Month: November 2010

Flies On The Wall

by digby

The Village shows why it gets paid all that money to “interpret” the ways of Washington for you :

Gloria Borger: It’s kind of like the first day at school Brooke. They heard the message from the American people that we want you all to work together.

It’s always interesting to report out what’s going on these meetings. If you ask the Democrats you get one thing if you ask the Republicans you get another story.

The Democrats said that the meeting was good because the Republicans seemed more serious about actually working together than they had when they were purely an opposition party. When I talk to Republicans they say, you know, it was a good meeting because the Democrats seem less arrogant because they no longer control both houses of congress.

And a couple of Republicans also said to me that they liked hearing the president admit that hadn’t been bipartisan enough. When I talked to some Democrats they said they didn’t really hear that, so since I wasn’t in the room..

Brooke: If we could be a fly on the wall..

Borger: This is our job as reporters though, we try to feel it out and get the best semblance of the reality of the session that we can, so I have to say that it was a much better session than we’ve seen over the past few years…

What was interesting to me Brooke, and to give you some idea that it might be serious about certain things like resolving the tax cut issue, is that for 35 minutes they threw out the staff and when they throw out the staff and it’s just the principles meeting, it’s that, you know what, we actually have to get down to business here and we don’t want all of this leaking to people like me. So they threw out the staff and the members still came out saying you know, “this is getting serious.”

Who need Wikileaks with crack reporting like that?

Borger did go on to explain that it was possible they were really looking to combine the tax cuts for the wealthy with maybe some deficit reduction.

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Unhooking The Networks

by digby

Greenwald’s commentary on the pushback against Wikileaks among our elite overlords is excellent and you should read the whole thing. Like him, the thing that leaves me the most gobsmacked is the media, which seems to be the most upset over the idea that the Government is having a hard time keeping its secrets. I think we can all see how odd that is — journalism being a field which is ostensibly about speaking truth to power and all that drivel.

This may be the best illustration of the point, also courtesy of Greenwald, in which the “diplomat” is the one who argues for transparency while the “journalist” (the editor of the New York Times as it happens) defends clearing their reporting with the government before reporting it:

If you find this subject intriguing, I would highly recommend that you read this mindblowing essay on Julian Assange’s philosophy. Yes, he has one. And it’s radical and it’s interesting although nobody seems to be interested in it. All I hear is the argument about whether or not it’s good for national security or whether it can be called real journalism. What I don’t hear about is what it is Wikileaks is trying to accomplish. I suppose most of the interested parties who lead our conversation aren’t comfortable with that. And you can understand why, when you read it.

I’m going to excerpt the conclusion of the essay, but please do not comment on it without reading the entire piece because you won’t know what you’re talking about unless you do:

There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists “expose” secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust. According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.

If you are a person who believes our current system is working well and that the mandarins, technocrats and their wealthy benefactors are competent and righteous and that we can safely leave our futures in their hands, then you will not like what Assange is up to. If, on the other hand, you are a teensy bit concerned that these elites might not know what they are doing (or even worse, might know very well what they are doing and it’s clearly not in your best interest) then you may find it useful to look at the way the world is organized with a fresh set of data.

For me, challenging the nation states’ systems of secrecy is probably necessary before this recent era of decadent recklessness leads us into catastrophe so, perhaps it will cause some of the ossified notions about the international security framework to be reconsidered. But I’m much more intrigued by the idea of this sort of transparency challenging the obscure practices of the transnational economic system. That’s where the power is and where the real issues of our future lie.

Regardless of where you come down on Wikileaks, it’s important to at least consider what they are actually trying to do — because they’re doing it whether you like it or not.

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Keep Those Calls and Letters Coming

by digby

Strengthen Social Security has come up with another handy tool to make your wishes known to the powers that be about leaving Social Security alone in this idiotic deficit debate. It provides some templates and makes it easy for you to find and send it to the proper place. (I would urge you to write your own — I suspect that papers are far less likely to print astro-turf from the left.)

I have been told by numerous people who work in politics that local papers are extremely important to legislators. They really don’t like to be put on the spot on their home turf and the locals can make their lives very difficult if they read something in the paper they don’t like. It’s very useful for constituents to engage his way. It doesn’t matter if your Representative or Senator is one of the “the good guys” or not. Right now, everything is very fluid and you don’t know what kind of deals are being made. It’s a crazy political environment. So write a letter anyway. They all need to know that people out here feel passionate about this and that there will be hell to pay if they do the wrong thing.

Also, remember to call congress today. You can sign up here, it’s very easy.

He Said/He Said

by digby

So the Republican leaders held a press conference and basically said the president admitted that he was a loser and a punk and that he understood that he’d been very wrong not to do their bidding in the past and is now their supplicant. They said that the people want jobs and that everyone agrees that the only way to create jobs is to extend the tax cuts and cut spending.The president then came out and said that they all agreed that the old Washington game will not work and they will work together.

Two sides of the same coin or alternate universe?

Update: Ali Velshi just told me that the President also said that they are going to work together to see that nobody sees a tax increase on January 1st. I didn’t hear it that way — I heard the president say that he believed that extending the Bush tax cuts was too hot and the Republicans thought it was too cold and that he had tasked Tim Geithner with negotiating for a tax cut that is just right. Perhaps Velshi assumes that means a temporary extension for the top 2%, which wouldn’t be surprising.

Update II: Ed Henry just said that it’s true that President Obama apologized for failing to be bipartisan and promised to work harder to find common ground. Tom Tomorrow describes the way this will work very well in this week’s strip.

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Grandma Millie Returns

by digby

According to this interview with Assange in Forbes magazine, Wikileaks will soon be releasing a trove of documents relating to a major US bank:

Assange: We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

Is it a U.S. bank?

Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.

One that still exists?

Yes, a big U.S. bank.

The biggest U.S. bank?

No comment.

When will it happen?

Early next year. I won’t say more.

What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that’s tremendously valuable. Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war.

You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.

Well, if it’s anything like Enron, it will sound something like this:

This is Bob Badeer (a trader at Enron’s West Power desk in Portland, CA, where all these tapes were recorded) and Kevin McGowan (in Enron’s central office in Houston, TX, as he mentions in the transcript):

KEVIN: So,

BOB: (laughing)

KEVIN: So the rumor’s true? They’re fuckin’ takin’ all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

BOB: Yeah, grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fuckin’ vote on the butterfly ballot.

KEVIN: Yeah, now she wants her fuckin’ money back for all the power you’ve charged right up – jammed right up her ass for fuckin’ 250 dollars a megawatt hour.

BOB: You know – you know – you know, grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know? You’re not going to –

KEVIN: They’re so fucked and they’re so, like totally …

BOB: They are so fucked.

Remember, they arrested Enron’s big shots Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, but it didn’t mean a thing to the Big Money Boyz. They carried on without losing a step. Its something to think about.

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With Friends Like These …

by digby

I’m watching an exasperated John King on CNN right now visibly stunned that the liberals don’t see the savvy genius of Obama’s move to freeze Federal Workers’ pay. He says:

King: The president here, he knew, the House was going to be in Republican hands in January. A pay freeze was was going to be in their budget. So he decided to be the engine not the caboose, to get out ahead of this, which is smart politics for the president. Get out and get some credit on this and show the voters, “I hear you” we’re going to do something.

Here’s Larry Mishel who runs the Economic Policy Institute, a labor backed think tank in Washington, says “this is another example of the administration’s tendency to bargain with itself rather than Republicans, and in the process reinforces conservative myths, in this case the myth that federal workers are overpaid.”

I’ll keep going on this point. On the Daily Kos today Jed Lewison writes, “So… instead of actually doing something real about ‘sky high deficit spending’ (like pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq ahead of schedule), we get a symbolic gesture that will reduce federal spending by less than 0.05 percent.And with that symbolic gesture we witness President Obama’s unfortunate alter-ego, President Gimmick.”

This is from the Left.

(Hearty derisive laughter from the panel.)

Paul Begala: Yes but I do think his point about capitulating rather than negotiating is a valid one with this president. The pay freeze is probably a good idea but should have come out of negotiation. What do the Republicans give, when the president gives…

Gloria Borger: Why not give something first though? People don’t like government and this is an easy gimme for the president.

Begala: What are the Republicans proposing? Then you get it on the Republicans turf. Why don’t you say I’ll freeze federal pay and cut this in return for this and that program but you guys need to come with taxes on the rich at least say people who make over a million bucks don’t get a tax cut. My Lord …

Borger: Well maybe there’s something else he can negotiate.

I’m sure there is. Why not throw in debtor’s prisons? It wouldn’t be enough to totally appease them, but it would go a long way toward proving they are “responsible.”

They prattled on a bit with both Dana Bash and Borger agreed with John King that this was very smart politics because it was something that was easy to give to “make the point.” Then John King turned to “analyst” Erick Erickson:

King: To that point, if your the Republicans and the president has made this gesture tonight, the man who will be House speaker said “good for you Mr President, this is something we would have done anyway.” [When, by the way, did the House gain unilateral power? Last I’d heard they were practically superfluous and everything depended on getting 60 votes in the Senate.]

Do the Republicans now reciprocate or do they just demand more?

Erickson: I think they probably demand more seeing as he folded so easy on this one. Why not? The problem is that they are fighting on the wrong ground. If you look at the data the federal workforce is only 200 thousand people larger than it was in 1960. With the inflation of population growth that’s ridiculously small…

Borger (scoffing): So are earmarks!

Crickets from the panel on the “folded” comment. Erickson said something stupid about federal workers at the state and local level needing to be cut and then he and King went back and forth about taxes, with Erickson parroting the usual “we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem” as if that makes any sense at all.

Then Borger just couldn’t stand it any longer:

Borger: Can I just defend what the president did today? Sometimes I believe presidents have to make symbolic gestures. Ok? And this was symbolic, just look at your pie chart. And you’re about to get a report from the deficit commission you’re about to sit down tomorrow with congressional leaders. People care about deficit reduction, they don’t like the federal government very much, they think that federal employees are treated differently on their health care and on their pay increases, so he made a symbolic gesture. What’s wrong with that?

I guess the reasons why it’s wrong as stated by Begala, Larry Mishel and Jed Lewison were so completely outside of her comfort zone that they aren’t even worth considering.

They all went on to agree that the deficit is caused by wars, tax cuts for the rich and the recession yadda, yadda yadda whatever. Who cares, everyone needs to sacrifice! Then they also agreed that both sides are equally to blame for the bad relations that poison the meeting tomorrow between the president and Republican congressional leaders (who are on record saying that their most important priority is his defeat at all costs.)

At that point King actually let fly with this old trope (I’m not lying):

King: Why, why is it so bad? Why can’t you go back and I guess we’re going back too far, to the days of Reagan when he and Tip O’Neill would spar like hell but they weren’t afraid to have a drink… Why is that gone?

Oy vey.

Look, when the president’s staunchest defenders are villagers like Borger and King, you know he’s on the wrong track. In fact, you really don’t need to know anything more than when they say something is “smart politics” to reject it out of hand and start over.

I hope the White House is not taking any comfort from this support from beltway gasbags. It’s a Democratic disease to think that pleasing the wealthy celebrities who make up the political punditocracy is a good guide to successful governance. These are, after all, people who are so caught up in their useless false equivalence that they continually ask why the relations between the two parties are so hostile. Sure it’s rhetorical, but the problem is that in their view it’s perfectly obvious that if only the president would just pass the Republican agenda everything would be fine. And what could be wrong with that?

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Going Back To Square One

by digby

Following up on the post below it should be noted that the idea that we need to talk about deficits at all is fairly ridiculous since we are in the middle of an economic slump so terrible that even thinking about anything but getting people back to work is just a distraction. Joshua Hollad makes that point well in this piece on Alternet today.

But the political reality is that the president made the calculation from the beginning of his term that he was going to make some sort of “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans and it has finally come down to this. It’s impossible to know whether or not he knew that by enabling deficit talk he was playing into an existing pernicious theme that the deficit boogeyman was responsible for the anemic economy, but it did. And here we are.

It’s important that people continue to keep perspective on this, but thanks to the president’s insistence on putting this issue on the menu early on, the political dynamic at the moment is such that liberals have to prove that their policies to create security and prosperity will fit this silly frame. And they do — basically create jobs, tax the wealthy at the rates they paid ten years ago and control health care costs et voila. The numbers add up.

Once you do that then we can get down to the real argument which is over whether the government should tax the wealthy and do more to create jobs. They are obscuring that argument with the deficit obsession for a very good reason — they don’t think they can win it. And why would they?

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Deficit Assumptions

by digby

We’ve known that the chances of getting a unanimous report from the Catfood Commission was highly unlikely and we knew that they knew that going in. It’s been out there for some time that the most they hoped for was a new “bipartisan” baseline which would, in all likelihood exclude only the liberals from the consensus. Earlier in the month we had reports of just that and today we see more evidence that this is their plan:

If the panel wins close to a dozen votes for its proposal, some of the ideas could be incorporated into the White House’s 2011 budget proposal, or tax and spending plans from either Democrats or Republicans next year. If the proposal receives only a handful of votes, it will likely send a signal that the parties remain at odds over how best to rework the country’s tax and spending priorities, suggesting that it will take much longer for any changes to be made.

A key threshold for the co-chairmen will be whether they can get the support of the 10 lawmakers on the panel who are returning in January as part of the new Congress.

Failure to win support from any of these members—who include likely chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Rep. Dave Camp (R., Mich.) and the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois—would show how difficult it might be for any proposal to win support from the politicians who would ultimately be charged with setting any plan in motion on Capitol Hill.

If those lawmakers vote for the plan, and withstand the political blowback from constituencies poised to defend their cherished programs, others on Capitol Hill could feel under pressure to act. Aides familiar with the matter said panel member Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) had expressed the most interest in forging a bipartisan deal.

The NY Times puts it this way:

Inside the commission, expectations remain low that a supermajority can agree on a plan, given most Republicans’ opposition to raising taxes and most Democrats’ resistance to deep spending cuts and reducing future retirees’ Social Security benefits.

Yet the panel’s proponents hope that agreement among even a bipartisan minority can be the basis for future action to arrest the unsustainable growth of government debt in coming years.

Now it only takes 10 votes out of 18 to be sufficiently “bipartisan.” Presumably that could mean all 8 Republicans and 2 Democrats, although considering the make-up of the President’s commission it seems likely that quite a few Dems will do the dirty work for zealots like Paul Ryan so that he can stake out the far right wing goalpost. (After all “consensus” really means never having to compromise with a liberal.)

The good news is that liberals have actually done something important, at least for the record, in that they released a deficit reduction plan today that actually doesn’t require heaps of suffering for the old and infirm.. Brad DeLong writes:

The Left Opposition Has a Budget-Balancing plan and it is a very good one–a much better one than the amateurish, unthought-through and far-right Simpson-Bowles or the professional but inequality-increasing and right-wing Domenici-Rivlin.

Here’s what it looks like:

In a world in which anyone (including the president) gave a damn about liberal solutions to problems, this exercise would have been required from the Commission itself so that people could see clearly what the trade-offs are and how the two ideologies differ in their approach to governance. Matt Yglesias analyzes the plan from a similar perspective:

Liberals didn’t like the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan largely because neither Simpson nor Bowles is a liberal so their proposal doesn’t encapsulate liberal thinking. Today the Our Fiscal Security coalition, comprised of Demos, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Century Foundation have released their fiscal blueprint which shows you would that liberal take would look like.

First and foremost that means explicitly situating the “budget” problem in a broader economic context. You see this two ways. One is the heavy (and appropriate) emphasis in the short term on mobilizing excess capacity to increase growth and decrease unemployment rather than austerity budgeting that will only increase resource-idling. The other is the principle they call No Cost Shifting, namely “Policies that simply shift costs from the federal government to individuals and families may improve the government’s balance sheet but may worsen the condition of many Americans, leaving the overall economy no better off.” …

At any rate, they show that medium term balance can be achieved basically entirely on the tax and defense sides.For the longer-term, like all long-term budget plans they need to rely heavily on fairly speculative assertions about health care costs. But I think that if you dig into it, you’ll find that OFS offers the least hand-waving on this point of any plan I’ve yet seen, though that’s not to say there’s no hand-waving.

Liberals look at the way the economy as a whole affects a citizen’s life and tries to fashion a set of policies that provide a little ballast in a necessarily risky capitalist system. Conservatives see that sort of thing as bailing out parasites who should have planned better and think everyone would be better off with a little “tough love.” (Simpson’s “greedy geezers” trope is designed to create means testing so they can finally get around to hectoring the elderly for failing to be responsible enough to save for their entire retirement on their own.)

Tomorrow the Citizens Commission will be releasing its report as well. You can see it here today and there will be more about it in the press tomorrow. Combined with the Schakowsky plan released a while back, these three blueprints prove that there are more ways to balance the budget than slashing all spending on social welfare.

It’s important to see this difference in approach spelled out in detailed plans like these. If there is any justice in our political system, it will force the non-FOX media to re-assess its assumptions and start framing this debate in a more balanced way. In fact, if President Obama wanted to be a Party leader and a president with a real vision, he could be the one to do it. There’s no economic reason not to — they all achieve long term deficit reduction. And unless he agrees with the conservative view of the government’s responsibility to its citizens (or the ruling class view that the wealthy must not be required to pay a fair share to support the society from which they benefit so grandly) there no political reason not to.

Social Security Works has something for you to do to help in this debate. Tomorrow is National Call Congress Day and you can sign up here to participate. They’ve made it very easy.

If you think this won’t make a difference, think again. Right wing radio managed to derail a very carefully negotiated Immigration reform bill with a tidal wave of calls to the congress. The good guys can play that game too.

Sign up here.

Update: Oh Jeez. Here comes Third Way, advertising itself as “progressive”, with it’s own plan proposing to help Alan Simpson turn the elderly into welfare recipients and pave the way to privatization. Can’t somebody sue them for misappropriation of labels?

Update II: What would really help at this point in the debate would be for someone to come up with a radical leftist plant to cure the deficit through the nationalization of corporations, total demilitarization and a 90% tax rate on the top .5% as a balance to the Ryan wrecking crew. That would successfully push all the other proposals to the center so that even Andrea Mitchell could talk about it in respectful terms.

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Boehner’s Staff Meets With Terrorists

by digby

They even have pictures:

That’s right, it’s anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry, meeting with John Boehner’s chief of staff right after the election. He’s fired up and ready to go:

When the Republicans are in power, pro-life groups and leaders become way too “polite.” We lose our edge; we don’t hold them accountable; we settle for trite phrases and broken promises as long as they will meet with us for 10 minutes, and we can take our picture with them, or they come to one of our meetings and receive some useless award.

I beg you to carefully consider my words; look at this situation with prophetic insight. Unless the Republicans do something concrete to save babies from murder, then they are collaborators with child killers, and we must treat them as such.

We have Pro-Life DEMANDS for Mr. Boehner & House GOP

We Must Play Hard Ball: They Must Fear Pro-Lifers!

It isn’t the first time he’s issued such a threat by any means. Just a year ago he said this:

Background: It is clear that many elements in the pro-abortion congress and White House want to force Americans to pay for the murder of the unborn in their “healthcare” program. If that happens, it is tantamount to the government putting a gun to taxpayers’ heads to pay for the brutal murder of an innocent child. This is tyranny and evil of the highest order. . . .

“Nevertheless, the sheer horror and frustration of such an evil policy will lead some people to absolutely refuse to pay their taxes. And I believe — if my reading of history from America and around the world is correct — that there are others who will be tempted to acts of violence.

“If the government of this country tramples the faith and values of its citizens, history will hold those in power responsible for the violent convulsions that follow.” — Randall Terry

Bin Laden’s anti-abortion. Maybe he should ask for a meeting with the Speaker’s chief of staff too.

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Immoral But Juicy

by digby

Roy Edroso at the Voice rounds up the usual right wing subjects on Wikileaks and finds them predictably confused:

Rightbloggers generally take a two-pronged approach to the leaks: They believe the new document dump is an unpardonable breach of U.S. security — except to the extent that it may be used to denigrate the Obama Administration, it which case they feel it deserves wider dissemination. It’s not as if rightbloggers have been alone in denouncing Wikileaks, as mainstream media outlets from the New York Times on down have attacked Assange from all directions — while sopping up his revelations on the basis of their newsworthiness. But that is an old, time-honored form of journalistic hypocrisy: Using hot news to draw readers with one hand, and tut-tutting its shameful provenance with the other. Rightbloggers have added a few new wrinkles to the game.

Read on for the full rundown. The calls for assassination are as predictable as the cried of treason are funny (Julian Assange isn’t an American, although most Americans believe the world belongs to them anyway.)Palin’s farcissistic [h/t to Adele Stan]contribution being the best of all:

Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book “America by Heart” from being leaked,but US Govt can’t stop Wikileaks’ treasonous act?

Yeah, Sarah, you’re quite the superhero. It’s all about you.

Roy’s point about the press being hypocritical is also key. It’s no different than their tabloid slavering over a sex scandal while decrying the immorality of the participants. There’s nothing more inane than the media lecturing others about proper decorum while they carefully parse all the juicy details.

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