Since my Letter to NewsMax, after seeing a misleading article was not accepted by their web site (it kept giving an error message) I will run their error correction task on this publicly:
Julie Cranshaw's reporting, and I fear this may be true of your entire staff, needs to be aware of the (I'll assume honest) mistake in her March 5, 2010 article "Soros: Obama's Bank Bailouts Were Big Mistake." As CBS has pointed out, more Americans incorrectly believe Obama did the bank bailouts, and don't know the fact that these were all BUSH BAILOUTS occurring in 2008. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20013452-503544.html
And apparently your reporters also don't know that all the bank bailouts were Bush Bank Bailouts.
TARP, the nationalization of AIG, Fannie and Freddie, the Federally-backed takeovers of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and on and on, all of this was 100% under Bush. If you can find any bank bailouts under Obama, cite amounts disbursed that fall outside of the TARP program (signed by Bush into Law in 2008), and then compare whatever you can find - in my extensive research you will find virtually nothing - to the trillions the banks got under Bush. Most of this was Federal Reserve Programs, some of which continued under Obama but all of these were run autonomously by Bush appointee Bernanke.
The only Obama bailouts were the half of the Auto Bailout that hadn't already been committed by Bush prior to Obama becoming president and the vastly scaled back (albeit ill-conceived nonetheless) Public-Private Investment Program.
The ironic thing about Ms. Cranshaw's article is Soros, whose positions the article is all about, doesn't even call them Obama's bailouts. Your author inserts the additional erroneous information to mislead what Pew and CBS (see link above) proved is an already severely misinformed public on this very issue.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Open Letter to President Obama and Congressional Democrats
Feb 21, 2010
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
Thank you for being one of the most important figures, and more importantly being among the most positive influences we’ve ever had. I hope I can assist you in becoming the most effective agent for a fairer future for a barely middle-class father like myself. As an Adjunct Economics Professor at several California Community College, I would like to share with you a partial overview of my progressive vision for 2010 and beyond.
MARKET POWER
As an economics professor, the biggest elephant in the room on the health care debate is that no one ever mentions the basic economic concept of market power. Count up the number of buyers and sellers; if there are very few sellers and oh, say, 300 million buyers, then the sellers have market power. If there are many sellers and a few buyers, better yet, one buyer, then the buyers have market power. Whoever has market power gets something closer to their preferred price (not to mention quantity). I’m disappointed this point hasn’t been made a central plank of the health care reform message.
So it is basic economic theory that medical costs will decline the closer we can get to single-payer. This is closely related to the useless waste of the entire private insurance industry’s existence. Every dollar of their money spent denying care, denying coverage, executive bonuses, marketing, and profits are a waste adding to over $400 billion per year. The many sellers should be those who have a role in the system: doctors, nurses, and hospitals – those who actually provide care, not someone who sits in an office trying to devise new ways to DQ Americans from receiving care.
FILIBUSTER
Clearly the filibuster is a roadblock. Everything should be done to abolish it at the start of the Congressional Session, as Joe Biden can request with a majority vote (you know, the way it’s supposed to work in the Constitution). In addition, a majority vote should be held now to lower the filibuster and require our esteemed Republican colleagues to read the phone book to delay things like unemployment benefits and health care.
I don’t know how many times one can use reconciliation, but if that’s the way to get the requisite national healing contained in hundreds of progressive policies passed with a majority vote, then please do everything you can to get Congress to use Reconciliation a dozen times per day for the next seven years.
In addition, and in the meantime as we wait for a return to majority rule, propose piecemeal legislation that really puts the GOP on the spot like unemployment extensions, and the key idea in the current health care reform, a mandated minimum care-payout ratio for insurers, the figure I’m usually hearing being around 80%.
BANKS
The biggest bank robbery in history took place under the Bush Administration (it was also the biggest Golden Parachute), and not just the Fed bank bailouts of non-transparent trillions spent, lent, or guaranteed. By the way, how much money is the Federal Reserve out for their involvement with the banks? Plus there’s the Treasury’s spending. I’ve heard much or all of this money is paid back, in the Fed and Treasury’s case. If that’s true, please let me know where I can see a summary of how all the trillions in lending facilities and other programs set up by the Fed under Bush has all been repaid, and the TARP has all been repaid. Have the $300+ billion in guarantees for Citibank/Citigroup been rescinded? For the toxic and other assets given to the Fed as swaps for cash, has the Fed gotten all that cash back and those assets back into the hands of the banks/ private sector? How can we really know this – isn’t that the type of thing some are asking for when they say the Fed should be audited/ more transparent?
I know a deeper crisis was averted, a crisis induced by worshipful adherence to laissez-faire purist free market ideology. A crisis that would have been lessened had Bear Stearns received the same Fed lending facilities their competitors immediately received. Adherents to deregulated idealized capitalism that ignores the presence of monopoly power and asymmetric information made many mistakes.
We should never pay for toxic assets. For the amount the Fed and Treasury have at times offered to pay banks for these poison derivatives, we could have paid off every single subprime mortgage in the country. And at this point I think that’s what we should have done. We definitely should have proposed (and still could) as Joseph Stiglitz did, that we have, not a “bad bank,” but a good bank, taking the private assets of value and leaving them to unload the toxic instruments they created.
I was told that my earlier letter against the PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program) was conveyed to you by a Stanford Professor who has or has had contacts with your Administration, Benham Tabrizi. I was relieved when it was announced that the program was to be downsized to 50 billion from the original 2 trillion (ProPublica.org reports it is down to 30 billion), and I hope it will be fully eliminated or rendered nearly impossible for banks to get any money for toxic assets. They are not toxic when foreclosures stabilize. The whole key is stabilizing the borrowers and the housing market. And if some instruments are so convoluted that they are still illiquid after housing has stabilized, it’s not the taxpayers’ problem. We should not spend one cent ever to try and detoxify toxic assets. Just worry about the underlying main street side, in this case, the troubled borrower of the predatory loan.
CORPORATIONS
Corporations are not people. Money is not speech. The laws that say otherwise should be reversed by legislation. Only complete public financing will restore to the American people their rightful voice in politics. Please aggressively support unions before their anemic counterweight to corporate power is totally eviscerated.
GUNS and CRIME
Focus for a moment on the right’s demand that we have a race to the bottom with state gun laws – the policy they want says: if you’re registered in the lowest-requirements state, you are legal in all 50 states. THEY HAVE A PLAN; right-wing anti-liberal and/or white supremacists will more easily transport guns, crime will go up, and they can blame you for the chaos that ensues.
Also many cities, in the midst of this terrible recession, have seen unexplained steep decreases in crime, murder, and violence. I think these need to get into White House regular talking points in some form. And I have not heard much to explain this yet, except, something about improved policing strategies. My hypothesis is so subversive and non-pc it might just be right: could the crime rates and murder rates be falling all over the country due to the Obama effect? Inner-city youths are inspired to achieve and seek mainstream livelihood, abandoning violence in droves, measurably soothing the long-festering wound of inner-city violence. I wish some friendly journalists could at least try this hypothesis. For heaven’s sake, Bush paid Armstrong Williams a quarter of a million dollars to print propaganda; the least we could do is give journalists a nudge.
IDEOLOGY
The GOP will continue to obstruct in every way they are allowed to do so. If the Democrats capitulate and declare the Republican minority the winners for the next few years, they will have rolled over and played dead the way Democrats usually do (see Florida 2000 –Gore’s attorney’s pathetic performance when the opposition invented case precedents – and Ohio 2004’s arguably worse multitude of voting and registration irregularities – capped by the censored from the media death of whistleblower and experienced pilot Michael Connell in a December 2008 plane crash) until the GOP officially does take power in the next elections.
Everyone who wants to represent people over corporations, and 99% of the people as opposed to the richest one percent, must push their side much more aggressively. I’d love to see you rattling off failings of the private sector and offsetting with things the state does well. For example:
- Private contractors in Pennsylvania bribed judges to systematically send children to harsh juvenile detention camps for minor infractions
- Wackenhut, now called GEO Group (always change the company name when embroiled in scandal, right?) has a long-documented history of just exemplifying horrid the privatized prison concept. Minimum wage teenaged guards with lower staffing ratios face increased riots and prisoner escapes when jailing is privatized.
- Blackwater, now called XE, forced the US military’s hand in Fallujah, massacred at Nissour Square and throughout Iraq, and a Blackwater guard committed point blank murder inside the green zone several Christmases ago, as usual to no punishment.
- A British company was caught providing coalition troops with useless “bomb detectors”
- KBR’s faulty wiring electrocuted US troops
- Multiple layers of private busing companies and subcontractors led to inaction during Katrina when it came to deploying emergency bus transit out of the city, as documented in Michael Eric Dyson’s book, “Come Hell or High Water”
- Companies that buy roads and highways in certain states have an array of strategies to hurt the drivers to benefit the company. By the way, these highway-buying firms are invariable not American companies.
We should collect, publish, and loudly publicize a running tally of the tremendous waste, fraud, and criminality private companies enact. We have an encyclopedia of everything that goes wrong when government uses private companies to do things it should do itself. Stake out a progressive angle, and when you get some type of outcome, push for an even more leftist position. Execute this pattern and repeat. This is what the right does so successfully and the Democrats just lay there dormant and ineffective, even when in total power with a loud mandate for action. The right stakes out a far-right position, they either get their way or some compromise, and then they stake out even more far-right positions.
I’m happy to contribute my ideas about policy, framing, messaging, and economics. Please translate your tremendous personage and the enflamed middleclass populism into unabashedly effective progressivism.
Sincerely,
David J. Moglen, MA
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
Thank you for being one of the most important figures, and more importantly being among the most positive influences we’ve ever had. I hope I can assist you in becoming the most effective agent for a fairer future for a barely middle-class father like myself. As an Adjunct Economics Professor at several California Community College, I would like to share with you a partial overview of my progressive vision for 2010 and beyond.
MARKET POWER
As an economics professor, the biggest elephant in the room on the health care debate is that no one ever mentions the basic economic concept of market power. Count up the number of buyers and sellers; if there are very few sellers and oh, say, 300 million buyers, then the sellers have market power. If there are many sellers and a few buyers, better yet, one buyer, then the buyers have market power. Whoever has market power gets something closer to their preferred price (not to mention quantity). I’m disappointed this point hasn’t been made a central plank of the health care reform message.
So it is basic economic theory that medical costs will decline the closer we can get to single-payer. This is closely related to the useless waste of the entire private insurance industry’s existence. Every dollar of their money spent denying care, denying coverage, executive bonuses, marketing, and profits are a waste adding to over $400 billion per year. The many sellers should be those who have a role in the system: doctors, nurses, and hospitals – those who actually provide care, not someone who sits in an office trying to devise new ways to DQ Americans from receiving care.
FILIBUSTER
Clearly the filibuster is a roadblock. Everything should be done to abolish it at the start of the Congressional Session, as Joe Biden can request with a majority vote (you know, the way it’s supposed to work in the Constitution). In addition, a majority vote should be held now to lower the filibuster and require our esteemed Republican colleagues to read the phone book to delay things like unemployment benefits and health care.
I don’t know how many times one can use reconciliation, but if that’s the way to get the requisite national healing contained in hundreds of progressive policies passed with a majority vote, then please do everything you can to get Congress to use Reconciliation a dozen times per day for the next seven years.
In addition, and in the meantime as we wait for a return to majority rule, propose piecemeal legislation that really puts the GOP on the spot like unemployment extensions, and the key idea in the current health care reform, a mandated minimum care-payout ratio for insurers, the figure I’m usually hearing being around 80%.
BANKS
The biggest bank robbery in history took place under the Bush Administration (it was also the biggest Golden Parachute), and not just the Fed bank bailouts of non-transparent trillions spent, lent, or guaranteed. By the way, how much money is the Federal Reserve out for their involvement with the banks? Plus there’s the Treasury’s spending. I’ve heard much or all of this money is paid back, in the Fed and Treasury’s case. If that’s true, please let me know where I can see a summary of how all the trillions in lending facilities and other programs set up by the Fed under Bush has all been repaid, and the TARP has all been repaid. Have the $300+ billion in guarantees for Citibank/Citigroup been rescinded? For the toxic and other assets given to the Fed as swaps for cash, has the Fed gotten all that cash back and those assets back into the hands of the banks/ private sector? How can we really know this – isn’t that the type of thing some are asking for when they say the Fed should be audited/ more transparent?
I know a deeper crisis was averted, a crisis induced by worshipful adherence to laissez-faire purist free market ideology. A crisis that would have been lessened had Bear Stearns received the same Fed lending facilities their competitors immediately received. Adherents to deregulated idealized capitalism that ignores the presence of monopoly power and asymmetric information made many mistakes.
We should never pay for toxic assets. For the amount the Fed and Treasury have at times offered to pay banks for these poison derivatives, we could have paid off every single subprime mortgage in the country. And at this point I think that’s what we should have done. We definitely should have proposed (and still could) as Joseph Stiglitz did, that we have, not a “bad bank,” but a good bank, taking the private assets of value and leaving them to unload the toxic instruments they created.
I was told that my earlier letter against the PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program) was conveyed to you by a Stanford Professor who has or has had contacts with your Administration, Benham Tabrizi. I was relieved when it was announced that the program was to be downsized to 50 billion from the original 2 trillion (ProPublica.org reports it is down to 30 billion), and I hope it will be fully eliminated or rendered nearly impossible for banks to get any money for toxic assets. They are not toxic when foreclosures stabilize. The whole key is stabilizing the borrowers and the housing market. And if some instruments are so convoluted that they are still illiquid after housing has stabilized, it’s not the taxpayers’ problem. We should not spend one cent ever to try and detoxify toxic assets. Just worry about the underlying main street side, in this case, the troubled borrower of the predatory loan.
CORPORATIONS
Corporations are not people. Money is not speech. The laws that say otherwise should be reversed by legislation. Only complete public financing will restore to the American people their rightful voice in politics. Please aggressively support unions before their anemic counterweight to corporate power is totally eviscerated.
GUNS and CRIME
Focus for a moment on the right’s demand that we have a race to the bottom with state gun laws – the policy they want says: if you’re registered in the lowest-requirements state, you are legal in all 50 states. THEY HAVE A PLAN; right-wing anti-liberal and/or white supremacists will more easily transport guns, crime will go up, and they can blame you for the chaos that ensues.
Also many cities, in the midst of this terrible recession, have seen unexplained steep decreases in crime, murder, and violence. I think these need to get into White House regular talking points in some form. And I have not heard much to explain this yet, except, something about improved policing strategies. My hypothesis is so subversive and non-pc it might just be right: could the crime rates and murder rates be falling all over the country due to the Obama effect? Inner-city youths are inspired to achieve and seek mainstream livelihood, abandoning violence in droves, measurably soothing the long-festering wound of inner-city violence. I wish some friendly journalists could at least try this hypothesis. For heaven’s sake, Bush paid Armstrong Williams a quarter of a million dollars to print propaganda; the least we could do is give journalists a nudge.
IDEOLOGY
The GOP will continue to obstruct in every way they are allowed to do so. If the Democrats capitulate and declare the Republican minority the winners for the next few years, they will have rolled over and played dead the way Democrats usually do (see Florida 2000 –Gore’s attorney’s pathetic performance when the opposition invented case precedents – and Ohio 2004’s arguably worse multitude of voting and registration irregularities – capped by the censored from the media death of whistleblower and experienced pilot Michael Connell in a December 2008 plane crash) until the GOP officially does take power in the next elections.
Everyone who wants to represent people over corporations, and 99% of the people as opposed to the richest one percent, must push their side much more aggressively. I’d love to see you rattling off failings of the private sector and offsetting with things the state does well. For example:
- Private contractors in Pennsylvania bribed judges to systematically send children to harsh juvenile detention camps for minor infractions
- Wackenhut, now called GEO Group (always change the company name when embroiled in scandal, right?) has a long-documented history of just exemplifying horrid the privatized prison concept. Minimum wage teenaged guards with lower staffing ratios face increased riots and prisoner escapes when jailing is privatized.
- Blackwater, now called XE, forced the US military’s hand in Fallujah, massacred at Nissour Square and throughout Iraq, and a Blackwater guard committed point blank murder inside the green zone several Christmases ago, as usual to no punishment.
- A British company was caught providing coalition troops with useless “bomb detectors”
- KBR’s faulty wiring electrocuted US troops
- Multiple layers of private busing companies and subcontractors led to inaction during Katrina when it came to deploying emergency bus transit out of the city, as documented in Michael Eric Dyson’s book, “Come Hell or High Water”
- Companies that buy roads and highways in certain states have an array of strategies to hurt the drivers to benefit the company. By the way, these highway-buying firms are invariable not American companies.
We should collect, publish, and loudly publicize a running tally of the tremendous waste, fraud, and criminality private companies enact. We have an encyclopedia of everything that goes wrong when government uses private companies to do things it should do itself. Stake out a progressive angle, and when you get some type of outcome, push for an even more leftist position. Execute this pattern and repeat. This is what the right does so successfully and the Democrats just lay there dormant and ineffective, even when in total power with a loud mandate for action. The right stakes out a far-right position, they either get their way or some compromise, and then they stake out even more far-right positions.
I’m happy to contribute my ideas about policy, framing, messaging, and economics. Please translate your tremendous personage and the enflamed middleclass populism into unabashedly effective progressivism.
Sincerely,
David J. Moglen, MA
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