Good News For The Animal Lovers
by digby
Yay:
I saw that footage yesterday in passing with the sound off and thought it was a horrible tragedy. I was so relieved to find out that they had actually saved the little guy. Who says TV news good for nothing?
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(Un) Intended Consequences
by digby
I just want to thank all the Democrats who were so desperate to find “common ground” with the anti-abortion fanatics that they signed on to “partial birth abortion” ban demagoguery and lies, giving it a bipartisan sheen for the court to rely upon in their ruling and moving the goalposts even further down the field. It’s worked out very well for the anti-choice zealots who, like all social conservatives, will take a mile if you give an inch and rightly saw it as an opening for further restrictions:
The 5 to 4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart turned away Carhart’s challenge to the federal ban on “partial birth” abortion and appeared to mark a significant change in the high court’s balancing of a woman’s right with the government’s interest.
The ruling was a key moment in the emerging identity of the court headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who marked his fifth anniversary on the court this fall.
Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., also nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005, have become part of a conservative majority willing to reconsider the court’s position on social and political issues. Race, campaign finance and the ability of plaintiffs to sue are some of the issues touched by the court’s changing jurisprudence.
But since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, no social issue has been as entwined with the court than abortion, nor as dependent on its nuance and shifting views.
That’s what made the 2007 decision so important to both sides of the issue.
“Many in the pro-life movement have become very pragmatic when it comes to the court: ‘Can you count to five?’ ” said Mary Spaulding Balch, director of state legislation for the National Right to Life Committee. “With the Gonzales decision, we were happy to see that we could.”
The justices have not revisited the issue of abortion since, but the decision has emboldened state legislators to pass an increasing number and variety of restrictions in hopes that a changed court will uphold them.
“I believe the decision was like planting a bunch of seeds, and we’re just starting to see the shoots popping out of the ground,” said Roger Evans, whois in charge of litigation for Planned Parenthood of America.
The Center for Reproductive Rights concluded that in 2010, state legislatures “considered and enacted some of the most extreme restrictions on abortion in recent memory, as well as passing laws creating dozens of other significant new hurdles.”
Read on. They’re trying every cruel and useless trick they can think of to deter women from exercising their rights in the wake of this ruling, fully expecting that the Roberts Court will hear any cases and likely rule in their favor. And while that’s happening many, many women are suffering for it.
There is a real price to be paid for sacrificing fundamental human rights in the name of compromise. Unfortunately, the price is rarely paid by those who are doing the compromising.
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There’s No Crying In Galt’s Gulch
by digby
I don’t know if these people are emotionally stunted adolescents or if they are crudely playing the refs, but this is just pathetic:
On the mental list of slights and outrages that just about every major figure on Wall Street is believed to keep on President Barack Obama, add this one: When he met recently with a group of CEOs at Blair House, there was no representative from any of the six biggest banks in America.
Not one!
“If they don’t hate us anymore, why weren’t any of us there?” a senior executive at one of the Big Six banks said recently in trying to explain his hostility toward the president.
“It’s not so much just this one thing,” he said. “Who cares about one event? It’s just the pattern where they tell you things are going to change, that they appreciate what we do, that capital markets are important, but then the actions are different and they continue to want to score political points on us.”
Still, the executive understands that it makes political sense for the White House to stiff-arm Wall Street, if not bash it with a massive sledge hammer.
After all, polls suggest most Americans believe Obama has handled the titans of Wall Street with an exceedingly light touch. He supported the deeply unpopular $700-billion bank bailout, pushed a financial reform package that stopped short of breaking up the biggest behemoths and, just this month, signed off on tax cuts for the wealthiest and continued low rates on capital gains and dividends.
And, of course, big-time bonuses at bailed-out banks are back, even as average Americans continue to get tossed out of their homes, corporate America has turned in its most profitable quarter in history and the stock market is at a two-year high.
Yet the executive dislikes Obama with, what seems like, an almost irrational passion. And he is not alone.
Along the gilded corridors of Manhattan’s largest banks, hedge funds and private equity firms and inside Washington’s financial lobby shops, Obama and the rest of his administration are regarded with a disdain so thick it often blurs to naked loathing, a fact that has significant implications for the president’s reelection campaign and his ability to operate over the next two years.
In an effort to understand such animus POLITICO interviewed a dozen senior Wall Street denizens, including C-suite executives, investment bankers, traders and financial lobbyists, who were promised anonymity in return.
Their complaints fell along similar lines: Obama and the White House don’t understand how capital markets work, don’t like people who make a lot of money and relish using Wall Street as a whipping boy to score points with the left.
“He whipped everyone into a frenzy against us,” said one banker.
“It’s a bunch of academic lefties down there,” said another.
“You say something to them and it just goes into a black hole,” said a lobbyist.
I think this tells you more about what’s wrong with our economy than any number of graphs and papers. The Master of the Universe are a big bunch of blubbering babies. I honestly couldn’t respect them less at this point.
The article must be read in its entirely to get the full picture of the simpering, pouting millionaires and billionaires hysterically lamenting about how mean the big bad pwesident is to them, even as they admit that their big bonuses are back, they got their obscenely low tax rates extended and the markets are roaring. Nobody liiiikes them and they just won’t have it!
But here’s the sad part:
There’s a precedent for this kind of antagonism – former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“You would really have to go back to 1934 to find a time when Wall Street was this angry at an administration following a crisis that was largely of Wall Street’s own making,” said Charles Geisst, a financial historian and professor at Manhattan College. “Back then, Wall Street basically went on strike and would not issue bonds for corporations. They stomped their feet like little kids. The same thing is happening now.”
But, as Geisst noted, this is not 1934. Not even close. Big banks are not getting broken up. Nothing Obama has done equates to having created the Securities and Exchange Commission.
You know the old saying “if you’re going to blamed for it anyway ….”
There are many pathetic sniffles and plaintive wails in this story, but this has to be the most pathetic of all:
But despite recent White House efforts to reach out to Wall Street, bankers believe Obama is much more worried about perceptions on the left.
As evidence, bankers point to recent White House meetings with labor leaders, Geithner’s dinner with the heads of progressive groups and Vice President Joe Biden’s recent pledge to fight the top-rate tax cuts again in two years.
And it is this, as much as anything, that gets under Wall Street’s collective skin.
“All that people in this White House seem to worry about is what The Huffington Post is going to say if they do something, anything, remotely probusiness,” one financial executive said. “They really don’t care what we think at all.”
Imagine that! A politician being more concerned about silly old voters than the few hundred sensitive millionaires whose vast sums of money can’t buy them love. Oh the humanity.
I’ve been writing about this sickening spectacle of Wall Street millionaires and their serious emotional and psychological problems since the beginning of the meltdown. It’s one of the most interesting sociological stories of this era and it reveals that far from being the macho, swashbuckling Galtian heroes of Wall Street myth, these Masters of the Universe and nothing more than spoiled little rich boys who throw tantrums when they aren’t treated like pampered little princes.
And it finally explains one of the most puzzling aspects of the meltdown: why were the petulant little miscreants so blind that they would kill their golden goose for short term gain? It turns out that it’s because they knew that mummy and daddy would buy them another one. But they also think that mummy and daddy should kiss them on the forehead and tell them that they are good little boys and that they can do no wrong. Even the slightest hint that they may not have behaved perfectly is met with spittling rage.
The servants, however, see that Little Lords Goldman and Chase are sociopaths whose killing of the golden goose may be a very disturbing precursor to something much, much worse. But who listens to the help?
Update: And then there’s Paul Ryan
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The Press Rejects Its Reason For Being
by digby
Greenwald has a good post up this morning about his appearance on CNN yesterday and what it and the rest of the media’s reaction to Wikileaks has to say about journalism. There are many fine points in the piece, but he mentions one zombie lie I’d really love to kill — the one that all of these so-called reporters seem to have absorbed as if it’s the received word of God — the one that says Wikileaks dumped 260,000 cables indiscriminately on the internet.
Here’s the truth, from an AP news report from December 3, 2010. There’s no excuse for journalists not to know this by this point:
Respected news outlets collaborate with WikiLeaks
By The Associated Press
12.03.10The diplomatic records exposed on WikiLeaks this week reveal not only secret government communications, but also an extraordinary collaboration between some of the world’s most respected news-media outlets and a website that is facing increasing pressure and criticism from governments worldwide.
Unlike earlier disclosures by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of secret government military records, the group is releasing only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material.
“They are releasing the documents we selected,” Le Monde’s managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper’s Paris headquarters.
WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified U.S. State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany. The Guardian shared the material with The New York Times, and the five news organizations have been working together to plan the timing of their reports.
They also have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents, Kauffmann and others involved in the arrangement said.
Each publication suggested a way to remove names and details considered too sensitive, and “I suppose WikiLeaks chooses the one it likes,” El Pais Editor-in-Chief Javier Moreno said in a telephone interview from his Madrid office.
As stories are published, WikiLeaks uses its website to release the related cables. For example, The Guardian published an article yesterday based on diplomatic cables discussing the assassination of former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko by radiation poisoning, and WikiLeaks quickly posted three cables on the same subject.
WikiLeaks, however, struggled to stay online today as corporations and governments moved to cut its access to the Internet. The site is essentially being chased around the Internet by hackers and government pressure. For now, it’s one step ahead of the opposition, but the site has been brought down numerous times over the course of a week.
EveryDNS — a Manchester, N.H.-based company that had been directing traffic to the website wikileaks.org — stopped late yesterday after cyber attacks threatened the rest of its network. WikiLeaks responded by moving to a Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch — and calling on activists for support. Two companies host the Swiss domain name, one of which is in France. The other is in Sweden.
Officials in France moved to ban WikiLeaks from servers there, with Industry Minister Eric Besson calling it unacceptable to host a site that “violates the secret of diplomatic relations and puts people protected by diplomatic secret in danger.”
The close arrangement between the website and the newspapers is unusual because it ties the news-media outlets more closely to WikiLeaks and reveals an unusual collaboration with a group facing intense international scrutiny, including a U.S. criminal investigation.
“In this case, what you have is news organizations partnering with an organization that very clearly has a different set of values,” said Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics professor at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.
But McBride notes that the unique collaboration also forces some degree of journalistic standards on WikiLeaks, which in the past has released documents without removing information considered sensitive.
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told readers in an online exchange that the newspaper had suggested to its media partners and to WikiLeaks what information it believed should be withheld.
“We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good,” Keller wrote. “Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity.”
Days before releasing any of the latest documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called Assange’s offer “a half-hearted gesture to have some sort of conversation.”
U.S. officials submitted suggestions to the Times, which asked government officials to weigh in on some of the documents the newspaper and its partners wanted to publish.
“The other news organizations supported these redactions,” Keller wrote. “WikiLeaks has indicated that it intends to do likewise. And as a matter of news interest, we will watch their website to see what they do.”
Although Keller has emphasized to readers that the Times is “not a ‘media partner’” of WikiLeaks and that it did not receive the State Department documents from WikiLeaks, his public comments describe a working relationship with the group on the release of the material and decisions to withhold certain information.
Keller told the AP in an e-mail yesterday that advising WikiLeaks about removing names and other sensitive details was the responsible thing to do.
“We have no way of knowing what WikiLeaks will do, no clear idea what they make of our redactions, but if this to any degree prevents WikiLeaks from carelessly getting someone killed, I’m happy to do it,” he said. “I’d be interested to hear the arguments in favor of having WikiLeaks post its material unredacted.”
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said this week there was “an active, ongoing, criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks’ release of the material. He said the release jeopardized national security, diplomatic efforts and U.S. relationships around the world. He declined to equate WikiLeaks to traditional news organizations that enjoy certain free-press protections.
“I think one can compare the way in which the various news organizations that have been involved in this have acted, as opposed to the way in which WikiLeaks has,” Holder said. He did not elaborate on the distinction he sees between WikiLeaks and the publications.
The WikiLeaks documents have been compared to the Pentagon Papers, an internal government study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that was completed in 1967. The documents were leaked in 1971 by former Defense Department aide Daniel Ellsberg and included many damaging revelations, including a memo that stated the reason for fighting in Vietnam was based far more on preserving U.S. prestige than preventing communism or helping the Vietnamese.
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz rejects similaries between WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers.
“It’s not as if we’re still up against the Vietnam War; and everybody has a right — no, a duty, to play Daniel Ellsberg,” said Wilentz, whose books include The Rise of American Democracy and The Age of Reagan.
“But this is extremely dangerous, given the imperatives of diplomacy. Is there some profound deception of the American people and the world going on which, as with Ellsberg, requires an insider to, in effect, blow the whistle? I don’t get that sense. I get the sense that there are people out there, like the WikiLeaks people, who have a simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency, who are simply offended by any state actions that are cloaked.”
But Ellsberg believes there are parallels to the documents he leaked nearly 40 years ago. He says that while early media reports about WikiLeaks focused on gossip and personalities, memos are now emerging that show greater U.S. involvement in Pakistan than the government acknowledged, a pattern revealed by the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam.
“This means the Obama administration is on a path that is as dangerous as can be,” Ellsberg says, noting Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. “I think the press did a disservice by leading with so much gossip, which isn’t terribly important.”
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a former senior editor at Commentary magazine and author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law, says WikiLeaks will have a “huge downside for historians” because it will encourage more secrecy. But he says he also wishes he had the chance to include WikiLeaks in his book and examine how a “nonstate actor” could “challenge frontally the U.S. security system.”
John Dower, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat and the National Book Award finalist Cultures of War, praised WikiLeaks. Embracing Defeat, a history of Japan after World War II, and Cultures of War, a comparison between the George W. Bush administration and the Japanese leadership before Pearl Harbor, are both books about understanding how one’s foes think and the dangers of unchallenged opinions.
“The public benefits by understanding what’s going on,” Dower says. “The government is bending over backward to be secretive. We need to understand what is taking place and how we are perceived by others. In recent years, we’ve had failure of intelligence and failures of imagination. We don’t understand the other side. We don’t know why people are being drawn to the terrorists.”
“I don’t see any reason to be worried about WikiLeaks. The government has all kinds of secrets, secrets that no leaker will ever get close to,” said Seymour Hersh, the author and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter known for uncovering the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and for his reports on the planning for the war in Iraq and the alleged torture of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison.
“There will always be a struggle between what the government knows and what the public can find out. That’s the reporter’s job, to find out. What’s happening now is about free expression. It’s the First Amendment. It’s the First Amendment. It’s the First Amendment.”
In the month since this was written, the newspapers have duly redacted and released nearly 2000 documents. Wikileaks has released exactly the same redacted documents on their own website — and those documents only. There has been no indiscriminate release of documents.
The funny thing about all this is that Wikileaks decided to do this release this way for two reasons. The first was in response to criticism of their earlier releases of raw material which were feared to potentially put people in danger (something which has thankfully not come to pass.) But the other reason should be of intense interest to journalists (asking a lot, since they seem not to be interested in even the basic facts) because it shows that they are still necessary. Here’s how Julian Assange explained their thinking on this:
Our initial idea, which never got… our initial idea was “look at all those people editing wikipedia”. Look at all the junk they are working on. Certainly if you give them a fresh classified document on the human rights atrocities in Fallujah, that the rest of the world has not seen before, you know it’s a secret document. Certainly all those people working on articles in art history, maths, and so on, and all those bloggers who are busy pontificating on the human rights disasters… who are complaining they can only respond to the NY times because they don’t have sources of their own. Surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something.
No, it’s all bullshit. All bullshit. In fact, people write about things in general, if it’s not part of their career, because they want to display their values to their peers who are already in the same group. Actually they don’t give a fuck about the material, that’s the reality. So we understood from very early on that we would have to at least give summaries of the material we were releasing. At least summaries to get people to pick it up, to get them to dig deeper. And if we didn’t have a summery to put the thing in context, it would just fall into the gutter. And in cases where the material is more complex especially military material which has lots of acronyms. It’s not enough to do a summery. You have to do an article, or liaise with other journalists on an exclusive or semi exclusive basis, to get them to extract it into semi understandable human readable form.
They originally thought there would be thousands of Marcy Wheelers combing through the documents and creating a narrative of events but found out that there were very few people of her caliber doing that kind of work and getting noticed. What they needed was professional journalism. And so they collaborated with newspapers and observed the rules they mutually agreed upon. Yet most journalists are still heaping them with scorn and accusing them of heinous crimes. It’s almost as if they’re afraid they might have to actually do something other than kow-tow to power so they’re rejecting the most powerful validation of their purpose and necessity in the internet age.
This is the saddest day for journalism since their guileless acceptance of the WMD boogeyman and giddy cheerleading for the Iraq war. It turns out that journalism is important, but most of these “professional” practitioners of the field are not only failing to practice it, they are hostile to the idea that they should practice it. It’s very revealing.
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Macaca Tea
by digby
Apparently the tea partiers are on the hunt for the perfect candidates for 2012. According to Right Wing Watch, they find Virginia’s George “Macaca” Allen, with a 92.3 lifetime conservative rating, to be something of a socialist hippie.
Jamie Ratdke, who recently stepped down as chairwoman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation in order to explore a Senate bid, said she began to consider a run for the Senate after attending a Tea Party convention that featured Rick Santorum, Lou Dobbs, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinnelli as speakers:
Radtke said that she had considered running for the state Senate next year but that she began thinking about the U.S. Senate instead after Virginia’s first tea party convention, which drew an estimated 2,800 people to Richmond in October. Radtke, who worked for Allen for a year when he was governor and she was right out of college, said it’s time for a new candidate. She said that Allen was part of “George Bush’s expansion of government” when he was senator and that she was concerned about some of his stances on abortion. Allen has said that abortions should be legal in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is endangered, and he owned stock in the manufacturer of the morning-after pill.
If George Allen is deemed not conservative enough for the Republican Party, then expect many more extremist candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell to win contested GOP primaries. Allen hurt his chances by supporting healthcare and education initiatives that were backed by President Bush and the Republican leadership, and is also deemed too moderate because he voted to include sexual orientation under hate crimes protections and believes in exceptions under a ban on abortion.
I keep hearing that these Tea Partiers don’t care about social issues. I don’t know why people think that.
Update: Scott Brown is having some similar problems with a group that headlines its dispatch: Pro-family Group Posts Detailed Expose On Brown In Bed With Gays
“I think that there will be a primary challenge,” said Christen Varley, president of the Greater Boston Tea Party. “There’s enough of an underground movement in the Tea Party movement as seeing him as not being conservative enough. There probably will be multiple people who attempt to run against him.”
Evidently, there are only about 15,000 registered Republicans in the state, so he could get the Mike Castle primary treatment. It remains to be seen if the Tea party remains a force in the GOP, but with Obama in the White House, I think they’ll stay relevant for a while. We’ll see if the establishment continues to fund them.
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The Revolving Door Is Whirling Like A Top
by digby
The incoming GOP majority is staffing up:
McKee is currently a lobbyist working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s division dedicated to deregulating complex derivatives products. In her new role working for Lucas, McKee will be liaising with regulators in charge of implementing new rules under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law to overhaul the over-the-counter derivatives market.
As ThinkProgress reported, the Chamber, which is funded by AIG, JP Morgan, CitiGroup, and other financial interests, took the lead role in fighting to defeat Wall Street reform efforts. Last year, the Chamber organized a conference call with other financial industry lobby groups and bank lobbyists to coordinate their efforts. As Tim Fernholz reported, McKee made clear that she was fighting to “kill” financial reform:
“We want to make sure that we hold all the Republicans and are able to influence enough Democrats to have a working majority to kill this thing outright or modify it to the point where it’s palatable to the business community,” Jason Matthews, the Chamber’s director of congressional affairs, told the callers. Ryan McKee, a senior director at the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets, was even more direct in response to a question from an caller: “We’re fundamentally trying to kill this,” she said.
This news brought to mind this post discussing Thomas Franks’ book The Wrecking Crew and it’s chapter about the revolving door:
Frank argues that in addition to big business-worship, a qualification for traversing this revolving door was the ability to injure, if not destroy, the institution in which the recruit was placed. Federal agencies were the main target, and some combination of the recruit’s hostility to government institutions and/or the recruit’s incompetence, either of which would weaken government to businesses’ benefit (the theory says), was desired.
I stood on one side of that door for that era’s final five years and worked with some of its travelers. As such, I was decently-positioned to observe some of the phenomena set forth in the book.
[…]
The firm was, in addition, well-known for its prestigious practice defending and advancing business interests in the courts and agencies of government. Throw in a PR group that relished opportunities to trumpet high-profile departures and returns (and was so generally adept it once got a national legal rag to portray a cadre of forty-something-year-old authoritarian dweebs as rebellious “Young Guns”) and the firm was fertile ground for the furnishing of the sons (and once or twice, daughters) of The Wrecking Crew into high legal places.
Those recruited fell roughly into three groups:
The Good: One fellow left as an associate to work in the front office of the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ’s”) Natural Resources Division, and returned a partner a few years later. A legal genius, great advocate, and fine human being, he simply was not one to bend rules or wrongly shade arguments for our business clients during our work together, regardless of the fact that he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. I have little knowledge of the substance of his service, yet ethics tend to travel well.
It hurts a bit to write of another relative youngster who left to become an Assistant Solicitor General. While, hands down, the most affected person I have ever encountered, his arguments before the Supreme Court were impressive, as was his record. A worthy public servant.
The Bad: Another young associate left to work for the Provisional Authority in Iraq, set up following “Mission Accomplished.” There are obvious elements of sacrifice worth acknowledging, but his job, helping write Iraq’s new Constitution, condemns the selection. Setting aside that era’s outlandish and doomed arrogance, signified by the shipment of a gaggle of young Federalists to an ancient Muslim country to write for it its own Constitution, it does not besmirch this fellow much to say he wasn’t a James Madison, and could only be sent to be one by an administration blinded by ideology and check-box credentials.
A junior partner left for a senior position in the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. This surprised many as this fellow wasn’t particularly known as an antitruster. He later jumped from DOJ to become General Counsel at a major federal agency. These appointments and the performance of these entities support Frank’s theories: the DOJ’s Antitrust Section, outside of criminal price fixing, was notoriously lax in the Bush years, virtually ignoring the Sherman Act’s prohibition on monopolization and the Clayton Act’s merger provisions. The other federal agency, like many in the Bush years, was criticized for failure to enforce existing law and abide by its legislative mandates.
The Ugly: After Jack Goldsmith left as head of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) because he refused to sign off on the shoddy legal analysis of his predecessor, a firm partner was tapped to take his place (and presumably give his imprimatur to the now-condemned analysis). OLC is a small elite group within DOJ that generally advises the Executive on the constitutionality of proposed legislative and executive acts. OLC attained infamy during the Bush II era for its work on warrantless eavesdropping and “enhanced interrogation methods.” “Just a guy,” it was said of this fellow, at the time of the appointment, he played a part in some of the historically venerated Justice Department’s darkest days.
A number of other firm folks passed through the revolving door during that time, particularly in less senior positions in the OLC. One appeared to fit Frank’s portrayal of the flunky-conservative’s ultimate government actor: the ideological incompetent. Indeed, as the controversy over the DOJ’s torture memos blew up, and some condemning their legal analysis suggested the work was so deficient it must have been deliberately so, I remember thinking “not so fast.”
In the main, then, Frank’s analysis is spot on, even if occasionally it sweeps in too much. As his analysis is more historical and political, it is worth supplying the legal basis for condemning a mode of government that elevates ideology above all else, including law. Those laws enacted by Congress and, to a lesser extent, rules promulgated by agencies, constitute, in theory, the will of the people, and democracy in action. They are worthy of enforcement, and indeed, demand enforcement, by the executive branch. That is not to say the legislative and regulatory regimes are perfect. They are not close. But there are legitimate ways to challenge and change them.
When a collection of individuals works instead to subvert our system of representative government, our nation ceases to be one of laws, and becomes one of men instead.
For some reason that sounds almost quaint. Aren’t we really just talking about which men at this point?
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Taxing The Parasites
by digby
Steve Benen notices what seems to be a jarring inconsistency in conservative philosophy (is there any other kind?) regarding taxes. It’s taken as a given that the right hates taxes, of course. But there have been signs over the past few years that the Republican elite really and truly only hate taxes for the wealthy — there has been a recent return to ancient themes about the lazy, morally corrupt poor who must be forced to “contribute” more so that they understand the burdens they place on the true producers of our society:
[L]et’s appreciate the underlying point of the conservatives’ concern — for all the talk on the right about cutting taxes at every available opportunity, there’s also a drive to raise taxes on those who can least afford it. The GOP has a natural revulsion to any tax system, but there’s an eerie comfort with a regressive agenda that showers additional wealth on the rich while asking for more from lower-income workers.
In fact, the drive on the right to increase the burdens on these middle- and lower-class families is getting kind of creepy. Some on the far-right have begun calling these Americans “parasites.” Earlier this year, Fox News’ Steve Doocy went so far as to ask whether those who don’t make enough to qualify for income taxes should even be allowed to vote.
Obviously, there’s nothing new in this belief. I suspect it goes all the way back to the beginning, but certain notions by the world’s great religions mitigated some of that as well as did the knowledge that altruism is a natural component of human beings’ evolution and inherent organizing principles. But recently, there has been growth in a “philosophy” that celebrates selfishness and it’s been fairly well absorbed by the right wing elite.
Here’s a little excerpt of Howard Roarke’s speech from The Fountainhead:
“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways — by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.
“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.
“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.
“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.
“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.
“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.
“No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind’s moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.
“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality — the man who lives to serve others — is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism.
Some of these people have been worshiping this stuff since they were teenagers. Others don’t even know where it comes from, just that people they know think this way and therefore it must be good.
Alan Greenspan, the most influential and powerful central banker of the last half century wrote this, as a young man:
‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
And he’s certainly not the only one:
James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas” at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.” He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.
“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he said, “that excellence should be your goal.”
John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand’s ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.
“There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out,” Mr. Stack said. “You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity.” He said he defied them. “ ‘Atlas’ helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC.”
Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. “It’s the best business book I ever read,” he said. “I didn’t do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that’s an eye opener.”
Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart.
Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.”
Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.
Woe be to all those ordinary Joes and Janes who are just working at jobs and raising families and trying to find some happiness in their short time on earth without feeling they need to be conquerors. Among many of the political and business elite in America they are no longer considered neighbors or even customers. They are parasites. In other words, the American Dream is nothing more than a system designed to drain all the “purpose and reason” from the legitimate owners of the world. Taxing the hell out of them will teach them a necessary moral lesson.
Update: KeninNY at Down with Tyranny gathered the 10 worst GOP quotations on the unemployed. They’re all doozies. But I think I like this one the best:
The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say ‘generally’ because there are exceptions. But in general as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or do not know how to do a days work.
That’s Ben Stein, pretend economist, dishonest shill and 80s character actor.
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Structural Rationale
by digby
If you read Krugman, you’re already aware of the emerging argument that current unemployment is “structural” rather than “cyclical” and that we just have to live with a very high level until … well, I’m not sure. Until the people who are unemployable die off? Emmigrate?
Anyway, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker offers a succinct explanation as to why the current unemployment is in fact cyclical and therefore why the government needs to provide more stimulus rather than “waiting it out.” He points out that there are always those who insist that unemployment is structural and that’s certainly correct. The usual suspects have been saying this in recessions as long as I can remember. But this time, I’m a little bit worried that it’s going to come from Democrats rather than Republicans as they attempt to rationalize the persistence of unemployment on their watch. I could certainly see the Ben Nelsons who are facing the Teabags in 2012 adopting that as a rationale for austerity and heartlessness.
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Churning The Swill
by digby
So the new Democratic Governor of Hawaii has decided to enter the birther fray:
Somehow this certificate of live birth isn’t enough for the ‘birthers.’ And it’s bugging Hawaii’s new Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie. He told the New York Times that he is looking at ways “to put this particular canard to rest” by changing state law so that more information about Obama’s birth can be released. His reasons for doing so are the height of honorable.
“It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Governor Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday. “It’s an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office.”
So, have at it, Gov. Abercrombie. Make those birthers choke on the facts. But we all know that — and that New York Times story goes to great lengths to point this out — birthers never let facts get in the way of their version of the truth.
That’s the problem, of course. This just feeds their delusions, especially since the governor is a Democrat who says he’s doing it because he knew Obama’s parents. A 50 year conspiracy!
I wonder if it’s going to take the crack investigative skills of Darrel Issa to finally get to the bottom of this.
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The Greatest Show On Earth
by digby
One of the worst kept secrets in DC right now is the GOP’s plan to dominate the agenda with activity solely designed to help their 2012 campaign. One hopes that the Democrats understand how to parry these tactics, but I think they might be a bit more sanguine than they should be:
“They’re pushing through a lot of bad policy at the executive level,” DeMint said. “We need to figure out how to rein it in.”
Democrats aren’t terribly worried. But they’re definitely annoyed. In an interview Wednesday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) — outgoing chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee — laid it out.
They can pass legislation, presumably through the House where they have a strong majority, but I can’t see them getting 60 votes [in the Senate] on a lot of what they say they want to do. They can attach amendments to the appropriations bills, but I don’t see how that would be successful because the President can refuse to sign it, the Senate refuse to pass it. They could use the … Review Act. Force votes. If they got a majority, the President could veto it.
“I think what they’re going to do is try to keep on dramatizing the issues that they think are helpful to them,” Waxman said. “The next two years I expect all their actions to be campaign oriented…. They’re all about messaging, they’re all about power, they’re all about politics. What they don’t seem to be concerned about is governing.”
There’s a lot to that critique. But it won’t deter the GOP.
“We need to make sure Americans know what’s going on,” DeMint said.
According to article, they are going to be using some obscure rules to hem in his executive power which, in the wake of the Bush administration, says everything you need to know about their intellectual consistency.
But the idea that they are going to be putting on a non-stop campaign pageant in the congress tracks with what Alex Castellanos said on CNN last week:
BORGER: They are — they’re going to call for the repeal of health care.
CASTELLANOS: Sure, they’re going to call for the repeal of health care. And it’s going to be a big vote.
BORGER: The job-killing health-care bill.
(CROSSTALK)
CASTELLANOS: And it will pass the House and it won’t pass the Senate, and then there will probably be a series of test votes throughout the year, repealing the parts that you don’t want to keep, keep the parts that work. Veterans, things likes that. Deductibility.
Obviously, the president is not going to agree to kill his own baby. But real bills will have to be passed to fund the government and the question is whether or not they’ll be able to package things in such a way that health care is held hostage so they can get the other things they want. It’s going to be up to Harry Reid to keep the Senate in line — and hope that the president isn’t backed into a corner where he must choose between his baby and something else.
Meanwhile get ready for the Oscar worthy performances in the congress as the Republicans put on the greatest show on earth.
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