Thursday, February 28, 2013

Something about power and corruption

Once more, a little collection of things I have read this week that deserve more than a Tweet, but for which I do not have time to write a full post.


So let me get this straight. President Obama is meeting with senior Congressional leaders to discuss sequestration on Friday, after the deadline has passed. Meanwhile, the Dow rallies and defense stocks, which are highly sensitive to government spending, are outperforming the market.

Is the market just conditioned to getting a last minute deal, just like what we saw during the 2011 debt ceiling impasse, or endless Eurozone summits over Greece in the same year?

What happens to equity prices if the cavalry doesn't arrive?

Ah, that would be 'crash', I believe.


-- The Supreme Court is poised to declare racism is over in America.

"There is an old disease, and that disease is cured," Bert Rein, the attorney leading the legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act—the landmark law intended to ensure all Americans can vote—told to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. "That problem is solved."

Rein represents Shelby County, Alabama, one of the jurisdictions covered by a key section of the Voting Rights Act called Section 5. Under Section 5, parts of the country with histories of discriminatory election practices have to ask for permission—or "preclearance," in legal terms—from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting rules. But the South, where most of the covered jurisdictions are, has changed, Rein said, and the law, although once justified, is now unfair and unconstitutional. The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to agree. "The Marshall Plan was very good too," argued Justice Anthony Kennedy, "but times change."

There was also something Scalia said about the right to vote being an entitlement, and not a right. And then there's John Roberts, who has been shaping arguments against VRA since he was a pup (and Reagan was president).

Pre-clearance might just survive this challenge because of the egregiousness of Shelby, but it certainly won't last much longer. A case with enough merit for the conservatives on the Court to strike it down is all but inevitable. Democrats in state legislatures across the country would do well to begin considering what legal challenges to voting discrimination would look like in a post-Section 5 landscape. Kuffner has more.

-- Jack Lew got quietly confirmed as Treasury Secretary yesterday. A topic of somewhat under-the-radar discussion prior to his approval by the Senate were his large bonuses, one from Citigroup (which conservative media from the WSJ to Brietbart.com assailed) and one from NYU. The bank bonus has been defended as SOP on Wall Street, as if that makes everything dandy.

I just can't be too enthusiastic about a fox of a different color pretending to guard the henhouse. Thank goodness for Elizabeth Warren. I'll bet those Republican senators who tried to block her as head of the CFPC wish now they had been unsuccessful.

"Any idea about when we're gonna arrive in the right direction?"

Update: Firedoglake has more.

-- Speaking of massive capitalist assholes, Jamie Dimon was in town yesterday to say thanks to the peasants who work for him, and some of the rich people who give him their money.

"We need a bankruptcy process that can take apart a big bank without taking down the economy. It's been done before," Dimon said in a phone interview before starting a four-city Texas bus tour. He was in Houston on Wednesday and goes to San Antonio on Thursday.

Some veterans of the financial services industry have called for dividing diversified global banks into separate commercial banking companies - those that take deposits and make loans - and investment banks that invest in companies and trade in derivatives that hedge risks. But Dimon argues against it.

"We don't speculate with depositors' money," Dimon said of JPMorgan Chase's derivatives activities.

[...]

Dimon, 56, repeatedly has said the United States needs large, diversified banking companies to help U.S. companies operate internationally with services that are efficient due to economies of scale.

"We have to compete globally," he said, citing larger, more consolidated banks in other parts of the world such as those in China. "They'd eat our lunch" if the large U.S. banks were broken into smaller companies, Dimon said. "We need global banks."

The day before yesterday, Dimon revealed his inner pig for a moment.

At JPMorgan Chase's annual investor day on Tuesday, CEO Jamie Dimon answered one analyst's question by saying, "That's why I'm richer than you." 

What do you suppose he meant by that?

-- And starring Bob Woodward as Derp Throat.

Woodward, who once upon a time went after presidents for breaking the law, finds himself in the comically hypocritical position of condemning Obama for not ignoring federal law. Woodward is shocked, shocked that a president isn't consolidating even more authority in the executive branch.

We have passed through the looking glass.

Update: Glenn Greenwald.

(H)ere is Bob Woodward, with one rant, expressing the core values of America's media class. The president is not constrained by law (contemptuously referred to as "this piece of paper"). He not only has the right but the duty to do anything - even if the law prohibits it - to project military force whenever he wants (even though the Constitution mandates as his prime duty not to Keep Us Safe but rather that he "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed" and thus must swear as his oath "to the best of [his] ability [to] preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"). The US must act as empire, dominating the world with superior military force if it wants to stay safe. Any reduction in military spending and deployment will endanger us all.

It's to be expected that these authoritarian and militaristic values shape political leaders and their followers. That these values also shape the "watchdog" media class, as embodied by one of their "legends", explains much about US political culture generally.

Bob Woodward fulfills an important function. Just as Tim Russert was long held up as the scary bulldog questioner who proved the existence of an adversarial TV press while the reality was that, as Harper's Lewis Lapham famously put it, he maintained "the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter", the decades-old Woodward lore plays a critical role in maintaining the fiction of a watchdog press corps even though he is one of the most faithful servants of the war machine and the national security and surveillance states. Every once and awhile, the mask falls, and it's a good thing when it does.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Other views in SD-6 as EV concludes

-- The Chron's Allan Turner, quoting UH's Rice's Bob Stein.

"Substantively," said Rice University political science professor Robert Stein, "the two candidates, with minor exceptions, are in lockstep … Carol is a new-breed Latina. Sylvia is old school." 

Am I the only one who reads some condescension -- maybe even a little misogyny -- into that statement? Maybe it's just my residual sensitivity from Seth MacFarlane's Oscar night trainwreck. Leaving that bias out... WTF is a 'new-breed Latina' ?!

-- Charles reviews the battlefield and tips some disgust with the volume of commercials on his teevee.

I for one will be glad when all of the nasty ads are done running on TV, in particular all the ads during basketball games on ESPN and CSN Houston. That’s the problem with live sporting events, you can’t zap the commercials.

Thank goodness I haven't seen a single one. Nor have I looked at any at the various pieces of junk mail sent out by the campaigns (some images have been sent to me, which I have worked hard to ignore). Let's get clear: this is what Alvarado and Garcia are spending the bulk of their millions of dollars on: attack ads -- print and electronic -- discussed, produced, and purchased by their political consultants, earning themselves commissions every step of the way. It's been a great start to the new year for them. They're probably pulling for Alvarado just so they can create another business opportunity.

-- The Chron's Patti Hart, with all the money broken down (same link as above).

The Senate District 6 race has been heavily financed by the two biggest donors in Texas: Houston homebuilder Bob Perry and Houston plaintiff's lawyer Steve Mostyn.

The latest reports to the Texas Ethics Commission show that, since Jan. 19, Perry, who typically has financed Republican candidates and the tort reform effort in Texas, donated $5,000 to Alvarado.

The political action committee he founded, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, donated another $259,000 during the same time period. In addition, lobbyist Mike Toomey, who works for Perry, donated $1,000 and homebuilder David Weekley, also a TLR supporter, donated $5,000 to the District 145 representative.

Garcia reported receiving $356,750 from Mostyn or his law firm, while receiving another $117,319.26 from the Texas Organizing Project, a group funded mostly by Mostyn. In addition, Garcia received a contribution of $55,000 from Texas for Insurance Reform, another group that also receives significant Mostyn financial support.

Since the January election, Garcia has raised $662,686 and spent $641,435. Alvarado has raised $581,969 and spent $463,495.68

Both candidates have topped the $1 million mark in campaign spending: Alvarado's total campaign expenditures from July 2012 through the last report indicate she has spent $1.2 million; Garcia has spent $1.1 million.

I cannot find appropriate adjectives to convey the proper degree of revulsion with which I find all of that news. The only thing I would like to know in greater detail is to whom -- and how much -- TransCanada and their various entites (PACs, executives, etc.) have donated.

I am certain that I would need a prescription to Zofran in order to tolerate learning the answer.

Update: This afternoon Burnt Orange Report and Texas Liberal weighed in.

Katherine Haenschen at BOR, in TLR Trying to Buy Democratic Senate Seat With Carol Alvarado:

Carol Alvarado raised almost half of her run-off money from Texans from Lawsuit Reform, Stand for Children PAC, a teacher's union-busting organization, payday lenders, and several Republican PACs and mega-donors. ... Sylvia Garcia, on the other hand, is primarily funded by trial lawyers and labor organizations...

Neil Aquino, from TxLib, in I’d Sit Out The Alvarado-Garcia Texas Senate District 6 Race Because It Offers No Hopeful Options...

As far as I recall, I’ve voted in every election since I turned 18. But I would sit it out if I could vote in the Texas State Senate district 6 runoff between Democrats Carol Alvarado and Sylvia Garcia. ...

There is little ideological or policy difference between the two, both campaigns are captive to special interest money, the campaign has been relentlessly negative, and turnout will be so low as to delegitimize the process. While ultimate responsibility lies with the electorate, it is also so that what voting will accomplish in this case is to legitimize a process that offers no real options.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Norma Zenteno 1953 - 2013


We attended the event originally planned as a benefit which became her tribute Sunday afternoon, and couldn't get in the door. There were a hundred people or more lined up outside at 4 o'clock, allowed to enter only as others left, as the fire marshal ruled the crowd was too large for the facility.

I listened to her music for years and was thrilled to meet her about two years ago as shared supporters of Barrio Dogs, the East End effort to help abandoned, abused, and neglected animals.

She could have easily reached national fame and fortune as a musician, but she didn't care about having those things. And as tremendous as her musical talents were, her warmth and grace and compassion exceeded even that.

There will be a service for her on Friday, March 1, from 10 to noon, at the Catholic Charismatic Center on Cullen Blvd.

There's just no getting accustomed to the loss of a soul like Norma Zenteno. The rest of us just get to hold our wonderful memories of her, and try a little harder to live our lives as she did hers.

Vaya con Dios, Norma.

This Week in Texans of Infamy

-- I am still holding out on posting anything at length about this miserable POS. As previously mentioned, I am trying. real. hard, Ringo... to be the shepherd. Or at least to not feed the trolls.

This wad craves the attention he is getting and I just don't want to give him any.

-- And the same goes for this douchebag. Even Ed Emmett has figured out that he's a moron. And yet, he makes an appeal to logic. Which of the two is more stupid, really?

-- I'm not cutting Phil Gramm any slack, though. He is precisely...

... the Forrest Gump of financial calamity. Time and again, his face appears at key moments in history. Unlike Gump, Gramm is usually planting the seeds of future disaster whenever he pops up. 

From Gramm, to Kay Bailey, to the current occupant of that Senate seat. It sure will be a beautiful day when Texas Republican voters wake up and smell the coffee, won't it?

-- This is a fellow we should all get to know better: Edward Blum, the godfather of the legal challenges to the Voting Rights Act. As the Supreme Court begins to decide whether or not to eviscerate it, just remember that if Craig Washington's personal financial difficulties had been publicly disclosed a little sooner, Blum might have made it to Congress for a two-year term... just like Steve Stockman.

Why is the VRA still necessary, you wonder? Because this. And this.

-- I would like to be more encouraged about this development, but until Texas Democrats stop advancing online petitions and start registering Latino voters in their neighborhoods -- and then going back and driving them to the polls during early voting periods and on Election Day -- I will remain skeptimistic. Similar to Socratic Gadfly.

Update: Jeremy Bird understands the scope of the challenge.


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Paraphrasing from the interview above: "1.5 million citizen Latinos in Texas, 500,000 African Americans, and 200,000 Asian Americans are not registered to vote. In 2008, 54% of Latinos were registered to vote, but only 35% turned out..."

Monday, February 25, 2013

The Weekly Wrangle, expanded

The Texas Progressive Alliance remains unsequestered and without an Oscar as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff talks about what happens after SCOTUS rules on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

As the special election runoff in Senate District 6 lurched into its final days, PDiddie at Brains and Eggs had a couple more posts on the sordid last-minute developments.

How we get Medicaid expanded in Texas makes no difference as long as it eventually gets done. That's why WCNews at Eye on Williamson says this about the Texas GOP: However they want to rationalize it is fine with me.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted a picture of an old VW van with a bunch of Republican bumper stickers. What kind of a lousy counterculture is that! Also, Neil continues to work on his new website that will feature a variety of creative efforts as well as a blog on the 2013 City of Houston elections.

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Snips from other Texas blogs...

Bluedaze previewed the tar sands pipeline presentation to be revealed at the National Summit to Stop the Frack Attack, in Dallas on March 2-3.

Burnt Orange Report covered the development of Beaumont's selection as America's Saddest City. Cue the sad trombone.

Dos Centavos reminded Texas legislators *cough*RickPerry*cough* that it is time to support the expansion of Medicaid.

Grits for Breakfast also had a legislative dispatch; 101 House members endorsed a bill that criminalizes taking or distributing photos taken via drone without a court order.

South Texas Chisme rejoiced in the fact that the Texas DPS can no longer shoot at people from helicopters for any old reason, and called for some respect for the remains of migrants who died while fleeing economic hardship.

Letters from Texas gathered the reactions to Rick Perry's California troll-baiting excursion.

And state Sen. Kelly Hancock got spanked by McBlogger for his craven pandering to State Farm.