Strange Signals From Bair and Warren
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Two recent financial reform developments jumped out at me for the cognitive dissonance they caused. First, the Senate released a proposal to create a resolution authority for large financial firms. Yves Smith had previously dismissed the idea as a boondoggle for several reasons, including this: “Investment banks were seen as normal enterprises, at risk of bankruptcy, before the meltdown, yet that did not prevent Bear, Lehman, and Merrill from getting themselves into trouble that ultimately proved fatal. And the leaders of these enterprises did not take meaningful financial hits…a lesson surely not lost on other bank CEOs.” In other words, the specter of a government euthanist will not scare anyone straight.
The Senate’s action was immediately preceded by Tim Geithner’s extravagant praise of the skill, foresight, wisdom and courage of Tim Geithner. His basic message was: at the most acute part of the crisis we pulled the economy back from the brink through bold, decisive action. If the timing of the bill and the braggadocio are not coincidence the message seems to be: We were lucky enough to have someone as great as Geithner at the helm this time, but we need legislation to make sure it gets taken care of next time (that the bill postulates a next time has not seemed to trouble many observers).
In Simon Johnson’s response he coins a phrase - “too big to save” - that I hope becomes part of the discourse:
In truth, “too big to fail” is not the worst thing we should fear – our financial institutions are now on their way to becoming “too big to save”. In 1929-30, even if the federal government had wanted to put in place a big fiscal stimulus, it could only have mounted something around 1 percent of GDP; the financial shock of that day was much bigger.Government had enough money to bail them out this time, but the ongoing consolidation of the financial sector combined with the increased risk taking that comes with implicit taxpayer guarantees means the next crisis will involve actors the government literally cannot save.
(On a related note, it seems entitlement (Social Security/Medicare) and military spending (which is ostensibly discretionary but functionally mandatory given our imperialistic nature) probably helped cushion the blow caused by the collapse of private sector spending. None of that was in place during the Depression and that had to have made it worse, no? In short, yay socialism!)
The conceptual flaws and inadequate scope of a resolution authority seem obvious enough that the remarks of Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairwoman Sheila Bair caught me off guard: “Ending too big to fail by creating an effective resolution regime that will apply to large financial institutions is the key to ensuring that we end the need for future bailouts.” I have a vague but favorable impression of Bair, based mostly on liking how she rightfully and openly antagonized Geithner last year. I may have overestimated her commitment to reform, or mistaken a salvo in a turf war for a willingness to stake out a politically unpopular position. Either way, her remarks brought me up short.
So did TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren. She has been a tireless champion for financial reform, as a quick review of her Huffington Post tag list shows. She always seems to be on the right side, and emphatically so. But on two separate occasions recently she has been agnostic on the location for the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).
In a HuffPo interview she said, “Where the agency sits on an organization chart is less important than its functional independence.” Then to Charlie Rose: “This is less about real estate and more about genuine independence.” (But in the same response acknowledged the Federal Reserve is “not interested” in regulating areas covered by the CFPA where it already has authority!)
The idea of “functional independence” seems plainly unrealistic. Real estate matters. Position on the org chart matters. If the CFPA is ultimately in Ben Bernanke’s chain of command - even only by a long, dotted diagonal line - it will inevitably reflect his priorities. Functional independence requires actual independence. I simply do not understand why Warren treats it so lightly, even if accompanied by the good things she mentions such as a separate funding source. It seems like a very Wall Street-friendly position to take from someone who has consistently prioritized Main Street.
These criticisms of Bair and Warren are not intended to be harsh, stinging rebukes. I think highly of both of them, and on the topics where I formed my good opinion of them I hope they succeed. But on these two issues it would be nice to hear at least a little elaboration from them.
Dan
Post a Comment
Email
PrintThis Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
The neocons may finally gone too far (via). There seems to be an actual backlash building against this latest smear. It’s kind of funny to observe what counts as “over the line” in Washington. Right wing lunatics have been casually impugning the patriotism of anyone who question their sadistic, authoritarian agenda for years. Why is this the straw that broke the camel’s back? Anyway, I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If it looks like people in the capital are finally figuring it out, better late than never.
Backlash is relative, of course. It isn’t hard to find voices on the right that approve of not just McCarthyite tactics but McCarthy himself. If you’ve only taken to heart one thing I’ve ever written, make it this: Some people are beyond the bounds of civilized discourse and their opinions need not be consulted. I don’t care about Dick Cheney’s opinions on anything unless they are expressed as part of a war crimes trial. His supporters don’t deserve space to provide to “balance” those opposed to war crimes. They should not be appearing on any respectable outlet, and in fact at this point any outlet that provides a forum to them is by definition not respectable.
Right wing extremism is sharply on the rise. Guess the Department of Homeland Security was right.
Kathryn Jean Lopez has the latest example of why it is impossible to parody the modern right. See this too. It’s as though they expect us to have complete amnesia about the Bush years. I just…really?
There’s always seemed to be tension between our military and our mercenaries, but this takes it to a whole new level. A few more incidents like that and even the fans of Pentagon socialism might have trouble justifying fat contracts.
Your tax dollars at work, brainwashing you.
Cynthia Kouril’s best stuff gets right to the heart of an issue and bristles with righteous indignation; this is a great example. She’s my favorite new blogger of the last year or so (I don’t know how long she’s been at it, but it seems relatively recent). She’s written about this before, and funny enough my take on it was “If Holder gets kneecapped on the KSM trial I hope he considers ‘resign in protest’ one of his options.”
Capone ended up getting nailed not for the crimes but for not paying the taxes on them. Maybe such secondary pitfalls will ensnare the banksters too (via). Also this from Yves:
the ability to get the markets to fall on cue when regulators are threatening to do things that are inconvenient has now become a critical source of power for the financial services industry.Remind you of anything?
Jack Balkin writes “we have developed polarized parliamentary-style parties in a constitutional system not designed for parliamentary government.” The implications are enormous.
Ben Smith is an asshole. He lavished attention on the ACORN story and wrote know-nothing pieces of anti-journalism like “The videos proved a rallying point for conservatives who had long accused the group of fomenting voting fraud.” Whether they were rallying around something legitimate is irrelevant; the fact of their rallying is politically interesting and therefore worthy of coverage. Then he wrote that this criticism was “more or less right”: “reporters, being used to tuning out charges against ACORN, were slow to realize that this was a time when the group’s opponents had the goods.” They had the goods! And when that same intrepid investigator was charged with a felony by rushing to his defense with “If true, that’s substantially less nefarious than trying to bug phones.” (“If true” I will christen the Smith Hedge, because the Asshole Hedge would be impolite.) He basically passes along wingnut talking points with a few weasel words thrown in for cover. And when it all blows up he passes along a block quote from another outlet with no additional commentary. Considering the unabashed cheerleading for O’Keefe, and the ACORN story in particular, you might think this would be a cause for a moment’s reflection. Not in the manic, ahistorical world of Ben Smith!
Another example of Smith’s deplorable work is how he rushed to give cover to the DOJ smear campaign by writing “the Justice Department’s choice right now to disclose a number, but not the name, of former detainee lawyers is a tempting target for the right.” Who cares if it’s a legitimate, or even ethical, tactic? Its temptingness renders it worthy of uncritically reporting on. God what a jerk.
Athenae had more on the ACORN story:
Maybe at this point we can finally start saying to ourselves that these Young Republican Activist Hotnesses live to engage in cheap douchebaggery and gotcha nonsense about nothing that will ever hurt a single soul. Maybe after they’ve been wrong about everything, over and over and over again, maybe after it’s been demonstrated that not a single one of their explosive iTeam reports has led to anything but their supporters having egg all over their faces, maybe after the benefit of the doubt has been extended time after time after time to these rich assholes and never to the people who are the targets of their frat-house antics, we can start to say you know, let’s try something else this time. Something fresh. Something new.
Let’s try assuming that the kind of people who would do this shit are full of crap from the start, and save ourselves the embarrassment later.
Great moments in journalism. This too, though it’s par for the course on Rupert Media (US edition). Here’s the latest on Rupert Media (UK edition).
We tend to speak of torture and indefinite detention as two different things. And it’s true that they’re notionally distinct. But imagine yourself placed into a cell for months or for years and abused, without anyone listening to your pleas to be brought before a judge and read the evidence against you, without any ability to contest or challenge what the interrogators tell you that you’ve done. And it drags on for years and years — just you and the guards and maybe the others imprisoned near you, the days counting down without anything changing. To have to find within you the remainder of your faith in something that will at least allow you to make sense of what has happened to you, if not actually set you free. That is, itself, torture.Eloquence, my friends.
It made me wonder, hearing these accounts: what if Jay Bybee or John Yoo or David Addington or John Rizzo or Jim Haynes or Alberto Gonzales or George Tenet or Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney or George Bush had to taste what this was like? The weight of the apparatus they created, bearing down upon them? It should, of course, never happen, because the most important thing in this world is justice, and justice is no less necessary for the iniquitous than it is for the good. But would any American experience this for himself or herself and not immediately see how plainly evil — evil — it is to subject someone to this treatment, no matter who they are or what they’ve done?
Pretty much any story with a headline starting “McCain, Lieberman team up” is guaranteed to make me feel queasy.
Surveillance state expands. Oh, and that war we’re in? No, the other one. Yeah. You don’t need to know what’s happening.
Blogger Mickey Kaus is an abysmal reporter whose idea of journalism is grounded in passing along gossip, rumors and allegations based on their deliciousness and not their credibility. A couple years ago Matt Yglesias noted this method as it was practiced with the John Edwards affair story. (Yglesias’ archives on The Atlantic appear to be gone, but there is a cross post here.) Using the Kaus standard of rigor, one commenter wrote (still in Google cache as of today here) “Hey, you know what I hear, Mickey Kaus likes to fuck goats.” Thus an Internet meme was born, and Kaus’ rumored proclivities became the stuff of legend.
The fact that the story that spawned the goat rumor turned out to be true is irrelevant for reasons Kathy elaborated on here. Kaus traffics in rumors, which means not that he will never be right, just that he typically will not be - to destructive effect. A detailed list can be found here.
Anyway, this week Avedon alerted me that he took out papers for a possible Senate run, and recommended the comment section. It included gems such as “It’s interesting that Mickey hasn’t knocked down the goat-blowing allegations yet. Not that I believe them. But the fact that he’s been silent for so long on this issue is very curious.” and (this one made me laugh till I had tears in my eyes) “Kaus has a massive Get Out The Goat operation.” Oh Internet how I love you so.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Jon Swift, may he rest in peace. Via.
Though it is very magnanimous of Vitter to accept responsibility for his transgressions, is he really to blame? After the Hollywood left redefined marriage, it must have been a very difficult and confusing time for him. The failure of the passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment must have taken a severe toll on him as he struggled to figure out what marriage really is if even gays can do it. As he grappled with the issue, is it any surprise that he found solace in the embrace of a disinterested paid companion?
The Shocking Solution to Senate Obstructionism
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
mathematical demonstration of the validity of a law concerning all the positive integers by proving that it holds for the integer 1 and that if it holds for an arbitrarily chosen positive integer k, it must hold for the integer k + 1Senate reform is a hot topic. David Waldman has two great posts this week, one on the filibuster crazy GOP and another on the use of anonymous holds. The second explains how proposed reforms are basically meaningless PR because anonymous holds are already not permitted. So at least some delaying tactics can be stopped, but they still go on. Here is why: Senators like the filibuster. Democrats like it. Republicans like it. Senators have a downright regal sense of self regard. They may be frustrated by particular instances of obstruction, and individual Senators may seem like sensible folks with low maintenance egos, but get them inside the building and all of a sudden it’s the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body and the Cooling Saucer* where comity is worshipped.
As I have written, it is all vanity. It gives them endless opportunities to flatter each other, cater to each other’s tender feelings and delicate sense of decorum, and generally act like a bunch of insufferable snots - consequences be damned. As a bonus, there is always the chance that your number will come up on some issue and suddenly you have the leadership or (be still my heart) an entire caucus falling all over themselves to fawn over you. Who doesn’t like getting lots of special attention?
Even assuming Senate Democrats wanted to stop the stalling, there is another obstacle: timidity. They are terrified of unpleasantness. Anything that provokes a temper tantrum on the right causes them to spring in to action to placate the GOP. The noise is simply intolerable. They do not care if they do the right thing, they just want it to stop. Which is what leads them to vote to defund ACORN over a fraud or condemn rhetoric by liberals that has been gleefully used by conservatives. They just want quiet.
They are as bad on substance. As Dan Froomkin put it, “[Rahm] Emanuel is a Bush Democrat - but not in that he has learned the lesson about the value of holding firmly to core values. He is a Bush Democrat in that he has allowed Republicans to traumatize him into submission.” On national security, civil rights, torture, you name it: They are terrified of being characterized as weak, and unwilling to challenge what “weak” really is.
With those enormous caveats in mind, here is how they could overcome Republican defiance. First, identify an ordinary nominee. Pat Leahy’s office helpfully published just such a list, so let’s start at the top: Barbara Milano Keenan. I had not heard her name before, nor I suspect have most people.
Next, begin the confirmation process - and put all other business on hold until it passes. (This would cause the mother of all hissy fits, which I am sure would be intolerable to Senate Democrats’ fragile nerves, but let me dream, OK?) Make them do an actual filibuster on it. Here is Jonathan Bernstein (via) on why it will not work: “it is true that if the minority couldn’t keep forty-one Senators on board that they could be defeated. However, that seems highly unlikely in general[.]” I disagree, particularly as it dragged on. Seeing day after day of a whole parade of Republicans collaborating to prevent the confirmation of Barbara Milano Keenan - whom most Americans would not know if they woke up in bed with - would cause an increasingly widespread reaction to set in: “What the hell is wrong with them?”
If Democrats could muster the courage (again, I know, dream) to stare them down, Republicans would take an absolutely massive hit in public opinion. When a vote finally happened they could either vote as a bloc, reinforcing the bad reputation, or vote to approve and look like hypocrites.
That is step one. Once Keenan was confirmed, go to the next name on the list. Rinse and repeat until the list is cleared. Then move on to more prominent nominees, like Dawn Johnsen for OLC. If they obstruct, more bad PR: “Why will they allow a vote on Barbara Milano Keenan but not on Dawn Johnsen? Johnsen is eminently qualified etc. etc.” Keep moving up the ladder until the big issues like health care, financial reform and jobs bills are on the plate. At that point they will have enough of a track record to not be able to claim principle for any kind of roadblock. Either they engage or they further cement their reputation for corrosive cynicism.
To repeat: This is all predicated on the idea that Senate Democrats want to challenge delaying tactics and possess the backbone to see a confrontation through. The point is that they have the tools at their disposal right now. Anyone who talks about additional reforms as a solution is just blowing smoke.
* For some reason CNN decided to use black text on black background, so highlight all the text to read it. Back to post.
Al Weisel, (aka Jon Swift), 1963 - 2010
Al Weisel blogged as Jon Swift. He was a regular read for me, and his dry faux-conservative persona was flawlessly done. He hadn’t posted in almost a year, but I thought he just sort of went off the grid as bloggers sometimes do. He was co-originator of Blogroll Amnesty Day, where bloggers “link down” to less trafficked sites. It was (and is) a great concept and showed a generosity towards other bloggers that I, as a resident of a lightly traveled section of this territory, really appreciated.
Here is a great example of his blogging style, and here is his last Blogroll Amnesty Day. And it’s hard to miss the unintentional foreshadowing in his final post.
More:
- Tom Watson
- skippy the bush kangaroo
- D. Aristophanes
- Diary of a Heretic
- blue girl
- Melissa McEwan
- jurassicpork
- James Wolcott
- John Cole
I didn’t know him and don’t have any personal stories to relate. I just knew him as a witty, original and perceptive voice on the Internet. He will be missed. My deepest condolences to his survivors.
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Searchable versions of the OPR report and related documents are available here. They are primary sources for items like this.
Andrew Sullivan on torture. I can’t tell you how much I admire his sustained focus on the issue.
Seeing as how we can’t properly manage our hired guns it makes sense that we should stop using them altogether. This seems to be especially true considering that barring perpetual service in a war zone they will eventually come back to the good ol’ US of A to live among us civilians with whatever awesome new equipment and social mores they’ve acquired. But obviously that directly conflicts with the project to outsource our wars entirely, which I suspect is and will continue to be a higher priority.
Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing Muslims. The Editors:
you shouldn’t kill people who haven’t done anything to you, because it isn’t nice. It’s considered bad manners, under most circumstances, which is why, in our day-to-day lives, most of us go out of our way to avoid “collaterally damaging” those around us, to the point of almost never firing Hellfire missiles anywhere there is even a remote chance of incinerating a baby. If one does happen to kill, say, 27 people one Sunday evening, one can expect to have to answer some fairly pointed questions, at least. Now, we are at war, and the longer it lasts the more it consumes us, but perhaps we could at least retain some small connection to our fellow humans and acknowledge that this was a mistake made by someone in uniform, but this mistake was made possible by deliberate policy. It doesn’t have to be a big song and dance, just something like “today we killed so-and-so, which we didn’t mean to do, but we did risk killing innocent civilians with our actions, which we feel is justified because so-and-so. We think it is worth killing civilians for this reason.” Acknowledgement, owning responsibility, that’s all.UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman on the same theme, different jubject:
I tend to feel that public diplomacy divorced from substantive policy decisions is transparent, condescending, credibility-destroying bullshit.
Speaking of The Editors, this is one of those issues where Republicans inadvertently make themselves useful (see this too (via)). Eric Holder seems to be trying to finesse his way through this long enough for attention to turn elsewhere.
Pat Leahy talked tough. Which does not inspire a whole lot of confidence. He did manage to swing into action on one issue though.
One of the links in the previous item is a 2007 story on the CIA torture tapes. That issue has not died down. As long as we don’t have clarity on war crimes issues like this will keep popping up. They won’t go away, and the sooner our leaders figure out there is no escaping history’s judgment on this the better.
Remember back to last April - less than a year ago - when conservative outlets were breathlessly reporting on the Department of Homeland Security’s warning about a rise in “rightwing extremist activity” that induced a spontaneous ragegasm on the right? Me neither.
Jennifer Hardy (née Koester) was part of the torture gang. Jennifer Koester. Commit to memory.
There’s a campaign to disbar the torture lawyers: “The Disbar Torture Lawyers campaign, which is part of a consortium that boasts over 120 transparency and watchdog groups, is now working to disbar Bybee and others complicit in advocating illegal interrogation methods.” I wish them great success.
Poland confirmed as black site location: “Warsaw air control service confirms that at least six CIA flights landed at disused military air base in northern Poland in 2003.”
Congressional Democrats are shameful cowards on terrorism. You know how one of conservatives’ big fears is that the left will run against George Bush for the next generation? One of mine is that Democrats in Congress will be in a state of suspended animation circa 2005 for the next generation:
Democratic leadership in the House was in disarray last night after having to withdraw the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, moments before it was to have been voted upon, as the result of a controversial anti-torture provision.
The amendment was added in the House Rules Committee late on Wednesday and had not previously been vetted in committee. It would have criminalized the most extreme forms of “enhanced interrogation” and provided stiff sentences for intelligence officers or medical professions who engaged in them.
Republican opposition caused the Democrats to attempt to remove the provision from the bill on Thursday by a unanimous consent agreement. When the Republicans refused to go along, the Democratic leadership was forced to pull the bill entirely.
Yves Smith on the latest news from the financial sector:
The point of this exercise was to show that the Fed’s secrecy claim was bogus. The argument was that it needed to keep this information secret to protect Maiden Lane III’s positions from “traders” to maximize value. But if non-traders, with access to neither a Bloomberg data service or specialized databases that show CDO collateral, could put this much together from public information, clearly traders could go even further. Thus it was clear that it was the public, not the trading community, who was the real object of the secrecy campaign.On a happier note, Massachusetts eyes a public option bank. As the state was a harbinger on health care, may it be one on financial reform.
Michael Isikoff’s article is worth a read if you haven’t seen it yet. The latest evidence on how the White House cooked the books on intelligence, in this case with torture. It’s really amazing to me that we can now report a former vice president lied in order to justify torture and it is greeted in DC with a sense of ennui. Nothing’s shocking.
There are a lot of people out there who believe that our sorry state of affairs is caused by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and, if they’re really deluded, they’ll add “and on the left, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann”. I know plenty of people who say things like this.
The truth is, it’s more the fault of Charlie Rose and Tom Friedman and David Brooks. Glenn Beck didn’t get us into Iraq.
Let it not be said that wingnuts never get off a good funny.
That’s Jeb fucking Bush casting doubts on other people’s intelligence. I’m fully aware that he’s supposed to be the smart one of the elder Bush’s brood, but that’s something akin to claiming Larry is the dignified one of The Three Stooges in my book.Of course, Bush skepticism didn’t bloom on the right until he was safely out of office and eligible for purging. A little bit of this from conservatives while W. was actually taking the wrecking ball to America would have been helpful, but that ain’t how they roll. The author comes out swinging in defense of the latest unassailable darling, and will continue to do so until she becomes politically unviable, at which point she will be erased from history - except for the infrequent occasions when she is held up to ridicule.
In sports news, the Canadian women’s hockey team celebrated their gold medal victory with cigars and booze on the ice, then had to apologize and now the International Olympic Committee is investigating. Unbelievable. I’m an American and don’t think it was the slightest bit disrespectful. It may have been a once in a lifetime achievement and they had every right to live it up. They weren’t doing it in front of the other team, talking trash or otherwise being disrespectful, they were just spending a little extra time basking in the afterglow. It takes a pretty ungenerous spirit to begrudge them that. You win, you celebrate; that’s how it works. As for the underage drinking, how about this for a rule of thumb: On days when you win an Olympic gold medal the drinking age is suspended.
And by the way, the pictures at the link are completely charming.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE digby:
Little Randian Paulites almost always turn into Big Business Wingnuts once they start making a paycheck, at which point their concerns about “corporatism” tend to morph into concerns about government spending money on people who aren’t wonderful producers like they are.
BONUS I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Adam Serwer (via):
The Senate is holding a hearing today where several current and former Blackwater employees will be testifying, but honestly the only way Congress would stop giving Blackwater money is if it started registering black people to vote.
The Many Deficiencies of the OPR Report
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on its ethics investigation for torture-approving lawyers has already generated some remarkable reactions. One of the few defenses came from former deputy counsel to George W. Bush Bill Burck and Bush’s former press secretary Dana Perino; it is an amazingly weak effort. For instance, they cite the counsel of one of the lawyers under investigation as an analyst, quote her defense of her client, and conclude she is “someone whose credentials and experience as a top-flight lawyer cannot be seriously doubted.” To which I can only respond, clownish is as clownish does.
They only address the issues in the report peripherally: “What makes this whole affair even more pointless is that OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] itself withdrew or superseded the relevant opinions of Yoo and Bybee during the Bush years.” That is, the fact that alleged lawbreaking ceased before the investigation obviates the need of it. Once wrongdoing stops there is no reason to pursue it; instead we need to move on and look forward. (Remember when conservatives used to accuse liberals of moral relativism?) They never try to address the central point though - what responsibility do the authors bear for helping construct our torture bureaucracy?
The closest they come is in citing former OLC head Jack Goldsmith - who withdrew the memos - as believing that “none of the interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, violated U.S. law. He also believed that Yoo had come to his views honestly and did not merely use them as a cover to justify torture.” That is simply obfuscation. The whole issue can be summed up as follows: Is waterboarding torture? (Yes.) Did the US waterboard? (Yes.) Is the US a signatory to the Convention Against Torture? (Yes.) Does the Convention require that any credible allegations of torture - even one time, even against an avowed enemy of the state, even against evil incarnate - be investigated? (Yes.)
The fact that Goldsmith believes waterboarding is not torture is irrelevant. Waterboarding is torture. There is abundant case law supporting that. Yoo could not honestly have come to another belief because it would have required willful ignorance of precedent. That seems to be the route Yoo actually took, but rather than exonerating him it only makes him more culpable. Yet even that is largely irrelevant; it might matter when it comes to establishing intent, but that only goes so far. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, which you can verify yourself if you’ve ever tried to talk your way out of a speeding ticket.
It is simply astounding that this is the best defense torture apologists can come up with: launch substance-free character attacks against the other side, insist any action amounts to criminalizing political differences, call for impunity in the name of looking forward and claim the kids really meant well. It is basically an entirely insubstantial response.
A wide variety of commentators have pointed out crippling deficiencies in the report. First, an in-house investigation should not inspire confidence even under the best circumstances. In the immortal words of Willem Buiter, self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance. On those lines, bmaz posted several links about the author and concluded: “It seems David Margolis has his own institutional interests that present an appearance of conflict with his duties to protect the public from malevolent lawyering by DOJ attorneys, especially high ranking ones.”
Jack Balkin wrote that this cozy review was done according to a standard that would only have found fault under almost impossibly extreme circumstances. (He followed up with this as well.) Scott Horton noted that redactions in the report were “made to protect political figures at the White House and CIA, and potentially other agencies, from embarrassment” instead of from national security concerns (and it partially failed there too). David Cole, correctly predicting the exoneration in the report a couple of weeks ago, contrasted its characterization of the torture lawyers as having used “poor judgment” with the more reasonable treatment of their actions as war crimes by a Spanish judge.
The report is simply a mess. It was constructed under terrible conditions using a compromised process by a professional whitewasher. That is not an accident; there is an irreconcilable tension between those inside the DC establishment and those outside it. Many in the Beltway’s political and media elite stand to look very bad, if not criminally liable, for America’s barbaric treatment of detainees. It is obvious they want the issue to just go away. The OPR report is the latest example of something that could have started to chip away at the stonewalling, but failed. Instead it just slapped a few more bricks into place.
Getting Beyond Regulation (Ritholtz Feedback)
Barry Ritholtz emailed about my quote of him on Thursday’s post [emph. his]:
You wrote:In short, regulation has a spotty track record lately. Economist Barry Ritholtz acknowledged that and pointed to a new approach when he wrote a recent proposal “would not have prevented this crisis, but it would reduce taxpayer exposure to Wall Street speculation.” Since regulation depends on human intervention, it would be good to have a simple mechanism that reduced the public’s exposure to abuse.Allow me to clarify what I wrote, as I think you may be misinterpreting my perspective somewhat:
The Volcker rule would not have prevented the current crisis; rather, it addresses new taxpayer risks created by the bailouts. Under the Volcker rule, the firms that engage in leveraged speculation should no longer expect Uncle Sam being there to backstop them.
Hence, you must choose: Either you have a proprietary trading desk, or you are a depository bank that benefits from FDIC insurance. Just not both.
As to the actual causes of the crisis, you could (and should) read Bailout Nation, but the short version is here.
My response:
I think the ease with which Goldman became a bank holding company implies that in a crisis it would still be able to extract some kind of backstop protection from the government. Moreover, a full reinstatement of Glass-Steagall (which is how I understand the thrust of the Volcker rule) wouldn’t help in the brave new world of CDO’s, CDS’s, high frequency trading, and other novel developments. Even as (mere) regulation it doesn’t strike me as addressing the current environment very effectively.
The bigger point is that I’ve come to see regulation as a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. Wall Street firms seem almost destined to have the advantage in looking for ever more complex and creative ways to get around whatever rules they can’t neutralize and regulators they can’t capture. The best structure can’t guard against being starved of resources or gorged with cronies and incompetents.
The idea of a public option bank or a CFPA in addition to regulation is appealing because they make no attempt to enforce any kind of good conduct by Wall Street. The former bypasses the system completely and as George Washington wrote about the latter:
Remember, credit default swaps didn’t bring down the economy because they are toxic while all other financial vehicles are pure as the driven snow. CDS brought down the economy because they were the choice du jour of the looters.
If we outlaw CDS (which I have argued for in the past), then the looters would create some other instrument for looting.What I was trying to get at is that in the current environment proposals for new regulation like Volcker are (relatively speaking) small ball because they play into a system the financial system has already demonstrated it can manipulate. By all means do them, but do them after the non-regulatory changes. I think those are the changes that will best insulate taxpayers from risky behavior by Goldman et. al.
And his:
I appreciate the response and clarification.There was a very specific run of actions that incubated, fed and accelerated the crisis
Some of these changes caused the crisis, others made it much worse.
- Start with ultra low rates (which caused bond managers to scramble for yield),
- Permit Ratings Agencies to “sell” their AAA rating to Wall St investment houses
- Do not regulate, the non-bank, lend-to-securitize subprime mortgage lenders
- Completely exempt derivatives from normal scrutiny, disclosure and reserve requirements (making them unique when compared with every other financial instrument, thanks to the CFMA),
- Allow massive leverage of investment houses far beyond historical net cap rules,
- Put into effect Federal Pre-emption rules that prevent states from enforcing their anti-predatory lending rules.
- Allow banks to marry WallStreet thanks to the repeal of Glass Steagall,
Note that all of this took place during a 30 year period where the dominant economic beliefs were:
- deregulation was always a good practive;
- markets know better;
- Big firms can regulate themselves
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
I hate to sound like a broken record, but Dick Cheney is shameless and is eager to be publicly guilty. He has made his life an open, defiant challenge to the US government. Does anyone have the courage to take him down, and unleash the inevitable whirlwind? Or does the entire DC establishment prefer to live in quiet, peaceful acquiescence? Those are the only options at this point. Cheney wants to cast as wide a net of complicity as possible; he wants not just his White House implicated but future ones. Not just the White House, but the executive branch. Not just the executive branch but the legislative and judicial branches as well. He wants as much company as possible so he does not go down as a singular villain. It is working, and will continue as long as our leaders prefer to put their immediate comfort over their obligations. Andrew Sullivan:
Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.What price ease?
On the same topic, it’s extremely important to keep in mind that the instruments of torture are being wielded throughout the government. And it’s all the worse because we know better. It is not a matter of an out of control president authorizing some cheap thugs to engage in sadism through secret, out of channel directives. It is about the creation of a torture apparatus by the executive branch, the promotion of it by the legislative and the allowing of it by the judicial. It can fairly be said: This is America.
The Friday night news dump was a big one this time. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers announced hearings in response, which on the face of it is not terribly encouraging. Conyers is an ornery bastard, though (and I write that with great affection) so it’s possible something may come of it.
Cheney is even crazier than many of us suspected, by the way.
Sullivan also had an amazing article on the complicity of the Catholic church in torture. Try to make the time if you haven’t read it yet. This too. He was a busy guy this week.
Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing Muslims.
Cynthia Kouril linked to the Hobbs Act (along with the useful exhortation “read the link, trust me”). Excerpt:
While the definition of extortion under the Hobbs Act with regard to force, violence or fear requires the obtaining of property from another with his consent induced by these means, the under color of official right provision does not require that the public official take steps to induce the extortionate payment: It can be said that “the coercive element is provided by the public office itself.”The Bush administration continually and forcefully used legalistic arguments to justify its criminality. The actual laws on the books are pretty expansive, though. The Hobbs Act doesn’t really allow for loopholes and doesn’t even require for the corrupt official to have direct control over the object of the crime. Sufficient proximity to it is good enough. Language like that in the Hobbs Act is basically a formalized way to cover the stuff that doesn’t pass the sniff test. We’ve become accustomed to requiring a smoking gun for high officials to be held accountable, but the existing standard is much lower.
This is the kind of thing I don’t follow as closely as I should, probably because I feel sufficiently occupied trying to keep track of America’s wrongdoing to focus on other countries. It is a fascinating story though.
Matt Taibbi’s latest, with caveats from lambert and Yves.
I usually avoid the rapid back and forth that happens with hot topics but this from William Jacobson struck me as somewhat dishonest:
TP [Think Progress] then suggested that readers watch the video. But anyone who actually watched the video would realize that TP’s presentation was a complete distortion and TP’s characterization of what Brown said was misleading. The video is below, here is the relevant portion of what Brown said:Relating it at all to anything going on in Washington amounts to treating it lightly. Brown is attempting to gain political advantage by doing so, and short of making a joke about it I don’t see how he could have treated it more lightly. He explicitly says it is about people wanting transparency, accountability, and to “talk about the things affecting their daily lives.” How on earth is that not an appeal to populist anger?Well It’s certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being effected by it. And I don’t know if its related but I can just sense not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things affecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better.Brown then went on about the issue of whether “populist rage” caused the attackYou don’t know anything about the individual, he could have had other issues. Certainly no one likes paying taxes, obviously, but the way we’re trying to deal with things and have been in the past at least until I got here is, there’s such a log jam in Washington, and people want us to do better, they want us to help solve the problems that are affecting Americans in a very real way….There was nothing Brown said which treated the attack lightly, or connected the attack to Tea Party or populist anger. In fact, Brown said just the opposite and his tone was one of concern.
Jacobson also wrote of Brown’s tone being one of concern. Have Republicans treated terrorism with “concern” the last eight years? No, they have treated it with pants-wetting lunatic raving. How does Jacobson not make the obvious point that the right has treated this terrorist attack in an unrecognizably different way?
For his benefit, and Brown’s, any anyone else’s who has trouble grasping what an appropriately serious response to this is, here is an example: “The madman who perpetrated this crime, who I will not do the honor of naming, has no right to have his opinions become part of public debate. We resolve our differences peacefully in America, not with violence. Anyone who resorts to violence, or the threat of it, as a means to affect public discourse is wholly discredited. We do not dignify them by permitting them to exert influence. They are beyond the pale, outside the bounds of civilization and are to be ostracized by people of good will everywhere. His wretched thinking will be buried with his body and under no circumstances should be used to prop up any argument. While his beliefs may in some cases have been shared by many who do not also share his barbaric nature, they must find ways to persuade the public of them without resorting to brutality.” TP was right and Jacobson was wrong. Brown treated it lightly and tried to politicize it. The right rallied around him. This tells you all you need to know about how seriously conservatives really take terrorism.
Carter watch, part 3. Previously.
Just imagine if the president had been this smart, dedicated and vigilant on terrorism in 2002.
I have a problem with this:
One big reason that the economy stabilized last summer and fall is the stimulus; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that without the stimulus, growth would have been anywhere from 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points lower in the third quarter of 2009. The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it’s largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, “By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth,” adding that she didn’t expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011. That prediction has since been echoed, more or less, by the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs.Goldman Sachs is a key player in the current economic crisis. Its leaders are assholes and scumbags. No one anywhere should be citing its research or analysis for any reason, because doing so will have the effect of legitimizing it. Goldman is not legitimate. It is a wholly corrupt and malevolent enterprise. If we can’t get a proper investigation of it at least we could stop referring to it in polite company.
Sunday funny: I found this comment to be wholly hilarious. (Original post.)
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE DougJ:
Movie-goers are pickier about the believability of movies than pundits are about the believability of politicians’ claims.
Getting Beyond Regulation
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
UPDATED BELOW
The theory on how to best protect the public from private sector wrongdoing consists basically of regulation. From the Federal Reserve Act nearly a century ago to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the Depression to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, we have largely trusted that a federal authority could effectively monitor, and if necessary punish, businesses.
Regulation’s limitations became too obvious to deny during the Bush years. The EPA, not exactly a pit bull to begin with, became almost totally, laughably ineffective (via). To be fair, environmental protection has been derided by conservatives as business unfriendly, myopic, job killing do-gooderism run amok for decades. It is not surprising that the agency had trouble getting the widespread support needed to sustain real vigilance. Also, compared to some of its sister agencies the EPA was a paragon of rectitude.
Even under the best circumstances regulation is destined to be under perpetual assault from those who would benefit from its absence. If you look, for instance, at the way Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (which incidentally is an anagram for “a cad churning smog slop”) installed a revolving door between its boardroom and Washington, it becomes unsurprising that regulation of it has ceased (here is this week’s scandal).
The neutering of regulatory bodies may paradoxically cause those in them to have a positively exalted view of themselves. For example, here is Simon Johnson’s mild take on Goldman’s latest: “If the Federal Reserve were an effective supervisor, it would have the political will sufficient to determine that Goldman Sachs has not been acting in accordance with its banking license. But any meaningful action from this direction seems unlikely.” Contrast that with Minneapolis Fed President Narayana R. Kocherlakota’s almost messianic view of the Fed:
My theme here is that this improvement in our economic situation is attributable in large part to actions taken by the Federal Reserve. I will emphasize that the Federal Reserve was only able to undertake these actions because of the expertise and information it had acquired as a supervisor of the nation’s banks. My conclusion is that stripping the Federal Reserve of its supervisory role would needlessly put a Great Depression on the menu of possibilities for our country.
(He appears, by the way, to be another inflation crusader. Look at the last two paragraphs of page six for a truly bizarre scenario on the dangers of inflation. I particularly like the line “Suppose that households believe prices will rise.”)
In short, regulation has a spotty track record lately. Economist Barry Ritholtz acknowledged that and pointed to a new approach when he wrote a recent proposal “would not have prevented this crisis, but it would reduce taxpayer exposure to Wall Street speculation.” Since regulation depends on human intervention, it would be good to have a simple mechanism that reduced the public’s exposure to abuse.
Think about the surprisingly durable support for a public health insurance option. It bypasses regulation completely. It says to the industry: do what you want, charge what you want, chart your own course - we will not interfere; we’ll just be over here with our own operation that folks can pick if they want. Those who wish to reduce their exposure to the wonders of laissez faire capitalism can sign up. The rest can go with you. What rugged individualist could possibly object? (The main objection to it - that it would undercut the private sector and drive it out of business - raises the obvious question: then what value is the industry providing?)
Similarly, Brent Budowsky recently called for a “public option bank” that would offer a small menu of simple, ordinary services for those who prefer not to take their chances with Citibank or Bank of America. It would not impact the private sector in the slightest - no new taxes, regulations or hoops to jump through. It would just provide an alternative to those who wanted reduced exposure. Those with a taste for swashbuckling capitalism can throw in with Wall Street, those who prefer less excitement can have it.
The “quarantined risk” model will not work for everything. You cannot very well have a government protected patch of the environment and let industry turn the rest into a Superfund site, for example. It does mark the emergence of a new possibility, though, and one that would be an excellent hedge against failed regulation. If it keeps getting traction look for even its most innocuous expressions to be ferociously opposed, because it will represent not just a change in policy or political alignment, but a change in the way we think.
UPDATE: Ritholtz responds.
Under The Weather
I’m on day 3 of some nasty bug, so I’ve only been skimming the headlines (and wouldn’t have the energy even if inspiration struck). Bleh.
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Declan McCullagh reported on the efforts to give law enforcement agencies direct access to ISP traffic. At the end of the article the Cato Institute throws in the towel and admits it doesn’t give a damn about individual liberty. I try to link to right-leaning civil libertarians on my blogroll (Cato was until this morning), but they seem susceptible to putting political considerations above principles. Stuff like this makes them look like frauds.
Cato is off my blogroll, but Marcy and Glenn showed why they’re pretty well cemented onto it at the moment.
A nice note of caution from Steve Benen, but I’d just like to point out Jonathan Alter is not a liberal. He blows with the capitol winds.
You know, Barack Obama has taken steps to close Guantánamo, real ones not symbolic. Here is another one. The fact that Congressional Democrats have still not found a way to stand up to the lily livered, pabulum puking, namby pamby, pants wetting conniptions on the right hasn’t made this task any easier. You’d think it would be pretty easy to defeat the GOP’s dedicated commitment to weakness. You’d be wrong.
Eric Holder cited the previous administration to push back on Republican fearmongering. Reflect on the following: Conservatives have succeeded in making George Bush look enlightened on civil rights. The beast is loosed.
I try to avoid long excerpts, but this (via) from Corey Pein of the Santa Fe Reporter is hard to do justice to in brief. It’s a long article on Samuel Bowles, the head of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute and an economist whose theories ought to turn the conventional wisdom on its head.
Zero describes the ultimate level playing field, a nonexistent land in which everyone has all the same stuff. A completely unequal society, in which one person has sole control of literally everything, would have a Gini of 100. New Mexico’s Gini score (45.7) reveals this state is more unequal than most. Utah is the most egalitarian state (with a 41.3 Gini), while the District of Columbia (53.7) is the most economically polarized, according to the most recent Census report, from 2006.The whole piece is that good.
The second figure, 23, is the Gini for Sweden, the world’s most egalitarian country. Whereas most of Europe, Canada and Australia have Ginis in the low 30s, the US has over the past several decades developed inequalities usually found only in poor countries with autocratic governments.
So what? Isn’t inequality merely the price of America being No. 1?
“That’s almost certainly false,” Bowles tells SFR. “Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it’s sand in the wheels.”
[snip]
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. - Mark Twain
James Wolcott had a sublime take on the neocons: “Feeding fiery coals and nameless corpses into their gaping jaws is an endless, inexhaustible task.”
Two longer pieces from later in the week that I’ll be getting to shortly. Jane Mayer on the KSM trial, and Marcy has a first take on it. Then Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story look at Goldman’s relationship with AIG, and Yves Smith and Tom Adams point to the missing actors: the Fed and the Treasury.
How obstruction works: “When there’s a 94-2 vote, it tells us that this was a fine nominee, who shouldn’t have had to wait nine months for an up-or-down vote.”
Pete Hoekstra: Still crazy. If he wins this November he will be the Detroit Lions of governors.
Spencer Ackerman has some details on why cutting military spending is necessary, and why it will be so hard.
Privacy and Security are Complimentary. This is the kind of thing civil libertarians could really make hay with. And liberals could really get some traction with this (via): “If we want more globalization, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty. Pretending that we can have all three simultaneously leaves us in an unstable no-man’s land.”
Finally, LarryE pushes back on Greenwald (emph. in orig.):
We can and we damn well should find that corporations do not have rights of free speech even as we may well want to (and should) say they have rights of due process. If the concern is about the effect of limitations on advocacy groups, we can treat non-profits differently from for-profits (including saying that for-profits can’t set up non-profits to evade the restrictions). The point is, we can choose.Principle versus discernment. I’m still trying to untangle that particular knot.
To suggest otherwise, to suggest corporations, by definition, either must have all the Constitutional rights of people or they can have no rights at all, that our only choice is between allowing huge corporations to spend untold amounts of cash in support of political candidates and having the ACLU, labor unions, and the Ma-and-Pa store down the street be at constant risk of being crushed under the heel of jack-booted FBI agents, Is. Utter. Pathetic. Nonsense.
I forgot to link to this last week. Your Sunday funny.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Matt Yglesias: “I congratulate Shelby on fully exploring the logic of the modern United States Senate.”
Living In The Age Of The Exploit
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
One of my favorite blog posts is L33T Justice by Kung Fu Monkey. Aside from being very funny and concisely getting at an important truth, it seems to represent a tipping point - one that mirrored my own. Prior to that things had been bad; we were lied into a war of aggression that was being planned well before 9/11, intelligence agencies engaged in 4th Amendment-destroying activities that major journalists appeared committed to reporting incorrectly, and of course we had already set up our modern gulags.
It seemed to me the country was frightened enough to disregard Benjamin Franklin’s warning for a while. As a fallback explanation I was prepared to believe we were simply a more bellicose and primitive culture than I had previously thought. By 2005 there was plenty of evidence that America had decided to make all its decisions with the lizard brain. I hadn’t made my peace with this prospect, mind you, but seeing your country willingly hand the reins to those committed to fearmongering and militarism has a way of blunting the sense of righteous indignation.
That is why when the Democrats took back Congress in 2006 relatively minor episodes like the Libby commutation and Gonzales’ deliberately obtuse testimony were more infuriating than the horrors that came before. There was finally a sense that yes, as a country we went crazy for a while but we were finally getting our bearings. It was happening too late for too many, but it was happening. What the summer of Scooter and Fredo showed was: No, it is not and it will not. Revelations began to trickle out, the first verdicts were finally coming in, and it became unmistakably clear that some of our leaders were criminals who were audacious enough to defiantly live publicly guilty lives. Among the rest of our leadership, there was a critical mass that was too cowardly to do anything about it.
That has been the situation for several years now. For the foreseeable future our government appears content to simply ignore the great crimes plainly in its midst. There is no sense of urgency, significant new developments are not acknowledged, and the plan seems to be to resolutely ignore all of it lest some turbulence disturb the ruling class. For those of us who care deeply about these issues it seems the best reaction now is not angry demands for real investigations and real consequences (outrage is difficult to sustain), but placid, ongoing documentation of the atrocities in order to have as complete a record as possible.
All of this is my somewhat awkward attempt to explain my reaction to Scott Horton’s report on detainee deaths at Guantánamo. It alleges war crimes that go all the way to the White House, it has been out for several weeks now, and continues to be developed. Yet there are no investigations, no hearings, nothing. We just postulate that our leaders did it, refuse to talk or do anything about it, and move on.
The problem is that such a corrosively cynical approach to governance causes foundational damage, and typically it is not recognized until the whole thing collapses. No one thinks anything will come of it, but nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse either. In fact, a vignette from that period comes to mind; I recall seeing video of this as reported by the New York Times:
The next day [Romanian leader Nicolae] Ceausescu himself in effect brought the revolt to Bucharest, when a crowd of 100,000 he had summoned to denounce the Timisoara revolt suddenly took up a chant of ”Timisoara! Timisoara!” The last televised image was Ceausescu’s shocked face shouting ”Be quiet!” That moment, all agree, finished him.
The investigations on Iraq in Britain and Guantánamo torture in Spain seem remote and of little interest right now. The erosion of credibility and good will that they symbolize is easy to ignore as well. In fact, the whole thing is. If anything comes of all that, however, we will be oblivious to it - carrying on as if nothing will change until the moment we, like a clueless dictator, look on uncomprehendingly as our world turns upside down.
That probably will not come to pass, though. The odds favor stagnation. I used to think it was a matter of getting the word out, making enough noise, keeping the issues alive and waiting for our political and media elite to finally catch on. Horton’s reporting, and the radio silence greeting it, puts the lie to that. We can - and must - continue to catalog these evils, but out of respect for the historical record and not any expectation that those responsible will be called to account. It’s L33T Justice, baby, and everyone gets a pass.
BlogRoll Amnesty Day
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Bruce Schneier writes, “In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts.” The bargaining away of our civil liberties in the name of keeping us Safe From Terrorists and Protecting The Children needs to be looked at in light of news like this. Leaders have been attempting (successfully) to exploit our fears in order to seize more power for themselves. It is not surprising, nor are unintended consequences like the Chinese hack of Google. Could we all be grownups and acknowledge this deal with the devil?
Fearmongering is still very popular though. Senators Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Robert Bennett and John Ensign are still strongly in favor of it. According to ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero they “are essentially calling for Obama administration officials to discard the Constitution when a terrorist suspect is apprehended – as if the Constitution should be applied on a case by case basis.” It truly boggles my mind that our lawmakers have such contempt for due process. I guess for some of them the body can’t turn into the Roman Senate fast enough.
A tissue of lies. Surprised? It served its purpose though - it got us to embrace torture as official policy. The actual truth is a historical footnote, a bit of trivia with no importance or impact.
Speaking of the utility of relentless delaying, my newborn son will be a grandfather before we find out what happened to David Kelly.
Obama administration not terribly fired up about transparency:
Meredith Fuchs, an open-records expert and general counsel at the nonprofit National Security Archive, said she has seen improvement in the amount of material some agencies provide. But in cases her group has taken to court, “it’s more of a mixed bag” with the Obama administration. She suspects that the administration reflexively defends decisions made years earlier to withhold records.So the arc from presumed openness to bureaucratic stonewalling is 370 days.
I don’t like this. It’s not illegal or even strictly unethical, but it’s got a bad whiff about it.
Tim Geithner claims that while he was head of the New York Federal Reserve he was unaware it wanted to smother details about the AIG bailout, and the efforts to hide them were treated “like a request to protect matters of national security.” Either he is lying or he is not capable of heading any large agency.
This Week In Speculation:
- The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility may be releasing its long awaited report soon, and it looks like it might be a whitewash.
- The KSM trial might not be held in New York City after all.
“The administration is in a tricky political and legal position,” Julie Menin, a lawyer who is chairwoman of the 50-member Community Board 1 that represents Lower Manhattan, including the federal courthouse and ground zero, said of President Obama and his Justice Department. “But it means shutting down our financial district. It could cost $1 billion. It’s absolutely crazy.”
9/11 shut down the financial district too, and cost considerably more than $1 billion. Trials should be held near the scene of the crime, even if it means inconveniencing the most important and irreplaceable people in world history. Notice too the absence of an alternative site mentioned. The Post has an idea though! - If Jonathan Turley and Glenn Greenwald are OK with the Citizens United ruling then I can’t get too worked up about it. Who knows what the long term implications will be, but it already seems like there’s plenty of soft money in national politics as it is - and media corporations were already exempt anyway. I would like to note, though, that once again the barnstorming umpires went way out of their way to find a game to call.
I wonder if anyone in Washington is paying attention to this:
UN human rights experts warned on Wednesday that “widespread and systematic” secret detention of terror suspects could pave the way for charges of crimes against humanity.It will probably come as a completely unexpected shock when an international body starts issuing arrest warrants for American politicians. But we aren’t obeying our own laws, or the international conventions we approved, or the treaties we signed. On these issues we are a lawless state. No one can imagine Bush or Obama in the Hague, but no one could imagine the collapse of the Soviet Union either.
The American government has a list of its citizens it wishes to murder. That’s probably not a great moment in human rights either.
Hmmmm. This is not a prank, folks. It’s a crime.
I’ve always bristled at the Post’s insistence* that its news and opinion sections are “wholly separate and independent operations.” They aren’t, really. They can’t be truly separate as long as they report to the same people — and, ultimately, they do.I’m increasingly less persuaded by the opinion/news dichotomy, for reasons best illustrated by a comedian (via). News organizations are news organizations. They have a point of view, and it shows not just on the Op-Ed page or in prime time. It shows up in what they decide is news, what is worthy of going above the fold, what gets relegated to the back pages, and what doesn’t get covered at all. It shows up in how often they cover a story - if they run something one time and leave it, or if they breathlessly splutter out in loving detail every new development. The largely neoconservative opinion pages and increasingly shoddy reporting are not independent phenomena, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.
[snip]
* And that of other newspapers, though the Post seems to make this claim more often than most, perhaps owing to the generally poor quality of its opinion pages.
CARTER WATCH, PARTS I AND II: I’ve been seeing rumblings lately from conservatives about Democrats using the tired old playbook of running against George W. Bush. But Republicans are celebrating thirty years of running against Jimmy Carter (he must have been the most powerful president ever!), so I’ve decided to note their ongoing obsession with the man as a reality check for their “don’t blame W!” theme. This, by the way, is not an exhaustive catalog; it starts with new developments and will not dig back for previous ones. That said, I would like to note how the right attempted to blame the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act for the economic meltdown, which is a truly superb bit of historical revisionism.
The first two installments of the Carter Watch come from Mona Charen and Mike Pence.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE watertiger:
It’s not every ophidian, carpetbagging politician who can apologize to a group of potential constituents by insulting them. Besides, I’m sure some of your best friends areFord’s candidacy has been a source of endless amusement. I hope he gets crushed in the primary, then decides to run for Senate somewhere else. He is a comically inept politician.JewsbankersNew Yorkers.
In the short time since Ford decided to take a territorial piss on this political tree (as a proxy for his BFFs on Wall Street), we New Yorkers have come to delight in the special kind of tone deaf gaffe-a-liciousness from the Joe Lieberman wannabe from Tennessee.
Thomas Hoenig Will Save Us All!
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
NOTE: Shortly before I finished this post Ben Bernanke was confirmed by the Senate for a second term as Fed chairman. I’m posting this anyway because I think it was a terrible decision that will only look worse with time, and maybe if we are lucky he will not serve his full term - in which case the post is relevant again. Stranger things have happened; you never know.
In December I made the case for Kansas City Fed chairman Thomas Hoenig to succeed Ben Bernanke. It was a mostly speculative post based on Bernanke’s less-than-inspiring Senate appearance and scattered rumblings among activists. Scott Brown’s surprising victory last week appears to have been a “come to Jesus” moment for Washington Democrats, though, and now the astounding unpopularity of Wall Street has made everyone a populist.
The Obama administration is issuing cool assurances that Bernanke will sail through, but opposition has grown. If nothing else, rejecting him would imply a small measure of responsibility. During his tenure he presided over the popping of a huge speculative bubble, the economy went into a tailspin, and conditions remain terrible. People want a scalp, and they want a senior one - not some low level schmuck who was left holding the bag and didn’t have the savvy to cover his tracks.
The tepid support for Bernanke outlined in my previous post has remained lukewarm. Paul Krugman favors it “only because rejecting him could make the Fed’s policies worse,” and after laying out his case concludes it is “not a ringing endorsement, but it’s the best I can do.” He then writes the following, which sums up the corrosive and unworkable conventional wisdom that seems to have set in on even liberal economists: “If Mr. Bernanke is reappointed, he and his colleagues need to realize that what they consider a policy success is actually a policy failure.”
It is hard to imagine a more depressing formulation. He calls for reappointment and then admonishes Bernanke to change course, which gets it exactly backwards. The onus is on Bernanke to admit his policy was a disaster prior to being reappointed. It is pure madness to send the architect back to his post based on the hope, supported by no evidence whatsoever, that he will change course. If Bernanke had gone before Congress, frankly admitted his failure, and outlined what aggressive steps he was planning to correct them if he were fortunate enough to win another term, that might be a different matter. (Might.)
He did no such thing though, and the sensible conclusion is that firmly intends more of the same. We would be better off with not just another nominee but one with another economic philosophy entirely. (The soundness of doing so was further endorsed in the form of egregious dumbass Tim Geithner’s dire warnings against it.)
For those who care about this issue, it is extremely important to get some other names out there immediately. MIT professor of economics Simon Johnson recommends Hoenig. In his Bernanke piece Krugman mentions San Francisco Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen, as has the economics blog Calculated Risk. She may well be a fine candidate, even better than Hoenig, but I heard her name floated just this week. Since I have not had time to familiarize myself with her I will restate the case for Hoenig.
First, the caveats. Hoenig, like Bernanke, privileges inflation over employment. There is no reason to think he would substantially depart from the current fantastically exaggerated fear of it. He could regard the current double digit unemployment rate as undesirable but inevitable. Moreover, he sees inflation in an undifferentiated way; in a 2005 speech on it he noted “businesses may face higher labor cost pressures, and depending on competitive conditions, these costs may increasingly be passed on to consumers.” That such higher labor cost pressures translate into a better standard of living for the labor in question, a situation once known as “The American Dream,” does not seem to matter.
That same speech utters not a word about real estate. It would have been nice to know he was at least aware of that massive time bomb as it ticked towards detonation.
These drawbacks may actually make him a better nominee, though. Last year’s speech “Too Big Has Failed” outlines an attitude towards large financial institutions that twenty years ago would have been unexciting, boilerplate economic conservatism, but now has a revolutionary ring to it. That may be about as sharp a break as the capitol can handle. Maybe it would be more acceptable if accompanied with a dose of familiar, soothing DC orthodoxy and washed down with a cup of Wrong On Housing Too.
There are probably many nominees who would serve the country well. I first became acquainted with Hoenig because of “Too Big Has Failed” and have tried to learn more about him since. People whose judgment I greatly respect like Yellen as a first choice, so she would probably be great too. There does not need to be unanimity on a successor, just that it not be another victim of cognitive regulatory capture.
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
I keep waiting for some official word on Scott Horton’s blockbuster exposé on detainee deaths in Guantánamo. In the mean time here are two observations on media coverage of this bombshell story. First, Yves Smith:
Anyone familiar with the cognitive bias literature will recognize that the differences in the two renditions (AP US versus AP Canada) make a great deal of difference in their plausibility. Starting as the first one does, with a question, suggests that either rendition might be equally valid. But accounts that provide detail are consistently found in laboratory studies to be seen as more likely than those that are sketchy (the conjunction fallacy, for instance). The limited detail of the first version makes it seem less plausible, while the second (which includes a key element, that the purported “black site” was denied to exist) would be much more likely to be accepted as true.Then Andrew Sullivan:
The premise of both Thiessen and Yoo is that what was authorized was not torture, and that Gitmo is the best of the best facilities for the worst of the worst prisoners. But the possible deaths-by-torture in Gitmo - which explode their lies and spin - do not rate even a mention.
The Office of Legal Counsel is still being used to retroactively legalize criminality. There’s been a decent amount of pushback on the left from people who think some liberals are wrongly and simplistically claiming there is no difference between Bush and Obama. There definitely is a difference (see last item for one particularly substantial one), but this is one of those cases where it really is true.
So the FBI was “simply persuading” telecom companies with a “stream of urgent requests” for their records. The obvious threat behind such requests makes a mockery of the word persuasion, especially considering “Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.” When the government approaches a company and tells it that it is their patriotic duty to break the law in order to prevent the wholesale slaughter of citizens, there is no more persuasion involved than there is for the casting couch. It is intimidation in an unequal power relationship; it is coercion.
Happily, the Post notes the FBI is “confident that the safeguards enacted in 2007 have ended the problems.” Once more, with feeling: It’s time to look forward and not criminalize political differences. Nothing to see here, everything’s been cleaned up, move along folks. Oh, and one more thing: “Among those whose phone records were searched improperly were journalists for The Washington Post and the New York Times, according to interviews with government officials.” Think the Post would have reported it the same way if it was done to some poor anonymous schmuck in the middle of nowhere? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it got the coverage it did, but I suspect the subtext of the article isn’t so much “look at what they did!” as “look at what they did TO US!”
Glenn had a great post about the selective outrage towards government spying on citizens. Then later in the week Hillary Clinton gave a speech that included the following criticism:
In the last year, we’ve seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet. In Vietnam, access to popular social networking sites has suddenly disappeared. And last Friday in Egypt, 30 bloggers and activists were detained. One member of this group, Bassem Samir - who is thankfully no longer in prison - is with us today. So while it is clear that the spread of these technologies is transforming our world, it is still unclear how that transformation will affect the human rights and welfare of much of the world’s population.In China’s state-run Global Times an editorial pushed back:
The free flow of information is an universal value treasured in all nations, including China, but the US government’s ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.Part of Clinton’s message was basically, “we are doing fine; here is what you people need to do.” Considering our own issues with government collecting information and spying on its citizens, it all might have gone over better if she had instead focused on our own issues. Saying that we can do what we want, but others have to do what we say, can certainly be interpreted as imperialism. What say we get our own house in order before we start calling out others, OK?
China’s real stake in the “free flow of information” is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism.
If the government secretly and illegally spies on you, you have standing to sue. But because it is secret, you are not aware you have standing. If you want to find out if you have standing by filing a lawsuit, the suit will be thrown out because you cannot prove you have standing. A nice, tight circle.
Ron Paul had some interesting thoughts on our military and intelligence services. His willingness to take on entrenched powers gets him a lot of good will in my book.
Cynthia Kouril reported on “a direct attack on the prosecutorial independence of DOJ and a direct attack” on Attorney General Eric Holder. The real news is that this attack came from the legislative branch and not the executive. If Holder gets kneecapped on the KSM trial I hope he considers “resign in protest” one of his options.
Weeks before Tuesday’s election debacle Brent Budowsky told (via) Democrats to get their act together. His message is even truer now. Nate Silver brilliantly diagnosed leadership as “nonchalant in good times and panicky in bad ones.”
If I’m ever thinking of picking a fight with Marcy Wheeler I hope someone who loves and cares about me talks me out of it.
On Thursday Barack Obama fired Donald Rumsfeld. Yves Smith’s take: “Obama Plans to Talk Even Tougher”
Last week I forgot to excerpt this from page 156 of Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis: “The Global Posture Review is a purely military analysis of where the United States might like to have military bases in light of possible future wars, including those we might start.”
Lots of leftover links from the election in Massachusetts. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer:
Nobody in this House believes this next election is a slam dunk, which means they’re out raising money, they’re out in their districts - working hard, communicating on jobs and getting the economy moving.Note that raising money and communicating about jobs are the things that come to his mind, as opposed to creating jobs and getting effective policies in place. (And before you say the House is doing fine but the Senate is the bottleneck, voters won’t make such fine distinctions at election time. Either the Democrats - as a whole - succeed, or they fail.)
Here is Coakley Pollster Celinda Lake:
If Scott Brown wins tonight he’ll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it. And right now they think they’ve got economic policies for Washington that are delivering more for banks than Main Street.Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, making the case for single payer:
It is grossly over budget and causing the state severe fiscal problems. In short, Massachusetts voters know the shortcomings of government health care.Drew Westen:
The White House just couldn’t seem to “get” that the American people could see that they were constantly coming down on the side of the same bankers who were foreclosing people’s homes and shutting off the credit to small business owners, when they should have been helping the people whose homes were being foreclosed and the small businesses that were trying to stay afloat because of the recklessness of banks that were now starving them.Then there is the perpetually ignorant Evan Bayh:
The only we are able to govern successfully in this country is by liberals and progressives making common cause with independents and moderates. Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country - that’s not going to work too well. [How have the left elements imposed their will? Seriously. Name one thing.]Followed by the intermittently ignorant Barney Frank (via): “our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened.”
Jon Walker:
If Democrats can’t run on their record of passing legislation that makes positive change in people’s lives, they will suffer terribly in 2010.Which is what makes this so ridiculous:
Hoyer and other Democrats point out that they passed a jobs bill late in the year, pushed through a sweeping energy bill — with a controversial cap-and-trade measure — and helped pass a crackdown on credit card companies.Unemployment is still over 10%, the energy bill is a long-term project that has no immediate benefit (and is possibly dying of neglect in the Senate anyway. Memo to Democrats: Don’t brag on legislation you’ve authored that is not yet the law of the land), and the credit card reform is nice but nothing compared to the mortgage crisis which you’ve done nothing about.
Spencer Ackerman animates a legislator:
DEMOCRATIC SENATORFictional, tragically.
Are you motherfucking kidding me? The issue isn’t Guantanamo Bay! It’s indefinite detention without trial! It’s torture! It’s the betrayal of the Constitution! You could put the fucking facility in the middle of a Thai whorehouse and as long as it doesn’t provide its inmates with access to the courts I’ll oppose it! You could have Reed Richards of the motherfucking Fantastic Four open a portal to the Negative Zone, put the thing there and I’ll oppose it!
Goldman under investigation for its securities dealings. Stay tuned.
I will leave you on an extremely positive note: The Iraq war is quietly winding down. Full credit to Obama for that.
Is a Tea Party Dynamic Growing on the Left?
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Most of the blame in Martha Coakley’s defeat Tuesday is on her. She had a series of blunders, some of which were such a ridiculous caricature of liberal elitism it makes me wonder if she was a GOP double agent. So: That point, first and most importantly. She ran a terrible campaign and gets the lion’s share of the blame.
There were also undoubtedly statewide issues that we will only know about anecdotally, if at all. For example, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers wrote of Bay State Democrats: “Twice they have fiddled with the election laws in the past five years…to control the process.” That kind of screwing around brings to mind Tom DeLay’s escapades in Texas, and to everyone but partisans such scheming looks plainly corrupt. Another factor may have been gender; so far women are zero for eight in gubernatorial and Senate races there. Presumably it is not a coincidence.
Still, it would be crazy for Democrats to not see some larger warning signs. For one, Barack Obama needs to freshen up his stump speech. He now has a track record, and the populist rhetoric of the 2008 campaign trail is not wearing too well. I listen to his speeches now and contradictory hyperlinks pop into my head. For example:
You know, we always knew that change was going to be hard…there were going to be some who stood on the sidelines, who were protectors of the big banks, and protectors of the big insurance companies, protectors of the big drug companies, who would say, you know what, we can take advantage of this crisis — because it’s going to be so bad, even though we helped initiate these policies, there’s going to be a sleight of hand here because we’re going to let Democrats take responsibility.
Does he not realize that people will increasingly call bullshit on such obvious discrepancies? Is he not aware it will discourage his base, because that is precisely the audience paying the closest attention? Coakley ran a lousy campaign. Know what helps make for a good one? A record to run on, a way to appeal to people’s aspirations and a reasonable expectation that what is being promised on the hustings will be delivered. Coakley was in no position to do any of that.
After his election Obama had energetic supporters champing at the bit to have their idealism harnessed; he continually stoked it during the campaign and they truly were fired up and ready to go. Since then he has made back room deals with the very industries that have been systematically looting the middle class. On health care why was he not constantly banging the drum for the reforms he considered most important, giving speeches in the backyards of recalcitrant lawmakers, urging supporters to contact their representatives, and generally exhorting his base to be passionately involved? It is the most baffling dissipation of enthusiasm since George Bush told the nation to go shopping in the wake of 9/11.
That is where the longer term trends are risky for the Democrats. In the aftermath of the attacks Republicans failed to direct the enormous public willingness to sacrifice, appealed constantly to their fears, and generally discouraged people from being engaged. Is it any wonder the country turned to new leadership a few years later?
Core supporters also became dissatisfied as basic principles of fiscal responsibility, level headed foreign policy and respect for individual liberty were casually disregarded. Then there is perhaps the biggest fraud of all, the promise - promoted loudly for decades - that lower taxes would unleash America’s entrepreneurial spirit, lead to economic expansion and still provide adequate federal revenue. Instead it led to the worst decade since the Depression.
To the extent that the Tea Party movement is about pure antipathy towards government or unhappiness with being out of power, it is nothing more than garden variety conservative bellyaching. A good part of it is deep dissatisfaction with having core principles routinely betrayed over a period of years, though, and that should worry Democrats.
Whether it was a failure to stop the Iraq war on retaking Congress, the refusal to act as a check on the Bush administration, the capitulation on FISA, or more recently the inability to even contemplate reform that does not look like a giveaway to favored lobbies, liberals have a damning bill of particulars against their ostensible allies that has been stacking up for years. Martha Coakley has nothing to do with that. The revolt now in full bloom on the right started with pent up frustration and burst on the national scene with a thumping. It is not hard to see the Democrats of early 2010 in a similar danger to the Republicans of early 2006.
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Among the problems with torturing detainees is that your choices afterwards are 1) imprison them until they die 2) kill them 3) release them. If you can’t do #1 and you won’t do #2, #3 implies that all the horrific details will be aired in public.
It’s possible that John Yoo would only consent to be interviewed by a comedy show host, and also possible he knew he would get the better of it as well. Still, it’s a pretty scathing indictment of the DC press corps that Jon Stewart is the only media figure to take a real interest in his book. You’d think the Sunday shows would be tailor made for a thorough discussion of this sort of thing. I kid, of course. We know they just want to keep walking.
On a related note, Glenn Greenwald on Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s new book, Game Change:
Washington’s journalist class is poring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.
If a news organization makes the same mistake repeatedly, eventually it becomes obvious that the problem is not sloppy reporting or inattentive editing, but an institutional commitment to a particular falsehood.
Bloomberg continues to try to get some details on the bailouts:
The ruling by the three-judge appeals panel may not come for months and is unlikely to be the final word. The loser may seek a rehearing or appeal to the full appeals court and eventually petition the U.S. Supreme Court, said Anne Weismann, chief lawyer for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a Washington advocacy group that supports Bloomberg’s lawsuit.We saw how quickly rulings can be done this week, and the approaching start of the trial required a quick turnaround. Still, the judiciary seems content to move at a scandalously slow pace even when it is clear, as it is in the Bloomberg case, that one of the parties is dragging its feet and trying to slow walk it to oblivion.
[snip]
“Bloomberg has been trying for almost two years to break down a brick wall of secrecy in order to vindicate the public’s right to learn basic information,” Thomas Golden, an attorney for the company with Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, wrote in court filings.
Col. Morris D. Davis wrote an article critical of the Guantánamo kangaroo courts and was fired. Now he is suing. Here’s hoping for lots of unintended consequences. Oh and by the way, it turns out civilian courts are better (via) than the tribunals. Not that being right has to do with anything in Washington.
Afghans to Take Over Bagram Prison. Really. The devil is in the details, but on the face of it this looks like a very positive development. Oh, and thanks to the ACLU we also found out who exactly is in there. (The ACLU also got some more documents on the torture tapes destruction, which I’m sure will be the source of additional news as they dig through it. The ACLU is a national treasure.)
Several Iraqis have claimed they were lied to in order to get them to sign settlements for the Blackwater massacre. Given Blackwater’s track record it’s hard to see how this goes well for them if the agreements are tossed.
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chairman Phil Angelides noted that a lot of the worthless paper being peddled on Wall Street went to those “representing pension funds who have the life savings of police officers, teachers.” That got the attention of both Robert Johnson (via) and Cynthia Kouril, who wrote:
This is big stuff, people. It’s admissions like this that set up a climate for regulatory reform. I cannot even begin to guess how much backroom work it took to force Goldman into the corner where they were forced to admit this.I certainly hope she’s right.
You don’t ask a question like that, and get an answer like that, unless both sides already know that the witness is going to go for his own lungs. Here’s a big CAK shout out to the commissioners and staffers who were able to force that break in the case.
It isn’t just terrorist suspects who get brutalized in American custody.
You know, if you pass something you call fundamental reform, and you really believe it is, there is no need to sell it once it passes. You just need to step back and let people start enjoying the benefits. If you need to crank up a propaganda campaign to convince everyone it’s awesome, it’s probably something less than it’s been cracked up to be.
Paul Krugman had a problem with Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Responded. Krugman minimizes it by saying there was “insufficient care about disclosure,” but that’s a big deal. A very big deal. I hate to see him be so dismissive of it. Also, he really goes off the rails with this:
by claiming that there’s a huge scandal when nothing worse happened than insufficient care about disclosure, Greenwald and the people at FDL are actually reducing our ability to call foul on real corruption. After all, if everything is a scandal, nothing is a scandal.The right wing has been running a continual loop of manufactured scandals about Obama for getting close to two years now, all of which (as far as I know) Greenwald has declined to inveigh against. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall seeing him complain bitterly about Obama’s ties to black churches, or his purchase of a putting green sized strip of land from Tony Rezko, or the visit of Bertha Lewis to the White House, or the outrageous firing of Gerald Walpin, and of course who can forget the strange cases of Vivek Kundra and Adolfo Carrion, and well, you get the hint. Has Krugman been paying attention to any of this? He doesn’t appear to have been, because there is no way to square those comments with Greenwald’s actual writing.
As far as I can tell, the problem is not that Greenwald’s point of view leads to a situation where if everything is a scandal, nothing is a scandal. It’s that under Krugman’s point of view if anything’s a scandal, everything’s a scandal.
Speaking of FDL, there seems to be two separate issues with their activism. One is their tendency to accuse anyone who compromises on any issue they consider crucial of selling out. The assigning of bad faith by some of the FDL writers is over the line, and to the extent they are doing so it brings down the discourse and ought to stop. But a good part of the critique has to do with whether or not the reform package is good policy. To the extent that they are arguing (with numbers) that the bill will force people to buy lousy insurance they will get no benefit from, it’s fair game. I’m glad they are agitating in that direction - it just might save the Democrats from themselves.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Jane Hamsher:
The fact is, the people who did the work to uncover the Gruber story were liberals. Neither Fox News nor the right-wing noise machine did that kind of in-depth accountability reporting on George Bush. Stealing our research now and presenting it as their own obscures the fact that there is a profound difference in the way that many liberals respond when “our team” is in office, as compared to the slavish propaganda that Fox offered up in honor of George Bush.
Deficit Chickenhawks
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Here is a one paragraph summary of our fiscal policy since 1980: A Republican president cheerfully dismisses probity when lobbying for increased defense spending and tax cuts, with the memorably irresponsible quip “I believe the deficit is big enough to take care of itself.” Then a Democrat comes in and suddenly professional concern trolls are out in force, urging cuts in social programs in the name of responsible budgeting. The Democrat turns the deficit into a surplus, which his prodigal successor dissipates in an orgy of further tax cutting and military spending. The right kicks the concern trolls to the curb, and the sainted GOP predecessor is invoked to justify the recklessness. A Democrat then wins the presidency and balancing the budget is all the rage again.
An absolutely superb specimen of furrowed-brow harrumphing over the parlous state of our nation’s finances was written by Niall Ferguson last month. He hits all the notes with perfect pitch, from his dripping contempt for Keynesians to his dark intimations of yellow peril in the form of crafty Chinamen slyly snapping up America’s vital assets (cf.) to his imperious declaration that “Unless entitlements are cut or taxes are raised, there will never be another balanced budget.” And since everyone knows tax hikes are off the table, that leaves entitlement cuts.
Where Ferguson really shines is in his deceptive characterization of military spending. In an article about budgets, notice how he flips the spotlight over to boots on the ground in order to downplay the impact of the defense budget:
We are, it seems, having the fiscal policy of a world war, without the war. Yes, I know, the United States is at war in Afghanistan and still has a significant contingent of troops in Iraq. But these are trivial conflicts compared with the world wars, and their contribution to the gathering fiscal storm has in fact been quite modest (little more than 1.8 percent of GDP, even if you accept the estimated cumulative cost of $3.2 trillion published by Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz in February 2008).
Also note how he conflates the cost of the wars with the defense budget. Look at it in the pie chart here, or run the numbers yourself from the CBO if you are a Wikipedia skeptic. It may even be a substantially larger share than that. What we spend on the military is absolutely enormous, and anyone who refuses to put large cuts to the Pentagon budget on the table is not a good faith actor in the budget balancing discussion.
The Fergusons of the world would also give themselves a little more credibility if they demanded auditing and transparency for our intelligence services. It is reflexively accepted that all monies allocated there are vital investments in the War on Terror, but the details that become public never seem to be terribly well spent. Consider the CIA’s Abu Omar kidnapping fiasco, and this vignette from page 133 of Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis:
The first operative arrived in Milan on December 7, 2002, and stayed at the Milan Westin Palace, according to court documents. The others started arriving in early January and by February 1, 2003, virtually all of them were there. They did not hide in safe houses or private homes but checked into four-star palaces like the Milan Hilton ($340 a night) and the Star Hotel ($325 a night). Seven of the Americans stayed at the Principe di Savoia - billed as “one of the world’s most luxuriously appointed hotels” - for between three days and three weeks at nightly rates of $450. Eating lavishly at gourmet restaurants, they ran up bills of at least $144,984, which they paid for with Diners Club cards that matched their fake passports, which is how police obtained their photos if not their real names. After the delivery of Abu Omar to Aviano, four of the Americans checked into luxury hotels in Venice and others took vacations along the picturesque Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany, all still on the government tab.
Keep in mind we only know about this because a foreign country held a trial for the agents involved and the details came out in the course of the investigation. Is it reasonable to think our money is in the hands of capable stewards everywhere but Italy? We have likely been funding opulent vacations all over the world. The culture of impunity that comes with the complete absence of oversight and accountability virtually guarantees it. Would that the fiscal scolds were as interested in cracking down on that as they are in degrading the medical care of the elderly.
This Week In Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
I listen to a technology podcast from CNET called Buzz Out Loud, and on Friday’s show they reported that one Bob Burbach won the Consumer Electronics Association’s “Innovation Movement’s Apps for Innovation” with a site called GovPulse, which “give[s] you a way to browse the [Federal] Register (from 1994 on) and use filters to decide what is important to you. And then act on it.” I first became acquainted with the Federal Register on pp. 68-9 of Barton Gellman’s Angler:
The vice president had an instinct for power and unrivaled knowledge of its junctions around the government. One of his first assignments to his staff was a fast-track review of Bill Clinton’s departing executive orders. That would have been a routine step, sooner or later, but Cheney had the savvy to call a halt to the operations at the Government Printing Office. Not many aides would have thought of it. Cheney knew regulations have no legal force until they are published in the Federal Register. Some of Clinton’s orders, signed in his closing hours as president, never made it.That part of the government is now open to us thanks to GovPulse. Spread the word!
A couple leftover links from Thursday’s OLC post. Here is the formal withdrawal of the torture memos, and here is a group of OLC memos the ACLU pried loose from the Justice Department.
Here are parts one, two and three of Jeff Kaye’s argument that using the Army Field Manual for interrogation is basically a codification of torture as long as the odious Appendix M stays in it.
Helen Thomas is a tough old broad, and I’m glad she’s on the beat.
The DC Court of Appeals gave away more power to the president. It seems as though a significant part of the judiciary wants to rule itself out of existence. What good are checks and balances when they are entrusted to those with an authoritarian streak?
(This is off my usual beat so maybe I’m way off base.) The recent buyer’s remorse among the Republican establishment for Sarah Palin and Michael Steele seem to be byproducts of the GOP’s inability or unwillingness to honestly grapple with the prospect of real leadership within the party for women or minorities. They roll along with white men running the show, occasionally become acutely aware of the how bad that looks, and in a spasm of diversity optics yank someone manifestly unqualified into a highly visible but largely ceremonial post. When the inevitable failure occurs it’s back to the white men. Say what you will about the heat of the 2008 Democratic primary, you had a woman and a black man battling it out through the party apparatus for leadership. In the Republicans’ “wait your turn” model of succession, does anyone really think it will ever be Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s turn? Can anyone blame ambitious women and minorities for looking at the situation and concluding that the only way to have a shot at really becoming numero uno is to amp up the crazy and work outside the system?
Now, the Palins, Steeles and Bachmanns of the GOP have made their own beds and have to sleep in it; either out of native lunacy or cynical calculation they’ve decided to make that their calling card. But I do have a certain latent sympathy for their circumstances of being where they are now, knowing where they want to go, and realizing that the only way to get there is to be a cartoon.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Roger Lowenstein:
Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage - forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?
Businesses - in particular Wall Street banks - make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral - perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.