Yearly Archives: 2012

While the substance is horrible, the anti-democratic PROCEDURE is the bigger concern …

Live streams covering one of at least 26 cities where Occupiers are marching tonight in support of OccupyOakland.

By lambert strether is an old school blogger from Corrente.

I make no apology for a late post on the SOTU; the SOTU, as Charles Pierce points out, was a campaign speech, so those of us who still listen to the teebee or the radio are going to be hearing the talking points and tropes deployed by Obama last Tuesday drone out over and over and over the airwaves at least until November 6.

Let me be clear: I did listen to the speech, and all the way through, too. One can hardly blame Obama for leading with his strongest card: He transmogrified killing the unarmed Osama Bin Laden, then dumping his corpse into the sea, into a surefire applause line. We’ve been here before; after all, Obama’s “Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country” isn’t all that different from Bush’s “Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our allies”, and really, who over the age of six ever expected anything else? After that first fine, careless rapture, at least.

Perspective from a long-time UAW member:

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Eric Holder has come out with details on the task force. But first, let’s look at a smoke signal. At this press conference announcing the task force, Holder had to apologize for Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, one of the key leaders of the investigative unit. Breuer, you see, couldn’t make it to the press conference because he was traveling. That’s how important this task force is to Breuer, so important that his travel schedule couldn’t brook interference. Such a bureaucratic snub has been no doubt noticed by the various underlings at the DOJ and the US Attorney offices.

Ok, let’s go to the substance.

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

There are two underlying structural problems with the new(ish) Federal task force on financial fraud. One, it is the policy of the administration to protect the banking system’s basic architecture, which means the compensation structure and the existing personnel who run these large institutions. Any real investigation into the financial collapse will inevitably lead to the collapse of this architecture. Thus, any real investigation will be impeded when it begins to conflict the basic policy framework of the Obama administration. And this framework is set by Obama. It’s what he believes in. He made this clear in his first State of the Union, when he said a priority of the administration was to ensure that “the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times.”