Elites

A funny thing happened on the way to the Tea Party.

Read Dana Milbank on the plutocratic co-option of the Tea Party.

Assuming there ever was a Tea Party.

Best Congress Money can Buy

This just in:

The Washington Post reports that the health care industry gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, with a narrow edge of 54% going to the Democrats -- increasing to 60% in the first quarter of this year, after the Dems expanded their majorities.

Hope you're feeling well.

I myself am feeling mighty puny.

.

Coming up: The Age of Restraint

The Age of Restraint. A phrase coined by Peggy Noonan who is famous for coining phrases. There is a certain sense of satisfaction in your faithful correspondent as he slides easily into geezerhood, striving for the coveted title of "Old Fart*" in seeing the younger generation suddenly realize that restraint rather than consumption can be a virtue. The richest society on the planet ever has suddenly discovered that there really are limits. Or as Noonan puts it:

There's something else going on, a new or renewed sense of national shame. Or communal responsibility. Or a sense of reckoning. Whatever it is it's a reaction to the excesses of the O's, a reaction against the ways of those who caused the mess on Wall Street and Main Street. It is a reassertion that there actually are rules, and that it is embarrassing to break them in a way so colorfully damaging and destructive to everyone else.

The excesses of the Os. Or the Double Zeros as I like to think of them. Apparently they topped even those of the 90s.

* though I recall that a girlfriend of mine told me after meeting my father, "Well, he certainly isn't an old fart."

.

Corruption and family values

Year's ago, while discussing whether or not we should allow a textbook sales rep to buy lunch for the entire history department, the chair told me "Sure it's corruption, but it's an acceptable amount of corruption." There was more wisdom to that than I first accepted. Human beings need an acceptable amount of corruption to feel, well, human. Corruption is in fact a family value, something I try to keep in mind as I study the various societies I come across teaching world history. As Scott Simon recalls in an article on honest corruption in today's Wall Street Journal,

A Chicago alderman once complained to me about modern reform hiring laws -- the line was so good, I borrowed it, unembellished, for a novel -- "What's this world coming to when a guy can get a job for a stranger more easily than he can for his brother in law?"

Take care of your own first, starting with the family, the basic building block of all human society. Even the Spartans were not able to banish it, though Lord knows they tried. Having formulated this theory years ago when studying the decline of both the Ottomans and the Manchus, I am gratified to find Simon backing it up with some real world observations about Chicago, a place where people know corruption and can catalog its varieties.

Regulars know that regular people sometimes need a little help. Under this kind of ethic, steering rewards to friends and family becomes a virtue. As Mayor Richard J. Daley once famously exclaimed when caught trying to shovel city insurance business to one of his sons (not Richard M. or Bill Daley), "Any father who doesn't do for his son isn't a good father, and if they don't like it, kiss my ass."

One of the major engines of world history, and a real family value for people who hold Blagojevich, governor of Illinois, in the richest contempt. They know the difference between healthy corruption and simple graft.

and if you don't like it ...

.

The high cost of American executives

I have often railed against the outsize salaries of American CEOs, both for moral reasons (I have to believe Jesus would have been against it) and practical reasons (now that they want us to save their asses it's a little difficult to convince people who make less than $70k to bailout people making $10 million on average).

Anyway, here is an article by Jonathan Macy in the Wall Street Journal that backs me up on this. Obviously he is a very smart guy. His case in point is Rick Wagoner, CEO of the failing General Motors.

When Mr. Wagoner took the helm eight years ago the stock was trading at around $60 per share. The stock had fallen to around $11 per share before the current financial crisis. It's now below $5 per share.

In 2007, Mr. Wagoner's compensation rose 64% to almost $16 million in a year when the company lost billions. The board has been a staunch backer of Mr. Wagoner despite consistent erosion of market share and losses of $10.4 billion in 2005 and $2 billion in 2006. In 2007 GM posted a loss of $68.45 a share, or $38.7 billion -- the biggest ever for any auto maker anywhere.

But Wagoner is just part of a widespread problem: huge executive salaries that have no relation to performance or worth.

The average pay for chief executives of large public companies in the United States is now well over $10 million a year. Top corporate executives in the United States get about three times more than their counterparts in Japan and more than twice as much as their counterparts in Western Europe.

Anyone want to argue that Wagoner and his ilk are worth three times what the CEO of Toyota or Honda is?

besides, whatever happened to the virtues of a free market and the creative destruction of capitalism?

What IS it about Florida?

Of course, this could just be vile gossip and character assassination. Well it could be. Remember Mark Foley, the Congressman from West Palm Beach who got a little too hot in his e-mails to congressional pages? Remember the guy who replaced him? Democrat Tim Mahoney. Here's an interesting little news item about him.

FWIW: this guy's a Democrat.

No rep left unturned

Further evidence that no one's reputation survives the touch of the Bush administration: the Department of the Interior. I assume most of you are aware of the charges leveled at employees there, of the bribes and sex involved. Here is an editorial from the NY Times about it today. Not entirely an unbiased source, but the facts in it are backed up by news stories I have read elsewhere.

In three extraordinary reports delivered to Congress this week, Mr. Devaney [the Dept Inspector General] found that officials at the Minerals Management Service — the division responsible for granting offshore oil leases and collecting royalties — accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drugs and sex with oil company employees as part of what he described as a broader “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”

The Times conclusion is more politically charged, but it fits my thinking for some time about the Bush administration. After pointing out that the current Secretary of the Interior can take comfort from being exculpated by the report:

The White House can take no comfort at all. The people it brought to Washington to run the department had no interest in policing the oil, mining and agricultural interests they were sworn to regulate and every interest in promoting industry’s (and their own) good fortune. The most notorious of these was J. Steven Griles, a mining industry lobbyist who really ran the agency for four years and who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff scandal.

The Abramoff scandal just goes on and on. There still seem to be cases out there waiting for prosecution.

Corruption in Congress! I am shocked. Shocked.

Republican senator Ted Stevens has been indicted on seven counts of corruption. The Wall Street Journal pretty much lays it on the line for the GOP here.

This post could, of course, be seen as another snarky commentary on how far the Repubs have fallen, but you can also read it more broadly: what has happened to our political class? Are they all like this? Most seem to be to some extent simply because of the fiscal requirements for getting elected, and re-elected.

But that is not the real point of this post. The article has taught me a new term, right there in the last sentence:

Some political hygiene would seem to be in order.

Politcal hygiene. What a great term. What a concept. The Balls Bluff Campaign for Political Hygiene.

I love new terms.
.

A Specter is haunting Washington DC

That specter is premature memory loss (and I'm not talking about Novak here). It's a terrible thing to see promising careers of Bushies blasted by the wasting of memory cells. Some people, like the head of the EPA have days where they can't remember anything.

And then there is the sad case of White House liaison Jan Williams .


See? I have begun to suspect that the Internet (and Bill Gates just for good measure) really IS evil.

.

Why are you a Republican?

Good question. Unless you hear it from the person interviewing you for a career service job at the Dept of Justice. Say, someone like Monica Goodling ( I wonder if she used that little girl voice she used when testifying before Congress?).

Alas, she was breaking the law we now discover.


and this was in an investigation run by the Bush DOJ! What happens next year?


.

You Get What You Pay For ... in politics at least

This little story from the Washington Post is almost too funny for words. So no commentary.

"The Producers" meet the Republican Fundraisers

Or, "The Republican Way of Business" - not to be too polemical about the dear GOP. As reported on "Talking Points Memo":

The Boston Globe had a great article yesterday about an outfit called BMW Direct Inc. whose business seems to be finding nonsense Republican candidates in hopeless races, raising tons of money for their hopeless campaigns and then funneling all the money back to themselves and sundry contractors and cronies. In 2006, they raised more than $700,000 for Charles Morse's run against Barney Frank in which Morse managed to get only 145 votes in the Republican primary. 96% of that money went back into BMW Direct's coffers and sundry affiliated contractors.

This seems to be the general mindset of business and government under this current Republican admin. Note that I am not saying that anyone specific in the admin is corrupt, certainly not Bush or Cheney (I have other problems with them, but not venality or personal corruption), but that there is currently a mindset within the ranks of the "right" that government serves no useful purpose as government, therefore it and the whole political process must exist simply as a pipeline for public funds to private businesses. A brief glance at books like Imperial Life in the Emerald City or most other aspects of privatizing government will furnish all the examples you should need. I brought this up a bit earlier, with a thoughtful comment from Jack.

So let's all do our patriotic duty and get rich.

NOTE: I did not refer to any of these people as 'Conservatives' - if that term means anything any more it means something a great deal more powerful and serious than the stupid right-wing slogans ('no new taxes' 'government is the problem' etc) misused by the folks I am talking about here.

The Dept of State - bumbling clowns

That is, for personal reasons involving the adoption of my grandson, about the mildest thing I can think to call them. After watching how the State Dept carried out a political agenda to screw hapless American citizens, proved absolutely unresponsive until forced to correct the mistake, and then lied about it, and continues to come up with fresh lies about it, the following news story on Talking Points Memo about how Dept of State employees checked into Obama, Clinton, and McCain's passport records makes perfect sense. It certainly sounds familiar: the same suspect behavior, the same secrecy as to who was doing what, the same contempt for transparency, and above all, the start of the same lies to cover their ass.

This comment from a reader of the above linked story seems to have it about right:

-Mismanagement. You’ll recall that the whole US passport program was in disarray at the end of 2007 because the Bush Administration failed to plan for the Canada-Mexico-Carribean travel changes. Waits were stretching on for months. It’s possible these offending contractors may have been brought in to fill the gaps that the Bush Administration allowed to happen.

-Mismanagement II. You’ll also recall that Condi Rice refuses to take even symbolic responsibility for the day-to-day management of State. Blackwater contract? US Embassy in Baghdad? Contractor fraud? Cookie Krnogard? (A Relevant Article from the Post)

-Cover Up. Someone at State knew and didn’t report it up the chain. If a system was installed to track this information, then surely SOMEONE thought it to be important. So where did the info stop, or who suppressed it and why?

I may hold my nose if necessary to vote for anybody the now clinically deranged Democratic Party can put up for President so I can be sure that clowns like this are purged from the ranks of the federal bureaucracy, once the wonder and envy of the world. At least for those of us who knew something about the workings of bureaucracies.

Freedom of the Internet is not free

And that can be read several ways. I once told young Clovis, my teenage computer guru, that there were lots of very smart people being paid big bucks to come up with a way to make providing internet service pay ... and pay ... pay. He seemed unconcerned.

Perhaps he should have been more concerned. Here is how one company, Comcast, is attempting to subvert the process so they can control the Internet and, consequently, charge you more for access.

BTW, notice Comcast's lame excuse for packing the hearing room.

How Repubs run a campaign

Or, the aquatic habits of sea-borne rodents. Seems that as the good ship "Repub Revolution" sinks slowly into the muck many of its former operatives seem to want to set the record straight.

So, here is Allen Raymond, the former GOP consultant of New Hampshire phone jamming fame (he served some time for it in fact), spilling the beans on the work he did for the Grand Ol' Party. That would be the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. It seems that Raymond is a little bitter after being thrown to the legal wolves by his former associates, and Josh Marshall over on TPM wants to tell us about it.

How bitter?

[Raymond] writes about heading to prison for his role in the jamming: "After ten full years inside the GOP, ninety days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal."

So about those phone tricks. The jamming, Raymond says, was a unique stunt. Much more common were false information campaigns via robocalls, push polling, and then sneakier stunts like the one described in the passage below.

Just click on the link and read "the passage below." It's a doozey.

Though a bit insulting to Ukrainian Americans.

The Money Vote and the Repubs

Most of us don't pay much attention to it, but there is a type of vote that takes place long before the actual elections and often determines the course of the election: the decision by people, businesses and organizations as to which candidate or party to support with money.

This time around it looks as if the money vote seems to be lopsidedly going towards the Democrats. Paul Krugman has a column on this that I think makes some interesting points. Here's one:

predictions that Mr. Rove and his disciples would succeed in creating a permanent Republican majority -- I have a whole bookshelf of volumes with titles like ''One Party Nation'' and ''Building Red America'' -- depended crucially on the assumption that the G.O.P. would have vastly more money than its opponents.

But something seems to have gone wrong:

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

That last sentence is telling, btw.

Krugman points out that much of this is simply driven by the polls (bad for the Republicans) and the weak field (worse for the Republicans). Who wants to spend money suuporting pols who aren't going to have the opportunity to return the favor? But there is also this:"disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years." What upsets corporate America is that the scandals usually are about no-name companies that came out of nowhere to earn juicy contracts for very suspicious reasons. It's one thing to tilt the playing field, it is another when the tilt is away from powerful established businesses.

And then there is this:

In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party -- not the other way around. ''The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,'' wrote Mr. Confessore, ''are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.''

But corporations weren't happy. According to The Politico, ''many C.E.O.'s'' used the term ''extortion'' to describe ''the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.''

I have never had much of a taste for Krugman: I don't understand economics well and his TV persona is a little odd, but this has the ring of truth. In some ways the K Street project has been a "catastrophic success" for the Republican.s