Month: August 2013

Why are seniors changing? (Take a look at who they are…)

Lawrence O’Donnell is MAD

by digby

Like so many commentators (an unusual amount of them on the left) Lawrence O’Donnell seems intent upon reliving the glory days of the Cold War. I guess now that bin Laden’s dead we need another Omnipotent Enemy Leader we can obsess over. Here he is last night arguing with someone who has actually covered Russia and knows something about the country today.  O’Donnell, on the other hand, seems to think that Vladimir Putin is some sort of super-spy Super Villain who is poised to invade Czechoslovakia and send nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Lawrence O’Donnell opened his show Wednesday night taking on President Obama‘s plans to skip a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin. The conversation was quickly derailed as New Republic writer Julia Ioffe disputed O’Donnell’s assertion that Russia has complete and total control over Edward Snowden‘s actions. O’Donnell repeatedly and exasperatedly jumped in to lecture Ioffe about how Putin in fact does have that much power over Snowden, telling her, “Let’s not be ridiculous about this!”

O’Donnell asserted that Russia was “in complete control of the outcome of what would happen to Snowden the second he arrived at that airport.” Ioffe shot back that Snowden’s become a “headache” for Russia, but when a plane carrying the Bolivian president was downed because authorities thought Snowden was on board, “there was really nothing the Russians could do.”

O’Donnell couldn’t believe what he was hearing, telling Ioffe Russia has “complete power over his every breath in that country.” Ioffe told him, “I think people who haven’t been to Russia tend to overestimate their abilities.” But what really set O’Donnell off was when Ioffe said Putin is not personally writing scripts for news anchors, merely sends a “signal” out to government-controlled media outlets.

O’Donnell half-shouted, “We’re getting absurd now!” Ioffe wryly asked, “Have you reported out of Russia?” O’Donnell shot back, “Let’s not be ridiculous about this!”, stating firmly, “The Kremlin owns them, Julia!”

I don’t know where this Cold War nostalgia is coming from but it’s so consistent among a certain set of MSNBC commentators, particularly those who are favorites of the administration, that I can’t help but assume it’s emanating from Democrats rather than the neo-con faction. The talking points are very consistent.

Honestly, I think a lot of these people like O’Donnell have been waiting all their adult lives to beat up on the Russians since they were forced to play the role of doves as youngsters and always felt emasculated by it. As for the younger liberal commentators I can only assume they watched some movies and have internalized Cold War propaganda but don’t quite understand the details. Krystal Ball and Joy Reid and others seem to be of the opinion that the Soviet Union still exists and that an invasion of Czechoslovakia is imminent. But nothing compares to watching Lil’ Luke Russert angrily proclaim that Putin is “sticking his finger in the eye of the United States.”  I half expected him to take off his shoe and pound it on the table…

Update: Oh dear God, this is so great:  Julia Ioffe responds to O’Donnell in language even he should be able to understand. Thank you!

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Could Republicans really lose in 2014?

by David Atkins

I’m a known pessimist regarding Democratic electoral chances in 2014. Between the six-year curse, the horrible gerrymandering, the unfavorable Senate map, the poor economy, and the President’s lackluster or downright counterproductive leadership, there’s not a lot of reason to hope for good results.

That said, this polling memo from Carville-Greenberg is certainly eye opening:

There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP. This is apparent in seniors’ party affiliation and vote intention, in their views on the Republican Party and its leaders, and in their surprising positions on jobs, health care, retirement security, investment economics, and the other big issues that will likely define the 2014 midterm elections…

—In 2010, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent). Among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.)

—When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives at the beginning of 2011, 43 percent of seniors gave the Republican Party a favorable rating. Last month, just 28 percent of seniors rated the GOP favorably. This is not an equal-opportunity rejection of parties or government — over the same period, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating among seniors has increased 3 points, from 37 percent favorable to 40 percent favorable.

—When the Republican congress took office in early 2011, 45 percent of seniors approved of their job performance. That number has dropped to just 22 percent — with 71 percent disapproving.

—Seniors are now much less likely to identify with the Republican Party. On Election Day in 2010, the Republican Party enjoyed a net 10 point party identification advantage among seniors (29 percent identified as Democrats, 39 percent as Republicans). As of last month, Democrats now had a net 6 point advantage in party identification among seniors (39 percent to 33 percent).

—More than half (55 percent) of seniors say the Republican Party is too extreme, half (52 percent) say it is out of touch, and half (52 percent) say the GOP is dividing the country. Just 10 percent of seniors believe that the Republican Party does not put special interests ahead of ordinary voters.

—On almost every issue we tested — including gay rights, aid to the poor, immigration, and gun control — more than half of seniors believe that the Republican Party is too extreme.

The issues seniors do care about? Not surprisingly, jobs, wages, Social Security and Medicare are at the top of the list.

Much has been said of the Republican Party’s problems with youth, women and minority groups. White seniors are the GOP’s bread and butter. I’m still not optimistic about 2014, but if seniors do leave the GOP tent, then look out below.

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Booker and the big money geeks

by digby

They’re not even trying to hide their corruption anymore:

The conference room in the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters of LinkedIn was packed with the stars of Silicon Valley. Top executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter gathered around a table; the billionaire Sean Parker looked on from a back row. The guest of honor: Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark.

The stated purpose of the gathering was to give Mr. Booker, already a Twitter fanatic, a seminar on social-networking technologies. But hanging in the air was an electrifying sense of being in the presence of an ascendant politician they believed understood the potential of the new digital world they were shaping.

“He’s part of this tide,” said Gina Bianchini, an entrepreneur who was at the meeting, in May 2009. “It feels like he’s one of us.”

Two and a half years later, some of those same Silicon Valley leaders joined forces again on Mr. Booker’s behalf. But this time, their efforts resulted in giving Mr. Booker, until then an admired outsider, the equivalent of full-fledged membership in their elite circle: an Internet start-up of his own.

Mr. Booker personally has obtained money for the start-up, called Waywire, from influential investors, including Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. A year after its debut, Waywire has already endured a round of layoffs and had just 2,207 visitors in June, according to Compete, a Web-tracking service. The company says it is still under development.

Yet in a financial disclosure filed last month, Mr. Booker, 44, revealed that his stake in the company was worth $1 million to $5 million. Taken together, his other assets were worth no more than $730,000.

That revelation, with just a week left in Mr. Booker’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, shows how a few tech moguls and entrepreneurs, many of them also campaign donors, not only made a financial bet on the mayor’s political future but also provided the brainpower and financing to help create a company that could make him very rich.

Waywire has also provided jobs for associates of Mr. Booker: the son of a top campaign supporter and his social media consultant, who is now on his Senate campaign staff.

The company has a goal: making it easy to “collect, curate and share” videos from across the Web. But much about its operations and Mr. Booker’s role as chairman appears ill defined.

Mr. Booker declined to answer questions about the details of Waywire’s finances, including what percentage of the company he currently owns. A spokesman said Mr. Booker had invested some of his own money in the company but refused to say how much.

Though his involvement in Waywire has been public since July 2012, Mr. Booker did not disclose his ownership interest in the company on his financial report filed with the city and only recently amended the federal form he filed as a candidate for the Senate to reflect his ownership. The spokesman, James Allen, said that the city form was amended Tuesday.

In the past politicians had the good taste to at least be out of office before they accepted such lucrative sinecures. Today they’re just taking their bribes right out in the open and calling themselves “entrepreneurs.”

New Jersey Democrats don’t have to vote for Corey Booker. They have a number of other much better options, especially this fellow, Rush Holt.

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Drugs, Terrorism and the Homeland

by digby

Over the past few years I’ve written a number of posts about domestic agencies’ involvement in the War on Terror. This one, based on an announcement from Janet Napolitano that Homeland security was tripling the number of agents being sent to Afghanistan was one.

This was another:

Drug Involvement 

by digby 

A couple of bad helicopter crashes in Afghanistan today make this one of the worst single days of the war there. I was interested to hear that DEA agents were among those killed because their involvement was controversial for a number of reasons, not the least of which was this:

In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.

Such complaints, so far mostly arising from the DEA’s Aviation Division, could complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to send dozens of additional DEA agents to Afghanistan as part of a civilian and military personnel “surge” that aims to stabilize the country.

Veteran DEA pilot Daniel Offield has alleged in an employment discrimination complaint he was told if he refuses to go to Afghanistan in July he’ll be demoted. The Stockton, Calif., agent asked for a reprieve because he was in the process of adopting two special needs children and offered to serve his required temporary duty in other countries.

Another agent, David Beavers, told McClatchy that he was ordered in July 2007 to prepare to go to Afghanistan in two weeks while he was on bereavement leave after his mother-in-law died. To avoid going, the Orlando, Fla., pilot decided to retire early.

Both men have flown for the DEA in Latin American countries wracked by drug violence, but they say service in a combat zone should be treated as voluntary because they’re not military personnel.

“You could say that the war on drugs is dangerous,” said Beavers, a DEA pilot for more than 20 years. “But it’s not quite like Afghanistan, where you can get your legs blown off by an (improvised explosive device).” 

One wonders if these DEA agents who were killed today were among those who were “drafted” into Afghanistan. 

It seems that our two abstract, endless Orwellian wars — the War on Drugs and the War on Terror — have officially merged. And the complications stemming from that decision are going to be immense. What are we fighting for again? 

As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration’s presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they’re being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who’ve volunteered say they’re not being properly equipped.

I was surprised at the time to learn that the DEA was in Afghanistan since we had the US military there and one would assume they could handle the job. But they are. In fact, they are in all the hot spots around the world under the guise of “narco-terrorism.”

U.S. authorities are stepping up counter-narcotics operations in West Africa, a key route for Latin American cocaine bound for Europe and allegedly a major source of funds for al-Qaida groups spreading their tentacles across the continent.

Indictments unsealed in April against senior officers in the armed forces of Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese colony that’s at the center of the narcotics route from South America to North Africa, marked a sharp escalation in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s offensive.

Among them was Rear Adm. Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, former commander of the tiny state’s navy and a suspect drug-smuggling kingpin.

He was arrested April 2 by U.S. agents and local police in international waters off the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean 650 miles west of Guinea-Bissau, which Western authorities consider to be the world’s only true narco-state.

Bubo Na Tchuto has been a DEA target since 2010, when he and Guinea-Bissau’s air force chief of staff, Gen. Ibraima Papa Camara, were identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as narcotics kingpins in the notoriously unstable country.

They were accused of working with the Latin American cartels moving large shipments of cocaine bound for Europe through West Africa.
[…]
The drugs are mostly carried in aircraft, usually cargoes of around 1.5 tons, on 1,600-mile flights across the Atlantic to Africa’s western shoulder, landing on remote airstrips dotted around Guinea-Bissau.

A senior DEA official recently commented “people at the highest levels of the military are involved. …

The DEA operations have raised the stakes against the drug smugglers and the Islamist militants further north in the Sahara region who provide the routes and protection for the narcotics that eventually are shipped across the Mediterranean to France, Spain and Italy.

The DEA’s push consists largely of undercover sting operations, often with agents posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — as in the capture of Bubo Na Tchuto — or as Lebanese paramilitaries.

There have been at least six major West African sting operations since December 2009, U.S. officials said.

When I wrote about that before I was told that this was just about the DEA stopping shipments of cocaine to Europe and so there was no reason to worry my little head about it. I wondered why the US would feel responsible for Europe’s cocaine problem. The truth is that  aside from our megalomaniacal desire to control absolutely everything, we aren’t responsible for Europe’s cocaine problem. What we are doing is using the DEA to “fight terrorism” in Africa.

Why do I bring this up? Well, because many people seemed to believe that the DEA use of NSA surveillance must be rare because the DEA is a domestic agency and the NSA is allegedly only tracking foreigners (with the occasional American caught up in that dragnet by accident.) The above reminders just show that “narco-terrorism” brought the DEA under the same NSA umbrella years ago so it’s entirely possible that the domestic drug trade and foreign terrorist threat have been conflated for some time. In any case, one can see how easy it would be to conflate them.

Once the War on Drugs started to be filed under the heading of The Global War on Terror it became almost inevitable that Americans would come under suspicion. It’s very easy to imagine the big kahunas of these agencies rationalizing using the collected metadata to chase suspected American drug runners on the basis of a couple of degrees of separation between them and money launderers who are suspected of financing Al Qaeda. It’s one big daisy chain.

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Do we really want to be incentivizing home ownership so much?

by David Atkins

I’ve long argued that one of the primary ills that plague the American economy is the desperate attempt to inflate asset bubbles in order to disguise wage stagnation. Wage stagnation leads to weak consumer demand; asset bubbles are volatile and require a number of ill-conceived incentives to keep them going.

Dave Dayen today has good point on that front on the subject of the biggest asset bubble of them all: housing.

Americans “like their cheap mortgages,” we are told. I’ll bet they like having a job even more. New research from the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows a healthy correlation between rises in the homeownership rate and rises in the unemployment rate, because business entrepreneurship suffers and sprawl increases, and investment plows into home equity rather than more productive purposes. Furthermore, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finds no correlation between high rates of homeownership and satisfaction with the quality of housing.

Despite calling homeownership a “cornerstone of American life,” the President did include a brief pitch for affordable rental housing. You have to ask whether there isn’t far more security and flexibility in renting, as long as elites take away the weird shame associated with it. One way to help stabilize rental markets would be to look into the mass purchases of foreclosed housing by Wall Street hedge funds, and their plans to securitize the rental revenue into bonds, creating the same opportunities for corruption. Local laws against slumlords and moderating annual rental increases would go a long way here. And they could promote the same kind of stability and community aspects that everyone seems to like about homeownership. After all, the people who need subsidies for housing are at the low-end, not the upper classes.

The last thing we need in the midst of the biggest financial collapse in decades, driven by an unsustainable run-up in housing prices, is to reconfigure the same market with a bunch of different names. If you have to throw a bunch of money in subsidies at a market just to get it to exist, you might want to question whether it should.

The other point one might make here is the obvious generational Ponzi scheme at work. Unlike Social Security which is actually a fairly stable social insurance program, runaway housing prices in deflationary wage environment mean that younger generations will have no ability to afford decent homes where most of the jobs are. Most of the action in the housing market right now is by large investment firms and middle-aged Americans cashing out stock investments or other real estate assets. Most college grads are barely able to pay down their student loan debt, much less afford a downpayment.

That in turn is leading another class-based division in American society: those with parents who can help them with downpayments and promise them a real estate inheritance in their late middle age, and those who cannot. The former can afford to buy, while the latter cannot.

It’s just another symptom of the social sickness of artificially promoting asset growth over wage growth.

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Handy comparison chart: Fed Chair

by digby

From Jen Sorensen at Daily Kos:

Also too, Larry Summers intervened on behalf of Enron (yes, that Enron) whileanet Yellen … didn’t:

In his book about Enron, Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald describes Summers’ role in the early stages of the California energy crisis when the state was suddenly faced with power shortages and energy costs that were soaring up to 20 times normal levels. Then-Governor Gray Davis, convinced that Enron and others were manipulating the market, begged the federal government to intervene.

Even as blackouts shut down dialysis machines and traffic lights from Sacramento to San Diego, Summers and the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, decided to take a few moments to teach the California governor a lesson or two about free markets. In an emergency meeting the day after Christmas 2000, Summers and Greenspan, responding to the governor’s complaints about corporate tampering, lectured the governor that price manipulation was only possible because California had improperly regulated its markets. They urged the governor to take it easy on Enron and the other power companies because, in effect, being too critical of them might make them reluctant to do business in California. Summers and Greenspan pressured the governor to remove state caps on consumer rates.

A second meeting took place a few weeks later, via video teleconference, with Summers, California’s governor, and energy providers —including Enron’s Ken Lay. This time, Summers not only called for consumer rate increases, he also urged the governor to reassure the markets by relaxing environmental controls (Ken Lay’s suggestion) so that more power plants could be built quickly.

Once again, the California governor protested, refusing to raise electricity rates for consumers, declining to eviscerate environmental controls, and instead requested federal price caps on the electricity that power companies sold to California. Remarkably, Summers defended the energy executives, including Ken Lay, as doing “a pretty good job” of serving California, and dismissed the possibility that they were colluding to drive prices up —even though, as we know now, that’s precisely what they were doing, Summers disparaged the governor’s plan; it wouldn’t work because such government intervention would inevitably “distort the market,” he said.

Neither side gave in. Seven days later, George W. Bush was inaugurated as president. At the time, Ken Lay himself was widely discussed as a possible treasury secretary. Blackouts increased throughout California and energy prices continued to soar until, finally, in the spring of 2001, federal regulators imposed price caps on not just California but on all of the western states…

Summers saw government interference in the crisis, as he put it, as “market distortion.” Yet disturbingly, Summers remained relatively unconcerned about the “distortion” caused by the market power of companies like Enron who, through collusion and predatory behavior, caused prices to soar.

Indeed, he may have been blind to the possibility. After all, in pure economic models, there is no room for manipulation because all information is known. But one thing we have learned in the early days of the recent economic meltdown is that Wall Street —like Enron —has found enormous profits in muddy markets of loan bundles whose very architecture is designed to hide the truth about their risk.

He’s an awesome choice for Fed Chair.

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Catfood update: could you live on this?

by digby

I’m sure there are cretins out there who would say this woman deserves to be in this position because she failed to adequately provide for herself when she was young. But they are going to hell:

Near the end of the event Sheryl Tenicat, of Des Moines, told her story through tears. “$624 a month. That’s what I live on. 99 of that goes to my Medicare Part ‘A’ and ‘B’. After I get my check in two weeks, it’s gone. I have nothing. I live on what I eat here (at the senior center). I don’t want my cost of living cut because I’ve paid in since I was 16.”

Tenicat, who is retired, said she is looking for a job because she can’t pay her bills. Her car broke down and she can’t afford to fix it. So she rides the bus to get to the senior center to get her free meals. She finished her plea for help by telling Harkin she is out of ways to save money, “There is no way for me to eat less.”

The good news is that if the administration succeeds in “reforming” social security by instituting the Chained-CPI, they promise to “tweak” it so this woman won’t lose as much money as she gets older as the new schedule shows she would. So, not to worry.

You see, we need the money that it would take to make her life a little bit easier to use to maintain our status as the world’s only super-power and that requires a blank check for the productive entrepreneurs who make weapons and supply surveillance over the entire world. Look at it this way, this little lady is doing her part to protect America from the boogeyman. A real patriot wouldn’t complain.

In case you didn’t know it by my dripping sarcasm, that video proves what some people have been saying for many years: Social Security is inadequate and needs to be expanded.
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A teachable moment?

by digby

I have my doubts that this will result in a change of heart among conservatives about the wisdom of cutting necessary government services, but it’s at least possible. This is from Ari Melber on the judicial system’s reaction to sequestration cuts hitting home:

“A significant problem arises when budget cuts impact our responsibilities under the Constitution,” he said. “This happens when we cannot afford to fulfill the Sixth Amendment right to representation for indigents charged with crimes,” Traxler explained.

Other federal judges are weighing in as well–an unusual occurrence for a spending debate freighted with political ideology.

This week, Michael Davis, the chief federal judge in Minnesota, told The Pioneer Press that the cuts are hampering “the administration of justice.”

Even America’s top judge was moved to confront sequester policy. While emphasizing that he was speaking on behalf of the courts, not the wisdom of a given policy, Chief Justice John Roberts recently protested that the sequester’s “sustained cuts” have a “direct” and harmful impact on judicial services, leading to furloughs and layoffs.

“The idea that we have to be swept along because it is good public policy to cut everybody–I am not commenting on that policy at all–but the notion that we should just be swept along with [sequester cuts] I think is really unfounded,” Roberts said at a judicial conference in May.

“The cuts hit us particularly hard because we are made up of people. That is what the judicial branch is,” Roberts emphasized. The Chief Justice was essentially challenging the entire premise of the sequester–that government employees should face the same kind of uniform cuts as government spending on weapons or infrastructure.

“It is not like we are the Pentagon,” Roberts said, “where you can slow up a particular procurement program.”

Yes, well that applies to many parts of the government doesn’t it? Parts that Roberts may not value but other people do. In fact, most conservatives would say that procurement cuts impact people as well and “cost jobs” (as only military and defense contracting jobs are ever considered worthy government employment.) But the idea that “people” should come before weapons is one in which I can certainly find bipartisan comity with the Chief Justice.

By the way, conservatives have been very interested in the issue of indigent defense for quite some time. They want to experiment with it by changing to a system of, you guessed it, vouchers. This is from a Cato Institute paper touted in the American Conservative:

Vouchers would empower indigent clients to select the most capable and independent counsel. To help clients make informed decisions, local bar associations could provide information on how prior clients have rated various attorneys and monitor their caseloads to identify counsel whose high volume of cases suggests they may simply be entering pleas rather than providing a vigorous defense. In Texas, the state Task Force on Indigent Defense is already beginning to explore these ideas.

Nearly forty years ago, Milton Friedman argued that although government may have a role in ensuring access to food and education, it does not necessarily follow that government is well-suited to managing grocery stores and schools. Food stamps for use in privately-managed groceries and vouchers for private schools probably work better. There is no reason the same logic would not apply to indigent defense services.

I would certainly agree that our system for indigent defense in inadequate. But why anyone thinks this would make it better is beyond me. In fact,  I’m going to guess they don’t actually believe that handing a voucher and rating card to some indigent prisoner would help solve the problem of bad legal representation. (That would be as absurd as saying senior citizens should be shopping around for cheaper tuna and heart bypass procedures so “the market” can work more efficiently…) Which makes you wonder what they’re really after. Well, not really. I think we know what they’re really after, don’t we?

I’m going to guess that Justice John Roberts is more concerned about judges being over-scheduled and understaffed than about indigent defendants. But them I’m a cynic.

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COINTELPRO lives, locally at least

by digby

From In These Times:

Rumors have flown for many years that DC police routinely infiltrate and spy on the frequent protests in the nation’s Capitol. But until now, activists have never been able to identify a specific undercover cop at a protest. Now, after months of piecing together evidence, attorneys Jeffrey Light and Sean Canavan working with United Students Against Sweatshop (USAS) have confirmed that under an assumed name, Metro police officer Nicole Rizzi has participated in USAS protests against companies doing business in Bangladesh who refuse to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh following the death of as many as 1,129 workers in the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

USAS and its lawyers have numerous pieces of evidence placing Rizzi at protests under a pseudonym. District of Columbia Public Employee Information List records obtained by In These Times confirm that Rizzi has been on the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) force since December of 2003.

USAS filed suit on Monday against the District of Columbia seeking an injunction to stop police from spying on the group’s activities.

Ironically, she was unmasked by her obsessive social media presence in which she posted pictures of herself and openly discussed being a police officer. Doh.

I wonder if they infiltrated all the Tea Party protests over the past few years or if it’s just “subversive” hippie events that concern them? It’s always possible I suppose.

The good news is that our federal, state and local governments never spy on Americans in order to quell dissent but rather to deliver us from evil.  I feel so much safer knowing that.

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