Don’t know if you have credit cards with major TARP-rescued banks. I certainly do, and this week I received a notice from one of them telling me that they were summarily changing the terms of my credit agreement. In essence, they said they were raising the interest rate on my card to 23%. Yes, that’s right – 23% on a balance well below my credit limit, on a card I’ve had for at least a decade without missing a payment. You don’t seem surprised. Perhaps they’ve done the same to you… and, in fact, they are doing the same to everyone, as far as I know. It seems CitiGroup, the recipient of $45 billion in publicly funded bailout dollars, has settled on a business model that empties the pockets of American taxpayers a second time. Charging 23% and more on credit in an economic environment such as this, when people are losing their jobs, their homes, their shoes, for chrissake… and when institutions like Citi are drawing money from the Federal Reserve lending window at 0% to 0.25% interest. So… I guess when they’re earning less than 20% on your ass, you’re considered a non-performing asset.

Okay, so that’s one screw job. Not surprising that they would attempt to get all of their rate hikes in place before the consumer protection law goes into effect. Law of the jungle, right? Still… our government has a bit of leverage over these guys. Last I looked, we were the equivalent of major shareholders. And last I looked, CitiGroup’s executives were still making a pretty penny (top execs getting an average of $18.2 million – not bad). If this isn’t a case when pressure should be brought to bear, I don’t know what is. And lest this seems as though I’m just complaining about my own situation, I should say that this is not killing me – it’s people whose mortgages are underwater, whose kids are in college, whose jobs are on the chopping block… I mean, those folks really worry me. And if they’ve got a Citi card that’s shooting up to 23 or 29% and a JPMorgan Chase card that’s rifling 5% minimum payments out of them, they’ve got a problem.

Of course, it goes beyond that. The banking sector is making life impossible for people’s employers, as well. It’s making it hard to get credit for capital expansion. It’s tightening up on educational loans, scrutinizing the financial profile of colleges and universities to a more stringent degree than even the Department of Education uses. It’s lobbying hard against its own regulation, particularly the proposed Consumer Protection agency. So it seems like we need to severely limit these people’s ambitions, instead of acting as though everything is still the way it was three or four years ago when nothing could ever go wrong, ever. Meanwhile, there seems to be no limit on the amount of money we can borrow to burn pointlessly (and, in fact, profoundly counterproductively) in Iraq and Afghanistan, year after year. It almost seems as though Obama is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall with respect to the latter war. I wonder when he’ll see it with respect to these rapacious financial institutions.

I suggest we all communicate with our Congressional reps about this, with a cc to the various committee leaders (and one to the President, as well).

luv u,

jp

Well, I don’t know if any of you were following it, but my neighboring Congressional District – New York’s 23rd – just experienced a national political dogfight reminiscent of the one we were treated to three years ago. In some ways, it was worse, actually. You may know the story. Long time Republican Congressman John McHugh was tapped by Obama to be Army Secretary, opening up a special election to replace him. Instead of being in essence a regional race for a national office, this became a clusterfuck grudge match between two wings of the Republican Party – the moderate-conservative and the lunatic-conservative. And the actual fighting took place not so much between office holders in the G.O.P., but among retirees, resignees, also-rans, and professional bloviators like Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, George Pataki, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Army, and so on. The G.O.P.’s-nominated candidate was apparently not conservative enough to please these… these…. objects, so they inserted themselves into a district of which they have no knowledge, to which have no connection, and in whose welfare they have no interest, just to score a point for their brand of reactionary politics. They supported the Conservative party nominee, pumped money into the race, and packed the airwaves with their endorsement messages and attack ads. And, well… they lost.

It’s kind of comforting, actually, that a plurality of residents in the 23rd district was able to resist this kind of manipulation. This was pretty remarkably cynical, even for the modern Republican party. I mean, Fred Thompson – Mr. “wake me up when I’m president” himself – endorsing the Conservative Doug Hoffman by saying “he’s like us”. Like “us”? What, an ex-Senator? A Hollywood star? A somnambulant presidential wanna-be? Are there a lot of those in the Adirondacks? Before long, these fuckers were falling over each other to show who had the more genuine hard-right, tea-bagger bona fides. Even once-though “moderates” like Tim Pawlenty and George Pataki weighed in on the right, with Gingrich taking the Republican nominee’s side. Strangely cartoon-like… these people were so over the top that Gingrich was “Mr. Reasonable” for a time. Not a pretty sight.

I won’t join in with the chorus of voices speculating about the broader political implications of this race. I can only say that I sympathize with my northern neighbors of both parties. Three years ago, we were bombarded by vicious political advertising as the G.O.P. and, to a lesser extent, the Democrats poured millions into influencing the outcome of the race for a then-open seat.  (We even got a visit by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, endorsing the Republican. Not sure it helped much.) It’s the kind of thing that makes campaign finance reform seem a more urgent matter than either party is willing to admit. In that kind of atmosphere, it takes real effort to discern the actual political positions of the various candidates. Much of the advertising is intended to discourage people from voting, rather than changing their minds. I am a registered Democrat and received stacks of direct mail from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, all of them flailing away at now-Congressman Michael Arcuri, the Democrat, accusing him of pretty much everything short of the Kennedy Assassination. None of it stood up to the most cursory review, but who has time to do research, right? Again… very cynical.

I’m expecting very much the same next year, when Arcuri is up for re-election. My guess is that this will be considered a relatively easy seat for the G.O.P. to pick up. Something to look forward to, eh?

luv u,

jp     

A lot of explosions are taking place in the imperial hinterlands these days. No matter how optimistic you might be, it’s a little hard to convince oneself that things are moving in anything like a positive direction. Of course, we live in an era when people point to Iraq as if it were some kind of success story. The truth is, that country is simply blowing up a bit more slowly than it was a couple of years ago.  I suppose you could say that the success of counterinsurgency strategy was to help bring a full-scale fratricidal war down to 2003-04 levels of killing. That is a bit like an arsonist taking credit for helping to put out a house fire he himself started – one that resulted in multiple fatalities. (Note to our “leaders”: Don’t expect a good citizenship award any time soon… aside from the Nobel prize.) I must admit, I find the “the surge worked” crowd more than a little nauseating – most of them were in favor of this disastrous war in the first place. If Iraq is to be presented as a model for future interventions, I can see why the Iranians might want to be building bombs. We’ve, in essence, destroyed Iraq, killed perhaps a million people, permanently displaced several million more. Anyone want the same out there? Anyone?

My guess is that this is what runs through the minds of sane people in Pakistan pretty much every time they see American military hardware flying overhead. Or every time they hear our Secretary of State providing cover for our southwest Asia strategy. I have to think that their minds turn to those other fortunate nations we have “helped” over the decades. Afghanistan, of course, is the closest and most current example, its very borders a product of imperial hubris from a bygone era. Hostility among Pakistanis to the idea of American military involvement in their country must at least in part be motivated by a desire to have their homeland survive as a minimally functional state, as opposed to the kleptocratic basket-case to their west. They have seen where this type of relationship often leads, and they don’t want to go there.

So what are we attempting to accomplish in Afghanistan-Pakistan? Making our own nation safer? How, exactly? By brewing deep-seated hatred amongst millions of people on both sides of the Hindu Kush? (Old Joe “Wrong Way” Lieberman probably thinks it’s a good idea… and has he got a health plan for you!) Responding to media questions in Pakistan, Hillary Clinton referred to the war to “drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan” back in the 1980s and how we had, after that was over, turned away from that country and left it for the buzzards to fight over. (My words, not hers.) She might have mentioned that we had begun meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs prior to the Soviet invasion, and that that invasion was, in part, a response to the fanatical insurgency our intelligence agencies had helped to set in motion – you know, the one that later spawned the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and a few other organizations we’ve heard from more recently. International interventions of this kind have consequences, intended or not, that seldom redound to our benefit as a society (to say nothing of the peoples we subject to our policies).  

Hey, Barack-o…. One way you can make America safer is by not making the same mistake your predecessors made – i.e. relying on bombs, spies, paid assassins, etc. to force your will on the world. Not a good track record there.

luv u,

jp