Bad Deeds for 9-2-2009

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Shouted Down At New Jersey Health Care Town Hall This is a video you need to see. It can’t be properly described with a few words. Much like the unruly town hall meetings that have been going on across the country, the angry crowd held up bizarre and nonsensical posters of protest while hurling insults at health care supporters.

A new low for these meetings may have been set when the crowd shouted down a wheelchair-bound woman with two incurable auto-immune diseases who asked a question.

Healthcare Opponent Punches 65-Year-Old Supporter in Face – A 65-year-old man cheering healthcare reform in Miami was punched in the face and knocked to the ground by an opponent of a public health plan, according to a reporter at the scene. The rally took place outside a Great Miami Chamber of Commerce event where Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) was speaking.

Glenn Beck’s Soliloquy: I am a Clown Who Wants to Make Money – Last night, Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck delivered the following soliloquy, “I am a clown. I am a guy who just… I just want to have laughs and fun, I’m a capitalist, I want to make money, all that stuff.”

Comment to Beck:

You are not a clown. You are a dangerous jerk who is putting this country in danger when you stir the pot.

You are not a capitalist. You get a paycheck. You are a wage earner, not that there is anything wrong with that. You are a mouthpiece for the economic elites. You are a useful idiot in their eyes.

Will you make a lot of money? Yes.

Will that lot of money make you ‘happy.’ Maybe, maybe not.

Will you have to sacrifice your soul or integrity to make that money? Yes.

Pfizer Inc. Unlawfully Promoted Prescription Drugs – Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug maker, will pay a record $2.3 billion civil and criminal penalty over unlawful prescription drug promotions. Authorities called Pfizer a repeat offender, noting it is the fourth such settlement of government charges in the last decade. Even as Pfizer was negotiating deals on past misconduct, they were continuing to violate the very same laws with other drugs.

To promote the drugs, authorities said Pfizer invited doctors to consultant meetings at resort locations, paying their expenses and providing perks. “They were entertained with golf, massages, and other activities,” said Mike Loucks, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts. The government will monitor the company’s conduct for the next five years to rein in the abuses.

Conservatives Have Pulled Another Hijacking – The term public has been hijacked and turned into a dirty word. Well it isn’t. Because the public, folks, isn’t them, it’s us. It’s “we the people,” it’s neighbors united to take care of one another, it’s citizens doing together that they can’t do alone.

The public square is our common ground. That’s why in England they call it “the commons,” the shared turf where in a democracy we stand together to overcome what keeps us apart and do together those public things (res-publica) that make us a republic.

Once we allow the word public to be vilified, however, then everything associated with it becomes pejorative. Like paying taxes. See, taxes is how we pool our money to do things in common that can’t be done alone. Like building roads or educating the young or fighting wars or taking care of the poor and the sick and those with handicaps. Taxes are the common allowance we give ourselves as a national family so we can pay for the things that make us a family and keep us a family.

The attack on the term public is really an attack on democracy, on citizenship, on our efforts to come together under the banner of “we the people” to protect our liberties and secure our property and ensure our safety. Because centuries ago we figured out you can’t do those things alone, one by one, even if you are strong. Behind the abstract term public stand your neighbors, your fellow citizens, your partners in common pursuits across the land.

Those who attack the public then are attacking you and me insofar as we want to think of ourselves as us. And in health care, us is critical, since the public health is at stake and only a public element can assure us a fair, efficient and cost-effective system.

It’s really quite simple: the public option in health care is the public good in health care; and health care constitutes the core meaning of the public good. So let’s out those who assail the term public: they are not protecting liberty, they are undermining the common goods and democratic institutions by which liberty is established and preserved.

Conservatives Are Killing Themselves – The tide is about to turn in the debate over health care reform. The lies and the screaming that captured the discussion in August have a lot of Republicans thinking they’ve got the Democrats right where they want ’em.

They are wrong. And they are wrong because their castle is built upon a pile of sand… a pile of crazy, crazy sand.

Sam Tanenhaus talked about it earlier today on Morning Joe. Discussing his new book, The Death of Conservatism, Tanenhaus warned that today’s Republican Party is more about radicalism than conservatism.

While the mobs, the conspiracy theorists and the lie-pushers look like they’re winning the debate for the Republicans, they are actually setting them up for a big fall. For the discussion will inevitably move past what the protesters think the dreaded ‘Obamacare’ will do, to ask A) why they feel this way and B) what’s their alternative? The crazy-crazies can only answer the first question. The Republican Party is utterly unprepared for anything else. Their alternatives are lousy because their party has spent no significant time honing and improving their failed ideas from when they were recently in power. Nor have they pushed the lunatics and extremists away from the debate; if anything, they’ve pushed them to the front.

In so many ways, you have the case of an opposition party that is not yet ready to be an opposition party. The smash-it-up approach may have worked for August, but it has done nothing to improve the Republicans’ capability to offer cohesive, plausible alternatives.

Companies Often Cheat Low Income Workers – Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

So, Mr. Free Enterprise, You Just Squandered Billions of Our Money . . . So Take Another Whack At It – Like golfers who treat themselves to a second drive after hooking the first one deep into the woods, these guys play on without apology or penalty. The maddening thing is that they’re getting away with it and nobody seems to care.

Consider the case of Jay Levine, once the co-chief-executive of RBS Greenwich Capital, the American investment banking arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Under Levine’s direction, RBS Greenwich went from the bottom of the “league tables” in terms of issuance of asset-backed securities to a perch near the top — right up there, one industry publication wrote at the time, with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers as one of the “best mortgage-backed houses” in the business.

At the height of the mortgage frenzy, Levine’s group generated more than $350 million in profit annually for RBS and Levine was reportedly RBS’s highest paid employee, earning more than $60 million during the three years before his departure at the end of 2007.

Now, two years later, RBS is a financial ward of the British government, which has had to put in more than $30 billion to keep it from collapsing. RBS’s biggest mistake was an ill-timed and overpriced purchase of a Dutch bank, but there were also tens of billions of dollars in U.S. credit losses, many of them attributable to RBS Greenwich.

Levine, meanwhile, left RBS at the end of 2007 to take the top job at Capmark Financial Group, a spinoff of GMAC that had become one of the country’s biggest commercial real estate lenders. Since then, of course, things have only gone from bad to worse in the world of commercial real estate finance, forcing Capmark to post more than $2 billion in operating losses before it stopped filing public reports this spring. Its biggest shareholder, the buyout firm KKR, has now written off its entire investment in the company. Levine volunteered to reduce his base salary from $5 million to $4 million.

But don’t shed too many tears for Jay. Even while remaining at Capmark, he’s reassembled some of the old team from RBS Greenwich at a new firm, CRT Capital Group, a small trading house in Stamford, Conn., that he bought in July with former RBS Greenwich co-chief-executive Ben Carpenter and Ron Kripalani, who once headed the capital markets group at none other than Countrywide Financial. In a statement announcing the purchase, the new managers suggested that with so much of Wall Street operating under government-imposed pay caps, it was a perfect time to lure away the industry’s “best producers.”

And he’s not the only one.

SEC Mishandled Multiple Madoff Probes – During the Bush Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission consistently mishandled its investigations of Bernard Madoff’s business, despite ample warnings of the multibillion-dollar fraud. The SEC enforcement staff, conducting investigations of Madoff’s business, “almost immediately caught (him) in lies and misrepresentations, but failed to follow up on inconsistencies” and rejected whistleblowers’ offers to provide additional evidence.

Regards,

Jim