Category: Corporate Statism

Bill Black on austerity

~ susie

From the RealNews.com:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.

Bill Black is a white-collar criminologist. He was on the committee that investigated banking fraud in the Savings and Loan crisis, and he’s been an often critic of the media and how it covers the current financial and economic crisis. He recently wrote a piece about The New York Times journalists and how they don’t even read some of their own financial guys, like Krugman. And he now joins us to talk about his critique of The New York Times and the media. Thanks for joining us. Bill joins us from D.C., where he’s now visiting. Bill, I think I did the whole introduction, except to say that you’re also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Thanks for joining us again.

WILLIAM K. BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.

JAY: So talk a bit about your piece about The New York Times. And what was your point?

BLACK: Well, there were a series of articles in The New York Times covering the recent elections in Europe, particularly in France and Greece, but also mentioning Germany and England. And the common denominator in each of these elections was that the people rose up against the parties imposing Berlin’s austerity program, which has forced Europe back into recession and forced the periphery of Europe back into depression. And they rejected this soundly in these votes.
But the amazing thing was that The New York Times reporters were treating this like, well, these people must be financially illiterate, because everybody knows austerity is the only thing that can be done, and austerity must be done, and it’s good and such. So the more they destroy the economy, the more the New York Times reporters seem to think that destroying the economy is the objective.

And Paul Krugman has been very good. He is, after all, Nobel laureate in economics. He writes a regular column for The New York Times, and for months he’s been explaining how insane the austerity program is. But apparently the New York Times reporters don’t read their own Nobel prize winning economists.

JAY: Well, the same thing was happening here during the high tide of the super committee and all the focus on the American debt and deficit. The same thing was happening. The media was just presupposing that you need to have these kinds of cuts and they’re good for the economy, and this kind of notion that if you have austerity, it frees up the society for growth. I mean, that’s the argument, and I guess most journalists seem to buy into that. So what’s wrong with that?

BLACK: Well, it’s the opposite is true. If you’re in a recession, the problem is you don’t have sufficient demand to keep people employed. And so that typically means private-sector demand is seriously inadequate. Austerity means that you reduce public-sector demand at the same time that private-sector demand is already inadequate. Well, if you do that, then you have really inadequate demand and you have really severe unemployment, which is why unemployment has shot upward throughout Europe, why it’s over 20 percent in a number of the nations of the periphery, why youth unemployment is over 50 percent, why immigration is a leading strategy of European kids when they get their college degree. And it’s a policy that is tearing the European Union apart politically, and socially as well.
You know, this is the equivalent up bleeding a patient, and then, of course, they don’t get better, because you bled them, so you bleed them some more, and then you yell at them for—you know, what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you recovering? And you bleed them some more. And, you know, pretty soon they’re pretty near death’s door and you’re—can’t understand why they’re not praising you and instead they’re voting you out of office.
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Wells Fargo has blood on their hands

~ susie ~ 14 Comments

Maybe someone should punish these bastards. Oh, that’s right, they’re all getting away with it!

Norman and Oriane Rousseau were one more couple pushed by a huge, greedy bank to the brink of homelessness. On Sunday, desperate and with nowhere to go, Norman Rousseau shot himself.


This is the story of what happens when an average couple is up against a giant, wealthy, powerful bank. Unfortunately the result is what the result always is when people are on their own against the wealthy and powerful: the bank ends up with all of their money, takes their house to sell and throws them out onto the street. In this case the bank is Wells Fargo.


The quick version of this terrible story is that Norman and Oriane Rousseau of Newbury Park, California were scammed into a predatory mortgage. But they made their payments anyway, always paying with a cashier’s check in person at the same branch. Then one day the bank misapplied their payment and said they still owed the money. This started a long, nasty process that led to the bank evicting the Rousseaus from their home.


Here’s the shocker: right at the start the Rousseaus came up with proof that the bank had received the payment and had cashed the check. But the bank continued to claim it had missed the payment, gave the Rousseaus the runaround, started applying fees, and used it as an excuse to foreclose on the house anyway.

Debtors prison

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I could be wrong, but I think this law may be unconstitutional. I think it’s pretty settled case law that they have to prove you owe the money – but then again, the world’s turning upside down, so who knows?

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has approved legislation making it easier for debt collectors to go after defaulting consumers and small businesses.
Brewer signed House Bill 2664 into law today. The measure allows collection agencies to use final billing statements as a basis to show amounts owed and interest rates as they seek court judgments and wage garnishments.


The bill was favored by debt collectors, which buy delinquent accounts from banks and credit card companies for pennies on the dollar, but receive only minimal information from those sources. It can be difficult and expensive for the collection companies to get additional information on the defaulting consumers and business owners.


Debt collectors’ business model depends on them collecting money from the account holders whose information they buy. The new state law makes it easier on them if they can obtain final billing statements from the banks and credit card issuers.

Basically, they make shit up. But so much for law and order in Arizona!

Citizens United

~ susie

Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker explains how John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision:

A private drama followed which in some ways defined the new Chief Justice to his colleagues. Roberts assigned the Citizens United opinion to himself. Even though the oral argument had been dramatic, Olson had presented the case to the Court in a narrow way. According to the briefs in the case—and Olson’s argument—the main issue was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on video on demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts’s opinion would say this much and no more.

At first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence which said the Court should have gone much further. Kennedy’s opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold’s restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut long-standing prohibitions on corporate giving. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservative Justices began rallying to Kennedy’s more expansive resolution of the case. In light of this, Roberts withdrew his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.

…

As the senior Justice in the minority, John Paul Stevens assigned the main dissent to Souter, who was working on the opinion when he announced his departure, on April 30th. Souter wrote a dissent that aired some of the Court’s dirty laundry. By definition, dissents challenge the legal conclusions of the majority, but Souter accused the Chief Justice of violating the Court’s own procedures to engineer the result he wanted.

Roberts didn’t mind spirited disagreement on the merits of any case, but Souter’s attack—an extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court—could damage the Court’s credibility. So the Chief came up with a strategically ingenious maneuver. He would agree to withdraw Kennedy’s draft majority opinion and put Citizens United down for reargument, in the fall. For the second argument, the Court would write new Questions Presented, which frame a case before argument, and there would be no doubt about the stakes of the case. The proposal put the liberals in a box. They could no longer complain about being sandbagged, because the new Questions Presented would be unmistakably clear. But, as Roberts knew, the conservatives would go into the second argument already having five votes for the result they wanted. With no other choice (and no real hope of ever winning the case), the liberals agreed to the reargument.

Smart ALEC

~ susie

Spin, spin, spin!

WASHINGTON — When the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) first started facing public scrutiny about its extraordinary ability to turn “model bills” written by corporate lobbyists into state law, the secretive group sent out a list of talking points to its members, telling them what to do when faced with questions about the role of the group’s corporate sponsors.


The guidance, in a nutshell: Change the subject.


“The following information is designed to help you navigate away from those tough questions and get back to talking about policy,” says the memo, which was obtained by the public interest group Common Cause and provided exclusively to The Huffington Post. “If you are asked any of these questions, acceptable responses are provided, but please then direct the conversation back to the policy to which you want to discuss.”

Read on for details, and for ALEC’s silly response.