Lobbying Firm's Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street

An exclusive report from Up With Chris Hayes exposes a lobbying firm pitching to the American Banking Association that the Occupy movement is dangerous, which must be killed in order for the Bankers to be safe.

The piece concerns a proposal written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.  The proposal (linked below) is pretty damning evidence of how worried officialdom is about the Occupy movement, and some of the strategizing.  The proposal theorizes that the Obama campaign might attempt to join forces with the Occupy movement if Wall Street gets tarnished badly enough.  It also suggests some Republicans might do so as well if the tarnishing gets bad enough.  Never mind that all politicians are tainted with receiving huge sums from Wall Street.

The vision is that Occupy and Tea Party overlap in terms of being angered populist movements.  The radical left and radical right are both channeling frustration about the economy into political action.  Somehow in some weird parallel universe the two movements might join together to do something traumatic to Wall Street.  At least that's the story GLGC spins to the Bankers.

Their proposal outlines some actions:-  Polling in some key states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada, and New Mexico) which are both states that Obama won, and states facing key issues in front of the electorate right now.  For example, Nevada is described as "ground zero for the foreclosure crisis".

Next they'd do "opposition research" looking for the financial backers of the Occupy movement, presuming that there are deep pockets people like George Soros behind this.  The idea will be to show these backers have "the same cynical motivation as a political opponent" to undermine the Occupy movement credibility.  Maybe at this point they're showing a profound misunderstanding of what's going on?

Social media monitoring to anticipate future Occupy actions and messaging, as well as "identify extreme language and ideas that put its most ardent supporters at odds with mainstream Americans."

Coalition planning activities would demonstrate that the companies targeted by Occupy still have political strength and that making those companies into political targets will carry political risk.

The ultimate deliverable is identifying messages that will "move numbers" (polling numbers), combat Occupy messages, and "provide cover for political figures who defend the industry."

As Chris Hayes points out, two of the names on the proposal are former staffers of Speaker of the House John Boehner.  

They also had an Obama campaign spokesperson on, Anita Dunn, to discuss this.  One critique of the Obama campaign is that they've taken a huge pile of campaign contributions from Wall Street, so doesn't that tarnish the campaign?  Ms. Dunn replied, sidestepping the question, that the majority of their contributions are small ones from individuals.  Didn't really answer the question.  She also said that the tough financial reforms against Wall Street were won by the Obama Administration, demonstrating that Obama isn't in the pocket of Wall Street.

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Exclusive: Lobbying Firm's Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street (VIDEO)

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/CLGF-msnbc.pdf

Obama Campaign Responds to "Up" Exclusive on Lobbyist Plan to Take Down Occupy Wall Street

Crusading state-level Attorneys General seeking to take down corrupt financial industry - Maddow

This week a major focus on Rachel Maddow's show is the corrupt financial industry that nearly killed the U.S. economy.  The deed was enabled by corrupt business practices that were in turn enabled by relaxed regulatory regime.  Largely speaking, even though many companies in the financial industry died, bankrupted, merged, etc, the people who committed the practices are often still employed in the same financial industry, and the regulatory system around them has changed very little.

As Maddow recounts, earlier in this decade a crusading NY Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer, took down several corrupt NYC financial industry titans.  That was before he went on to a prostitute scandal and a stint as a CNN host.  In her coverage this week she focused on two Attorneys General, Eric Schneiderman from New York and Beau Biden from Delaware.   One take-away from this is that Change can happen when bright people pursue a course of correcting wrongs, and use their position of power to enable change in the world.

Of course there is positive change and negative change.  Someone in a position of power can create a corrupt system, or work to remove corruption.  It depends on how they apply the power their position gives them.

These people who are in public service - ideally their job is serving the better interests of all.  Consider the Attorney General job.  It's about seeing justice is served, lawbreakers are found and punished, the law is applied in a just manner, etc.

But history is replete with people who used positions of power to instead feather their own nests, or work with cronies to feather each others nests, or create a regime of dictatorial control, or .. etc .. on and on ..  There have been plenty of Attorneys General who used their positions of power to hide corruption, to stonewall investigations, etc.  Again, it's a matter of how each individual uses their time in the position of power.

During the interviews below, Maddow asked Beau Biden (son of Vice President Biden) why these investigations are happening at the state level rather than the federal level.  Interesting question, and he answered that while there is a lot of state-level investigation, that it seems the state level investigators are cooperating, there is also federal level investigations.

 

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This starts a little slow with analysis of Republican advertisements, the poor pitiful state of Democratic advertisements .. etc ..  The segue point is a Democratic ad that really hits hard on the mortgage crisis corruption.   Almost half of Arizona home-owners are "under water" with foreclosures "everywhere" but Romney's message to Arizona is that he wants the mortgage crisis to "hit bottom" and that home-owners are on their own.

In other words - the banks (e.g. the rich 1%) got bailed out, while we the 99% get foreclosed.

Would it work to brush the corruption under the rug and ignore it?  The business-friendly Republicans want to brush this aside, but does this mean they think "business-friendly" means "corruption-friendly"?

A lot of the base raw feelings driving the Occupy protests is this exact issue.  Rampant financial corruption and corrupt practices.  Who is going to step up to the plate to correct this?  A minute ago I suggested that people in positions of political power have a choice, to use their power for the good of all, or to use their power to protect corrupt practices keeping the game going.

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Later in the show they had Glenn Greenwald on to shill for his latest book, but this weaves into the same narrative.  This book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, "lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability" and "shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud".

The book has a chapter titled - Too Big To Jail - great meme.

Basically, he was there to talk about officially sanctioned corruption and the general pattern that the rich get away with things we little people would be in jail over.

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In this segment Maddow shows, with numbers charted on a graph, the effect of the system.  Note that Greenwald identified a tipping point 40 years ago when Richard Nixon got pardoned, and by being pardoned started this "Too Big To Jail" precedent that's been used to let others get off with little or no punishment for misdeeds.

Here the graph shows how, upon the election of Ronald Reagan, the economic well-being of the 99% and 1% began to diverge.  The Rich got Richer far faster than the rest of us, creating an enormous gap in financial well-being.  Reagan did a lot to remove the regulatory system that had kept the financial system in check, keeping corruption out of finance.  One thing that enabled was for the rich to get richer, and it enabled the rampant corruption.

Oh, and this more-or-less proves how bogus were the "Trickle Down Economics" of the Reagan era.  We see right here that there's no trickle-down.

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This is the segment where she talks about Elliot Spitzer in the period he was the crusading New York Attorney General, the role now held by Eric Schneiderman above.  The segment starts with a quote from the Chamber of Commerce complaining about Spitzers effectiveness.  From the Chamber of Commerce perspective we can imagine they saw Spitzer as a threat, but that just fits the meme where "business-friendly" really means "corruption-friendly" doesn't it?

Thanks to Spitzer, Wall Street was being "perp walked" for stuff they used to routinely get away with.

Sure, investments are not a sure thing and investors should certainly know this.  THe one thing investors deserve is honest advice.  Instead what they got was crap self serving advice that actively misled investors to investing in crap.

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Immediately after the prior segment, we have Beau Biden (VP Biden's son) on to talk about what Delaware is doing.  Where Delaware enters the picture is jurisdiction.  Where Delaware is the preferred state to register corporations, those corporations are subject to accountability by Delaware's judicial system.

Beau Biden as the Delaware Attorney General has just launched a lawsuit against the entire mortgage industry.

The allegation is that in the mid 90's the banks privatized regulation of mortgage notes, so that mortgages could be securitized so that they can be traded on the open market.  A result of the securitization was that it's now nigh-on-impossible to determine who actually owns a given house, because the mortgage originator securitizes the mortgage to sell the mortgage securities on the market.

 

Dylan Ratigan demonstrates the fraudulent shell game leading to the 2007-8-9 mortgage crisis

The youtube video is from October 2009 and has Dylan Ratigan, Eliot Spitzer and comedian Sherrod Small play a game of credit rating theater. There is extreme truth in this little bit of comedic fiction, including the fact that absolutely nothing has changed. Pass this one to a friend.

Arrests of OccupyWallStreet protesters in Boston, arrest threats in Seattle ...

The OccupyWallStreet movement is the latest happening thing in America.  To me it seems like some memes from the "Arab Spring" touched nerves in the U.S. and became this outrage at Wall Street.  What's happening is in cities across the U.S. (maybe it's spread to other countries?) clusters of people have formed, camping out in their downtown areas (e.g. in San Francisco they're camped out on the sidewalk in front of the SF branch of the Federal Reserve) demanding ..something..  It's one thing to have outrage, it's another thing to focus the outrage into meaningful change especially when there's so many opinions of just what change there is to make.

It's also interesting to view this process through the different lenses available.  These popular uprisings have happened in several countries this year, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and now the U.S., and in each country events have unfolded in different ways, and it's been portrayed differently.  There's a way ones perspective or point of view changes how you interpret these things.

In the U.S. we're seeing Officialdom responding to protesters camped out downtown with police force and arrests.  In NYC a couple weeks ago hundreds of protesters were herded onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were arrested for blocking traffic.  We see below that in Boston a hundred or so protesters were arrested in a 1am raid with police attacking a group named "Veterans for Peace".  Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino has expressed sympathy for the issues expressed by the protesters, saying that corporate fraud and greed are issues he's worked on his whole political career, "But you can't tie up a city" in defending the arrests.  In other words he's saying that the functioning of the city is more important than the protest/ers?

In Seattle the protesters were told the city was not at that time planning to commit any arrests.  However the location of their encampment, Westlake Park, is supposed to close at 10pm each night and the city officials are demanding that protesters obey that regulation, and are threatening arrests.  Further police there are banning people from carrying umbrella's; it's Seattle, everyone carries umbrella's, but protesters who want to stay outside for days at a time and stay dry will rely on umbrella's, so by banning umbrella's it's a sneaky way to make it hard on protesters to do their thing.

I'm sure the Mayor of Cairo had similar thinking last Jan/Feb with the thousands upon thousands of protesters camped out in the center of that city.  I'm sure he woulda said something like "But you can't tie up a city."   The throngs of Egyptian protesters had huge international positive press coverage, with throngs of people around the world rooting for them.  I'm sure it was inconvenient to the Egyptians to have their city blocked up by protesters, with Officialdom in part simply desiring to restore "order".  The Egyptian protesters could have complied with "you can't tie up a city" and kept their protests limited enough to let the city keep functioning, but they didn't.  They had a political regime to change, a society to remake into a positive format, converting it from brutal dictatorship to one that treats its people humanely.

The job of the Mayor is to keep the city running, right?  One could argue that a Mayor who lets protesters run rampant and disrupt things isn't doing his/her job in keeping order.  Even if in the greater scheme of things, the protesters are advocating for positive and worthy change, in the process they're disrupting order.  It's the job of the Mayor or Governor or whatever Officialdom, to work to keep the population orderly and functioning smoothly.  In other words "you can't tie up a city".

On the other hand creating change does mean interrupting the current order of how things are done, so things can be changed into a new/different order.  You can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs.

You might think that in the U.S. we don't have as dire a situation as they had/have in Egypt.  That our situation in the U.S. isn't as desperate as the Egyptian's or Libyan's.  But, maybe our situation is as dire, or more so, and maybe our situation is part and parcel of their situation.

The Occupy<City> movement has identified "Wall Street" as the culprits.  What they're be pointing to is the corporate-greed-control complex that has subverted the political systems not just in the U.S. but around the world.  In the U.S. a symptom has been the rampant fraud in housing mortgages - Almost a quarter of all home mortgages today are currently underwater, 2 million homes are in the foreclosure process – and at least 5 million homes have already lost to foreclosure since 2007.  A lot of it due to corporatists who set up a fraudulent system to defraud these millions of home owners out of their homes.

But the same corporatists are committing other financial sins all around the world.   "Globalization" means that it's the same global-elite-power-corporatists everywhere.  They are dominating not only the U.S. but the whole world economy.  The issues faced in Egypt in part are the same issues we have in the U.S.  In both cases our political systems have been subverted by the global power/money/elite structure, and many rightfully see e.g. the economic meltdown etc as a symptom of the looting and fraud behind the banking chaos.

 

 

Boston Police Attack Veterans for Peace by @haveyoumetter for @DigBoston

Boston’s mayor: “Civil disobedience will not be tolerated”

The worst OWS moment so far

Seattle pressures protesters to relocate

Jubilee 2012?

Nobody got rich on their own - Elizabeth Warren clearly explains the social contract, shows why right wing rich coddlers have it all wrong

There's a chorus that's been making me sick, and Elizabeth Warren just speared the chorus with a clear thinking straight to the core issue description of the social contract.  The what?  The social contract was something I vaguely recall hearing about in History class way back in High School, but it's basically the bargain we make with each other as a society that keeps the society running.  Scroll down to the video below - or else read a bit of my ranting first.

BEGIN-RANT: The right wing chorus that's taken over has this irrational basis in individual freedom, individual responsibility, getting the government out of our affairs, etc.  But it's entirely hypocritical - because the same people who push for individual responsibility also pushed for the bank bailouts in late 2008.  If they were all hot for individual responsibility they should have just let the banks fail, that would have taught those bankers a thing or two.  And what about government intrusion into deciding who can and cannot marry?  Why should the government be controlling this, and say that marriage can only be between a man and a woman?  And what about the ability to choose to have an abortion?  Why should the government intrude into this, if government should be small and out of our individual lives?  The examples of hypocracy can go on and on .. and hypocracy exists in the Democratic party not just those close minded right wing blow hards in the Republican party.  BTW - hypocrisy and hypocracy are different but similar things.

Basically the thing going on is the public conversation is about coddling the rich - making sure the rich have all sorts of benefits, tax loopholes, ability to commit crimes and get off scotch free (witness the recent rape allegations against Domonique Strauss-Kahn that got dropped), etc etc etc ... A common bit of rhetoric is the "self made zillionaire" whose right to run their factory (or whatever) the way they want is sacrosanct, and the government should but out.

The truth is that we are not individualists.  One of the American memes is individualism, but it's really a figment of our collective imagination.  None of us can get along on our own.  Anything we do is done within a context created by all of us working together.

END-RANT: This is where you'd start reading again if you skipped my rant.  This is a transcript, and below that is the video.  The speaker, Elizabeth Warren, has spent the last couple years working to establish a consumer protection agency.  But due to Republican led coddling of the rich, she isn't being allowed to be considered to be the lead person of that agency she worked so hard to create.  They are afraid to give her that power, and someone else got the job instead.  As a result she is now a candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts.  After hearing her say this I'd almost want to move there so I could vote for her; but then I remember the stories about their winters and, well, there are braver people than me living in that state.

I hear all this, oh this is class warfare, no! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Halliburton's no-bid contracts came to an end

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Halliburton's no-bid contracts came to an end

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Halliburton for years had no-bid contract access to providing services to the U.S. Military. How could such obvious corruption have gone on for so long? Well, it did come to an end, and the whistleblower responsible has a chance to explain herself.