“We the Parasites” Benefiting from HAMP

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You’ve probably already read DDay’s and Atrios’s pieces on what some Treasury officials admitted about HAMP the other day. But partly because I want to link to this really comprehensive account of the entire meeting and partly because I want to elaborate on a point made in it, I thought I’d join in.

Basically, at some blogger chats last week, some folks at Treasury judged that, in spite of the catastrophic failure of HAMP to achieve its stated purpose–to help homeowners stay in homes either bought during a bubble or refinanced at a time when lending standards had been all but eliminated–it was still a good thing because it gave the banksters some time to recover from their catastrophic investment in the shitpile.

On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those.

As these revelations about Treasury’s self-congratulation on HAMP have come out, I keep thinking of the word “parasite.” The folks we pay to keep our financial system running for the good of the citizens of the United States are unabashedly celebrating that they’ve made individual families’ lives more miserable because the banks–who while SCOTUS may treat them as people are not actually part of the “We the people” originally envisioned by the Constitution–will have time to recover from their own damn mistakes.

Our government is happy–not from the pain of the families, per se–but because a bunch of artificial entities that seem to have replaced “we the people” as those who will receive  “general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” from our government will be better off.

The guys in charge of our economy actually seem incapable of understanding who they work for–not to mention the additional problems their “qualified success” will cause. (What happens in a decade when large numbers of middle class kids can’t go to college because the government decided it was okay to subject their families to more misery during a foreclosure?)

Or, they don’t give a shit that this program asks homeowners to pay over and over for their mistakes, all to make sure the banksters never have to pay for their own.

Which is the other problem with this attitude. The alternative to HAMP, of course, is cram-down, in which the banksters have to cut the principle owed to them to what was probably more realistic value in the first place. Every time cram-down gets dismissed, the person dismissing it as an option mobilizes the language of morality, the need to make homeowners pay for buying more home than they could afford (assuming, always, they haven’t been laid off because the banksters ruined the economy or run into medical debt). But there seems to be no language of morality to describe the price banksters should have to pay by failing to do any real due diligence on loans or for accepting transparently bogus assessments of value. Heck, even the banksters get the equivalent of cram-down without a big morality play.

Treasury’s attitude about HAMP is not just evidence they’ve lost all track of who they work for and where the benefits of the economy are supposed to be delivered, but it also suggests that these Treasury folks have lost the most basic notion of capitalism, that if businessmen never pay for bad decisions, they’ll continue to make bad decisions.

And meanwhile, a whole bunch of “we the people” will be worse off because of the really twisted sense of purpose held by the folks working for “we the people.”

How a Previously Qualified Elizabeth Warren became Unqualified, According to a Previously Progressive Chris Dodd

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July 27: Chris Dodd says of Elizabeth Warren, “She’s qualified, no question about that”

August 9: Katrina vanden Heuvel tweets that several sources have told her Elizabeth Warren would be nominated “next week”

August 12: Warren meets with Financial Services Roundtable President Steve Bartlett and then meets with David Axelrod at the White House to discuss the CFPB position

August 13: Robert Gibbs acknowledges that Warren had been meeting about the CFPB position, but says no announcement would be made in the next week

August 17: Chris Dodd raises questions about whether Warren can manage anything to suggest she may not be confirmable even while he admits she has “a great campaign”

“My simple question about Elizabeth is: Is she confirmable?” Dodd said during a visit Tuesday with The Courant’s Editorial Board. “It isn’t just a question of being a consumer advocate. I want to see that she can manage something, too.”

But when pressed about where he stands, Dodd said: “If the president wants to name her and it goes through the hearing process, then fine, he’ll have my support. But she has to tell me more than just she’s a good consumer advocate or that’s she’s got a great campaign.”

I guess the only question this chronology leaves is whether or not Dodd is acting at the behest of his future employers, the banks, the White House, or both.

We Can’t Restore Our Country If We Underpay the Folks Restoring Our Buildings

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The lowest paid full time employees at the White House–Christopher Liegel and Elizabeth Jackson–make $37,826 and $37,983 respectively (they’re both “Records Management Analysts”). They presumably also get those great benefits federal employees make.

After those two, the lowest paid people in the White House (specifically, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds) are a bunch of craftsmen restoring the stonework in EEOB. If they work full time this year, they’ll make $39,270 for skilled work. And they get no healthcare benefits. All in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

That’s because the General Services Administration working for a Democratic President hired a non-union contractor to do the second phase of this project. The union workers who did the first phase of this project–under George Bush–made something closer to $60,000 a year, plus benefits (the median salary at the White House is $66,000 a year).

Now, I realize I might get branded as a member of the Professional Left for complaining about this.

But shouldn’t the guys working in the White House get paid in the same range as the staffers working in the White House? Shouldn’t a President fighting to make sure all Americans have health care ensure those working just outside his own window–working on the offices of his Vice President and others–have health care?

We will not get out of this recession until wages stop falling. And one way to ensure that happens is to make sure skilled craftsmen get paid a viable wage. Apparently, we have to start that fight right on White House grounds.

A Tale of Two Airline Heroes

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You’ve heard about Steven Slater.

He’s the Jet Blue flight attendant who got fed up, bitched out a nasty passenger over the flight intercom, grabbed two beers, then escaped via the emergency slide (the YouTube is the Taiwanese animation dedicated to his meltdown).

And he’s become the latest hero to those who are fed up with their lack of dignity on the job — or the equally large number of people who are fed up with the lack of dignity when flying.

I don’t blame people for empathizing with Slater (though I do confess to having gotten into a cursefest with a flight attendant who tried to check my bag — one of the first on the plane — because her own was taking up an entire overhead bin).

But I do find it telling given last year’s airline hero: Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who saved 155 passengers by successfully landing a US Airways jet in the Hudson river (note, BorowitzReport is the first person I saw make this comparison). I made the point then that the success of the landing and evacuation likely had something to do with the fact that the all-union crew and (with the exception of the Coast Guard) first responders had had years of safety training largely won through organizing.

This year’s airline hero, by contrast, works for an airline that has avoided unions.

Mind you, I’m not crazy enough to believe that flight attendants on any of America’s crappy unionized airlines have much more dignity at work, particularly in the face of crabby passengers. And the indignity of flying is pretty much universal in this country.

But it will be interesting to see what happens with Slater (who has not yet been fired from his job).

And more generally, it is a telling statement about where we are headed as a country when last year’s dramatic plane landing has been replaced by the deployment of the emergency chute by one disgruntled employee.

Mistaking a Nomination for an Appointment

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Katrina vanden Heuvel set off the twitters with this:

WH (& others) indicate Elizabeth Warren 2 be nominated next week to head Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Kudos 2 all who worked 4 her.

While I agree with vanden Heuvel that those who have worked thus far to make sure Warren gets the position deserve kudos, they don’t, IMO, deserve a celebration, yet.

After all, given what happened with Dawn Johnsen, a rumored nomination is a long shot from getting the position. Especially in the wake of Obama’s recess appointment of Donald Berwick to run Medicare, ostensibly because the health care reform bill presented some urgency that necessitated a recess appointment.

How is fixing our financial system less of an emergency? How, given the number of people still underwater on their mortgages, is this not critically urgent?

And anyone celebrating anything less than Warren in the position is accepting less than the Administration can give, on its own.

According to the bill’s language, the Treasury Secretary has sole authority to build the new agency before it’s ultimately transferred to the Federal Reserve. That includes anointing a person to head the effort on his behalf, and under his authority. The interim head would serve until the President’s nominee is confirmed by the Senate.

That person could be Elizabeth Warren.

And the legislation doesn’t appear to contain a deadline for a Presidential nomination, experts say, which means Warren could start the agency from scratch, put her people in, begin cracking down on predatory and abusive lenders, and initiate a culture that would put consumers’ interests above those of the nation’s most powerful financial institutions.

In short, she could set a tone the agency will follow for the next several years without the administration needing to fight a potentially drawn-out confirmation battle that could stall Obama’s pro-consumer agenda.

Sure, Liz Warren’s appointment might excite a bunch of people in the middle class heading into mid-terms, even as it pisses off the much less numerous bankster class. Even assuming giving the middle class something to be happy about is a bad thing politically, why would incumbency be one?

The Administration can put Liz Warren on the job, today, to deal with the emergency of the ongoing abuse of real people by the banksters. Or, the Administration can decide doing that is not all that important, and it has the time to wait for the do-nothing Senate to take action.

But I would submit that rumors of a nomination are no cause for celebration when we know nothing is preventing the Administration from putting Warren in the position, today. Because anything short of an outright appointment–particularly given the rumors that suggest the WH agrees Warren is the best person for the job–is simply dismissing the urgency of the ongoing financial crisis for the middle class.

Leaving Las Vegas

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I’m at the airport well in advance of my flight to leave Netroots Nation, and thought it overdue to check in, since I’ve been so quiet all week.

This year’s Netroots Nation–the fifth (I’ve attended all of them)–felt utterly familiar, like a family reunion only without any of the fights about politics. FDL had a good contingent (as has probably been obvious): given that we do so much work together remotely, it was great to spend time with Rayne, Gregg, Michael Whitney, David Dayen, Lisa Derrick, and Jon Walker. And I enjoyed spending good time with Rosalind, Bob Schacht, and Garrett.

Just as important seeing the increasingly few people trying to return our country to the rule of law. In addition to the great people on my panel: Jerry Nadler, Vince Warren, Matthew Alexander, and Adam Serwer, people like Daphne Eviatar and Jason Leopold were there (and I’ve not spent much time with either before), as well as more folks from ACLU and CCR. Jeremy Scahill would have been at my panel–except that his conflicted with mine (though we did get to spend some time together).

And then there were all the discussions about where we go from here. There was a bunch of discussion about several things: how we put the teacher funding back into the war supplemental–we have no business firing teachers to pay for war (yeah, then there’s the big question of whether we have any business at war in Afghanistan). There were lots of discussions about the economy generally. And there was near unanimity (well, maybe downright unanimity) that we need to make sure that Elizabeth Warren gets the Consumer Financial Protection Agency position.

In fact, one of the highlights of the trip this year was meeting some of the best women in politics. I got to meet Warren, who is every bit as much a rock star in person as she is on teevee. I spent some time with Linda Chavez-Thompson, talking about what she will do when she wins her election to be Lieutenant Governor of Texas. And, as you’ll see on Monday once I’ve transcribed everything and written it up, I had the opportunity to talk to Nancy Pelosi (and Jan Schakowsky) about intelligence reform. It’s pretty damned humbling–and inspiring–to get to spend time with such a collection of women heroes.

There’s a lot more I’ll hopefully write up over the next few days. But for the moment, I head back home once again remembering that this bloggy politics thing is all about community.

America’s Dilemma: Teachers or Food

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Remember that important NYT story from early this year describing the growing number of Americans whose sole income consists of food stamps?

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.

Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.

Well, months after that report came out, some genius in the Obama Administration, according to a very shrill David Obey, proposed offsetting funds to keep teachers in the schools by cutting food stamps. Said genius wanted to cut these people’s only safety net so Arne Duncan could go on privatizing our schools.

The secretary of Education is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted .… So, when we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal.

So as far as I’m concerned, the secretary of Education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He’s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.”

We gave [Duncan] $4.3 billion in the stimulus package, no questions asked. He could spend it any way he wants. … I trusted the secretary, so I gave him a hell of a lot more money than I should have.

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the Secretary of Education.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change. [emphasis original]

As a reminder, here’s David Dayen’s summary of the squabble between Obey and Duncan.

One of [the amendments in the war spending resolution] included this social spending money, comprised of:

$10 billion for an Education Jobs Fund, $4.95 billion for Pell Grants, $701 million for border security, $180 million for innovative technology energy loans, $163 million for schools on military installations, $142 million in additional Gulf Coast oil spill funding, $50 million in emergency food assistance, and $16.5 million to build a new soldier processing center at Fort Hood.

You can read the full summary from David Obey of the Appropriations Committee here. There were some underlying provisions from the Senate war supplemental that appropriated funds to disaster relief, victims of Agent Orange, mine safety, the oil spill, and other areas.

This money in this amendment is entirely paid for through rescissions in various programs, and actually reduces the deficit by $439 million. But in order to pay for the education jobs fund and save 140,000 teachers, House appropriators dipped into $500 million of the Race to the Top fund. Arne Duncan has been sitting on $4 billion dollars in stimulus money for over a year so he can bribe states into changing their education policies. In the meantime, state budgets are in absolute crisis and hundreds of thousands of teachers could lose their jobs. Read more →

We Are All South America Now

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At the point in the World Cup when five South American teams had made it to the knockout round and European teams like Italy and England performed badly, I wondered whether this year’s Cup would be a kind of revenge on the IMF. All these South American countries that had spent much of the 80s and 90s struggling with onerous debt crises were winning. Teams from Europe, which is now being subjected to similar austerity measures, were losing or failing to qualify (and for a while, PIIGS countries like Ireland, Greece, and especially Italy were having particularly bad years). I thought the Cup might end up marking a symbolic shift of dignity away from Europe at a time when Europe is being treated as South America once was.

All that was before Spain won everything and Brazil and Argentina underperformed, of course. So now the lesson I take from the Cup is that in this day and age, when the Dutch go to South African and try to prevail through raw brutality, they fail.

While my first World Cup lesson was wrong, it does go to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how average people in rich countries are being abused, through some old but also some new tactics, to the same treatment much of the developing world suffered from in earlier decades. The elite would suck the money out of the economy into their protected bank accounts, and then leave average people paying the debt.

I’ll surely have more to say about what I mean. But with that in mind, read this post from Yves Smith and the Martin Wolf book review it links to. Wolf notes:

We already know that the earthquake of the past few years has damaged western economies, while leaving those of emerging countries, particularly Asia, standing. It has also destroyed western prestige. The west has dominated the world economically and intellectually for at least two centuries. That epoch is over (see charts). Hitherto, the rulers of emerging countries disliked the west’s pretensions, but respected its competence. This is true no longer. Never again will the west have the sole word. The rise of the Group of 20 leading economies reflects new realities of power and authority.

Yet this is far from the only change in the global landscape. The crisis has revealed deep faults within western economies and the global economy as a whole. We may be unable to avoid further earthquakes.

In his book, Prof Rajan points to domestic political stresses within the US. Related stresses are emerging in western Europe. I think of it as the end of “the deal”. What was that deal? It was the post-second-world-war settlement: in the US, the deal centred on full employment and high individual consumption. In Europe, it centred on state-provided welfare.

In the US, soaring inequality and stagnant real incomes have long threatened this deal. Thus, Prof Rajan notes that “of every dollar of real income growth that was generated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 per cent of households”. This is surely stunning.

“The political response to rising inequality … was to expand lending to households, especially low-income ones.” This led to the financial breakdown.

Much of Yves’ response to this focuses on how a shift in policy emphasis away from full employment and a disempowerment of unions created the need to provide easy credit to ensure that people kept spending and therefore created the demand that makes the economic system hum.

So the new program was to reduce workers’ bargaining power, both by combating unions, and by tolerating un and underemployment. Rising worker wages had been seen as crucial to greater prosperity; it was quietly abandoned as a policy goal. But this has profound implications. As rising income inequality demonstrates, the benefits of growth accrued substantially to those at the very top. But absent a few wastrels, people with that level of income are not going to spend as much of their income on consumption as those less well off. Thus (in very crude terms) Keynes’ problem of the paradox of thrift, that the understandable desire of households to save can result in insufficient demand, becomes even more acute when it it pretty much only the rich who are getting richer.

If workers’ wages don’t start growing, there won’t be the demand for a full recovery. Yet the response has been to cut the safety net promised so long ago–to continue to take from the poor.

And in related news? The average American can’t afford to buy the average American car.

Obama Comes to MI to Celebrate Korean Technology

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Let me start by saying I’m thrilled the Obama Administration has focused stimulus and energy efficiency funds to support a number of new battery plants in and around Michigan. For all my complaints about the Obama Administration, it has used the auto bailout as an opportunity to support new technology for the auto industry. But I think Obama’s upcoming visit to Holland, MI (Crazy Pete’s hometown in West Michigan) to attend the ground-breaking of a new LG Chem-Compact Power battery factory offers a bittersweet lesson.

South Korea-based LG Chem is building the $300-million, 650,000-square-foot battery plant in Holland that is set to start operating in 2012. LG Chem and its Troy-based subsidiary Compact Power are behind the battery system to power the Chevrolet Volt, the nation’s first mass-market extended range plug-in electric vehicle, which will launch later this year.

LG Chem has received $151.4 million in grants from the Department of Energy for its Holland plant.

The factory, which will be able to make 15 million to 20 million battery cells a year, is one of at least five battery plants built in Michigan. Johnson Controls, through its joint venture with French battery company Saft, also is converting one of its existing factories in Holland into a lithium-ion battery plant.

No details were immediately released about the timing of the event and whether it will be open to the public.

The government has distributed more than $2 billion in grant money to advanced battery manufacturing to create a base for high-tech battery making in the United States.

Today, most of the world’s advanced batteries come from Korea, Japan and China.

Last month, the groundbreaking of Dow Kokam’s advanced battery plant in Midland attracted Vice President Joe Biden.

The preliminary coverage of the event has noted how unusual it is for a President to attend the groundbreaking for what is effectively a foreign firm. (h/t Leen) Yet no one–at least as far as I’ve seen–has faulted the White House decision to attend. That’s because, here in MI, we’re desperate for the jobs. And even those outside of MI point to battery technology as one of the many technologies in which the US lags–at its great cost.

There’s even a big benefit to the auto industry: in my meetings with GM on the Volt, they told me they’ll save $200 per car in battery shipping costs once they can source locally. It’s one of the places GM anticipates beginning, over time, to bring production costs down so the Volt and related follow-on cars will one day be profitable.

But the opening of these battery factories in the US should be read in tandem with this excellent article from Intel founder Andy Grove.

Grove’s article focuses on our inability to scale new technologies.

Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late — unless you are counting Asia, where American technology companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Mythical Moment

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Grove uses advanced battery technology as one example to show the problem with shipping all US manufacturing overseas because it no longer invests in scaling up new technologies. When we shipped our electronics production overseas, we shipped with it the evolving technology tied to it, which eventually included the all-important battery technology. Read more →

Bob Corker Kills the Catfood Commission

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The catfood commission (aka Obama’s deficit commission) is dead.

Well, it must be, right?

After all, that great figure of Beltway-corporatism-posing-as-moderation, Bob Corker, has decreed that we shall pass no legislation during a post election lame duck session.

Corker called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), the Democratic leaders in their respective chambers, to make a similar pledge.

“I think for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to say the same thing — that they’re not going to try to use the lame-duck session as a place to do things that otherwise would not pass,” he said. “That type of thinking, that concern about … cap-and-trade and other types of policies just feeds into this whole unpredictability issue, the issue of what’s going to happen in Washington. We need to move away from that uncertainty.”

And that’s precisely when the Obama Administration plans to implement the catfood commission’s cuts on social security.

White House officials are working closely with the president’s new fiscal commission in the hope that the bipartisan commissions final report will provide Republican cover for the deal. The commission, due to report by December 1, needs fourteen out of its eighteen members to make an official recommendation. One hope of the deficit hawks is that a super-majority report could steamroll a lame duck session of Congress to act quickly, pending a more Republican Congress in January.

If someone like Corker won’t play along with the plan to cut social security, then it’s unlikely to get the mix of Republicans and deficit hawk Democrats they’ll need to pass the Commission recommendations.

So long as Corker keeps his word, then, about opposition to moving big legislation during the lame duck session, then social security should be safe.