Month: April 2009

Mad As Hell

by digby

I just watched one of the most disturbing yet bizarrely entertaining shows I’ve ever seen on television. It’s a Glenn Beck special called “Destined To Repeat(?)” featuring noted right wing intellectuals Jonah Goldberg, Amity Schlaes, and a couple of other fringy authors discussing the connections between Obama and Hitler, Stalin, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and other “progressive” dictators, illustrated throughout with black and white footage of Nazis and concentration camps.

It ended with a stirring speech by an actor dressed as Thomas Paine exclaiming that the American founders wouldn’t have flown airplanes into buildings or passed the biggest spending program in history. And then he said to join the tea parties.

Here’s Beck’s intro:

Our country is not being controlled by jack-booted fascists, but just like I said during George W. Bush’s presidency, the groundwork is continuously being laid to take us there.

History shows us that it only takes two simple things for fascism to rear its ugly head virtually overnight: fear and hunger. A temporary crisis is almost always a precursor to a much more permanent one.

With that in mind, let me show you the four main things we’ll be talking about tonight.

First, to Russia, where, under communists like Lenin and Stalin, their revolution pitted peasants against the rich. They were basically saying “Eat the rich! They did it to you! Get them, kill them!” These days? There were demonstrators rioting in front of the G20, unions protesting in front of AIG and buses showing up at the houses of the evil AIG executives.

It’s a different style, but the sentiments exactly the same: find them, get them, kill them.

Second, we’ll consider what the average person thinks about fascism. They believe it’s ridiculous and could never happen in America; after all, no one’s electing Adolf Hitler to office. But the secret we’ll learn tonight is that fascism wasn’t always synonymous with mass murder.

Progressives once had a love affair with it — particularly with Mussolini. You may remember him as the guy whose body was hung upside down by meat hooks while civilians threw stones at it. But before that he had lots of admirers in the United States, including singers Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, comic Will Rogers (who said “I’m pretty high on that bird,”) and The New York Times, which wrote “Mussolini is a Latin [Teddy] Roosevelt who first acts and then inquires if it is legal. He has been of great service to Italy at home.” Mussolini was also well-respected abroad. Winston Churchill once called him “the world’s greatest living lawgiver.”

Third, I’ll show you how Woodrow Wilson moved away from the Founding Fathers’ principles and values. Today, those who disparage the strict constructionists as worshiping old men in wigs are building on what the progressives started at the top of the last century.

The fourth topic tonight is the Great Depression. The world was starving and when the world goes into darkness, it’s always based on several small events followed by one cataclysmic one. Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point; he said he was going to protect the common man, people rallied around him.

I watched this surreal, intellectual train wreck with a mixture of awe and stunned disbelief. (You can watch video excerpts here.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it on national television.

I wrote the other day that Roger Ailes is a genius and I am convinced more than ever that he really is. He’s reinventing FOX News as the voice of a revolutionary, counterculture right and, frankly, it’s really fresh. It’s like they’ve been set free and can finally do what they’ve always wanted to do.

I’ve featured Howard Beale over there on the left side of the page for a long time, mostly because the film Network predicted today’s wierd, surreal media to an astonishing degree. But I think it’s finally coming to full fruition with this Beck thing. And Roger Ailes is the Diana Christenson (Faye Dunaway) of our time:

Diana Christensen: Look, I sent you all a concept analysis report yesterday. Did any of you read it?

[Aides stare blankly at her]

Diana Christensen: Well, in a nutshell, it said: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps.” So, this concept analysis report concludes, “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” I’ve been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows. I don’t want conventional programming on this network. I want counterculture, I want anti-establishment. I don’t want to play butch boss with you people, but when I took over this department, it had the worst programming record in television history. This network hasn’t one show in the top twenty. This network is an industry joke, and we’d better start putting together one winner for next September. I want a show developed based on the activities of a terrorist group, “Joseph Stalin and His Merry Band of Bolsheviks,” I want ideas from you people. This is what you’re paid for. And by the way, the next time I send an audience research report around, you’d all better read it, or I’ll sack the fucking lot of you. Is that clear?

Now Beck isn’t carrying Howard Beale’s actual rants by any stretch. But he is performing the same role. And I would guess that it’s going to translate into lots of money for the network.

The question is what it’s going to do to politics.

And lest anyone think that this problem isn’t helped along by the rest of the media’s capitulation to the same values, here’s Diana Christenson again to help you understand how this works:

Diana Christensen: I watched your 6 o’clock news today; it’s straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park; on the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost puppies. So, I don’t think I’ll listen to any protestations of high standards of journalism when you’re right down on the streets soliciting audiences like the rest of us. Look, all I’m saying is if you’re going to hustle, at least do it right.

Ailes has just upped the ante.

It’s hard to believe that movie was made as a satire 33 years ago.

Update: Here’s Dennis Hartley’s review of Network from a while back.

By Land, Not By Sea

by dday

As we wait another day for the resolution of this hostage situation by the Horn of Africa, it’s worth understanding the nature of the piracy problem off the Somali coast, which has exploded over the past several years. Matt Yglesias, who unlike most people in the media has actually written a fair bit about Somalia, has a great short piece on this, and at the risk of just reiterating it let me just summarize his two basic points.

First, it’s a big ocean, and no amount of sophisticated monitoring systems or military patrols will be able to proactively stop pirating. If the areas near the coasts become secure, the pirates just move out further into open water. You’re not going to secure the entire 70-odd percent of the planet covered by the oceans. And accompanying every shipping container with a military protector vessel is impractical.

Second, the way to end piracy is to provide opportunity for the pirates on land. Somalia has essentially had no government for close to 20 years, and the money that can be made from piracy significantly dwarfs the money that can be made on land.

To make a long story short, to curb the Somali pirate problem you need to fight them on land. This was recognized by everyone back in December but it hasn’t materialized since nobody really wants to try to mount a serious operation to bring Somali territory under control. And far be it from me to question that decision. I don’t want to either. But given that reality, while we can try to mitigate the pirate problem at sea, we’re never going to resolve it and suggestions that the Obama administration should snap its fingers and make this problem go away are absurd. What we need to do is wait until such time as someone or other establishes some kind of coherent control over Somali territory and then deal with piracy issues as part of our relationship with that person / group / organization or whatever it may be.

Unfortunately, the last time it appeared that a coherent de facto government was emerging in Somalia—the Islamic Courts Movement—we helped sponsor an Ethiopian invasion that plunged the country back into chaos. We need to stop doing that!

Ian Welsh concurs, and this is one of the more little-known Bush screw-ups that made the world less safe. Peace can only be had with the groups that can secure it. The Ethiopians couldn’t hand off Somalia to a transitional government that had no legitimacy. The new “unity government” in Somalia actually includes some more moderate ICU members, and they’ve vowed to deal with the piracy problem, if they get some funding help. But the hardliners in the al-Shabab movement continue to fight. The Obama Administration apparently is watching al-Shabab closely, but hasn’t come to a decision. I don’t think we know if the unity government has the legitimacy inside the country among the people yet, but I think striking the al-Shabab camps at this point wouldn’t help matters. Whatever the case, there needs to be a larger effort to understand the problems on land in Somalia as a means of stopping the problems at sea, as Russ Feingold has been saying for years.

“With more than a thousand miles of coastline along the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, however, increased maritime patrolling can only do so much. Until stability, the rule of law and effective governance are established, Somalia will remain a safe haven for these pirates. Moreover, until a functioning economy can be established, piracy will remain the most lucrative business in the region.

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Shocked Disbelief

by digby

These bankers amaze me. In spite of everything, they continue to flex their muscles and insist that the taxpayers should hand over money with no strings attached and do things their way. Or else.

Remember when Alan Greenspan said this?

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity — myself especially — are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

Well, I wasn’t that shocked, but I confess that I am a bit shocked by their current self-destructive narcissism. The executives of these lending institutions understand their own self-interest to be to do anything they damned well please and to hell with anyone who says otherwise and they are ready to take down the entire system if they don’t get their way.

Showdown Seen Between Banks and Regulators

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration completes its examinations of the nation’s largest banks, industry executives are bracing for fights with the government over repayment of bailout money and forced sales of bad mortgages.

President Obama emerged from a meeting with his senior economic advisers on Friday to say “what you’re starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy.” But there were also signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation’s banks over the next phase of the financial rescue.

Some of the healthier banks want to pay back their bailout loans to avoid executive pay and other restrictions that come with the money. But the banks are balking at the hefty premium they agreed to pay when they took the money.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and two other executives of large banks raised the issue with Mr. Obama and the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, at a meeting two weeks ago.

“This is a source of considerable consternation,” said Camden R. Fine, who attended the White House meeting as president of the Independent Community Bankers, a trade group of 5,000 mostly smaller institutions, many of which are complaining about the repayment requirements.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration wants weaker banks to move more quickly to relieve their balance sheets of the toxic assets, the home loans and mortgage bonds that nobody wants to buy right now. But the banks are resisting because they would have to book big losses.

Finally, there is increasing anxiety in the industry that the administration could use the stress tests of the 19 biggest banks, due to be completed in the next three weeks, to insist on management changes, just as it did with General Motors when officials forced the resignation of its chief executive after examining that company’s books.

If only the rest of us had the kind of clout (and chutzpah) to nearly destroy an entire industry, the country and the world — and expect to be able to dictate the terms of how it’s fixed. Oh and then whine publicly about everything being unfair and calling the bailout un-American:

Facing a host of government restrictions — from how much they pay executives to how many foreign citizens they employ — some small banks have returned the bailout money, and some larger ones, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Northern Trust, have said they want to do so as quickly as possible.

On Friday, Sun Bancorp of Vineland, N.J., became the sixth bank to exit the program, returning $89.3 million just three months after it received its loan.

Regulators are reluctant to approve the early repayments until banks can show that they have the capital to withstand further erosion in the economy and will not curtail their lending.

Both large and small banks have pressed the Obama administration to make it less costly for them to exit the bailout program by waiving the right to exercise stock warrants the banks had to grant the government in exchange for the loans. At a meeting last month, the chiefs of three of the largest banks separately asked Mr. Obama to direct the Treasury not to exercise the warrants, Mr. Fine said.

Douglas Leech, the founder and chief executive of Centra Bank, a small West Virginia bank that participated in the capital assistance program but returned the money after the government imposed new conditions, said he complained strongly about the Treasury Department’s decision to demand repayment of the warrants. That effectively raised the interest rate he paid on a $15 million loan to an annual rate of about 60 percent, he said.

“What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American,” he said. “Even though the government told us to take this money to increase our lending, the extra charge meant we had less money to lend. It was the equivalent of a penalty for early withdrawal.”

Basically he’s saying that it’s un-American for the US Government to try to save the banking system in spite of the fact that the people running it are such short sighted, greedy, self centered jackasses that they refuse to be saved unless they get to fuck things up all over again. (Oh, and make a killing doing it.) I’m not against these banks paying back the TARP money but they have to live up to the agreements they made when they took the money — just like I do when I have to pay a penalty for early withdrawal. After all, they have a rather nice alternative: they could just loan the money to someone, which was the intent of the program. But then they’d have to live under the threat that the big bad gummint is coming to take their bonuses and that’s just unacceptable to these pampered princes.

Nobody wants to take on the ruling class, particularly once they’ve become (or were born into) the ruling class themselves. But there are times when it’s very dangerous for politicians not to do it and this is one of those times. If the bankers insist upon preserving their prerogatives in spite of all they’ve done and continue to carry on like a bunch of French aristocrats, they have to be taken on or risk something much more politically destabilizing.

Obama is playing with fire by trying to appease these guys, even if he’s convinced that the best thing to do is simply restore the system to what it was. They are too far gone. If he doesn’t decide to take on systemic reform we’re going to find ourselves in a worse mess not too far down the road.

Greenspan was shocked because he thought these guys were operating out of self-interest and it turned out they were actually quite stupid and self-destructive. They just keep proving it over and over again.

Get Moving!

by digby

If you haven’t already planned to go to the New Way Forward rally in your area, it’s not too late. You can find the locations here.

It’s at 2pm EST, 11am PST.

If you plan to go to the one in LA, maybe I’ll see you there.

My Hero

by digby

Greg Sargent, for writing this on the Washington Post’s own website. Bravo.

Give Me The Post Office Any Day

by digby

In the coming debates over health care, when your Uncle Bob pulls out the old conservative trope asking, “would you really want government bureaucrats to be in charge of your health care?” give him this article:

Five months ago, Rose Camilleri was a superstar at the Zales outlet at Woodbury Common Premium Outlets.

In November, the diminutive grandmother with an Italian accent was flown to Dallas, home of Zales’ headquarters, where she was honored with a 1-carat diamond necklace for making $1 million in sales last year.

[…]

It was the fifth diamond Camilleri had earned during 4½ years at Zales, where she received nearly a dozen commendations.

“I loved my work,” she said. “I loved the people, and I loved it when people came in and asked for me.”

But in early March, Camilleri developed bronchitis and went for a chest X-ray and an MRI. Her doctor discovered an aortic aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of the aorta, which, without prompt treatment, might rupture and cause quick death.

Camilleri told Zales she would need surgery as soon as possible.

“I told my manager I can’t get upset because it could explode any minute,” she said. “I typed up a letter asking for time off and guidance from human resources.”

One week later, on March 14, she was asked to attend a meeting with a new regional manager.

“He said, ‘You’re terminated,'” Camilleri recalled. “I tried to keep myself very calm because I knew something could happen to me. I said, ‘You’re joking — you’ve never been in my store.’ He said, ‘It’s the best thing.'”

It also meant Camilleri had to postpone her March 26 surgery until she could convert her insurance to a self-pay plan known as COBRA.

Two weeks later, Camilleri had not even received the paperwork.

Her son e-mailed the Times Herald-Record.

“We are told that it could take up to 45 days,” Charles Camilleri wrote. “I lay awake every night fearing the worst.”

Contacted by the Record, Zales would not comment. Charles Camilleri called Zales’ human resources, explaining it was a life-or-death matter, and he simply needed a fax from Zales to start the COBRA process. He was floored by the employee’s response.

“She said, “Well, if the surgery was rescheduled, then it’s probably not a life-or-death situation,” Charles Camilleri recalled. “I absolutely was blown away

Once again, the Record contacted Zales’ corporate office, stressing that Rose Camilleri’s condition could be fatal.

That afternoon, Charles got good news from Zales.

“They’re turning my mother’s health coverage back on today and expediting the COBRA information,” he said.

After paying the first premium of $830, Rose had surgery last week and was back home on Sunday. “I don’t think we would have had the surgery so soon if it weren’t for your e-mail,” Charles Camilleri said. “They probably would have kept us hanging.”

If people really think that dealing with private industry bureaucrats is any improvement over government bureaucrats, they need their heads examined. Human resources is a cost center not a profit center and most businesses do not put their best employees there. (That’s not to say there aren’t good HR people out there, just that they are the step children of the business world.)

The sad thing is that this woman’s fight is only getting started because she hasn’t even begun to deal with the insurance company yet. Lord knows what awaits her with that. In that industry, they actually give bonuses to their employees for denying coverage to their policy holders.

I know that people think the government is cumbersome and unresponsive. But I have had dealings with the IRS that are far more efficient and pleasant than anything I’ve ever done with an insurance company. The post office almost never loses a letter. Airplanes rarely run into each other in the sky and until George Bush came in, we didn’t have a lot of food born illness or drugs malfunctioning. They actually do a pretty good job, if only because the people raise holy hell if they don’t and have some ability to affect who the bosses are.

I would much prefer a government run bureaucracy than a for profit bureaucracy. In the first I am at least a stakeholder. In the latter I’m simply a cost.

h/t to bb

All The King’s Horses

by digby

Michael Hirsh is one of the few MSM columnists whose writing on the economic crisis, and specifically the Obama approach to dealing with it, succinctly and I think accurately synthesizes the debate among liberals. (One of the interesting things about all this is the fact that conservatives have absolutely nothing to say on the matter besides screeching about taxes and mouthing platitudes about free markets.)

Hirsh is not a reflexive Obama critic although he is a skeptic. (He gave the Geithner plan a pretty good review.) But his value is in dewonkifying the details and giving us a look at the big picture,which for most laypeople is about the only way to wrap our minds around what’s at stake. Today’s piece offers a look at what I consider to be the essence of the economic disagreements between the Obama administration and its critics: fundamental change in the financial sector vs putting a band-aid on the problem and letting reform wait for another day.

Not long ago, a group of skeptical Democratic senators met at the White House with President Obama, his chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. The six senators—most of them centrists, joined by one left-leaning independent, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders—said that while they supported Obama, they were worried. The financial reform policies the president was pursuing were not going far enough, they told him, and the people Obama was choosing as his regulators were not going to change things fundamentally enough. His appointed officials and nominees were products of the very system that brought us all this economic grief; they would tinker with the system but in the end leave Wall Street, and its practices, mostly intact, the senators suggested politely. In addition to Sanders, the senators at the meeting were Maria Cantwell, Byron Dorgan, Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and Jim Webb. That March 23 gathering, the details of which have gone largely unreported until now, was just a minor flare-up in a larger battle for the future—one that may already be lost. With the financial markets seeming to stabilize in recent weeks, major Wall Street players are digging in against fundamental changes. And while it clearly wants to install serious supervision, the Obama administration—along with other key authorities like the New York Fed—appears willing to stand back while Wall Street resurrects much of the ultracomplex global trading system that helped lead to the worst financial collapse since the Depression. At issue is whether trading in credit default swaps and other derivatives—and the giant, too-big-to-fail firms that traded them—will be allowed to dominate the financial landscape again once the crisis passes. As things look now, that is likely to happen. And the firms may soon be recapitalized and have a lot more sway in Washington—all of it courtesy of their supporters in the Obama administration. With its Public-Private Investment Program set to bid up and buy toxic assets, the administration is handing these companies another giant federal subsidy. But this time the money will come through the back door, bypassing Congress, mainly via FDIC loans. No one is quite sure how the program will work yet, but it’s very likely going to make a lot of the same Wall Street houses much richer at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, the big banks that still need help will almost certainly get another large infusion once the stress tests are completed by the end of the month.

It is interesting that the Senators who carried that message are not known as pitchfork wielding populists (if there is such a thing in the Senate) but rather are considered middle of the road centrists. One wonders what their motives are — I expect they sense the rising anger among the populace and worry that unless something pretty radical takes place the unintended consequences could be rather destabilizing, politically at least. But that’s just a guess.
I have heard people argue that reforming the financial system, as opposed to propping it up, is not a liberal priority and will eat up too much political capital at the expense of more important priorities like health care. I have also heard that fundamentally reforming the system is a political impossibility if it requires that congress appropriate money for more bailouts. (Considering the likelihood of more bailouts anyway, this strikes me as weak.) many people make the connections, as is mentioned in the piece, that Obama is too close to people who run Wall Street — or more broadly, that the entire political system is too close to those who run Wall Street — and therefore, they are failing to see the forest for the trees. I do not know if those reasons are correct. But it occurs to me as I read about our latest gilded age that they may be making a broader calculation about the economy as a whole. After all, we are no longer the manufacturing giant we once were and globalization is rapidly cutting into the manufacturing capacity we still have. The promise of the highly educated workforce doing the high tech jobs for the future has been shrunk decidedly in the last few years as we’ve seen powerhouses like India produce educated high tech workers who make far less than Americans.
In fact, it turns out that the financial sector is one of the few growing sectors in the American economy. As Krugman pointed out a few weeks back:

Even during the “go-go years,” the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company.It all sounds primitive by today’s standards. Yet that boring, primitive financial system serviced an economy that doubled living standards over the course of a generation.After 1980, of course, a very different financial system emerged. In the deregulation-minded Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale. The new system was much bigger than the old regime: On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies — giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

So perhaps the Obama folks have been convinced (by the guys with the metaphorical IEDs strapped to their chests) that if they constrain this sector in any way, the American economy will shrink even further — that the overfed, underregulated financial system is the only real hope for rapid, future growth.

Of course, the flip side is that this booming sector is built on wizardry and gimmicks and so at its best can only provide booms and busts — and leave all but the wealthy in a perpetual state of insecurity. And that leads to political instability. I’m pretty sure that only benefits the disaster capitalist Money Men, not the politicians (although the way the system works, they’re pretty much the same people.)

I can understand the political calculation that says you can’t fight on all fronts at once. The administration has the largest set of challenges since Roosevelt’s. They are necessarily having to prioritize. But I think what has so many liberal wonks spooked is that this meltdown is so systemic and so huge, they really don’t know whether we can rebuild the edifice of trust enough for it to even work on its own fraudulent logic anymore. It strikes me, anyway, as terribly naive to think that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together after this.

If the political calculation is to just get thing rolling again so they can do the things they campaigned on, I think they are taking a huge, huge political risk that far outweighs that of taking on reform. On the suibstance it’s just awful. The system as it stood was unjust and the suffering that’s come in the wake of its failure should not be seen as a normal price to pay for growth. Certainly, the people who perpetrated these schemes should not be allowed to pick up where they left off or further destruction is inevitable.I am not sanguine.

Hirsh concludes his piece this way:

The White House and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to my requests for comment on these issues or on the March 23 meeting (beyond confirming that it took place). But it’s noteworthy that more than a month and a half passed before Obama agreed to the meeting, which was prompted by a letter that Dorgan sent in early February. The senators were invited after one of the group, Sanders, put a hold on the nomination of Gary Gensler, Obama’s nominee to be head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In an interview, Sanders said he opposes the nomination because Gensler has spent much of his career in Washington working for Wall Street’s interests. Gensler, in testimony, has said he has learned from his past mistakes. “At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace,” Sanders said.

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Instead, the old culture is reasserting itself with a vengeance. All of which runs up against the advice now being dispensed by many of the experts who were most prescient about the crash and its causes—the outsiders, in other words, as opposed to the insiders who are still running the show. Among the outsiders is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the trader and professor who wrote “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Taleb wrote in the Financial Times this week that a fundamental new approach is needed. Not only should firms be prevented from growing too big to fail, “complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it,” he said. Yet even as we are still picking up the debris, we seem to be ready to embrace that world once again.

And if they succeed, which is debatable, there will be a few more millionaires made until it all blows up and another round of taxpayer bailouts of outrageous proportions will be required. And then we may find ourselves not laughing at those tea parties anymore because a whole lot more people will be on board. The right hasn’t figured out how to ride populism to power yet. But they will.

Looking Backward

by digby

Nicole Wallace, professional Bush apologist was on Blitzer today and was asked about this piece where she says that she can’t figure out why Obama “apologized” to the Europeans instead of lecturing everyone about America being the greatest country the world has ever known. Chris Kofinis explained that he had to go over to Europe and do what he called the “clean up Bush’s mess” tour just to get us back into the world of nations.

This was her impatient response:

“I would just say that the Democratic obsession with looking backward is the inexplicable thing to me. I cannot understand why liberals and Democrats are so obsessed with looking back and blaming the one man who despite whatever else you say, you can agree with David Axelrod, who said George Bush is the example of grace, and the example of a statesman at this hour. George Bush has set the bar.”

Poor thing. Kofinis pointed out that he wasn’t talking about what Bush has done in the last three months but rather what he did during his eight years as president. She wasn’t appeased.

Bush has set the bar for failure, that’s for sure. That he is keeping quiet at the moment is more likely a function of the fact that he actually doesn’t give a damn about any of this. He did his thing and now he’s out. I don’t believe he is being introspective or statesmanlike or anything else. Cheney is the one fighting for a successful legacy because it’s his legacy.

And Republican whining about the “Democratic obsession with looking back” is just laughable coming from people who have fetishized personal responsibility and law and order. No wonder they raise kids like George W. Bush. I don’t know how they live with all this dissonance in their heads, but they seem to have an endless capacity for it.

Democrats, Always With The Change-In-Waiting

by dday

For what it’s worth, I thought Joe Sestak did an admirable job explaining why we need to change funding of the military based on the wars we fight and the threats we face, not based on the threat of a USSR that doesn’t exist.

Which is fine, but he dances around the larger point that, for example, we don’t NEED 187 F-22 fighters, which is the level AFTER this shift in emphasis in the Pentagon budget. I would go further and hint that we don’t need troops based in 130 countries either, unless we are planning a major imperial expansion anytime soon. Similarly, Robert Gates explained, to his credit, that we don’t need each armed service to have duplicative machinery and personnel when fighting jointly in a theater, but he nonetheless has increased the Pentagon budget even when accounting for this duplication, or at least being mindful of it for the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review.

Now, Matthew Yglesias makes a moderately compelling argument that you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run, on this issue.

I would urge progressives who are having trouble getting themselves excited about this fight to recognize two points. One is that it really is nice to reorient a given quantity of military spending in more useful directions even if it doesn’t lead to cuts in the headline number. But the other is that if you ever do want to see further-reaching reform, we need to pass something like this budget first. It’s a key political test of whether it’s even possible to defy what the defense contractors and the joint chiefs want. If that does prove possible, then in years to come many things are possible, including a long-term trajectory that has defense declining as a percent of GDP. If it’s not possible then nothing is possible, and no future president will tackle it.

I recognize the first point and strongly disagree with the second, especially in light of the initial reaction. Conservatives and those who want to protect their parochial interests were ALWAYS going to characterize this as a cut. They know they can score political points off of it, and furthermore they have sufficiently brainwashed the media into believing that military spending is magic and doesn’t affect the budget. In this way, Republicans can very easily call spending on giant weapons programs stimulus after arguing for months that federal spending isn’t stimulative. They have wired the political establishment to orient themselves this way. Heck, they have media embeds who extoll the virtues of various weapons systems in the media without having to disclose how they profit off of them.

That being the case, why would anyone want to have this fight TWICE? If you’re going to provoke the reaction that your Administration is cutting military spending, why not actually cut military spending in the process? This is a familiar Democratic technocrat argument, where they argue for a half-measure and a go-slow approach because we’ll have the upper hand on talking points. “See, it’s really an INCREASE!” And thus progress gets delayed and eventually denied.

It may hold that the Obama Administration doesn’t actually want to cut military spending, which is my view, based on the fact that as a candidate, the President consistently said that he would increase the budget. While I appreciate the logic behind transformation and the need for more efficiently orienting our military toward actual things that could happen, I don’t appreciate so-called progressives assuring me that this is some step toward a less insane balance in the military budget as a percentage of GDP. There’s no evidence for that whatsoever, and it strikes me as the typical Democratic skittishness to actually embrace real change.

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They’ve Got A Secret

by dday

I think I mentioned this here in passing once, but it deserves a fuller rendering. The outcry over the President’s expansive use of the state secrets privilege to shut down lawsuits against illegal wiretapping has escalated. TPM Muckraker finds a series of experts willing to acknowledge that this is no different from Bush’s policy to get these lawsuits tossed out.

Ken Gude, an expert in national security law at the Center for American Progress, supported the administration’s invocation of the state secrets claim when it was made earlier this year in an extraordinary rendition case. But its position in Jewel is “disappointing,” Gude told TPMmuckraker, calling himself “frustrated.”

Gude confirmed that the Obama-ites were taking the same position as the Bushies on state secrets questions. “They’ve taken the maximalist view that the judge has hardly any role in determining whether national security” would be compromised by the release of classified information,” he said. “There’s going to be people who are very unhappy, and justifiably so.”

He added: “I’m very uncomfortable with the notion that the people who get to decide [whether national security would be jeopardized] is the government.”

Gude’s general view was echoed by Amanda Frost, an associate professor at Washington College of Law who has written extensively about issues of government transparency. Frost made clear that she hadn’t followed the Jewel case, but called the Obama administration’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in a similar high-profile wiretapping case involving an Oregon-based Arabic charity “indefensible.” The NSA, she said, has already acknowledged the existence of the wiretapping program, and some of its details are publicly known, so the claim that national security would be jeopardized merely by allowing the trial to proceed doesn’t hold water. The government is making that argument in both the Oregon case and Jewel.

There are more at the link. Even the traditional media are starting to openly question Obama officials on these points – and the officials are maintaining that the President fully supports the invocation of the state secrets privilege on expansive national security grounds to dismiss lawsuits. Dan Froomkin calls it utterly un-American. And this find by Greg Sargent makes clear the official hypocrisy at work:

Obama attacked Bush’s use of (the state secrets privilege on the grounds of national security) during the campaign. Indeed, Obama’s campaign Web site still identifies Bush’s use of the tactic as a “problem” that created undo “secrecy” and needs to be changed.

Congress can actually act here. Russ Feingold has carried legislation that would sharply limit the ability of the executive to use the state secrets privilege. Far from being the work of “America-haters” or based on a knee-jerk antipathy to George Bush, civil liberties advocates were always adamant that the standard of the rule of law be equally applied in all cases. No executive, Republican or Democratic, should have the untrammeled power to essentially supersede the courts and act above the law. Here’s Feingold’s statement, reflective of this belief:

I am troubled that once again the Obama administration has decided to invoke the state secrets privilege in a case challenging the previous administration’s alleged misconduct. The Obama administration’s action, on top of Congress’s mistaken decision last year to give immunity to the telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in the warrantless wiretapping program, will make it even harder for courts to rule on the legality of that program. In February, I asked for a classified briefing so that I can understand the reasons for the Department’s decision to invoke the privilege in another case, and I intend to seek information on this new case as well. I also encourage the greatest possible public accounting of the use of the state secrets privilege and welcome the Attorney General’s statement that he hopes to share his review with the American people.

Beyond the particular case at issue here, it is clear that there is an urgent need for legislation to give better guidance to the courts on how to handle assertions of the state secrets privilege. The American people must be able to have confidence that the privilege is not being used to shield government misconduct. That is why I am working with Senators Leahy, Specter, and others to pass the State Secrets Protection Act as soon as possible.

This is truly ugly stuff, and the worst aspects of the Obama Administration thus far, in fact almost all of them, have been when they have sought to participate in what amounts to a cover-up. They should not have the tools to do so, at least in this case. And while state secrets invocations are generally successful in the courts, the continual smackdowns by federal judges to the Bush Administration’s attempted capture of more and more expansive executive power should at the least caution Obama’s team not to follow down the same path. But they are now fully implicated in this, and will have to face the consequences.

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