¶ The Paragraph

“It was like someone poured molasses on the enforcement division,” said one manager about the Bush II Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the chairmanship of Christopher Cox.²⁰ As financial fraud raged on Wall Street, Cox’s management slowed financial law enforcement at every stage of a case.²¹²²²³ To open a case, an investigator had to wait, sometimes for months, for the five-person (Republican majority) commission to review and approve it. To research a case, an investigator had to deal with lousy support facilities. For example, the old, patchwork data system often forced an investigator to go outside the agency for real-time trading information. And the lack of administrative help left an investigator to spend hours a day on tasks such as scanning documents and making ones own travel arrangements. To bring a case to court (an enforcement action), an investigator had to get it through eight levels of review before placing it before the commission for approval. Some cases were dropped during this review process because they had become so old. To settle a case where the corporate culprit would pay a penalty, again the investigator had to send it to the commission, which would often slash or wipe out the fine. In one case, the commission set the penalty below that which the company itself had proposed, leaving the investigator to go back to the company to explain the lower amount. Seeing one’s work undercut at the final stage, swayed investigators away from taking up difficult cases of big financial fraud, and towards easier cases, such as small Ponzi schemes and insider trading. For example, cases of naked short selling — an illegal practice rife for big fraud — were not pursued, with 5000 complaints over 15 months resulting in zero enforcement actions.²⁴ Under these conditions investigators left the agency, further slowing enforcement. So here we see one way that the pro-corporate Bush regime fought corporate regulation: by hindering civil servants from doing the job.

Sources

Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

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The debate on a U.S. national health insurance bill has ranged over three main plans: at one end, the single-payer system most favored by the people; at the other end, the all-private system favored by insurance companies; and in the middle, the public option among private options, favored by the majority Democratic leadership.x¹⁰ Since that leadership barred the single-payer plan from Congressional committees working on the bill, insurance companies have lowered their sights on the public option. At the first Senate committee hearing, insurance company agent Karen Ignagni offered to give up charging women more for medical insurance than men, as a concession towards killing the public option.x¹¹ But Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) did not see that as a worthy bargaining chip. “The disparity between women and men in the individual marketplace is just plain wrong and it has to change,” he said. And before the day was out, Kerry put in a bill to ban that practice.x¹²x¹³ While that one try did not work out for the insurance companies, it still serves to show a contrast in bargaining styles. At one end, the people’s supposed representatives open with a position that has already ceded half the ground, while at the other end, the insurance companies see even a small concession as a bargaining chip.

Sources

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As the U.S. Congress works on a national health care bill, people have lined-up behind three main proposals. The one most favored by citizens and doctors — and many Democratic lawmakers — is the single-payer system, which would improve and extend Medicare to all persons.x¹ With this system everyone chooses one’s own doctors, and no one has to shop for health insurance. This type of system has been proven to work well in many other developed countries.x² But both Congressional committees working on the national health care bill have taken single-payer off the table, saying that moving to it from today’s huge for-profit insurance system would be “disruptive”.x³ The second proposal, favored by much of the national Democratic leadership, is the public option, where a person would pick one from a menu of several insurance company plans and a non-profit government insurance plan.x⁵ Like single-payer, the public option would be free of the huge costs in marketing, executive pay and profits of insurance company plans. But, to keep the public option viable, lawmakers would have to tool the system to guard against insurance companies cherry-picking the healthiest persons. To get the public option passed, proponents might have to deal with renegade Democrats sympathetic to insurance company gripes of not being able to compete.x⁶ The third proposal, favored by insurance companies, and those Republican lawmakers who favor any proposal at all, keeps an all-private insurance system, which would have some new regulation while requiring all persons to buy insurance.x⁷ This type of system was adopted three years ago in Massachusetts, but has failed to control costs and provide health care to all.x⁸ Still, the millions of dollars the insurance business has put into lobbying and lawmakers’ campaign chests might sway Congress to choose this system.x⁹ So, while it appears that corporate pull has yanked single-payer off the table, it remains to be seen if the people have enough pull in Congress to at least get a viable public option.

Sources

Cartoon credit: ‘Count Bleed-Ya-Dry’ by Bill Jarcho via The Backbone Campaign

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In the 1990’s right-wing talk spread to nearly every radio dial in the United States, and, day-after-day, pelted liberal-thinking citizens with scorn, and railed against use of government to help the people — even knocking long-established programs such as the minimum wage and social security.x⁷⁰x⁷¹x⁷² Behind that barrage, a Republican majority rode into Congress, and cut regulations for financial corporations.x⁷³ Later, under cover of the ongoing barrage — now strengthened by a new right-wing TV news network — the right-wing corporate Bush regime snuck into power, and pushed through big tax cuts for the richest citizens, and cut enforcement of regulations on big corporations.x⁷⁴x⁷⁵x⁷⁶ So, with a free rein, big financial corporations sold trillions of dollars of shaky bonds, bets on bonds, and bonds on bets, which poisoned and slowed the world-wide economy, causing millions of people to lose their jobs.x⁷⁷ During all of this, the Black Hills wind blew across Mount Rushmore and the chiseled faces of four past leaders who warned about such events.

George Washington warned against internal enemies who would try to separate one group of citizens from another, and the people from their government:

The unity of Government, which constitutes you one people, … is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty, which you so highly prize. But … it is easy to foresee, that … much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed …x⁸⁵

Thomas Jefferson foresaw fraudulent banking:

[L]iable as [a bank’s] cash would be to be pilfered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently re-issued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation.x⁸⁶

Abraham Lincoln believed that government “for the people” should include protecting workers’ wages:

[I]t has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government. x⁸⁷

Theodore Roosevelt warned of corporate bosses undermining government for the people:

The big trust magnates …, the big politicians of the old boss type …, stand against the people. They object to the government, to government being used primarily in the interest of the people themselves. Naturally, they will do all they can to breakdown the only real enemies that they have and the only real champions, the only real and efficient champions of popular right, and economic, social, and industrial justice.x⁸⁸

Now there is liberal talk — though not nearly on every radio dial. But where it exists, it serves to beat back the right-wing barrage, and to broadcast words like those from the Rushmore wind.

Liberal Talk Radio Links

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In September last year, the Bush regime left behind its old refrain that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” and went to Congress for a quick $700B to bail out collapsing banks stuck with toxic assets.x⁶⁰x⁶¹ Then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for giving himself total control of the fund and making his decisions “non-reviewable … by any court of law or any administrative agency.“x⁶² Congress passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to provide the money, but wrote-in oversight, and created the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) appointed as chairman Elizabeth Warren, a bankruptcy law professor free of banking and government ties. In October, Paulson reported to COP that Treasury had used the TARP fund to buy assets “at or near par”, but COP researched and found that to be false: Paulson had overpaid by $78B, nearly a third of what was spent. Now, with a new regime, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in charge of TARP, the U.S. may be getting a better price for bank assets, but it still avoids taking over big banks, de-toxing them and selling them back into private hands — like the FDIC does for smaller failed banks. As chairman of COP, Warren does not give policy advice, but the professor did answer an interviewer’s question about what a bankruptcy proceeding for a bank would look like:

Here’s how it would work in a Chapter 11 if this were any other industry: all the equity would be wiped out, then the creditors would get a percentage on the dollar,” she said. “We would totally protect all the deposit accounts, and the rest of the debt would get some combination of stock and pennies on the dollar. The minute that happens, the banks are solvent, and new capital can flow in.”

Someone said to me, You’re describing ripping the Band-Aid off all at once, and we’re saying how ‘bout we just keep peeling the corners off a little at a time — ouchy, ouchy, ouchy — and maybe we can adjust as we go along. [In the early 90’s,] Sweden ripped the Band-Aid off all at once, and Japan took ten years. But the Band-Aid had to come off.

Who are we trying to protect here? Is it a banking system that is in service to American families and the economy, or is it the American families and the economy in service to a banking system? I know what I think the answer should be.”

The biggest taker of banking bailout money, AIG — getting $40B of TARP money in November, plus $43B from its own special bailout fund and $38B in loan money — is now in line to get another $30B from TARP.x⁶³ Ouchy, ouchy, ouchy.

Sources

Photo of Elizabeth Warren by Millicent Harvey, published in the Harvard Law Bulletin

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