D-Day has a truly amazing piece of work up, highlighting 21 Republican Senators who voted in favor of TARP and bailing out Wall Street, collected $31 million dollars in cash from the banksters in 2010, and then voted against financial reform.
Bought and paid for.
General Stuck
Front Row Stuck – eat shit mofo’s
Comrade Luke
Check out the McCain career earnings number on that list.
Wow.
The other thing that stands out to me is that Demcrats are a fucking cheap date.
John Bird
trollhattan
I love how the Republicans have turned the public’s head into thinking TARP was all Obama’s doing. You know, when he was in office before the election.
OT, but California Republicans have to be seen to be believed. Here’s one hoisting Godwin’s Law up the ol’ flagpole, whilst invoking water boarding and the poor set-upon Koch brothers. Why? Commie environmentalists have been attacking farmers again!
http://devinnunes.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html
Talk about bought and paid for.
cyntax
Another salient point from that piece is that making it such a painless bailout was a very bad idea. Here’s an interview with Raghuram Rajan (one of the people who correctly predicted a number of years ago the problems we’re having now):
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Luke: Typo? It is wicked out of line with everyone else’s numbers.
General Stuck
These stories were once bugs, but no longer. Common winger corporate whoring that is now blessed as a constitutional virtue by the wingnut SCOTUS via Citizens United. I seriously doubt we pull out of it without going through a dystopian phase of at least semi anarchy.
Imagine that, an autonomous south with thermonuclear devices.
Moses2317
These clowns have never been for fiscal responsibility. Keep in mind that these same Republicans filibustered aid for small businesses and to prevent the layoff of teachers, firefighters, and police officers but are now aggressively fighting to increase the national debt by $1.3 trillion in order to give an average of $103,000 per year in tax relief to millionaires and to eliminate the estate tax on the top 0.3% of estates.
For Republicans, fiscal responsibility applies only when the middle class, working class, and poor are involved. When it comes to their billionaire sugar daddies, Republicans don’t care about fiscal responsibility.
Winning Progressive
Comrade Javamanphil
Logic and facts only confuse the teabaggers. We keep thinking the truth will set us free from this madness when all it does is cause them to dig their heels in further. I wish dday’s piece mattered as much as Halperin’s latest “who’s up and who’s down” nonsense but it never will.
Who’s got the scotch?
Ash Can
Jane Hamsher might be an attention whore, but if her “All About Me” TV punditry tour of the last few days has directed more eyes to FDL to see this, it’s a consolation. The public at large — and the constituencies of these assholes in particular — need to get it through their heads just what these pricks are doing.
Mark S.
That isn’t really fair. They were taking the principled conservative position of opposing anything our Muslim president is in favor of. They are disciples of Burke and Oakeshott.
El Cid
Remember, they’re not against proper financial regulation, they’re just against Obama’s attempt to impose Stalinist anti-capitalist Kenyonesian repression against Our Nation’s producer class.
These Republicans would have been perfectly happy to vote for financial reform legislation if only Obama had resigned and appointed a Republican President. Obama’s intransigence lost him their support.
General Stuck
@Ash Can: She is right about one thing. Democrats are in fact destroying the democratic party. Maybe Jane figures she will emerge from the rubble of a crumbled America as the new Queen of Chaos and begins lopping off the heads of rivals for fun.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@General Stuck:
That’s ok Stuck, I prefer the rear seats on the bus. I like throwing shit at the people up front and when they turn around to see who threw it I just smile.
Banksters own our congress and I would really like to see a law passed where they have to wear racing-style suits that proudly display the logos of their corporate sponsors on it.
They should be proud of their corporate sponsorships!
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: Plus, they weren’t consulted in a bipartisan fashion before it was rammed, rammed, I say, down their throats.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: If Republicans had entirely written the bill, they still wouldn’t have voted for something if Obama was going to be the one signing it.
General Stuck
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I will duck of course and leave the bus driver at your mercy. Guess who that is?
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: Well, obviously that is part of the ramming.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: A huge, massive package rammed down their throat by this dark-skinned foreign barbarian man.
Suck It Up!
Watch out John, PO Gate is baaaaccckkkk!!!
Comrade Luke
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe, but I assumed that if you followed the money it would lead directly to the S&L bailout…
ETA: Doesn’t look like a typo: http://www.ourfuture.org/files/images/careerwallstreetcash.jpg
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: One thinks that they might have some unresolved issues regarding sexuality and race, n’est-ce pas?
Ash Can
@General Stuck: She’s right about a lot of things. That’s why she makes me crazy when she goes off on her anti-Obama and other tangents. Like I say, though, if her notoriety draws more eyes to the good stuff at FDL, then it’s a little less crazy-making.
Comrade Luke
@Ash Can:
I think dday was the best addition they ever made to FDL.
Ash Can
@Odie Hugh Manatee: How awesome would that be? Maybe that’s the perfect solution to the Citizens United ruling.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Luke: Could be. I followed the links within the links and the $34 million stayed consistent. If there was a typo, it was in the source documents.
ETA: Great minds.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@General Stuck:
There’s a driver? I thought it was on autopilot.
Ya lern sumptin’ knew ebery daye!
Mark S.
@Comrade Luke:
I think they are counting money McCain got when he was running for president.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Ash Can:
I think that the only way to shame them is to make them wear the logos of those corporations that they have sold themselves out to. I’ve seen someone once photoshop a congresscritter into a NASCAR-type racing suit with corporate logos. It would be cool if someone with mad photoshop skillz would put together custom suits with appropriate logos for each congresscritter and then let the radicals on teh intert00bs copy and paste them into press conferences and tv appearances. Get that shit out there on the internet and let people stare, point and ridicule. If this was done regularly you can bet it would start to bite the pols in the ass.
Get shit like that out in front of the public and they will pay attention if only for the uncomfortable squirming the congresscritters will do when anyone points to one of the pics and asks them what they think about it. If they won’t wear their corporate logos on their own then lets help them out!
:)
You Don't Say
Oh, boy, I bet Jane Hamsher is all over this.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: Unresolved issues or inability to keep from injecting their own fantasies into ordinary rhetoric.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: PotAYto, potAHto.
Comrade Luke
@Mark S.: Oohhh…great catch. I bet that’s it.
jonas
I’m sure now that it has come to light that a lot of the Republican Senators are bought-and-paid-for bitches of the financial industry that benefited from the TARP, the Tea Partiers are sure to turn on them.
Right?
*Crickets*
General Stuck
@You Don’t Say:
Doesn’t bother me either way how it happened. And the theory of a WH sellout, is belied by the fact that Harry Reid put the PO in the senate version of HCR and Joe Lieberman said no way jose. If there was some behind the scenes agreement by the WH, then Reid didn’t get the memo, and you would have to believe Holy Joe was in cahoots with the WH running cover. I don’t buy it, but it is possible and maybe even likely, that Obama agreed to not go all out for a PO, if the HC industry would not go all out to kill reform altogether. But this particular bill was too big a deal to expect Obama to control congresses actions very much. A lot of people for a long time had been fighting for it, and a few on the dem side fighting against it. The ones with close ties to the industry and the GOP like Nelson et al. So Obama couldn’t really make any deal with the industry that he could control, short of promising a veto if a PO came out of the sausage grinder. Does anyone believe that?
Martin
@General Stuck: Obama had many of the insurers on board to reform early on, but the PO was a big concern for them, and one that was likely to get them to drop their support depending on how it was crafted. I can state that definitively.
The worry by the insurers, which is actually playing out now to taxpayer benefit in Medicare Advantage, is that once the government got the power to negotiate better rates, they’d be vastly stronger than the insurers at getting costs in line leaving the insurers highly uncompetitive in the marketplace. Basically, the PO had the potential to put them all out of business. Would that have happened? Probably not, but it probably would have put a number of them out of business.
Here’s an example: CMS, who negotiates Medicare rates, has considerably more power now than it did a year ago and it’s taking the big stick to the Medicare Advantage insurers and forcing them under the new mandated medical loss ratio. How hard are they squeezing them? Pretty hard, but not as hard as they could. A big issue is what counts as medical loss? ‘Administration’ is a hazy term. If your insurer sends you information on how to keep your blood pressure low, is that administration spending or medical spending? (It’s considered administration spending.) If we want to change that to medical spending, every insurer will slap that information on the back of every bill and statement they send you and declare all of it medical spending. That’s where the battles are.
If the federal government wants to run these guys fully out of business, it probably could do it with a public option – and that’s particularly true of the for-profits, and that not only threatens part of the insurance industry, but also gets the attention of every corporation that has employees spread across the country. Where does FedEx get their insurance once the for profits are run out? They need to cobble together plans across different states. It’s a legitimate worry for them.
Now, I personally think that’s a grand idea when it comes to hospitalization coverage, but I’m less enamored with doing it for health coverage. If there was going to be a public option, it was going to have to be weak to get the insurers in any way on board (and you have to get them onboard). I think people miss who the villains are here. To consumers, the villains are the insurers, no question, but the villains to the Federal Government are the care providers, not the insurers. The insurers are their allies in that fight. The fight to get costs down should be the feds and the insurers working together against Pharma, suppliers, hospitals, doctors groups, etc. That’s what they wanted at the outset, and the public option didn’t help advance that. Once costs were down, we could have a separate debate about whether the insurers were a problem or not, but from day one, the WH saw the insurers as the Soviet ally against the common enemy of the care provider axis. The PO was always there to keep everyone in line, so no, it wasn’t taken off the table, but that was supposed to be for the 2nd fight. Winning the public option but having to gut Medicaid and Medicare because the trust fund is broke is a shitty bargain, but it’s the bargain the left insisted on. It was a stupid strategy.
Just Some Fuckhead
@You Don’t Say: It’s the only sane explanation for the way the situation played out. Obama deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off in the face of Democratic majorities in the house and senate and public support for a PO north of 60%. That is fucking brilliant. (Nothing I haven’t said before, BTW.)
cmorenc
HERE’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW:
An incumbent US Senator faces re-election every six years, which = 2190 days, not counting the one or two extra days for leap years during that time. So: For every million dollars ($1,000,000) that Senator will need to raise for their re-election campaign, they will have to raise an average of $456.62 every single day, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays included, during those six years. For every ten million dollars they need raise for their re-election campaign, that’s $4,566.20 they’ll need to raise each and every day during those six years.
HERE’S THE QUESTION:
How do any US Senators manage to avoid being “bought and paid for” by some of their steadiest, most generous campaign donors? Some are of course much, much worse than others, but the present system contains almost irresistible pressures toward corrupt judgment and voting behavior by US Senators.
trollhattan
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Agreed! Luckily, somebody’s already done the creative end. Now we just need to get them fitted.
http://www.enjoy-your-style.com/idiocracy.html
General Stuck
@Martin: Obama threaded the needle through the multi headed monster arrayed against him. Even if he had just gotten a ban on banning pre existing conditions from coverage, it would have been a major victory against the potent forces not wanting any change. And of course, we got much more than just people no longer being denied insurance because they are, or were sick.
Nick
@General Stuck:
Liberals looking for a sellout will believe whatever they want to believe anyway.
But I don’t see how this is different from what everyone was already saying. If the public option had the votes in Congress to begin with, there wouldn’t need to be compromises because what the industry wanted wouldn’t have mattered.
This goes back to whether or not you think he has any influence over Congress and I’ve long said (and am backed up by recent proof) that he doesn’t, so whatever his position on the public option, doesn’t make a lick of difference.
Nick
@General Stuck:
I still think we should’ve just done that, and maybe a few other things. America just doesn’t do comprehensive.
dday
I appreciate the shout-out, John, but I will say that the real legwork on the TARPsters here was done by Zach Carter of CAF and Alternet, one of the best bloggers that doesn’t get enough attention. His link, in my piece:
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010093928/crony-capitalism-wall-streets-favorite-politicians
Oscar Leroy
Wow, that’s almost as hypocritical as a Democratic president working to cut Social Security.
Steve
@Nick: If you’re telling people you really really want a public option, and you’ve already made a deal to give it away, it’s not a defense to say “we couldn’t have gotten it anyway.”
Dennis SGMM
@dday:
According to the totals at the piece that you linked, the amount that Wall Street has spent fighting financial reform this year ($251 million) works out to around a dollar apiece for each life that their insane casino has negatively affected, or a fraction of the amount that Wall Street paid out in bonuses this year, or a rounding error in the amount paid to the top twenty-five hedge fund managers.
Not only are our politicians bought, they’re bought for what their purchasers regard as chump change.
Omnes Omnibus
@Oscar Leroy: Not to start all this again, but it ain’t happening.
burnspbesq
In other news, the sun rose in the east today.
C’mon, y’all, the Republican Party has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce since the 1880s.
The last piece of meaningful economic regulation enacted when there was a Republican in the White House was the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Prez at that time? Benjamin Harrison.
burnspbesq
@cmorenc:
Point taken. And it’s always going to be easier to raise that money in increments of $100K than in increments of $20. That’s why left aggregators like ActBlue have the potential to be transformative.
Karmakin
Obama was “against” single payer (he’s said that if he were to design a system from scratch it would be single payer) because of how economically disruptive it would be. I’d imagine that there’s the possibility of the public option being similarly disruptive as well.
I think that in that case, not outright attacking the stakeholder’s was probably the right thing to do. The problem is that Obama has done that for everything now, which isn’t always the right thing to do.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@trollhattan:
Idiocracy almost makes up for the heaping piles of excrement that is called King of the Hill.
Almost.
Dennis SGMM
Ooops, used the word fi-nan-ci-al in my comment and now it’s awaiting moderation.
FYWP
Nick
@Steve:
I’m sure he would’ve been damn happy if Congress gave him a public option.
Congress was the one who gave it away. Or did we forget the President didn’t write the bill, something he was criticized for. If Congress wanted to give him a public option, that’s great, but he could neither get them to pass it, nor get them not to, so he didn’t make it a sticking point.
Elizabelle
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
re photoshopping disclosure re congressional sponsors:
Like this idea. I hope someone does this, soon.
And if it’s lots and lots of money, one could make the congresscritter bigger.
Jolly Orange Boehner Giant striding about.
Tiny Ike Skelton there too.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Elizabelle:
I think it would be an excellent way to rip on the pols who vacuum up the cash from the corporations. I picture one of those Capitol Hill photographs where they are all out on the steps. Photoshopping the whole gang there into their uniforms with corporate sponsorship logos on them would make for an epic picture. I bet that if enough people modded the pols photo ops that it would soon follow that the pols would start to get pissed off seeing these pics being distributed online. With those assholes, their appearance is everything to them.
Take that away from them and they will wilt on the vine. What I am proposing would do just that. I know that they would get very sick and tired of seeing themselves being correctly depicted in their ‘racing uniforms’, proudly displaying their corporate sponsorships.