Excellent opinion from Hold Fast Blog

By Matt Browner Hamlin

Cutting Pay, Wall St. vs Main St.
October 23rd, 2009

Joe Nocera of the New York Times has an article today on Obama administration pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s efforts to rein in top executive pay at banks bailed out by the American taxpayer. You know, a story on the novel subject of accountability and transparency in American business, something that cuts as close to fiction as possible for the journalists tasked with covering Wall Street. Nocera’s piece is a column, not a straight piece of reporting. But in either case, I don’t think this paragraph would be differently written:

And the American International Group is contractually obliged to make bonus payments of nearly $200 million in March 2010. The company has promised to try to reduce that amount by 30 percent. But once again, there is nothing Mr. Feinberg can do because those bonuses were already written into contracts — and there is a high likelihood that the bonuses will create another furor in Congress, just as they did earlier this year. [Emphasis added]

It’s really remarkable how inviolable contracts with Wall Street executive are. Contracts, when written between big banks and investment firms, cannot be broken. To break these contracts would undermine the basic foundations of America and would likely immediately turn the US into a communist country. Or something.

Contrast this with the contracts between automakers and members of the United Auto Workers. Let’s look back and see what Nocera was saying when GM was looking at bankruptcy a year ago.

For instance, it is critical for General Motors to be able to break its contracts with both its unions and its dealers. It needs to dramatically reduce its legacy benefits, perhaps even eliminating health care benefits for union retirees. It needs to close plants. It needs to pay its workers what Toyota workers are paid in the United States — and not a penny more. It needs to reduce the number of brands it sells — which means closing down thousands of dealerships, which is difficult to do because of state laws that protect car dealers. When General Motors shut down Oldsmobile, it cost the company more than $1 billion to buy out the Oldsmobile dealerships across the country. If it slims down its dealerships from 7,000 to a more appropriate 1,500, it will cost many times that amount. [Emphasis added]

Not only was it imperative for Nocera that GM not honor their contract with the union, Nocera was also arguing that GM must find ways to go against laws in states that protect car dealerships. Voiding contracts was not enough, he was arguing for voiding laws!

Another example of a prominent member of the press using two different standards for assessing the sanctity of the contracts of union auto workers and Wall Street executives is Ruth Marcus. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post went to great lengths to defend AIGs bonuses and contracts while simultaneously chiding unions to renegotiate — and if they didn’t like the deal they got, they could just stop coming in to work. The autoworkers were not only required to renegotiate their previously negotiated contracts, but any protestations by their workers or supporters that these contracts be honored was met by disgust by the pro-business press.

The hypocrisy of how the contracts of Wall Street executives are being treated versus those of union workers is simply stunning. All I want to see in an economic crisis is fairness. If contracts are inviolable, they are inviolable for everyone, regardless of whether they are between blue collar workers in factories, white collar workers in office complexes, or the multi-millionaire executives on Wall Street. If the economic crisis demands that auto workers take a haircut on their pay, benefits, and pensions, Wall Street executives must be held to the same standard. Conversely, if the contracts between big banks and investment firms and their top executives simply cannot be changed, then it’s time to go back and honor the contracts between the auto industry and organized labor. It’s that simple.

Coincidence?

For more, visit Core of Corruption: here

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September 26, 2009

Moral Lessons of Capitalism

By Starla Immak

Capitalism teaches us to be greedy, self-centered, and to compete with others until we destroy our competition.

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The economic system that we have now rewards greed, excess, and focuses on the individual in competition with others. The system we have now highlights some very nasty traits in individuals while undermining traits such as community, sharing, and living in a sustainable manner. While some associate communal living with Marx, I can think of whole civilizations that lived that way far before Marx. The Native Americans lived that way and even some Christian groups such as the Amish still live that way. Sharing and emphasizing the common good was not invented by Karl Marx.

In the US corporations make money off of sick people. Their corporate CEOs make millions in bonuses by refusing people care and letting them die. They are rewarded by society with lots of money by doing such things. Competition, greed, and having little care for those around us are honed by having such a system.

U.S. bankers make billions by defrauding individuals who are trying to buy a house. They are rewarded by billions of dollars coming from honest tax payers to fund such dishonesty. They are placed on a pedalstool treated in a special manner because of their wealth. They are exempted from regulation, rules, and honesty while the rest of us are not even allowed to file for bankruptcy, can’t pay late, and are spied upon by banks using the “credit report”.

The military industrial complex makes money by making sure that there is some type of war all the time. They make money by destroying civilizations, blowing up innocent people, and wasting billions of dollars making weapons that could be made cheaper. They consume half of the US expenditures. They tell Americans that they have the right to do what they want, and when they want and where they want to do it without impunity. Might makes right. Much of our scientific community is employed making some type of weapon. They waste taxpayer’s money, and they waste scientific effort that could go elsewhere into peaceful projects.

The oil industry has enriched itself making sure that it has no competitor. They would in fact prefer money in their pockets to a world that people can actually breathe in. They create psydo-science to fight the science of global warming. If it was up to them they would keep making money at the expense of the entire planet. If one group really needs to be nationalized to move forward on cleaning up the environment, then this is the group. This group’s greed locks fists with the military industrial complex to make sure they maintain a monopoly on consumption, pollution, and the continuance of an expensive and ineffective system of transportation. They absolutely have no care for the planet we live on or the people, animals, and plants on it.

The economic system we have is destroying the economies of other countries, killing people in other countries, maintaining inequality, poverty, and overpopulation. Isn’t it about time we came up with another idea or went back to a simpler time when people cared about the earth, and other people?

Author’s Website: http://shankariopedpage.blogspot.com/

Author’s Bio: I enjoy writing about political/ economic events, and I am especially concerned about the US as a warlike nation. I would like to see this nation turn itself around from a conquering nation in both commerce and war to a nation of peace. I hope that we can build fair trade based on mutual interests, and respect other countries enough to allow them to make their own decisions.

Dems & Repubs, both work for the same masters

Democrats joined Republicans in voting to “Defund ACORN,” yet have done nothing to stop Blackwater’s ongoing taxpayer funded crusade in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Jeremy Scahill

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch-hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working class people. This campaign now unfortunately has gained bi-partisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009 which has now passed the House and Senate. As Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has pointed out, the legislation “could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex:”

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

According to the Project on Oversight and Government Reform, this legislation could potentially eliminate a virtual Who’s Who of war contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and KBR to other corporations such as AT&T, FedEx and Dell.

Perhaps one of the most jarring comparisons here is the fact that ACORN is now being attacked while the Obama administration continues to contract with Blackwater, the favorite mercenary company of the Bush administration, which is headed by Erik Prince, who was a major donor to Republican causes and campaigns, including those of some of the Defund ACORN bill’s sponsors, including Indiana Republican Mike Pence, one of the key figures in hunting down Van Jones. Prince, of course, was recently described by a former employee as a man who “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

At present Blackwater has a $217 million security contract through the State Department in Iraq which was just extended by the Obama administration indefinitely. It holds a $210 million State Department “security” contract in Afghanistan that runs through 2011 and another multi-million dollar contract with the Defense Department for “training” in Kabul. All of this is on top of Blackwater’s clandestine work for the CIA, including continued work on the drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This also does not take into account Blackwater’s lucrative domestic work training law enforcement and military forces inside the US at the company’s compounds in North Carolina, California and Illinois, nor the private “security” work it does for entities like the International Republican Institute, nor the work it does in training “Faith Based Organizations.” It also does not include the contracts doled out to Erik Prince’s private CIA called Total Intelligence Solutions, which works for foreign governments and Fortune 500 corporations.

Then there is this fact: Blackwater was paid over $73 million for its federally-funded, no bid-security contracts with the Department of Homeland Security in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, billing taxpayers $950 per man per day, a spending decision the Bush administration called “the best value to the government.” ACORN, meanwhile, only helped poor people who were suffering as a result of the government’s total and complete failure to respond to Katrina.

Meanwhile, a recent federal audit of Blackwater, compiled by the State Department and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, suggests the company may have to repay some $55 million to the government for allegedly failing to meet the terms of just one federal contract in Iraq, which, it is important to note, is $2 million more than the total money allotted by the federal government to ACORN over the past 15 years. (The company also cannot account for one federally funded “deep fat fryer” in Iraq, according to the audit).

Overall, Blackwater has raked in well over $1 billion since 2003 in security contracts alone—all of which were kicked off by a fat no-bid contract to guard L Paul Bremer. Let’s also remember that Blackwater was estimated in Congressional hearings in 2007 to earn some 90% of its revenue from the federal government and Prince refused to disclose his salary, but said it was over $1 million. Blackwater has been or is being investigated by the US Congress, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department and the IRS, among other agencies, for a range of issues from arms smuggling to manslaughter to tax evasion. One of its operatives pleaded guilty to killing an innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilian, while five others have been indicted on manslaughter and other charges over the 2007 Nisour Square massacre during which 17 Iraqi civilians were gunned down. The company is also facing a slew of civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings in Iraq.

Here is a question for those Democratic lawmakers that voted in support of the Defund ACORN Act: How do you justify making this a major league legislative priority while Blackwater continues to be armed and dangerous across the globe on the US government payroll? Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?