Needlenose

After voicing his support for the recent wing-nut terrorist Joe Stack and his suicide air attack on the IRS, Steve King is now standing up for the little guy – the Washington lobbyists on K Street.  They are apparently his ‘go to’ guys for all his information regarding pending legislation!  Imagine that, getting all your campaign financing, legislative review and background information from one convenient source!

Has Mr. King taken over the Pombo mantle of Congressional venality?  How does an evil dumbfuck like that get elected anyway – they can’t be that stupid in Iowa, can they?

For the short term, I think Pelosi should strip Mr. King of his congressional staffers and aides, since he his needs can all be satisfied by K Street.

*Update 2/26/10* Please show your appreciation for Mr. King by donating to one of his two Democratic challengers in the Iowa 5th District, Matthew Campbell or Mike Denklau.  I prefer Mike, but I think Matt might have the edge in $ and seems more Iowan.  They said we couldn’t unseat Pombo here in CA, but McNearney is in Congress and Pombo is off shagging sheep, so it can be done!

*Update 2 2/26/10* Seems to be the day for asshole Republican Congressmen. Trent Franks believes African Americans were better off as slaves then they are today – some tortured argument involving abortion.  Let’s fund whomever runs against him!

There seems to be only one means to achieve bi-partisan support for a bill – lard it with pork.  Or make it a pork-only bill, with cash for everybody’s constituents!

Case in point – 5 members of the GOP, hearing the “Woo pig sooie!” siren call of pork-barrell spending, crossed the aisle to vote for the so-called Jobs Bill.

The Repugs used this to good effect in the early post-9/11 days of the Shrubya Preznitcy to bring Democrat pigs to vote on their bills – Remember those bipartisan bamboozles such as the Agribusiness Handout  of 2008, the original Agribusiness Handout of 2003, and perhaps the most odious piece of legislation ever, the Big Energy Handout of 2003?

That must be why the Health Care Bill stalled out…insufficient pork!

Carbon limits are for the little people! Faster, driver!

Sir Richard Branson saw fit to lecture to world leaders currently debating carbon emissions limits at Copenhagen on behalf of the airline industry.  “Reduction targets”, not carbon taxes is what he’d like.  He’s also pushing the idea of moving the airline fleets to biofuels, something he terms green fuel.

Biofuels, you know – things like ethanol and bio diesel derived from industrial agriculture that require more energy inputs then they produce in outputs and exist only as pork delivery vehicles for firms like ConAgra?

Keep in mind this bullshit is from a guy who has made an a second fortune from running an especially carbon porky business, an airline.  And if that weren’t enough, his latest venture is to fly fat rich tourists into space.  Hey Sir Carbon Asshole, here’s a reduction for you – shelve your stupid space tourism and save the planet an additional 54,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually – and tell your rich buddies to go plant some trees on one of their 365 days of yearly vacation instead.

And while you’re at it, why don’t you make a real statement and shelve your new Formula 1 racing team.  I don’t think the additional 50 tonnes of CO2 your car will emit per season will ‘tip the balance’ but talk about hypocrisy.

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

Depressing news, a new world record – there are now 1 billion hungry people in the world, about 1 out of every 7 people.  Lester Brown of the WorldWatch Institute warns how food shortages are leading to failed states and a threat to the overall world order.

Venal senators from the Midwest just don’t get it – they insist on porking out the current energy bill with subsidies for corn farmers, diverting food from the plates of the world poor into the gas tanks of the rich’s SUVs.

Josh Marshall caught this snippet in a Politico article on the meeting between President Obama and the CEOs of major banks last Friday:

“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. . . .

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

It’s a nice quip, demonstrating the commonsense grasp on things that appeals to many of us who voted for Obama. But many of us are also concerned that such clear thinking has gotten lost in translation between the president and his top financial appointees’ plans to deal with the current meltdown. A joint profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner published last night by ProPublica and the Washington Post gives a vivid example:

In September 2005, Timothy Geithner made one of his most visible moves as a supervisor of the U.S. banking system. He summoned the nation’s top financial firms and their regulators to streamline an antiquated system that threatened Wall Street’s boom.

. . . Geithner’s summit, held at the New York Fed’s fortress-like headquarters near Wall Street, was a success. By fall 2006, the new system had all but eliminated the logjam, helping derivatives trade more efficiently.

. . . Although Geithner repeatedly raised concerns about the failure of banks to understand their risks, including those taken through derivatives, he and the Federal Reserve system did not act with enough force to blunt the troubles that ensued. . . .

. . . Looking back at his time at the New York Fed, Geithner said: “I wish I had worked to change the framework, rather than to work within that framework.”

That same sense of caution seems to have afflicted Obama and his economic team to date, as they resist calls for bolder action and treat the banksters who created the current mess as delicate, yet powerful interests who mustn’t be spooked — to the extent that Obama compared them to suicide bombers a couple of weeks ago.

This isn’t the first administration to feel intimidated, and its ambitions constrained, by the perceived power of Wall Street’s reaction (anyone remember James Carville’s famous quote about wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market?).

But in a moment of such importance, I can’t help but ask: Mr. President, why are you standing on that side of the pitchforks?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

It dents my American pride to admit that a corrupt crony capitalist state like the PRC shows superior leadership and vision on the green retooling of their automotive industry.  Talk about a lost opportunity!  Instead of using the economic meltdown to recast Detroit as I suggested back in November, the Dems have chosen to throw a bunch of money into the bottomless pit of the Big Three – Obama, like a plastic-suit wearing auto dealer,  is even promising to warranty your next GM purchase!  WTF?!?

In retrospect we should have just pulled the plug last fall, and put those billions into Tesla.

While every talking head from Capitol Hill to the late night talk show hosts are focussed on how the corruptly crafted and rushed-through bailout legislation led to the infamous AIG executive incompetence bonuses, the real problem is far more insidious – nothing precludes the TARP recipient firms from using our cash to lobby for favorable legislation – which they have apparently taken to doing with gusto.

I’ve never really bought the argument that corporate lobbying is a form of ‘free speech.’  However, getting that banned is a change I doubt I’ll see in my lifetime.  Still, even the stupidest Federal Judge should be able to see how dangerous it is to allow a private firm to ‘recycle’ tax dollars into lobbying efforts to craft favorable legislation for the recipient.    It’s the type of feedback loop that distorts the market and creates institutional ‘winners and losers.’

• In any governmental bailout of a private firm, we need to insist on the following basic principles:
• The government holds an initial majority stake in the firm
• The goals of the investment and required restructuring and changes are clearly defined and milestones established
• The public stake is reduced in step with the achievement of the milestones
• The firm is barred from any and all political lobbying efforts while the government investment remains.

For the period of time in which the government is a large stakeholder in a private firm, the organization becomes, to some extent, a quasi-governmental organization.  It would be like having the US Post Office spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby Congress to expand their budget!!

The Repugs, riding the wave of public indignation, are having a field day with the AIG executive retention bonus crap.  And why shouldn’t they?  It was a Dem legislature that stripped out the provision to cap the bonuses of firms getting Federal bailouts to keep afloat?

I mean, $163 Million sure is a lot of money, right?

Well the public should get a sense of perspective, and call the Repugs out for their feigned amnesia – I mean where the fuck was all the ‘indignation’ when goddman Shrubya & the Repug Congress of the day lost $12 Billion in the ” biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve” in a ‘rebuild Iraq’ program that had Zero oversight and accountability?

It’s time for a reality check here – that is 2 orders of magnitude larger than when the Dems just pooch-screwed away, and what’s more – at least we know where the $163 Million ended up (and we might be able to get it back through a special tax)!!  The $12 Billion just vanished without a trace.

And that’s not including another $10 Billion spent on no-bid contracts with unenforced oversight handed out to Shrubya cronies on “questionable or unsupported charges in Iraq reconstruction contracts.”

There are days when I believe they put funny pills in the American drinking water supply.  Seriously.

Ron points out he tried to amend the Wall Street Con Artist bailout plan to cap executive bonuses, but his provision was stripped out.   He snipes at Obama a bit over the bungling of the Bailout II (which did happen on Obama’s watch), but I think the problem is still Harry Reid, the wrong man for the Senate Majority Leader position.

Ron and Senator Snowe are trying to reintroduce the provision as standalone legislation:

“… he and Snowe have a remedy: they are reintroducing their stimulus provision as a stand-alone bill, only they are getting even stricter with bailed-out institutions. Instead of capping bonuses at $100,000, they are lowering the level to $25,000. The law would cover all recipients of taxpayer TARP money, as well as those firms — like AIG — which have received money outside of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. And it would deal with bonuses issued in 2008. If a company refuses to give up the bonuses, the amount that exceeded $25,000 would be taxed at 35 percent.

“They are either going to have to pay it back or they are going to be taxed,” said the Senator. “And I think that is going to be pretty hard when they are already getting taxpayer money.”

Good luck Senator Wyden!