Month: February 2009

Boomer Bust

by digby

I know that everyone hates baby boomers, including me, and I am a card carrying one. But social security is one issue where I have to stand up for my spoiled generation and say that we’re getting a bum deal in this downturn and there are people out there trying to make it worse. If anyone has had it sweet, it was the Greatest Generation, not us, with huge pensions, massive government spending and a bunch of kids who made sure that social security was well funded and fat during their golden years. I don’t begrudge it to them, they deserve it. But everyone deserves to have a decent retirement and having at least a portion of it guaranteed in the form of social security is a necessity if you want people to spend their lives taking some risk in a dynamic, capitalist system.

Dean Baker sums it up perfectly:

Remember all those headlines about how the baby boom cohorts just lost several trillion dollars in home equity due to the collapse of the housing bubble and how they lost trillions more in their retirement accounts as a result of the stock market crash? Most people probably don’t remember those articles because most of the media have failed to notice the stories.

This should have been an easy one for the media to see. The people who take the biggest loss when home prices plummet will be the people who have equity to lose. This will mean mostly older workers or people who are already retired, since these are the people who will most likely have paid off much or all of their mortgage.

Similarly, the loss of stock wealth would have been concentrated among older workers and retirees. Few workers manage to accumulate any substantial stake in the stock market in their 20s or 30s. This means that loss when the stock market collapsed was almost entirely born by older workers and retirees.

Given the massive loss of wealth incurred by the baby boom cohorts that are nearing retirement, it would be reasonable to think that President Obama and Congress are trying to develop plans to ensure that they can still enjoy a secure retirement. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. There are reports President Obama is considering establishing tasks to examine Social Security and Medicare with an eye toward making cuts in both programs.

However, there is one step that President Obama can take to boost the economy without going through Congress: He can reaffirm his support for Social Security and assure the baby boomers nearing retirement that he will not allow their benefits to be cut. If this huge cohort in their late 40s, 50s and early 60s knows that they can count on getting their promised benefits, they will feel more comfortable spending and supporting the economy at a time when it badly needs a boost.

Workers are likely to be especially fearful about the prospects of getting their Social Security benefits now, due to an all out assault on the program financed by billionaire banker Peter Peterson. Peterson has spent much of the last two decades trying to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits for the elderly. He recently contributed a billion dollars to a foundation bearing his name that is primarily committed to this goal.

Peterson’s investment has paid off both in exposure from the media and, more importantly, attention from many members of Congress and their staffers. There are now dozens of senators, members of Congress and staffers running all around Capitol Hill crafting creative new ways to cut Social Security. Baby boomers are right to fear that Peterson and his crew will take away their benefits.

The idea of taking away Social Security benefits from baby boomers was always outrageous. After all, this is a generation that has paid into Social Security at the current 12.4 percent tax rate for almost their entire working life and will be forced to wait until age 66 or even 67 to get full benefits. Their average returns are projected to be lower than the generations that follow and far lower than the generations that preceded them.

Even more importantly, because of the incompetence of Mr. Peterson’s friends in the financial industry and the regulators and economists who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble, the baby boom cohort has just experienced the largest loss of wealth of any age group in the history of the world. Much of the $8 trillion in lost housing bubble wealth belonged to the baby boomers, as did much of the $7 trillion in wealth lost in the stock market crash.

The loss to the baby boomers is a gain to younger generations. They will, on average, be able to buy up the housing stock for prices that are 30 to 40 percent lower than what they would have faced three years ago. They will be able to buy the wealth of corporate America at a discount of more than 40 percent.

If policy were responding to reality, then this massive redistribution from older generations to the young should cause the government to focus more attention on helping the elderly. But the agenda of Peter Peterson and his ilk never had anything to do with generational equity. The point was always to gut Social Security and Medicare. These programs stand out as key targets precisely because they are hugely effective and popular programs.

When I was young, I didn’t believe social security would be there for me. After all Ronnie Reagan and all of his friends told me so, over and over again. And it made some sense. Our generation was so huge, forming such a bulge in the population, that it seemed impossible that younger people could shoulder the burden. But as it turned out, they upped the retirement age (I don’t get benefits until I’m 67) and raised the payroll tax on us to create a “trust fund” (which they’ve been using for other purposes since then) and it’s now comfortably funded until long after the boomers have shuffled off their mortal coils. But more importantly, it turns out that the population fall-off that was expected wasn’t as steep as everyone feared. Why? Immigration. Guess what, you can bring in younger people from foreign lands, put them on the grid and they pay payroll taxes just like everyone else. It’s not a bad deal for them — or for us.

The boomers got a huge leg up in life from their parents, who lived most of their adult lives in a time of great American propserity. They did fight a war and many of them went through the depression. But those things happened when they were quite young and once that was over, they had very smooth sailing from then on, with a vast, growing economy, a government that was generous and many opportunities to remake themselves over and over again if they needed to. We boomers, on the other hand, had it easy in our youth, but things stagnated in our working years and now are starting to really fall apart for us as we get old. Perhaps it’s just desserts for being embarrassing dirty hippies, but it is what it is. Now there is a huge cohort of ex (and current) hippies out there, having just suffered a huge hit to their retirement income. You can’t kill em and they don’t have time to earn it all back.

Nonetheless, boomers are still sitting on a vast pile of wealth that’s badly needed to be put to work investing in this country. But it’s shrinking dramatically and it’s making people very nervous. As Baker writes, if one of the purposes of the stimulus is to restore some confidence in the future, then talk of fiddling with social security and medicare is extremely counterproductive. If they want to see the baby boomers put their remaining money in the mattress or bury in the back yard instead of prudently investing it, they’d better stop talking about “entitlement reform.” This is a politically savvy generation and they know what that means.

If they perceive that social security is now on the menu, after losing vast amounts in real estate and stocks, you can bet those who still have a nestegg are going to start hoarding their savings and refusing to put it back into the economy. They’d be stupid not to.

Update: If you didn’t get a chance to read this piece by James Galbraith at FDL this morning, make the time.

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Land Of Fruits And Nuts

by digby

You’ve probably all noticed the frightening lack of dday posts the last couple of days here at Hullabaloo. But it’s for very good reason. He and his colleagues at Calitics are doing the only real time analysis of what’s going on with the California budget crisis. (Seriously, folks, this is very, very bad.) Unfortunately, there is no political media in this state, so this is it.

Any of you who are journalists or are other interested parties who would like to see what happens when three batshit insane Republicans have the power to take the state down because of their “principles,” read down the page. It’s almost unbelievable — except it’s true. They are political sociopaths.

If Cali goes down, it’s going to take a lot of the rest of the country with it. This is no joke.

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Philosophical Differences

by digby

Harold Ford and JD Hayworth debated on Hardball today about the politics of the stimulus package. They sparred about “philosophical differences” and Hayworth complained that the media defined bipartisanship as the Republicans caving into Democrats etc, etc. (Hayworth took credit for “working with” president Clinton to create the economic success of the 1990s and made the case that George W. Bush was a picture of bipartisanship.)

He was his usual lying, sanctimonious, bombastic self — and Ford was slightly hotter than his usual bowl of lukewarm water. It went on for quite some time, but I’ll pick it up near the end for a very interesting exchange:

Hayworth: What we really ought to be working for is non-partisanship.Not bipartisanship. But saying these are American priorities, we have some disagreements, let’s take a couple from column R and a couple from Column D and we’ll work it out.

Ford: But in fairness, JD, more than 30% of this bill was made up of tax cuts. There are many things that this president conceded. but for some reason many of my former Republican co0lleagues decided not to vote along with him. They had every right to do that. There’s a philosophical gamble that’s been made here. And all I ask is that if you’re on the other side of that ledger, saying you are against this bill, don’t don’t root against the country. I’m not saying you are, but in a lot of ways you’re rooting against the economy.

Hayworth: No, No. You’re making a tragic mistake confusing the welfare of the president and the welfare of the country. And speaking of welfare, when you take out all the welfare reforms, again, a bipartisan triumph of the Clinton administration and the then Republican congress, when you take that out of the way and you redefine tax cuts as payments to people who don’t pay taxes, I gotta tell ya — it’s a legitimate philosophical difference. That’s not a tax cut, that’s welfare.

Ford: People who go to work everyday deserve a tax cut. And again, that’s a philosophical difference. I hope what President Obama pushed through the congress works. I know you do as well. If it doesn’t work, I hope they all have the ability to come back to the table and work on a package that will work…. (blah, blah blah.)

Hayward: There are legitimate philosophical differences, but please lets not make the mistake right out of the gate of saying that because we disagree, one side is hoping the worst for America… [ha! — ed]

Matthews: Would we be better of if we had eight more years like the eight we just had?

Hayward: I believe, although I’ve got my differences with John McCain, I believe he would have done a better job with some of these…

Matthews: No,no,no, eight more years of the policies we just had. Hayward: Eight more years of the same policies? well..

Matthews: The same policies that you guys had the last eight years.

Hayward: Tax cuts that promote jobs? sure.

Matthews: The economic policies that led us to where we are right now. We should have eight more years of that and we’d be better off.

Hayward: We should have had… Look the tax cuts I worked for, on the Ways and means Committee. ..

Matthews: No, no

Hayward: That’s part of the eight years!

Matthews: You guys controlled the White House for eight years. Would we be better off if we had eight more years of that policy of the Republicans for eight more years. Would we be better off?

Hayward: Low taxes, a strong national defense and good economic growth. Yeah, I’ll take that.

Matthews: But that’s not what we’ve got! We have an economic catastrophe on our hands after the last eight years! We have nobody buying anything, nobody selling anything. Nobody buying houses, nobody buying cars, stock prices going through the floor. You think this is good?

Hayward: You want to get into the whereas’s of this we can go back and take a look. No, I’ll tell you what was bad. The sneak attack on our economy, the dress rehearsal that was the debacle of Indybank, that Chuck Shumer helped get that started and the guy in the backround, George Soros manipulating all the currency. You wanna keep that goin’?

Matthews: What?

Hayworth: That’s what’s goin’ on here. The fact is that …

Matthews: You mean the economic situation we face right now is not the results of the administration policy but ..

Hayworth: You want to get started on outlandish scenarios, go take a look at what Paul Kanjorski had to say…

Matthews: JD, you can talk fast, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Hayworth: You don’t want to listen

Matthews: George Soros? What are you talking about?

Hayworth: Go take a look at what Paul Kanjorski said a couple of weeks ago on CSPAN about how the economy got in the mess it was in. I’ll tell ya this. On balance, six of the eight years were strong years. Did we have a meltdown, you bet. Do I want to see the meltdown continue? No. No American wants to see that. But to have you set up a narrowly defined area where you can say “aha! I gotcha, and I really should be running for the senate against Arlen Specter” — is a moot point, Chris. And maybe that’s why Specter went for the package after all.

Matthews: (Looking confused) Let me go back to Harold Ford. I think it’s a reasonable question. When someone criticizes the president’s policies today, you ask them whether they would prefer the policies of the last eight years. I think that’s a good question.

Ford: The country answered resoundingly, no…

The paranoid strain is running very close to the surface these days, isn’t it?

Hayward’s reference to the Kranjorski comments is something that’s spreading like wildfire across wingnutland. Sadly No has been following this and traced at least part of it to none other than Pamela Atlas:

This is un-frickin-believable. The financial crisis was deliberate, planned, staged. Who made the run? …

On Thursday Sept 15, 2008 at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two. Money was being removed electronically. …

More to think about. Somebody took a lot of money out of the banks. A lot. So where did it go? Who to? … A run is a banker’s term of art [Pure. Comedy. Platinum. With Marshmallows. And Fudge Topping. — ed.], and it is like a herd stampede, or panic, or a psychosis of a lot of people. … So, the people who do such things, who monitor who and where the orders come from, and who keep track of whose accounts the money is taken from, have to have been able to figure that out, and who was responsible. Yet, they do not tell us. … And while I do not pretend to be on the inside of any of these nefarious machinations – it can’t help but raise a red [sic] that the US treasury department, one week after nationalizing the banks, is giving seminars in Islamic finance and George Soros is buying our assets from the FDIC.

Oh where, where, where to begin? Well, for starters, of course, with what actually happened. Given the time frame mentioned by Kanjorski, he’s referring to the following sequence of events. On September 15, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. A major money market fund — the Reserve Primary Fund — held almost $785 million in IOUs from Lehman Brothers, causing a number of investors, both institutional and individual, to withdraw funds from the fund. The large volume of withdrawals cause the Fund to “break the buck,” meaning that each share was worth a few cents less than a dollar. Money market funds aren’t supposed to do this, and that prompted large transfers of funds from other money market funds to other investments and accounts Now, of course, among the points of hilarity in Pam’s financial sleuthing is the idea that this money was “disappearing” from the system, as if an acceptable destination of an electronic funds transfer was “under my mattress” or “behind the rock near the front of my cave in Pakistan.” Equally insane is her notion that a Treasury Department seminar on a Islamic banking is a harbinger of a takeover by Muslim terrorists and proof that the transfers were engineered by Islamo-terrorists. We probably shouldn’t tell her the Department of Agriculture provides classes teaching people how to speak Arabic.

There’s more. Much more.
The Soros thing is even more obscure, but I think it also has something to do with this (and the fact that the name Soros has a totemic meaning to conservatives, that has something to do with jews and nazis and ruthless bankers — ‘cept he’s in league with the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. And hippies.)Still, Hayworth dissolving into angry, wingnut conspiracy gibberish shows that Matthews’ question had him stumped. To be sure, he didn’t give the standard wingnut response, which is that he fought Bush’s spending too (even though he didn’t) but that two wrongs don’t make a right. But then he’s not the sharpest tool, even in a shed full of very, very dull ones. Considering that we’ve got Huckleberry whining on television that “the country is screwed” and John Boehner stomping his little feet and throwing piles of paper on the House floor, I think it’s obvious that they are having a very hard time keeping their heads from exploding.
Maybe it’ll work for them, I don’t know. But I suspect people are really wishing that their leaders won’t go completely batshit insane right now. I could be wrong.
Update: Crooks and Liars captures Msnbc’s Contessa Brewer challenging conventional wisdom. Note the look of shock on the NY Times reporter’s face, when Brewer posits that Obama’s efforts at bipartisanship may have fallen on Republican deaf ears. Apparently, it’s quite shocking to even suggest such a thing. MSNBC’s on a roll today.

Update II: Here’s the video of Ford and Hayworth, thanks to JT.

Update III: Apparently Rush has been pimping this Soros speculation too, along with Townhall:

If what Kanjorski says is “fiction,” Americans, particularly Americans in Kanjorski’s 11th district of Pennsylvania, need to know. After all, this isn’t a story that just goes away on its own, particularly not when Paul Kanjorski is chairman of the Capital Markets Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee. Of course, incredible as Kanjorski’s revelations were, almost equally incredible was the interviewer’s failure to ask the next obvious question of national interest: Who or what was responsible for that electronic run on the banks “to the tune of $550 billion”?

That’s where Limbaugh went with the story. “Now, let’s assume for a second here that elements of this are true,” Limbaugh said of Kanjorski’s statement. “Let’s assume that there was a $550 billion … electronic run on the banks and money market accounts in one to two hours. The question is who was doing this? Who was withdrawing all this money? And the next question is why? That’s where my mind starts exploding, and this is dangerous to have these explosions going this way. Could it have been George Soros? Could it have been a consortium of countries — Russia, China, Venezuela — countries that are eager to have Barack Obama elected because they know that will make it easier for them to continue their own foreign policies in the world?”

I’ve heard serious people float similar theories regarding financial attacks on our economy emanating from the Middle East, but again, who knows?

They’re all excited.

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Moral Bar

by digby

On president’s day the gasbags are arguing about whether or not its fair that the historians have put George W. Bush at the bottom of presidential rankings. Howard Fineman wondered if it’s reasonable to rank him with those presidents who’ve traditionally been at the bottom because of their immoral stand on slavery.

I dunno. I think ordering anal rape ranks right down there on the immorality scale. But it is a very low bar.

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The Wrongness Of Women’s Trousers

by digby

I’m not a religious person so I tend not to be too interested in the theological side of religious debates. But this truly is illuminating.

It comes from a Catholic Bishop:

Dear Friends and Benefactors:

Canadians strike me as a gentle people; but “strike” is the word! Ten yeas ago I was innocently asked in Canada whether women should wear trousers. Some ten weeks ago, also in Canada, I was asked whether a girl should go to a conservative Novus Ordo university. The answer now to the second question may be as stormy as the answer to the first:- because of all kinds of natural reasons, almost no girl should go to any university!

The deep-down reason is the same as for the wrongness of women’s trousers: the unwomaning of woman. The deep-down cause in both cases is that Revolutionary man has betrayed modem woman; since she is not respected and loved for being a woman, she tries to make herself a man. Since modem man does not want her to do what God meant her to do, namely to have children, she takes her revenge by invading all kinds of things that man is meant to do. What else was to be expected? Modem man has only himself to blame.

In fact, only in modern times have women dreamt of going to university, but the idea has now become so normal that even Catholics, whose Faith guards Nature, may have difficulty in seeing the problem. However, here is a pointer in the direction of normalcy: any Catholic with the least respect for Tradition recognizes that women should not be priests – can he deny that if few women went to university, almost none would wish to be priests? Alas, women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God’s Nature which characterizes our times. That girls should not be in universities flows from the nature of universities and from the nature of girls: true universities are for ideas, ideas are not for true girls, so true universities are not for true girls.

That’s from the holocaust denying Bishop, of course. But you can certainly see why the conservative Pope would want to reinstate this person. I suspect this is one thing they absolutely agree on.

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It’s All They’ve Got

by digby

If you’ve been wondering what the the hoohah over the census is all about, TIME lays out the basis the alleged controversy in this article. One thing that’s missing, however, is the fact that the Republicans are ginning this thing up, just as they are fear mongering about the fairness doctrine and a dozen other smallbore dittohead issues. This stuff is designed to get the troops riled up.

Conservatives believe they are an oppressed minority. They even believed it when they were running the whole damned world. But now that they are actually in the minority,their worldview shattered by ideological failure, their sense of oppression and victimization are more important to them than ever.

But on a more prosaic level, they are also looking to keep the census issue on the table for specific political purposes. They want to discredit it as part of their long-term project to discredit all of our electoral systems. When the demographics are against you and you have no new ideas with which to attract new voters, you have to rely more and more upon manipulation of the system.

The protests against putting a hard core right winger like Gregg in charge of the census were well founded and the Obama administration was right to take it out of his hands (although if they were that suspicious of the guy then perhaps he shouldn’t have been named in the first place?)

Here’s a good example of the kind of cynical hardball they are already playing:

Having just seen what President Barack Obama can do with 58 Democrats in the Senate, Republicans are more determined than ever to keep him from getting a 59th.

Especially if the 59th is Al Franken.

Franken, the former comedian, leads Republican Norm Coleman by 225 votes in a “Groundhog Day” of an election that dawned more than three months ago and shows no signs of ending soon.

Which is exactly how Senate Republicans want it. The National Republican Senatorial Committee held a ritzy fundraiser for Coleman in Washington this week, helping him raise the money he needs to keep his legal challenges alive through a trial and then a lengthy legal process if he loses.

How long should Coleman hold out?

“However long it takes,” says Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who chairs the NRSC.

“I encourage him to see it through the end,” Cornyn said Thursday. “He feels like he owes it to the voters of Minnesota and his colleagues here. He realizes how important retaining that seat is to us.”

The Democrats know how important the seat is — and they accuse the GOP of prolonging Coleman’s legal fight just to keep it empty.

“It’s clear that national Republicans see the vacancy in Minnesota as one of the few arrows in their quiver to obstruct Democrats in the Senate from getting real change passed,” said Eric Schultz, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

With 58 Democrats in the Senate — technically 56, plus Independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders — Obama was able to push through a $787 billion economic recovery plan by picking up just three Republican votes: Sens. Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter. With Ted Kennedy unable to vote because of his health issues, he needed all three of them.

If Franken becomes the 59th senator to caucus with the Democrats, the GOP knows that Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will be able to railroad legislation through the Senate by picking off a single Republican moderate.

(I like how the AP calls it “railroading” with a 59 vote majority. Whatever.)

If the shoe were on the other foot, they would provisionally install Franken, passionately insisting that there should be no taxation without representation for the people of Minnesota and that it is unpatriotic to deprive them of their senator in a time of crisis.

Our electoral system is a mess. And the Republicans are doing everything they can, from all angles, to manipulate it to maintain their diminishing power. It’s a sure sign of weakness on their part, but the fact that the Democrats aren’t doing anything substantial to reform the electoral system is a sign of their weakness as well. This stuff has a way of blowing back on them at the worst possible time. They should care more about this.

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It’s Not Over

by digby

Just in case you needed something to make Monday even worse:

The war in Iraq isn’t over. The main events may not even have happened yet

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President Obama campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, but even he has talked about a post-occupation force. The widespread expectation inside the U.S. military is that we will have tens of thousands of troops there for years to come. Indeed, in his last interview with me last November, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told me that he would like to see about 30,000 troops still there in 2014 or 2015.

Yet many Americans seem to think that the war, or at least our part in it, is close to being wrapped up. When I hear that, I worry. I think of a phrase that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz often used in the winter of 2003, before the invasion: “Hard to imagine.” It was hard to imagine, he would tell members of Congress, the media and other skeptics, that the war would last as long as they feared, or that it could cost as much as all that, or that it might require so many troops. I worry now that we are once again failing to imagine what we have gotten ourselves into and how much more we will have to pay in blood, treasure, prestige and credibility.

I don’t think the Iraq war is over, and I worry that there is more to come than any of us suspect.

That’s by Thomas Ricks, who actually knows what he’s talking about.

Update: Whatever you do, don’t ask what all this is going to cost. Money spent for useless meat grinders is exempt from fiscal responsibility. It would be unpatriotic and a sign that you don’t support the troops to even ponder why we should keep spending trillions on a war that was fought for no good reason. “Fiscal responsibility” only applies to government programs that directly help Americans.

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Breaking Down The Sense Of Impenetrability

by digby

The torture debate has often been pretty sickening over the years. But there has been one common technique described over and over again that was particularly revolting — and which I wrote about in the past: This excerpt is from Jane Meyers book:

“A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the ‘takeout’ of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to ‘sodomy.’ He said, ‘It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.’ The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, ‘because it’s demoralizing.”

There were also forced enemas, as reported by the New York Times back in 2005:

None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, “I bet they said he was dehydrated,” adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

There was also this, which as far as I know was never part of the criminal complaint against any of the guards:

A US military investigation, carried out by Major General Antonio Taguba, uncovered evidence of war crimes against the inmates, including: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.

There have been many similar reports of sodomy and other sexual abusecollected by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which have routinely been dismissed as some kind of slick propaganda training by Al Qaeda. Now we have a former Guantanamo prison guard also validating the charges — and implicating medical personnel (which is another sick aspect of this that we’ve discussed at length, but still don’t know the extent of.) Scott Horton reports:

[T]the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

The medical personnel involvement is sick and after all the stuff about force feeding and using prisoners’ psychological profiles for interrogation purposes, I guess I’m not as surprised as Horton is. But the fact that the white house consciously and knowingly used anal rape to control, interrogate and punish prisoners and went to some length to protect those who were doing it from scrutiny, still has the power to stun me.

Are we really just going to let this stuff go? Really?

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Send In The (Gun) Nuts

by digby

Wow. Here’s Glen Beck making Bill O’Reilly look sane by comparison (via Media Matters)

Dave Niewert has pointed out that Beck’s increasing weirdness may be leading up to one of the most spectacular flame outs in broadcast history. (He really is a freak.) But he doesn’t dismiss his rantings about “revolution” and “militias.” They are the lifesblood of right wing populism and I fully expect to see a reemergence of this kind of talk.

Here’s Neiwert talking about the Tennessee church shooter:

The manifesto he composed before his murderous rampage was just released; you can read the whole thing here [pdf file], and it’s worth reading in its entirety for a number of reasons. But I especially took note of Part III:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

That seems to sum up Adkisson’s thinking: He wanted to be the spark in a wave of similar fed-up-niks taking their anger out on liberals. It’s also worth looking at the kind of reasoning that led him there:

In a parallel train of thought; It saddens me to think back on all the bad things that Liberalism has done to this country. The worst problem America faces today is Liberalism. They have dumbed down education, they have defined deviancy down. Liberals have attack’d every major institution that made America great. From the Boy Scouts to the military; from education to Religion. The Major News outlets have become the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. Liberals are evil, they embrace the tenets of Karl Marx, they’re Marxist, socialist, communists.

The guy was obviously nuts. And Glen Beck sounds nutty even to Bill O’Reilly (for the moment.) But there are plenty of Fox viewers who think Beck’s got a point. They have organized their world in opposition to liberalism at the behest of the conservative movement and it gives their lives meaning and structure. Now that so-called liberals are in charge, they are naturally putting themselves back into oppressed, revolutionary mode. That it’s gone mainstream so early isn’t surprising considering what the conservative leadership is doing and how mainstream their noise machine has become. It’s only the beginning.

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Why We Can’t Trust Them

by digby

David Walker responds to William Greider’s piece about the Peterson Foundation’s assault on the safety net. It’s not particularly illuminating except to confirm my worst fears.

Greider replies:

David Walker is offended but, if you read his letter closely, he more or less confirms what I wrote about the establishment’s assault on Social Security and other entitlement programs.

I said they want to loot Social Security. He says it’s already been looted. I said they are trying to evade the regular processes of representative democracy. He says Congress is “broken” and so cannot be trusted to make sound decisions in a timely manner.

Do they want to whack benefits for Social Security recipients, as I claimed, or don’t they? Walker declines to answer the question. Readers may decide for themselves whom to believe.

Bill Greider

I don’t ever believe these fiscal responsibility scolds, particularly those who work for Pete Peterson who has made it his life’s work for the past thirty years to put an end to social security. It’s the holy grail of conservatism and there is always some Loserman Democrat around to give it a bipartisan sheen.

Here’s a piece of a post I wrote back in 2004, during their last attempt at “reforming” the system. They’ve been making almost exactly the same dire predictions for nearly half a century:

My grandfather used to believe that back in the 60’s and it’s still true today. He believed it because people like Ronald Reagan were saying back then that social security was a bad deal:

But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.

A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary — his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can’t put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they’re due — that the cupboard isn’t bare?

That was forty years ago. Later, in the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan’s indiscreet budget director David Stockman admitted that the purpose of ginning up the social security crisis was “to permit the politicians to make it look like they are doing something for the beneficiary population when they are doing something to it, which they normally would not have the courage to undertake.”[that’s from Grieder’s seminal article “The Education of David Stockman”, btw. — ed] And then with masterful chutzpah, considering his famous “Choice” speech from 1964, excerpted above, Ronnie then went on to use the so-called “looming” SS crisis to great effect — he flogged the GOP contention that the program was insolvent (as they’d been doing for fifty years) and also raised the payroll taxes which they immediately raided to cover their budget deficit. And now, lo and behold, we are “in crisis” again. Imagine that. Brilliant.

This keeps coming back mainly because Democratic politiciansin explicably keep using it as a yardstick of “fiscal responsibility.” It’s actually the opposite.

Any Grand Bargain that includes negotiating with conservatives on social security must be off the table. They want to destroy it. They always have.

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