View previous stories
	The Best Congress the Banks Money Can Buy by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship Huffington Post USA   April, 2012   Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight"s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.   They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. Before you know it, what once was an attempt at genuine reform creeps back toward business as usual.   It"s happening right now with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act -- passed two years ago in the wake of our disastrous financial meltdown. Just last week, for example, both parties in the House overwhelmingly approved two bills that already would change Dodd-Frank"s rules on derivatives -- those convoluted trading deals recently described by the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as "the largest dark pool in our financial markets."   Especially vulnerable is a key provision of Dodd-Frank known as the Volcker Rule, so named by President Obama after the former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. It"s an attempt to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling your savings on the bank"s own, sometime risky investments. It will come as no surprise that the financial sector hates the Volcker Rule and is fighting back hard.   On March 26, Robert Schmidt and Phil Mattingly at Bloomberg News published an extensive account on the coordinated campaign being waged by the banking industry to persuade regulators to scale back reform. Headlined "Bank Lobby"s Onslaught Shifts Debate on Volcker Rule," their report chronicles the many ways in which banks are turning up the heat, enlisting the help of clients, customers, and other companies, among others.   "Some banks recommended consultants and law firms," they write, "... to help clients write letters arguing that the proposed language defines proprietary trading too broadly. Partnering with trade associations, the banks also commissioned studies, tested messages with focus groups, distributed talking points and set up a phone hotline for Capitol Hill staffers."   The banks found another ally in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest pro-business lobby in America, which helped put together a coalition of companies, including Boeing, DuPont, Caterpillar and Macy"s department stores.   In one instance, the banking behemoth Credit Suisse got an assist from a man named Robert Auwaerter, who oversees hundreds of billions as the fellow in charge of the fixed income group at Vanguard Group, a mutual fund company. He came to a briefing Credit Suisse held for three congressmen who belong to the New Democrats, a group of House members known "for their centrist and pro-business leanings."   Auwaerter led the 90-minute meeting and said the three Democrats "were really receptive to our comments." We"ll just bet. According to the Bloomberg News reporters, one of them, Joe Crowley of New York, "pushed back at one point, telling the group that he"d recently marched in a Lunar New Year parade in Queens with Thomas DiNapoli, the New York State Comptroller who oversees a state retirement fund of about $140 billion. Why wasn"t DiNapoli complaining about Volcker?   "The asset managers told Crowley they have a closer view of how the markets work than the pension funds that hire them. The proposed rule, they said, would slow bond trading, making it harder for them to execute their strategies. They predicted that would mean lower returns for funds like DiNapoli"s, as well as for 401(k) plans and individual investors. "Less than two weeks after the Credit Suisse visit, 26 New Democrats signed a letter to regulators noting that "millions of public school teachers, police officers and private employees depend on liquid markets and low transaction costs to retire with dignity and ease."   In other words, fellow members and regulators, lighten up on the Volcker Rule! A thick wallet helps, of course -- lobbyists for the financial sector spent nearly half a billion dollars last year. And the congressional newspaper The Hill reports, "Members of Congress pressuring regulators to go easy on the "Volcker Rule" received roughly four times as much on average in contributions from the financial industry than lawmakers pushing for a stronger rule since the 2010 election cycle, according to Public Citizen, a left-leaning group advocating for strict implementation.   "When it is all added up, opponents of a tough Volcker Rule received over 35 times as much from the financial industry -- $66.7 million -- than advocates for a strong stance, who received $1.9 million."   All of which makes it darkly amusing to read in the April 4 edition of the financial newspaper The American Banker that, in the words of Roger Beverage, president and CEO of the Oklahoma Bankers Association, "Congress isn"t afraid of bankers. They don"t think we"ll do anything to kick them out of office. We are trying to change that perception."   Which is why Beverage and his colleague are creating the industry"s first super PAC. They"re calling it -- we"re not making this up -- "Friends of Traditional Banking," a smokescreen of a sobriquet if we ever heard one, vaguely reminiscent of the Chicago mobsters in Billy Wilder"s Some Like It Hot who dub themselves "Friends of Italian Opera."   Matt Packard, the super PAC"s chairman, told The American Banker, "If someone says I am going to give your opponent $5,000 or $10,000, you might say, "Yea, okay." But if you say the bankers are going to put in $100,000 or $500,000 or $1 million into your opponent"s campaign, that starts to draw some attention." Don Childears, president and CEO of the Colorado Bankers Association chimed in, "It would be nice to sit on the sidelines or sit on our hands and say, "Oh we don"t get involved in that stuff," but that just means you get run over. We need to get more deeply involved as an industry in supporting friends and trying to replace enemies."   All of which demonstrates, as per Bloomberg News, "that four years after Wall Street helped cause the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, its lobby is regaining its power to blunt or deflect efforts to rein in the banks."   Nonetheless, just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on how a movement to challenge big banks at the local level has gained momentum around the country. Activists want to restructure Wall Street from the bottom up. As a result, the Los Angeles City Council is considering an ordinance that would gather foreclosure and other data on banks that do business with the city. Officials in Kansas, City, Missouri, passed a resolution directing the city manager to do business only with banks that are responsive to the community. And here in New York City, legislation is pending to require banks to reinvest in local neighborhoods if they want to hold city deposits. Similar actions are underway in other cities. Visit the related web page
	Manifesto for a Global Democracy by Mary Kaldor, Saskia Sassen, Lucio Levi & others openDemocracy   "We want to be citizens of the world and not its mere inhabitants." A group of leading intellectuals has composed a document arguing that deeper and more extensive forms of democracy are essential to cope with the demands of globalisation and its associated transformations of governance. The document is being launched in a series of international events that begin at the London School of Economics (LSE) on 27 June 2012. It is published here, followed by a list of the fourteen author-signatories (eight of whom are also openDemocracy authors).   Manifesto for a Global Democracy   Politics lags behind the facts. We live in an era of deep technological and economic change that has not been matched by a similar development of public institutions responsible for its regulation. The economy has been globalised but political institutions and democracy have not kept pace. In spite of their many peculiarities, differences and limitations, the protests that are growing all over the world show an increasing discontent with the decision-making system, the existing forms of political representation and their lack of capacity for defending common goods. They express a demand for more and better democracy.   Global welfare and security are under threat. The national and international order that emerged from the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall has not been able to manage the great advances in technology and productive systems for the benefit of all humanity. On the contrary, we are witnessing the emergence of regressive and destructive processes resulting from the economic and financial crisis, increased social inequalities, climate change and nuclear proliferation. These phenomena have already affected negatively the lives of billions of human beings, and their continuity and mutual reinforcement menace the peace of the world and threaten the survival of human civilisation.   Global crises require global solutions. Within a social universe determined by globalisation, the democratic capabilities of nation-states and international institutions are increasingly restricted by the development of powerful global processes, organisations and systems whose nature is not democratic. In recent years, the main national and international leaders of the world have been running behind global events. Their repeated failures show that occasional summits, intergovernmental treaties, international cooperation, the multilateral system and all the existing forms of global governance are insufficient. The globalisation of finance, production chains and communication systems, and the planetary power reached by destructive technologies, require the globalisation of the political institutions responsible for their regulation and control, and the global crises require coherent and effective global solutions. That’s why we call for the urgent creation of new global agencies specialised in sustainable, fair and stable development, disarmament and environmental protection, and the rapid implementation of forms of democratic global governance on all the issues that current intergovernmental summits are evidently incapable of solving.   We need to move forward to new, more extensive and deeper forms of democracy. The current model of technological-economic globalisation must give way to a new one which puts these processes at the service of a fairer, more peaceful and more humane world. We need a new paradigm of development which has to be sustainable on a global basis and which benefits the poorest of humanity. In order to avoid the deepening of global crises and to find viable solutions to the challenges posed by globalisation we must move forward to more extensive and deeper forms of democracy. The existing national-state organisations have to be part of a wider and much better coordinated structure, which involves democratic regional institutions on all the continents, the reform of the International Court of Justice, a fairer and more balanced International Criminal Court and a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as the embryo of a future World Parliament. Yet, this institutional change will not be successful if it only accrues from the actions of a self-appointed elite. On the contrary, it must come from a socio-political process open to all human beings, with the goal of a creating a participative global democracy.   Globalising democracy is the only way to democratise globalisation. Beyond our differences about the contents and appropriate methods to move towards a fairer and more stable world order, we the signatories share a strong commitment to the development of a global democracy. On behalf of Peace, Justice and Human Rights we do not want to be governed at the world level by those who have only been elected to do so at the national one, neither do we wish to be governed by international organisations which do not represent us adequately. That is why we work for the development of supranational political spaces and for regional, international and global institutions that live up to the challenges of the 21st century; institutions that express the different viewpoints and defend the common interests of the 7 billion people who shape humankind today.   We ask every human being to participate in the constitution of a global democracy. We share the appeal to "unite for global change" and for "real democracy" with the world social movements. Both postulates express the growing rejection of being governed by political and economic powers on which we have no influence. Autonomy and self-determination are not only valid at the local and national level. That’s why we champion the principle of the right to participate in the making of fundamental global decisions that directly affect our lives. We want to be citizens of the world and not its mere inhabitants. Therefore we demand not just a local and national democracy, but also a global democracy, and we commit to work for its development and call on all the political, intellectual and civil-society leaders of the world, all the democratic organisations, parties and movements, and all persons of democratic persuasion on the planet to actively participate in its constitution.   [signed]   Daniele Archibugi, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, David Held, Fernando Iglesias, Lucio Levi, Giacomo Marramao, George Monbiot, Heikki Patomäki, Mary Kaldor, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Vandana Shiva, Andy Strauss Visit the related web page
	View more stories