradigm of providing political co-operation and protection to corporate crime. The flow of money from everyone else to the privileged 1% was done largely by corporate criminals, and the skewing of the tax code to basically hand the taxes of the elite to the middle class.  

Much has been said about the complete corruption of both political parties in the United States. Much of it is true. It could be successfully argued that the American National Government isn’t a government at all, but a vending machine. A vending machine is not a government.

The legal corruption of the American electoral system virtually guarantees that elective office holders will be forced to raise large sums of money to stay in office, and that money comes from people who want something, and those people get what they want. Every time. The brave voices that have cried out against this system, like Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, have been totally ignored. This system exists nowhere else among the western democracies, almost all of whom have lower un-employment, and far better health and working conditions.

One of the many great failings of the Tea Party was blindness to this key issue. Instead of taking on this crucial, fundamental issue, they merely aped the Republican talking points and took the Aetna funded busses to the kill health care rallies, then climbed in bed with one of the most notorious lobbyists in Washington, Republican political hack Dick Armey, a virtual poster child for everything that is wrong in American governance. Some reform movement.

The Republican Party in toto has fallen all over itself to do virtually anything the corporate racketeers want, when they want it and how they want it. The recent unanimous votes against a sound and badly needed jobs program is merely the latest in what should be considered outrageous adherence to corporate demands.

All of the major political players in the events which created not only the Wall street meltdown, but the racketizing of the credit card industry, the rapacious excesses of the health insurance industry, the student loan racketization, the unheard of run up in pharmaceuticals, or the almost unbelievable gaming of the electrical power industry in California by Enron were Republicans.

The Republicans are the party of corporate crime. They are the war party. They are the party of pandering to terrifying greed, and virtually unimaginable avarice. They are the party of international plundering, the party who gleefully throws millions of Americans into the waiting arms of health insurance companies like Aetna that in any other western democracy in the world would be declared criminal organizations outright.

The OWS people hit a nerve. They are on the most important topic in the world in a big, big way. The movement has attracted international attention, provoked serious debate about the American corporate state and its unlimited power, and about greater issues like income distribution and fair tax policy.

This movement could, could with a capital C, actually affect outcomes in the future.

Much maligned as they are, the Tea Party did what every successful pressure group in this nation’s history has done, from the suffragette movement, to prohibition, to civil rights and countless other popular movements. They focused a great deal of their efforts on the ballot box. And they won, they virtually took Congress, threatened the Senate with the most marginal candidates ever fielded, severely compromised health care reform, and brought this once fine nation to the precipice of financial catastrophe. How? By bringing millions of voters to the polls. By showing up. By registering to vote. They won, they affected the debate. They affected legislation. They changed their world. Sadly all for the worst, just like the prohibition movement.

What is incredibly ironic, is a story on page 1 of the New York Times, Oct. 31, 2011, detailing the massive middle class movement in India against political corruption, led by activist Anna Hazare. Add this with the Arab spring, and Americans can easily feel left out of worldwide movements demanding decent government. In fact, Americans are left out.  Americans aren’t demanding much of anything, at least at the ballot box. On the same page is an article about the super-billionaire Koch brothers and other Republican groups with virtually unlimited money, dedicated to one goal and one goal only. Eliminating any government role in business or their taxes.

What is missing from this picture? The American middle class, rising up and organizing, just like in India, to throw off a wholly corrupt government and the out of control corporate state that has hopelessly corrupted it.

The 2012 election is on balance one of the most pivotal in American history. In many ways it is a PNR. A point of no return.

The Republican party and its incredibly rich supporters is still powerful enough to freeze and sidetrack most of the efforts to bring this pitiful nation back into some semblance of balance, and help the 15 million unemployed.

The Republican hubris is incredible. Their arrogance is astonishing. They think they are invulnerable, as they still have the power to mislead so many Americans through sheer volume of misinformation, lies, obfuscation, and fear mongering.  They probably are invulnerable.

Unless, that is, the bullet hits the bone.  

The question now for the OWS movement is a simple one. “Where do we go from here? What can we accomplish? Where is our enemy weakest? What is the point of attack?”

What they can do, and what we can do if we want the corporate racketeers, and financial criminals to choke on their $300.00 cigars, is take the US Senate away from the Republicans and give this embattled President a chance to restore decency to a nation that was founded on that one simple idea.

There are only ten Republicans up for re-election in the Senate this cycle. The OWS could easily organize efforts in these states, demonstrate at these Senators offices, and plead, plead, plead with young people, old people, and everyone else who has been fleeced by the corporate racketeers to vote these men out of the US Senate.

And they are:

John Kyl, Arizona (replacement not yet named)

Richard Lugar, Indiana

Olympia Snow, Maine

Scott Brown, Massachusetts

Roger Wicker, Mississippi

Dean Heller, Nevada

Bob Corker, Tennessee

Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas

Orin Hatch, Utah

John Barrasso, Wyoming

If all of the anguish, suffering, injustice, frustration, disenfranchisement, and disgust with the corporate crime wave and their political component can be focused, to these Senate races, the power base of the corporate criminals will be severely damaged, and hope for meaningful reform and re-balancing of our once great nation will become possible.

The bullet needs to hit the bone, and hit it now.

Go #OWS!