Wonkette takes on a Wall Street Journal opus urging a $5 an hour minimum wage. Just go read.
Category: #OccupyWallStreet
Sen. Warren to Obama: Stop nominating corporatist judges
She gives me hope. Via Talking Points Memo:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Thursday called on President Obama to nominate fewer judges who have represented corporate interests and more with backgrounds working for public interest groups.
“Power is becoming more and more concentrated on one side,” she said at an event organized by the left-leaning Alliance for Justice. “Well-financed corporate interests line up to fight for their own privileges and resist any change that would limit corporate excess.”
Warren pointed out that after the Senate voted to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees, it could be easier for the Senate to confirm such judges.
“[I]t’s unsurprising that the president and a majority of the Senate gravitated to nominating corporate lawyers…that most conservative senators could not object to,” she said. “We have an opportunity to…fight for something that balances the playing field in the other direction.”
Alliance for Justice released a report Thursday on the President’s judicial nominees. Seventy-one percent of the judges he nominated primarily represented corporate interests.
Oops
So the Koch brothers held their annual conference, and someone left behind a confidential document — which someone turned into Mother Jones.
Coincidence, prescience or just a good week?
I mean, I’m sure we can rule out guilty conscience, right? So it’s either personal, or it involved losing money:
Bloomberg reported on Friday that Mike Dueker, chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead on the side of a Tacoma highway in Washington state. Police have stated that it appears he took his own life.
“He may have jumped over a 4-foot fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment… the death appeared to be a suicide.”
A statement released by Russell Investments read, in part:
“Mike was highly respected and regarded at Russell Investments and in the broader financial services industry. In the five years that he worked at Russell, he made valuable contributions that helped our clients and many of his fellow associates.”
But wait – there’s more. Last Sunday, William Broeksmit – a former senior manager for Deutsche Bank – was found hanging in his South Kensington, London home. He was 58 years old. The Daily Mail reports that the death was “non suspicious.”
Creeped out yet? If not, this should do it.
Completing the macabre hat-trick, consider that last Tuesday, Gabriel Magee, a vice president of JPMorgan Chase & Co in London, apparently jumped to his death from a building in the Canary Wharf financial district plunging 500 feet to his death after hurling himself off the roof of the JPMorgan Chase and Co.’s European headquarters. Again, police ruled the death a suicide.
Pete Seeger, ‘ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser’
I was away from the swamp, stealing potatoes at the local Super Fridge, when I heard about Pete Seeger. This will be a rough day, I thought. Swamp Rabbit is an old leftie with a soft spot for New Deal-influenced folksingers, and Seeger, 94, was the last of that breed. Sure enough, the pesky rodent was weeping next to the wood stove whe I got back to the shack. He drank Wild Turkey while I put the taters on the fire. Then we surfed for obits and skimmed old books.
The Associated Press used the phrase “ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser” and found a way to best sum up the difference between Seeger and the only other folksinger, pre-Bob Dylan, who would have as big an influence on popular music:
On the skin of Seeger’s banjo was the phrase, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender” — a nod to his old pal [Woody] Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with “This machine kills fascists.”
The record will show that Seeger was as brave and well-respected as he was peace-loving. Dylan alluded to this in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, while describing the day he was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond:
Recently [Hammond] had brought Pete Seeger to the label. He didn’t discover Pete, though. Pete had been around for years. He’d been in the popular folk group The Weavers, but had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had a hard time, but he never stopped working. Hammond was defiant when he spoke about Seeger, that Pete’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, that his relatives had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill, for Christsake. “Can you imagine those sons of bitches blacklisting him? They should be tarred and feathered.”
Seeger had been blacklisted after testifying before the “anti-communist” House Un-American Activities Committee. He had politely told the honorables to fuck off:
I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.
Then we read that Seeger “lost his cool” in 1965 because Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival and the instruments drowned out Dylan’s words. A familiar story, gossiped about many times.
“I forgave him for that,” I said. “Dylan’s show must have been a shock to a guy who was born more than 30 years before rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Well now, Pete’s ghost must be sighing with relief,” the rabbit replied. “Who gives a shit who you forgive?”
We read about Seeger’s inspiring appearance at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and wondered whether Barack Obama would mention in his State of the Union address that Seeger’s life and art were exactly in sync with the social democratic policies that boosted the quality of life in mid-20th century America. Policies that have been under constant attack since Ronald Reagan took office.
“Oh sure,” the rabbit said. “Then the Democrats and Republicans is gonna hold hands and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Hold the taters, you twit. Just pass me another bottle.”
Poor, poor bankers
When are they even exposed to the news that people are bashing them? They don’t consort with the likes of us!
It’s all your fault
No such thing as systemic problems, it’s all about character flaws:
Whether you’re rich or poor, Republicans believe that’s on you.
Findings released Thursday by Pew showed that most Republicans think rich people are largely responsible for their socioeconomic status. They also feel the same way about poor people.
Fifty-seven percent of GOP voters said that a person is rich because “he or she worked harder than others,” while just 32 percent attribute it to advantages they enjoyed. The results are almost completely flipped among Democrats.
Overall, 51 percent of Americans said that people are wealthy due to advantages in life, while 38 percent said it had more to do with hard work.
Punishing us for protesting
Yes, this is England. But it will happen here:
Chief constables are shortly to press the home secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon by any police force across England and Wales to deal with anticipated street protests.
The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.
The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon onto the streets of London ready for use by this summer.
Money addict
A very powerful op-ed in yesterday’s Times written by a former hedge fund trader. I strongly recommend reading it all, especially the comments:
But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”
I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.
From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.
I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.
Continue reading “Money addict”
‘Flies on the wall’
That’s what we are to the kind of people supporting Christie and Rick Scott:
Mr. Christie shunned public appearances in Florida, where he is raising money for Gov. Rick Scott, a fellow Republican.
Instead, the New Jersey governor was whisked into an event at the Country Club of Orlando, and, later, a fund-raiser at a Palm Beach home owned by the heir to a sugar fortune.
Inside, Mr. Christie found what must pass, at this difficult moment, as an oasis for him: a group of Ferrari and Jaguar-driving Florida Republicans for whom traffic in New Jersey is a distant thought.
Getting into his Bentley after the fund-raiser, one guest, Geoffrey Leigh, called the controversy over the lane closures “little flies on the wall, quite frankly.”
You know what I think about people driving those cars: They’ll be the easiest to pick off when the revolution comes!