Greece, Home of Democracy, Deprived of a Vote Armed by Papandreou with a referendum, the Greek people had clout. Now, they're powerless before the troika's austerity plan by Dean Baker / Common Dreams

Published on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Greece, Home of Democracy, Deprived of a Vote

Armed by Papandreou with a referendum, the Greek people had clout. Now, they're powerless before the troika's austerity plan

by Dean Baker

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou touched off a firestorm last week when he proposed putting the austerity package designed by the "troika" (the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Union) up for a popular vote. The idea that the Greek people might directly be able to decide their future terrified leaders across Europe and around the world. Financial markets panicked, sending stocks plummeting and bond yields soaring.Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou: while Greeks could have vetoed the bailout, they had some bargaining power. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images
However, by the end of the week, things were back under control. The leaders of France and Germany apparently laid down the law to Papandreou and he backed off plans for the referendum. While the government is in the process of collapsing in Greece, the world can now rest assured that the Greek people will not have an opportunity to vote on their future.
This is unfortunate, since it means that Greece's future will likely be decided by politicians who may not have the interests of the Greek people foremost in their minds. By their own projections, the austerity package designed by the troika promises a decade of austerity, with high unemployment, falling real wages and sharp reductions in public services and pensions. And their projections have consistently proven to be overly optimistic.
If given the opportunity, would the Greek people endorse this sort of austerity package? The answer obviously depends on the alternative.
The alternative route almost certainly means a disorderly debt default and a departure from the euro. That is not a pretty picture. If Greece follows the path of Argentina, the last country to make a similar break, then the economy is likely to undergo a free fall for a period of time. The duration of this free fall will depend on how long it takes the government to get a new currency in use and construct some provisional formula for converting euro-denominated contracts into the new currency.
In Argentina, this period was three months, with another three months of stagnation before the economy began a sustained boom. The process could be more difficult in Greece, both because it is tied in more extensively to the eurozone countries, and because Argentina at least had its own currency.
However, even in the case of Greece, such a break would not be impossible. There would be a desire to hold the new currency. The government just has to impose a new property tax, which is only payable in the new currency.
People will want to hold onto ocean-front property in the Greek islands or at the foot of the Acropolis, so there will be demand for the currency. Also, the prospect of a tourist boom, once prices in Greece fall by 50% relative to Italy, Spain and other popular destinations will go a long towards supporting the Greek economy.
If the Greek people can convince themselves that this would be a plausible alternative, then they could make a few demands on the troika. First, they could say that ten years of continuous austerity is not acceptable.
Yes, the Greeks had been reckless borrowers, but the European banks had also been reckless lenders. It is true that the Greek government had lied about its budget situation. But the word among finance types is that everyone knew they were lying and went along with the joke. Goldman Sachs even designed a nifty swap that allowed it to profit from the lies.
Instead of austerity, the Greek people might insist that the ECB focus on a growth agenda. This would mean that the ECB would have to ditch its obsession with a 2% inflation target and start acting like a real central bank. The ECB could start by guaranteeing the debt of Italy and Spain, both of which risk a rising interest rate/debt default death spiral, if there is not a credible guarantee behind their debt.
It might also start pushing more expansionary policies. It's always hard to admit when you are wrong, but the ECB-IMF policy of growth through austerity is not working. Every month, we get more proof of this fact – with data showing that growth is lower than expected and unemployment is higher than expected. Is there any evidence that could get these people to change their minds before they destroy Europe's economies? Maybe, the Greek people could have forced the troika to actually look at the data.
There would have been other potential for fun in these negotiations. The Greek people, who have already been forced to accept a rise in their retirement age and lower pensions, may suggest the same for IMF economists. These hard-working types can often retire from their jobs in their early 50s. Instead of the meager Greek pensions of a few hundred euros a month that got the banker types so riled, the IMF crew can be pocketing close to $10,000 a month in their pensions. Perhaps IMF pensions would have come up for debate, if the Greek people actually had to be convinced that a bailout was in their own good.
But the chance to bring the Greek people into the discussion was quickly nixed. We are back to a conversation among the bankers and the politicians. There is not much room for democracy in this story, but we can still dream.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

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Keynes Trumps Hayek in Debate Felix Salmon / http://www.thedailybeast.com/

Keynes Trumps Hayek in Debate

Nov 9, 2011 4:45 AM EST

In the Asia Society debate, Keynes was a proxy for Obama’s economic policies and Hayek played the same role for GOP presidential candidates—with most of the audience siding with the Keynesians who think the government should do something about the economy.

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It’s been billed as the Fight of the Century: John Maynard Keynes vs. Friedrich Hayek. And on Tuesday night at the Asia Society it became a high-powered Thomson Reuters debate, moderated by Sir Harry Evans and featuring Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps on the side of the Hayekians.

Nicholas Wapshott, who introduced the debate, gives a good overview of what’s at stake in an article for Reuters. It’s particularly germane right now, with Keynes acting as a proxy for Obama’s economic policies and Hayek serving the same role for essentially all of the Republican candidates.

Boiled down, it comes to this: Keynesians see a dreadful economy and say that the government should do something about it. Specifically, the government should get the economy moving again by spending money now. Hayekians, on the other hand, mistrust the idea that the government is the solution to any problem, and suspect that more government spending only acts to make matters worse. It’s a stance that makes for compelling political rhetoric: pay less in taxes, and see the economy grow! Nothing not to like there.

But could the Hayekians withstand the scrutiny of a formal debate? They had a hard time of it tonight.

For one thing, the Keynesians had the advantage of history. Keynes is a giant of 20th-century economic thought, who was intimately involved in policy decisions at the highest level and whose works are revered to this day. Hayek, by contrast, has always been a more marginal figure, whose works are borderline unreadable even in the original German, and who had an unhelpful habit of contradicting himself on a semiregular basis. Some of Hayek’s ideas—a nugget here, a concept there—have proved surprisingly resilient over time. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to point to a big-picture philosophy of practical economics in Hayek’s oeuvre as a whole. And as Sylvia Nasar pointed out, when Hayek did make specific statements and predictions about the economies he lived in, he was very quickly proved wrong.

Friedrich Hayek (left )Lord John Maynard Keynes, AP Photos (2)

What would Keynes do, right here, right now? That’s easy to answer. Hayek? No one has a clue. He would avoid meddling in the economy, trying to pick sectors and pick winners—and yet Phelps, arguing for Hayek, said he’d like to see a National Innovation Bank. Not a bad idea—but not a way of winning this particular debate, either.

The problem with the Hayekian position is that it’s relentlessly negative: spending doesn’t work, stimulus doesn’t work, all we can do is suffer a nasty bout of deflation and trust in the invisible hand to eventually get us back to work again.

For the Hayekians, the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth was particularly revealing: she would take a question about rescuing the financial system and duck it by talking about how rescuing the auto industry was a bad idea. Or she would ridicule high-speed rail by saying that no one wants to take the train from New York to L.A.—a route that precisely no one is proposing. In other words, the Hayekians were more comfortable with straw men than with messy reality.

Furchtgott-Roth did stammeringly admit that she thinks AIG should have been allowed to go bust, which is exactly the kind of thing that gives Hayekians a bad name. No responsible president would ever have allowed AIG to collapse—it would have meant the end of the financial system as we know it, and a Great Depression to rival that of the 1930s.

And when economist Lawrence White was asked if the U.K. government was following a Hayekian course and whether he thought it would work, he simply ducked the question outright, saying he had no idea.

Meanwhile, the Keynesians were full of real-world examples, either from Keynes’s own history or from the more recent past. The financier Steve Rattner did a good job of defending the auto-industry bailout, saying it saved two million jobs and represented a classic case where the government could step in when the market fails. White responded by saying that GM wasn’t a market failure; it was “a market verdict.” Which is a great sound bite, but sound bites don’t save two million jobs.

Phelps, by far the most reality-based of the Hayekians, was happy to adopt Keynesianism in a crisis. He approved of most of the fiscal and monetary policy adopted by Presidents Bush and Obama in the face of the financial crisis, saying that they “served to remedy a deficiency of liquidity.” He just feels that such mechanisms have outlived their usefulness at this point—that they can help for a year or so after a crisis, and should then be abandoned. That’s an interesting and defensible point, but it seems to me a point for Keynes rather than for Hayek. As New Yorker writer John Cassidy noted, we’re all Keynesians in a crisis—including, it would seem, Ned Phelps.

Five Articles About Abramoff, Delay and Spitzer By Alex Pareene and Andrew O'Hehir / Salon

Tuesday, Nov 8, 2011 5:00 AM 23:36:26 PST

Jack Abramoff plays the earnest reformer

In his new book and in a "60 Minutes" interview, the felon and former super-lobbyist poses as a changed man

By Alex Pareene

Jack Abramoff (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Jack Abramoff, Lobbyists, Campaign Finance, Political Books, 60 Minutes

Jack Abramoff is back! He’s selling a book, naturally. (The movie was already made, limiting his cashing-in opportunities.) To celebrate, “60 Minutes” had him on to look sort of contrite while nostalgically reminiscing over his time as Washington’s top incredibly corrupt super-lobbyist.
Abramoff pleaded guilty to defrauding his lobbying clients through over-billing and double-dealing. He admitted to bribery and wire fraud. In his interview, Abramoff explained basically How He Did It, and it turns out that it’s really not that hard to “bribe” a member of Congress. Offer their staffers jobs and give the members lots of gifts and campaign donations. Then you can write whatever you want into pending legislation, more or less.

Why it works is pretty simple too. Members of Congress are mostly rich, but they spend a lot of time with people who are really rich, so they need a constant influx of free shit like concert tickets and vacations in order to “keep up” with the people they actually respect and care about. The staffers of members of Congress, though, are almost entirely not rich, at all, and they, too, spend a lot of their time around people with money (most of them went to school with people who went on to make a lot of money), so bribing them with job offers is potentially even more effective. Representatives and senators rely on their staffs to tell them how to vote, and their overworked and underpaid staffs frequently rely on lobbyists.
“60 Minutes” tries its hardest to be tough on Abramoff, but it’s impossible for a news outlet to give the guy this much airtime without basically enabling his rehabilitation effort. It certainly won’t hurt his book sales.
The new Abramoff scam
As the great Dan Froomkin pretty clearly reveals in one of his posts on the book, Abramoff is still deceiving, trying to implicate Democrats in what was an almost exclusively Republican scandal, and absolving his allies and co-conspirators of responsibility while accusing those who exposed Abramoff’s crimes of corruption. In his book, convicted criminal former Rep. Bob Ney is a naif led astray, while Byron Dorgan and Harry Reid knowingly took his dirty money.
Part of the new Abramoff scam is coming off as an earnest reformer, too. The whole system is corrupt, Abramoff says to “60 Minutes.” In his book, he rails against the corruption of the people whom … he worked very hard to corrupt:

“Most of these legislators had taken thousands of dollars from my clients and firms, and now they were sitting as impartial judges against me. Washington hypocrisy at its best,” he writes. “Members swim in a swamp of corruption, and thrive in it, but they are able — with a straight face no less — to accuse others at will and sanctimoniously punish what they see as malfeasance.”

“Everyone in Washington is a sanctimonious hypocrite” is a line that a lot of people will agree with. It has a bit more moral authority coming from literally anyone who isn’t Jack Abramoff.
But jail time, according to Abramoff, changed him. Now he even has a lobbying reform proposal! It has one real idea (permantly end the “revolving door” between congressional offices and lobbying firms) and a bunch of nonsense and unrelated stuff (term limits, repeal the 17th Amendment). It’s not a particularly serious attempt to deal with the issue of how money corrupts politics. (For that, try Lawrence Lessig?)
Washington forgives almost everyone, of course, no matter their crimes. Tucker Carlson is hosting Jack Abramoff’s book party, and I’m sure Carlson thinks that’s a delightfully wicked thing to do. (The book is published by the lunatic birthers of WorldNetDaily, the world’s silliest and least respectable source of wholly made-up news, which is why I am not naming or linking to it. Google if you’re curious.)
There’s no reason we should take Abramoff the contrite reformer seriously. He was a pious moralizer when he was buying off legislators with golf trips and he’s a pious moralizer now that he’s been humbled by some time in jail and a lower standard of living. Let’s not enable his comeback tour, lest he end up like Chuck Colson or something, permanently comfortably employed by the conservative pundit welfare system.

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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011 3:01 PM 23:36:26 PST

John Boehner’s policy director gave out Abramoff favor money

He greased the wheels for the symbol of GOP corruption, now he works for the leader of the new majority

By Alex Pareene

Jack Abramoff and Sen. John Boehner

Topics:John Boehner, R-Ohio, War Room, 2006 Elections, 2008 Elections, Jack Abramoff, Republican Party, The Republican takeover

John Boehner is so obviously a favor-trading tool of monied interests — this is the man, it must never be forgotten, who literally handed out tobacco company checks on the floor of the House — that sometimes it hardly seems noteworthy when he again proves that he is nothing but a puppet of well-heeled lobbyists. But we must guard against cynicism and always take opportunities to remind the nation that Speaker Boehner is a corrupt tangerine. So documentarian Alex Gibney writes today of Boehner’s recently hired policy director, Brett Loper. Before joining team Boehner, Loper was, naturally, a medical device lobbyist, whose job was to protect the profits of the medical device industry at the expense of, among other things, the federal deficit. And before that, he worked for the gloriously amoral Tom DeLay.

While working for Mr. DeLay, Loper took a trip to the Marianas Islands with Michael Scanlon, super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s co-conspirator. They went to the Marianas Islands to deliver favor money to two legislators in order to bribe them into switching their votes to support an Abramoff ally in his campaign to become speaker of the House. They switched their votes, Abramoff’s buddy got the job, and Abramoff was rehired and “resumed lobbying for the continuation of abusive labor practices in the islands.” This guy, a bagman for a corrupt lobbyist before he became a corrupt lobbyist himself, is now in charge of policy, for the speaker.

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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene Monday, Aug 16, 2010 1:45 PM 23:36:26 PST

No federal charges for Tom DeLay

The Justice Department decides not to charge the former House majority leader for his connections to Jack Abramoff

By Alex Pareene

Tom DeLay

Topics:Tom Delay, War Room, Department of Justice, Jack Abramoff

Tom DeLay has finally been completely vindicated. After a six-year investigation, the Justice Department has declined to press charges against DeLay for his connections to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Former top DeLay aides Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy pleaded guilty years ago to corruption charges, but apparently DeLay himself did not violate any federal laws. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that DeLay isn’t still an amoral, unethical scumbag. The details of DeLay’s relationship with Abramoff are a matter of public record, and while blocking legislation banning sweatshops in the Northern Mariana islands from reaching the floor of the House, as a favor to Abramoff, isn’t a crime, it is still probably not something you want to brag about. DeLay still faces charges in Texas for conspiracy and being just as corrupt as everyone always knew he was.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene Thursday, May 6, 2010 9:01 AM 23:36:26 PST

Jack Abramoff, Eliot Spitzer: A tale of two swindlers

What connects the disgraced N.Y. governor and the jailed D.C. lobbyist? Oscar-winner Alex Gibney explains

By Andrew O'Hehir

Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer speaks at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit 2010 in New York April 28, 2010. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (UNITED STATES - Tags: BUSINESS HEADSHOT) (Credit: © Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters)

Topics:Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Campaign Finance, Documentaries, Enron, Jack Abramoff, Oscars, Tom Delay, Movies

What do the following have in common: Imprisoned Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, disgraced ex-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the collapse of Enron, the Bush administration’s torture policies, the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson? Before we go chasing some thread of thematic continuity — and we could definitely do that — let’s observe the emotional connection. All of those people and things provoke or embody big, visceral reactions: shock, outrage, disgust, amazement.

The other thing they have in common, of course, is Alex Gibney, who has made movies about all those subjects, including the Oscar-winner “Taxi to the Dark Side,” the box-office breakthrough “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” which wasn’t a big hit but strikes me as a key work in understanding what Gibney is up to. He thrives on those oversize emotions mentioned above, channeling them into intentionally ambiguous pop documentaries that inhabit a nuanced middle ground between journalism and entertainment. As he would be the first to admit, Gibney’s films depend on the work of old-school investigative journalists, those lumbering sauropods who take months or years to reach their destinations. His particular genius lies in taking their facts and figures, their reams of insider testimony, and spinning them into compelling on-screen yarns, loaded with archival news footage, goofy animations and special effects, dramatic re-creations and comic-relief moments. Yet if Gibney’s films are a long way from the purist cinema-vérité documentary tradition, they’re closer in spirit to old-fashioned muckraking than to the clown-prince pranksterism of Michael Moore. (Gibney’s voice can be heard in his films, both literally and figuratively, but he never appears as a character.) Even by Gibney’s prolific standards, 2010 is shaping up as a bonanza, or perhaps an unmanageable pileup. When I met him recently at the New York offices of Magnolia Pictures, we were officially talking about his explosive, hilarious and eye-opening Abramoff film, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” which Magnolia releases in theaters this week. But Gibney also had — count ‘em — three other new movies premiering in the Tribeca Film Festival, at least if you count his section of the anthology documentary “Freakonomics,” adapted from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s bestselling books. (Other co-directors of that film are Seth Gordon, Eugene Jarecki, Morgan Spurlock and the “Jesus Camp” duo, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.) Gibney also unveiled a sneak preview of his as-yet-untitled Eliot Spitzer documentary at Tribeca, along with “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” a film based on journalist and author Lawrence Wright’s solo theater piece about his quest to find the roots of Islamic terrorism. (That film will play on HBO, and perhaps also receive limited theatrical release. The commercial fate of the Spitzer film remains undecided.) “Casino Jack” veritably revels in the rollicking, stranger-than-fiction details of the Abramoff scandal, in which a brilliant and charismatic lobbyist pimped out much of the United States Congress to big-money corporate clients, along the way defrauding Indian tribes, the territorial government of the Mariana Islands and other easy marks. Beyond that, though, Gibney is fascinated by the scandal’s larger implications — and it’s there that we begin to see the conceptual thread that ties his films together. Abramoff was no rogue out to enrich himself (although he did that too) but a committed right-wing ideologue who permanently changed the rules of the game in Washington. He embraced and embodied that old gag about the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules. As always, Gibney was a cheerful, upbeat conversationalist in person. He’s a film buff who stays busy at festivals catching other people’s work, and in an interview context he delivers concise, on-message sound bites, not dark, philosophical jeremiads. Still, as I told him, I sense a pattern here, whether or not it’s entirely conscious: Gibney is documenting the not-so-slow and not-so-gradual demolition of the American dream, the interlinked vision of freedom, democracy and capitalism that has been so influential in the recent history of the world, and now seems to be in potentially terminal decay. So, Alex, we’re here to talk about “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” but you’ve got two other films that are either complete or almost complete. And then there’s “Freakonomics,” which you directed part of. I think you should write some kind of self-help book on how to get stuff done. Are you one of those people who’s incredibly organized? Man, that would make everybody who knows me howl with laughter. I may be the world’s most disorganized person. But I do put in the hours. I should probably join Filmmakers Anonymous. Stop me before I say yes again! You know, you could look at your films and describe them as miscellaneous. Generally you’re taking the work of journalists and adapting it for the screen. But when I look at them, I see a congressional corruption scandal, a major corporate scandal, a disgraced politician and a dead journalist who spent his life excoriating the stupidity and corruption he saw around him. Is there a pattern? Maybe if you see it, you’ll let me know. [Laughter.] There are clearly certain things that interest me, and I seem to go there. But a pattern? I don’t know. Well, if I were a graduate student trying to write a thesis about you, I might suggest that these are all aspects of the decline of America since 1980 — the legacy of the Reagan revolution and the triumph of conservatism in American politics. Well, there’s a theme in that. I think that’s the big story. Now we’re seeing that the net result of the Reagan revolution was the Wall Street meltdown. Take away all the rules and regulations, and what do you get? Meltdown. So I think that’s a theme. But the other thing that’s increasingly interesting for me is human behavior. What makes people do the strange things they do? How do good people go bad? How do people abuse power? Those are big things for me. You’re showing your movie about Eliot Spitzer at Tribeca, but it has no title yet and we’ve all been asked not to write about it. So I take it you don’t think it’s ready to roll? I’m taking my cue on the Spitzer film from what happened with “Casino Jack” at Sundance. We thought it was finished. But seeing it with an audience, who weren’t my friends or anything, you learn things about how it plays. So we made it a lot shorter, we took at some narration, we just shifted stuff around. I would say the Spitzer film is largely finished, and now we’ll see how people respond. We may make a few adjustments. Your other new film is “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which — well, how would you describe it? Is it an adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s performance piece? Yeah, in some ways it is. He did a one-man play called “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which is like “my summer vacation,” except in the Middle East. What intrigued me was that it was an everyman’s look at al-Qaida — why they attacked us, and why they came to be what they were. In making the film, we filmed the play, but then we enhanced it. The set of the play was Larry’s study, but it also included a TV screen. We made that TV screen significantly bigger on our set, and used it as a magic portal. There’s a kind of time and space travel in the film, where we go to Cairo, to London. We also travel through space and time to the caves in Afghanistan, to Saudi Arabia, so that you can see and feel these places in addition to traveling on Larry’s personal journey, which is his play. Getting back to “Casino Jack,” which is a movie about a scandal that was widely covered in the media when the story broke, five or six years ago. It seems as if you’re arguing that people may know Abramoff’s name, and maybe the general outlines of the story, but may not understand its importance. In some ways, he assembled the tool kit that lobbyists are still using. Now, people will object to that: “Absolutely not! Jack Abramoff was one of a kind! He was completely outrageous.” Well, yes. He was outrageous, and he was way out of control. But he used the same tool kit everybody uses today: the rapacious use of not-for-profits to hide trips, to hide agendas, to hide money flows. The revolving door, where you get staffers from senators’ or congressmen’s offices and put them into your lobbying shops so you can influence votes, influence legislation. The use of entertainment and skyboxes — there are different rules now, but there are also ways to get around them. Biggest of all is the way you manage money to influence legislation, in a way that skirts the prohibitions on quid pro quo. It’s about going inside the kitchen in the world’s biggest restaurant and seeing how the sausage is made. Jack Abramoff was the master chef in the world’s biggest restaurant. We wonder why Congress is dysfunctional, why they’re not doing the people’s bidding, why everyone seems to hate them. The reason is, the system is broken, because it’s all based on money. By looking at Jack’s story, you can see how that happened. And Jack’s story — first of all, it’s hilarious and spectacular. It’s globe-girdling, there’s a murder in it, there are sweatshops in Saipan, dirty deals in Russia, arms whistling to the West Bank. But at its heart is the very stuff that is breaking our system of democracy. This was the biggest congressional corruption scandal ever, at least at the time. But did the level of corruption that Abramoff represented become the new normal, in a sense? Because in the film you suggest that even more dramatic stuff has happened since his downfall. The dispiriting thing is that Jack Abramoff, in the wake of the financial lobbying of the last few years, looks like a piker. I mean, he’s Podunk! The financial lobbyists, and the medical and pharmaceutical lobbyists, have taken what Abramoff did to a new level. You mentioned the fact that the Abramoff story is highly entertaining, which it certainly is. And while it’s unlikely that your viewers will find him likable or sympathetic, let’s just say this: He makes one hell of a lead character. There is another film, which is still called “Casino Jack.” I think they’re going to change the title. It’s a fictional version of this story, in which Kevin Spacey plays Jack Abramoff. I’ve seen the film, and Kevin Spacey is very good in it. But he’s no Jack Abramoff. [Laughter.] Jack Abramoff is one of a kind. As Neal Volz, a former staffer for congressman Bob Ney who later worked for Jack, says, “Jack could talk a dog off a meat truck.” He was that persuasive. He was the ultimate salesman, but he was also a man of great imagination. He was a film buff, who saw his own life as an action film or a spy thriller. As a result, he imagined himself into situations that, you know, make for pretty good moviegoing. Suddenly, we’re in Angola, in Africa, where Jack is holding a sort of right-wing Woodstock [in June 1985], shooting machine guns with a bloodthirsty character named Jonas Savimbi and a guy named Adolfo Calero, who used to run the Contras in Nicaragua. And they’re all holding hands after a lot of machine-gun shooting and singing a version of “Kumbaya” with this guy Lew Lehrman, who later ran for governor in New York state, and who gave George Washington’s bowl to Jonas Savimbi, this bloodthirsty dictator. You can’t make this stuff up! Yeah, I literally couldn’t believe that entire sequence. It’s so amazing. It seems impossible, totally fictional. Was it difficult to find documentation of that event? It sure was. We got lucky or we were good, one of the two. We tracked down a cameraman who had been there, and he still had 10 hours of footage. We also got Jack’s film, which was amazing. Jack was a film producer. He produced “Red Scorpion,” with Dolph Lundgren [released in 1989], and “Red Scorpion 2.” I think the Angola affair — it taught Jack that it wasn’t a big enough deal. That was his documentary version, and he was always going to make an action film. So he reinvents Savimbi into Red Scorpion, and has Dolph Lundgren as the action hero, shooting up everybody and performing weightlifting tricks. And that’s what Jack was as a young man, a weightlifter. So Dolph Lundgren is standing in for Jack. I have a fun thing at the beginning of the film. There’s this thing that Jack said to somebody, which we transposed into an e-mail: “Documentary? You don’t want to make a documentary. Nobody watches documentaries. You want to make an action film.” So to some extent, this film is an action film. That’s what I told Jack: “It’s an action film, man. People are going to be entertained.” I think it’s also a comedy, at least in parts. But unfortunately it’s a comedy in which the joke’s on us. So you’ve had contact with Abramoff. What was that like? Very interesting. I visited him in prison, and found him to be a very engaging character, very funny, good storyteller. He loves to quote movies. Did he know who you were? He did. I think — no, I know — that there was great reluctance to meeting with me. It wasn’t like I had a big record as a movement conservative, which was something we joked about. We agreed on one thing: I didn’t see him as a bad apple. I saw him as spectacular evidence of a rotten barrel. He was at the center of things, not on the periphery. Everybody else was trying to make him the scapegoat: “Oh, we got rid of Jack Abramoff. Everything’s fine!” I told him, and I firmly believe, that he was at the center. He was doing stuff to the extreme, yes, over the top. But he was doing the same stuff everybody else was doing. Well, you make a pretty strong case that Abramoff wasn’t in it for the money, or not entirely. He had an ideological motivation. He actually believed he was doing the right thing. Right. I think he was a zealot. Unlike his partner, Mike Scanlon, who was in it for the money, Jack Abramoff was a zealot. He believed in the principles of the Reagan revolution. He was very anti-Soviet, but he also wanted to do what Grover Norquist has suggested: make government so small you can drown it in the bathtub. Denude it of its resources. Destroy the government, in effect. Do you see any parallels between Abramoff and Eliot Spitzer? Here are these two brilliant, headstrong guys from opposite sides of the political spectrum, who appeared to be very idealistic, driven by ideology, but who allowed themselves to become corrupted. I don’t know that Eliot was corrupted by his ideology, but I think he’s a character who did something that was wildly unexpected. If there is a parallel, it’s hubris. I think Jack became so entranced with his outsize reputation that he began to believe his own press releases. And I think Eliot Spitzer — he started seeing prostitutes at the moment of his greatest political influence. He was on his way to being governor, overwhelmingly popular among both Republicans and Democrats. And at that very moment, at the top of his game, he began to see prostitutes. Dudley Do-Right did wrong. Of the two of them, maybe Spitzer was the real hypocrite. You can call Abramoff a lot of things, but not that. I don’t think you could really accuse Jack of being a hypocrite. Jack was corrupt, and I don’t think you can say that Eliot Spitzer was corrupt. But he was hypocritical, there’s no doubt about that. Look, he had increased penalties for johns in New York, and he had prosecuted escort services. Now, I have rather politically incorrect liberal views about whether prostitution should be legal. [Laughter.] But the fact was that it was illegal, and he was the governor of New York, who had convinced people to elect him because he was Mr. Clean. So, yes, he was a hypocrite. And Jack wasn’t. “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” opens May 7 in New York, Los Angeles and Washington; May 14 in Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Santa Cruz, Calif., and Seattle; May 21 in Atlanta, Boston, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Sacramento, Tucson, Ariz., and Austin, Texas; May 28 in Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, Miami, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Santa Fe, N.M.; and June 4 in Houston and Waterville, Maine, with more cities to follow.

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More Andrew O'Hehir Friday, Apr 30, 2010 9:31 AM 23:36:26 PST

Exclusive Alex Gibney clip: Jack Abramoff and healthcare

See a deleted scene from Oscar-winner Alex Gibney's new movie about the guy who dosed Congress with dirty money

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics:Jack Abramoff, Film Salon, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Documentaries, Campaign Finance, Tom Delay, Enron, Oscars, Movies

In an exclusive premiere for Film Salon readers, here’s a deleted scene from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.” The film recounts the horrifying, mesmerizing saga of über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the congressional corruption scandal of the late ’90s and early 2000s that dramatically changed the landscape of Washington (and definitely not for the better).

In this Webisode, Gibney explores the elaborate money shuffle through which Abramoff channeled money from supposedly legitimate lobbying clients (like Indian tribes) through Republican PACs and Big Pharma front groups, who in turn wrote industry-friendly legislation that was passed intact by the GOP-led Congress. I’ll have an interview with Gibney and more coverage of the film next week. “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” opens May 7 in major cities, but you’ll only find this clip here (at least until the DVD comes out).

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Greece Gets Ultimatum: Accept Austerity Plan or Forego Extra Bailout Cash by David Gow / The Guardian UK Athens / Common Dreams

Greece Gets Ultimatum: Accept Austerity Plan or Forego Extra Bailout Cash

by David Gow in Athens

Greece has been given an ultimatum that it will get no more money from the European Union and International Monetary Fund until its people have voted to accept the austerity measures demanded by the bailout package.
Protesters dressed as prisoners gather during an event to protest against austerity measures outside the Greek parliament in Athens, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) The latest tranche of bailout aid, worth €8bn (£7bn) and agreed just two weeks ago, is seen as vital for ensuring that Greek public sector workers can continue to be paid. But it will now be delayed until after the country decides in a referendum whether it accepts the new rescue package or even wants to stay in the euro.
The threat to send Greece closer to bankruptcy emerged on the margins of the G20 summit in Cannes – due to start on Thursday – and follows a blunt warning from Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the eurogroup, that the sixth tranche of the original €110bn bailout was now in jeopardy.
Speaking after the bombshell decision of Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, to hold a referendum, Juncker, Luxembourg's veteran prime minister, asked: "Can we under these conditions pay out the sixth tranche, the €8bn, that we decided upon two weeks ago when we don't know whether the Greeks still agree with what was agreed?"
The €8bn was due to be paid in mid-November but German officials are suggesting that Greece – which has €360bn debts and GDP of just €220bn – can survive until mid-December without the payment. The likely dates for the referendum are thought to be 5 or 12 December.
The IMF board had yet to endorse the payout of the sixth tranche, but it is now thought that meetings of both the 17-strong eurogroup of finance ministers and the broader EU group including non-eurozone ministers could formally decide to withhold payment early next week in Brussels.
However, there remains doubt whether the referendum will ever be held, given the fragile hold on power that Papandreou has before Friday's confidence vote on his government. There is also confusion about what exactly the Greek public will be asked. Some suggest the vote will only be on the bailout package, while others claim it will be on membership of the EU.
Stockmarkets have regained some composure after Tuesday's sell-off, but EU officials are angry that Papandreou's action has guaranteed weeks, if not months, of political uncertainty and market volatility. France's prime minister, François Fillon, told his parliament: "Europe cannot be kept waiting for weeks for the outcome of the referendum. The Greeks must say quickly and without ambiguity whether they choose to keep their place in the eurozone or not".

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

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G20 Summit Fails to Allay World Recession Fears / The Guardian/UK / Common Dreams

Published on Friday, November 4, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

G20 Summit Fails to Allay World Recession Fears

Summit ends in disarray as world leaders fail to agree increase to IMF and concerns mount over prospects for Italian economy

by Patrick Wintour and Larry Elliott in Cannes

The G20 summit in Cannes has ended in ominous disarray, drawing nearer the threat of a world recession.
The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, right, at a G20 news conference with his finance minister, Giulio Tremonti. (Photo: Dylan Martinez/Reuters) Leaders were unable to agree upon a boost to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help distressed countries, while debt-ridden Italy, now seen as the epicentre of the euro crisis, was forced to put its austerity programme under the fund's control.
UK hopes that the Germans would relent and allow the European Central Bank to become the lender of last resort for the euro were also dashed.
In a day of unremitting gloom, and yet more market turbulence, the Greek government also stood on the precipice of collapse, risking an uncontrolled default, as the government of George Papandreou faced a late-night confidence vote in parliament. Prime Minister Papandreou was forced to cancel plans for a referendum on the euro.
The sense of stasis led the British prime minister, David Cameron, to issue a stark warning about the impact of the crisis on the world economy: "Every day that the eurozone crisis continues and every day it is not resolved is a day that it has a chilling effect on the rest of the world economy, including the British economy. I am not going to pretend all the problems in the eurozone have been fixed. They have not. The task for the eurozone is the same as going into this summit. The world can't wait for the eurozone to through endless questions and changes about this.
"We like the rest of the world need the eurozone to sort out its problems. We need more to happen in terms of detail on the European firewall." He also hinted at worse to come, describing this as only "a stage of the global crisis".
There had been hopes that the G20 would agree to increase IMF resources by as much as $250bn (£156bn) to more than $1tn, but disagreements about the wisdom, structure and size of the boost to the fund and over who would contribute meant the decision was left to a meeting of G20 finance ministers next February. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had been eager to flourish a figure both to assure the markets and to top off his chairmanship of the G20.
Cameron revealed the friction, saying: "The very worst thing would have been to try and cook up a number without being very specific about who is contributing what. If you cannot do that, it is better to say the world stands ready to increase resources to the IMF as necessary."
Barack Obama, under pressure from his own Congress, was deeply reluctant to contribute to an expansion of IMF funds without clearer signs that the eurozone was sorting out its problems. Admitting he had been given "a crash course in European politics", the US president urged Greek and Italian parliaments to take decisive action to control their deficits, and so combat what he described as some of the psychological origins of the crisis. He also urged the euro area to start putting some resources into its European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF), a rescue fund agreed at the European summit on 27 October.
But the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said: "There are hardly any countries here which said they were ready to go along with the EFSF."
The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was summoned to a late-night hotel meeting with Merkel, Sarkozy, the IMF director general Christine Lagarde and Obama, where he was instructed to bring Italy under quarterly IMF surveillance to ensure he implements tough austerity measures, including changes to the labour market, pension reform and the sell-off of state assets.
Italy has debts of €1.9tn (£1.6tn), or 120% of GDP, and if it followed Greece down the path towards a financial bailout, or default, the impact on the European banking system would be huge. Italian debt yields rose again on Friday to near unsustainable levels as traders reflected fears of a default by demanding higher returns. Italy faces new tests in further auctions of its debt this month – it has to raise €30.5bn in November, and a further 22.5bn in December.
Sarkozy denied the demands on Berlusconi represented something approaching an IMF coup, saying: "We never wanted to change governments, either in Greece or in Italy. That is not our role; that is not our idea of democracy, but it's clear that there are rules in Europe and if you exonerate yourself from these rules you exclude yourself from Europe."
Berlusconi, facing defections from his own party, insisted he had invited the IMF to offer advice. He said on Friday he had rejected an offer of IMF funds. "I don't think Italy needs that," he said, claiming his country was more solid than France or the UK. "Italian restaurants and vacation spots are always full. Nobody has the sense the country is in a crisis."
British officials privately admit that fear of an economic collapse in Italy is the single biggest concern gripping world leaders. They said: "We cannot have the Italians meeting in crisis every three days. We need some action."
The UK government will now focus on urging its European partners to make progress, and will continue to support extra cash for the IMF. Cameron said he would not need UK parliamentary approval to do this since the Commons had already voted to sanction an increase that would cover the proposed UK additional contribution.
In a sign that the collapse of Italy could lead to a collapse of the single currency, the chancellor, George Osborne, said the Treasury was undertaking scenario planning on such a development.
The EFSF has €440bn available to lend, of which roughly half is expected to be consumed by bailouts of Ireland, Portugal and Greece. The European Central Bank has purchased Italian debt since August, but will not do so indefinitely. Financing could leverage the EFSF's money into something larger, which has led the EU to pursue countries outside the eurozone with surplus cash, such as China.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Video: Euro-Chaos and Global Capitalism / The Real News Network / Common Dreams

Published on Friday, November 4, 2011 by The Real News Network

Euro-Chaos and Global Capitalism

Leo Panitch: We are witnessing the irrationality of capitalism and the incredible struggle of people in the street

© 2011 The Real News Network

Thirty Of America's Most Profitable Companies Paid 'Less Than Zero' In Income Taxes In Last 3 Years: By Jillian Berman / ICH

Thirty Of America's Most Profitable Companies Paid 'Less Than Zero' In Income Taxes In Last 3 Years:

By Jillian Berman
November 03, 2011 "Huffington Post" -- Many major corporations have managed to pay taxes at just over half of the corporate income tax rate, according to a new report.
Nearly 300 of the nation's most profitable companies paid an average tax rate of 18.5 percent from 2008 to 2010, less than half of the 35 percent corporate tax rate, according to a study by the Citizens for Tax Justice released Thursday. Of the 280 companies, 78 studied paid a tax rate of zero or less during at least one year of the three year period.
And thirty companies, the report says, had a negative income tax rate from 2008 to 2010, even though they took home a combined $160 billion in pre-tax profits.
The financial services industry netted the largest share -- at 16.8 percent -- of the $222.7 billion in total tax subsidies that the companies received, the study found. Wells Fargo took home the most tax subsidies of them all, raking in nearly $18 billion in tax breaks over the last three years.
Officials at some major corporations lashed out at the study's findings following its release. In a statement, GE called the report "inaccurate and and distorted," according to the Washington Post. Verizon spokesman Robert Varettoni, told WaPo that "findings in this and other recent reports have been more politically motivated than truthful."
Even without lowering the corporate tax rate, large companies are still able to take advantage of a variety of loopholes available to them to avoid paying taxes. One, called the "active financing exception" allows corporations to sidestep paying taxes on overseas profits if the company derived those profits by "actively financing" a deal, according to the NYT.
Corporations also commonly take advantage of a rule called "accelerated depreciation," which allows them to write off investments faster than they wear out, according to WaPo. The companies then subtract the falling value of the investments from their taxable income.
The findings come as politicians wrangle over the best way to cut the nation's budget deficit. Republicans recently proposed lowering the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and paying for it by eliminating business tax breaks. A study by the Joint Committee on Taxation, requested by congressional Democrats, found that eliminating the business tax breaks alone wouldn't bring in enough revenue to make up for the lowered rate.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry said last month that if elected president he would cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent. Perry told The New York Times that he didn't care that his tax plan could possibly increase income inequality. Another Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, vowed to slash the corporate tax rate as part of his 9-9-9 plan, which if enacted would cap sales tax, corporate income tax and personal income tax at 9 percent each.
Companies such as Apple and Google are lobbying Congress to pass an additional tax loophole known as a repatriation tax holiday that would allow corporations to avoid taxes on more than $1 trillion in offshore profits, Bloomberg reports. In exchange, the companies argue, companies would invest those dollars in the U.S.
U.S. corporations with foreign profits that amounted to 10 percent or more of their worldwide profits paid tax rates to foreign countries that were nearly one-third higher than the tax rates they paid to the U.S., the tax justice study found.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, reversed its position on the repatriation tax holiday last month, saying that it wouldn't help to spur U.S. job growth or investment. The Treasury Department found that a similar tax holiday passed in 2004, did little to boost employment growth.
In fact, several companies that benefited from the 2004 law cut jobs in its wake. Dow Chemical, Verizon and Bank of America are just some of the 10 companies that slashed jobs after benefiting from a repatriation tax holiday, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.