But is it paid for?

What would our country be like if most of the goofy Republican caucus in Congress walked away from their jobs for some goofy reason, and Democrats suddenly had majorities which could try to implement their legislative priorities? The well-thought-out policy ideas of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders would instantly be on the legislative agenda and politicians would jockey to find ground from which to distinguish themselves in the novel environment. Add in an existential war in progress that had to be funded by previously unheard of expedients and things might get radical.

That's a fair parallel to where newly elected President Abraham Lincoln and the then-newly consolidated Republican Party found themselves in 1861 when southern states tried to end the Union -- and thus end the experiment in constitutional government which was the federal United States.

We can be confused reading this history today because 1) the Republicans were both the progressive force and the mostly anti-slavery political party and 2) the Democrats were the hide-bound conservatives whose attachment to states' rights hamstrung government action and support the slavery system. In the century and a half since, our political parties have roughly traded sides.

Roger Lowenstein is an American financial journalist and writer who recently explored aspects of governance in the 1860s in Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.

This is a book that probably tries to do too much. Others have written gracefully about Lincoln's Team of Rivals, his contentious Cabinet. I didn't really care about how the Confederacy tried to solve its fiscal problems; my understanding of Confederate fiscal history is that what happened there was mostly decided by the failure to bring Britain in on the side of the South in the war.

What interested me here was what the Republican Congress of 1861 accomplished with its new freedom of action. And Lowenstein offers plenty that is interesting. This prologue helps with imagining Republican priorities which were not what we might assume in 2023:

Few northern whites had much to do with Blacks, slave or free, and even fewer supported abolition. They were opposed to slavery's extension mainly because they preferred their own societies to the slave societies of the Deep South. Whigs, and later Republicans, advocated a system "free labor," which connoted not just the absence of slavery, but a positive culture of small farms, cottage industries, and independent craftsmen. ... What northerners truly abhorred was the South's economic and social backwardness. The South was less urban, less educated, woefully under-industrialized. ... Republicans did not plan on a war in 1861, but their social vision prepared them for one. Their ideal of a stronger and larger central government not only enabled them to harness the necessary resources to win the war, it encouraged them to do so in a way that helped bring about a modern and dynamic industrial society.

The accomplishments of the freed-up Republican Congress were great -- and the consequences unexpected when they finally were able to pass what northern social movements had envisioned. Lowenstein labels the Congress of December 1861-July 1862 the "Forgotten Congress."

... [they] enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the federal government, for the first time, a visible presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. ... It broke from the "governing least" philosophy of Jefferson and legislated in the spirit of the "more perfect union" advanced by Lincoln. It abandoned laissez-faire and interposed a visible hand in the hope that, also in Lincoln's words, "every man [might] have the chance." Congress enacted a protective tariff ... and enabling legislation for a transcontinental railroad. It involved the federal government in agriculture, education, and land policy. It legislated an income tax and refocused the war's purpose to include a frontal attack on slavery. It could almost be said that it created the government itself. ... They legislated boldly and to the perceived edge of constitutional license. A San Francisco newspaper approvingly declared, "Constitutions are made for peace. We are at war." ... On the whole, they were less intent on preserving, more on building and improving. ...

By war's end and the defeat of the South in 1965,

... it was now, as it had not been before, the federal government's business to help educate farmers, to preserve natural lands, to fix the standard railroad gauge, to nurture the sciences, to operate an expanded postal service, to regulate banks, to encourage immigration. Even abolition, on the surface a stand-alone event, was enabled by the new ideology of centralism.

... The purposes of the government were also elevated in the minds of Americans. They looked to it, as they hadn't before, to solve national problems. Since the government had freed the slaves, people expected it to address other pressing issues, such as low farm prices, labor disputes, the power to the railroads, and monopolies. ...

Though in the war's aftermath the Republicans were soon captured by the industrialists and plutocrats of the Gilded Age, in a vital moment, they gave the country its most benign institutions.

• • •

I was curious about this book because a great-great grandfather of mine played a part in its story. Elbridge Gerry Spaulding (1809-1897; yes, named for the relative and Massachusetts governor who gave his name to our present dubious redistricting processes) had been a Buffalo mayor, an early adopter of the new Republican Party, and a successful banker who sat in the Forgotten Congress. I'm sure the idea was floating around in the wider policy ether, but he was the guy who proposed that the Treasury could fund the war with "greenbacks," the paper currency that led to the current dollar. Previously government, and especially war, had been funded by a small stream of tariff revenue and by borrowing from banks and bankers. That was where the cash was. Banks were chartered by the separate states and they all issued their own notes; this was not a system which inspired confidence in paper money.

By the winter of 1861-1962, the federal government was desperate for cash. According to Lowenstein, Spaulding proposed a bill to pay for the war that was "revolutionary."

As if by a conjurer's trick, it authorized the Treasury to print United States Notes to distribute to soldiers, suppliers, and others. The catch was that, unlike virtually every other bill in circulation, Spaulding's notes would not be redeemable for silver and gold. This meant the government would not be constrained by the supply of metal; it could print as much as it liked, or at any rate as much as Congress authorized.

And Spaulding's notes would not pay interest. Today, we scarcely pause to consider that the money in our wallets does not yield a return. After all, it is "money." In 1861, virtually all government paper did pay interest. That was the inducement for holding it. Finally, Spaulding's paper would not have a maturity date. This, too, was unusual. A maturity date was a pledge that the paper could be exchanged for something of value at a specified time. But these notes would not be redeemable. They were issued for perpetuity.

To the Civil War mind, these features were both shocking and blasphemous. ... U.S. Notes would be "legal tender" -- they would be money by proclamation, that is, by government fiat. They would suffice for all debts and commercial exchanges; acceptance would be compulsory and universal.

The twists and turns of getting the greenback bill passed were many; Lincoln supported it, but left it to his doubtful, but desperate, Treasury Secretary to do the legislative lifting. Once passed, the system made it all the more obvious that a system of state-chartered banks could not serve the Union cause. Financial entrepreneurs jostled to cash in on the reform. The Confederates tried something similar but you have to win on the battlefield to make a fiat money system work.

By the end of the war, both enhanced revenue and national banking had been added to the federal arsenal, creating something akin to the financial system as we have known it. That system might be due for another upgrade; I am sure Elizabeth Warren is working on it. Imaginative and determined individuals make these things happen, remote as they may seem.

Let's roll: it's the turn of big banks!

Bill McKibben reminds me of an Old Testament prophet. His decades of arguing and campaigning for action to prevent and mitigate human-caused climate change have often been an unheeded voice in a wilderness of noise.

Except that McKibben, though just as dedicated as those angry ancients, is more forgiving of human foibles. And, as he sees even Joe Manchin forced to take up a bit of the climate struggle (if the current Congressional deal  survives), he wants to make sure credit is distributed where it belongs for what is being described as the best climate bill in thirty years.

Zeitgeist matters ... most of all it was, I think, the widespread public scorn. Somehow it began to break through to Manchin that the only thing history would ever remember about him is that he blocked action on the worst crisis humans have ever faced.

There’s no longer a real public doubt about climate change. Yes, for partisan Republicans it remains fun to pretend it’s a hoax, but after thirty years of science, fifteen years of movement building, and an ever-increasing cascade of fires, floods, heatwaves and droughts, the public mood is finally strong enough to at least begin to match the political power of the fossil fuel industry.

You could feel it building when Bernie made it a key campaign issue in 2016; by 2020, every Democratic candidate was on board, because primary polling showed it was one of the top two issues for voters. The political force most responsible for this victory was the Sunrise Movement; those young people built that wave and then rode it with immense skill.

But this is a win engineered by everyone who ever wrote a letter to the editor, carried a sign at a march, went to jail blocking a pipeline, voted to divest a university endowment, sent ten dollars to a climate group, made their book club read a climate book. It’s for the climate justice activists who brought this fight into whole new terrain, the scientists who’ve protested, the policy wonks who wonked, and the people whose particular fights may have been sacrificed by the terms of this deal. (Them in particular—if Manchin had to deal because a pipeline he wanted was going down in flames, well, the people who made that possible are heroes).

And when this climate package becomes law, McKibben has another direction in which climate activists need to turn our energies:

... the movement now needs to shift more of its attention and vigor from Politics to the other player big enough to matter, Finance. There’s been lots of wonderful work on banks and asset managers, but it’s never had the undivided attention given to politics (in part because it doesn’t have the regularly scheduled elections to drive that focus, though shareholder season in the spring gets a little more notice each year). Taking on the big banks is key (join our Banking on the Future pledge at Third Act if you haven’t already); if you had any doubts, note that it’s the strategy the fossil fuel industry is busily adopting. West Virginia, Texas, et al are trying to intimidate banks to keep lending to Big Carbon; we need the treasurers of blue cities and states (where most of the money lives) to match their game. ...

... I ... thought of the hundreds of thousands of people who have played roles large or small in those divestment campaigns around the world. There’s lots more we can do; we’ve got momentum now, and the best use of momentum is to roll over the opposition.

Listen to Mr. McKibben. He's been a faithful prophet.

Now I know for sure we're living in a failed state

The Ford Foundation, the occupant of this glowing New York City headquarters, has chosen to issue bonds, payable in the far future, in order to increase its grants in this moment of pandemic, economic collapse, and necessary uprisings. According to the Times:

In 2019, the Ford Foundation handed out $520 million in grants. [Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation,] quickly realized that was not going to be anywhere near enough in this crisis-engulfed year.

His solution: Borrow money, spend it quickly and inspire others to follow Ford’s lead. The Ford Foundation plans to announce on Thursday that it will borrow $1 billion so that it can substantially increase the amount of money it distributes.

Walker has lined up four other old-line, extremely affluent, charitable foundations to follow his lead. This is old money stepping up.

Walker at Ford is doing exactly what every progressive and even conventional economist has urged governments to do since 2008: when interest rates are near zero, borrow and push out that cash to build up social capital as well as needed infrastructure. This is what a functional government would do. Unhappily, Republicans have only been willing to allow the government to borrow to give a $1.4 billion dollar tax cut to their rich buddies -- and to their plutocrat in the White House.

So here we find private wealth doing what government ought to be doing. I guess we're lucky there's a Ford Foundation. (This was something I was less sure about back in the day when I was a supplicant. These institutions are awfully satisfied with their own virtue.) They could be doing far worse things with their $13.7 billion dollar endowment. Hitler-loving Henry Ford must be rolling in his grave. Give some of that money to the people who are setting the agenda in the streets!

Greeks vote a resounding NO

View image | gettyimages.com

This is a story about democracy breaking through. We've had dramatic political events in the U.S. recently -- it's not likely that many of us have been paying much attention to what has been going on in Greece and the European Monetary Union. But Sunday's 61 percent vote against further economic measures that would immiserate ordinary Greeks in order to placate northern European bankers should invigorate everyone who prefers democracy to plutocracy.

Sure, Greek governments in the '00s ran up some huge debts, debts the country was never likely to repay. Note the lenders were probably smart enough to know that, but they trusted the European Union project to save their speculating asses.

Comes the 2008 recession and by 2010, Greece can't pay up. So in that year, the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (the Troika) sent enough cash to Greece to enable the private creditors (mostly French and German banks) to escape their losses. In return Greece has had to cut government services, raised taxes and slashed pensions. This sent the Greek economy into a tailspin -- twenty-five percent unemployment and collapsing small businesses sent some people to picking through garbage for food. Meanwhile, all this pain is doing no more than pay interest to the Troika. Greece is never going to pay off the principle on the original loans. Repayment was probably always impossible; with a trashed economy, default is a certainty.

Meanwhile, the Greek people decided they couldn't forever let technocrats and Northern European elites decide what their lives would be like -- or if they'd even survive. In January of this year, exhausted Greek voters turned to the party of the Coalition of the Left, Syriza. Syriza promised to negotiate a better deal with the Troika. Over several months, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Troika said the bankerly equivalent of "screw you and we will take your mother as well as your money." Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras finally said we'll just put that "offer" of yours up to a vote of the people. That is what happened Sunday. Greeks thumbed their noses in return.

Economist Paul Krugman says this is a good thing and he knows a lot more about it than I do.

... we have just witnessed Greece stand up to a truly vile campaign of bullying and intimidation, an attempt to scare the Greek public, not just into accepting creditor demands, but into getting rid of their government. It was a shameful moment in modern European history, and would have set a truly ugly precedent if it had succeeded.

But it didn’t. You don’t have to love Syriza, or believe that they know what they’re doing — it’s not clear that they do, although the troika has been even worse — to believe that European institutions have just been saved from their own worst instincts. ... democracy matters more than any currency arrangement.

Just maybe, Greece will now have to leave the Euro, the common currency used by most of the states of the continent. This may be economically painful, but it is not clear that fate will be worse than being dictated to by (mostly) German plutocrats. And people insisting on self-determination against bankers is almost always inspiring.

Greece; Iran; terrorism; doors opening, maybe

Things I think that I think about the situation we're in ... some, guardedly, hopeful. While other events wrung me out over the last few days, I can't let pass three developments foreign and one domestic.

Tourist photo from Athens

1. Does it seem to anyone else that the German government and European banking elites are treating Greeks much as rural state legislators treat cities where people of color are the majorities -- as stupid, incompetent, foolish, lazy and incapable of self government? In Europe, are Greeks the blacks?

Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz might concur:

We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece.

But, again, it’s not about the money. It’s about using “deadlines” to force Greece to knuckle under, and to accept the unacceptable – not only austerity measures, but other regressive and punitive policies.

2. Sometime in the next ten days, the U.S. and its partners in nuclear negotiations with Iran will or will not come up with a deal to prevent further bomb making for some period of time. If there is a deal, there'll be war in the U.S. Congress between the administration and the fully bought and paid for representatives of the Israel Lobby in both U.S. parties. Oil industry friends of the Saudis will be doing their best to scuttle the deal as well. It's going to be one of those times when people who care about peace will have to push for spine transplants for our legislators.

It is worthwhile remembering a little of the backstory of U.S./Iran relations. In addition to using the C.I.A. to impose the Shah's dictatorship over Iranians in the 1950s, the U.S. supported chemical war by Iraq against the revolutionary Iranian people during the 1980s. Robin Wright in the New Yorker explains:

Officially, the United States was neutral. But Washington did not want Iran to win, so U.S. intelligence provided satellite imagery of Iranian positions to Iraq, along with military options. With American and other foreign guidance, the Iraqis constructed a replica of Faw for practice runs.

Iraq also used U.S. intelligence to unleash chemical weapons against the Iranians in Faw. U.N. weapons inspectors documented Iraq’s repeated use of both mustard gas and nerve agents between 1983 and 1988. Washington opted to ignore it. At Faw, thousands of Iranians died. Syringes were littered next to bodies, a U.S. intelligence source told me; Iranian forces had tried to inject themselves with antidotes. The battle lasted only thirty-six hours; it was Iraq’s biggest gain in more than seven years. The war ended four months later, when Iran agreed to a cease-fire.

... U.S. intelligence estimated, at the time, that Iran suffered more than fifty thousand casualties—deaths and injuries–from Iraq’s use of nerve agents and toxic gases. A senior Reagan Administration official told me that he was ashamed of the covert U.S. role at Faw and during the final period of the war.

No wonder we're not buddies with Iran.

3. Last Friday, militants linked plausibly with ISIS killed scores of people in Tunisia, Kuwait, and France. Probably fortunately, most U.S. media where too preoccupied to notice. U.S. media have lately pointed out that, since 9/11, nearly twice as many people in this country have been killed by right-wing (racist) extremists as by Islam-tinged nutcases.

And 4, here at home: Some recognition that our legal system of mass incarceration and brutal punishment is off the rails seems to be infiltrating the rarefied precincts of the Supremes. And it is the "centrists" who are talking. First, out of the blue, Justice Kennedy questioned the constitutionality of unbounded solitary confinement in prisons. Then Justice Breyer raised the likelihood that application of the death penalty, in the words of former Justice Potter Stewart, is as random as being struck by lightening.

The problem, Breyer suggests, may be irresolvable. We can have executions without long delays, or we can have the procedural review necessary to avoid unfair executions, but we can’t have both. If the Constitution requires both, the death penalty may well be unconstitutional.

It's a start.

Betting (and profiting) on climate change

Under capitalism, society is organized so that the only reliable incentive to innovation is for someone to make money. We don't seem likely to do away with capitalism anytime soon, so combatting global warming, if we do it, will have to happen in a context of private profit. David Atkins at Political Animal thinks we have an unlikely ally:

... rising sea levels and more frequent natural disasters will either make many areas uninsurable, or insurance companies will go bankrupt trying to insure them (and the same goes for insurance backed by the federal government.) Insurance companies have an existential need to get ahead of the curve on the climate question.

And he points to a Christian Science Monitor report:

A major insurance company is accusing dozens of localities in Illinois of failing to prepare for severe rains and flooding in lawsuits that are the first in what could be a wave of litigation over who should be liable for the possible costs of climate change. ...

"It's a long shot for the insurance companies, but it's not completely implausible, and if you have enough cases like this going forward it might build some helpful precedent," said Robert Verchick, who served on the Obama administration's Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

He said insurance companies are vocal about the rising costs of global warming and want to push cities to invest in prevention as a way to avoid future lawsuits.

We might get some meaningful mitigation efforts out of this economic pressure, I suppose. How come I remain convinced that the people who've profited from our addiction to fossil fuels will pay less of the costs than the ordinary shlubs who find themselves blown away or flooded out?***When Robert Shiller was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2013, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution explained his intellectual bent:

... most people who think that markets can be inefficient are anti-market. Shiller’s solution to market problems, however, is more markets!

So we probably should not be surprised that Shiller thinks the outlandish products of contemporary financial markets can help with climate adaptation. He wants more opportunities for Wall Street to make money from global catastrophe.

...global warming needs to be addressed by the private institutions of risk management, such as insurance and securitization. They have deep experience in smoothing out disasters’ effects by sharing them among large numbers of people. The people or entities that are hit hardest are helped by those less badly damaged. ...

We already have weather derivatives that can help, like the 50 contracts in 13 countries offered by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A ski resort can already buy protection against inadequate snowfall and a city can buy protection against too much snowfall next winter by, in effect, taking the opposite side of the same futures contract (through the exchange), thereby pooling their opposite risks. There are also catastrophe bonds, like the three-year, $1.5 billion Everglades Re Ltd. issue sponsored this month by the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. It would provide relief to the insurer of Floridians hit by a bad hurricane; in such an event, the bond holders would bear losses.

...We have a crucial need to bring innovation to our risk-management institutions. We need to make them flexible, to clarify their long-term international legal status, to develop mechanisms and indexes that can be the basis of long-term risk management contracts and to educate the public about them. Most important, we need concrete action now to build a mechanism that will provide real help for the victims of climate-change disasters.

New York Times, May 24, 2014

Shiller is obviously a brilliant guy, looking for a decent response to crisis from the sector of social activity that is his area of expertise. I find this sort of financial gamesmanship repulsive. I cling to an instinct that human beings were made for cooperation, not competition gone feral. But climate crisis will take all kinds.

Getting something done in the U.S. Congress

Last week Jim DeMint, a former Republican South Carolina Senator and current head of the rightwing think tank Heritage Foundation, astonished (historically literate) listeners by announcing that it wasn't "big government" that freed the slaves. I guess that Sherman's Union army that marched through his state to hook up with General U.S. Grant in Virginia didn't have a big government behind it. Mr. DeMint may not like remembering that some 18,000 white men from his state were willing to die to keep African-Americans in bondage. (I don't think that figure includes South Carolina slaves who joined the Union Army after the Emancipation proclamation.)

Historian Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money mocks DeMint's crackpot tale:

This is funny on so many levels but my favorite part of this “interpretation” that the federal government didn’t free the slaves is that in fact not only is this wrong, but doing so led to the largest expansion of the federal government in the nation’s history to that time.

What Loomis points out here is one of my main takeaways from James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. The short period (1860-65) when the U.S. government perforce operated without a bunch of conservative southern states obstructing progress was one of tremendous change and accomplishment well beyond the successful war to save the democratic republic.

In the absence of the conservative drag on government (in those days the naysayers were southern Democrats while the innovators were radical Republicans), Congress was able to advance ideas for national growth that had been stymied for a decade or more.

• A Homestead Act enabled settlers moving west to stake claims to more than 3 million acres.

• The Morrill (Land-Grant) Act provided public land to states to found colleges and universities.

• The Paciic Railroad Act and other legislation gave railroads right of ways for their tracks and much additional land, thereby opening the west to modern commerce.

Perhaps most importantly to the growth of big government that causes DeMint such distress, Congress created a modern tax and financial system. While the Confederacy went gradually broke, its unsecured paper money becoming worthless, the modern U.S. dollar, the "greenbacks," paid for the war.

Congressman Elbridge G. Spaulding of New York, chairman of the House subcommittee charged with responsibility for framing emergency legislation, ... introduced a bill to authorize the issuance of $150 million in Treasury notes -- i.e., fiat money. This bill seemed to imitate the dubious Confederate example -- but with a crucial difference. The U. S. notes were to be legal tender receivable for all debts public or private except interest on government bonds and customs duties. ...

Opponents maintained that the legal tender bill was unconstitutional because when the framers empowered Congress "to coin money," they meant coin. Moreover, to require acceptance of paper money for debts previously contracted was a breach of contract. But the attorney general and most Republican congressmen favored a broad construction of the coinage and the "necessary and proper" clauses of the Constitution. "The bill before us is a war measure," Spaulding told the House, "a necessary means of carrying into execution the power granted in the Constitution 'to raise and support armies.' . . . These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary measures must be resorted to in order to save our Government and preserve our nationality." Opponents also questioned the expediency, morality, even the theology of the legal tender bill. ...

But the bill passed and the financing system proved stable thanks to the strength of the northern economy and Union victories -- and thanks to that other innovation of this Congress: an Internal Revenue Act which created a personal income tax as well as a Bureau of Internal Revenue. The former was a war measure; the later never afterwards withered away.

The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

The new tax was relatively progressive; it exempted the food of the poor and the wages of manual laborers, hitting only persons of some property or other wealth.

Maybe that example is what DeMint truly resents -- along of course with freeing all those uppity black people.

McPherson summarizes the accomplishments of the Civil War Congress:

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted "the blueprint for modern America."

Much as I celebrate the accomplishments of my ancestors in preserving a republic that could gradually expand the freedom of all its people, I probably should feel a little cautious knowing that the progressive surge was made possible by war. The current, spurious post-9/11 wars have enabled far less desirable measures.

E.G. Spaulding, pictured here, was a western New York banker, a state assemblyman, mayor of Buffalo, a Congressman, "father of the greenback bill," and my great-great-great grandfather. Until reading "Battle Cry," I never had much sense of what he accomplished besides temporarily enriching himself.

Some Occupiers kept pushing even after most of us moved on

Over a year ago, I wrote here about the efforts of a group of one-time protesters who regrouped as Occupy the SEC after their encampment was forcibly cleared. They aimed to influence the rule making that would determine whether the Dodd-Frank "financial reform" would do any good. Well, the part of Dodd-Frank known as the Volcker rule has now been formally promulgated. This is supposed to force the banksters to use their own profits if they want to gamble with exotic financial products, instead of risking our federally insured deposits.

Astonishingly, Lydia DePillis reports that the SEC didn't completely blow off these organized, studious "occupiers." One of them, Akshat Tewary, explained to her:

They've cited our suggestions 284 times in the final rule, and in a lot of those contexts they agreed with us, and a lot of the time they disagreed with us. They're not going to say that Occupy said this and we're going to follow it, but we are pretty comforted that they followed at least some of our suggestions.

[For comparison, the rule cites the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (bank and finance lobby) 599 times , Americans for Financial Reform (a liberal coalition) 179 times, and Senator Jeff Merkley 176 times. -- note from DePillis' post with my clarifications]

… the number of times that they cited us suggests that regulators are subject to public oversight. It was heartening to be part of that conversation, and I think it indicates there's potential for that kind of activism going forward.

DePillis wanted to know what "Occupy the SEC" would be doing now. Apparently the Volcker measures are constraining enough so that they expect Wall Street to go straight to court to try to free itself from them.

… if there's a lawsuit that's filed, they can expect us to file an amicus brief on the other side.

I'm grateful for the willingness of these folks to dig into the weeds of financial policy; this sort of expertise is not all it takes for change (and the Occupy the SEC folks know that) but not having this sort of competence limits any progressive reform movement.

Celebration time

One of the harder tasks for progressive political activists is to recognize when we win something. We're used to getting beat up, hurting, and painfully pulling together the courage to move on to the next necessary fight.

But hey -- US progressives have been (part of) some big wins for people power in the last week. Let's celebrate before moving on.

At least for now, the US is not going to make war in Syria -- and maybe now will become never! This time, the people said NO and our leaders followed. Sure, our rulers got a lifeline from a self-interested Russian nationalist, but hey, we got to take what we can get. And keep making friction in the system.

David Swanson, a peace activist whose purism I often think impedes building broad coalitions, is saying this well:

Admit It: Things Are Going Well
... A major victory has been won, and we need to claim it and celebrate it.

Imagine the euphoria -- or don't imagine it, just remember it -- when this country elects a new president whose main redeeming feature is that he isn't the previous president. For personality fanatics that's big stuff. And there are big parties. For policy fanatics -- for those of us interested in seeing policies change rather than personalities -- that kind of moment is right now. We need some parties ...we have to celebrate what really happened. We have to announce it. The point is not to take credit. No one person or group did this. People espousing a variety of ideologies did it. And they did it over many years. Millions contributed. The point is that war was popularly rejected.

Why does this matter? It's not a case for optimism, or for pessimism. I continue to have very little use for either bit of self-indulgence. The forces that press for more wars have not gone away. Neither have they been empowered. The point is that those who nonsensically proclaim that stopping wars is impossible cannot get away with saying that anymore.

Read it all.

And then, over the weekend, Larry Summers took himself out of the running for appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve system. The president had wanted to give him the job, but, again a wide variety of people simply said NO. Summers was one of the architects in the Clinton administration of releasing the financial and banking business from any restraints, all to great profit among Wall Street wheelers and dealers. He may have all sorts of good economic plans now, but putting one of the guys in charge who enabled the crime is just wrong.

The popular NO to Summers worked because a new crop of Democratic Senators on the Banking Committee (where their votes were essential) have come along who listen to progressives. It's worth learning the names: John Tester, an old fashioned rural populist from Montana; Jeff Merkley, a tough progressive policy guy from Oregon; and Sherrod Brown, a union-backed economic populist from Ohio. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who actually understands finance, was also expected come out against Summers. These people bear watching.

For a fuller discussion of how liberals won this one, see Jonathan Chait.

Messages from Granada’s walls

Like so many others, Spaniards and foreigners, we journeyed by train to visit the Moorish/Christian fortress/palace, the Alhambra. Eight thousand visitors are admitted a day, every day. The Alhambra is, rightly, Spain’s biggest tourist draw. And it lives up to its reputation. One of these Saturdays I’ll post some photos of this World Heritage site.

To visit the Alhambra is to spend time in the city of Granada, 300,000 people or so, including a population of 80,000 students at the University of Granada, founded in 1531. The tourist section of the city is also a student section, a warren of old buildings divided into apartments, bar/cafes, and street life. It’s great fun. And Granadans, young and possibly also old, have been taking their opinions to the walls of the city.

Some sentiments seem universal in young, politically active locales. “Fucking cops” seems a norm everywhere. This was on a wall of the city’s cathedral.

So was this only slightly more complex sentiment: roughly, “the only church that lights the world is one that is burning.” Not what the devout want to hear, but having seen a few Spanish churches, I can imagine the resentment of wealth which inspires the feeling.

This one is complex. The top layer, in black, expresses the common belief of the unhoused the world over: “People without houses [need/deserve] houses without occupants!” With all the vacancies in depressed Spain, it is not surprising that some of the unemployed might think they ought to have access to empty homes.

Underneath the first layer, in blue, there’s another thought: “Nazis, NO!” (The Z in Nazi is rendered as a swastika.) Where economic distress is great, so, for some, can be the appeal of fascism.

Across from the Alhambra on a steep hillside is the neighborhood called “Albaizin” (various spellings) -- the former medieval Moorish quarter. Its dense, ancient alleys are a tourist attraction in themselves and also an island of pre-modernity in this modern city. And, judging from the neighborhood’s signs, the Albaizin is a prime target for gentrification. Residents are fighting back:

Roughly: “before the city government meddled, Albaicin was a peaceful and safe place; now [by closing a road] they are making it isolated and unsafe.”

Sometimes the sentiment is simpler and apparently more organized:

Stop evictions! I don’t know if the deaths are literal or metaphorical, but I know that everywhere resistance to displacement can be a life or death struggle for individuals suddenly finding themselves in the path of development.

On a day when the temperature exceeded 100F, we ducked into an island of modernity, a brightly lit cafe with strong air conditioning. Afterward we were somewhat mortified to discover this graffiti on the outside:

The assertion: “the workers in there are scabs!” It’s hard for scrawled anarchism to trump air-conditioning.

The class struggle seems alive and all too well in Granada.

We’re not in the Spanish mountains anymore …

This was the scene that greeted us at Malaga International Airport as we began our journey to the States. Several union federations had banded together to protest cuts to airport security jobs -- I can't say whether we are seeing the equivalent of the TSA or airport employees generally. It was polite and peaceful but exemplary of the pain and sporadic resistance we saw all over Spain, one of the countries most hurt by the Great Recession.

Everywhere on our trip we saw the effects of Spain’s burst housing bubble: unfinished tracts; rural houses empty, but posted with “for rent” signs; stores selling off their merchandise (especially clothing) and going out of business. Everyone we talked with felt times were very bad -- and very different than they had been just a few years ago.

Economist Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times has been describing the misery that is the Spanish economic situation for several years. He argues strongly that Spain is being subjected to needless pain by (northern European) leaders that treat economic problems as a morality play, rather than a set of imbalances in the euro area that better policies could alleviate. Here’s a sample from last year:

Consider the state of affairs in Spain… Never mind talk of recession; Spain is in full-on depression, with the overall unemployment rate at 23.6 percent, comparable to America at the depths of the Great Depression, and the youth unemployment rate over 50 percent. This can’t go on — and the realization that it can’t go on is what is sending Spanish borrowing costs ever higher.

In a way, it doesn’t really matter how Spain got to this point — but for what it’s worth, the Spanish story bears no resemblance to the morality tales so popular among European officials, especially in Germany. Spain wasn’t fiscally profligate — on the eve of the crisis it had low debt and a budget surplus. Unfortunately, it also had an enormous housing bubble, a bubble made possible in large part by huge loans from German banks to their Spanish counterparts. When the bubble burst, the Spanish economy was left high and dry; Spain’s fiscal problems are a consequence of its depression, not its cause.

Spaniards we talked with about this seemed to agree with Krugman’s conclusion:

European leaders seem determined to drive their economy — and their society — off a cliff.

Certainly there was tremendous alienation; none of their own politicians inspired any hope.

The belief that economics is a morality play and that people who can’t succeed in a rigged game have only their own sins -- laziness, profligacy -- to blame attracts conservatives everywhere. Our Republicans believe this -- and so apparently does Barack Obama when he is not actively rallying the middle and working class (of whom so many are not working) to support him.

But this is bull bleep: it’s time for an update of a once popular slogan: instead of (or in addition to) Question Authority, we need to Question Austerity! Neither Spaniards nor people in the US need to experience more economic pain. We need an economic jump start from our governments, damn the expense. What’s so hard about that?***Weirdly, though we dutifully presented ourselves at the Malaga airport for what was supposed to be a trip to Boston by way of Zurich, that’s not where we are tonight. A cat got into the plane’s landing gear, causing a several hour delay. Incredibly, when they took it all apart, there was living cat in there. But we missed the Boston leg of our flight and find ourselves with a night in Zurich at Swiss Air’s expense. Don’t know when I’ll next be able to post.

Straight arrow prosecutor in Washington-land

In his book on the experience, former Special Inspector General for Oversight of TARP Neil Barofsky sometimes comes off as a cross between the Jimmy Stewart character (Tony Kirby) in the film You Can't Take It With You and Eliot Ness. That is especially the case in the sections on the abysmal deficiencies of the federal program -- HAMP -- advertised to help homeowners suffering foreclosure in the wake of the mortgage bubble juiced by Wall Street financial cowboys.

Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street begins and ends with Barofsky bemused at how an investigating, Democratic-voting, criminal practice attorney like him ever was nominated for the job of seeing what the Treasury Department did with the $700 billion taxpayer funds extracted from a reluctant Congress in the fall of 2008 when the whole global financial system came unglued.

Suffice to say, he wasn't a welcome addition in Republican Hank Paulson's Treasury Department under Bush and he was probably even less welcome under Tim Geithner when President Obama came into office. He kept asking questions. He expected if they were going to throw all that money around there would be prudent controls. They tried to brush him off -- after all, Wall Street financiers were their kind of people and they trusted them. Besides, nothing was ever really the fault of the money men; it was all some kind of fault-free accident. They were certain some outsider lawyer couldn't possibly understand the entrails of high finance.

In fact, Barofsky understands the financial implosion very well indeed -- this is a great book for anyone who wants to get a basic picture of what the hell the financial plutocrats did (and are doing again) with their clever inventions for betting on our dingy remnants of a real economy. (The only equal in clarity I've read is Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold.) He spent three years trying to get government officials to use the bailout bonanza they'd come into to restore the economy for ordinary citizens as well as for their peers in high finance. Or at least not to allow crooks to run off with too much of the cash. Though he had some influence, he doesn't feel he succeeded. As he wrote in his last report:

… even if TARP saved our financial system back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car [with faulty brakes…]

[Barofsky's addition.] He hoped the Dodd-Frank law would force some changes, especially by breaking up the "too big to fail" banks. Because the recovery as organized under both Bush and Obama has just made these few banks bigger and more politically powerful, he believes we are heading for yet another nasty crash sometime down the line.

Barofsky describes himself as, at times, remarkably politically insensitive. I found it amazing that he didn't understand why efforts to undercut his oversight reached a crescendo right before the 2010 midterm elections. Of course the Obama administration got huffy with this jerk who was messing with their message. Not that he should have shut up, but he could have anticipated some of the grief.

On the other hand, he rapidly figured out that Congresscritters are subject to slightly different pressures than the executive branch and that he could leverage his Congressional supporters on both sides of the aisle to get more influence. Several Congressional figures who seldom get a positive mention from any progressive get high marks for supporting his efforts to avoid fraud: would you believe Darrell Issa and Max Baucus come off as caring about the taxpayers' money? I find it hard. Barney Frank was also a good ally to the oversight function.

Given the mountains of fraud, recklessness, and unethical behavior Barofsky describes here, you might expect that Bailout is depressing. It is not. It is even sort of fun in a police procedural sort of way. Washington may be a rat's nest of greed, ambition and obliviousness to ordinary citizens, but book is still a testament to how persons with decent values plugging away in our various spheres can make some difference. It's not nirvana, but it can be an improvement.

Looking for movements in all the wrong places

I hesitate to comment on this "Critic at Large" column from the New Yorker magazine because it is behind the subscriber pay wall. I read it on paper; the New Yorker is the only magazine I still sporadically look at in hard copy.

But that sometimes excellent journalist George Packer has written something so off base that I can't help myself. In "Don't Look Down," he discusses what he calls "the new Depression journalism," chronicles of today's poor and suffering written by Barbara Garson (Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession), DW Gibson (Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy), Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson (Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression), Charlie LeDuff (Detroit: An American Autopsy) and Chris Hedges with Joe Sacco (Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.)

I haven't read any of these -- though I've seen articles and excerpts from several. They all sound like worthy efforts to ensure that the human cost of our greed and austerity regime is not completely swept under the metaphorical rug. I'm glad they got coverage in the New Yorker.

But what humiliation Packer puts these writers through for their grudging mentions! These writers just don't stand up to comparison to their historical forefathers in Packer's opinion. Before he gets to describing any of them, he waxes lyrical for a full page on the 1930s Depression-era literary lions who visited the victims of that crisis of capitalism. Here's a sample:

In early 1931, Edmund Wilson left his desk job as the literary editor of The New Republic to travel around the stricken country and write a series of articles on the effects of the Depression, then in its second year. … There was nothing unusual in those owl-eyed literary man from the landed gentry, Princeton '16, showing up in Virginia coal country. Sherwood Anderson was there, too -- "all full of Communism," Wilson reported to his friend John Dos Passos. … After Dos Passos finished the second novel of his "U .S.A." trilogy, he joined a group of writers led by Theodore Dreiser on a trip to Harlan County, Kentucky, where they held hearings on the miners' living conditions, and were charged by local authorities with "criminal syndicalism." …

Packer apparently wants a jolt of insurrectionary romance from writers on poverty and he's not getting his fix. He complains that none of the contemporary chroniclers he reviews somehow deserve the pedestal on which he places the men who reported on the Great Depression -- not apparently taking into account that these gents' celebrity was not rooted in their foray among the poverty stricken.

Moreover, there's something oddly anachronistic in searching among the literary chroniclers of the current Great Recession for inspiration. Might not the liberal intellectuals who could fill such a role be located somewhere very different in our current media environment? Perhaps to comprehend our current morass we should be looking at bloggers, say Digby or Ta Nehisi Coates. Or perhaps our best creative commentators on social suffering are no longer primarily writers at all -- they've gone off to do TV -- think old timer Bill Moyers, or Chris Hayes, or Melissa Harris-Parry. This is a different creative environment -- the enthusiastic energy to make a better world that Packer admires in '30s literati almost certainly has different outlets (and very different faces) today.

Moreover Packer goes all nostalgic -- the 1930s gave birth to a heroic labor movement; why aren't there heroes struggling for economic and civic equality today?

Why haven't victims of the new depression come together in a mass movement? Where are the Bonus Marchers, he Townsend Clubs? … Occupy turned out to be a moment of its time -- a cri de coeur, stylish, media-distracted, …

And thus basically a bust. Well maybe. But as with Packer's apparent lack of connection to contemporary intellectual social currents, he's also just showing how out of touch he is contemporary struggles for justice. Some of his '30s icons made heroes of the poor of that day -- but only when they weren't very close. James Agee's portraits of sharecroppers look no more populated by people likely to rise up in anger than LeDuff's characters in Detroit.

There are potent social movements in our time -- it is just that we the comfortable (and Packer) don't easily see them because they haven't broken through yet and we don't have to look. As is usual in the history of eruptions for justice, these are arising among people who have almost nothing to lose and radiate out from that core. In our day, excluded workers -- taxi drivers, day laborers, housekeepers and nannies, fast food employees -- are searching for new forms of self-assertion. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is one potent new organizational formation. All these efforts are tightly tied in to agitation for immigration reform -- and improbably our dysfunctional politicians of both parties have been forced to at least pretend reform is on the agenda. There are no guarantees -- but George Packer would be more credible if he were looking where the action is.

Who are the super rich and what are they doing to us?

Last fall during the election campaign I'd occasionally be asked what I really thought about President Obama. Questioners seemed to mean something along the lines of "who is he?" Damned if I know. Mere consumers of the political theater of democracy can't know, of course. But even when he is disappointing, Obama remains a fascinating figure. I'd say I had a book to recommend, one that I found somehow a little more enlightening than his own autobiography, or David Remnick's effort or William Jelani Cobb's. I suggested Jodi Kantor's The Obamas. I don't know if anyone took up my suggestion -- after all, this was "chick nonfiction" (according to historian Douglas Brinkley.) But it brought me insights that none of the others had teased out.

Chrystia Freeland's Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else strikes me as another important book that a lot of people are probably dismissing as "chick nonfiction." Dismissing this is a mistake. Freeland has been an accomplished financial journalist with the Financial Times and Thomson Reuters; she cut her reporting teeth on describing the rise of Russia's post-Communist billionaires in Sale of the Century. Sure, she writes charmingly about the milieu of her subjects -- but it's the dimwitted reader who misses the edge she brings to her topic.

In this book she chronicles the two current Gilded Ages she sees global plutocrats exploiting concurrently.

… we aren't just living through a replay of the Gilded Age --- we are living through two, slightly different gilded ages that are unfolding simultaneously. The industrialized West is experiencing a second gilded age; … the emerging markets are experiencing their first gilded age.

The gilded age of the emerging markets is the easiest to understand. Many countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa are industrializing and urbanizing, just as the West did in the nineteenth century, and with the added oomph of the technology revolution and a globalized economy. The countries of the former Soviet Union aren't industrializing -- Stalin accomplished that -- but they have been replacing the failed central planning regime that coordinated their creaky industrial economy with a market system, and many are enjoying a surge in their standard of living as a result. The people at the very top of all of the emerging economies are benefiting most, but the transition is also pulling tens of millions of people into the middle class and lifting hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty.

… The collapse of communism is more than a footnote to today's double gilded age. Economic historians are still debating the connection between the rise of Western democracy and the first gilded age. But there can be no question that today's twin gilded ages are as much the product of a political revolution -- the collapse of communism and the triumph of the liberal idea around the world -- as they are of new technology. …

At the same time, the West is also benefiting from the first gilded age of the emerging economies. If you own a company in Dallas or Dusseldorf, the urbanizing peasants of the emerging markets probably work for you. That is good news for the plutocrats in the West, who can reap the benefits of simultaneously being nineteenth-century robber barons and twenty-first century technology tycoons. But it makes the transition even harsher for the Western middle class, which is being buffeted by two gilded ages at the same time.

Freeland, not surprisingly given her experience, is one of the many smart critics of plutocracy who adopts the view that un- and under-regulated free market capitalism is the worst of all possible systems -- except any other that humans have created.

Like at least one other female financial journalist I can think of (Gillian Tett), Freeland approaches her subjects with an ethnographer's eye.

… if you are looking to define the archetypal member of the super elite, he isn't Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy, with his gorgeous acres of Pemberley. He -- and they are almost all still men -- is an aggressive, intensely educated mathematician, the son of middle- or upper-middle-class parents, who made his first fortune young. … The result is a super-elite whose members have been working to join it for most of their conscious lives -- if not since nursery school, certainly since high school, when the competition for those elite college places begins in earnest. … One sign of the shift is the illicit drug of choice among the gilded youth -- Adderall. Its great virtue, one Princeton engineer told me, is that you can study for twenty-four hours without losing your concentration or needing to sleep.

… Revolution [technological, financial, political] is the new global status quo, but not everyone is good at responding to it. My shorthand for the archetype best equipped to deal with it is "Harvard kids who went to provincial public schools." They got into Harvard, or, increasingly, its West Coast rival, Stanford, so they are smart, focused, and reasonably privileged. But they went to public schools, often in the hinterlands, so they have an outsider's ability to spot the weaknesses of the ruling paradigm and don't have so much vested in the current system that they are afraid of stepping outside it.

… If wonks were fashionistas, big data would be this season's hot new color.

… The plutocratic bubble isn't just about being insulated by the company of fellow super-elites, although that is part of it. It is also created by the way you are treated by everyone else. One financier, speaking about his friend who is one of the top five hedge fund managers in the world, said, "He's a good man -- or as good as you can be when you are surrounded by sycophants."

Freeland seems to find the plutocrats she has reports on alluring, if also slightly horrifying; I find them repulsive. Their myopic worship of money and undisguised greed leave me wondering how their mothers can have failed so utterly to knock some humane values into them.

But Freeland knows that the society these men are building is a house of cards that can't last if plutocrats succeed in warping our institutions entirely to their benefit. She explores some of the contradictions between the one percent and the .01 percent that provide some space for efforts to rein in the global super rich. She covers some of the same ground explored in Why Nations Fail, such as the example of the Venetian Renaissance elite who stifled innovation and social mobility and ended up losing their preeminent position in commerce. A Gilded Age, new or old, is delightful for global winners and their hangers on, but it is devastating for most of us.

If you want your plutocracy charmingly and bitingly described, this is a book for you.
*** I need to mention that the notion that uncontrolled free market capitalism is heating up the planet in ways that are likely to change the prospects for even the most affluent humans shows up nowhere in this book. In 10 years, in 20 years, in 50 years, will be it be possible to describe how our economies are and have been organized without mentioning the impact of climate change? I doubt it. But for now, the band plays on...

This is what a democracy deficit looks like

If you put money in a U.S based bank, the Federal government insures it up to $250,000 -- if the bank gambles your money on worthless paper, gives it to its CEO, or otherwise fails, you get paid back up to $250,000 by the FDIC. Nobody would trust banks without this guarantee. It would make more sense to hide your money under a mattress which would lead to a very different and impoverished world. (This is how banking worked before the Great Depression; 4000 U.S. banks failed leaving their depositors without recourse in 1933.)

The present government of Cyrus promised people who put money in its banks that their deposits were insured up to 100,000 Euros (about $130,000). The Cypriot banks gambled and lost, like so many under-regulated financial institutions all around us. If they are to stay in business, they need a bail out. And they are getting one -- one third of which will be financed by grabbing a percentage of individual deposits from the banks. Many of the big depositors are Russian oligarchs who were using Cypriot banks as a place to stash money in Euros. But Cypriot depositors, ordinary people with less than $130,000 mostly middle class families, are getting hit for 6.75 percent of what they thought was safe government-insured savings. It is not as if Cypriots are even getting anything tangible for this tax: this is cash the European Central Bank (ECB) demands to be used to pay off bank investors -- mostly richer European countries like Germany.

I don't usually write about this sort of thing, but the ill-omens are too strong to ignor. I'll pass it to someone who knows what he is talking about: Felix Salmon, Reuters' finance blogger.

What we’re seeing here is the Cypriot government being forced to break one of its most important promises — the promise that if you put your money in the bank, and your deposits total less than 100,000 Euro, then they will be safe. What’s more, there’s no good reason for insured deposits to be hit in this manner: the same amount of money could be raised just by taxing the uninsured deposits at a slightly higher rate. The insured depositors are being hit, it seems, just so that the uninsured depositors can be taxed at single-digit rather than at a double-digit rate.

Meanwhile, people who deserve to lose money here, won’t. If you lent money to Cyprus’s banks by buying their debt rather than by depositing money, you will suffer no losses at all. And if you lent money to the insolvent Cypriot government, then you too will be paid off at 100 cents on the euro. ...

The big winner here is the ECB, which has extended a lot of credit to dubiously-solvent Cypriot banks and which is taking no losses at all. … of course, there are all the hedge funds who have been betting that the Cypriot government won’t default: they’re all popping Champagne right now.

The big loser are working-class Cypriots, whose elected government has proved powerless in the face of decisions driven by Germany, and who are now edging towards fury. The Eurozone has always had a democratic deficit: monetary union was imposed by the elite on unthankful and unwilling citizens. … Across the continent, they’ve lost their democratic right to determine their own fate at the ballot box, and instead they’re being instructed what to do by Germans. Now, in Cyprus, they’re simply and directly losing their money.

Someone with 8,000 Euro of life savings in the bank can ill afford to lose an arbitrary 540 Euro, but that’s exactly what is going to happen. … This decision is important not only because of the precedent it sets with regard to bank depositors, but also because of the way in which it points up just how powerless all the Mediterranean countries (plus Ireland) have become. More than ever before, it’s Germany’s Europe. That’s bad for Cyprus — and it’s not even particularly good for Germany.

People have been known to go mad with rage when they experience broken promises on this scale. The promise that their vote and their well-being matter is being exposed as a fraud. If we don't want to find ourselves in this fix someday, we need to make sure our democracy has the capacity to impose limits on capitalist greed. The many have to rein in the few, ultimately in the interest of all of us, even the plutocrats.

Busy today ...

A friend, the Rev. Gloria Del Castillo, is facing foreclosure of her home at the end of the month. Yes, she was behind in her payments and the house is "underwater" -- worth less on the current market than her remaining mortgage debt would require her to pay.

She has been attempting to negotiate refinancing with the bank (CitiBank, in case you wondered) but apparently the bank has been engaged in the underhanded practice of "dual tracking" -- pursuing foreclosure without disclosing this while stalling talks with my friend.

On January 1, this sort of bank duplicity will be outlawed under legislation passed last year. So naturally CitiBank has scheduled foreclosure for the December 31.

Time to organize against this outrage! The San Francisco Organizing Project has called for a press conference and demonstration outside a branch of the bank. Here's the information:

Thursday, Dec. 20 -- 10am sharp
CitiBank at 245 Market Street, near Embarcadero BART, SF

Call CitiBank Corporate Headquarters: 800-285-3000 and tell them to stop the auction of Rev. Gloria del Castillo’s home! Press 8 for the Directory, then press * for operator assistance, tell them your name and that you would like to lodge a complaint with the CEO on behalf of Gloria del Castillo, whose home is being foreclosed upon. You will probably be put on hold for a little while. More information about making these calls at SFOP.

Regular blogging will resume when I've done some organizing for this.

We need to put the banks on notice they can't get away with their greedy tactics.

Fiscal cliff follies

Okay -- a little about the fearsome "fiscal cliff".

The so-called "fiscal cliff" is an imaginary disaster of invented by politicians of both parties to cover up the fact that they are allowing themselves to be diverted from doing their jobs. There is no "fiscal cliff". There is only the perpetual unwillingness of rich people -- the 1 percent -- to contribute their fair share to the common good.

If the government needs money to do its job -- to "provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare" according to the Constitution -- it should get money from where the money is. And where's that? In the hands of the 1 percent. Tax 'em. If they won't pay, denounce them for the parasites they are.

The rest is all hoohah, obfuscation in the service of socially irresponsible greed.

Today the Prez sent his supporters a letter asking them to tell him what they'd do with $2K next year if he manages to keep the fearsome bogeyman -- that's the fiscal cliff -- from taking it away from them. Nice, but irrelevant. People need to be banging on the government to do its job -- to ensure the solvency of necessary programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If that requires upsetting the 1 percent, screw 'em.

Here's how a brave President deals with this kind of phony "crisis":
On the monument to that President in Washington is this sentence:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.

Would that the current incumbent would show a little of that spirit.