Why Gas is so Expensive
at the Pump

"There is no more debate. Excessive speculation is a major reason oil prices have risen so sharply," Sen. Bernie Sanders said, referring to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data he recently released. The data reveals Wall Street speculators played a major role in driving up the price of a barrel of oil to $147 in 2008. During the rampant oil speculation, regular unleaded gas in Vermont hit a record $4.09 a gallon, causing financial hardship for many Vermonters.

"While making this confidential information public may have upset Wall Street oil speculators, the American people have a right to know exactly what caused gasoline prices to skyrocket to more than $4 a gallon back in the summer of 2008," Bernie said. "This report clearly shows that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy."

Speculation is rampant again, and – no surprise – gas prices have soared over the course of the last year. This week, gas in Vermont cost 90 cents more than one year ago. "There is little doubt that the same speculators who caused gasoline and heating oil prices to unnecessarily spike in 2008 are playing the same games again in 2011. This is simply unacceptable and must not be allowed to continue," Bernie said.

Bernie called on federal regulators to meet in an emergency session to crack down on speculators and provide needed relief for motorists and for people who heat their homes with heating oil. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission was required by the new Wall Street reform law to stop excessive speculation by January, but the regulators have ignored that new law. In a letter, Bernie called on the CFTC to "finally do what the law mandates and end excessive oil speculation."

Read Bernie's letter to the CFTC »
Document: Read the confidential report revealing rampant oil speculation »
Watch Bernie on The Ed Show on MSNBC »
Read more in the International Business Times »

Legislative Update : Bernie introduced the End Excessive Oil Speculation Now Act of 2011 that would force the CFTC to impose strict limits on the amount of oil speculators can trade in the commodity and futures markets. The bill has eight co-sponsors.

Disappointing

Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal

POSTED: August 24, 11:17 AM ET

President Barack Obama

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.

On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.

This deal will also submarine efforts by both defrauded investors in MBS and unfairly foreclosed-upon homeowners and borrowers to obtain any kind of relief in the civil court system. The AGs initially talked about $20 billion as a settlement number, money that would “toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners,” as Gretchen Morgenson reported the other day.

The banks, however, apparently “balked” at paying that sum, and no doubt it will end up being a lesser amount when the deal is finally done.

To give you an indication of how absurdly small a number even $20 billion is relative to the sums of money the banks made unloading worthless crap subprime assets on foreigners, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers around the world, consider this: in 2008 alone, the state pension fund of Florida, all by itself, lost more than three times that amount ($62 billion) thanks in significant part to investments in these deadly MBS. 

So this deal being cooked up is the ultimate Papal indulgence. By the time that $20 billion (if it even ends up being that high) gets divvied up between all the major players, the broadest and most destructive fraud scheme in American history, one that makes the S&L crisis look like a cheap liquor store holdup, will be safely reduced to a single painful but eminently survivable one-time line item for all the major perpetrators.

But Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR. 

In addition to the global settlement, Schneiderman is also blocking an individual $8.5 billion settlement for Countrywide investors. He has sued to stop that deal, claiming it could “compromise investors’ claims in exchange for a payment representing a fraction of the losses.”
If Schneiderman thinks $8.5 billion is an insufficient, fractional payoff just for defrauded Countrywide investors, then you can imagine how bad a $20 billion settlement for the entire industry would be for the victims.
In that particular Countrywide settlement deal, it looks like Bank of New York Mellon, the New York Fed, Pimco and other players negotiated on behalf of defrauded investors. They told the Times they were happy with the deal, but investors outside the talks told Gretchen they weren’t happy with the settlement.
Schneiderman apparently listened to those voices instead of the Mellon-Fed-BofA crowd, which infuriated the insiders who struck the actual deal. In a remarkable quote given to the Times, Kathryn Wylde, the Fed board member who ostensibly represents the public, said the following about Schneiderman:

It is of concern to the industry that instead of trying to facilitate resolving these issues, you seem to be throwing a wrench into it. Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.

This, again, is coming not from a Bank of America attorney, but from the person on the Fed board who is supposedly representing the public!
This quote leads one to wonder just what Wylde would consider “indefensible,” given that stealing is pretty much the worst thing that a bank can do — and these banks just finished the longest and most orgiastic campaign of stealing in the history of money. Is Wylde waiting for Goldman and Citi to blow up a skyscraper? Dump dioxin into an orphanage? It’s really an incredible quote.
The banks are going to claim that all they’re guilty of is bad paperwork. But while the banks are indeed being investigated for "paperwork" offenses like mass tax evasion (by failing to pay fees associated with mortgage registrations and deed transfers) and mass perjury (a la the “robo-signing” practices), their real crime, the one Schneiderman is interested in, is even more serious.
The issue goes beyond fraudulent paperwork to an intentional, far-reaching theft scheme designed to take junk subprime loans and disguise them as AAA-rated investments. The banks lent money to corrupt companies like Countrywide, who made masses of bad loans and immediately sold them back to the banks.
The banks in turn hid the crappiness of these loans via certain poorly-understood nuances in the securitization process – this is almost certainly where Scheniderman’s investigators are doing their digging – before hawking the resultant securities as AAA-rated gold to fools in places like the Florida state pension fund.
They did this for years, systematically, working hand in hand in a wink-nudge arrangement with clearly criminal enterprises like Countrywide and New Century. The victims were millions of investors worldwide (like the pensioners who saw their funds drop in value) and hundreds of thousands of individual homeowners, who were often sold trick loans and hustled into foreclosure when unexpected rate hikes kicked in.
In a larger sense, even the (often irresponsible) people who simply bought more house than they could afford were victims of this scam. That's because in many of these cases, credit simply would not have been available to those people had the banks not first discovered a way to raise vast sums of money dumping crap loans on an unsuspecting market.
In other words: if Bank of America hadn’t found a way to sell worthless subprime loans as AAA paper to the Chinese and the Scandavians in May, you can be sure that it wouldn’t be going back to Countrywide in June to lend out more money for more subprime loans.
And Countrywide, in turn, wouldn’t then have been sending masses of reps out into the ghettoes to offer juicy home loans to undocumented immigrants and refis to confused old ladies on social security.
This is as bad as white-collar crime gets. But to Wylde, it doesn’t rise to the level of being “indefensible.” Until they do something worse than this, we apparently should support the banks, and make sure they don’t have to pay more than a fraction of what they made off of this kind of crime.
What is most amazing about Wylde’s quote is the clear implication that even a law enforcement official like Schneiderman should view it as his job to “do everything we can to support” Wall Street. That would be astonishing interpretation of what a prosecutor's duties are, were it not for the fact that 49 other Attorneys General apparently agree with her.
In Schneiderman we have at least one honest investigator who doesn’t agree, which is to his great credit. But everyone else is on Wylde’s side now. The Times story claims that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and various Justice Department officials have been leaning on the New York AG to cave, which tells you that reining in this last rogue cop is now an urgent priority for Barack Obama.
Why? My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If Barry can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he’ll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer.
Which is good for him, I guess. But it seems to me that it might be time to wonder if is this the most disappointing president we’ve ever had.

Congressional Black Caucus

U.S. Politics

  

Obama’s Black Backlash

Aug 19, 2011 9:07 PM EDT

Exasperated with the first African-American president, the Congressional Black Caucus says it’s time to emulate the Tea Party. Patricia Murphy on its vow to adopt get-tough tactics.

     With a stinging budget defeat behind them and unemployment in the black community soaring to 16 percent, members of the Congressional Black Caucus say they’re done waiting for Barack Obama to fight their battles for them. Instead, the 43 African-American lawmakers say they’re taking matters into their own hands and will carry the fight to Tea Party Republicans, whom they blame for Obama’s latest lurch to the right.

      “The Tea Party discovered something. That is if they organize, if they talk loud enough, if they threaten, if they register to vote and elect a few people, they can take over the Congress of the United States,” said Rep. Maxine Waters. “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”

     Waters was speaking in Atlanta, a stop on the CBC’s five-city job fair and town-hall tour now making its way across the country. On the same day Obama left Washington for a 10-day Martha’s Vineyard vacation, eight caucus members hosted a crowd of nearly 5,000 out-of-work Georgians who had flocked to event for the rare chance to meet recruiters from companies that can actually hire them.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters considers the summer of 2011 "a defining moment" and says the Tea Party "called our bluff and we blinked.", Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo

     The scene outside the event told the story of the black community, whose jobless rate is more than 50 percent above the national average and spikes as high as 39.2 percent for young African-Americans. Dressed in dark suits, knotted ties, and shined leather shoes, men and women stood for up to five hours in a line that stretched four and five people deep as it snaked and switched back across the Atlanta Technical College campus. Some held umbrellas against the Georgia sun, while most fanned themselves with a few fresh resumes. Once inside, they could visit booths set up by prospective employers, smile, shake hands, and hope to make an impression. At least, many said, it was something to do.
     “The people want us to fight. They want us to stand up,” Waters said. “We are going to be insistent that what comes out in September is going to reflect the experiences that we have had.”

At the town-hall meeting that followed the fair, Waters and other CBC members told 200 or so attendees that everyone, from members of Congress to folks in the seats, needed to start doing more or suffer the consequences at the hands of Tea Party–aligned Republicans back in Washington.

     Waters called the summer of 2011 a “defining moment” for her and the African-American community, especially as Capitol Hill’s new supercommittee gears up to slash federal spending further this fall.

“The people want us to fight. They want us to stand up,” Waters said. “We are going to be insistent that what comes out in September is going to reflect the experiences that we have had.”

     Looking back on the summer, several CBC members acknowledged that the freshman class of Tea Party Republicans had out-hustled, out-shouted, and out-organized them as the Aug. 2 default deadline neared. In the end, President Obama chose between allowing the country to go into default and signing onto a deal with deep cuts to domestic spending but no tax increases, despite liberal insistence that more revenues were needed.

     “It was the Tea Party and the radical right, the right of the right, that hijacked the Republican Party,” said Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of the civil-rights movement. “They wanted to destroy this president. They made a decision to make him a one-termer, and that’s what it was all about.”

     Lewis joined two thirds of the black caucus in voting against the budget deal, warning that the trigger mechanism in the bill will gut Medicare and Medicaid if the evenly divided supercommittee deadlocks and automatic spending cuts kick in.

     Rep. Cedric Richmond, one of a handful of freshman Democrats elected in 2010, said he voted for the deal to avoid a national default. “I didn’t want to vote for it, but I didn’t want to take castor oil when I was sick either,” he said.

     In an interview with The Daily Beast, Richmond called the House GOP and Tea Party members in particular “sinful” for holding the American economy over a barrel to get the spending cuts they wanted.

“They won because they are organized, they are monolithic, and they are willing, I think, to obstruct the success of the country to win the next election,” he said. “That is what I find to be sinful, with so many people unemployed.”

Denier Rick Perry Takes $11 Million from Big Oil, Then Claims Climate Scientists ‘Manipulated Data’ For Money

By Joe Romm on Aug 17, 2011 at 5:44 pm

If you look up chutzpah in the dictionary, there is a picture of Rick Perry.  Perry has received millions of dollars from Big Oil to push its pro-pollution, anti-science agenda:

So what does Perry do when a questioner points out that the National Academy of Sciences and observed data utterly disagree with his disinformation on climate change?   He simply asserts with no evidence that a “substantial number” of climate scientists have “manipulated data” for money, as TP Green reports.  Here’s the background and the video:

At the Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, NH, Perry was questioned by Jim Rubens, a former New Hampshire Republican legislator and technology investor, who noted that the National Academy of Sciences, which has advised presidents since its founding by Abraham Lincoln, has concluded that global warming is caused primarily by fossil fuels.“If observed scientific data and the National Academy of Sciences are both wrong on an issue involving thousands of scientists, and an issue as prominent as global warming,” Rubens asked, “doesn’t this call into question the entire science discovery process that forms the foundation of a hundred years of America’s technological preeminence?”
“You may have a point there,” Perry replied, arguing that “there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects”:

You may have a point there, because I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes our climate’s changed, they’ve been changing ever since the earth was born. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have in some cases found to be manipulating this information.
And the cost to the country and the world of implementing these anti-corbon programs is in the billions if not trillions of dollars at the end of the day. And I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money still on a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective, is being put more and more into question.

Watch video shot by ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron:

Global warming has indeed been politicized by the fossil-fuel industry and the tea party extremists — but the degree of politicization is unique to this country, which should tell you all you need to know about its source (see National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones”).
Anyone who knows actual scientists knows that they don’t do things for the money.  Indeed, it is quite safe to say very few become scientists if money is among the top things they are interested in.  In fact, virtually nothing is more important to a scientist than his or her professional reputation, which can be maintained only by doing research that can be reproduced by others.
It is understandable why Perry would project onto scientists the motivations of the pro-pollution politicians and lobbyists he hangs out with.   Virtually nothing is more important to them than money and the influence of its buys, which can be maintained only by making crap up.
It is understandable, perhaps, but not forgivable, since the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren and countless future generations –  billions of people — are at stake.

Political MoJo

 Ohio Gov. John Kasich: Hey Unions, Let's Make a Deal on My Bargaining Ban ByAndyKroll|WedAug. 17, 2011 1:39 PM PD

ProgressOhio/Flickr

     With the dust barely settled on Wisconsin's slate of summer recall elections, a backlash to Gov. Scott Walker's attack on union bargaining rights, Ohio Gov. John Kasich wants his state's unions to cut a deal on his anti-union bill, known as SB 5.

     Kasich asked union leaders on Wednesday to compromise with him on changes to SB 5 and back off a referendum on the bill scheduled for this fall. As the Columbus Dispatch reports, Kasich, one of the most unpopular governors in America, told labor unions to "set aside political agendas and past offenses" and cut a deal, a move he said would be in the "best interest of everyone, including public employee unions."

Unions rejected Kasich's olive branch. A spokeswoman for We Are Ohio, a group of labor unions spearheading the SB 5 referendum, said Republicans "can repeal the entire bill or join us in voting no on Nov. 8," adding, "We’re glad that Governor Kasich and the other politicians who passed SB 5 are finally admitting this is a flawed bill."
Here's more from the Dispatch:

The governor said the offer stems from him being a "believer in talking," and not out of "a fear we are going to lose." Kasich asked for a delegation of 10 public employee union leaders to talk Friday with state officials.
Fellow Republicans William G. Batchelder, Ohio House speaker from Medina, and Senate President Tom Niehaus of New Richmond, joined the governor at this afternoon’s press conference.

Confronted At Town Hall, Romney Falsely Claims Raising Payroll Tax Cap Wouldn’t Strengthen Social Security

By Travis Waldron on Aug 17, 2011 at 6:55 pm

ThinkProgress filed this report from Berlin, New Hampshire.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) was confronted at the Iowa State Fair last week for indicating that, as president, he would not support lifting the income cap on taxes used to finance Social Security (currently, income above $106,800 is exempt).
Romney was again asked about his plans today in New Hampshire, where a questioner asked him why he supported raising the retirement age instead of raising the payroll tax cap. Romney reiterated that raising the cap amounted to a tax increase he would not support, and falsely claimed that it wouldn’t “begin the solve the problem” facing Social Security’s long-term viability:

ROMNEY: What I want to do is make sure Social Security is there for your generation.
ATTENDEE: By raising the retirement age, though?
ROMNEY: There are two ways we could go, you can tell me your choice. One is we can keep Social Security –
ATTENDEE: Raise the cap.
ROMNEY: That doesn’t begin to solve the problem. [...] My guess is [people] are going to say, give me lower benefit growth but don’t raise my taxes.

Watch it:

Upon Romney’s proclamation that raising the cap on income taxed for Social Security purposes would not “begin to solve the problem,” the woman presented evidence backing up her claim, telling him that raising the cap would ensure the program’s solvency for at least 75 years. Romney responded, “I don’t agree with your numbers.” He then guessed that Americans would rather face benefit cuts than an increase in the amount of income taxed, despite poll numbers showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to benefit cuts.
But whether Romney agrees with the numbers is moot because the questioner’s evidence is correct. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, fully eliminating the cap without increasing benefits would create a long-term surplus for Social Security and would indeed ensure its solvency for at least 75 years. None of the other “solutions” Romney proposed — means testing benefits, changing the way benefits are calculated, or raising the retirement age — would strengthen the program so substantially without drastically cutting benefits.
Romney is, however, correct in one way: raising the cap on the amount of income taxed for Social Security purposes does not begin to solve the problem. Instead, it solves the problem altogether.

The Smooth Look of Corporatist, Secessionist and Racist

      Don't be fooled by the well manicured, every hair in place, smooth, slick look. It's the same thing we have to remind our sons and daughters. When looking for a mate they often look for the best looking person they can find. The problem is that a lot of the times is that person is all sight and no substance. The picture you're seeing now tells the same story.

     Mr. Perry has called Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and public education unconstitutional. And no doubt, he  he probably agrees with Mitt Romney that corporations are people, too. There's nothing more that the corporations would like better than to add the money from these programs to their profit margins.Cutting education programs and hiking college tuitions are also a good way to ensure that the middle class continues to shrink, further dividing the "haves" from the "have nots". Which group do you think Mr. Perry will fall into? Which group will you fall into? 

     It was just over one year ago that he was speaking about the state of Texas seceding from the Union, which would be unconstitutional. But now he wants to be president of the same union that he wanted to secede from. Would he not fly around the country in Air Force 1 or the Presidential helicopter? Would he not move into the White House? Woyuld he just shut down government? Just exactly what is it that he's saying?

     In recent years, there have been many in the south who have refused to see the resurgence of racism in the south. Whether they want ot admit or not, it is true. It began to make a comeback during the Bush and Cheney campaign at the height of rhe Rush Limbaugh talk show era. Governor is affiliated with the neoconfederate group Sons Of Confederate Veterans of which some members are outright racists. Just listen to the hate filled and poisonous speech that comes out of his supposedly Christian mouth. Just because they disagree with him, he has called the president's patriotism into question and has not only suggested the fed chairman treacherous and treasonous but has suggested that some harm should come to him. Do these words match his Christian confession? I'm just sayin'.

      Some how that doesn't seem presidential to me. Remenber, all that glitters ain't gold. Look a little deeper at Gov. Rick than his boyish good looks and tailored suits. Oh! and by the way, what will he do with all those unlimited corporate $ millions that he is receiving. Atta boy, Rick!