Federal Reserve Bankers Mocked Unemployed Behind Closed Doors


“The room of central bankers then broke into laughter.” (The Intercept)


In 2011, unemployment was at a near crisis level. The jobless rate was stuck around 9 percent nationally, an unusually high number due to the continuing effects of the financial crash.

House Democrats were aghast. “With almost five unemployed Americans for every job opening, too many people remain jobless because of a lack of work, not a lack of wanting to work,” said Congressman Lloyd Doggett, D-Tex. So in early November 2011, they introduced a bill to reauthorize Federal unemployment benefits, an insurance program designed to aide those looking for work.
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Democrats can’t win until they recognize how bad Obama’s financial policies were


He had opportunities to help the working class, and he passed them up. (The Washington Post)


During his final news conference of 2016, in mid-December, President Obama criticized Democratic efforts during the election. “Where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, you know, politically correct, out-of-touch folks,” Obama said, “we have to be in those communities.” In fact, he went on, being in those communities — “going to fish-fries and sitting in VFW halls and talking to farmers” — is how, by his account, he became president. It’s true that Obama is skilled at projecting a populist image; he beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa in 2008, for instance, partly by attacking agriculture monopolies .
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Should Government Bring Back Trust-Busting?


Monopolies Are Antithetical to Democracy (The New York Times)


The proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger is a watershed moment for our political system. Will we continue to allow the further concentration of economic power at the top, or will this be the moment when democracy fights back?

ATT-Time Warner would be a giant in pay-TV, wireless service, broadband, news and entertainment — it could certainly shape the media to its advantage in a myriad different ways.
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Government Has Gutted Its Independent Research


Cuts to research agencies have left Congress outsourcing policy analysis to privately funded institutions. (The New York Times)


There is an inherent conflict posed in the financing of policy ideas. On the one hand, money is required to assemble the data and narratives necessary to present policy options. On the other hand, money can also, in and of itself, corrupt those ideas. This is the think tank analogue to the problem presented by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
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How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul


In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system. (The Atlantic)


It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of corruption and dirty politics the Nixon White House had wrought. Richard Nixon himself had resigned just a few months earlier in August. But the Watergate Babies didn’t just campaign against Nixon; they took on the Democratic establishment, too. Newly elected Representative George Miller of California, then just 29 years old, announced, “We came here to take the Bastille.”
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The Federal Reserve’s independence is dangerous, undemocratic, and a boon to Wall Street


“Regulators who don’t want to change the culture on Wall Street, won’t.” (The Week)


A few months ago, a former employee at the secretive Federal Reserve Bank of New York named Carmen Segarra came forward and blew a big fat whistle. She alleged that she had witnessed regulators, and specifically her boss Mike Silva, act unethically and deferentially towards an entity they were supposed to regulate, Goldman Sachs.
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Lobbying Used to Be Illegal


A Review of Zephyr Teachout’s New Book on the Secret History of Corruption in America. (Medium)


If there’s one way to summarize Zephyr Teachout’s extraordinary book Corruption in AmericaFrom Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, it is that today we are living in Benjamin Franklin’s dystopia. Her basic contention, which is not unfamiliar to most of us in sentiment if not in detail, is that the modern Supreme Court has engaged in a revolutionary reinterpretation of corruption and therefore in American political life. This outlook, written by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the famous Citizens United case, understands and celebrates America as a brutal and Hobbesian competitive struggle among self-interested actors attempting to use money to gain personal benefits in the public sphere.

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Why the Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does


A book review of “The New Democrats and the Return to Power”       by Al From. (Medium)


There is no end to the whining from Democratic activists after a rotten election, and no end to finger pointing after legislative defeats on contentious questions. This story in the Washington Post is the tell-all of the 2014 wipe-out, featuring the standard recriminations between the President and Congress. In it, the chief of staff of the Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, David Krone, attacks the White House. “We were never going to get on the same page… We were beating our heads against the wall.” The litany of excuses is long. Democratic candidates were arrogant. The White House failed to transfer money, or stump effectively. The GOP caught up in the technology race, or the GOP recruited excellent disciplined candidates.
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Why Is Alan Greenspan’s Lawyer, Scott Alvarez, Still Controlling the Federal Reserve?


“He’s so powerful that he is sometimes called the ‘power behind the throne.'” (NAKED CAPITALISM)


 

There’s been a sharp focus on Janet Yellen’s Chairmanship role at the Federal Reserve, and rightly so. She’s the first female Chair and she actually cares about inequality. But what is missing from virtually all Fed watching, except for this piece by Jesse Eisinger, is any recognition of how the Alan Greenspan-appointed staff at the Fed still retains substantial control of the institution through the high-level staff who were promoted into their roles by Greenspan.
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Wait, so THAT’S what the bailouts were about?


The prevailing narrative is fundamentally dishonest. (Medium)


One of the reasons that no one went to jail for the elite control fraud that caused the financial crisis is because of the pervasiveness of the criminality. You couldn’t send one guy to jail without having that guy very publicly rat out everyone else. To get to a high level on Wall Street you had to be dirty, like in a corrupt police department. No one trusts the one guy who won’t take bribes. Which brings us to Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former AIG CEO who is now, for lack of a better word, ratting everyone else out.
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