Month: August 2013

50 years ago today

by digby

“Change will not roll in on the heels of inevitability…”

Perlstein has a fascinating piece up at the Nation with some very relevant historical context. The Villagers of the day were apoplectic about the notion of all these people marching on Washington and causing lawmakers to feel “pressure.” They considered such behavior to be both provocative and undemocratic.  Martin Luther King disagreed:

Martin Luther King, bless his soul, understood the game: don’t back down. He joined a group of leaders who met with the president. “Dr. King had told a banquet group just the before that ‘if they start filibustering, by the hundreds and the thousands and by the hundreds of thousands white people and black people ought to march on Washington.”

Damn, he spoke well. That sentence is poetry, pure pulsating rhythm: “by the hundreds and the thousands and the hundreds of thousands.” He also strategized well: he understood how the popular fear of violence advantaged the marchers. It was, as we’ll see, a sort of bargaining chip. And he would not trade it away lightly. The opposite, you might say, of Barack Obama, who keeps a bust of King in the Oval Office, and will no doubt have sonorous words on tap this Wednesday lionizing King—whose thought I don’t really think he understands at all.

Obama should actually keep a bust of Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, because that is more who he is like. “I have never proposed sit-ins at the Capitol,” Wilkins said, according to The New York Times. “I have said that any demonstrations, in Washington or elsewhere, should have specific, not general, objectives…I am not involved in the present moment.” Five days later he warned against what he termed a “whoopin’ and a hollerin’ operation.” I suppose he had reason to fear. For what the marchers were proposing to do might well be illegal. Explained the AP: “Federal laws specifically forbid demonstrations at the Capitol, Capitol buildings, or Capitol grounds without permission granted specifically by the vice president and the speaker of the House, acting jointly…. The blocking of roads and streets leading to the Capitol, and unauthorized ‘harangues’ also are forbidden in the Capitol area.” (Informed readers: is this still true?)

The AP cited their inside source, the one who warned about the possibility of violence: “One plan under consideration…is an effort to induce leaders of civil rights groups in ‘reasonable numbers’ to accept a ‘dramatic confrontation’ meeting with congressional leaders and other appropriate Congress members as an alternative to sit-ins. ‘Citizens have a right to petition the Congress,’ this source said,’ but they do not have a right to try to overpower it.’ He said there has been official consideration of whether the police might have to be augmented by military personnel if no compromise can be evolved.” The next day, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy warned the march’s organizers off: while he had “great sympathy” for protest, “Congress should have the right to debate and discuss this legislation without this kind of pressure.”

Right. Because the “national conversation” would have happened on its own, without the rude interruption of Edward Snowden, oops, I mean A. Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King…

You can follow today’s speeches at this live feed.

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Pandemic, schmandemic

by digby

I wanted to leave you all with a nice animal video or a pretty picture to end this long August week, but then I read this about the National Institute of Health:

An already stagnant budget was made worse this spring when Congress and the White House failed to prevent sequestration. The NIH was forced to cut $1.7 billion from its budget by the end of September, lowering its purchasing power about 25 percent, compared with 2003.

Roughly six months into sequestration, however, the situation is worse than predicted. Internal NIH estimates show that it will end up cutting more than the 700 research grants the institutes initially planned to sacrifice in the name of austerity. If lawmakers fail to replace sequestration at the end of September, that number could rise above 1,000 as the NIH absorbs another 2 percent budget cut on top of the 5 percent one this fiscal year.

“It is so unimaginable that I would be in a position of somehow saying that this country is unable to see the rationality of covering what biomedicine can do,” Collins said, in an interview with The Huffington Post. “But I’m not sure from what I see right now that rationality carries the day.”

The real-world implications of irrationality, Collins added, are quite grave. His most vivid example is the flu vaccine, which he says could be as close as five years away from discovery. NIH officials are working to insulate that program from budget cuts. But sequestration will, at the very least, mean that research goes slower than it could.

“If you want to convert this into real meaningful numbers, that means people are going to die of influenza five years from now because we don’t yet have the universal vaccine,” he said. “And God help us if we get a worldwide pandemic that emerges in the next five years, which takes a long time to prepare a vaccine for. If we had the universal vaccine, it would work for that too.

“The clock’s been ticking on the potential of the next eruption of a pandemic outbreak from South Asia or wherever. And we’ve gotten lucky so far [that it hasn’t happened]. But are we going to stay lucky? So, how can you justify doing anything other than pulling out all the stops in that kind of circumstance? And yet we’re prevented from doing so.”

Well that’s certainly an upper.

Remember, this isn’t because there isn’t enough money. There’s plenty of money. This is happening because rich people are hoarding all their money, we are spending vast sums on a global military empire and the political system is totally dysfunctional.

You are living in interesting times. If you young people live long enough — and the country and planet survive — you’ll have quite a tale to tell your grand kids. Nobody will believe what morons we were.

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Hilarious prison camp jokes

by digby

This is nice:

Lying to the world about the Guantanamo inmates being huge Fifty Shades of Grey fans is one of the least disturbing things to happen at the prison, but it still isn’t cool. On Sunday, defense attorney James Connell said he suspected military commanders told members of Congress about the prisoners’ passion for the smutty novel as “a joke or some kind of disinformation.” His client, Ammar al-Baluchi, says the next night guards put the book in his cell. “He says, ‘No thank you.’ He does not want the book,” said Connell, whose client gave him the book. “It’s in my safe and as soon as I am able I will return it to Joint Task Force Guantanamo.” Connell said of the apparent taunting, “If this is a practical joke it has gone too far.”

Nah.  It’s all good fun, amirite?

I’m old enough to remember when people cared about torture and civil liberties during the big bad Bush years and one of the hallmarks of their twisted regime was a total obsession with Muslim sexytime and a vacuous adherence to the notion that they could manipulate Muslim prisoners by making them all uncomfortable with wimmins and their dirty parts. This alleged interrogation strategy often revealed more about their own hang ups than anything else. And Abu Ghraib was the most glaring example of where that leads.

It was very popular during the early years after 9/11 to regale people with lurid tales of “The Arab Mind” as if they were aliens from another planet. I thought maybe it had gotten old, but it would appear that this sort of thing still works very well on gullible members of congress.

I do not believe for one moment that it was a joke. They just figured they could pull one over on lunatics like Louis Gohmert. Why wouldn’t they? It’s been proved more than once that at least half of the congress will believe anything, especially if it’s something that makes them feel all funny down there.

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Is there a generation gap among Republicans, too? Or is it only skin deep?

by David Atkins

Interesting findings from Pew Research today on the state of the GOP electorate:

A recent survey of Republican and Republican-leaning adults about the GOP’s future found stark age differences in opinions on the question of whether more diverse nominees would help the party perform better in future elections. (Some of the findings in this post were not included in the original report.)

Among Republicans and leaners under 40, 68% say nominating more racial and ethnic minorities would help and 64% say the same about more women nominees. Far fewer Republicans 40 and older view these steps as helpful: 49% say nominating more racial and ethnic minorities would help and 46% say the same of nominating more women.

More generally, younger Republicans are more likely than older Republicans to say that the GOP has not been welcoming to all groups of people. Overall, most Republicans (60%) think the party “is tolerant and open to all groups of people,” while 36% say it is not. Younger Republicans are divided – 51% say the party is tolerant and open to all, while 45% disagreed. Among older Republicans, twice as many view the party as tolerant (64%) than not (32%).

This is being touted as a significant generation gap among Republicans, but I’m not convinced. The only disagreement here between younger and older Republicans is about whether female and minority candidates and figureheads would help the GOP’s image. The question had nothing to do with altering Republican policies. What’s startling about the findings is that nearly a majority of Republicans over 40 aren’t even comfortable with giving their party with window dressing of female and minority support, much less relaxing the policies that disadvantage those groups.

And indeed, on questions of policy both younger and older Republicans think the answer to their woes is to become even more conservative:

Despite these ideological differences, younger and older Republicans generally agree that the GOP needs to address major problems – rather than just make minor changes – in order to be competitive in the future.

And there are no significant age differences over the party’s future ideological direction: 50% of Republicans under 40 and 55% of those 40 and older favor their leaders moving in a more conservative direction.

In short, the GOP base seems unlikely to change significantly as they approach the tolling bell of the 2020 census. Women and minority voters have already proven that they can see through token candidates like Sarah Palin and Alan Keyes who remain hostile to their interests. If the generational changes in the Republican firmament are only skin deep, their national fortunes will remain dim.

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Survivor’s guilt for dummies

by digby

We’ve come full circle: the right wing is now excusing criminal behavior on the basis of a bad childhood. Well, actually it’s waaay beyond that. They are saying that anyone who was born after 1973 has “survivors guilt” which may lead them to commit crimes.Yes, they “survived” abortion and are so traumatized by it that they have become criminals.

A vast silent system

by digby

This piece by Harold Meyerson about the history of the march on Washington and the power it had to put fear into the hearts of politicians everywhere is an absolute must-read on the eve of the commemoration. If, like me, you are only vaguely aware of this history, you will learn a lot.

I was particularly struck by this quote by Michael Harrington in 1962:

“If all the discriminatory laws in the United States were immediately repealed, race would still remain as one of the most pressing moral and political problems in the nation. Negroes and other minorities are not simply victims of a series of iniquitous statutes. The American economy, the American society, the American unconscious are all racist. If all the laws were framed to provide equal opportunity, a majority of the Negroes would not be able to take full advantage of the change. There would still be a vast, silent, automatic system directed against men and women of color.”

This is what makes the comments about the civil rights act being superfluous by the likes of Rand Paul so fatuous: he not only didn’t believe the laws needed to be changed, he says he believes that racial harmony was going to happen naturally without any mass movement or change in the legal structure at all. These people never acknowledge the “vast, silent, automatic systems” that exist in our culture that must be changed through the acts of people rising up and demanding that at the very least our civic structures no longer accommodate them. That’s just the first step. And it’s never an end in itself.

We can see the progress that’s been made since those laws were challenged. Our society is much fairer and less racist than it was. That’s due to the hard work of people who marched and fought for the laws of this country to be changed and Jim Crow to be thrown onto the rather large rubbish pile of American segregation history. But it didn’t stop there. It couldn’t. The subsequent 50 years were spent in hard work by people taking the next step to change the “vast, silent, automatic system directed at men and women of color.” And they aren’t done yet.

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Spartacus the mule

by digby

This report from Buzzfeed says the New York Times is going to be collaborating on some new NSA reporting with The Guardian.

The Times’s involvement in the story also brings into sharp relief a second question: Whether carrying classified documents across national borders can be an act of journalism. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin recently compared David Miranda, Greenwald’s partner, to a “drug mule” for having sought to bring a thumb drive with classified documents from Brazil into the United Kingdom; British officials detained Miranda and confiscated data he was carrying.

Now the Times or an agent for the paper, too, appears to have carried digital files from the United Kingdom across international lines into the United States. Discussions of how to partner on the documents were carried out in person between top Guardian editors and Times executive editor Jill Abramson, all of whom declined to comment on the movement of documents. But it appears likely that someone at one of the two papers physically carried a drive with Snowden’s GCHQ leaks from London to New York or Washington — exactly what Miranda was stopped at Heathrow for doing.

Abramson declined, in a brief telephone interview from Boston, to “comment on any of that,” and stressed that she would not discuss the subject on her mobile telephone because “my cellphone is not a secure line.”

That last says it all.

With the exception of certain Toobinesque authoritarian types, journalism in general may be recognizing its responsibility (or perhaps its self-preservation) at last. Can they all be traitors?

I think the bylines should all be “Spartacus” from now on.

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The country’s still rich. It just the people who aren’t.

by digby

EPI put out a fascinating paper yesterday about wage stagnation. (Yes, it really was fascinating!) The upshot is that we’re still a very rich country. The problem is that the wealth isn’t being broadly distributed:

How much does this profit-biased recovery matter for wages? In the first quarter of 2013 (last quarter for which data is available), suppose that the corporate sector capital income share was at its pre-Great Recession long-term (1979-2007) average of 19.7 percent instead of the 24.7 percent that actually prevailed. This would represent roughly $350 billion that would have accrued to labor income rather than capital income during the recovery, or, a $6,900 raise for every employee in the corporate sector. And to be clear, the corporate sector of the economy is big—accounting for a majority of all economic activity and more than 45 percent of employment in the economy (so, spread this money over the entire private-sector workforce and the raise would still be more than $3,000.

There are lots of problems caused by how profit-biased the recovery has been. For one, income accruing to capital-owners is less likely to recycle quickly back through the economy and generate demand (as evidence, see the huge amount of idle cash balances on corporate balance sheets in recent years). If a larger share of income growth had translated into wage-growth, this would have sparked more self-generating demand and improved the recovery. From a political economy perspective, the rapid recovery of corporate profits has also likely led to less urgency from a potential ally in asking for more macroeconomic stimulus (corporate business, which, remember, strongly supported the Recovery Act).

And, most directly, these higher profits just mean that all else equal, there’s less to go to paychecks. And as yesterday’s paper shows, that’s a sadly familiar outcome.

That is not to say there aren’t solutions to this. The problem is that those solutions must come from our completely dysfunctional political system:

We’ve got some solutions here, and, we should note that there is a glimmer of good news in Larry and Heidi’s analysis: we are a rich country that gets richer just about every year. Look at the productivity trends (check out Table 1) in their piece—in 2012 productivity was nearly 8 percent higher than it was at the start of the Great Recession! The problem is insuring that these potential income gains actually are broadly shared—and this is mostly a political problem. Political problems are bad (trust us, we know), but they’re better than genuine economic problems. To put it another way, it’s better to be arguing over how to fairly split up a big pile of money than to have no big pile of money to split up.

That’s not much to hang on to. Our political system is so corrupted by money and obstructed by a rump fanatical minority that it’s hard to see how we get out of it before this economic problem turns into a very big social and yes, economic problem. It’s very hard to see where one ends and the other starts.

Still, it’s good to know the money is still there. The greedheads who are hoarding it all should probably think hard about just how much they really need to keep for themselves. These things tend not to end well if they don’t.

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The problem with red lines

by David Atkins

The Obama Administration’s policy on Syria has largely been one of caution and reticence to engage. However, the President did make clear that any sign of chemical attacks by Assad’s regime against his own people would be a bright “red line” necessitating a belligerent response.

There’s no absolute proof yet that the regime has crossed that line, but the evidence seems to suggest that there was indeed a major chemical attack on a rebel population. UN Inspector General Ban Ki Moon is intoning “serious consequences” if there is proof that Assad did use chemical weapons on his people.

But what exactly is the international community prepared to do? It would be reckless and counterproductive at this point for the United States to start lobbing bombs into Syria. A massive UN peacekeeping force might be in order, but the architecture of the Security Council is such that Russia and China will never agree to such a move even under the best of circumstances. Moreover, the time for a UN peacekeeping mission in Syria was long ago: at this point, the genie of retributive violence will be almost impossible to put back in the bottle even if the UN had the capacity and political will to send in forces.

Yet the red line has been crossed, and both nation-state leaders and international leaders cannot afford to lose face and have their bluff called, or dozens of murderous dictators will be emboldened further to act against their own people without fear of retribution.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, but it seems that one of two things should be done: either the responsible nations of the world must work much more effectively to give the UN teeth to respond when red lines are crossed, or they shouldn’t be issuing red line ultimatums at all.

Causing even greater, even more futile violence just to save face is the worst of all options.

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Arming the schools with empathy

by digby

I think this shows that  school officials armed with common sense, courage and empathy are more effective than those armed with guns:

[I]t appears as though one major reason the nation isn’t mourning another Newtown today is the level-headed reaction of a school clerk who spent an hour talking the gunman down after he arrived in the school office. 

“I just started talking to him … and let him know what was going on with me and that it would be OK,” the clerk, Antoinette Tuff, told Atlanta’s Channel 2 Action News during a lengthy sit-down interview that should be watched in full (embedded above). In a subsequent interview with ABC News, Tuff described Hill as “a young man that was ready to kill anybody that he could.”