Back to the Drawing Boards

Anyone else cheering? Here's the bottom line: this bill was bad news. It didn't even accomplish the 'little things,' like capping executive pay and preventing "golden parachutes" as these executives are pushed out for basically ruining the entire economy. The execs who brought us this disaster don't deserve parachutes. They deserve to feel a semblance of the pain regular citizens have been feeling for close to a decade during the Bush economy, knowing that if the slightest thing goes wrong (health, job loss, etc.), they could hit the economic pavement from a thousand feet in the air, head first. This bill did nothing for proper oversight (do yourself a favor and read that link), ceding control over to the Bush admin and the people who were originally responsible for this failure, at least until Obama came in office - $350 billion too late.

Of course, we'll see another bill - and soon. Congress is not going home. My advice to Frank and Pelosi: focus on the Democrats, not the Republicans. There's 95 Democrats who voted against this thing. If they want this thing passed, they've got to get 70 or 80 of those Democrats on board. How does Frank and Pelosi manage to do that? Write a bill Democrats can be proud of. If the President were to veto it, it would only go to show that they clearly don't think this is a crisis. At that point, the Democrats have done their job and can feel guilt free in letting predatory lenders go bankrupt.

It shouldn't be too hard to get a majority in Congress just from within the Democratic Party. Make this a much smaller bailout that keeps the companies afloat while we seriously look at the industries needs - and prevent this from being just their last opportunity to raid the cookie jar. Obama can then come in and build a coalition from within Congress, without having to worry about Bush's veto pen.

Better yet, use Wall Street to solve Wall Street's problems - and make this bailout revenue neutral. Tax each transaction on Wall Street .25 cents a transaction and this government raises $350 billion a year, paying for whatever bailout Wall Street needs. That's the only way to make sure more wealth in this country isn't redistributed from Main Street to Wall Street, while also sending the investors who started this whole mess a message that they are going to be held responsible for it one way or the other. No, we're not going to let the economy go in the tank because of greedy scum who can't manage their way out of a paper bag, but neither are we going to pay for it, either. That's true accountability - and that's something the American people could rally behind.

Supremely Disappointed in Obama

I'll tell you, I was starting to get excited about Obama, but I can't state how much of a disappointment this is for a stalwart Democrat.

Asked specifically why he's supporting the current FISA bill when he'd promised months ago to support a filibuster of an earlier version of the bill, Obama suggested flat out that "national security" overrides the question of telecom immunity.

First of all, we've managed to pass FISA extensions for years now: it's not as if there's a choice between national security and the constitution. That's a Republican fallacy that, sadly, Obama seems all too happy to promote. Second of all, it can't be described how weak this is on Obama's part: it's something we may have expected out of a Democrat in 2002, not today.

There's an opportunity here to further brand the RNC as the party of fear mongering and political manipulation, which is all true, if Obama is willing to take it. All we need is a minimum of patience and some political courage to turn this into a conversation of "do you support the Constitution or not?" Apparently, Obama's too afraid of being called a Muslim, or something.

For the naysayers: anyone who says "AT&T deserves immunity, because the national government demanded it," is either a hack or an ignoramus (no offense to the latter). In no way whatsoever did the Federal Government vote to sanction our intelligence community to wiretap US phones without going through FISA and getting a warrant. The Bush administration is not the federal government; it's just one branch. As such, it had no authority to demand telecoms bypass FISA whatsoever.

All of these Telecoms have lawyers enough to populate entire communities, they knew Bush had no such authority, so that argument just doesn't fly. Point in case: not all of the Telecoms did Bush's bidding, some refused and demanded the BushCo. compel them, which the White House could never do... because it wouldn't be constitutional. No, there were other reasons why most of the Telecoms went along with it - a hint: it rhymes with squid bro fo.

The "Government" didn't force the telecoms to do anything; certain agencies, under the auspices of Dick and Bush, asked for that information, maybe even bullied for it, but nothing changes the fact that ultimately the Telecoms chose to give up the goods (your 4th amendment rights). None of them kicked and screamed and took the Government to court to protect you, their paying customers, from being spied on by the Government. Swallow that while considering the thousands a year we all pay these companies - the very same companies that are now asking for immunity, for protection against us.

No, these Telecoms deserve whatever punishments eventually come their way, criminal or otherwise, if we can somehow prevent them from cashing in early on some of those quid pro quos - in the form of the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card. With millions of people in this country's prison system, we're going to decide that the white collar executives at AT&T, who have teams of lawyers and never suffer from wont of anything, are the ones who deserve retroactive immunity? With all the lawyers they had on staff to give them sage legal advice, these are the people who deserve to be free from 'frivolous lawsuits?'

Does Senator Obama and Speaker Pelosi even know what accountability means? This is perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of modern America and not only are the Democrats content to do nothing about it, they're making sure they'll never have to do anything about it ever. With immunity, what's there to be done? Ask telecoms politely not to do it again? How will we ever know the full extent of what went on if Verizon gets to Pass Go & Collect $200? On FISA alone, I'll refuse to send Obama a dime or volunteer a single minute, unless he changes course pronto.

The good news: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came around on the issue, as well as Senator Chuck Schumer from NY. If Senator Clinton follows suit, as she often does, who knows? At least, for true blue Democrats who bought into the mantra of "change," Hillary would have the last laugh if she could help lead the filibuster. Unless, of course, Obama quickly grows a conscience realizes the Constitution trumps political ambitions any day of the week, especially when, in the long run, being courageous on FISA very likely will be to our advantage - as the party that fixes things.

Earmarks Still Secret

Lynne loves to chat earmarks on our podcast, so maybe I should send her a link to Bill Moyers's discussion of them at the national level. After the Democrats were elected in '06, they came with the promise of reform to the earmark system - where politicians can tack on federal dollars to private, pet projects - and not attach their name to it or debate the worthiness of those projects on the floor. Earmarks never get discussed in committee and the press rarely picks up on them, for reasons I'll get to below, so they've become remarkable tools to both reward loyal politicians (often willing to screw over the American people) and protect vulnerable incumbents by helping them send home some extra bacon.

Well, as Moyers gets to on his show, the Democrats in D.C. did reform the system - in some very important ways. First, now every earmark has to come with a request - both including the name of the Congressman who wants the earmark, as well as the reasons they feel its needed. However, out of the several important reforms the Democrats did make, they seemingly forgot (yeah, right) to make a big one: the access to this information is limited, at best.

You can flip through the letters and see what the-- what people asked for. But you can't remove a copy of that or have any other copy of that. You can't make any photocopies. But you can feel free to take notes." If you have any questions, I'll try to help. But y'know.... You go to the transportation committee, another committee that also does earmarking, the committee that brought the bridge to nowhere, they just have a file box there. And you can just flip through the file folders by congressional district and look at the letters. But again, they sit there and watch you while you're doing it. And you can take some notes, but that's it.

What? Anyone think Nancy Pelosi can do better? What this also means is that, to see any of the earmarks before they're actually passed, people have to actually be in the presence of the office in which is requesting it: that means they have to be in D.C. Notice how none of this information isn't what I'd call widely available online.

The saddest thing is that most of these earmarks aren't even ending up tangently helping the American people. A very large chunk of it is going directly toward the Pentagon: the well funded Pentagon isn't even asking for these earmarks, it's the defense industry that wants these extra billions. Furthermore, there have been recent projects that have been found to directly benefit a congress person's pocket book, yet found perfectly ethical according to the ethics committee.

BILL MOYERS: Sometimes they strike pay dirt. Ellis' colleague Erich Zimmermann helped the LOS ANGELES TIMES analyze the record of Representative Ken Calvert who was angling last year for a seat in the ear-marking factory known as the Appropriations Committee. Zimmermann spotted $5.6 million dollars earmarked for a transit center in Corona, California. When he looked closer, he found that the Congressman owns seven nearby commercial properties that stood to benefit.

ERICH ZIMMERMANN: Right here is where the Transit Center is gonna be built. And you can see some of these properties are actually very close to the Transit Center. The pins represent the properties that he owns. When we see a pattern where somebody's property so clearly surrounds a project it just raises questions. And we ask those questions of other people that may be interested in those questions as well and we try to get a sense is this abnormal? Is this normal? Is this increasing property values?

BILL MOYERS: Congressman Calvert appealed to the House Ethics Committee. The committee cleared him on the grounds that other nearby property owners stood to benefit too. In other words, the tortured ruling meant that if Calvert's neighbors gained from his earmark, so could he.

STEVE ELLIS: So, essentially, we would have to be having the taxpayer build a new bathroom in Representative Calvert's house for it to be determined to be actually an earmark that benefits him.

Here's a quick way to draw down the deficit: stop the dirty earmark system. The federal government is far too small to properly analyze the over 32,000 annual earmark requests (that's hundreds per congressman), yet we have government agencies that oversee where most of this money is going anyway: the Federal Highway Department, the Defense Department, etc. While Congress should certainly oversee these agencies to make sure they're doing a good job, they shouldn't pick and choose every minute project and pretend that they're experts enough to know when the Defense Department needs billions of dollars in planes they didn't ask for. What Congress should do is create a mission statement for them, then allow them to do their job. This system of political rewards - and bloating budgets - has got to go. Step one in doing that is making the process transparent.