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If Geithner and Summers as well as the refusal to audit the federal reserve does not prove there is no difference between republican and democratic members of congress I do not know what will.

We all seem to like our personal 3 reps in congress but seem to hate everyone else's.

We must start voting out the incumbents every election. At a minimum run someone against them in the primaries in order to remind them of who they work for.. As of now every congressman works for the corporations.

Can any of us say congress is representing the people in any aspect from the military to health care.
(When I read the military is buying rucksacks with their own money because the plastic govt issue does not get the job done (democratic rule and the military did not have the plating on their vehicles necessary to prevent bullets and many IEDs (republican rule)) and I doubt if anyone understands how the health-care bill will affect us. History proves that the majority of laws congress passes costs us more money. Personally I cannot think of any legislation ever passed that saved the regular Joe any money.

We all talk reform and congress only gives us lip service. Must be a great job.

Until we get
donations limited to congressional districts and no money from business or pacs

12 year limits on serving in congress

illegal for spouse to be a lobbyist

10 years after leaving congress before becoming a lobbyi

This would be a good place to startcleaning house and then to the House!

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In the last year alone, of the 535 members of congress:

36 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71 Cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21currently are defendants in lawsuits,

84 have been arrested for drunk driving

The same group of criminals that crank out
Hundreds of new laws each year
Designed to keep the rest of us in line.

To big to fail=big banks. To small to matter=Main street USA

The Problem with the Revolving Door - It Brought Us Too-Big-To-Fail

Submitted by Tiffiniy Cheng on December 29, 2009 - 09:55

Bailouts and political connections go hand in hand according to a just released academic study. The study, which was conducted by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan researchers, shows concretely that lobbying, campaign contributions, and the finance/federal government revolving door has helped the most damaging banks despite the dangers they pose to our economy.
In the age of the bailout, blaming the revolving door between corporate lobbying and politics is so obvious that it has become almost cliche. But the reason why it is one of the greatest handicaps to our political system is critically important. The revolving door turns "survival of the fittest" on its head by masking failure, propping up underperforming companies, and hiding inefficiencies in the markets. The new study  shows the extent to which political connections influenced how TARP bailout funds were paid out.
The researchers found that there was a 31% increase in the likelihood of receiving bailout funds at financial companies whose executives had served on the board of the Federal Reserve. Banks that had connections with members of Congress who serve on key finance committees were found to be 26% more likely to receive bailout funds than banks without those kinds of connections. It is the revolving door between lobbyists and politicians that undermine a fair and accurate system for determining healthy policy.
But the research hits just the tip of the iceberg. Zach Carter at The Nation recently reported on a much deeper case of how the revolving door shapes U.S. policy. Our "too-big-to-fail economy" was developed in large part by one of the country's current top bank regulators; someone who has major conflict of interest with the banks he is supposed to regulate, Carter reports. John Dugan is now chief regulator of the largest US banks at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In one of his former positions at the Treasury, he was a chief architect of the three most influential pillars of banking deregulation that have been blamed for causing the financial meltdown last year (hat tip The Big Picture). In 1991, Dugan published a 750-page book where he successfully pushed for policies allowing banks to operate in multiple states without additional regulatory oversight, to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act allowing safe commercial banks to merge with risky investment and insurance companies, and to allow corporations like General Electric and Sears to own banks.
"[Dugan's book] was unquestionably the blueprint for the major Clinton-era deregulation," says Arthur Wilmarth Jr., a longtime banking scholar at George Washington University Law School. "It was the first real recipe for too big to fail."
A few years after publishing his book, Dugan was out of government and in a new job as a lobbyist with the American Bankers Association working his political connections to help pass the financial deregulatations he described in his book. From his earlier years in government, he had enough pals in Congress and the Clinton administration to get many of his policies enacted. Now he's back playing the game from the government side as one of the country's chief regulators. Same guy, same mind, same mission; just working from the inside at the moment. Indeed, "as head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Dugan played a leading role in gutting the consumer protection system, allowing big banks to take outrageous risks on the predatory mortgages that led to millions of foreclosures," Carter reports.
The revolving door actively hurts our economy because it puts our country on a path of survival of the richest, most connected lobbyists with cover-ups of market inefficiencies and bad consumer products.  Dugan helped dangerous-for-the-consumer, highly-profitable-for-the-bank consumer products pop up throughout the 90's as subprime and adjusted rate loans.   The Ross researchers agree that "the effects of political ties on federal capital investment are strongest for companies with weaker fundamentals, lower liquidity and poorer performance — which suggests that political ties shift capital allocation towards underperforming institutions." When money determines political power, the political system itself encourages corporations to put profit and lobbying above developing consumer products people actually need.
Dugan's role in aiding the creation of too-big-to-fail banks was born out of industry.  Because Dugan has a highly influential political position, his weaving of politics and private interests which has spanned a career is problematic: "Over the course of nearly a quarter-century, Dugan has proved himself a staunch ally of the American financial elite as a Senate staffer (1985-89), a Treasury official (1989-93) and a lobbyist (1993-2005), building a career that culminated in 2005 when George W. Bush appointed him comptroller of the currency. When the financial system finally succumbed to its own excesses in September 2008, Dugan’s fingerprints were all over the economic wreckage, but almost nobody noticed." Dugan's work is exemplary of the phenomena of policy being determined by webs of influence.
To be fair, lobbying presents opportunities for busy politicians to learn about issues.  But, unfortunately the weaving of long tentacles in private and public sectors is a prerequisite to effective lobbying. Last week in DC, I met young career politicos who saw Capitol Hill jobs as a first stop on the road to high-paying lobbying jobs later on. Their political connections are golden resume nuggets. This complicated climb to the top is bearing down on policies we see today - President Obama made a campaign promise to keep out the lobbyists in his administration and failed, but the disheartening part is the bottom to top entrenchment of Citigroup executives and lobbyists and their work on financial reform policy.
At its inception, corporations were allowed to exist when they served the public's interest; the Supreme court ended that in the 1800-1900's . No longer bound by public duty, shareholders' returns have become a singular goal in the free market and politics race to the top  -  Congress seems to have understood less and less the impact these policies have on the economy at large.  The money and secret inner circle of influence in DC is unfair because it creates a snowball effect of making the powerful more powerful and policy less about policy. Thus lobbying and its powerful cousin, the revolving door serve to prop up companies that may be weak or have bad products, leading to an economy that is more likely than not to become fractured or in other words, too big to fail.

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WASHINGTON — As the health care debate moves to the floor of Congress, most of the serious proposals to fulfill President Obama’s original vow to curb costs have fallen victim to organized interests and parochial politics.

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Labor leaders and insurance and health industry executives joined President Obama as he discussed cost-cutting efforts in May.

A blog from The New York Times that tracks the health care debate as it unfolds.

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Obama Cites G.O.P. Officials in Call to Action on Bill (October 11, 2009)

Times Topics: Health Care Reform

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Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, says containing costs will be a priority as health care legislation advances.

And now the last two initiatives with real bite that are still in contention — a scaled-back “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans and a nonpartisan Medicare budget-cutting commission — are under furious assault.
Most economists’ favorite idea for slowing the growth of health care spending was ending the income tax exemption for employer-paid health insurance to make lower-cost plans more attractive. But that would hurt workers with big benefit plans, and a labor-union lobbying blitz helped kill that idea by the Fourth of July.
Lobbying by doctors, hospitals and other health care providers, meanwhile, dimmed the prospects of various proposals to cut into their incomes, including allowing government negotiation of Medicare drug prices and creating a government insurer with the muscle to lower fee payments.
“The lobbyists are winning,” said Representative Jim Cooper, a conservative Tennessee Democrat who teaches health policy.
Total health care costs in the last 20 years have doubled to about 16 percent of the economy, with no signs of tapering. Along with universal coverage, Mr. Obama has made controlling those costs a central pillar of his health care overhaul, calling the current course “unsustainable.” The effort is a pivotal test of his campaign promise to break the stranglehold of special interests.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Mr. Obama applauded the bill set for a vote next week in the Senate Finance Committee. “By attacking waste and fraud within the system,” he said, “it will slow the growth in health care costs, without adding a dime to our deficits.”
In an interview, Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director and the official most associated with the drive to cut costs, singled out the proposed Medicare commission and the “Cadillac tax” as evidence of progress. “A key priority now,” Mr. Orszag said, “is to make sure cost containment holds up as we move through the legislative process."
Neither element appears in any of the other four health care bills on Capitol Hill, and both face dug-in resistance in the House.
Although the bills contain other measures aimed at medical costs, most of the surviving ones do not antagonize any organized interest. Among them are voluntary efficiency measures like encouraging the coordination of medical records, disseminating information comparing the effectiveness of treatments and various pilot projects.
White House officials argue that in any case it is prudent to start with such tests, and that many could be expanded to more comprehensive programs. But their real impact is hard to gauge, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assigns them little weight. (The budget office credited the Finance Committee bill with reducing the federal deficit, but how much it will slow the growth of total public and private health spending is another question.)
The tax on gold-plated insurance plans is the last vestige of most economists’ favorite idea, eliminating the tax exemption for employer plans. The finance bill would impose a 40 percent excise tax on insurance plans that cost more than $8,000 a year for an individual or $21,000 for a family.
The bill has aroused the frantic opposition of labor and business lobbyists who appear to have found friends in the Capitol. On Wednesday, 157 House Democrats — a majority of the party — signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing the tax.
“It has no legs in the House,” said Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the health subcommittee of the tax-writing panel.
The proposed Medicare commission, aimed at providers instead of consumers, is becoming a case study in the political difficulty of reducing medical payments.
The commission was intended to side-step the interest-group pressure that often stymies Congress. Modeled after the nonpartisan commission for military base closings, it would present a roster of Medicare cuts that Congress could block only with legislation.
But along the way, the White House and the Senate Finance Committee have cut deals for political support with lobbyists that may circumscribe the cost cuts, potentially including the recommendations of the commission.
For example, the White House and the panel’s chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, reached an agreement with the drug industry for its companies to contribute a total of $80 billion — but no more — over 10 years in reductions to their government payments.
Many Democrats would like to see the government negotiate far lower prices for the Medicare drugs it buys. But drug industry lobbyists say — and the debate on the finance bill appears to confirm — that Mr. Baucus’s agreement to limit the industry’s costs excludes such price negotiations. Now the drug lobbyists are pushing to be sure the Medicare commission could not force negotiations either. The relevant text of the bill is still being written. (Page 2 of 2)
Some analysts contend that in other ways the drug industry deal could even encourage unnecessary spending on brand-name drugs. As part of its $80 billion, the industry would provide discounted drugs for certain Medicare patients who had previously been forced to pay for them until their bills reached a certain level. The deal will thus eliminate what had been an incentive to switch to cheaper generics. “It is market protection,” one drug company lobbyist said of the deal, speaking anonymously for fear of alienating the White House.

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A blog from The New York Times that tracks the health care debate as it unfolds.

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Top Discussions: The Public Option | Medicare and the Elderly | A Single-Payer System

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Obama Cites G.O.P. Officials in Call to Action on Bill (October 11, 2009)

Times Topics: Health Care Reform

Senate finance staff members counter that their bill encourages the use of generic drugs in other ways by waiving the first co-payment for patients who try them.
A parallel White House deal with hospital lobbyists is posing a more serious political problem for the Medicare commission. The White House and the Senate finance chairman agreed to limit the hospitals’ payment reductions to $155 billion over 10 years, and in this case they added a guarantee to the hospitals that for that 10-year period the proposed Medicare commission would not extract any more. (The hospitals are also gaining new income from the expansion of insurance.)
A Senate Democratic aide said the hospitals had already agreed to significant cuts and noted that 10 years was not very long. (White House officials previously disputed the hospital lobbyists’ account of the deal, but the Senate finance bill confirms it.)
Now other heath care interests, led by the powerful American Medical Association, are complaining that it is unfair to protect hospitals from the commission, especially since they are the biggest recipient of Medicare money.
“This presents a serious inequity,” the group said in a letter to Mr. Baucus. The association and others also complain that the commission could cut only provider payments, without authority over benefits or premiums.
Some Democratic lawmakers are upset, too. “To work, it has to look at the full picture,” Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, one of the commission’s principal sponsors, said in an e-mailed statement. “There can be no carve-outs for specific provider groups.”
Mr. Cooper, the Tennessee Democrat and another supporter, predicted the end of the commission. “This will start a race for the exits,” he said. “Every other provider group will say, why are you letting these guys out? Why should we have to participate?”
The House committee chairmen were already hostile to the commission as an unconstitutional intrusion on their budgetary powers. At a dinner with Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol Hill home of Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut a few months ago, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, practically “tackled Orszag” in a dispute over the commission, one lawmaker present said.
Mr. Waxman confirmed a “spirited” disagreement. When he learned last week about the hospital exemption, “it amazed me,” he said. “If they think Congress is too political to be involved in Medicare cuts, it seems rather political to have exempted the hospitals.”
A spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said she also opposed the commission.
How the measures fare in the final weeks of debate could determine how well the bill lives up to its original promise of curbing health care costs, said Dr. Mark B. McClellan, an administrator of Medicare and Medicaid in the Bush administration who is now tracking the legislation at the Brookings Institution.
“It is still up in the air,” Dr. McClellan said, adding, “I’d give them an A for effort, but there is a lot more they could do.”

WASHINGTON — The House ethics committee on Thursday expanded its investigation of Rep. Charles Rangel to include his belated financial disclosure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unreported assets and income.
The expansion only increases the political burden that the Ways and Means Committee chairman from Harlem places on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who refuses to make him step down from his post.
Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have said they would take no action while the ethics investigation of the New York Democrat is under way, but the inquiry has dragged on for a year and expanded several times while it pushes closer to the 2010 election year.
Republicans have forced House votes three times, the latest this week, on removing Rangel from his tax-writing position. While Democrats easily defeated each attempt, the issue has allowed Republicans to ridicule Pelosi's refrain that Democrats would drain the swamp of ethical misconduct that previously plagued Republicans.
The committee said it would now investigate whether Rangel broke House rules "with respect to all financial disclosure statements and all amendments filed in calendar year 2009" as required under the Ethics In Government Act.
The law requires annual financial reports filed by all members of Congress showing ranges of assets and income.
Rangel's revisions showed assets and income from 2002 through 2006 that should have been reported in those earlier years.
The committee also gave an accounting of its work so far.

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The House investigators have authorized nearly 150 subpoenas, interviewed some 34 witnesses and reviewed more than 12,000 pages of documents.
The committee has been concentrating on alleged financial improprieties and fundraising irregularities.
Among the most serious of Rangel's problems: the House's tax-writing chairman failed to pay all of his taxes, allowing Republicans to level charges that a tax scofflaw is writing tax legislation.
The unreported assets included a federal credit union account worth between $250,000 and $500,000; a Merrill Lynch account valued between $250,000 and $500,000; tens of thousands of dollars in municipal bonds and $30,000 to $100,000 in rent from a multifamily brownstone building in New York.
The ethics committee of five Democrats and five Republicans is also investigating whether Rangel and four other members of the Congressional Black Caucus violated gift rules and other standards of conduct with trips to the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.
It's looking at contributions of money or monetary pledges to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York and his use of official House stationery to solicit potential donors.
Other questions involve Rangel's acceptance and use of rent-stabilized apartments in New York from a Manhattan developer, and whether he received a sweetheart deal to finance his ownership interest in the Dominican resort.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/08/ethics-committee-expands_n_314342.html

WE are responsible for everything!
Why is it that our little blue planet, floating in the vastness of space, is constantly in the throws of conflict?

Two words. Selfishness and Greed.

We like to think of ourselves as superior to every other life-form on the earth yet we can't seem to achieve the most basic level of harmony that the natural world achieves without any effort at all. Every other life form on the planet lives according to basic instincts and awareness of a natural order that keeps things in perpetual balance. As far as we know, only we humans have the gift/curse of self-awareness that allows us to totally ignore our interconnectedness with everything around us in favor of isolated, selfish motivations.

Humans are selfish creatures. Even when we act in giving, seemingly unselfish ways it's often because we want to be liked, to be seen as a good person, which in itself is fundamentally selfish. Of course, many of us also have genuine unselfish moments. We can give of ourselves, our time, our resources without any expectation of getting something in return. If we're honest however, if those moments fail to be recognized and appreciated eventually they too end up being tainted by our desire to at least get a thank you every now and then. Even the best of human nature ends up wanting.

The point of this isn't so much to emphasize how flawed we are but to draw attention to how this fact of human nature has led to the situation we all find ourselves in with a government, military and corporations that are totally out of control. All of these institutions are comprised of people just like you and I. The infamous THEM is us. In order for our present situation to exist, it requires millions of people just like you and I to go along with it. It takes millions of us to ignore the enormous amount of fraud and corruption going on all around us all the time. The problem isn't just those who are making the big decisions. It's about whether or not you and I have to courage to face them down and stop turning a blind eye to all the things we know are wrong. Somehow, we have to speak up, organize with each other so we don't have to stand alone within companies, within the military, within the government. We have to stand up and resist or the downfall of our nation will not stop.
Never Ending Class Warfare
When speaking about the selfish side of human nature the group of people that have always been the biggest offenders are those we call "THE RICH." There are examples of rich people that have a moral compass. There are people who built their fortune by playing fair and treating their employees with respect, acknowledging they couldn't have achieved their success without them. This is not the group I'm talking about. The group I'm talking about gained their wealth and power through less than honorable means. They are called the Robber Barons, the ones that gave meaning to the word "railroaded." We all know who these people are and we all know they use their wealth and power to gain unfair advantage over everyone else. They never play fair.

We like to think we live in a country where we are free. Are we? Are we free? Think about it. How much control do we actually have over our own lives? Every single month we see our government grow larger and larger, imposing more and more rules, regulations and penalties for non-compliance. We love to think we live in a democracy, but when you look at our culture square in the face, what you see is mostly authoritarianism. The relatively small group of people making the big decisions about what direction our society takes have absolutely no interest in what any of us want, think or feel.

Whether we like it or not we live in an authoritarian world. Just about everyone seems to have more say over our lives than we do. Our nation was founded as an unrealized ideal. Benjamin Franklin once said they have given us a Republican form of government, which is ours if we can keep it. I think it's clear the ideal has never been realized. It's been a constant battle against those that feel they have a right to rule over the rest of us.

I believe most people do want to do the right thing, to treat people fairly, but I also see that many also fall prey to the dark side of human nature perhaps because we don't really seem to have much control over the shape of our lives. When we get a little power, a little say . . . well, we all know what can happen, especially in government positions.
Our Representatives are surrounded by the trappings of royalty. So why are we surprised that the climate in Washington corrupts everyone?
Check out this photo of Orrin Hatch and the late Ted Kennedy. Notice the room they are in. Notice the humble furnishings. Look familiar? This room is palatial, no different from a royal palace in Europe. The moment someone is elected to a seat in Congress, they enter the top five percent wage earners in the country. They now earn a whopping $174,000 a year, plus benefits and all those lovely perks that they typically get down the road. Members of Congress have ZERO incentive to change their ways. For most of them, everything is running exactly how they want it to run.

The ruling class, as they refer to themselves, created the climate in Washington to be just as it is. They clearly did not want to foster the sense that ordinary people were to rule this nation. I've often thought that we should turn the Capital building into a museum and make everyone work in regular offices like the rest of us and pay them a salary similar to what the rest of us live on. What the heck do members of Congress do to warrant the kind of pay they get. I guess the idea was if they get paid enough they would not be susceptible to bribes. Yeah, that worked out well, didn't it?

We're in the mess we're in for a great many reasons. Much of the social conditioning is by design but that doesn't mean we don't have some responsibility for it. We can still undo the mess we're in, but the first step is to face the fact that we've let this happen in the first place. Millions of us have spent decades keeping our mouth shut about all the crimes being committed in the places we work. We have watched it all happen and have done nothing about it.

Well, this is your chance to change all of it. We have to start somewhere so what better place than with a bunch of no good rotten criminals we call our representatives in Congress. If we all take a stand against them and make them pay a price for what they've done . . . "Well begun is half done!"