Little green apples

By Distributorcap

It took 30 years and 204 days, but on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 the fruits of the Reagan Tree of Life will finally have reached its peak when the over-ripened, low-hanging, worm-filled Reagapples will begin to pound the ground, not with sweetened blossoms, but with a dead thud. Thirty years and 204 days of belittling and ignoring the American education system, calling ketchup a vegetable, telling us trees cause pollution, cutting taxes to create trickled-down imaginary jobs (okay, there are a few more maids and gardeners), and teaching Americans that they could have everything they want and it will cost nothing -- the Teadras-educated Republican Party is willing to take the ultimate bet and tell the piper (or croupier) this time to shove it.

The U.S. Congress has spent the better part of the past month arguing over whether the credit limit on the Visa card should be raised in order to pay their bills -- bills they have committed and signed to pay. If this game of cold-war brinkmanship weren't so dangerous on so many levels, it would actually be comical to watch. Watching the children of the right storm out of a meeting (Eric Cantor, who probably has the distinction of having had the most spit balls thrown at him during 7th-grade lunch) and then say no, no, no as the opposition capitulates to nearly every one of their demands is nothing short of having Macbeth playing in a Kabuki theater.

The 80 or so Teabaggers who sandbagged their way into Congress last November promising to stop those eternal welfare queens from driving Cadillacs and finally ridding the country of the leeches who live off their hard-earned (over)taxed dollars, are about to allow the real grand experiment to go forward -- let the U.S. default on its payments for the first time in history, and default by choice. You know the world's strongest economy is going to look like it is managed even worse than Greece.

I used to think the only item on the Republican platform (aka Our American Mein Kampf) was the personal destruction of Barack Obama (or any Democratic president), but now I realize there is actually a second principle enshrined in the GOP's manifesto. Not only do the Teabaggers and their enablers want to see Obama fail, they also want to prove that the ripened fruit of the Reagan revolution ("something for nothing") is actually a sweet treat, that the U.S. defaulting on its bills will have absolutely no consequences.

After all, American exceptionalism is American exceptionalism. Chicken Little is really just Donkey Little, a completely made-up scenario just to allow those pesky liberals to abscond with more money from hedge-fund billionaires and private jet owners to pay for BMWs for those food-stamp queens and unemployed kings. Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama has not given the goose-stepping lunatics in the GOP any stained dresses to use as evidence of a grand socialist conspiracy. Short of the 21st-century version of Fanne Foxe showing up in next few days, the Teabaggers will have to resort to their only other weapon, actually pushing the nuclear trigger. In other words, in order to save the country, they have to vaporize the country. Three hundred million Americans will just have to hope the dice on 8/2/11 are boxcars or snake eyes and not a craps. Good luck with that when one die is all threes and the other is all fours. 

Obama has made this so easy for the Republicans. He has caved so many times to the right on so many issues even the more "reasonable" Republicans (an oxymoron if there ever was one) realize they can play the blinking game knowing their odds of winning are about as good as Secretariat's was at the 1973 Belmont. His obvious weakness as a leader and his hesitancy to confront a group of people bent on his destruction has made the Republican work of making a mountain out of a molehill as easy as selling worthless credit default swaps to a bunch of insurance companies. Compromise requires compromise, not rolling over time after time. Obama has rolled over so many times John Boehner finally figured out that those 80 or so Teabaggers in Congress must really be onto something.

What the Teabaggers and their enablers (actually, they are all a bunch of Teabaggers) fail to realize is that if the sky does fall on August 2nd (and it will), it will be more than repossessed Cadillacs. While those teabagging Congressmen will barely suffer the loss of a nickel in salary, benefits, and pensions (and plenty of them have more than enough money to cushion the potential blow), I would think they have relatives who will suffer, and suffer badly, from a default. And what about the millions who actually voted for the Teabaggers thinking these really smart guys would save them from the leeches on society, only to see now that a government that cannot pay its bills means no Social Security checks mailed, no medicare payments, soaring interest rates on their variable mortgages, a collapsed housing market, more bridges and roads crumbling, weakened airport security, soldiers in Afghanistan watching their checks bounce, and finally a lot of very angry Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Brazilians, Australians, Saudis, and Swiss, people who help fund the elite of Wall Street?

And what about those private companies the Teabaggers just love so much? You know, the ones that actually employ thousands of teabagging voters, the ones that receive a big chunk of their revenue from government contracts? Do you think Boeing and Lockheed Martin are going to keep pay a lot of private employees sitting around the lunchroom while they wait for Tim Geithner to sign the checks? What about the diners, dry cleaners, auto mechanics, waiters, coffee trucks, baby sitters, and hundreds of thousands of other private businesses that exist because of companies employing thousands of workers based on government contracts? And those free parks the Teabaggers love to take their kids to on vacation -- gonna get awfully expensive at $50 a head to get into Yellowstone. This is the real trickle-down economy, people who really do earn a living because other people are getting a paycheck, no matter where that paycheck originates, not from so-called job creators who just take their tax breaks and buy more Prada or stash the money in the Cayman Islands.

So old people, government contractors, ancillary businesses, soldiers, medical professionals that help the elderly -- it is time for you to sacrifice in the name of proving the Teabag Gambit. The road to Teabag nirvana is filled with collateral damage. We may suffer, we may default, we may see rising interest rates, we may start opening Hoovervilles, but those fine Republicans in the House, the ones that were sent to ensure an orderly country -- well, they will just be right.

Maybe we can form a new union of people to pick up those little green Reagapples.

Beware those who don't heed history's lessons: A review of HBO's Triangle: Remembering the Fire

By Edward Copeland

"People forget the Triangle fire at their peril... If people want to know what deregulated industry would look like, look at the bodies on the sidewalk outside the Triangle building."
Leigh Benin, Adelphi University labor historian

With big corporations seeking to gain more and more power by using bought-and-paid-for politicians to strip away regulations and weaken workers' rights, there couldn't be a better time to look back at the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, which killed 146 people 100 years ago March 25 and brought about the reforms and labor movements billionaires and the historically ignorant seek to dismantle today. A well-done and brief primer on the fire and the events leading up to it and its aftermath premieres on HBO tonight. Triangle: Remembering the Fire debuts at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT / 8 p.m. CDT.

For those unfamiliar with the story of the Triangle fire, this 45-minute documentary gives you almost all you need to know about the 100-year-old tragedy and offers lessons needed for today as it seems we risk the rise of a new Gilded Age where tycoons value profits over the safety of their workers and the government at both the state and national level seems to be more-than-willing co-conspirators with its push to deregulate anything and everything. If one wants to look for modern examples of this, they need looks no further than the lack of safety enforcement at various coal mines that have cost many miners their lives, the BP Gulf disaster which killed their own workers and destroyed an ecosystem and the "fracking" techniques used in the search for natural gas that has been linked to poisoned water sources, cancer deaths and possibly even earthquakes, all of which exploration companies were exempted from environmental laws under the Bush Administration. This doesn't even take into account how the blind eye of regulators allowed financial speculators to cause the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and a housing bubble that sparked a foreclosure debacle. Just last week, both parties in Congress, led by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., all still doing the bidding of the big banks, sought to delay the huge fees the banks collect on debit card transactions for another two years, weakening already toothless financial reform legislation. Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner also is rumored to further water down the reform by exempting currency derivatives from transparency requirements in the legislation. Yes, government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations shall not perish from the United States it seems.

In 1911, out of the ashes of the tragedy of the Triangle fire came reforms for workers, first in the state of New York, that laid the groundwork for FDR's New Deal when he became president 22 years later, reforms that politicians backed by rich businessmen seek to dismantle today as we've seen in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio with more on the way.

Tovah Feldshuh narrates Triangle: Remembering the Fire and her calm voice serves perfectly as an invisible teacher. The Triangle Waistshirt Company was one of many businesses associated with the garment industry in the early part of the 20th century in New York. Co-owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had hit upon a new trend in ladies' fashion: basically, the blouse. For the first time, women were wearing separate tops just as men did. It made them rich and their company occupied the top three floors of one of downtown Manhattan's newest skyscrapers, the 10-story Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. The building, now known as the Brown Building and part of the NYU campus, still stands and has been registered a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

With the huge demand for their product, the Triangle company workers tended to be on the job seven days a week for long hours and little pay and the people willing to be exploited this way did so because they had no other choice. They tended to be newly arrived European immigrants who had been fleeing famine and persecution. Not only did they not find the American dream in their work situation, most could only find living arrangements in tenements on the lower eastside. In the case of the garment industry, most of these virtual slaves were women, especially young women, some not even teenagers yet. To get as much production going as possible, the ninth floor of the Asch Building had been stacked to capacity with 300 sewing machines, leaving barely any elbow room for the workers inside. About a year and a half before the Triangle fire in November 1909, The International Ladies Garment Union Workers Union staged a massive strike demanding better working conditions for women. The 20,000 female strikers who took to the streets was unprecedented — and this was taking place more than a decade before women had the right to vote in the United States. It really was the first head-on clash between the tycoons of The Gilded Age and their corrupt political minions ensconced in Tammany Hall and the growing progressive movement. The strikers may have been women, but it didn't prevent Tammany from sending out police and hired thugs to arrest them and get rough. By the time the strike ended, the workers at Triangle returned to their sewing machines without any union recognition.

As we see today when the gap between what company CEOs make and the wages given to their average workers have reached startling disparities, similar differences existed at the time between company owners and the average Americans. For example, Triangle co-owner Max Blanck surrounded himself with servants and spent more than $100,000 to renovate his home, quite a contrast when the average American in 1911 only made $300 to $600 a year. Yet Blanck and other company heads didn't want to spring for the readily available sprinkler systems for new buildings or follow the recommendation of New York Fire Chief Ed Croker who, after a similarly tragic fire at a Newark, N.J., factory a mere four months before the Triangle fire had killed 25 workers, again mostly women, had suggested that buildings routinely practice fire drills. Company owners, always focusing on the bottom line, felt drills would affect work productivity and since no government regulations existed to enforce the sprinklers or the drills, they had no one twisting their arms to do the right thing.

What's so compelling about Triangle: Remembering the Fire is not just recounting all that missteps that led to the tragedy and can anger you a century later even when the event occurred long before you were born, but also the interviews with people related to both survivors and victims of the blaze. The filmmakers interview Suzanne Pred Bass who had two great-aunts who were in the fire, one who survived, one who didn't, presumably because they lost sight of each other in the smoke that quickly enveloped the ninth floor.

The cause of the fire has never been clear, but most believe a still-burning cigarette tossed into a trash can on the eighth floor quickly consumed the three floors. The switchboard operator on eight notified the 10th floor and the fire department immediately but in her haste, forgot to tell the ninth floor. Though the documentary doesn't confirm it as fact or legend, the story goes that of the two fire escapes on the ninth floor, they kept one locked so that when workers left for the day, they could be searched to make certain that they weren't stealing anything. Those who did survive from the ninth did so thanks to the heroics of elevator operator Joseph Zito who kept overloading his vehicle to get as many out as he could until it finally collapsed under the weight of the panicked who leaped down the elevator shaft to escape the flames. Most of the people on 10 were able to flee thanks to people in a neighboring building who got ladders across the space between the two buildings. Even though the fire department arrived two minutes after receiving the call, once they got to the Asch Building, the ladder trucks only reached to the sixth floor. Many of those who died were killed jumping to their deaths. At first, some bystanders thought they were tossing bundles of clothes out the windows to save them until they spotted the legs, arms and faces beneath them. Some hit the pavement so hard they crashed through glass plates on the sidewalk. In all, 146 died, 129 women and girls and 17 men. The blaze consumed all three floors in just 18 minutes from the time the blaze started and that 18 minute mark was when the last body hit the ground. Of the 146 deaths, 90 leaped to escape the flames.

The horror of what happened led Al Smith, a Democrat thick in Tammany Hall politics who would later lose the presidency to Herbert Hoover, to shake off the cronyism and lead the fight for reforms. New York led the way for proper workweeks and pay and, most importantly, safety conditions for its citizens. It even began to set up a pension system for those too old to work any longer, all ideas that Franklin Roosevelt would bring nationwide in the New Deal. The tragedy showed the need for strong unions and for the government to be for the people, not the corporations, and it is frightening to see the backpedaling that is happening today. Blanck and Harris eventually did face criminal charges for the deaths of their workers, but they were acquitted by an all-male jury and since they had lots of insurance, the fire didn't do much damage to them at all. Because many of the bodies were charred so badly, six couldn't be positively identified but in a separate feature, Triangle: The Unidentified, available only on HBO OnDemand, co-producer and historian Michael Hirsch uses research and genealogical techniques unavailable 100 years ago to give names for the first time to those resting in a mass grave in the Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn so now when the names of the dead are ready every year, those unidentified six can now join the other 140.

Triangle: Remembering the Fire premieres tonight at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT / 8 p.m CDT. You owe it to yourself to watch.

Michigan power grab

By Mustang Bobby.

Via Steve Benen comes a story about the new governor of Michigan being granted basically limitless power to do anything he wants.

Newly elected Republican governor, Rick Snyder, is set to pass one of the most sweeping, anti-democratic pieces of legislation in the country -- and almost no one is talking about it.

Snyder's law gives the state government the power not only to break up unions, but to dissolve entire local governments and place appointed "Emergency Managers" in their stead. But that's not all -- whole cities could be eliminated if Emergency Managers and the governor choose to do so. And Snyder can fire elected officials unilaterally, without any input from voters. It doesn't get much more anti-Democratic than that.

Except it does. The governor simply has to declare a financial emergency to invoke these powers -- or he can hire a private company to declare financial emergency and take over oversight of the city. That's right, a private corporation can declare your city in a state of financial emergency and send in its Emergency Manager, fire your elected officials, and reap the benefits of the ensuing state contracts.  [Italics in the original.]

Ironically, this was the kind of thing all the tea-partiers were screaming about last year that President Obama was plotting to do with the stimulus and healthcare law: he's a tyrant who will stop at nothing to take away the power from the people and turn it over to the bureaucrats and the evil Soshulists.  So, naturally, you'd think that the tea-folk in Michigan would be apoplectic about this.  Well, you would be wrong.  They're delighted with it.

One of the Republican state lawmakers who supports this effort characterized the plan as "financial martial law" -- and as far as he's concerned, that's not a criticism, that a defense for this little scheme.

Rule Number 1 of Dictators: It's not tyranny when we do it; it's "emergency powers." (See: Mubarak, Hosni; Castro, Fidel & Raul).

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Be careful which enemies you make

By Edward Copeland 

In Charles Ferguson's outstanding documentary on the financial meltdown, Inside Job, one of his interview subjects is former N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who'd been known as the Sheriff of Wall Street for going after shady business practices long before the collapse. Toward the end of Inside Job, it makes the point that none of the financial firms ever faced investigations for their traders writing off high-priced escort services as business expenses, but the Justice Department did pursue Spitzer when it was discovered after he was governor that he used an escort service. The work that Spitzer did and the promise he held as a gifted politician that came crashing down because of his personal weakness are detailed well in another excellent documentary from the prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

Gibney also made the great 2010 documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money as well as the similarly outstanding Taxi to Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the World. He also served in producing capacities on Ferguson's excellent No End in Sight and the brilliant Who Killed the Electric Car?

While Client 9 definitely makes the case that the political downfall of Spitzer may have been an orchestrated hit by his enemies in the business community and the Republican Party, Gibney doesn't try to downplay Spitzer's faults beyond the weakness that led him to seek high-priced sexual companionship in the first place. The film paints a broader portrait of the man's achievements and his hubris, which include a superiority complex and an approach that makes him come off as a bully, even if what he was trying to do was right.

As with the best documentaries, Client 9 teaches you things that you didn't know. It seems as if so many of the recent outstanding documentaries, no matter what their subject may be, show how spoonfed the U.S. media are, regurgitating "facts" that get handed to them while seldom checking their veracity. As far as I knew (and I imagine this to be the case with most people who heard about Spitzer and the call girl), his preferred escort was "Kristen" aka Ashley DuPre, who then turned herself into another of those freak celebrities, who ended up with a job at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as a love and sex columnist.

Client 9, through interviews with one of the owners of The Emperors Club escort service, reveals that Spitzer saw "Kristen" maybe once but mainly went out with a woman who went by the name Angelica. Gibney interviewed her, but she didn't want her face or voice revealed, so an actress plays her part and reads the transcript of her interviews. Ironically, she's now a commodities day trader.

Where Spitzer really might have earned the enemies who were determined to stop him was when as attorney general he went after the head of AIG, Hank Greenberg, for the crooked financial games that company was playing, long before that company's collapse became a major cause of the world financial collapse and cost U.S. taxpayers billions in not one, but two bailouts. Greenberg was not at the helm by then, having been removed by his own board for violating company rules, but the methods AIG employed while Greenberg ran it were still going on and led to AIG's implosion.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia prevented Spitzer's pursuit of Greenberg prior to that by claiming the Justice Department was building a case against Greenberg, which they never filed. However, this same Garcia intercepted wire transfers Spitzer made and started looking into escort services that led to leaks that got Spitzer's sexual habits revealed. This also came at the time the Bush Administration was firing U.S. attorneys who weren't prosecuting enough Democrats.

Needless to say, when prosecutors go after prostitution rings, they rarely go after the clients, just the owners and the prostitutes. In contrast, around the same time, the D.C. Madam case surfaced and they only pursued the madam there, even though it was revealed that two of her clients were high-profile Republicans, including Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who was just re-elected. He faced no legal inquiries.

Many believed that Spitzer had a good shot at being the country's first Jewish president. I just wonder if he'd been able to keep after Wall Street as he was doing, whether some of the mess that happened could have been prevented since no regulatory fixes have really been put in place to stop it since. Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations shall not perish from the United States and we the little people always will be the ones paying the price. Thank goodness we have documentary filmmakers such as Alex Gibney to do the job that journalists have long since abandoned or forgotten how to do.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)

The United States of Goldman Sachs

By Edward Copeland 

In 2007, Charles Ferguson directed the great documentary No End in Sight. Last year, he helmed another that told the story of an entirely different type of destruction, Inside Job, only this time the war wasn't against another country, it was against the world's financial system and instead of only those actually in Iraq and their families paying a price, we all suffered for Wall Street's greed and Washington's malfeasance.

As Ferguson did in No End in Sight, he makes a very complicated subject easier to understand through his masterful presentation of the facts and history of the situation (narrated by Matt Damon here) and interviews with key subjects. It's not an easy task in Inside Job because trying to explain the mechanics of financial derivatives and its role in the economic collapse is nowhere near as easy to do as it was to show all the mistakes and blunders involved in the Iraq war.

Not surprisingly, most of the key figures such as Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, etc., refused to be interviewed for the film, but what's shocking is that Wall Street and financial service figures who do give interviews feel completely at ease showing their arrogance and defending the industry's actions.

Inside Job, briskly edited by Chad Beck and Adam Bolt, shows how decades of deregulation under presidents of both parties led to one crisis after another, each bigger than the last, with seemingly no one in Washington learning any lessons.

The film also provides fascinating tidbits such as the fact that as recently as the early 1970s bond traders' salaries were low enough, that some had to take second jobs to make ends meet. It also tells how employees of various financial firms engaged in cocaine-fueled parties with prostitutes which were billed to the companies as things such as computer supplies.

The handful of firms who would tell their clients a purchase was good while betting on its failure behind their back is staggering, though not as staggering as the refusal of regulators to do any regulating or the number of former top Goldman Sachs executives who end up serving in presidential administrations of both parties. (When Hank Paulson stepped down as Goldman CEO to be Dubya's treasury secretary, he had to sell $450 million in Goldman Sachs stock but thanks to a law signed by the first Bush, he paid exactly zero taxes on it and some say the rich are taxed too much?)

Ferguson's No End in Sight proved to be not only informative, but to provoke outrage at all of the things that were and weren't done prior to the Iraq war. Inside Job does just the same for the history of the financial collapse, especially when you see all of the names who profited from Wall Street's greed that have populated the Obama Administration, not that he invented the problem.

It began with Reagan, got worse with the first Bush, declined further under Clinton and took the big nosedive under the second Bush. Now, Obama's advisers come from the same group and Congress passes reforms without teeth because Wall Street controls what happens. Inside Job tells this infuriating story in great detail and it tells it well.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)

It's not alright, Jack

"We've lost sight in Washington of what Congress is for, of who Congress serves. It serves the people of the United States. Instead, we've found it serves Chinese sweatshop owners, Russian gangsters — Congress is now serving those interests. The thing is it has become accepted now, so part of our political culture now, that it's normal. Your average citizen doesn't have the voice you'd expect him to have because these voices are much louder and much better financed."
— J. Michael Waller, director, Institute of World Politics

By Edward Copeland 

It's slightly confusing that jailed former lobbyist Jack Abramoff has inspired two 2010 films about his escapades and that both have Casino Jack in the title. I've yet to see the fictional feature starring Kevin Spacey and directed by the late George Hickenlooper, but the documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money by Alex Gibney, the great documentarian behind past gems such as the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room has made an excellent nonfiction version. On top of that, Gibney also directed or co-directed THREE other 2010 documentaries I've yet to see, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Freakonomics and My Trip to Al-Qaeda. He also executive produced the phenomenal No End in Sight and was a consulting producer on the exquisite Who Killed the Electric Car? Busy man and from the films I've seen him make so far, a damn fine nonfiction filmmaker as well as a prolific one.

Even if you followed the tale of uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff closely, Gibney's film will keep you riveted as it tells the story of his life and various malfeasance through interviews with many of the associates who were involved in his schemes, either as victims or perpetrators. You also get handy reminders of what a true character the man really was, dating all the way back to his days as he took over the national college Republicans to spin them in a more conservative direction with friends such as Karl Rove and Grover Norquist.

It's also funny to remember his interest and obsessions with pop culture, such as when he grew tired of his secular Jewish rearing and decided to become orthodox based on, of all things, seeing the film version of Fiddler on the Roof. Then there is the obsession he and other college Republicans had with the movie Patton, repeating the famous speech George C. Scott delivers in the film, only replacing every German or Nazi reference with Democrat. Longing for spy games at heart, when an Angolan adventure goes awry, Abramoff even turned to movie producing, financing the Dolph Lundgren hoot Red Scorpion.

However, lobbying proved far more lucrative to Abramoff than show business ever could have been, ethics and laws be damned. It led to the the top our system of legalized bribery (and some instances of not-so-legalized bribery) as he peddled influence on Capitol Hill, mostly with Republicans though Democrats cashed in on his largess as well. The shocking parts are watching as he enlists Indian tribes as clients to promote gaming on one hand and charges them huge fees while on the other hand helps forces out to stop the Indian gaming movement if it interferes with specific clients. Rest assured though, Abramoff and his associates were making money on both sides of the equation.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money tells Abramoff's story in a sleek, informative way and it's still unbelievable that only member of Congress, Bob Ney, R-Ohio, went to jail for his involvement with the man, even if he did help shove Tom DeLay out the door. Gibney saves his suckerpunch for the epilogue though, when you realize that as bad as the system is and as horribly as Abramoff abused it, it turned out to be small potatoes compared to what the lobbyists for the titans of Wall Street have and continue to accomplish.

The result should really be more depressing than it is, but it's made too well and entertains too much for much sadness to seep in.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)