Month: November 2009

Yellow Peril

by digby

Chris Hayes went to China:

As Barack Obama touched down in China, the American press seemed to settle on a single story line. The president, wrote the New York Times, will be “assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.” And the Wall Street Journal highlighted “China’s Blunt Talk for Obama,” about US economic policy and the “nervousness” expressed by Chinese leaders that “huge U.S. budget deficits will weaken the dollar and slash the value of China’s massive foreign-currency holdings.” The karmic symmetry of this state of affairs makes for an appealing fable. The once mighty United States, which for decades used the IMF to impose its will on the domestic policies of developing countries across the globe, is brought low by its profligacy and forced to beg sufferance from the miserly Chinese. But just a few days here in Shanghai (on a trip sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Association) has convinced me it’s bullshit and the Chinese know it. “There’s an old Chinese saying,” Yang Jiemian, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told me. “If you borrow a hundred dollars, you are borrower; if you borrow a million dollars, you are not borrower.” There’s an English version of this, which is a bit zippier–“When you owe $100,000, the bank owns you. When you owe $100 million, you own the bank”–and it aptly describes the US relationship with China, which holds approximately 70 percent of its 2.3 trillion foreign reserves in dollars.

He goes on to explain just how co-dependent the two countries are and very astutely answers the biggest question out there. Why in the hell is this country ginning up the yellow peril again?

The answer to that, I think, is politics. It’s increasingly clear that China has replaced the bond market as the nebulous specter that fiscal hawks will use to justify domestic austerity. In the 1990s Bill Clinton was persuaded by Robert Rubin and others that the deficits he inherited required him to abandon any extension of the welfare state, lest interest rates go through the roof and the economy into the tank. He was urged to balance the budget, which he did, prompting James Carville to quip: “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Of course, we still have a bond market, but the fiscal hawks don’t talk much about it these days. That’s because despite all the borrowing, interest rates remain low. So instead, fiscal hawks have attempted to outsource their browbeating to the Chinese, often referred to as our “biggest creditor,” even though China holds only 22 percent of foreign-held US Treasury securities. (The majority is held domestically.) In June Illinois Republican Mark Kirk bragged during a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that on a recent trip to China he’d told Chinese officials that “the budget numbers that the US government had put forward should not be believed. The Congress is actually gonna spend quite a bit more than what’s in the budget, and the healthcare bill probably being the lead driver of additional spending by the Congress.” This bizarre bit of self-sabotage makes sense only if you recognize that Kirk is hoping that panicking the Chinese will boomerang back to the States and whack Obama’s domestic agenda.

Got nihilism?

Hayes points out that elites of both countries are playing with populist fire by refusing to deal with their respective problems properly and that following the advice of the wrecking crew is exactly the wrong thing to do (as usual.)

Read the whole thing, it’s short. And then send it to Saturday Night Live which inexplicably turned itself into Larry Kudlow’s press flack this week-end.

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Independent Elders And The Deficit

by digby

I’m listening to Matthews, Fineman and Cook obsess about the “independents” as if this is the first time they’ve ever noticed them. (Oy — “independents” are the new “values voters.”)

Fineman points out that the crosstabs on the new Gallup poll shows that Obama is doing fine with younger independents up to about age 55 but has lost all those over 55 who are obsessed with the deficit. Here’s how Matthews and company explain what’s going on:

Matthews: So it’s interesting, what’s hurt the president is two things, just to get the policy problem, or the people around him, there’s two concerns people have, people who read the papers and the older people especially who have the time to do that, worried about money, because they’re trying to keep it.They’re worried about the debt. They’re worried about deficits growing. People who are in their earning years, people who are 40 and 30, 25 out there and are trying to make a buck, those people are worried about jobs.

Here’s the conflict, the rub if you will. If the president goes out and spends more money to create jobs, he runs up the deficit. If he holds back and makes the deficit conscious people happy, no more jobs. So he has to decide who he wants to appeal to in the next year, right?

If you’re Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel, and Joe Biden, they’re sitting around advising the president, “Mr President, you have to make up your mind here. You have to decide if you’re going with the working people, 30 or 40 years old who are trying to make a buck, or worry about the older people.” If you’re just talking in terms of politics. ..

Charlie Cook: Clearly there’s a squeeze play going on. Do something about the economy and jobs vs don’t aggravate the deficit.Don’t expand the…

Matthews: Which way are they leaning now? I think they’re leaning towards doing nothing.

Cook: Well, I’m not sure which is doing nothing …

Matthews: not creating jobs by spending money

Cook: Well the thing is, if you’re just looking at it politically, old people vote midterm elections and young people don’t.

Matthews: Therefore, worry about the deficit.

Cook: In a midterm election if you only cared about politics that would be it

Fineman: But the complicating part of that is that you want your hardcore base to come out in a midterm election and that’s why Barack Obama ..

Matthews: Older white people tend to vote Republican …

Fineman: So that’s why he’s focusing on trying to get this healthcare bill passed. The problem is that as he focuses on it, older Americans are scared about cuts in Medicare which the Republicans are talking about extensively. And they’re worried about the deficit.

And the wealthy deficit scolds who come out from under the bed anytime someone wants to do anything but kill people and cut taxes are …. what? Concerned senior citizens? Please. To leave out the people who are spending billions to keep the government from delivering anything of value to its citizens is malpractice. (Here’s James Galbraith today on that subject.)

But Matthews is fundamentally correct in his simplistic assessment of the electorate. The older white people don’t like government spending and the younger people are desperate for it. But why is it that these older Americans, of all people, would be so worried about the deficit? They won’t, after all, be here when the bill comes due. While they may say that they care about future generations, you’d think that watching their own children struggle in their peak earning years and lose their dream of a successful future (and watching their grandkids have to leave school because they can’t afford the 32% hike in their tuition) would tug just a teeny bit at their allegedly generous heart strings.

Let’s face it. A good number of them are just conservatives who never liked Obama and just believe in their guts that he and the tax and spend hippies are going to give their Medicare to the blacks and Mexicans. But a lot of other older people just feel vulnerable and alone and mistrust what they see as hyperactive, neglectful youngsters who are driving the world into chaos. They are excellent targets for con artists, scammers and demagogues — and at this point conservatives are pretty much defined by those terms. There is no greater elder scam than to trouble them with unfounded fears of deficit forecasts and social security shortfalls decades in the future. (You should see the horrible mail these old people get from the right wingers.)

But where else are the Republicans going to get voters? Young people think they’re clowns. Racial and ethnic minorities know very well they hate them. Women can’t stand them. The only place they have to go is to those among the frightened older population who they can con into believing that the black president is trying to kill them. No other demographic out there beyond their crazy base believes anything they say.

But the fallacy of Matthews’ and Cooks’ argument is that Obama could possibly appease these people by “addressing” the deficit. As Krugman pointed out a while back:

[T]here are very good odds that even if Obama exhibited iron fiscal discipline, voters wouldn’t notice. There’s a remarkable, depressing paper by Achen and Bartels that includes an analysis of voter views of the deficit in 1996 — by which time the huge deficit that Bill Clinton inherited had been drastically reduced. Here’s what voters thought they knew:

Yep: after one of the biggest moves toward budget balance in history, a majority of Republicans, and a plurality of all voters, believed that deficits had increased. Not to put too fine a point on it: if Obama succeeded in reducing the deficit, would Fox News or the Washington Times report it?

No. And the minute they did, the Republicans would start caterwauling about tax cuts and “it’s yer muneee” and some greenspan figure would sagely tell everyone that surpluses will kill the economy the whole thing would start all over again anyway. That’s the big scam.

The deficit scolds are not sincere (and the average Joes out there who fret over them are either deluded or lying.) It not just the Peter Petersons, but also the Larry Summers, Bob Rubin people who are always finding new rationales for the same ends. The people pulling the strings are the ones who have a direct, personal stake in keeping the government weak and disrespected and the deficit cudgel is just one of many weapons in their large arsenal. It sure isn’t poor old people who stand to gain anything by “deficit reduction.”

Unsurprisingly, the whole Village has, overnight, worked itself into a slobbering tizzy over deficits, just as the administration is contemplating how to deal with the massive, growing unemployment problem. Who could have predicted such a thing?

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Stooges

by digby

In the course of a typically enjoyable email exchange with my pal Jonathan Schwartz about whether or not sociopaths inevitably inhabit the corridors of power he sent me this extremely interesting post of his from a while back on the occasion of the death of Margaret Hassan the famous aid worker who was kidnapped and killed by some horrible assholes in Iraq. It was an awful thing and brought Jonathan to muse on the sociopathic tendencies among us and to quote what he calls the THE GREATEST DESCRIPTION OF POLITICS EVER WRITTEN:

From High Weirdness by Mail by Rev. Ivan Stang:

There are three kinds of people — I call them Larrys, Curlys, and Moes. The Larrys don’t even know that there are three types; if they’re told, it’s an abstraction, because they cannot imagine anything beyond Larry-ness. The Curlys know about it, and recognize the pecking order, but find ways of living with it cheerfully…for they are the imaginative, creative ones. The Moes not only know about it, but exploit and perpetuate it. The naive, pleasant believers of all kinds are Larrys — ineffectual, well-meaning do-gooders destined always to be victims, often without once guessing their status. Like sheep, they don’t want to hear the unpleasant legends about “the slaughterhouse”; they trust the strange two-legged beings who feed them. The artists, unsung scientific geniuses, political writers, and earnest disciples of the stranger cults are Curlys — engaging, original, accident-prone but full of life, intuitively aware of the Moe forces plotting against them and trying to fight back. They can never defeat the Moes, however, without BECOMING Moes, which is impossible for a true Curly. The Moes, then, are the fanatics, the ranters, the cult gurus, the Uri Gellers AND the Debunkers; they are the Resistance Leaders and the Ruling Class Bankers. They hate each other, but only because they want to control ALL the Larrys and Curlys themselves. They don’t actually enjoy their dominance; it’s simply part of their nature. Nor are they less foolish for the fact that they make the decisions. They suffer a chronic paranoia that is unknown to their less demanding underlings. Larrys and Curlys die in wars started by rival Moes — the Larrys willingly, the Curlys with great regret. Concepts like “Hell” and “Sin” were invented by Moes to keep Larrys in line; the Larrys in turn, being far more numerous, exert social pressures on the Curly minority to also obey…mainly so the Larrys won’t feel like suckers. The Moes also invent myths, like that of the “Grouchos, Harpos, Chicos, and Zeppos,” to throw the more rebellious Curlys off their trail and keep them unsure of the real situations. [When the Curly’s finally die of overwork, the Moes find that they cannot live in an all-Larry world; they select special Larry’s and vainly try to mold them into False Curlys…but it isn’t the same.] I am a Moe, though not a particularly powerful one; that is why I know these things, and it is also why I dare to tell you — for most of you will think it’s just a funny joke. A few will know it is the truth, but will fight far harder against my Moe enemies than you will against me, a relatively harmless Moe. My fellow Moes — enemies and uneasy SubGenius allies alike — will know what I’m REALLY saying, and chuckle in appreciation while plotting my downfall. In vain. ALL in VAIN, boy.

Jonathan thinks that Larrys are sleeping Curlys, which is kind of nice. I’m quite sure that among a certain sub-set of highly superior holier-than-thou commentators it’s an article of faith that all Curlys are just slightly more fashionable Larrys.

But, on some level, I think most people probably think they are Moes . In America at least, they would be the real “winners.”

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Divas, Zombies and David Broder

by digby

Think Progress depressingly lays out what may end up being the most pernicious and dangerous Big Lie about the health care reform bill:

Despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that Reid’s bill would reduce the federal budget deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years, opponents of reform are still trying to paint it as fiscally irresponsible. On the Senate floor on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) quoted a then-unreleased column by the Washington Post’s David Broder in order to claim that “the experts agree with the public opinion polls that this 2,074-page bill is a budget buster.” But as Ezra Klein, Broder’s colleague at the Washington Post, pointed out, Broder is misreading the CBO ‘s score of the legislation. Broder pointed to a section of the CBO report that says “federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period,” which he claimed means that deficit will increase, not decline. But as Klein notes, “The net increase of $160 billion in the first 10 years is part of CBO’s analysis, not a caveat to it. It doesn’t mean the bill doesn’t cut the deficit, it just means that overall spending is larger before you add revenues into the equation.” On Fox News Sunday yesterday, host Chris Wallace made the same exact mistake as Broder by selectively quoting the same section of the CBO report. As the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky noted, the last paragraph of the same page that Wallace and Broder quote says that “during the decade following the 10-year budget window, the increases and decreases in the federal budgetary commitment to health care stemming for this legislation would roughly balance out, so that there would be no significant change in the commitment.”

Perhaps this sounds like some arcane inside-the-beltway argument that doesn’t have any salience beyond Capital Hill. Sadly, this isn’t true at all, as David Sirota points out in this post called How the media and the GOP turn lies into zombie lies – a health care case study:

As both Media Matters and the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein show, the lie is now framing the discussion over the Senate version of the health care bill. That’s to be expected – it’s Washington, D.C. after all, the beating heart of the American Idiocracy. But where that standard D.C. lie becomes a zombie lie is at the local level. When a lie starts getting repeated as fact in local news outlets where most average non-Beltway Americans get their news, it quickly becomes a zombie lie. In the extended entry I provide a case study – you have to see it to believe it.

You do. (click here) Sirota lives in Denver and he shows the front page of the Denver Post and a segment of the local news to illustrate just how far this zombie lie has penetrated:

So, if you are the typical non-political junkie who glanced at the front page of the Denver Post, giant red font and a whopping 9 zeroes (for extra effect, of course) misled you to believe that the CBO says the Senate health care bill costs $849 billion – not that the CBO actually says the Senate health care bill will reduce the deficit by $127 billion over 10 years and up to $650 billion over 20 years. Likewise, if you are the typical non-political junkie who caught the evening news on Saturday, you were given at least a little more accurate information – but only in a he-said-he-said way that calls into question the whole numbers. Specifically, you heard only that one guy – David Sirota – claims the bill will reduce the deficit, and that another guy – Colorado Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams – insists the bill costs $2.5 trillion. You didn’t hear that, in fact, it wasn’t David Sirota who said the bill will reduce the deficit – it was the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that the Republican Party itself cites as an unquestionably credible source. And you didn’t hear that Dick Wadhams literally made up his $2.5 trillion number out of thin air.

We’re back in “opposiute world” again. Sadly, health care reform has not come to this point because someone suddenly had his consciousness raised about the plight of people who are uninsured. It has come about because certain economic forces have created a market for reform, not the least of which is that both the government and businesses are going to collapse under the strain of the current runaway health care costs. This is happening all over the world, but the US, with its obscene rationing system that only guarantees coverage to the wealthy, the lucky and the elderly is at more peril than the others which have at least devised some controls and have their entire society covered.

Now for those of us who would prefer that our broadly prosperous country stay broadly prosperous and at least somewhat decent rather than become a banana republic, health care reform has been on the agenda for decades, for moral as well as practical reasons. It’s disgusting to live in a country where wealthy people arrogantly complain when they might have to pay a tax for their botox treatments while tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen die each year purely because they lack access to adequate health care. But let’s not kid ourselves that such inequality is the reason we find ourselves on the brink of health care reform. If only.

Of course it’s possible to fix this and there were many roads that made more sense than the ones they chose. The only question has ever been whether they have the political will to take on some of the sacred calves that dominate our society and demand that they not be expected to sacrifice anything for their country because they are so damned special. Indeed they must be treated like Diva sopranos lest they decide to withhold their “talent” in a fit of pique.

And even when they are, what do they do? They call it socialism and create zombie lies that it’s doing exactly the opposite of what it’s actually intended to do — which is cut costs over the long haul, through a whole series of measures including universal coverage. And braindead parrots like David Broder, with no proof whatsoever, believe them because it just “sounds right.” After all, everyone knows that the deficit is the cause of the current economic meltdown and everybody knows that any program the government does will raise the deficit, no matter what the CBO says (unless it says it will raise the deficit in which case it’s true.)

This zombie lie that any reform is going to break the bank is precisely the opposite of what the bill is intended to do, far beyond peripheral things like covering sick people. Indeed, if covering sick people were the only motivation we wouldn’t be where we are today. And in the end the usual suspects will probably have their cake and eat it too — the cost cutting will help their bottom lines but they’ll make political hay out of the horrible socialistic takeover of the system. It’s win win for them. The rest of us, not so much.

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All In The Same Boat

by digby

I remember reading somewhere that one of the reasons there are more benefits and privileges for working people in Europe than you do here is because their parliamentary systems encourage more working and middle class people to actually participate in electoral politics. (Shorter, cheaper elections etc.) Less representation from the upper classes means more representation for everyone else.

I’m sure you all have noticed that it’s only when Republicans and their families are afflicted by a problem that they will agitate for government funding for research and the like. If that’s so then, as Joe Klein notes, this is a very smart move:

My favorite provision requires that all members of Congress give up their federally-funded health care benefits and join the health care exchanges that will be set up by this bill. This is brilliant politics, addressing the tide of populist anger and fears of incipient socialism. But it also makes an important substantive point. The future of health care reform in this country will depend on how effectively the exchanges–health insurance super-stores–are working. If members of Congress have to participate in this system, you can bet they’ll insist on a array of choices, similar to the system they currently use, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.

If they are personally affected, then they will likely ensure that the exchanges are adequate. It’s not exactly how we all assumed that representative government worked, but in our culture of greed and self-dealing, this may be about the best we can do.

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Waiting For The Bubble

by digby

In today’s column about the administration listening to Wall Street’s scare stories about what will happen if they do what’s necessary and actually try to create some new jobs, Krugman is as astonished by Obama’s words last week about deficits causing a double dip recession as I was:

In December 2008 Lawrence Summers, soon to become the administration’s highest-ranking economist, called for decisive action. “Many experts,” he warned, “believe that unemployment could reach 10 percent by the end of next year.” In the face of that prospect, he continued, “doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

Ten months later unemployment reached 10.2 percent, suggesting that despite his warning the administration hadn’t done enough to create jobs. You might have expected, then, a determination to do more.

But in a recent interview with Fox News, the president sounded diffident and nervous about his economic policy. He spoke vaguely about possible tax incentives for job creation. But “it is important though to recognize,” he went on, “that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

What? Huh?

Most economists I talk to believe that the big risk to recovery comes from the inadequacy of government efforts: the stimulus was too small, and it will fade out next year, while high unemployment is undermining both consumer and business confidence.

He goes on to write that many Wall Street analysts are all having hissy fits about the debt because they are convinced that rates are going to soar and there’s goingto be acollapse in investor confidence. (He later points out that these are the same analysts who were having major hissy fits just months ago about inflation — and were arguing against the stimulus for that reason.) And the whole thing reminded me of this post I wrote last March:

I was just reading this interesting piece about narcissistic personality disorder and musing about the mindset that believes it’s ok to take down the world economy and then dictate the rules by which it is fixed.(Not to mention turn a profit at it!) And then I read this:

In recent days, in spite of public furor over huge bonuses paid at American International Group Inc., the administration has concluded that it needs the private sector to play a central role in fixing the economy. So over the weekend, the White House worked to tone down its Wall Street bashing and to win support from top bankers for the bailout plan announced Monday, which will rely on public-private investments to soak up toxic assets.

But weeks of searing criticism by politicians and the public had left bankers leery of working with the government. After brainstorming about what to do about that problem, the White House resolved to try to take control of the debate, according to several administration officials. In weekend television appearances, President Barack Obama and other administration officials tempered their criticisms of the financial sector.

President Obama met with members of the National Conference of State Legislature at the White House speaking adamantly about how his $787 billion dollar bailout must be used wisely and that wasteful spending will be avoided. Video courtesy of Fox News.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his colleagues worked the phones to try to line up support on Wall Street for the plan announced Monday. They told executives they don’t favor using the tax code to retroactively penalize specific individuals who had received bonuses, according to people familiar with the calls. They asked officials to sign on “in pencil, not ink,” and to “validate” or “express support” for the plan, these people say.

Some bankers say they turned the conversations into complaints about the antibonus crusade consuming Capitol Hill. Some have begun “slow-walking” the information previously sought by Treasury for stress-testing financial institutions, three bankers say, and considered seeking capital from hedge funds and private-equity funds so they could return federal bailout money, thereby escaping federal restrictions.

Well that certainly clears this up:

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

No kidding. Reading that WSJ article, I can’t help but be reminded of another president who was shown in no uncertain terms who was really running the show:

Clinton’s experience shows what such pressure can do to a president’s agenda. Promises of spending on education, public works and a middle-class tax cut fell by the wayside as advisers led by Robert Rubin, who later became Treasury secretary, convinced the new president the best thing he could do for the economy was to show investors his resolve on fiscal discipline.

“You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton raged at aides, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s book, “The Agenda.”

As it was then, so it is now. (And you can bet that the fucking bond traders are getting ready to strap on the IED over health care and energy…) The owners of America will be appeased or they will destroy everything in their wake.

In another world, they would call this economic terrorism.

Krugman winds up his column with this:

Still, let’s grant that there is some risk that doing more about double-digit unemployment would undermine confidence in the bond markets. This risk must be set against the certainty of mass suffering if we don’t do more — and the possibility, as I said, of a collapse of confidence among ordinary workers and businesses.And Mr. Summers was right the first time: in the face of the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, it’s much riskier to do too little than it is to do too much. It’s sad, and unfortunate, that the administration appears to have lost sight of that truth.

Since the same people who advised Clinton that his economic program depended on a “bunch of fucking bond traders” are advising Obama today, I guess we’d just better keep our fingers crossed that there’s another once in a lifetime bubble right around the corner to get us out of this thing. It sounds like that’s what they’re counting on.

Update: And then there’s this. (h/t to mike)
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Horror

by digby

Vaguely following up Tristero’s post below, it should probably not go unmentioned that today was the 46th anniversary of JFK’s assassination:

The procession left the airport and traveled along a ten-mile route that wound through downtown Dallas on the way to the Trade Mart where the President was scheduled to speak at a luncheon. Crowds of excited people lined the streets waving to the Kennedys as they waved back. The car turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. As it was passing the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire suddenly reverberated in the plaza. Bullets struck the President’s neck and head and he slumped over toward Mrs. Kennedy. The Governor was also hit in the chest.

The car sped off to Parkland Memorial Hospital just a few minutes away. But there was little that could be done for the President. A Catholic priest was summoned to administer the last rites and at 1:00 p.m. John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. Governor Connolly, though seriously wounded, would recover.

The President’s body was brought to Love Field and placed on Air Force One. Before the plane took off, a grim-faced Lyndon B. Johnson stood in the tight, crowded compartment and took the oath of office, administered by U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Hughes. The brief ceremony took place at 2:38 p.m. Less than an hour earlier, police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a recently-hired employee at the Texas School Book Depository. He was being held for the assassination of President Kennedy as well as the fatal shooting, shortly afterward, of Patrolman J.D. Tippit on a Dallas street.

With the sick stuff that’s out in the ether these days I couldn’t help but be reminded of this.

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Vietnam/Afghanistan

by tristero

I’d like to revisit both the topic and links for two recent posts of Digby’s, on Afghanistan. Those of us who lived through the multiple horrors of the Vietnam war – like Digby, like myself – need to make it crystal clear to those of you who didn’t that the decisions Obama is about to make about Afghanistan will have the most far-reaching consequences imaginable, both for that country’s future, and our own.

First, let’s turn to the eloquent, ominous ending to Bill Moyers’s report on Johnson’s struggles with Vietnam. I can’t improve on what he said. I urge you to listen to the broadcast, because the full emotional impact of these words can’t be conveyed in pixels on the the intertubes.

BILL MOYERS: Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

Which brings us to Garry Wills’ dismaying essay in the New York Review of Books about the political cost Obama will pay if he chooses, as he should, to resist the crushing domestic political imperatives to continue Bush’s war in Afghanistan.

Can even someone as brilliant as Barack Obama resolve this ghastly dilemma? Can he find a way both to avoid the bloody quagmire Bush – deliberately – left for the incoming president, and also serve for two terms? Wills seems to think it’s all but impossible. Sadly, I agree.

Escalating the Afghanistan conflict will lead to disaster. Refusing to escalate it will lead to political ruin not only for Obama or the Democratic party, but for this country, which will be torn apart by the extreme right, even if there isn’t a spectacular 9/11 attack after an American withdrawal.

Indeed, Digby is probably right: Obama will escalate, somehow. And countless American and Afghani lives will be sacrificed, for… what, exactly? Certainly not Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government.

No. Escalation will likely have little to do with Afghanistan, or even foreign policy, but everything to do both with a sitting president’s ambition as well as the prevention of an extreme right takeover in the next presidential election. Just like Vietnam. I hate the American far right as much as any liberal, but it is not worth getting people killed in Kandahar to prevent them from seizing power. If the US really is that far down the road to fascism, then escalating a pointless war will not prevent an imminent rightwing takeover.

We live in the most interesting of times, god dammit.

Consumer Populism

by digby

I honestly believe that this is the kind of thing that affects people every day and is leading to a populist backlash. People not only blame those who do these things, they blame those who have the authority and power for failing to step in and stop it:

Three years ago, the Haggler’s credit card bill seemed to stop showing up in the mail. Another month went by — no bill. The month after that, still nothing. Each month, the Haggler would call the issuer, Bank of America, and pay over the phone, then ask the same question: “Why did you stop sending me a bill?”

We’re still sending you a bill, came the company’s reply each time.

Guess what? The company was right. It just was sending the bill in a restyled envelope, with no trace of “Bank of America.” In other words, it looked like junk mail, and the Haggler kept throwing it away.

Now, the Haggler can’t prove it, but this seemed like a brilliant, low-cost way to pocket a fortune in late fees.

“We are not trying to fool people, and we don’t change our envelopes on a regular basis,” said Anne Pace, a company spokeswoman. She explained that the change in envelope design was prompted by the 2006 acquisition of several credit card companies, after which the envelopes of all customers were left blank “for the sake of consistency.”

Consistency? It would be consistent, as far as B. of A. customers are concerned, to leave the envelope unchanged, no?

Seriously, the person who dreamed up the envelope switcheroo must wake up laughing. Ever since, the Haggler has held a grudging, vaguely appalled respect for credit card companies.

The same thing happened to me. The plain brown envelope looked like it was one of those car dealership “checks” that were all the rage before the credit crisis hit. And because I didn’t realize the first month that I hadn’t gotten my bill, it created a black mark on my credit for a late payment which resulted in a cascade of raised rates on several cards.

It was clearly a sneaky trick. Yes, it’s my responsibility to know when my bills are due, but I had been in the habit of putting the bill into the “to pay” file and paying it on the following Monday. It didn’t occur to me that the bill would suddenly come in an envelope with no return address or label on it that didn’t look like a bill and so I tossed it into a junk pile and didn’t look at it right away.

And that’s what people are dealing with all the time as consumers, with their health insurance, their credit cards, their mortgages, their pensions — overwhelming complexity designed to trip them up and cost them money or deny them benefits to which they believed in good faith they were entitled. And its all perfectly legal — or at least there’s no visible accountability for it.

The late fee tricks we are seeing all over the news is apparently going to go on unabated for as long as they can get away with it. And it goes back to the same central problems that created the financial meltdown in the first place:

The backdrop of this boo-boo is an industry that for the last 10 years has been refining the low art of late-fee shenanigans. Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, says that starting in 1999 — when the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act allowed commercial and investment banks to merge — credit card companies started looking to late fees for profit.

“It began with regulators allowing banks to say that if a bill arrived on the due date but after a certain time on that day — like noon — then it was late,” Mr. Mierzwinski said. “Now, how many people know when a bank checks their mail?”

Some banks started moving up due dates without notice. Others required that payments sent via overnight mail use a special address, so that if you sent a payment by FedEx to the regular address, you were late.

Getting the picture? In May, Congress passed the Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which curtails some of these practices. But critics predict that the elimination of some fees will give rise to new ones.

As we know, they are already doing some unbelievable tricks in advance of the law taking effect — and the Republicans have put an inexplicable hold on efforts to stop them. All people see is more trickery, with the government spending vast sums on the bailouts and failing to enact meaningful reforms in a quick and forceful way.

The Democrats should be the consumer’s best friends right now, valiantly and openly fighting these huge enterprises and demanding that they answer for their previous bad behavior. There is some action on these fronts in the congress, as with the credit card bill, but they are so slow-moving and opaque that hardly anyone knows about it. And when the Republicans stand in the way as they did with both the extended unemployment insurance or the necessary credit card reforms, the Dems don’t bother to use their obstructionism to build a narrative that will stick with the Republicans come election time.

I just don’t get this. This is a populist moment and with the exception of a few liberal economists and professors and a couple of Democratic congressmen, the whole field is being left to the teabaggers. This populist fever doesn’t just affect the rural working folks, it affects people in the big urban centers and the suburbs just as much. Everybody’s getting screwed. Somebody needs to address that or the wrong people are going to be blamed.

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Raising Little Fido

by digby

I enjoy the Dog Whisperer as much as anyone. He has a special way with man’s best friend. But according to this article, some parents are so into his techniques that they think they should raise their children like he raises dogs. And they think it’s such a nifty idea that they actually talked to the New York Times about it.

Cesar Millan doesn’t talk about this on his shows, but he did explain how this whole thing might work when the reporter questioned him about it:

Mr. Millan says parents question him all the time. “I’m going to give them my point of view — I’m a father myself,” he said.

As a native of Mexico, he said, he adheres to a more traditional, hierarchical child-rearing philosophy, which he considers effective in both the pack and the family. There, “for thousands of years, the elder has always been the pack leader, it’s never the child,” Mr. Millan said. “In America, kids have too many options when they only need one: ‘Just do it, because.’ ”

If that doesn’t work you can rub their noses in it.

Seriously, it seems like every generation rediscovers the patriarchal model and calls it progress because it turns out that authoritarian domination makes for less rambunctious little humans. Go figure. And if humans were as simple as dogs they might even willingly succumb to this order. Unfortunately, human beings evolved into creatures that have free will and a highly complicated psychological and intellectual framework, so these sorts of arrangements end up affecting them in less predictable ways than it does dogs.

Discipline is part of parenting, of course, but designed for the human psyche please, not for Fido. Even children who behave like animals aren’t dogs.

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