Month: September 2011

Toxic Sludge Champ Rick Perry
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

This story hasn’t received nearly as much press as it deserves:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to remove a state commissioner who opposed expanding a West Texas nuclear waste dump run by one of his largest political donors, Reuters reports today. When it became clear that Bobby Gregory of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission might be able to block the dump from accepting out-of-state nuclear waste, Perry’s office offered him an alternative job—a prestigious post on the board of regents of a state university.

The news is certain to fuel the longstanding political scandal over the dump, which was licensed in 2008 by Perry’s top environmental regulator, Glenn Shankle, over the objections of his staff, three of whom resigned rather than sign off the on the deal (Shankle later left to become a lobbyist for the dump’s parent company, Waste Control Solutions). WCS is owned by Harold Simmons, a billionaire corporate raider who has given Perry’s campaigns at least $1.2 million.

This is an especially big deal, since Rick Perry has fueled his political career on the backs of just a few big donors. Of particular note is one Harold Simmons, nuclear waste dump kingpin of west Texas. Per NPR:

In his career as governor of Texas, a state where millionaires are plentiful and contribution limits are lax, Perry has raised about half his campaign cash from just 204 big donors, according to an analysis by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. And his administration has helped many of those donors, even when it comes to disposing of radioactive waste.

Perry donor Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old billionaire, is a political player. He gave millions of dollars to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, financing ads that knee-capped Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

For Perry, Simmons has anted up roughly $3 million worth of support over the past decade — some of the money going to Perry’s campaign committee, other dollars going to the Republican Governors Association when Perry was fundraising for it.

Simmons also owns Waste Control Specialists LLC, working in the heavily regulated industry of radioactive waste disposal.

Craig McDonald, of Texans for Public Justice, says those two facts go together.

“There has been no secret that Harold Simmons’ direct self-interest lies in building, permitting and operating his hazardous waste dump and low-level nuclear waste dump in West Texas,” he says. “And the wheels have been greased at every turn.”

n 2003, the Texas Legislature took the state-run radioactive waste program and made it a private monopoly for Waste Control Specialists. Simmons later bragged about the lobbying that accomplished that.

Waste Control Specialists owned the site in West Texas. But it needed an environmental review. A panel of eight state employees fended off corporate lobbyists and the Perry administration for four years to produce their report.

“We knew from the beginning that this permit was intended to be issued,” says Glenn Lewis, who was on the panel.

And they understood why.

“The realization that Harold Simmons was a top campaign contributor to Gov. Perry,” Lewis says.

Recall that when George W. Bush was selected President, there was a sense that things wouldn’t be so bad, because Bush had a record of cooperative with Democrats in the legislature, and no terribly onerous scandals involving outright corruption. He was, until he moved into the Oval Office, the sort of Republican who could take up the mantle of the “compassionate conservative” and people would believe him. There had been indications of Bush’s absence of character throughout his life, but his record as a politician did not suggest that he would be the most corrupt and hyper-partisan president in America’s history.

Rick Perry’s record, by contrast, is incontrovertibly and ostentatiously corrupt and incompetent. It’s all on the record:

If a majority this nation elects Rick Perry president, its citizens will deserve every moment of suffering they receive. There will be no excuse.

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Don’t kill this man

by digby

Just this:

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Bad investments
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

As the Solyndra non-story picks up steam in the news media, it might be worth remembering this:

Osama al-Nujaifi, the Iraqi parliament speaker, has told Al Jazeera that the amount of Iraqi money unaccounted for by the US is $18.7bn – three times more than the reported $6.6bn.

Just before departing for a visit to the US, al-Nujaifi said that he has received a report this week based on information from US and Iraqi auditors that the amount of money withdrawn from a fund from Iraqi oil proceeds, but unaccounted for, is much more than the $6.6bn reported missing last week.

“There is a lot of money missing during the first American administration of Iraqi money in the first year of occupation.

“Iraq’s development fund has lost around $18bn of Iraqi money in these operations – their location is unknown. Also missing are the documents of expenditure.

“I think it will be discussed soon. There should be an answer to where has Iraqi money gone.”

And maybe more importantly this:

U.S. taxpayers spent a lot of money on the soldiers, but the Pentagon paid Halliburton to do the work. The company billed the military top dollar knowing that the brass would look the other way. The gravy train finally ground to a halt when two brave members of Congress inquired about the results of the internal audit.

Two, almost none of the money that American taxpayers provided for reconstruction was spent because the rules were too stringent for the CPA’s taste.

And three, we dished out Iraqi money to companies like Halliburton like it was going out of style because the United States government knew that neither Congress nor the United Nations would ask us difficult questions about what we were doing with other people’s money. Equally importantly, Bush officials were worried that the new Iraqi government might ask us difficult questions about their money once they gained any modicum of power. So they were eager to spend the money while they could.

Or

School for scandal

by digby

Ok. After having just watched the fourth breathless “Solyndra” piece on cable TV, I guess I have to just give up and accept that this stupid, trumped up, pseudo-scandal has got the typically braindead press corps all hot and bothered and it’s not going away. There’s just no end to this nonsense.

So, it’s time to get educated on the damned thing because we’re going to have to talk about it whether we want to or not. Here’s a timeline of events from ThinkProgress, the five biggest lies about Solyndra by Dave Johnson and Joe Conason on Solyndra vs Whitewater.

And here’s Kevin Drum’s pithy explanation which serves as an excellent starting place:

Basically, Solyndra was working on a solar technology that promised to be cheaper than silicon, and at the time of the loan it looked really promising both to DOE and to private investors. But then the market turned: Silicon prices dropped, and China started producing super low-cost silicon PV. That spelled doom for Solyndra. They had a good idea, but it didn’t work out.

In any case, Solyndra is a tiny fraction of DOE’s green-energy loan program, and Solyndra’s loan guarantees are dwarfed by those of both fossil fuel and nuclear companies, which range into the multiple billions. There was no scandal in the loan process, and there’s nothing unusual about having a certain fraction of speculative programs like this fail. It’s all part of the way the free market works.

This is one of the many ways the right — with the help of well-meaning reformers and the press — have managed to make any kind of government spending a huge risk for anyone who undertakes it. It started with the “fleecing of America” reports, in which stories about the government funding “the sex life of honeybee studies” and the like became common shorthand for government inefficiency and waste. Over time these stories took on a life of their own creating an image of liberal government run amock even to the extent that Bobby Jindahl mockingly referred to “volcano monitoring” as a ridiculous waste of government money.

This problem was obvious when the stimulus was being proposed. The administration was desperate not to have any of the money go to projects that didn’t pan out because this kind of hissy fit would be the obvious result. (Remember all the shrieking that some of the money was going to public health programs and fixing the grass on the Washington Mall?) They weren’t wrong to be worried and it’s actually surprised me that something like the Solyndra failure hasn’t come to light earlier. Of course some of the money was going to go to failed projects, particularly when the free market fetishists insist that they go to private enterprise, the very definition of “risky.” Nobody bats a thousand and the fact is that the “success” of the program isn’t the most important thing about economic stimulus in any case. Getting the money into the economy is.

So this goes, once again, to the problem of right wing tropes being the default standard because liberalism is the ideology that dare not speak its name. If people understood the role of government in economic crises as being something other than “please save us by cutting spending” this would not be the problem that it is. Unfortunately, the entire population has been indoctrinated into this concept (which I recognize is easy to do) and so they are extremely skeptical of something like stimulus to begin with — and are quite ready to believe that the whole thing is a crooked game.

What makes it most delicious for the Republicans is their ability to manipulate the press into focusing on alleged Democratic corruption (not that it doesn’t ever exist, mind you) while successfully obscuring and stonewalling the very serious, high dollar corruption of the GOP. It all works together like a well oiled machine to paralyze liberal action. And the centrists, like vultures, are there waiting to leap on whatever opening either side gives them to portray themselves as the “pragmatic” “moderate” “common sense” alternative, which somehow always seems to end up being that which benefits the wealthy status quo.

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Plane authoritarians

by digby

I haven’t written about this awful “flying while brown” incident from last week-end, but James Fallows has covered it in depth and I highly recommend you read about it. It reminded me of an incident the last time I flew a couple of months ago.

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Tim’s Bay of Pigs

by digby

Perhaps you’ve seen this already:

A new book offering an insider’s account of the White House’s response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn’t initially consider for their high-profile roles.

Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including Obama, Geithner and other top officials for “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President,” which will be released Sept. 20. The Associated Press purchased a copy on Thursday.

The book states Geithner and the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009 order to consider dissolving banking giant Citigroup while continuing stress tests on banks, which were burdened with toxic mortgage assets.

In the book, Obama does not deny Suskind’s account, but does not reveal what he told Geithner when he found out. “Agitated may be too strong a word,” Suskind quotes Obama as saying. Obama says later in the book that he was trying to be decisive but “the speed with which the bureaucracy could exercise my decision was slower than I wanted.”

Geithner says in the book that he did not recall that Obama was mad at him about the Citigroup decision and rejected allegations contained in White House documents that his department had been slow to enact the president’s plans.

“I don’t slow walk the president on anything,” Geithner told Suskind.

“The Citbank incident, and others like it, reflected a more pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young president’s authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers,” Suskind writes.

I haven’t read the book but Susskind is a highly reputable reporter with a strong record. I have no reason to suspect his facts. So what would this mean? So far, as one would expect, liberals are gathering into factions. The defenders are saying it’s all hogwash, don’t believe a word of it and the super critics are saying it’s a whitewash, excusing the President’s leadership by saying it’s his advisers who have led him astray.

As I said, I haven’t read the book although I plan to. But if this passage is correct, I don’t think it excuses the President at all. What it does is paint him as somewhat weak in his early days in office, which I don’t find surprising. It’s reminiscent of another young president who got swept along by the existing hierarchy and approved a fateful assault called the Bay of Pigs. The question is what happened next. In Kennedy’s case, he learned to be extremely skeptical of the establishment and he relied on different advisors before making such decisions in the future.

It must mean something that Tim Geithner is almost all that’s left of President Obama’s original economic advisers. The only logical answer is that in spite of the above anecdote the President came to depend on Geithner to the exclusion of the others — and that is very different from how Kennedy reacted. I’ll be fascinated to read the book to get a sense of how that happened.

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That was the week that was

by digby

This came out yesterday, but it was so depressing that I didn’t want to post it:

The number of people applying for unemployment benefits jumped last week to the highest level in three months. It’s a sign that the job market remains depressed.

The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly applications rose by 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 428,000. The week included the Labor Day holiday.

Applications typically drop during short work weeks. In this case, applications didn’t drop as much as the department expected, so the seasonally adjusted value rose. A Labor spokesman said the total wasn’t affected by Hurricane Irene.
Still, applications appear to be trending up. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, rose for the fourth straight week to 419,500.

Applications need to fall below 375,000 to indicate that hiring is increasing enough to lower the unemployment rate. They haven’t been below that level since February.
The economy added zero net jobs in August, the worst showing since September 2010. The unemployment rate stayed at 9.1 percent for the second straight month.
The job figures were weak because companies hired fewer workers and not because they stepped up layoffs, economists said. Business and consumer confidence fell last month after a series of events renewed recession fears.

The government reported that the economy barely grew in the first half of the year. Lawmakers fought over raising the debt ceiling. Standard & Poor’s downgraded long-term U.S. debt for the first time in history. Stocks tumbled — the Dow lost nearly 16 percent of its value from July 21 through Aug. 10.

Businesses added only 17,000 jobs in August, which was a sharp drop from 156,000 in July. Government cut 17,000 jobs. Combined, total net payrolls did not change.
Unemployment benefit applications are considered a measure of the pace of layoffs.
The total number of people receiving benefits dipped 12,000 to 3.73 million, the third straight decline. But that doesn’t include about 3.4 million additional people receiving extended benefits under emergency programs put in place during the recession. All told, about 7.14 million people received benefits for the week ending Aug. 27, the latest data available.

More jobs are desperately needed to fuel faster economic growth. Higher employment leads to more income. That boosts consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of economic growth.

Higher gas and food prices have cut into their buying power this year. The economy expanded at an annual rate of just 0.7 percent, the slowest growth since the recession officially ended two years ago.

So, what to do? Well, even the IMF has weighed in on the lunacy of creating contractionary policies in this environment, so anyone with any sense would not propose that the government would do that. So naturally, the millionaire lunkheads in the Senate are gathering their forces:

Saxby Chambliss’ Gang of Six has grown to 38 U.S. senators from both parties, who on Thursday urged the debt reduction “supercommittee” to aim high and secure $4 trillion in budget savings.

The Georgia Republican was joined by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and a group too large to fit on the news conference stage to send a message to the 12-member joint committee created in the summer’s deal to raise the debt ceiling. The committee must devise a plan by November to reduce future deficits by at least $1.2 trillion, on top of $917 billion in already agreed-upon savings. Chambliss and his gang want to nearly double that, as most budget experts say a $4 trillion course correction is necessary to lasso the nation’s rising debt.

“As you can see, our numbers have grown significantly,” Chambliss said. “We’re not only bipartisan, but we stretch on both sides of the spectrum in our respective caucuses. That’s how serious we know this debt is.”

That’s very impressive in its bipartisan idiocy, I’m sure.

But never let it be said that the House of Representatives is going to be left out of the insanity:

Two separate but related Republican efforts are increasing the odds that the government will shut down at the end of September, despite repeated assurances from both GOP and Democratic leaders that neither party has an appetite for another round of brinksmanship.

In a Thursday letter, over 50 House Republicans, led by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), pushed Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to make steep cuts to discretionary spending in the next fiscal year, reneging on the agreement the parties struck to resolve the debt limit standoff. That legislation set a cap on discretionary spending at $1.043 trillion and both Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) are committed to funding the government at that level for the coming year.

But many House conservatives want to go lower, and if they defect then House Democrats will have to pitch in to make sure it passes and avert a shut down.

It doesn’t get any better than that for sheer foolishness. Setting aside the bad economics, you have to wonder if the Republicans are just hoping to suppress turnout to zero in the coming election with gambits like this.

Recall:

It is important to recognize how fragile economic perceptions were headed into the final stretch of the debt-ceiling negotiation. Along with Hart Research [Associates], we have been doing economic tracking roughly every quarter from 2007 through today for CNBC. Workers’ perceptions of their likelihood to get a raise, Americans’ confidence in the stock market, and homeowners’ perceptions of their home value were as weak or weaker in June 2011 than they have been at any point during this four-year period.

Americans’ attitudes about the debt ceiling are not only based on the actual outcome but are primarily derived from the manner in which this issue was debated and resolved. Their views about this process are clear, and are overwhelmingly negative.” McInturff contends, “The perception of how Washington handled the debt-ceiling negotiation led to an immediate collapse of confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress.

So let’s start talking about another shutdown!

Using the Pulpit
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Digby had a fantastic post yesterday about how the media doesn’t even try to analyze whether claims made by various hacks are right or wrong, but simply does its stenographic duty and then reports on the public’s perception of the misinformation they blithely helped provide:

Yes, he’s accurately reporting what people inaccurately believe. He just forgets to present the real facts and correct their misapprehensions. And then goes on to praise presidential candidates for being savvy enough to flog the same misinformation.

We have a very serious problem with epistemology in this culture and a huge part of it is due to the press. I don’t know how to fix it. But until we do, our politics are going to be distorted and dysfunctional.

That’s true. Nor can we expect the media to change its stripes. What is going today is a partisanization of the media, rapid on the Right but also slowly gaining steam on the Left. That trend, while better than the misinformation masquerading as objectivity on display in the traditional media, isn’t going to solve our epistemology problem. I know there is a cadre of strict deconstructionists who believe that true epistemic objectivity is impossible, and that only the exposure of isms and political agendas in all texts can hope to provide clarity. Thankfully, no one outside of an ivory tower actually believes that. (That sort of thinking is why I left academia.)

There is an actual reality out there. That reality happens to have a liberal bias most of the time. It would be nice if journalists attempted to stand by it and call out peddlers of misinformation, regardless of whether it meant that the journalist appeared to have a liberal slant. Objectivity is defined by adherence to the facts, not the artificial rejection of ideological appearance.

But the media is not likely to provide that. A few corporations dominate the media world; those who aren’t bought off are afraid to upset colleagues or readers; there’s a general culture of pseudo-objectivity; and an increasingly partisan media isn’t really helping solve the problem.

But that’s where the much-maligned “bully pulpit” comes in. When the facts are made increasingly irrelevant by a conservative opposition that simply doesn’t care if it peddles outrageous lies to a pliant media, the only option left is to tell an alternative story. The truth lies not in attempting to refute the conservative’s story through a dispassionate resort to facts, but rather in weaving the facts into a narrative that fits an ideology that makes sense in the context of the universe that actually exists.

That is why the President must be a partisan. A Democratic President’s job is first and foremost to explain issues in the context of a progressive narrative. The job is to show why the conservative narrative fails to account for reality.

Telling that story in turn influences the media, who are forced to scribble down notes and dutifully act as stenographers for that story.

In a world where epistemology is dead, all that is left is competing narrative. The narrative that most closely fits the facts should win the day, so long as it is communicated emotionally and effectively. And that’s what the bully pulpit is there for. No sane believes that the bully pulpit will help convince Senator X or Y to pass a specific piece of legislation. But it should be able to tilt the media playing field in a specific direction that makes the job of convincing Senator X or Y behind the scenes, easier to accomplish.

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Unpopular Bill

by digby

Well this is fun.

I’ll just pile on with my own favorite Bill Daley story, which I think fits quite well with the emerging narrative:

This passage from Jeffrey Toobin’s book about the 2000 election recount (in which Daley served as Gore’s campaign chairman) probably illustrates how Daley will be advising the president better than anything else could:

Even though the automatic recount had cut Bush’s lead dramatically in the previous three days, Christopher and Daley offered little hope that the margin could be eliminated completely. “Look you got screwed,” said Daley, “but people get screwed every day. They don’t have a remedy. Black people get screwed all the time. They don’t have a remedy. Sometimes there’s no remedy. There’s nothing you can do about it…

Lieberman did not share the advisers’ reluctance to push forward on all fronts. This became a recurring theme of the post-election period. The Connecticut senator always sounded like a warrior — in private settings. (Much to the frustration of the Hawks on Gore’s team he sounded much different before the cameras.)

Gore too railed against the prophesies of hopelessness he was hearing from Daley. He drew a series of concentric circles on the butcher paper to illustrate what he saw as his responsibilities.Inside the smallest circles were Gore and Lieberman; their closest supporters were in the next circle, then Democrats generally, finally the country as a whole. Gore said his actions had to serve all those groups not just those closest to him. An immediate surrender would be a violation of his obligations to all those who supported him, he said —- all the people in the circles…

In the end Gore thought they shouldn’t make “any momentous decisions.” But it was clear that Daley and Christopher felt any victory for Gore was impossible even though more people had gone to the polls there intending to vote for the Vice President than for Bush. Gore and Lieberman couldn’t wage the battle alone, of course, and their two principle deputies were telling them, in effect, to give up.

This Saturday had begun with Bush and Gore locked in a closer contest than earlier in the week.Indeed, the Vice President had made gains over the past three days. But the day ended with James Baker leading the attack — and Bill Daley and Warren Christopher making the case for surrender.

Who ever could have guessed that he’d be the wrong man for the job?

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Michelle Obama’s Marxist takeover of your lunch

by digby

So the domineering harpy Michelle Obama has once again pulled on her Prada jackboots and put them to the throat of business insisting they rip the Tollhouse cookies out of the hands of crying little children and replace them with slimy okra:

Calorie by calorie, first lady Michelle Obama is chipping away at big portions and unhealthy food in an effort to help America slim down.

In the year and a half since she announced her campaign to curb childhood obesity, Mrs. Obama has stood alongside Wal-Mart, Olive Garden and many other food companies as they have announced improvements to their recipes – fewer calories, less sodium, better children’s menus.

The changes are small steps, in most cases. Fried foods and french fries will still be on the menu, though enticing pictures of those foods may be gone. High-sodium soups, which many consumers prefer, will still be on the grocery aisle. But the amount of sodium in each can will gradually decrease in some cases, and the taste of their low-sodium variety will be improved.

On Thursday, the first lady joined Darden Restaurants Inc. executives at one of their Olive Garden restaurants in Hyattsville, Md., near Washington to announce that the company’s chains are pledging to cut calories and sodium in their meals by 20 percent over a decade. Fruit or vegetable side dishes and low-fat milk will become standard with kids’ meals unless a substitution is requested.

Mrs. Obama said Darden’s announcement is a “breakthrough moment” for the industry. The company owns 1,900 restaurants in 49 states, including Olive Garden, Red Lobster, LongHorn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze and Seasons 52.

“I believe the changes that Darden will make could impact the health and well-being of an entire generation of young people,” the first lady said.

I’m sure there’s something horribly wrong with what Michelle Obama is doing. I’m just too tired to figure out what it is.

Meanwhile that lean and buff conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, says she’s fat.

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