Monthly Archives: March 2010

Banking Reform Legislation Background

So now that we’re done (for the moment) with the HCR, it is on to Banking Reform. This work has been ongoing in the House (who passed a bill already) and Chris Dodd’s Banking Committee. The Congress is in recess now, but it is worth taking some time to get up to speed on the coming issues and the bill itself.

Want to know why we are trying to regulate these institutions and the issues and risks involved? This piece from David Leonhardt is indispensable. And if you only decide to read one thing, make it this article.

Summary of H.R. 4173 — An overview of the House Bill. I’ll try to find a better one, but this bill is pretty flawed and largely enshrines Too Big To Fail. It also does not go far enough to regulate derivatives or CDS and oddly exempts auto loans. It doesn’t deal much with the Credit Rating Agencies, either. Mike Castle voted NO on its passage.

Another Summary from CNN Money.

H.R. 4173 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 — Links (pdf) to the bill itself.

Summary of Chris Dodd’s Reform Bill — This is the bill that Chris Dodd rescued from endless negotiation to start passage to some floor debate. This bill, too, has its flaws, notably that it can’t quite wrap itself around killing off Too Big To Fail, either. This bill calls for a Financial Stability Oversight Council which seems to have some broad charter to monitor financial institution activity and can create some rules for itself for actions based on that monitoring. If you try to think about what this body might have done in, say, 2003-2005 timeframe, you might get a sense of the problem here. When everyone is making money (especially in a housing bubble) and feeling wealthier, how does a group like this manage to take away the punch bowl? Without some clear rules to abide by –most especially leverage limits — it is going to be far too easy for this group to just capitulate to pressure.

After our own Senator Kaufmann pointedly told Dodd that his bill simply did not address Too Big To Fail, Dodd acknowledges this issue, but makes no commitments to try to fix this. There is still time to make this alot better, but banks themselves are spending lots of money to water down this regulation. And republicans, oddly, are gearing up to defend the banking status quo. More on this later.

Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection

This is from a conference held a few weeks back in NY with the theme of “Make Markets Be Markets”. Elizabeth Warren is always awesome, and this is one good argument for the entire Consumer Protection agency that banks are currently working overtime to eliminate. This is around 10 minutes long and worth every minute. Keep all of this in mind as you start hearing about the Banking Reform effort coming up.

Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection (MMBM) from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo.

There are videos from many of the speakers here at their Vimeo site.

This Would Have Been Nice to Know Alot Sooner Than This

GOP Congressmen:Most Republicans Now Think That The Iraq War Was A Mistake

Anybody see this reported in the traditional media? Anywhere?

So you can mark this down as ONE MORE THING we were right about — even though these fools fought us, called us names and worse, here they are, after all of the blood and money has been spent thinking it was a mistake:

Rohrabacher:

“I will say that the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake. …Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood… all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.”

McClintock:

“I think everyone [in Congress] would agree that Iraq was a mistake.”

And if you watch the clip at the link, you see something more than an admission that Iraq was a mistake — that they had qualms about Iraq and about Afghanistan from the beginning. But standing up and saluting when their President told them to was the path taken. Which likely fills in some of the rationale for why BushCo worked so hard at their war narrative — they needed to keep their own on board to keep selling the entire debacle. Outrageous.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky-ts5bYBdo[/youtube]

Health Insurance Mandates Nearly as old as Constitution.

I happened onto this little fact by way of Roger Ebert, of “At The Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert” fame, who is now quite the avid and political tweeter recently. And would you believe me if I told you that one of our most important Founding Fathers, President John Adams, signed legislation providing for a health insurance mandate?

In July, 1798, Congress passed, and President John Adams signed into law “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen,” authorizing the creation of a marine hospital service, and mandating privately employed sailors to purchase healthcare insurance.

This legislation also created America’s first payroll tax, as a ship’s owner was required to deduct 20 cents from each sailor’s monthly pay and forward those receipts to the service, which in turn provided injured sailors hospital care. Failure to pay or account properly was discouraged by requiring a law violating owner or ship’s captain to pay a 100 dollar fine.

Given that many of the critics of the Health Insurance Reform law based their constitutional challenges on the provisions mandating the purchase of insurance, this little known fact may signal their prospects of success in the courts, which is none.

Sunday Afternoon Reading

The Party of Cruelty was written by James Howard Kunstler last week after the HCR was almost a week ago, but I just saw it yesterday. It is a long read, but a truly excellent retort to the apocalyptic fear and loathing ramped up by repubs — not just during the process, but also afterwards. Fear and loathing that is now being expressed in physical threats and in property destruction aimed against lawmakers who voted for this. Make sure you go over there to read the entire thing:

It was amusing to see the Republican party inveigh against health insurance reform as if they were a synod of Presbyterian necromancers girding the nation for a takeover by the spawn of hell. This was the same gang, by the way, who championed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, then regarded as the most reckless giveaway of public funds in human history. Along the way, they enlisted an army of nay-sayers representing everything dark, disgraceful, and ignorant in the American character. If the Republicans keep going this way, they’ll end up with something worse than Naziism: a party that hates everything but believes in absolutely nothing. […]

[…]I hope that Mr. Obama’s party can carry this message clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of the public interest. […]

Democrats won’t go this far to criticize Republicans, but it is really clear that in getting themselves utterly wrapped up in just obstructing everything to score political points, they are not getting any of the people’s business done. And they don’t see this as a problem — which is the sign of folks who were never interested in governing in the first place. Which is the heart of the repeal and replace strategy, right? More political point scoring, no thought to the many solutions now made law and no coherent replacement out there that does anywhere near what this law now does.

But it is clear that republicans no longer have anything to say about real governing goals — and as long as all they’ve got is fear and loathing they won’t.

Bring It, Spence.

Ron Williams has a very informative column today. Hey, even a broken clock….

[Ginger Gibson] was sitting in a Senate hearing room a half hour before a discussion of the Department of Corrections’ budget was to begin. […]

Gibson, a Senate staffer and another reporter were present when [Terry] Spence [the former Republican Speaker who was defeated for reelection] proceeded to rag heavily on The News Journal reporter who had recently written an article about how former Republican legislator Vince Lofink had been reimbursed for tuition to receive his master’s in education degree. That reporter was Gibson, who sat silently as she listened to Spence, addressing her as a total stranger, railed on and on about how he did return phone calls to that pesky little reporter, whoever she is, and he didn’t understand what all the hubbub was about.

It was about $756,000 in Republican expenses and perks that the Democrats, now in control, found they could cut from the state budget. The state auditor said the tuition payment to Lofink, approved by Spence, as were all the other expenses such as gold-embossed business cards, was improper and that Lofink should pay it back.

Spence, according to Gibson, continued to berate the reporter who wrote the story and question why anyone thought it was worth the paper. After nearly 10 minutes of reporter-bashing, Gibson finally spoke up and clued in Spence; that reporter would be me, she said.

Spence then proceeded to stammer and stutter his way through various phases of apologetic requests for forgiveness since he really didn’t mean to be so critical, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, Spence also acknowledged that he was probably going to run again because Majority Leader Pete Schwartzkopf, who had been critical of Spence in the article about Republican spending, had gotten too big for his britches and “had [testicles] like steel” and needed to be brought down a peg or two.

The person here who has unimaginable and undeserved hubris is Terry Spence. Ron Williams does not go into much detail in his column as to what Gibson reported, so let’s remind ourselves of the true scope of Gibson’s story:

[T]he GOP spent their budgets to support themselves when they were in control of the House. This report has the feel of a tip of the iceberg — as in there is likely more there to look at. But it is very good to see how the people who want to lay claim to making a better use of tax money (largely via hyping their own bete noirs, insensible math and trying to paint everyone else as being profligate) are especially profligate on their own behalf. Using Delaware tax money.

Among the items Democrats say were partisan and should not have been funded with tax dollars were the salary of a political consultant who many longtime staffers say never came to work, thousands of dollars in improper tuition payments to a former Republican legislator, questionable payouts to political advisers for unused vacation and sick time, and money for a Web site that delivered Republican perspectives.

A no-show legislative job, giving themselves more benefits than prescribed and trying to build a partisan messaging website that was supposed to be a stand-in for a vehicle that actually told the people of Delaware about the business being conducted on their behalf. Perhaps that is what they mean by open government.

So, against that backdrop, Spence feels himself to be the true victim here. A victim of ace investigative reporting on the part of Gibson which accurately exposed the GOP’s misappropriation of taxpayer funds during their control of the House. A victim of a new Majority Leader who seeks to clean up the mess of the former Republican majority. Spence sees nothing wrong with his party running a political operation out of the General Assembly and on the taxpayer dime. He sees nothing wrong with berating a reporter for nothing but reporting on the what should be considered outright fraud and theft on the part of Spence and LoFink. Third, he is angry at Pete Schwartzkopf for rightly being critical of his these actions.

Like a criminal who is angry at the Police for getting caught.

And he wants to run again?

Bring it, Spence. Bring it.

Karen Weldin Stewart Decides That Maybe She Does Have a Job To Do

Today’s News Journal updates the status of the investigations into the denials of prescribed tests for heart patients by BCBSD. Aetna is also now part of the doctors’ complaints — Aetna is using the same pre-authorization firm as BCBSD.

Now that the News Journal has been looking into this pretty intently, and Senator Jay Rockefeller (from West Virginia) has asked for information on these denials, we find that Delaware’s IC has decided to open up her own investigation:

Stewart said her office will contract with third-party examiners to probe the pre-authorization procedures of the three carriers.

The insurance department announced plans to open its investigation after receiving several more complaints of pre-authorization denials in the past week, Stewart said Saturday from Denver, where she is meeting with insurance commissioners from other states. Stewart could not put a precise number on the amount of complaints that have reached her office, but said she needed to see evidence of a pattern of questionable behavior before opening a formal investigation.

“A pattern is three [complaints], at least three,” Stewart said.

An outsourced review of BCBSD pre-authorization procedures (why can’t the already paid staff do this?), no idea how many complaints received (really? After almost a week this issue has been in the spotlight?) and her definition of a pattern.

Check. And after all of this there will be public hearings. But months down the road. Wonder if these get outsourced too.

Check again.

So the News Journal finds a pattern and the IC’s office will take months to look into it. One of the things I wonder is if there were people who the News Journal has reported on here who actually did complain to the ICs office too. We already know that a request from Senator Jay Rockefeller was enough for BCBSD to loosen up their requirements. The question at end is whether Delawareans with pre-authorization issues will always need to count on the attention of Senator Rockefeller to get local insurance companies to do what they get paid to.

The News Journal Admits Delaware Liberal Is Correct

The News Journal has obviously been poking around DL again. They wrote an article about DD’s post on Michelle Rollins “Millionaire Michelle Rollins Takes Bonus From Wilmington Trust TARP Funds.” The News Journal represents this as a partisan attack but also admits that the post is accurate.

The numbers being tossed around at DelawareLiberal are accurate. In 2008, according to the bank’s proxy statement, Rollins had a total compensation of $20,470. In 2009 — even as the bank was holding $330 million in government TARP money — her compensation soared to $92,991.

The jump in compensation took her from the third-highest-paid director in 2008 to No. 1 in 2009. The critics fail to note, however, that Rollins wasn’t the only director to see more — compensation levels were raised across the board for 2009.

Still, it seems perfect fodder for a political season — and something that has prompted one anonymous DelawareLiberal blogger to vow they would close out their Wilmington Trust account, ASAP.

This statement – The critics fail to note, however, that Rollins wasn’t the only director to see more — compensation levels were raised across the board for 2009 – does not absolve Rollins in this matter. It sounds like what Wilmington Trust did is take the TARP money and then reward themselves for doing such a bad job managing other people’s money. The fact that Wilmington Trust has not repaid the TARP money shows WT needed the money to function.

If the Republicans nominate Michelle Rollins for the DE-AL seat, just remember that Republicans have taken TARP off the table as an issue (even though TARP happened under Bush). Michelle Rollins loves her TARP money.

He Was For It Before He Was Against It

As you might have read, President Obama has finally pushed through some recess appointments. Republicans are “upset”. John McCain said he was “very disappointed” and:

Once again the administration showed that it had little respect for the time honored constitutional roles and procedures of Congress

Let’s take the Hot Tub Time Machine back to 2005 when Bush was thinking of pushing John Bolton through on a recess recess appointment. Gee, I wonder what McCain said then:

I would support it. It’s the president’s prerogative.

Once again, Republicans prove my theory that if President Obama discovered a cure for cancer, the GOP would find fault with the discovery.

Weekend Open Thread

Happy weekend everyone! I hope you’re having a good one. A little birdie told me that liberalgeek is having a birthday today, so everyone wish him a happy birthday. I think he’s turning 29 today. So let’s start this open thread.

As expected, President Obama has made some recess appointments:

The White House has just announced that President Obama has made fifteen recess appointments, including several for hot-button nominees. These are appointees Republicans refused to allow votes on and for which the president’s supporters have been pressing for recess appointees.

Notable on the list are Craig Becker to NLRB and Chai Feldblum to EEOC.

In arguing for the appointments the press release states: “President Bush had made 15 recess appointments by this point in his presidency, but he was not facing the same level of obstruction. At this time in 2002, President Bush had only 5 nominees pending on the floor. By contrast, President Obama has 77 nominees currently pending on the floor, 58 of whom have been waiting for over two weeks and 44 of those have been waiting more than a month.”

If Republicans keep up their temper tantrums, the only way things will get done in Washington is by reconciliation, recess appointments and executive orders. Do Republicans really want to be irrelevant?

This story says it all:

Various members of the DNC — including Chairman Tim Kaine, Executive Director Jen O’Malley Dillon and Communications Director Brad Woodhouse — contacted their respective RNC counterparts this week in hopes of getting RNC Chairman Michael Steele to co-sign a document with Kaine that, in part, called for “elected officials of both parties to set an example of the civility we want to see in our citizenry.”

“We also call on all Americans to respect differences of opinion, to refrain from inappropriate forms of intimidation, to reject violence and vandalism, and to scale back rhetoric that might reasonably be misinterpreted by those prone to such behavior,” read the proposed joint statement, which came at the end of a week that saw acts of vandalism and threats of violence directed at members of Congress from both parties, but mostly aimed at Democrats who voted yes on the health care bill.

Republicans see the statement as an attempt to force them to either reject the statement — allowing Democrats to say the RNC finds the incidents acceptable — or to sign on to something that the DNC would later wield against them.

The Republican party doesn’t care if people get hurt, especially if it helps them politically. They should have thought about the political implications of not signing the statement.

Markell Is Now Giving Weekly Addresses.

What, does he think he is, the President of something? All kidding aside, I do think this is a good idea, because it is always a good thing for our government to be informing us of what they are doing in our name. And if we don’t like it, we vote them out, and if we do like it, we keep them. That is how America works, unless of course you are a violent Republican teabagger terrorist, but I digress.

The first radio address [was] at 8:05 a.m. [this morning] on WDEL/1150 and then be posted on the governor’s Web site and can be downloaded from iTunes as a podcast. Transcripts of the two- to three-minute messages also will be posted. Beginning in mid-April, video messages will be carried Friday evenings on WHYY/12/64. The video also will be uploaded to http://www.youtube.com/user/GovernorMarkell.

“I want Delawareans to get as much information as they can about what we are doing to … move Delaware forward,” Markell said.

And that is the correct motivation. Even in a state as small as Delaware, we really don’t see our Governor unless you are political junkies like us and attend political events, or you may seen him out at summer parades and carnivals, but that is really it. Otherwise, unless you seek him out, you are not in contact with him. This will change that.

Here is the Governor’s first address.

Government Checks Are OK For Me, But Not For Thee

The Washington Post interviewed James Vanderboegh, the self-styled “patriot” who called for people to vandalize the offices of Democratic lawmakers.

“So, if you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party [that they] cannot fail to hear, break their windows,” Vanderboegh wrote on the blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars. “Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again. Break them under cover of night. Break them in broad daylight. Break them and await arrest in willful, principled civil disobedience. Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats. But BREAK THEM.”

In the days that followed, glass windows and doors were shattered at local Democratic Party offices and the district offices of House Democrats from Arizona to Kansas to New York. At least 10 Democratic lawmakers reported death threats, incidents of harassment or vandalism at their offices over the past week, and the FBI and Capitol Police are offering lawmakers increased protection.

Vanderboegh has been in this so-called “patriot” movement for more than a decade, according to the SPLC. He also believes we’re going to have a civil war (or is a better word “hopes”). The WaPo also solicited this interesting tidbit:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.

This anti-government warrior, this self-styled leader, sponges our tax money? I guess he really deserves that money while other people are just lazy.

It’s difficult to take a movement of confused, angry people who get government checks (disability and Medicare) seriously as some kind of movement that will change America. They don’t even have a coherent ideology. All they have in common is fear and unfocused rage. Shame on those people who seek to feed that fear instead of trying to educate.

The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle

The real problem we are facing today is not that the Tea Party is part of the Republican Party, it’s that the Republican Party has been absorbed by the Tea Party.  When the GOP lost the middle all it was left with was its fringe.  And like all fringe groups Tea Partiers aren’t willing to compromise – on anything.  (Hence, the term fringe)

The Tea Party has many problems.  One of the biggest is that there is no clear leader.  Many are vying for that title – Palin, Beck, Rush, Bachman, Perry, Freedomworks, militia groups, patriot organizations, etc. – but none have been crowned.  What we’ve ended up with essentially is a mob.  And mobs are dangerous since they’re fueled by rage rather than reason.  The trajectory of a mob depends on the moment.  Words count because what is said to a mob can alter its path.

Oh yeah, words matter.

It was supposed to be a routine campaign stop. In a poor section of Indianapolis, 40 years ago Friday, a largely black crowd had waited an hour to hear the presidential candidate speak. The candidate, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had been warned not to go by the city’s police chief.

As his car entered the neighborhood, his police escort left him. Once there, he stood in the back of a flatbed truck. He turned to an aide and asked, “Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

They didn’t, and it was left to Kennedy to tell them that King had been shot and killed that night in Memphis, Tenn. The crowd gasped in horror.

Kennedy spoke of King’s dedication to “love and to justice between fellow human beings,” adding that “he died in the cause of that effort.”

And Kennedy sought to heal the racial wounds that were certain to follow by referring to the death of his own brother, President John F. Kennedy.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to … be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” he said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

Many other American cities burned after King was killed. But there was no fire in Indianapolis, which heard the words of Robert Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy’s words changed the trajectory of Indianapolis that night.

Sadly, the Republican Leadership has chosen a different course.

The most amazing thing about that video is not what’s being said, but who is saying it.  Elected officials are firing up a mob they have no control over and unleashing them on society – in the hope it will pay off in the voting booth.  Russian Roulette style politics.  They are fanning the flames and then feigning shock when their encouragement turns into action.  They are no Bobby Kennedy.  Actually, they have become the kids in the hallway egging on a “Fight!” while doing nothing to break it up.  There is no leadership here – only followers of a mob which will turn on anyone (including Republicans) with the slightest provocation.  Dr. Frankenstein, meet your monster.