Suburban Guerrilla

Can you imagine Barack Obama cracking down on financial speculators rather than giving them White House jobs? Jeff Cohen can’t:

With U.S. media obsessing on the fight here at home among conservatives vying to become president, most of them missed some big news about France, which already has a conservative president. This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take the lead — even go it alone within Europe, if need be — in introducing and pushing a Financial Transaction Tax in his country.

That’s right — the conservative president of France wants to tax the financial traders and speculators.

Referring to the tax as a “moral issue” and blaming deregulation and speculation for the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy has said that traders must “repay for the damage they have caused.”

What does it tell us about U.S. politics that the conservative president of France – on this issue and others — is way to the left of President Obama? The U.S. president has not publicly promoted a Wall Street transaction tax (even though U.S. financial institutions, not the French, were largely responsible for the global crisis).

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Matt Taibbi recently shed more light on how Wall Street executives, with the help of the D.C. establishment, cheat and bribe their way up to a level of wealth and privilege many of us can’t even imagine. More here.

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I’m glad Paul Krugman took a moment Friday to link Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street to Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, but I’m wondering why the columnist pulled his punches rather than go for the KO. More here.

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From Salon:

When it comes to our government’s collective refusal to aggressively investigate — much less prosecute — Wall Street crime, one prevailing line of apologism implies that it’s all about resources. As the general fable goes, Wall Street is so sprawling and so lawyered up that public law enforcement agencies simply don’t have the resources to make sure justice is served, especially at a time of budget deficits. In this story, Wall Street is not simply too big to fail; it’s too big to even police.

The motivation for such myth-making is obvious: It wholly absolves elected officials for their decisions to let their financial-industry campaign contributors off the hook. Yet thanks to recent events, the whole “Too Big to Police” rationale is being exposed for the farce that it is.

At the local level, the same governments that plead poverty when they’re asked to enforce their laws on financial fraud have somehow found plenty of resources to deploy their militarized police forces against Occupy protesters. At the federal level, it’s even more blatant. As we learned in a little-noticed Washington Post piece on Tuesday, the same Obama administration that has refused to spend political capital and federal monies to go after Wall Street is expending new resources to crack down on the supposedly rampant problem of food stamp “fraud.”

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In his speech Tuesday, President Obama noted the “deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street,” and suggested that the big banks should “go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit.” I’m sorry, but why wasn’t he saying these things two years ago? More here.

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Here’s all you have to know about the integrity of the billionaire mayor from Wall Street:

After ordering the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday explained that the park would temporarily remain closed due to a court order that restrained the city from closing the park.

A ruling issued by [Manhattan Supreme Court Justice] Lucy Billings… said that the city is “prohibited from: “(a) Evicting protesters from Zuccotti Park and/or (b) Enforcing the “rules” published after the occupation began or otherwise preventing protesters from re-entering the park with tents and other property previously utilized,” the ruling said.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Bloomberg said that protesters had only been “temporarily” asked to leave the park “to reduce the risk of confrontation and to minimize destruction in the surrounding neighborhood.”

More here.

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Politicians routinely laud cops as heroes, except for the “bad apples.” The question is, how many bad apples does it take to spoil the whole barrel?
More here.

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When it comes to describing the complacency of the Wall Street banksters, their disregard for the millions of people they defrauded and the ease with which they continue to push the right buttons in Washington in order to avoid restitution and prosecution… well, nobody does it better than Matt Taibbi.

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Information in e-mails often ends up in databases that can be used against us by government agents. However, as Matt Taibbi points out, agents can just as easily destroy a database that might contain evidence of crimes in high places.

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