RSN: Enron Billionaire Brags About Being Expert on Cutting Pensions, 44 Years a Prisoner: The Case of Eddie Conway, et al

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Robert Parry | Putin or Kerry: Who's Delusional?

Robert Parry, Consortium News
Parry writes: "Official Washington and its compliant mainstream news media operate with a convenient situational ethics when it comes to the principles of international law and non-intervention in sovereign states."
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Tom Engelhardt and Mattea Kramer | Why Washington Doesn't Want to Leave Afghanistan
Tom Engelhardt and Mattea Kramer, TomDispatch
Engelhardt and Kramer write: "At stake has been leaving a residual force of U.S. and NATO trainers, advisors, and special operations types behind for years to come, perhaps (the figures varied with the moment) 3,000-12,000 of them."
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David Sirota | Enron Billionaire Brags About Being Expert on Cutting Pensions
David Sirota, PandoDaily
Sirota writes: "One particular reaction to Pando's scoop was downright newsworthy, and that was the reaction from John Arnold himself."
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Amy Goodman | 44 Years a Prisoner: The Case of Eddie Conway
Amy Goodman, Truthdig
Goodman writes: "Marshall 'Eddie' Conway walked free from prison this week, just one month shy of 44 years behind bars."
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Meet the Company That Can Track Everywhere You've Been and Tell Police About It
Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Ganeva writes: "As it turns out, DHS didn't need a national license-plate database, because such a database already exists. It's run by a private company called Vigilant Solutions and ICE and other law enforcement agencies have been dipping into it for years."
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Steeped in Bloody History, and Seeing a Chance to Rewrite It
Andrew Higgins, The New York Times
An excellent historical perspective on the depth of Russia's ties in the Crimea. Required reading.
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Nine-Month-Old Baby May Have Been Cured of HIV, US Scientists Say
Scott Malone, Reuters
Malone reports: "A 9-month-old baby who was born in California with the HIV virus that leads to AIDS may have been cured as a result of treatments that doctors began just four hours after her birth."
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'Liberal Washing' as only David Sirota could describe!

(illustration: Kim Seidl/Shutterstock, Sam Diesel/iStock/Salon)

Here's Why Plutocrats Control Our Politics

By David Sirota, Salon

02 November 13

Here's why plutocrats control our politics: Corporate America knows both parties are up for sale

What is most striking about the present is not the virtues of moderation but of the potential power of conviction. One detects, behind all the anxiety about 'extremists,' 'radicals,' and 'militant minorities,' a degree of envy. On the Right there is a group with enough commitment to a shared project that is willing and able to disrupt the ordinary functioning of government. If only the Left had such wherewithal. We might, at the very least, get something more than than the economically stagnant, politically oppressive Mugwumpery of the Democratic Party." - Jacobin's Alex Gourevitch

This trenchant passage about liberals' reaction to the Tea Party summarizes a hugely significant yet little discussed truism: American politics has been inexorably lurching to the right not only because of the extremism of the Tea Party, but also because of a lack of Tea Party-like cohesion, organization and energy on the left. There are, of course, many factors that contribute to that sad reality including a successful war on the labor movement; a campaign finance system that makes conservative oligarchs even more powerful than they already are; and a mediasphere that ignores principles and tells liberals everything must be seen exclusively in partisan red-versus-blue terms. One factor, though, stands out for how it so destructively shapes the assumptions that define our political discourse. That factor can be called "liberal washing."

Similar to green washing or so-called "gay washing"/"rainbow washing," liberal washing is all about wrapping corporate America's agenda in the veneer of fight-for-the-little-guy progressivism, thus portraying plutocrats' radical rip-off schemes as ideologically moderate efforts to rescue the proles.

Liberal washing has always been around, of course. But it has really risen to prominence - and dominance - in modern times. Indeed, one of the most reliable political axioms of the last 30 years is this: If corporate America cooks up a scheme to rip off the middle class, Republicans will provide the bulk of the congressional votes for the scheme - but enough establishment-credentialed liberals inevitably will endorse the scheme to make it at least appear to be mainstream and bipartisan. Yes, it seems no matter how venal, underhanded or outright corrupt a heist may be, there always ends up being a group of icons with liberal billing ready to drive the getaway car.

The most reliable way to liberal-wash something is to get a famous Democrat to support it. This is because even though many Democratic politicians, party officials, operatives and pundits are neither liberal nor progressive, the media nonetheless usually portrays all people affiliated with the Democratic Party as uniformly liberal on all issues.

The famous examples of liberal washing come from the White House. A few decades ago, Democratic President Bill Clinton liberal-washed corporatist schemes like NAFTA and financial deregulation. Today, it is Democratic President Barack Obama liberal-washing the insurance industry's healthcare initiatives and now joining with a handful of Democratic legislators to liberalwash - and legitimize - the right-wing crusade to slash Social Security benefits.

But, then, as evidenced by just the last few months of news, liberal washing also operates just as powerfully in other political arenas.

In the Congress, for example, the NSA surveillance programs that so enrich private contractors were frantically liberal-washed by (among others) California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D.) In that case, the liberal washing served as a handsome payback for the private surveillance contracting industry that bankrolls the California lawmaker's election campaigns and her family.

Likewise, in the think tank sector, the Center for American Progress (where I once worked many years ago) is next week liberal-washing Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and another Goldman executive. That's right: According to the Beltway's most prominent liberal think tank, the bailed out bank isn't the Great Vampire Squid that helped destroy the economy. It is, instead, according to CAP, an icon of "shared social goals in areas like housing, clean energy and - most recently - preventive social services." Such liberal washing is a clear P.R. coup for Goldman Sachs - one it was probably hoping for when, according to the Nation magazine, Goldman Sachs became one of CAP's many corporate donors no doubt looking to be liberal-washed.

 

Out on the campaign trail, it is often the same kind of liberal washing. As just the most famous example, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker used his billing as a liberal hero to famously liberal-wash the private equity industry's predatory business model and its anti-public school agenda. In return for his efforts, he was showered with Wall Street cash, which helped him then buy his state's Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate - and, ultimately, the U.S. Senate seat itself.

 

At the municipal level, this kind of thing can be even more shameless, and it involves not only Democratic politicians but also leaders of traditionally liberal organizations. A few years ago, for example, some (but not all) prominent union leaders helped liberal-wash Rahm Emanuel. Those union leaders endorsed the former investment banker in his run for Chicago mayor, despite Emanuel being the architect of the union-crushing NAFTA and calling liberals "fucking retarded." Once elected, Emanuel used his manufactured liberal credentials to then liberal-wash a full-scale war on organized labor. That war has included school closings and efforts to privatize municipal services - aka policies designed to undermine public-sector unions.

 

A similar story is now playing out in Rhode Island, where financial executive-turned-Democratic State Treasurer Gina Raimondo is liberal-washing a Wall Street rip-off plot of truly epic proportions. Championing a scheme that enriches the same financial industry that bankrolls her campaigns, Raimondo has used her public office to slash retiree benefits and divert more of the state's public pension funds into risky hedge funds. Not surprisingly, the latter move forces retirees to pay the excessive fees to the same financial industry that launched Raimondo's career.

 

As if underscoring the devious liberal-washing objectives, Raimondo has made sure to publicly bill her pension-slashing record as proof that she is a "progressive Democrat." Such language is the epitome of liberal washing, as it equates progressivism with slashing retiree benefits. For her efforts, Raimondo has been supported by Enron billionaire John Arnold - who recently tried to liberal-wash himself with a high-profile donation to Head Start after he was outed as the sponsor of pension-slashing initiatives all over America (note: The humiliating stories about Arnold haven't stopped him from working with a Democratic mayor to liberal-wash a new pension-slashing initiative in California). Meanwhile, when the local union representing Rhode Island's public employees raised objections to Raimondo's pension initiatives, out came even more liberal washing, this time from former Service Employees International Union leader Andy Stern.

 

Having recently converted his national labor prominence into a plum position in the empire of private equity billionaire Ronald Perelman and in the education "reform" foundation of anti-teachers-union billionaire Eli Broad, Stern this weekend published a Providence Journal editorial that has to be read to be believed. He first berates unions for supposedly airing "ideologically-driven attacks" and then liberal-washes Raimondo as a populist champion of the ordinary worker. Somehow omitting the embarrassing fact that Raimondo's Wall Street-enriching moves are failing to even out-earn the fee-less S&P 500, Stern insisted that "Rhode Island should be applauded" for using more cash from public workers' retirement nest-eggs to pay the exorbitant fees of billionaire hedge fund managers and private equity executives (and potentially enriching Raimondo personally in the process).

 

Genuine liberals and progressives may behold all this and wonder: With friends like these, who needs Gordon Gekko? It's a justifiable harrumph. But as depressing as the situation is, the rise of liberal washing should be anything but surprising.

 

Sure, it may seem counterintuitive that liberalwashing has come to prominence at the very moment American politics has become more partisan. But it is entirely predictable. With politics more than ever becoming a mind-deadening video game between two principle-free teams, the oligarchy is no longer betting on one of those teams. Instead, it is employing liberal washing to hack the whole red-versus-blue operating system.

 

As a political tactic, it makes perfect sense. Whether it is a company, a trade association, a front group or a lobbying firm that is pushing a particular policy, corporate America knows that it has a better chance of getting its way if it can portray its goals as an apolitical agenda with support from both sides of the ideological spectrum. Liberal washing is the key to that formula; it helps depict the radical as mainstream, the ideological as pragmatic and the old-fashioned heist as an act of bleeding-heart altruism.

 

Until liberal washing becomes anathema to more of the genuine left, there is little chance of combating today's plutocratic politics. It is a politics that manufactures the parameters of economic debates so that only corporate-friendly outcomes are possible. It is a politics that relies as much on money and votes as on permissive semiotics - the kind that permits labels like "liberal," "progressive" and "left" to include those who shill for the right. Only when those labels start meaning something and liberal washing is defanged can we hope to get, in the words of Gourevitch, "something more than the economically stagnant, politically oppressive" culture we're currently stuck with.

Public pension-funding is a bombing waiting to explode!
Great article - worth reading, as well as the previous articles....

Pension-Fund Looters Get Tax Breaks, Too

By Matt Taibbi

POSTED: October 4, 4:10 PM ET

Rhode Island State Treasurer Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, has declared war on public pensions

A few weeks ago, I wrote a feature on pension reform in states like Rhode Island for Rolling Stone. Since the piece was sharply critical of alternative investments like hedge funds, I expected a heated response, and got one right away. In fact, a series of raving/chest-thumping emails from one Manhattan Institute hedge fund billionaire appeared in my email inbox about four and a half seconds after the piece went live on the Rolling Stone website.

 

This colorful personage calmed down eventually, though, and I figured a more sophisticated, for-public-consumption response would come from those quarters later on.

It finally showed up this week in GoLocalProv, when Aaron Henn, an "opinion-leading urban affairs analyst" who appears in striking tie-and-folded-arms pose in his column photo, wrote a piece in defense of the Rhode Island Treasurer profiled in the piece called "Matt Taibbi's Deceptive Hatchet Job on Gina Raimondo."

 

Henn discloses up top that he's written in the past for the Manhattan Institute (again, a think-tank created by hedge funds to further industry objectives), so there's that. I'm not going to go through his article line-by-line, because this dispute is surely already becoming tiresome to many, but there are one or two points in it worth responding to.

For one, Henn complained that I didn't mention in my article that Raimondo is a Democrat. Through this omission, he says, I was trying to "obscure the severity of America's municipal pension crisis by portraying reform efforts as driven by right-wing ideology."

Well, it is right-wing ideology, for sure. Ayn Rand herself would have loved the idea of unilaterally imposing cuts to the "unsustainable" benefits of parasitic workers. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been advanced by Democratic Party politicians. That's something I have no problem admitting.

Anyone who covers the finance sector knows Democrats over the years have been in bed with Wall Street every bit as much as Republicans. In some ways, the finance industry is actually closer, especially on a cultural level, to the Democrats (many prominent financiers, former Goldman chief Bob Rubin being a great example, are social liberals).

This dates back to the Nineties, when two of the signature deregulatory moves that led to the financial crisis – the final repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act deregulating derivatives – were pushed by the Clinton administration and its ballyhooed Rubin/Summers economic advisory team, famously lauded on the cover of Time as the "Committee to Save the World." (Even back then, politicians were casting Wall-Street friendly reforms as technocratic decisions designed to save regular people from financial ruin.)

 

More recently, I've written many times about the failure of Democratic Party politicians like Barack Obama to do anything about the outrageous carried interest tax break, under which hedge fund billionaires like the ones manning the board of the Manhattan Institute and making millions managing the pensions of states like Rhode Island pay a maximum personal tax rate of 15 percent.

In fact, not only have Democrats not done anything about that outrage, there have been many prominent ones – like for instance Cory Booker and Bill Clinton, two politicians who both benefitted from finance-sector largesse in their respective careers – who stood up and defiantly took bullets for the industry when Obama offered highly muted criticisms of Mitt Romney's finance-sector past last summer.

 

In a way, I should probably thank Henn, because had he not written his piece, I wouldn't have remembered this key point. Not only are states like Rhode Island paying millions in fees to outrageously expensive money managers, but those millions will be taxed at a rate far below what the teachers and police and sanitation workers who are being forced to swallow cuts in those states pay on their dwindling incomes. This is thanks in large part to a tax loophole preserved for years by cowardly Wall Street-supplicating politicians hailing, as Henn correctly notes, from both parties, Republican and Democrat.

There's another section of Henn's piece that coincides with another industry-friendly online criticism of the Rolling Stone piece, an article written by Andrew Biggs for the American Enterprise Institute. I've actually also seen the following argument in a few letters sent to me from pro-industry types in just the last few days, so it feels like a collectively-agreed-upon talking point of very recent vintage. And it's really, really weird stuff.

 

Both writers essentially say that the central thesis of the RS piece – that hedge funds are pushing reform because it's in their own financial self-interest – is "illogical" or a "non-sequitur," despite the undeniable fact of the hundreds of millions in fees paid out to money managers who have gone to great lengths to keep the details of their compensation secret.

Henn's argument went like this:

I agree with Taibbi that having pensions invest in hedge funds is a dubious practice, though I could quibble with his method of using simply fees paid as reason why it's bad. But that misses the much bigger issue, which is that cutting pension liabilities actually reduces, not increases, the justification for investing in hedge funds.
Taibbi rightly shows how governments systematically underfunded pensions for years and then attempted to deal with the resulting deficits through high risk investment strategies like hedge funds. But if you reduce the liability, you reduce the incentive to gamble with the funds. So it's absolutely anti-sensical to suggest anyone acting at the behest of peddlers of such risky plans would take action to reduce the very liability that gives any sort of a fig leaf to investing in them. His central thesis is a complete non-sequitur.

You can get a contact high just from staring at those paragraphs for too long. I think Henn here is saying the following:

States are turning to hedge funds because they have an unfunded liability problem and need to address it by earning higher returns. But if those high returns go on to actually reduce the liability, this will therefore reduce the justification for hiring hedge funds in the first place.

Therefore, nobody acting at the behest of hedge funds would actually hire a hedge fund.

Right? Or something like that. Incidentally, I didn't point to fees "simply" as the only argument against hedge funds. I also noted that they are underperforming blind bets on the market at two or three hundred times the cost, that many of the funds being chosen to manage union money have anti-union histories, and a few other things. In any case, Biggs, from the American Enterprise Institute, echoed Henn:

What strikes me is [the Rolling Stone article's] basic illogic. Taibbi's thesis is apparently a) the high fees charged by hedge funds are ripping off public pensions; and b) think tanks and other groups are pushing to shut down DB pensions.
I'm not sure whether either of these claims is true, but the problem is that – as Taibbi goes to lengths to argue – these shadowy groups are themselves supported by current or former hedge fund managers. In other words, the very people Taibbi claims are profiting the most from the public pension gravy train – and profiting they are, as public plans are the largest single investors in hedge funds and private equity in the country – are the ones trying to stop it. My spider-sense tells me the story might be a little more complicated than Taibbi lets on.

Biggs leaves out the fact that pension-reform advocates are not trying to "stop" pensions, they're mainly trying to convert them from a defined-benefit model to a defined-contribution model. The gravy train they're trying to "stop" is for workers, not money managers, who will actually earn more under reform, as states move more toward alternative investments. In no way is the financial services sector campaigning for an end to its pension gravy train. This is a pretty big thing to forget in this particular argument. It's actually the whole argument, isn't it? Readers, if I'm missing something, please let me know.

Related

• Looting the Pension Funds: How Wall Street Robs Public Workers
• The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
  

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/pension-fund-looters-get-tax-breaks-too-20131004#ixzz2gwmksHsp
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