This is perhaps a post that klynn and Leen (and BoxTurtle, too?) will appreciate more than the rest of you. Because they, like me, have undoubtedly almost crashed their car because they were laughing so hard as they drove by Touchdown Jesus, which is a mighty gaudy distraction just east of 75 north of Cincinnati.

Or should I say was?

Because last night an Act of God–in the form of a lightning strike–destroyed Touchdown Jesus. (Thanks to cbf for alerting me of the target of this particular Act of God; for video, go here.)

Though I tend to think it was not so much an Act of God as an Act of (fat) Al Gore–or rather, climate change. After all, climate change is likely the more direct cause of the really crazy weather we’re having this year. And this Act of God occurred just one week after tornadoes took part of the roof off Michigan’s Cabelas (which, for you arugula-eating Coasters, is a temple to hunting culture much cherished in flyover country), which is MI’s biggest tourist site and, like Touchdown Jesus, is also a testament to the hubris of Americans.

I think climate change is trying to tell us something.

(Touchdown Jesus photo by Morhange under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)

The title pretty much tells the tale. It was just stated on The Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC that:

Family of 11 victims of the Deep Horizon explosion to visit White House next week.

Well, that is just swell.

On the day a forlorn paucity of the media belatedly report on the deceptive collusion that the US Government and BP have been sitting on physical evidence, and factual conclusions drawn therefrom, contained in the full set of video feeds they both have been viewing from the outset of the BP Macondo/Deepwater Horizon blow out, we learn the White House is suddenly going to submit to external pressure and grant the victims of the BP/Deepwater Horizon homicides a walkby meet and greet ceremonial dog and pony show. After nearly two weeks of the victims screaming they have been forgotten, the audience has been approved from on high.

How refreshing. I hope the bereaved at least get an official White House coffee cup and Presidential keychain for their participation.

This is just wrong. It is not wrong for Obama to meet with the relatives and next of kin to the wrongfully deceased of an American natural disaster. It is wrong they had to beg for it, wrong it is being sold like a new product release, and wrong it is used as a convenient image makeover for an Obama Administration recalcitrant to treat mass scale criminal, and wholesale recklessly wanton environmental behavior as what it really is.

Think this is an exaggeration? Just wait and watch. Let me know when there is individual criminal liability where it belongs, as opposed to an inbred with the corporate culture, wink and nod plea and fine scheme in collusion with BP, Transocean, Halliburton and/or their powerful lobbyists. You know, criminal prosecution of the truly criminally negligent actors and authorities. The ones making the imminently foreseeable, cold, craven and disastrous decisions precipitating the needless death of eleven souls and the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the United States. Not the kind of cozy package deal the US government is known for giving BP when they have wreaked wholesale death and environmental destruction.

I do not presume to speak for the Deepwater deceased and their survivors; but I find it hard to believe they would not rather the President and American government show they will no longer accept the absent regulatory effort, coddling of profit before morals corporate greed, and “looking forward” blind ignorance of accountability for dereliction and destruction of the ethos we should, and claim to, stand for. The dead and their relatives are entitled to better than is given the latest basketball team to win a championship.

Mr. Obama, show the victims of the negligent homicide at Deepwater Horizon you have something more than meager food for souls forgot.

[Graphic from Rachel Maddow Show via Jalopnik]

What can brown do for you? If you are George Will, apparently only mow the yard or fill the water glass at the local stick in your butt snob steakhouse. In the latest condescending pile of rancid, rambling garbage by Will, set for tomorrow’s Washington Post, Will defecates on about everybody he can find over the immigration law fiasco in Arizona:

“Misguided and irresponsible” is how Arizona’s new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a “sanctuary city,” an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of “nullification” and “interposition,” anarchy and disunion. Strange.

Uh, hey George, in the first place Pelosi is right, and your discreetly veiled misogynistic demeaning of her, and offensive put down of her hometown of San Francisco, are intellectually impertinent and scurrilous. The rest of the paragraph is such a non-sequitur you have to wonder about the stability of the mind authoring it.

Arizona’s law makes what is already a federal offense — being in the country illegally — a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona’s right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer’s character and motives, saying she “caved to the radical fringe.” This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a “fringe” of their state?

“Some critics”, namely George Fucking Will (that is what the “F” stands for, right?) do not seem to understand the concept of Federal preemption. Maybe Will is one of those conservative headcases who consider the Tenth Amendment the most supreme law of the land; but it is not, and there is a reason serious minds term such morons “Tenthers” in the same vein as the nutjob Birthers. Clearly George Will would not know a proper legal argument of “concurrent jurisdiction” if it hit him in the ass. The rest of that paragraph is gibberish unworthy of a grade school response.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy — judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes — because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things “beyond the reach of majorities.”

What? This paragraph makes Charles Cheswick and Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest look sane. You have got to be kidding me. The link is to the Cliff’s Notes, because it appears George Will Is not familiar with the great American novel.

But Arizona’s statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make “a reasonable attempt” to determine the status of a person “where reasonable suspicion exists” that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of “reasonable” will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights — the Fourth Amendment — proscribes “unreasonable searches and seizures.” What “reasonable” means in practice is still being refined by case law — as is that amendment’s stipulation that no warrants shall be issued “but upon probable cause.” There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of “reasonable suspicion.”

Brewer says, “We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status.” Because the nation thinks as Brewer does, airport passenger screeners wand Norwegian grandmothers. This is an acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of “evenness” as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.

Some critics say Arizona’s law is unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” prevents the government from taking action on the basis of race. Liberals, however, cannot comfortably make this argument because they support racial set-asides in government contracting, racial preferences in college admissions, racial gerrymandering of legislative districts and other aspects of a racial spoils system. Although liberals are appalled by racial profiling, some seem to think vocational profiling (police officers are insensitive incompetents) is merely intellectual efficiency, as is state profiling (Arizonans are xenophobic).

Aw jeebus. Little surprise Will is considered an intellectually big thinker in the party that selected Sarah Palin as its second choice to lead the United States through the perilous times extant in the current world. Well, yes George, the failure of the statute to define what is “reasonable” in pertinent circumstances, and the impossibility of defining such a concept in terms of suspect classes and equal protection concerns, does indeed make the statute presumptively unconstitutional; as does the fact that such status will “not be obvious in many contexts”. In fact, that is the exact context prohibited by a long and seminal thread of Supreme Court cases dating back to Terry v. Ohio and progeny like Dunaway v. New York. But, hey, facts and law are inconvenient things for George Will; even his own ombudsman at the Washington Post has confirmed. The attempt to falsely equate this law with “liberal” concepts of equality in education and government contracting is intellectually duplicitous and disgusting; and “racial gerrymandering” is a creature of conservative Republican bigots like Will, not “liberals”. Oh, and George, the highest law enforcement officer in the country thinks you are an idiot, as do the chiefs of police across the nation.

Will saves his lowest blow for last when he declares from his on high tuffet:

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

Hey George, you introspectively incompetent imbecile, that is you who thinks that way, not Arizonans. As both an Arizona native and current resident, I am shocked and livid the august Washington Post would print this tripe by George F. Will. Will is an embarrassment to the Washington Post (if the Post is capable of such anymore), ABC News and the nation; how some blue blooded pampered pimpernel like Will is allowed to issue screed like this is unfathomable.

George Will is long the wrong side of his “use by” date, if he was ever fit for the use intended to start with. The grass is growing long in the pundit meadow, time to put this racist jackass out to pasture.

(perfect graphic by latinopundit.com)

The inevitable has been announced; Bob Lutz is leaving Ed Whitacre’s new General Motors. From the New York Times:

Vice Chairman Bob Lutz will retire from the automaker effective May 1, people briefed on the plans said on Wednesday.

Lutz, 78, had been serving as a senior adviser to GM Chairman and Chief Executive Ed Whitacre after shelving retirement plans to take charge of the automaker’s marketing after it emerged from bankruptcy in July 2009.
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The announcement comes a day after GM shook up its sales and marketing operations in its home market for the third time in five months.

Lutz was charged with overhauling GM’s marketing efforts under former CEO Fritz Henderson, but he appeared to have been sidelined by Whitacre, a former AT&T executive brought in by the Obama administration.

In late February, Whitacre named Stephen Girsky, a former investment banker, as special adviser and vice chairman in charge of corporate strategy, a move that raised questions about the tenure and role of Lutz.

And it really was inevitable. Last December when Fritz Henderson was unceremoniously dumped in a midnight putsch by Ed Whitacre, the former corporate phone boy from AT&T, we had some things to say here. Marcy, noting Whitacre’s professed desire to ram products to market quicker – to do everything quicker – observed:

Now maybe it would be possible to bring out new products more quickly. Maybe there is merit to disrupting the very complex model year and product cycle schedules that every car company relies on to manage new product introductions.

But I worry that this push to introduce products more quickly will come at a price–the price of doing it right, both from an engineering perspective (you don’t want the Cruze to come out with all sorts of recalls, after all) and from a marketing perspective (if you introduce a product but don’t have the marketing budget to support it, it’s not going to do much good).

And I commented that the Whitacre putsch had other consequences too:

There is one other consideration. With Fritz gone, the only marketable face GM has left to the actual auto people is Bob Lutz, and he will bolt in a heartbeat if he thinks the wrong car decisions are being made. Lutz is very comfortable with the big money wheeler dealers, but he is, first and foremost, a car guy all the way. And he does not need the money or grief. If they were to lose Lutz in any short order in addition to Henderson, they will have a potential real mess.

Well it turns out the thoughts may have been prescient. And make no mistake, Lutz is in fine health and as active and ornery as ever; he is leaving because he is dissatisfied with what he sees happening under GM’s newfangled corporatist leadership. Lutz did not agree to stay on a mere couple of months ago just to up and leave now; at least not if he was satisfied with the plan and direction of the company.

No, despite the happy talk you may see in the news, Lutz doesn’t like what he is seeing. In an article hitting the New York Times last night, reporting the second shuffling of sales and marketing leadership in GM in the last three months (i.e. since Whitacre took over), came this ominous passage tacked on to the end of the article almost as an afterthought:

The moves are a sign of Whitacre’s impatience, but may not be wise because it generally takes 12 to 18 months for people to become effective in their jobs, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management.

Whitacre, Sonnenfeld said, is all about convincing people to buy GM’s products rather than improving them over the long term.

”This is an illusion of take-charge as opposed to actually working on strategic visions, creating great product,” he said. ”This is his, I think, extremely short-term view.”

So Ed Whitacre, an AT&T corporatist specializing in huge executive compensation packages while screwing his customers, was the guy the Obama Administration and the Wall Street Masters Of The Universe led by Steven Rattner installed, and he wasted little time in getting rid of Fritz Henderson, a widely respected executive steeped in the automotive industry and trusted to make the GM transition, first made himself temporary CEO and then decreed himself permanent CEO after a Dick Cheney like comprehensive search for the best person for the job.

And now Phone Boy Whitacre, who was supposed to be being advised and trained on such issues by Lutz, one of the most accomplished and successful marketing and product development guys in the history of the automotive business, has instead lent his ear to Girsky, the former investment banker, for “corporate strategy”. That is corporate strategy writ idiotic.

Say what you will about Bob Lutz, and much has been said over the years, the man is the consummate car guy, both in his love for them and his legendary track record in producing and marketing them. BMW was floundering along as a marque when Lutz weighed in on the design and development of the now ubiquitous 3 Series and made it the centerpiece in the push to establish their presence in North America. That worked out pretty well, to put it lightly.

It may be hard to grasp right now, but there was a time when Ford was on the ropes, and if not for anti-trust concerns, probably would have been in real danger of sinking. For all of the things said about the Ford Explorer, it single handedly saved Ford and reinvigorated the company. That was a Bob Lutz program (no, he did not design or specify the crappy Firestone/Bridgestone tires and corresponding suspension tweaking that led to the problems).

Same with Chrysler; while his Chrysler products like the new Ram truck, Viper, Prowler and LH platforms that led to current sedans like the 300, Charger and Challenger may not have been very eco-friendly, they were the pizzaz and new blood that, for a period gave new life and a continued existence to a dying brand. What has occurred at Chrysler since he left, a moribund company with no desirable products and no buzz whatsoever, speaks volumes.

In short, love him or hate him, Bob Lutz is a man with vision, guts and an unparalleled record of success in product development and marketing in the automotive manufacturing world. But Ed Whitacre has decided to listen to the former investment banker guy and scurry around like a chicken with his head cut off in an impatient search for instant gratification and profit. Ladies and gentlemen, your “New GM” as brought to you by the Obama Administration and the Wall Street Masters Of The Universe.

As you may have heard (See here and here), the Supreme Court has entered a last minute stay to put a hold on the video feed of the seminal Prop 8 trial in the Norther District of California (NDCA) to select other Federal courthouses in the country as well as the delayed release of video clips of the proceedings via YouTube.

This is the full text of the order issued by the Supremes:

Upon consideration of the application for stay presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court, it is ordered that the order of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, case No. 3:09-cv-02292, permitting real-time streaming is stayed except as it permits streaming to other rooms within the confines of the courthouse in which the trial is to be held. Any additional order permitting broadcast of the proceedings is also stayed pending further order of this Court. To permit further consideration in this Court, this order will remain in effect until Wednesday, January 13, 2010, at 4 p.m. eastern time.

Justice Breyer, dissenting.

I agree with the Court that further consideration is warranted, and I am pleased that the stay is time limited. However, I would undertake that consideration without a temporary stay in place. This stay prohibits the transmission of proceedings to other federal courthouses. In my view, the Court’s standard for granting a stay is not met. See Conkright v. Frommert, 556 U. S. ___, ___ (2009) (slip op., at 1–2) (Ginsburg, J., in chambers). In particular, the papers filed, in my view, do not show a likelihood of “irreparable harm.” With respect, I dissent.

This is, to say the least, a disappointing ruling. It had been my guess that Anthony Kennedy would field the issue, which went directly to him as the hot judge for emergency matters from the 9th Circuit, and see it as a matter within the discretion of the 9 Circuit and let them make the call, which they had done in favor of video dissemination. For those not aware, this idea of video from the courtroom was not germinated from the Prop 8 trial, even though that has been the focal point. Instead, the pilot program was the brainchild of the 9th circuit Judicial Conference, as described in this LA Times article from late last year:

Federal courts in California and eight other Western states will allow video camera coverage of civil proceedings in an experiment aimed at increasing public understanding of the work of the courts, the chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday.

The decision by the court’s judicial council, headed by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, is in response to recommendations made to the court two years ago and ends a 1996 ban on the taking of photographs or transmitting of radio or video broadcasts.

“We hope that being able to see and hear what transpires in the courtroom will lead to a better public understanding of our judicial processes and enhanced confidence in the rule of law,” Kozinski said. “The experiment is designed to help us find the right balance between the public’s right to access to the courts and the parties’ right to a fair and dignified proceeding.”

The first proceedings to be taped or photographed will be chosen by the chief judge of each of the 15 districts in the 9th Circuit region in consultation with Kozinski, the court announcement said, noting that only non-jury civil cases would be subject to the new rules.

The Prop 8 trial became the hot button topic on the pilot program simply because the Chief Judge of the NDCA is Vaughn Walker and he chose the non-jury Prop 8 trial as the first proceeding for his district. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate case to televise and allow access to than one involving fundamental human and constitutional rights, as well as one that is in the forefront of the socio-political/legal conversation in the United States.

It is similarly hard to imagine anyone would object to that trial being disseminated by video to a wider audience unless, of course, you are the Proposition 8 supporters and do not want the world to see the ugliness of both your soft and hard bigotry. And so that invasive and discriminatory group did just that and filed a Petition for Stay to the United States Supreme Court to halt the video Judge Walker had ordered. There were three response briefs submitted, by the plaintiffs in the lower court (Perry) challenging the constitutionality of Prop 8, a Supplement by Perry, and one filed by an interested Media Coalition.

I could spend a couple of thousand words explaining my thoughts on why the order permitting the restricted video coverage which had been entered by Judge Walker, and upheld by the 9th Circuit, is appropriate and why the Supreme Court erred in setting it aside, even if temporarily, but the words and argument of the attorney for the Media Coalition, Tom Burke, really say it all better than I could. Take a look at it, it is not long and is excellent.

It will be very interesting to see what the Supremes have to say at the end of the day Wednesday once they have had a chance to engage in “further consideration”. I think there is a chance for bifurcation in their treatment between the live video feed to other selected Federal courtrooms and the dissemination of “YouTube” clips to the internet. We shall see. In the meantime, I would like to focus for a minute on the almost certain basis for the reticence of the Supreme Court, and it is their own longstanding, and somewhat self centered, interest.

The issue of video cameras in Federal courtrooms has, at root, historically been framed in terms of the First Amendment right to free press and the transparency it portends versus the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. As the top court, the US supreme Court has consistently ruled against permitting video cameras in courtrooms, generally citing the Sixth Amendment. Except where they haven’t; for instance in state court cases that could not set a precedent which could eventually lead to cameras in – gasp – the US Supreme Court.

In the 1981 case of Chandler v. Florida, the Supreme Court stated (from the syllabus):

The Constitution does not prohibit a state from experimenting with a program such as is authorized by Florida’s Canon 3A(7).

This Court has no supervisory jurisdiction over state courts, and, in reviewing a state court judgment, is confined to evaluating it in relation to the Federal Constitution.

Estes v. Texas, supra, did not announce a constitutional rule that all photographic, radio, and television coverage of criminal trials is inherently a denial of due process. It does not stand as an absolute ban on state experimentation with an evolving technology, which, in terms of modes of mas communication, was in its relative infancy in 1964 when Estes was decided, and is, even now, in a state of continuing change.

An absolute constitutional ban on broadcast coverage of trials cannot be justified simply because there is a danger that, in some cases, conduct of the broadcasting process or prejudicial broadcast accounts of pretrial and trial events may impair the ability of jurors to decide the issue of guilt or innocence uninfluenced by extraneous matter. The appropriate safeguard against juror prejudice is the defendant’s right to demonstrate that the media’s coverage of his case — be it printed or broadcast compromised the ability of the particular jury that heard the case to adjudicate fairly.

Whatever may be the “mischievous potentialities [of broadcast coverage] for intruding upon the detached atmosphere which should always surround the judicial process,” Estes v. Texas, supra at 381 U. S. 587, at present no one has presented empirical data sufficient to establish that the mere presence of the broadcast media in the courtroom inherently has an adverse effect on that process under all circumstances. Here, appellants have offered nothing to demonstrate that their trial was subtly tainted by broadcast coverage — let alone that all broadcast trials would be so tainted. (page citations omitted)

See? Broadcast is not inherently bad, and it certainly does not violate the Constitution, by the Supreme Court’s own words. But they sure sing a different tune when the thought of video coverage gets closer to their own hallowed halls; thus they have consistently fought off allowing video in Federal courts, because once it permeates lower Federal courts, it will get to the Supreme Court. And the cloistered Supreme Justices simply do not want the scrutiny that such transparency would yield to their process.

Many attempts have been made over the years to get video coverage of Supreme Court sessions permitted, the most recent championed in the US Senate in 2007 by Arlen Specter and, believe it or not, John Cornyn (who had experience in the Texas Supreme Court and found the camera coverage quite acceptable). But none other than Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Clarene Thomas schlepped down to the Senate to implore Congress not to pass legislation sanctioning camera coverage of the Supreme Court. Justice Kennedy testified on March 8, 2007:

But I don’t think it’s in the best interest of our institution…Our dynamic works. The discussions that the justices have with the attorneys during oral arguments is a splendid dynamic. If you introduce cameras, it is human nature for me to suspect that one of my colleagues is saying something for a soundbite. Please don’t introduce that insidious dynamic into what is now a collegial court. Our court works…We teach, by having no cameras, that we are different. We are judged by what we write. WE are judged over a much longer term. We’re not judged by what we say. But, all in all, I think it would destroy a dynamic that is now really quite a splendid one and I don’t think we should take that chance.

Fine for thee, but not for me has long been the Supreme Court view. Justice Souter famously declared in Congressional testimony back in 1996 when an earlier move to televise Supreme Court proceedings was raised:

The day you see a camera come into our courtroom it’s going to roll over my dead body.

For a complete breakdown on the respective views of the Supreme Court bench on televised proceedings, see this summary page from CSPAN on Cameras In The Court. The reticence to permit cameras in the Court is palpable, even though several couch their views to give the appearance of being open minded. The salient point is that every time Congress renews the subject, emissary Justices are immediately dispatched to give committee testimony against permitting video coverage; there are never corresponding Justices sent in favor of camera coverage. To be fair, Breyer and Ginsberg expressed no opposition during their confirmation hearings; but never on the record at regular hearings.

The bottom line for the Prop 8 case is that once Anthony Kennedy decided to take it upon himself and the Supreme Court to remove the decision power from the applicable circuit and trial court, there was not going to be ready approval for Judge Walker’s plan under the 9th Circuit pilot program. If history is any guide, the decision come Wednesday will be consistent with the long history by the Supremes of protecting their turf from the transparency eyes of the video courtroom by forbidding encroachment even in lower courts. But it is a new day, maybe the Justices will lend a new vision and openness. Here’s hoping.

Previously, Marcy Wheeler noted the unsavory blending of the private interests of health insurance companies with the power and hand of the US government:

It’s one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes–to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have up to 25% of that go to paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the company CEOs.

It’s the same kind of deal peasants made under feudalism: some proportion of their labor in exchange for protection (in this case, from bankruptcy from health problems, though the bill doesn’t actually require the private corporations to deliver that much protection).In this case, the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections for the corporations.
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The reason this matters, though, is the power it gives the health care corporations. We can’t ditch Halliburton or Blackwater because they have become the sole primary contractor providing precisely the services they do. And so, like it or not, we’re dependent on them. And if we were to try to exercise oversight over them, we’d ultimately face the reality that we have no leverage over them, so we’d have to accept whatever they chose to provide. This bill gives the health care industry the leverage we’ve already given Halliburton and Blackwater.

Marcy termed this being “On The Road To Neo-feudalism” and then followed up with a subsequent post noting how much the concept was applicable to so much of the American life and economy, especially through the security/military/industial complex so intertwined with the US government.

Marcy Wheeler is not the only one recently noting the striking rise in power of corporate interests via the forceful hand of US governmental decree (usually at the direct behest of the corporate interests). Glenn Greenwald, expanding on previous work by Ed Kilgore, penned a dynamic description of the dirty little secret (only it is not little by any means) afoot in modern American socio-political existence:

But the most significant underlying division identified by Kilgore is the divergent views over the rapidly growing corporatism that defines our political system.

Kilgore doesn’t call it “corporatism” — the virtually complete dominance of government by large corporations, even a merger between the two — but that’s what he’s talking about. He puts it in slightly more palatable terms:

To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, “New Democrat” movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as “the Third Way,” which often defended the use of private means for public ends.

As I’ve written for quite some time, I’ve honestly never understood how anyone could think that Obama was going to bring about some sort of “new” political approach or governing method when, as Kilgore notes, what he practices — politically and substantively — is the Third Way, DLC, triangulating corporatism of the Clinton era, just re-packaged with some sleeker and more updated marketing. At its core, it seeks to use government power not to regulate, but to benefit and even merge with, large corporate interests, both for political power (those corporate interests, in return, then fund the Party and its campaigns) and for policy ends. It’s devoted to empowering large corporations, letting them always get what they want from government, and extracting, at best, some very modest concessions in return. This is the same point Taibbi made about the Democratic Party in the context of economic policy:

The significance of all of these appointments isn’t that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It’s that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants.

One finds this in far more than just economic policy, and it’s about more than just letting corporations do what they want. It’s about affirmatively harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector.

Ms. Wheeler and Mr. Greenwald are correct, and the phenomenon is not just limited to the healthcare and military/industrial complex either; it is even more alarming in the ever more dominant and pervasive financial sector, home of the “too big to fail”. The phrase itself should terrify citizens, yet the country seems blithely oblivious to the implications. If there was even a vein of common sense among the people and leadership of this country, there would be immediate realization that an entity too big to fail is so big that it controls the government as much as the other way around. But the people are asleep, distracted by their own despair and desensitized over the years. The leadership, as both Wheeler and Greenwald describe have become symbiotic with the cause and, thus, are the part of problem not a source of solution.

Marcy Wheeler describes the concentration of power and wealth in corporations married to the hand of government as neo-feudalism; Glenn Greenwald and Kilgore posit it as corporatism. Both are worthy and descriptive terms, but the real ill goes a bit deeper if you also consider the accompanying rise in income inequality and transfer of wealth to the privileged and powerful few individuals that has paralleled what Marcy and Glenn describe. When you put it all together, the result is a situation that eerily duplicates the era of the robber barons existing in the United States 100 years ago.

The New Robber Barons

Robber Barons as a descriptor for the modern overlords came to me during a conversation with several colleagues a week or two ago on how to term the healthcare companies and their owners and executives. In writing this article, however, I have found I am far from the first person to realize how the old is new again in this regard to the rapacious class. Over a decade ago, Brad DeLong hit on the same precise thought, and he hit it hard and big:

“Robber Barons”: that was what U.S. political and economic commentator Matthew Josephson (1934) called the economic princes of his own day. Today we call them “billionaires.” Our capitalist economy–any capitalist economy–throws up such enormous concentrations of wealth: those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, driven and smart enough to see particular economic opportunities and seize them, foresighted enough to have gathered a large share of the equity of a highly-profitable enterprise into their hands, and well-connected enough to fend off political attempts to curb their wealth (or well-connected enough to make political favors the foundation of their wealth).

Matthew Josephson called them “Robber Barons”. He wanted readers to think back to their European history classes, back to thugs with spears on horses who did nothing save fight each other and loot merchant caravans that passed under the walls of their castles. He judged that their wealth was in no sense of their own creation, but was like a tax levied upon the productive workers and craftsmen of the American economy. Many others agreed: President Theodore Roosevelt–the Republican Roosevelt, president in the first decade of this century–spoke of the “malefactors of great wealth” and embraced a public, political role for the government in “anti-trust”: controlling, curbing, and breaking up large private concentrations of economic power.
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And whatever the causes, the period since the mid-1970s has seen wealth concentration in the United States increase more rapidly than ever before–even during the heyday of industrialization in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Aggregate measures of wealth concentration today are greater than at any time since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression, and are within striking distance of the peak in wealth concentration reached during the Gilded Age (see Wolff, 1994).
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It is striking how closely numbers of “billionaire” match shifts in aggregate wealth inequality: when the frequency of billionaires in the labor force is high, wealth concentration is high. A simple linear regression predicts that the frequency of billionaires would drop to zero should the share of wealth held by the top one percent drop to twenty percent or so–and, indeed, we find no billionaires back when wealth concentration was so low.
…..
These causes of immense wealth have nothing to do with the determinants of the relative supplies of skilled and unskilled workers, or with the technological requirements of production. It makes me think that the overall level of wealth concentration is much more a “political” and a “cultural” phenomenon than an “economic” one: that we through our political systems and our attitudes have much more to do with the concentration of wealth than does the dance of factor supplies and technology-driven factor demands.

DeLong’s piece is a comprehensive thesis that describes both the history of the earlier American robber barons and modern day versions, at least as of the time he penned his work in 1997-98. Brad noted disturbing trends at the time, but did not reach hard conclusions as to the overall effect of the phenomenon on the health of American society.

So if there is a lesson, it is roughly as follows: Politics can put curbs on the accumulation of extraordinary amounts of wealth. And there is a very strong sense in which an unequal society is an ugly society. I like the distribution of wealth in the United States as it stood in 1975 much more than I like the relative contribution of wealth today. But would breaking up Microsoft five years ago have increased the pace of technological development in software? Probably not. And diminishing subsidies for railroad construction would not have given the United States a nation-spanning railroad network more quickly.

So there are still a lot of questions and few answers. At what level does corruption become intolerable and undermine the legitimacy of democracy? How large are the entrepreneurial benefits from the finance-industrial development nexus through which the truly astonishing fortunes are developed? To what extent are the Jay Goulds and Leland Stanfords embarrassing but tolerable side-effects of successful and broad economic development?

DeLong knew what the issues were, but did not have firm conclusions and answers as to the potential detriment or benefit of such unequal wealth distribution. However, the decade plus that has elapsed since Brad wrote his version of the robber barons, and especially the last two, has put a far different patina on the situation. It is not just the difference between the rich man and poor man, it is the vanishing middle class coupled with the ever grosser arrogance, recklessness and impunity which makes the New Robber Barons such a dangerous and destructive force. There is no longer need to describe what the downside of the insanity could be; we know, we are living it as we speak and have been over the past two years.

The question is where we go from here with respect to the New Robber Baron overlords. Just mosey along status quo as the Obama Administration appears to envision, not looking back with anger, accountability and real change; or do we plow the harder, but ultimately more fertile ground of curbing the irrational and destructive accumulation of wealth and power through Teddy Rooseveltian anti-trust programs, return of Glass-Steagall protections separation of banking and investment functions and tax and social programs to rebuild the evaporating middle class.

Healthcare is the current flashpoint, and it is rightfully a big one. There is no question but that the US needs “reform”; but there is a real question, still to be answered, whether there will be something produced which benefits the masses of citizens both now and in the future or just an illusory pile of junk that benefits the ruling classes of politicians and health industry robber barons.

As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald have persuasively argued, however, it goes much, much deeper than merely healthcare; the battle is over the root ethos of what this country is and is going to be. The incontrovertible trend is toward an unholy blending of the robber barons with the government itself. Not just the usual influencing of government policies through lobbying and monetary control of individual politicians to seek favorable policies, but where the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections, enforcement and expansion for the corporations. The best time to rethink and reverse this trend is now, it will not get easier as the trend becomes more ingrained and pervasive with time.

As long as this post is, the surface of this topic has barely been scratched. It is my hope to peg this phenomenon with a term simple, descriptive and instantly understandable by all, and to start a discussion both in comments to this post and in subsequent posts here and by others across the spectrum. Time is wasting at an alarming rate.

(graphic courtesy of Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University)

I have had several people ask me off blog about the “opinions” on the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) that have surfaced recently in the 9th Circuit. I may write more later; but for now I want to lay out the sequence of facts and actions and start the discussion.

The current issue really took flight last month when 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski entered an order dated November 19, 2009 on the matter of Karen Golinski, a staff attorney for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Judicial branch employees such as Golinski are Federal employees and therefore have their benefits administered by the Office of Personnel Management (the same folks Obama and Harry Reid want to administer their poor excuse of a substitute for the Public Option). Based upon the OPM’s stated position, the contracted benefits carrier (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) refused to provide health benefits for her same sex legal spouse, Amy Cunninghis.

From Judge Kosinski’s November 19 Order:

Karen Golinski has been denied a benefit of federal employment because she married a woman rather than a man. I previously determined that violates this court’s guarantee of equal employment opportunity. To avoid a difficult constitutional problem, I harmonized the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 1 USC §7; the statutes creating the benefit program at issue, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), 5 USC §8901 et seq.; and this court’s commitment to equal employment opportunity.

I then entered [an] order
…
No “party or individual aggrieved” by my decision appealed it.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) complied with my order and submitted Ms. Golinski’s form 2089 to the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Servie Benefit Plan, Ms. Golinski’s health insurance carrier. That’s as it should be; the AO is subject to the “supervision and direction” of the Judicial Conference of the United States, 28 USC §604(a), and I exercised authority delegated by the Judicial Conference when I ordered relief. After the AO submitted Ms. golinski’s form, I thought this matter had concluded.

The Executive Branch, acting through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), thought otherwise. It directed the insurance carrier not to process Ms. Golinski’s form 2089, thwarting the relief I had ordered. (citations omitted)

That is the basic tale of Golinski and Kozinski. Since the November 19 Order the above language was taken from, the situation has become even more exacerbated by the intransigence of the Obama Administration and its OPM which, either comically or tragically depending on one’s view, is headed by John Berry who the Administration made a big show of touting as its highest ranking openly gay official.

The irony just oozes. After further refusal and contempt of his clear order, which the Administration never appealed, Judge Kozinski entered another Order Tuesday further blistering the Administration and all but instructing Karen Golinski to sue them.

But that is not the only such matter percolating in the 9th Circuit. In a separate matter involving Brad Levenson, a member of the Federal Public Defender’s Office of Central California, an office also under the same benefits plan, a different 9th Circuit Judge, Stephen Reinhardt, has also indicated dissatisfaction with the position of the government as directed by the Obama Administration. In a decision dated November 18, 2009, just a day before Kozinski’s Order in Golinski, Reinhardt wrote:

Brad Levenson, a deputy public defender in the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Central District of California (“FPD”), is legally married, under California law, to Tony Sears. Nevertheless, Levenson has not been permitted to enroll Sears as a family member beneficiary of his federal health, dental, and vision benefits (hereinafter “federal benefits”) because both spouses are of the same sex. In a previous order, I determined that the denial of benefits on this ground violates the Ninth Circuit’s Employment Dispute Resolution Plan for Federal Public Defenders and Staff (“EDR Plan”), which expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. I also determined for similar reasons that the denial of benefits violates the United States Constitution. As a further remedy for those violations Levenson now requests an order directing the FPD to enter into separate contracts with private insurers in order to provide Sears with benefits comparable to those provided in the existing federal plans, or alternatively, a monetary award pursuant to the Back Pay Act. For the reasons set forth below I have determined that an order directing the FPD to enter into separate health insurance contracts would not be a “necessary and appropriate” remedy within the scope of the EDR Plan. A back pay award, however, would be appropriate under the circumstances. Accordingly, I grant Levenson’s alternative request for monetary award, and remand the matter to the FPD to determine the actual amount awarded.

In both of these cases, Golinski and Levenson, the “plan” they were under was contractual and stipulated the only remedy and forum available for prosecuting claims of employment discrimination, which mandated first a “counseling” which was effectively a discussion with OPM representatives, followed by mediation, followed only after unsuccessful exhaustion of the first two avenues, by the ability to petition the 9th Circuit Judicial authority. The latter allows the matter to be heard by a judge, but clearly in an administrative authority as opposed to pursuant to their Article III formal judicial authority. And therein lies the rub and why the Obama Administration feels empowered to contemptuously thumb their nose at the resultant orders.

In case there is any question what Judge Reinhardt thinks of DOMA and its effects on members of the LGBT community under the circumstances:

As I concluded in my previous order, the application of DOMA to FEHBA so as to deny Levenson’s request that his same-sex spouse receive federal benefits violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. In reaching that conclusion, I believe it likely that some form of heightened Constitutional scrutiny applies to Levenson’s claims.

For the uninitiated, Reinhardt finds DOMA clearly unconstitutional and, because it discriminates against protected classes, must be judged under a particularly burdensome standard, which it cannot, and does not, meet. A striking and quite correct analysis.

It is somewhat scandalous, if not outright scurrilous, that the Obama Administration, which ran hard on relief to the GLBT community and protection and equal protection of their rights, would hide behind the DOMA they once scorned to deny equal protection to Karen Golinski and Brad Levenson. But that is just how they roll.

The question now is what avenue for remedy will Golinski and Levenson pursue? That is still unclear, but it ought to be very interesting. The other thing that simply cannot be emphasized enough is how remarkable the decisions of Judge Stephen Reinhardt and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski are. They have not hidden behind illusory outs or carefully kept their powder dry. Both judges have observed unconstitutional provisions and acts, egregious positions by the Obama Administration that openly claimed otherwise to get elected, and denial of equal protection to worthy citizens, and they flat out called it for what it is.

And make no mistake, those of us who live and practice in the 9th Circuit can attest to how different a place on the ideological spectrum these two are. Stephen Reinhardt is a proud old school hard liberal appointed by Jimmy Carter; Kozinski was a young and fairly radical conservative when appointed by Ronald Reagan and openly complained that the 9th was too wild eyed liberal when he joined. Their decisions here may not have precedential value as reported Article III cases, but when these two are on the same page calling foul, as they have done on the acts of the Obama Administration against Ms. Golinski and Mr. Levenson, it is a powerful marker that something very wrong is afoot. And so it is.

That’s punkin, not pumpkin my fellow gobblers and gobblees. Yes indeedy, the White House has been officially punked. Late breaking from the Washington Post:

A couple of aspiring reality-TV stars from Northern Virginia appear to have crashed the White House’s state dinner Tuesday night, penetrating layers of security with no invitation to mingle with the likes of Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi — polo-playing socialites known for a bitter family feud over a Fauquier County winery and their possible roles in the forthcoming “The Real Housewives of Washington” — were seen arriving at the White House and later posted on Facebook photos of themselves with VIPs at the elite gathering.
…
While the White House offered no official explanation, it appears to be the first time in modern history that anyone has crashed a White House state dinner. The uninvited guests were in the same room as President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, although it is unknown whether they met the Obamas and the guest of honor.

Here is the best part – they had their picture taken with the one and only Ron Emanuel:

But the best was yet to come: Once inside the dinner tent, they got pictures that appeared to show them with ABC’s Robin Roberts, Bollywood composer AR Rahman, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Obama Chief of Staff Emanuel (identified as “Ron” in the couple’s Facebook photo caption) and two with a grinning vice president. (Emphasis added)

So, that is a pretty good story; but here is an even better one of some punkin going on at the White House, courtesy of the inestimable Howie Klein.

Howie tells the story of how he arranged for Lou Reed to attend and perform for an official Clinton White House State Dinner for Vaclev Havel, President of the Czech Republic:

One of the “big” news stories yesterday was the State Dinner President Obama gave in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who, like CNN’s Sanji Gupta– a guest– is a doctor. 400 people were invited– probably 200 + 1 each, but I’m not certain– and it was in a heated tent on the lawn. I have a half-baked reason for telling the story of the state dinner I went to in September, 1998
….
I understood exactly what President Clinton wanted– and delivered. Havel and Lou Reed, a Reprise artist and a friend of mine, had such a powerful bond that Havel actually credited him with being part of the inspiration for the Velvet Revolution that freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet domination.
….
Everyone was grooving out (Henry Kissinger, Ted Stevens, Eric Holder, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Harman, Chuck Hagel and 2 generals, John Shalikashvili and my new pal, Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)– not just Lugar– and I kept wondering if anyone had any clue what the lyrics were. Clinton certainly didn’t. He got up onstage and played his sax.

Now that is some punkin the White House!

Well, this is exciting! Yesterday on Morning Joe on MSNBC, Mike Allen of Politico proudly announced that he, the managing editor at Politico, John Harris, and Politico executive editor Jim VanderHei all went on their first deer hunt Monday. And, according to Allen, they ALL bagged a large mammal from the Cervidae family.

In plain English, all three of these first time rookie deer hunters managed to take time off from chasing unnamed sources, get dressed, get out of town, track their prey, shoot and kill a real live deer. These are clearly some awesome American Sportsmen!

This would also mean they are such studs that they tracked and finalized the kill on each of the three deer, field cleaned their prey and transported the large carcasses out of the wilds, back to their vehicles, loaded and secured the bodies and drove out of the hunting fields. And they were all back safe and sound at home in time to get a night’s sleep and be in a studio at the crack of dawn to do Morning Joe! Astounding!

All it took was a few hours apparently. These guys must be damn good, because when I was younger, I used to deer hunt with three older men that were knock down dead eye pros, we went for 3-4 days at a time to open the season, and never had the kind of success that beginners Allen, VanderHei and Harris did in seemingly just a few short hours. My coonskin hat is off to all three of them; this is a truly impressive feat.

I am kind of shocked they didn’t run into Dick Cheney, kind of sounds like his type of “hunting” expedition. But, as Allen’s face did not have buckshot oozing from it, I guess not they did not encounter Deadeye Dick. I tried emailing and phoning the three intrepid hunters for more details of their safari, but they failed to return contact.

Fortunately, in an Emptywheel exclusive, we were able to obtain video of the grand hunt!

In the guise of pitching her book on career and family yesterday, Mika Brzezinski had this to say:

Finding a job is hard enough, but have you ever considered the odds and the challenges of finding a good man?

Bad news, girls. The odds are definitely better on getting the right job than getting a good partner for life. Someone who will grow with you. Someone to develop memories with. Someone who was there in the beginning. Someone who will be there at the end.

Don’t push away that chance if you’re one of the lucky ones who find that partner. And remember, you can always change a job. I hear it’s much harder to switch out a husband.

Now maybe this will come as a surprise to someone born into fame and connections like Mika, but it’s not actually all that easy to find a job. As CNN pointed out the other day, statistically it’s actually harder to find a job right now than it is to get into Harvard (or Mika’s alma mater of Williams).

Since the beginning of the recession in December 2007, job openings declined from 4.4 million to 2.4 million and the number of officially unemployed persons grew from 7.5 million to 15.7 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If the 15.7 million officially unemployed workers were to apply for those 2.4 million jobs, the chance of any one of them finding a job are about 15 percent, or roughly the same odds as being accepted to the University of Pennsylvania.

[snip]

The exclusion of these so-called “discouraged” workers from statistics means that the official number of unemployed severely understates the weakness in the labor market. If you include these workers, the unemployment rate would rise to 13 percent, or 21.3 million.

If these workers were to apply for the 2.4 million jobs available, the odds of securing a job would be 11.2 percent, or roughly the same as getting into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[snip]

Adding part-time workers to the number of officially unemployed and the discouraged workers, as labor market expert Leo Hindery, Jr., has observed, results in a rise in the real unemployment rate to 19.2 percent, or 30.6 million people.

The odds of any one of these 30 million securing one of the 2.4 million full-time jobs available is 8 percent, the same as the admissions rate of the Ivy League gold standard, Harvard University.

Now, maybe Mika had an exceptionally difficult time finding her husband. After all, if it was harder finding him than finding a job, that means she must have had around a 7% chance of finding him.

Or perhaps someone with Mika’s connections just has no fucking clue how hard it is for average people to actually find a job. Perhaps Mika has just inadvertently revealed that she is a newsperson who doesn’t have the faintest clue what is happening out there in the real world, as millions of people struggle to find some way to make a living.

I’m guessing it’s the latter. Which sort of defeats the purpose of pitching your book–proving that you are completely unaware of and therefore incapable of providing advice on careers to real people.