Last week, Matt Stoller wrote an excellent review of Stress Test, Tim Geithner’s new book, The Con-Artist Wing of the Democratic Party. That headline is not an exaggeration; that’s truly what he thinks of Geithner. Basically, he’s making an argument that should be very familiar to my readers: about 25 years ago, the plutocrats took over the Democratic Party. They aren’t interested in social policy; they just want to take money away from the poor and give it to the rich. And Stoller sees Geithner as critical to this process, “It struck me that I was reading the memoirs of an incredibly savvy and well-bred grifter, the kind that the American WASP establishment of financiers, foundation officials, and spies produces in such rich abundance.”

Go read the whole article because it is very informative, not just about Geithner but about the whole New Democratic movement. Also of much interest is Dean Baker’s review of the book, Stress Test: The Indictment of Timothy Geithner.Baker plays a critical role in keeping me sane, because he is the most clear-eyed observer of the political economy and he reminds me that I’m not just a crank; I have very good reasons for seeing the world the way I do.

There was something in Stoller’s review that really struck me: Geithner’s life story. He was born into the power elite. And then, without really trying, he finds that his career leads him to the very top of the power structure. After talking about how he wasn’t a good student, he writes the following that is simply jaw dropping:

Geithner doesn’t seem to think it is at all strange. Imagine a smart but lazy poor black kid who made it into college. Would he have gotten through school with such an attitude about his studies? And assuming he did graduate, would he just get a great job working for a really important company? This is beyond white privilege, which is bad enough; this is rich privilege. But Geithner is so used to getting everything handed to him that he doesn’t notice it.

So it isn’t surprising that he has what is basically an aristocratic worldview what dictates that Geithner’s social class has to be protected at all costs, but middle class families can just lose their houses and their lives because they are the “little people” who don’t matter anyway. I was shocked to learn that Geithner isn’t a lawyer and doesn’t have a PhD in economics or a comparable field. No, he was just pushed up the ladder of success because he was the “right” kind of person.

And the power elite were right to promote him. Because when the chips were down, Geithner did just what was best for the power elite without a thought to what was best for the nation or the world. He is one of the great villains of the last few decades. And now he will be rewarded for it. There is no doubt that Geithner will die a billionaire.

If this is meritocracy, then I think people ought to stop talking about it like it is a good thing.

Derek Willis over at The Upshot had a little fun at Congress’ expense, Do-Nothing Congress? These Members Did Something (Annual Reports). Since Congress doesn’t really pass any legislation and since earmarks are gone, it’s hard for our representatives in Congress to show that they’ve actually been working. So some of them are producing yearly reports.

Actually, I’m not against this at all. Reports are useful. For example, most Californians don’t know that our Senator Boxer is the chair of the Environment and Public Works committee. So it’s good to let the people know what these people are doing. But in a great example of professional level snark, Willis wrote, “Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, was among the members of Congress who wrote an annual report to detail his activities. At 357 pages, it included all his tweets from 2013.”

Of course, that’s not all that Mike Lee has been up to. After all, since 2009, he’s only tweeted out 2,763 such delights as this:

What does he fill up all those pages with? Well, for one thing: letters. Not ones he wrote, of course. Ha! That would be too time consuming. Ones he signed. (That can be exhausting depending upon the weight of the pen.) For example, he signed, “Letter to President Obama on the Russian Adoption Ban” (May 31, 2013). And that was just him—and 153 others. But still.

There are also a number of press releases. For example, would you believe that Mike Lee introduced a Balanced Budget Amendment? Who would have thought? Probably the reason you didn’t hear about is because it didn’t go anywhere because its purpose was the same as most of what Mike Lee does: publicize Mike Lee and what a great guy he is. Everyone loves the idea of a balanced budget. The fact that it is a terrible idea is why we haven’t enacted one.

Lee also has a lot of “reactions.” Like on 26 Jun 2013, he was “disappointed” that the Supreme Court didn’t understand that fags getting married was gonna ruin it for all the good God fearing straight couples around. He also sponsored measures like S 1616 that was, “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.” That’s as far as it got, but you know: that’s about as far as Mike Lee ever gets. Did I mention he hates fags?

After about a hundred pages of that, we get to the sexy stuff: Constituent Outreach. That’s where we learn in one nifty info graphic that Mike Lee provided 81,089 written responses. If you’ve ever asked for a response from a representative, you know that these are written by computers. His “mobile office” visited 29 counties. He sent 5,850 letters to Boy Scouts, which I don’t think has anything to do with the Boy Scout pedophilia scandals. He had 629 meetings with constituents. I wonder: does that include lobbyists? Because if it does, that’s probably 621 lobbyist meetings and 8 meetings with actual voters. But I’m cynical.

A total of 311,544 “mail” was received. What does that mean? I don’t know. It must be mostly email messages. And I doubt it matters. But what does matter—and it matters a lot—is that Lee has distributed 1,150 servings of Jell-O. I have no idea what that’s about, but it creeps me out. I don’t think I will ever again be able to eat that delicious dessert.

And on it goes. It includes letters from constituents who tell Mike Lee that he is doing a hell of a job. And there is one letter from a young child who seems to be about in the third grade. The letter is about how this child would really like Lee to do something about Obamacare. Why? “I am against paying for some else’s insurance.” And you thought the Jell-O was creepy! Even better: Mike Lee’s office does not block the name or address of this poor child who I’m sure is not responsible for the letter. It is rather too specific. What 8-year-old says, “Have a good one!”?

There is also an infographic on media outreach where we learn that his website gets 41,392 average visits per month. That shocked me! That’s about half of the number of people who visit Frankly Curious, which is (you know) a tiny blog. But there were 18 occasions on which editors were so desperate that they allowed Mike Lee to write an editorial. And then it ends with his twitter feed.

There is no conclusion—nothing to wrap up the important work that Mike Lee did last year. Which I think is the proper conclusion. Because having gone through the whole report—page by page—it doesn’t seem like he did much. There is a lot of repetition. For example, press releases at the beginning are shown pretty much unaltered at the end under “media outreach.” After 357 pages, I think Mike Lee is a slacker.

On this day in 1930, the great singer-songwriter Monique Andree Serf, better known as simply “Barbara,” was born. She was a French Jew who had to hide out during the Nazi occupation of the country, and overall had a pretty bad childhood. She later became a cabaret singer. But it was not until she started writing her own longs that her career really took off. According to Stephen Evans at the BBC, her song “Goettingen” was more important in reconciling Germany and France after World War II than Charles de Gaulle’s 1962 speech in Ludwigsburg. I’m not that fond of the song—it’s kind of theoretical with lines like, “Mais les enfants ce sont les memes, a Paris ou a Goettingen” (“But children are the same, in Paris or in Goettingen”).

Barbara was at her best when she was being extremely personal—and that was most of the time. No one can make me cry as easily as she can. It isn’t just the writing. Her cool delivery makes it all seem so factual—like she’s saying, “I’m just telling you what happened.” There is also the sense that she is on the verge of losing it too.

But as is typical of a chanteuse, her songs told complicated, even deep, stories. A great example of this is her song “Nantes,” about coming to see her estranged father before he dies and arriving too late. This is not a great recording, but it is the only one I could find with English subtitles (although they aren’t very good subtitles). Prepare to be affected:

Happy birthday Barbara!

Jonathan Chait has published a nice little pick-me-up for discouraged Democrats, Obama Promised to Do 4 Big Things As President. Now He’s Done Them All. The four big things are: economic recovery, healthcare reform, climate change, and education reform. Barring the courts interfering with the new power plant regulations, he has done major things on all of these.

Chait rightly points out that one can complain that he didn’t do enough (if you’re on the left) or he did the wrong things (if you’re crazy). But you can’t deny that he has accomplished a lot. The “hapless mediocrity” meme on the right ought to be dead. And I’ll go further than Chait in one way, I think that Obama did all this despite more resistance than any president has ever faced. So yeah, Dodd-Frank is a really weak law and not even close to what we need. But given the Congress that he had, we should be impressed with what we did get.

There’s one thing that I disagree with Chait about, “What’s no longer possible is to imagine that historians will look back at Obama’s presidency and conclude not much got done.” He’s basing that statement on the fact that Obama did what he said he was going to do. But that isn’t how presidents are judged. To be honest, the way historians judge presidents are no less fickle than the way the people judge them. The only difference is that historians have a longer list of presidents to judge.

And how do the people judge presidents? On one thing: how the economy was when they left office. And in that regard, I think that Obama will do okay. But he won’t be remembered like Reagan and Clinton are remembered. They are both remembered well because the economy had been struggling when they came into office and it took off midway through their presidencies. The fact that neither president really deserves any credit for this—that it was was just dumb luck—doesn’t really matter. If the economy continues to improve, Obama will be remembered for that. Otherwise, I don’t think it much matters.

Think about Richard Nixon. I know he’s a special case, but the man did start the EPA. Do normal people even know that? Is he given much credit for it? I know that Obamacare is a big deal, but the way the law was created, it was designed to not seem like a law at all. More people will get Medicaid. Most won’t know whether they would have qualified before or not. The exchanges and the subsidies will just become part of what everyone does and no one will think about it. Healthcare inflation has been reduced? Hooray! That means once Republicans get back into power, they will have more money to waste on tax cuts for the rich and their beloved crony capitalism.

In the end, Obama will be judged on the economy. And there really were things that he could have done to make things a lot better. But to do that, he needed a willing partner in Congress. He didn’t have that, even when Congress was controlled by the Democrats. And I’m not sure Obama himself understood the economic situation correctly. So if the economy continues to improve, history will say he was a pretty good president—maybe even a damned good president. But just like with Reagan and Clinton before him, it won’t actually say anything about him.

Normally, I do not go in for pure advocacy, but this really struck me. Even after Attorney General Eric Holder said that no reporters would go to jail for not revealing a source, it looks very much like The New York Times reporter James Risen is set to go to jail for not revealing a source. This is yet another one of those cases where the government is using the Espionage Act of 1917 against pretty much everyone. In this case, it is ex-CIA agent Jeffrey Alexander Sterling. The information that he revealed to Risen was so important that no one seems to know what it was. Was Sterling a pissed off ex-employee? Sure. Was he also a whistleblower? Based upon the content of State of War, he definitely was.

Of course, we live in the country where you go to jail simply because you piss off the wrong people. The government doesn’t need Risen to testify in order to throw Sterling in jail. It is just an act of government intimidation of the media. (Given how accommodating the media are to the government, I don’t see the need.) This is exactly the kind of thing that used to make me so angry about the Bush administration. It’s even worse with our current president. We all thought his being a constitutional law professor would make him uphold the Constitution more. But it’s turned out that he just uses his knowledge to get around it.

Anyway, Roots Action has a petition that I really think you ought to sign, We Support James Risen Because We Support a Free Press. I’ve signed it and I rarely sign petitions. So please, go over there. This is kind of important. Hopeless, I suppose; but important.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. — Frederick Douglass

Keep those words in mind. Always. It doesn’t matter how friendly or noble power seems. Power is like the will. Before Obama became president, he seemed like someone who was against the overreach of presidential power. Hell, he still seems that way. Yet his administration has been one of the most abusive of any—just ask John Kiriakou. But that’s old news, I suppose.

Friday, I saw a very interesting article over at Talking Points Memo, Ex-Brooklyn DA Accused of Funneling a Whole Lot of Money to Political Consultant. According to the article, Charles J Hynes used “money seized from drug dealers and other criminal defendants to pay a political consultant in his failed re-election campaign last year.” I just love this because it gets to the very heart of what is wrong with our society. According to the power elite from the 1980s onward, non-sanctioned drug use was so terrible that due process didn’t matter. If the police thought someone was a drug dealer but they couldn’t prove it, they just took his possessions and then it was up to him to prove that he wasn’t a drug dealer.

Notice that the Tea Party and other conservative apologists get up in arms about a 4.9 percentage point increase in the top marginal tax rate. That is tyranny! That is theft! But when it happens to relatively poor people, well, they just don’t care. And the fact that all it has managed to do with all this totally unconstitutional theft is make drugs more available to users, doesn’t really matter. Because it isn’t about protecting the poor drug addict; it is about taking money from the poor and potential interlopers and giving it to the rich and powerful.

In the case of Hynes, he used the money to try (unsuccessfully it turned out) to stay in power. But this was hardly the first time that Hynes had abused his power. There were a number of high profile cases. A good example was his prosecution of John O’Hara for voting in the wrong district—a form of voter fraud. He was prosecuted because O’Hara ran against one of Hynes’ political allies. There are lots of wrongful murder prosecutions too of course. And there is much else, because in addition to simply being a terrible person, Hynes was a District Attorney: the most powerful position in our legal system. And repeat after me, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

But the use of raw government theft from the powerless—something that pretty much everyone in the power elite thinks is just fine—to illegally try to stay in power is almost too much. But it gets better. The money, taken from poor people, was used by Hynes and given to “widely respected jurist” Barry Kamins. Kamins and Hynes discussed how to attack Hynes’ Democratic primary opponent Kenneth P Thompson. But that’s not all. They also discussed pending cases, which I suspect is totally common, but technically wrong, and morally outrageous.

Kamins’ lawyer’s justification was this, “Joe Hynes and Judge Kamins have been good friends for 40 years and have talked politics for much of that time.” He said other things, but that’s the meat of it. And the fact that he (and probably most people in the power elite) think that is fine is a big part of the problem. I don’t want cops being friends with prosecutors; I don’t want prosecutors being friends with judges. For all of those people, the whole legal system is just a game that they get paid to play. But for the people who get arrested and prosecuted and imprisoned, it is something much bigger.

Jabbar Collins spent 15 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit because of misconduct by Hynes’ office. After being freed, Collins sued various prosecutors:

Which does get to the very core of the issue in the abuses of the power elite. They get promoted and they make money by abusing the powerless. But when they get caught, nothing happens to them. Collins may win his lawsuit, but it won’t be the people who colluded against him who will pay the price. So it makes perfect sense that Hynes and Kamins thought they were above the law—because they pretty much are above the law. And in the end of this, they will get some minor punishment. But it won’t destroy their lives—not like it did the lives of so many poor people who they prosecuted and punished.

Afterword

I cropped that image of Hynes above so that you could see that American flag lapel pin. I just love that. So patriotic! Like most of the power elite, he loves America! It’s just its ideals and people he’s not so hot on.

On this day in 1872, the great Flemish Symbolist painter Jan Frans De Boever was born. I don’t know much about him, even though he was very popular in his own time. He is probably best know for illustrating French Symbolist writer Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). Both men were quite interested in the intersection of sex and death. Pretty much all of his work seems like the action is taking place in hell.

You can find a lot of his work online, mostly I think, because there are a lot of goth websites and his work goes along with that. But it’s surprising how little actual information there is about his work. As with my experience with Bernard Frouchtben, the art world is fickle. We know far too much about certain artists and not nearly enough about others. The Wikipedia page of De Boever makes three main points about him: he was arrogant, he became popular in the United States were I think he moved, and his work went out of favor toward the end of his life. That’s not a lot to say about a very productive artist who lived almost 78 years. Compare that master’s thesis Wikipedia provides on Vincent van Gogh.

Some of De Boever’s work shows a real sense of humor, although he was generally interest in the symbolism of his work—he was very interested in literature. I mostly just like the look of his work that is very distinctive. Here is Les Danaides. Danaides were from Greek mythology, “The daughters of Danaus, who at their father’s command murdered their bridegrooms on their wedding night and were condemned in Hades to pour water eternally into a leaky vessel:”

Happy birthday Jan Frans De Boever!