Boehner Should Never Have Appointed Issa Chair Of House Oversight... Now He Should Remove Him

Darrell Issa is the wealthiest and most personally corrupt member of the House of Representatives. So of course Boehner gave him the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee... no irony there, huh? Starting as a gutter-level car thief, Issa has clawed his way into great personal wealth, which he has used to further corrupt an already corrupt right-wing political Establishment bent on protecting the status quo for the wealthy at the expense of society itself. Issa has consistently used his position as chairman of House Oversight to further enrich himself and his supporters. As that Sacramento Bee put it yesterday:

Issa continues to run his expansive business empire while also serving as a member of Congress. Other congressmen with similar wealth have put their holdings into blind trusts to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Issa has not. That raises obvious questions of conflict. It's impossible to know when Issa's official actions are intended to benefit the American people, his constituents or his own narrow self-interest.



...Issa has frequently participated in government actions that directly benefit his far-flung business interests, the Times reports. For example, he helped arrange a federal earmark for $800,000 worth of roadwork near a medical plaza he owns north of San Diego that enhanced traffic flow and the property's value.



Issa strongly objected to the government's role in encouraging Bank of America to purchase Merrill Lynch during the 2008 financial crisis without disclosing that he had been immersed in business deals with Merrill Lynch involving hundreds of millions of dollars. At a 2008 House hearing into a proposed merger of two satellite radio companies, Issa praised the proposal without mentioning that an electronics firm he owns was involved in a lucrative deal with one of the companies.

Yesterday at Think Progress, Lee Fang asked a crucially important question, at least in terms of good governance: "Has Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) turned the House Oversight Committee into a bank lobbying firm with the power to subpoena and pressure government regulators?" Blunt? Dead on, is what it is. Fang's exclusive report went on to point out that "a Goldman Sachs vice president changed his name, then quietly went to work for Issa to coordinate his effort to thwart regulations that affect Goldman Sachs’ bottom line." Did Issa know before today?

In July, Issa sent a letter to top government regulators demanding that they back off and provide more justification for new margin requirements for financial firms dealing in derivatives. A standard practice on Capitol Hill is to end a letter to a government agency with contact information for the congressional staffer responsible for working on the issue for the committee. In most cases, the contact staffer is the one who actually writes such letters. With this in mind, it is important to note that the Issa letter ended with contact information for Peter Haller, a staffer hired this year to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee.



Issa’s demand to regulators is exactly what banks have been wishing for. Indeed, Goldman Sachs has spent millions this year trying to slow down the implementation of the new rules. In the letter, Issa explicitly mentions that the new derivative regulations might hurt brokers “such as Goldman Sachs.”



Haller, as he is now known, went by the name Peter Simonyi until three years ago. Simonyi adopted his mother’s maiden name Haller in 2008 just as he was leaving Goldman Sachs as a vice president of the bank’s commodity compliance group. In a few short years, Haller went from being in charge of dealing with regulators for Goldman Sachs to working for Congress in a position where he made official demands from regulators overseeing his old firm.



It’s not the first time Haller has worked the revolving door to help out Goldman Sachs. According to a report by the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, Haller-- then known as Peter Simonyi-- left the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2005 to work for Goldman Sachs, then quickly began lobbying his colleagues at the SEC on behalf of his new firm. At one point, Haller was compelled to issue a letter to the SEC claiming he did not violate ethics rules. A brief timeline of Haller’s work history underscores the ethical issues raised with Issa’s latest letter to bank regulators:

– After completing his law degree in 2000, Haller was employed by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as an economist, and later with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Office of Enforcement.



– In April of 2005, Haller resigned from the SEC to take a job with Goldman Sachs. He soon began lobbying the SEC on behalf of Goldman Sachs.



– On September 2, 2009, Haller left Goldman Sachs to take a job with the law/lobbying firm Brickfield Burchette Ritts & Stone.



– In January of 2011, Haller was hired to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee. Under the supervision of Haller, Issa sent a letter dated July 22, 2011 to bank regulators (including the heads of the Federal Reserve, FDIC, FCA, CFTC, FHFA, and Office of Comptroller) demanding documents to justify new Dodd-Frank mandated rules on margin requirements for banks dealing in the multi-trillion dollar OTC derivatives market, like Goldman Sachs.

When he took over the chairmanship of the Oversight Committee this year, Issa dramatically shifted the committee’s focus away from its traditional role of investigating major corporate scandals. Instead, Issa has used the committee to merge the responsibilities of Congress with the interests of K Street and Issa’s own fortune.



In June of this year, ThinkProgress broke the story about Issa’s own complicated relationship with Goldman Sachs. We revealed that Issa purchased a large amount of Goldman Sachs high yield bonds at the same time as he used the Oversight Committee to attack an investigation into allegations that Goldman Sachs had systematically defrauded investors leading up to the financial crisis. This conflict of interests, along with our exclusive story about Issa’s earmarks benefitting his own real estate empire, received coverage in a recent piece by the New York Times.



We also broke a story last month revealing other revolving door conflicts within Issa’s staff. Peter Warren, Issa’s new policy director, maintains some type of financial contract with a student loan lobbying group he led last year, and received a bonus from the lobbying group before leaving to work for Issa. Since joining Issa’s staff, Warren and his colleagues have fought to weaken the recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency charged with overseeing student loans.



The new revelations about Peter Haller, however, raise even more significant ethical concerns than Peter Warren and other ex-lobbyists working for Issa. Why did Issa hire a high-level Goldman Sachs executive to work on stopping regulations on banks like Goldman Sachs? Haller’s direct involvement in the July letter brings Issa’s ability to lead the Oversight Committee-- charged with conducting investigations on behalf of the public interest-- into serious doubt.

Raise your hand if you're looking forward to a choice between one of the GOP presidential dwarves and President Obama

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering a "fireside chat," around the time of the January 1944 State of the Union address, in which he enumerated "a second Bill of Rights," consisting of "economic truths" he said "have become accepted as self-evident" -- though not by most present-day "Democrats"

"On March 28, 2011, President Obama was given a "transparency award" from five 'open government' organizations: OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org. Ironically -- and quite likely in response to growing public criticism regarding the Obama Administration's lack of transparency -- heads of the five organizations gave their award to Obama in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House."

-- opening of a WarIsACrime.org post,
"Rescind Obama's 'Transparency Award' Now!"

by Ken

As you may have noticed, our coverage yesterday of the New Hamphshire Republican presidential debate came by way of China, and let me tell you, I was plenty grateful to Howie -- not to mention relieved -- for tackling it from the other side of the globe. As I wrote him after the fact, I really did feel that we ought to say something about this, er, event, but the chances of me watching, or even reading, what this rogues' gallery has to say are the proverbial slim to none.

Here they are again: your NH GOP presidential field.

Here I was thinking the 2008 Republican presidential field had hit rock bottom. I mean, really, could you imagine a lamer collection of losers fancying themselves presidential timber? Well, now you don't have to imagine it. I give you the 2012 Republican presidential field, in which anyone caught saying anything sane, or anything that can be twisted into anything that might resemble something that could be said by someone not entirely insane, is subject to immediate ejection, except by personal dispensation obtained via prostrating yourself before Rush Limbaugh and claiming you really didn't say it, or mean it, and in any case will never say or mean it again.

So we have a "front runner" about whom the only thing that can be said for certain is that he will never say what he actually believes on any subject, but only what he judges to be most acceptable to a mob of screeching ignoramuses and lunatics. I suppose there's some entertainment value in spectating what Sahil Kapur in The New Republic calls "The Campaign Within the Conservative Movement to Take Him Down." But there's not much entertainment value, when both sides are this repellent.

However, I can understand the sentiment of a colleague who reacted to this quote, "If the guy at the top of the ticket goes against the free market, goes against what we believe in, then we’re not really motivated by just getting a Republican in office,” by saying that he actually admires the attitude, that "this is how you move the conversation in your direction," something we on our side of the political spectrum are all kinds of terrible at doing.

And with the Democrats seemingly ever more hopelessly ensorceled the chimera of "centrism" (a more benign-sounding name for corporate conservatism) -- weren't we already confident, months before the 2010 electoral debacle, that the Village principals would "learn" wildly wrong lessons from it? -- that brings us back to the other half of the 2012 presidential equation, reminding us that however used we become to describing each successive election-cycle choice we're offered as the worst ever, we still manage to be surprised when the next one is even worse.

Far be it from me to suggest that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans, or that the difference isn't important enough to matter. Look how well that thinking worked in the case of the Republican recapture of the House of Representatives. But that doesn't mean I have to like it when Democrats offer a merely less crackpotty and rhetorically less savage rendering of what is in so many areas essentially the same policies. And case in point is this business of President Obama and "transparency." It does seem true that transparency is something he likes to talk about. Practicing it, however, is something else.

My goodness, is it really possible that nobody involved in the bestowal of this award at the end of March noticed the disconnect represented by bestowing it in secret? It's understandable that the administration wouldn't want to encourage media busybodies to go rooting around its actual record on transparency, but how did those five organizations that bestowed the award let themselves get snookered into doing it under cover of darkness?

It's a symbol of the administration's cynicism or ineptitude (take your pick) on transparency that they've actually gifted a low-life thug like House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa with an issue, deficient governmental Freedom of Information Act response, to bludgeon them with. It should go without saying that this would never happen if it was a Republican administration thumbing its nose at FOIA response (c.f. "Bush regime, eight years of"), in the same way that Republican voices would never be heard moaning about a Republican president taking on war powers unimagined ore even specifically barred by the Constitution. Still, the fact is that the Obama adminstration, either by misadventure or conviction, has found itself in the role of transparency opponent.

Here is just the start of the bill of particulars "drafted by FBI Whistleblowers Sibel Edmonds and Coleen Rowley," as part of an appeal to the five award-bestowing organizations, urging them to take the award back, an appeal that's already been signed onto by two dozen individual whistleblowers and more than two dozen organizations. (You'll find links as well as the rest of the list onsite.)

• President Obama has not decreased but has dramatically increased governmental secrecy! According to a new report to the president by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) -- the federal agency that provides oversight of the government's security classification system -- the cost of classification for 2010 has reached over $10.17 billion. That's a 15 percent jump from the previous year, and the first time ever that secrecy costs have surpassed $10 billion. Last month, ISOO reported that the number of original classification decisions generated by the Obama administration in 2010 was 224,734 -- a 22.6 percent jump from the previous year. See "The Price of Secrecy, Obama Edition".
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• There were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies -- 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

• Obama has invoked baseless and unconstitutional executive secrecy to quash legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor. The list of this President's invocations of the "state secrets privilege" has already resulted in shutting down lawsuits involving the National Security Agency's illegal wiretapping -- Jewel vs. NSA and Shubert vs. Obama; extraordinary rendition and assassination -- Anwar al-Aulaqi; and illegal torture -- Binyam Mohamed.

• Ignoring his campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers, Obama’s presidency has amassed the worst record in US history for persecuting, prosecuting, and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama's behavior has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises which included live streaming meetings online and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama’s Department of Justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks -- more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.

• The Obama DOJ's prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake who, up till June 9, faced 35 years in prison for having blown the whistle on the NSA's costly and unlawful warrantless monitoring of American citizens typifies the abusive practices made possible through expansive secrecy agreements and threats of prosecution.

• President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama's, military subordinates.

• Obama is the only president who has reenacted Fahrenheit 451 by actually having his agency collect and burn a book due to a never-justified classification excuse: Lt. Col Tony Shaffer’s Operation Dark Heart.

And the list goes on, to cover FBI harassment of antiwar activists; instituting a a secret assassination program; codifying by executive order the government program of secret kidnapping, imprisonment, rendition, and torture; going after reporters to reveal sources; protecting the secrecy of White House visitors' logs; aggressively pressuring foreign governments to refrain from investigating possible U.S. government crimes in matters of international law (consistent, it should be added, with its own refusal to do so).

We're all well aware by now that the hard-core "centrists" to whom the president almost always listens (and why not? they're his people), even beyond their generally visceral hatred of everyone to their left, believe there's a substantial net electoral plus from not just ignoring but actually spitting on us, that there are more votes to be gained from the phantom "middle" than lost from us crazy radicals. In reality, their only electoral hope is that the Republicans make themselves so egregious to voters that they'll give their votes to Democrats as a slightly-less-odious alternative.

And just as we've seen in numerous elections since 2010, starting with the Virginia gubernatorial disaster, voters who believe in core Democratic values will be left sitting on their hands on Election Day. Maybe President Obama doesn't care, since he stands a good chance of being reelected anyway. But I sure don't see much hope of preventing the all but inevitable Republican take over of the Senate, or of making the House Republican majority any less intractable. (Maybe the president doesn't care about that either, since the compromises he'll be "forced" to accept --as with the crippling of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- seem to be compromises he's eager to make anyway. And with that implacably hostile Congress, how can he be expected to accomplish any of the things Democratic voters assume, wishfully, he really wants to?)

WHAT DO I MEAN BY "CORE DEMOCRATIC VALUES"?

I would encourage you to take a list at the 1944 State of the Union address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which Howie, again from China, appended to my post yesterday on the Congressional Progressive Caucus's summer 2011 12-city Speakout for Good Jobs Now "listening tour," which kicks off Saturday in Minneapolis. In that speech, you'll recall, the president enunciated some points that are part of "a second Bill of Rights," economic rights, which he insisted had already "become accepted as self-evident." I know this post is running long, but I think it's important to look again at the rights he insisted were included:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

"All of these rights," the president continued, "spell security."

And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.

For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Can you imagine how the Republican scum in Congress would react if a president dared to give such a State of the Union speech today? More important, can you imagine how most of the Democrats in Congress would react?

Howie refers a lot in his DWT posts to the betrayal by today's Democrats of "core Democratic values," and I suspect some readers sometimes wonder what values he's talking about, or whether they're really "core" values. Well, here they are.

On that day in January 1944, with World War II still raging, and with a whole reelection battle still to be waged (successfully, of course), I don't know whether President Roosevelt knew how close he was to the end -- just 15 months, almost to the day. But on that day he left a powerful testament. It's a shame so few Democrats choose to accept, let alone honor, that legacy.

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Driving Up Unemployment Is Bad For America But Good For The Republican Party

A GOP face of increased unemployment & economic ruin

James Carville took his incoherent, gloomy messaging to Don Imus' radio show and was probably mindful that it is simulcast on Fox, when he announced that Obama's reelection effort could be "very rough" if job growth remains anemic. You think? I guess he chose to ignore the White House line that the 54,000 jobs created in May was an anomaly and that the thing to emphasize was the 2,000,000 jobs created this year. "If 54,000 new jobs is the new standard, it's going to be a very, very rough 2012 for President Obama," brayed Carville. "I can't tell you what's going to happen, but if this last jobs number is an indication of future jobs numbers, it's going to be very, very rough."

Actually 83,000 jobs were created; the net job creation number was so much less because Republicans in control of state governments are firing public employees as fast as the private sector can create new jobs. And by the private sector, primarily small businesses. Big business is sitting on billions of dollars in cash, distributing some to shareholders and huge amounts to upper-level management but not creating any jobs at all. And governors like Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, Paul LePage, Chris Christie, John Kasich, etc are lay-off machines... all doing their bit to drive up the unemployment figures drastically.

The U.S. economy is adding jobs, if slowly, but state and local governments cut 30,000 jobs in May, the seventh straight month they've shed workers. Rather than adding to U.S. economic growth, this time they're subtracting from it.

And people are feeling it-- from reduced services to fewer teachers, police officers and firefighters. Few see the pain subsiding soon.

Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities, expects state and local governments to slash 20,000 to 30,000 jobs a month through mid-2012.

Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors notes that when states cut spending, a ripple effect multiplies the damage: Companies that do business with states and localities suffer. These companies, in turn, scale back their hiring.

"There's a whole slew of private companies that have to cut back when they don't get the [government] contracts they had been getting," Naroff said. "You can't balance a budget and say everything's going to be beautiful."

Moody's Analytics estimates that each job in state and local government supports an additional 1.3 jobs elsewhere.

The Republican hostage takers threatening to tank the economy entirely and send the U.S. into a Depression by refusing the raise the debt ceiling, have added two new demands. One doesn't sound like a completely terrible idea: a bi-annual rather than an annual budget, which limits the power of corrupt congressional appropriations chiefs like Hal Rogers and Jerry Lewis (a good thing). And now they're demanding that the federal government lay off another 10% of its workforce, a demand guaranteed to push the country into a depression. This one is being led by 3 right-wing extremists, Darrell Issa (R-CA), Dennis Ross (R-FL) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) with their bill, HR 2114.

And what happens if Democrats don't give in to the hostage-takers and the Republicans actually go ahead-- as many of the most extreme of them have already vowed to do-- and refuse to raise the debt ceiling? Nina Hachigian at the Center for America Progress laid it out in a pretty straight forward way. "American power and world economic stability," she states flatly, "are at stake."

[I]t is not wise to toy with a significant source of American power. America enjoys the unique privilege of having its currency act as the world's reserve. Every political circus act on the debt gives ammunition to those (often from emerging powers like China and Brazil) who are calling for the world to become less reliant on the dollar, and eventually to replace it with another reserve currency. While there is, at present, no attractive alternative, and some economists think a switch to another currency would be a net positive for the U.S. as it would force us to live within our means, such a move would take away advantages Americans have long grown accustomed to, and the transition would likely be very, very painful. And, more immediately, some analysts predict that a failure to increase the debt ceiling could send the U.S. back into a recession.

Oh yeah, that too. Could it really happen? Wall Street golden boy Paul Ryan may be a little tarnished but right-wing Beltway pundits still consider him "serious" and even "courageous." Many Republican Members of Congress no longer trust him-- he helped Boehner trick them into voting for Bush's TARP bailouts and he made all of them walk the plank on his insane kill-Medicare-budget. But now he says he's "serious" about not raising the debt ceiling unless the Republicans get exactly the untenable budget cuts they are demanding, though he earlier admitted that a government default was "unworkable." Time for the GOP to stop posturing and start treating the deby ceiling with the gravity it demands.