Understanding Government

Underwater homeowners facing foreclosure despite promises of federal aid disrupted a  meeting of Wells Fargo Bank shareholders in San Francisco yesterday, reports Aaron Glantz of The Bay Citizen.

Demonstrators called on the firm, a recipient of emergency taxpayer aid during the financial crisis, to institute a foreclosure moratorium. Eight were eventually arrested after refusing to leave the building. (more…)

California’s latest whipping boy, the state’s proposed High Speed Rail project, receives another lashing today from The Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walter, who’s aghast at what he sees as blatant political patronage behind the award of another major federal grant just before this month’s election.

Walter connects the dots between US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s announcement that about a quarter of the funding for 56 high speed rail projects around the nation will go to California’s initiative and that the very first segment will be constructed in a swing district represented by Democrat Jim Costa, which until the dust cleared was thought to be a pick-up for Republicans. (more…)

A report by The Sacramento Bee exposing up to $100 million worth of malfeasance and fraud within the California National Guard has prompted an investigation by the National Guard Bureau and a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice, writes writes the Bee‘s Charles Piller in a follow up story to a piece that ran Sunday. Apparently, monies meant to provide college funds and other rewards for combat veterans were treated as a private slush fund and doled out to guardsmen, many of them officers and recruiters, who never served in combat. (more…)

The Blagojevich scandal is being been turned into a placeholder for other anxieties in American politics.  The Republican Party, looking to distract itself and others from its November losses, calls the Blagojevich case a test of Barack Obama’s transparency pledges, though there seems to be very little reason to link Obama and Blagojevich even when they were both Illinois politicians.  Corporate interests working through the Center for Union Facts are tarring the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) with the Blagojevich brush, with the stated goal of discrediting SEIU and other unions’ push for easier union entry rules in the workplace (the so-called "card check" approach to unionizing).  And Blago appears to be enjoying being at the center of attention, even though he may end up in jail and even though he supposedly has a state to run.  At a time when America has so many national and global challenges to face, president-elect Obama and other national politicians should hove to John McCain’s sound advice and pull together to solve problems instead of paying too much attention to someone as disreputable as Blagojevich. -NH

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday that he did not retaliate against Philadelphia Housing Director Carl Greene. Yesterday’s Washington Post suggested otherwise, reporting on e-mails from high-ranking HUD officials that discussed Green’s possible punishment for not rewarding Jackson’s friend a vacant lot in downtown Philly. (more…)