Underwater Walrus
by digby
I find it hard to believe that Matthews came up with this odd term by coincidence. (And it makes me sort of like him a little bit.) But I also can’t believe that Matthews would be hip to something that anyone at Sadly No isn’t hip to. Indeed, it seems impossible. So it must be a coincidence, in which case I still don’t like him.
Ahhh — the world has righted itself again.
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Who Cares?
by digby
Krugman mentions Sarah Palin’s latest insult and wonders why conservatives are able to insult regions of the country cost-free? I’ve wondered the same thing, many times.
Here’s what she said, talking about her show about “Real Americans:”
“It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to excite you guys on the East Coast, but everyone else is dying to hear stories like these,” said one of her representatives who was not authorized to speak on the record but was authorized to slam the East Coast.
Krugman points out:
By East Coast, of course, she doesn’t mean the whole coast — South Carolina is clearly part of “real America”, even though it, ahem, tried to leave it way back when. Instead, she’s bashing the Northeast Corridor, aka Acelaland.
As usual, the Onion had it right, in its first post-9/11 issue:
Rest Of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection For New York
What I don’t quite get, however, is why it’s politically OK to insult around 50 million Americans. Back when, Barry Goldwater paid a price for his remark that
sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.
In fact, I remember seeing the Johnson ad about that. But these days, insulting large blocs of Americans, implying that the rural and small-town and (ahem) white minority is the only genuine part of the country, seems to be cost-free.
Those of us who live out here in the land of fruits and nuts don’t get it any better, I’m afraid. (Let’s not forget that “San Francisco liberal” is used as an epithet.) It’s as politically correct as can be to suggest that NY and California aren’t even legitimately part of America.
Of course, there are also plenty of people on the coasts who ridicule the south and midwest, small towns and the rest. The difference is that those who live in these godforsaken metropolitan hellholes usually laugh along in a sort of shamed agreement. It’s a different sense of regional pride (or lack thereof) I guess. Or perhaps we snobbish coastal elites don’t really care much what Sarah Palin thinks about us. In any case, it goes both ways, but only side is taken to task for it.
But the laugh’s really on Palin:
Sarah Palin’s much-hyped LL Cool J-less Fox News special last night didn’t bring in the huge ratings some (ok, we) predicted. Greta Van Susteren’s On The Record which normally airs at 10pmET beat the program the previous three nights in the A25-54 demographic and two out of three nights in total viewers. The show also lost viewers from the first quarter hour to the final quarter hour by double digits.
It turns out that Real Americans everywhere weren’t dying to hear those stories after all.
h/t to bill
Cover-Up News Network
by digby
I wrote earlier about the video released by Wikileaks this morning showing the killing of civilians, including journalists. You’ll recall Dan Froomkin’s description, I’m sure:
None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.
“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.
A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”
Story continues belowTwo crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.
And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”
You’ll also recall that this story was originally covered up by the Pentagon:
The shooting, which killed Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, took place on July 12, 2007, in a southeastern neighborhood of Baghdad. The next day, the New York Times reported the military’s official cover story:
The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.
“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.The video shows otherwise.
Ok. So this film released today showed the killing of what turned out to be innocent civilians, including journalists. It also featured sick, disturbing attitudes among the soldiers who fired on these innocent civilians. And it shows that the Pentagon originally lied to the press about what happened.
You are not going to believe how CNN covered this story today:
And here’s the caption for the video:
Newly released video shows a 2007 attack by a U.S. Apache helicopter in Iraq. Several people were killed in the attack, two of them journalists. The helicopter crew members believed they were firing on armed insurgents. FULL STORY
I don’t think they were being ironic, although the excuse that they are sparing the families of the slain journalists is certainly farcical.
The most trusted name in news?
Well Played, CNN
by digby
How long before somebody gets fired for hiring this ridiculous clown:
ERICKSON: I want to start this morning, though, just — I’ve been telling you guys that Media Matters and the left-wing kooks are out there listening now to every word I say. Yesterday, you will remember I talked about the American Community Survey. Now, this is not the census, although it’s run through the Census office at the Department of Commerce. It is a survey that 200 some-odd thousand Americans get every year, and these little bureaucrats in the Census Department, they make you fill this out or threaten you with jail or fines if you don’t. Now, this survey asks you when you leave for work, when you return, how long your drive is, who drives with you, how often you flush your toilet, how many people live in your house — it’s the census plus a bunch of garbage.
Now, as I said yesterday, repeatedly, you need to fill out your census form. You need to get it mailed in. The news is reporting it’s about $1,700 per person comes in through census funding. Now, if you don’t fill out your census form, these workers who have been hired causing the unemployment number to go down, they’re going to come door to door anyway.
There is a constitutional obligation for you to fill out your census. A free society cannot operate — a modern republic cannot operate without knowing precisely how many people there are in the country. And the Constitution requires a hand-counting, not a statistical sampling, but a hand-counting.
Well, this American Community Survey, there’s no statutory authorization for it. The just — the Census Bureau ran with it. Congress gave them a little, and they took a lot. And so the story I was reading yesterday was about the ACS surveyor who showed up to the door of the writer, basically demanding that he either fill out a survey or off to jail with you. And I said that if someone were to show up on my doorstep and try to haul me off to jail for not telling the government how often I flush my toilet, well I’m going to get my wife’s shotgun and chase them off the property.
So naturally, of course, the morons on the left immediately blew up yesterday by the time I got off the air, that I’m out there – or of course now that they refer to me as CNN’s right-wing contributor Erick Erickson. Yeah. Is calling for killing Census workers.
Now, I don’t know in what part of my statement encouraging you to fill out your census or they’re going to come door to door and get it and they’re required to get it and we have an obligation to help them get it, is where they can interpret that as me encouraging people to kill Census workers. But, you know, I forget who prayed the prayer, ‘Lord give me smart enemies,’ but we’ll make that my prayer, I guess. Give me smart critics and smart enemies. Good Lord, people. I am not advocating the killing of Census workers.
I am saying, though, if somebody shows up at my house because I refuse to fill out this American Community Survey and they tell me I’m going to go to jail because I won’t tell the government how often I flush my toilet, what size toilet it is, and when I go to work, and when I return home, and who rides with me, and the invasiveness of this survey is outrageous – well, I will chase those people off my property.
Here’s the thing. The left that is out there attacking me for saying this stuff and misconstruing along the way what I’ve actually said, they should be right there with us. They’re the big privacy advocates. It’s the left that’s decrying the Patriot Act, it’s the left that views abortion as a privacy matter. It’s the left that says it’s the Republicans in your bedroom. No, it’s not the Republicans in your bedroom. You know Ronald Reagan didn’t write this American Community Survey. Wasn’t around in 1980. And yet they’re out there saying, “Oh, Erick Erickson. He’s encouraging us to kill Census workers. He’s so evil and mean. And he works for CNN.” You know, I — long ago I realized — well, not that long ago, a year or so ago, that people linger on every word I say. Well, linger on these words, please: You people are nuts. Absolute nuts. Where do you get off misconstruing that I’m agitating for killing Census workers when you people are out there advocating for the killing of the unborn on a regular basis. You have no shame.
In case you’re wondering what it was Erickson actually said after that word salad, here it is:
“This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.”
See, he wasn’t threatening the census worker. He was threatening the ACS worker, which is totally different. Except it isn’t, since they are the same workers. But you know what he means, right? Plus he would only scare them, not actually shoot them, so that’s ok.
As I wrote earlier, I think it’s just fine if all these idiots refuse to give this information. And then when their sewers back up because nobody knew they were being overwhelmed and the bridges they use fall down, they can all jump into the sewer and swim to work.
I’m guessing CNN’s honchos were sitting around looking at the ratings one day bemoaning letting Beck go when somebody handed them this guy’s picture. He needs some seasoning before he can bring the full crazy, though. Right now he just sounds like a typical whiny wingnut who needs someone to give him a bottle and put him to bed.
*As for the civil libertarian left not caring about privacy in this instance, well, yeah. I honestly don’t mind telling the government how many times I flush my toilet or how far I drive to work. I do care if they listen in on my phone calls or read my emails without a warrant. And I’m not keen on them forcing women to give birth against their will or telling gay people who they can marry. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
And for the record, I absolutely believe that it’s worse to kill census workers than blastocysts. I guess I’ll see Erickson in hell.
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Boyz Living Large
by digby
Speaking of our Dark Overlords …
Hardly a soul in official Washington doesn’t know that National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers can be very high maintenance. Brilliant, bullying, and packing an ego the size of the national debt. Even President Obama has been frustrated with Summers a time or three. All of the exhaustion of Obama’s first year, coupled with the toxicity of wrestling with Summers, may soon send some staff members out the door or into new posts, informed sources report. Summers’ legendary self-regard worsened last August, when the president reappointed Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke to a second term. Many Fed-watchers — Summers chief among them — thought that Obama might turn to his economic adviser instead of retaining the Republican academic whom President George W. Bush appointed and who presided over the Great Recession.
So peeved was Summers that he buttonholed Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for some personal perks he wanted to add to his position in the West Wing. First, according to informed sources, Summers asked to play golf with the president, which he did four weeks later on September 27. The economic adviser also huffed that he desired Cabinet status, an upgrade that Emanuel granted. Summers got walk-in privileges to Cabinet and other high-level meetings, for example, and he strode among the Cabinet officers who witnessed Obama’s State of the Union address. In addition, the former Harvard University president sought a personal car and driver, which happens to be a privilege that the head of the nation’s central bank enjoys. The chief of staff initially said yes, only to discover that that perk simply does not exist in the White House.
Well, not exactly. The president has his own car and driver. But he’s not quite on Larry Summers’ level.
This is inevitable. Elites like Summers have a terrible time grappling with the fact that lesser men than they are making huge sums of money while they toil for far less doing a more important job. When he gets dissed, he needs to be soothed somehow, and persuaded once again that he really is superior to all these other bozos in the room. Hence the demand for perks.
And frankly, Summers is a piker. Remember this guy?
As White House Chief of Staff, Sununu reportedly took personal trips, for skiing and other purposes, and classified them as official, for purposes such as conservation or promoting the Thousand Points of Light. The Washington Post wrote that Sununu’s jets “took him to fat-cat Republican fund-raisers, ski lodges, golf resorts and even his dentist in Boston.” Sununu had paid the government only $892 for his more than $615,000 worth of military jet travel. Sununu said that his use of the jets was necessary because he had to be near a telephone at all times for reasons of national security. Sununu became the subject of much late-night television humor over the incident. Sununu worsened the situation shortly afterwards when, after leaking rumors of financial difficulties in his family, he traveled to a rare stamp auction at Christie’s auction house in New York City from Washington in a government limousine, spending $5,000 on rare stamps. Sununu then sent the car and driver back to Washington unoccupied while he returned on a corporate jet. In the course of one week, 45 newspapers ran editorials on Sununu, nearly all of them critical of his actions.
Sununu repaid over $47,000 to the government for the flights on the orders of White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, with the help of the Republican Party. However, the reimbursements were at commercial rates, which are about one-tenth the cost of the actual flights; one ski trip to Vail, Colorado alone had cost taxpayers $86,330.
And then there’s Michael Brown and the Squealing Eagles.
Hey they all know that if you want to hang with the Big Money Boyz you have to live large. And lord knows, they have to hang with the Big Money Boyz. They run the country.
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Noble Prize
by digby
Nearly 400,000 jobless Americans are going to see their long-term unemployment benefits cut off after Congress failed to pass a short-term extension before taking a two-week break.
Members of the House already had voted to extend jobless benefits and went home for the spring break. Everyone knew those benefits would be running out Monday should the Senate fail to act.
On the Senate’s last day in session, Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin pleaded with his Republican colleagues on the Senate floor: “Let’s have a little heart. Let’s have a little compassion. Let’s have a little understanding of what these people are going through every day in their lives, the stress that they have. Let’s do the right thing, and extend the unemployment benefits for one month.”
Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn objected. He said he was all for extending unemployment benefits as long as they were paid for, which they were not in the measure the House passed.
Coburn’s objection meant Democrats would have to muster 60 votes and spend days more debating to get past his opposition. “Whether you call it filibuster, whether you call it obstruction, as a grandfather of five children that is truly reflective of tons of grandparents out there and tons of grandkids out there, I’m not gonna agree,” he said.
I guess he cares more about a potential tax hike for his well-fed, wealthy grandkids 30 years from now than whether the kids of 400,000 people can eat today. Spoken like a true aristocrat.
They’ve made it quite clear who they care about:
Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow complained of being lectured to about fiscal responsibility; after all, she said, the last time the budget was balanced and the treasury built up a big surplus was under President Clinton.
“Under President Bush, under the Republican Congress, that went away pretty fast,” Stabenow said. “By not paying for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, somehow, that was OK.”
In fact, none of the Bush tax cuts were paid for, and all of them expire at the end of this year. Still, Democrats plan to extend those for incomes up to a $250,000 a year.
Nothing is being done to make up for the $1.3 trillion that will mean in lost revenues, but that doesn’t bother Kyl. He says tax cuts should be extended for those in the top income bracket as well.
“The money belongs to them,” Kyl said. “If we want to extract less from them in the future, we shouldn’t have to somehow make that up by finding another way to tax them to ‘make it up for Washington.’ “
“The money belongs to them.” So does the right to benevolently bestow unemployment benefits on people who have been thrown out of work due to the ruling class’s degenerate gambling problem. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
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Collateral Murder
by digby
Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing until-now secret video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.
None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.
“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.
A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”
Story continues belowTwo crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.
And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”
Be sure to read the whole article, which also outlines the cover-up.
This isn’t just about rehashing old problems. The issue of needless civilian casualties is a problem in Afghanistan right now. Indeed, it’s a problem in all of our benevolent occupations. And that’s not the only problem, I’m afraid:
There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are “cowards,” NATO attacks on civilians are “tragic accidents,” intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.
Some journalists in Kabul are hamstrung by security rules set in Europe or America, which often reflect the least permissive times in Baghdad rather than any realistic threats in Afghanistan. These reporters can’t leave their compounds without convoys of armed guards. They couldn’t dream of driving around rural Paktia, dressed up in local clothes and squashed into the back of an old Toyota Corolla, to interview the survivors of a night raid.
Ultra risk-averse organizations go even further and rely almost entirely on video footage and still images gifted by the entirely partial combat-camera teams or the coalition’s dedicated NATO TV unit, staffed by civilian ex-journalists who churn out good news b-roll. Others lap up this material because it’s cheaper and easier than having their own correspondents in a war zone.
This self-censorship is compounded by the “embed culture,” which encourages journalists to visit the frontlines with NATO soldiers, who provide them food, shelter, security and ultimately with stories. British troops will only accept journalists who let military censors approve their stories before they are filed. Ostensibly, this is to stop sensitive information reaching the insurgents. In my three and a half years in Afghanistan, the British invariably use it as an opportunity to editorialize
For the full story on Wikileaks — and the pressure it’s under from governments all over the world — read this by Glenn Greenwald.
Update: Turns out Greenwald hit all of this in-depth today already.
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Priest Accused of U.S. Abuse Still Working in India
by tristero
Evil words are very bad. Evil deeds are much worse:
A Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota is working in his home diocese in India and has no plans to return to the U.S. to face the courts, he and his bishop told The Associated Press on Monday.
Church documents obtained by the AP show the Vatican was alerted to the accusations against the Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul more than three years ago but did not respond.
The priest has received only a minor punishment and is currently working in his bishop’s office processing teacher appointments for a dozen church schools in the diocese of Ootacamund in southern India.
”We cannot simply throw out the priest, so he is just staying in the bishop’s house, and he is helping me with the appointment of teachers,” said the Most Rev. A. Almaraj, the bishop of Ootacamund. ”He says he is innocent, and these are only allegations. … I don’t know what else to do.”
Almaraj emphasized that Jeyapaul was engaged in only ”paperwork, nothing to do with the children or anything.”
The main group of clerical abuse victims in the United States has scheduled a news conference for Monday in St. Paul, Minnesota, to draw attention to the Jeyapaul case and demand he be suspended and returned to face justice in the United States….
According to the criminal complaint, the teenage girl accused Jeyapaul of threatening to kill her family if she did not come into the rectory, where he then forced her to perform oral sex on him and groped her in the fall of 2004.
In a telephone call with The Associated Press, Jeyapaul denied the charges.
”It is a false accusation against me,” he said. ”I do not know that girl at all.”
He said he had no intention of facing the charges, and Almaraj said the church had never discussed asking him to return to the United States to appear in court.
Read the whole sorry story.
As mentioned, as bad as the evil words coming from the Vatican these days are – and they are really, really bad – they are merely an attempt to distract us from the numerous credible allegations of sexual abuse of children and women and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by Catholic priests and the hierarchy.
As long as the Church continues to defend itself against the indefensible with indefensibly sleazy tactics, I think it is important to insist that the focus stay exactly where it belongs: on revealing the full extent of the abuse and the coverup.
Our sympathy belongs with the victims, despite the fact that the Church wishes us to ignore them completely as they did.
His Mouth Says No
by digby
…but his eyes say yes, maybe, if you beg me:
Many voters yearn for an outsider, someone with authenticity, integrity and proven accomplishment. Someone who has not spent their life plotting how to ascend the greasy pole, adjusting every utterance for maximum political advantage.In this toxic climate, perhaps the only public institution that has increased in prestige in recent years is the American military. Its officers are looked upon, as General George Patton once noted, as “the modern representatives of the demi-gods and heroes of antiquity”.Where better to look for Obama’s successor, therefore, than in the uniformed ranks? Not since 1952, when a certain Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was elected President, have the chances of a military man winning the White House been more propitious.Within those ranks, no one stands out like General David Petraeus, head of United States Central Command, leader of 230,000 troops and commander of United States forces in two wars. Having masterminded the Iraq surge, the stunning military gambit that seized victory from the jaws of defeat, he is now directing an equally daunting undertaking in Afghanistan.
*swoon*
Petraeus, 57, has survived the collapse of his parachute 60 feet above the ground. After he was shot in the chest during a training exercise and endured five hours surgery, the then battalion commander refused to lie in hospital recuperating. Demanding that the tubes be removed from his arm, he declared: “I am not the norm.”A Princeton PhD, he has revolutionised the way America fights its wars, inculcating the doctrine of counter-insurgency in a new generation of officers who have finally put the ghost of Vietnam to rest. At West Point he qualified for medical school just to prove he could, never bothering to apply.
*gush*
The problem is that Petraeus appears to have no desire to be commander-in-chief. His denials of any political ambition have come close to the famous statement by General William Sherman. The former American Civil War commander, rejecting the possibility of running for president in 1884 by stating: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”Yet speculation about “Petraeus in 2012″ persists. The White House is wary of him just as President Bill Clinton was wary of General Colin Powell in 1995. Rumours that he wants to run have even reached Downing Street.At a recent appearance in New Hampshire – which happens to be the state in which the first presidential primary will be held in January 2012 – Petraeus was emphatic.”I thought I’d said ‘no’ about as many ways as I could. I really do mean no,” he insisted when asked if he was destined for politics. “I’ve tried quoting a country song ‘What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?’ but I really do mean that…I will not ever run for political office, I can assure you.” Almost Shermanesque.
Well, that’s that. How incredibly disappointing.
But does no really mean no?
Some note, however, when the future President Barack Obama was asked in February 2007 if he would serve his full six-year term in the Senate (due to expire in 2010), he responded: “If you get asked enough, sooner or later you get weary and you start looking for new ways of saying things.” When asked directly if he would run for the White House in 2008, he said flatly: “I will not.”
There all little prez-teases!Seriously, I have no idea if Petraeus will run. He would certainly be the savior the Republicans are waiting for. After all, the military is (so far anyway) the only elite institution that hasn’t completely destroyed itself over the past few years. And he’s at the very top of that elite heap.He may not want to run right now, but if they beg and plead and tell him how much they love him — well, he might just throw caution to the wind and go all the way.
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Their Country, Their Future
by digby
Those who own the country ought to govern it
John Jay
On behalf of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, I cordially invite you to attend the 2010 Fiscal Summit: America’s Challenge and a Way Forward. This event will take place in Washington, DC on April 28, 2010, featuring a moderated discussion of the issues with President Bill Clinton. We will send a more detailed agenda shortly, but we hope that you will save the date and plan to join us for this important forum. The purpose of this event is to further a national dialogue on solving America’s fiscal challenges through several moderated discussions with leaders on the issue from across the political spectrum. In addition to President Bill Clinton, who will be interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, we will hear from a range of experts, including Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, Former Chairmen of the Federal Reserve; Bob Rubin, Former Secretary of the Treasury; Alice Rivlin, former OMB Director and Member, National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform; Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), Member, National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform; John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress; John Castellani, President of Business Roundtable, and others. The audience for this gathering will include prominent thought leaders, policymakers, business executives and academics. The national news media will also be invited. There is limited space for this event, so if you could provide us with an attendance response, as soon as possible, we’d be most grateful. We will be sending you more information and details very soon, but wanted to urge you to put this event on your calendar now.
That’s quite a group of overlords.
Let’s hope Clinton at least admits that his budget balancing success came about because of tax hikes and a booming economy and doesn’t decide to join his former advisor Rivlin in fearmongering social security. He could do some real good here.
But don’t hold your breath. He’s the same guy who declared “the era of big government is over” so I have a feeling he’ll be eagerly agreeing that “now is the time” to gut social security before they have to …. gut social security. It would seem the elites are all forming a phalanx on this.
Robert Kuttner takes them downtown:
This is such a travesty that it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, note the prominent role of Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan. If any two Americans are responsible for the economic, financial and fiscal mess we’re in, they are Rubin and Greenspan. Much of the rising deficit, after all, is the result of the financial collapse. The main reason for the big deficits is that tax revenues are down in a severe recession. The financial collapse also required the government to step in with increased public spending. If the orgy of financial deregulation that led to the crash had two prime sponsors, the Democratic one was Rubin and the Republican one was Greenspan. Inviting these characters to a fiscal summit to devise a way out of the crisis is like inviting arsonists to design a seminar on fire prevention.[…]
This is billed as a “national dialogue on solving America’s fiscal challenges,” but spare me. This is a propaganda event. For the most part, the featured speakers follow the Peterson line. John Podesta, the closest thing to a liberal playing a headliner role, accepts that there is a serious deficit problem, but would entertain a value-added tax as part of the remedy. But the speakers’ list is clearly stacked and there is no one to Podesta’s left. […]Obama himself has contributed to this trap by creating the presidential commission, a clear majority of whose members are deficit hawks. There are just four liberals out of the commission’s 18 members. Its executive director is Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council, home of the Democratic Party’s corporate faction. The Peterson summit comes a day after the official commission’s opening meeting April 27...
It’s worth a look at the Peterson Foundation’s website, which is one part fiscal fear-mongering and one part homilies about thrift so syrupy that they would make Polonius blush. If you want the counter-argument, have a look at fiscalhighroad.org, a partnership of the Economic Policy Institute, Century Foundation and Demos (where I am a part time senior fellow.) Another good resource is the Scholars’ Strategy Network, founded last year by Harvard’s Theda Skocpol. Basically, the counter-story goes like this: Yes, we will have a national debt problem if we don’t get a return to high growth soon. But the more immediate problem is restoration of prosperity–and in the near term that will require more public outlay, not less. Once a real recovery is on track, we need to increase progressive taxation, both to moderate deficits and to pay for sustained public spending on things the economy and society need, such as 21st century infrastructure, a green economy, good jobs, as well as a national health and pension system. We need a national debate on this basic choice, with equal prominence for the folks who want to gut social spending and deliver austerity, and those who propose a high road to fiscal stability. But nearly all the resources and the largest megaphone are on one side of the debate. Peterson’s April 28th event should be the occasion for counter-argument, and no small measure of ridicule for the proposition that anyone should take the likes of Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, or Pete Peterson seriously as fiscal prophets.
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