Month: September 2013

Elizabeth the stalwart!

by digby

“Our agenda is America’s agenda”

The speech was reminiscent the populist, fiery Warren from the 2012 campaign who excited the political left in and outside Massachusetts, raised heaping sums of money, and appeared poised to take up the liberal mantle in the Senate.

Warren also took aim Sunday at a Supreme Court she sees as far too conservative. She talked about the “corporate capture of the federal courts” (words she has used before), and added, “You follow this pro-corporate trend to its logical conclusion, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Supreme Court that functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business,” according to Politico.

Warren’s prepared remarks also included digs at the agendas of Republican governors in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, talk about raising the minimum wage, and a reminder about her push to bring back Glass-Steagall.

In short, it was a speech chock full of items at the top of the list for many liberals.
The speech also reinforced the potential Warren has for higher office. While Warren has shown no signs she is gearing up for a presidential bid (or is really even thinking about higher office) and has kept a notably low public profile on Capitol Hill, there is arguably no other Democrat who resonates as much on the left as Warren does right now in terms of policy, speaking ability and fundraising heft.

Afterwards she said, “I’ve been wanting to give that speech for years! For 30 years! Probably all my life!”

I’m proud to have supported her from the beginning.

Give credit where credit is due (and not where it isn’t)


by digby

Oh boy.  I’m starting to see the 12 dimensional chess theory being trotted out once again and it’s as nonsensical today as it always was. Look at this video of Kerry’s statement yesterday:

If Kerry was acting there he’s been in the wrong job all these years. He could give Daniel Day Lewis a run for his money. (And he had to have planted that question, which someone should ask about if they think this was all staged.) We watched him perform for a solid two years on television back in 2004 and saw nothing of this fantastic acting ability.  I really doubt that’s what it was.

I don’t know why it’s so important for people to believe that the president is a Jedi Master but he clearly isn’t. However he is willing to change course (on foreign policy anyway) when an opportunity presents itself and I think that’s praiseworthy in itself, particularly after our last experience with a stubborn president determined to go to war no matter what.  I think it’s a good thing that they can take advantage of an unseen possibility.  Why the need to make it more than it is?

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The gaffe that changed the world

by digby

Well, it looks like Kerry’s loose lips may have changed the course of history:

Syria confirmed it would accept a Russian-brokered deal to hand over its chemical weapons Tuesday, but the White House said President Barack Obama would still ask Congress to approve the use of military force against Damascus.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem told NBC News in Moscow that he hoped acceptance of the “peaceful solution” would “put an end to the war.”

He was speaking hours after France announced it would seek a U.N. Security Council resolution along similar lines. That added to the international momentum behind the proposal, which has already been endorsed by Iran and China and cautiously welcomed by Britain and Germany.

The bad news is that the administration is still seeking a congressional authorization to use force and will now use the excuse that it’s just for “leverage.”

Perhaps you’ll recall John Kerry’s speech of September 2003 at Drake University explaining his vote to authorize force in Iraq:

I believed then – and I believe now – authorizing force was the only way to get inspectors in, and the only way ultimately to enforce Saddam Hussein’s compliance with the mandate he had agreed to, knowing that as a last resort war could become the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism.

And I also believe that those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe we are not safer with his capture don’t have the judgment to be President – or the credibility to be elected President.

A year and a half ago, as this campaign was starting, I argued that for Democrats to win America’s votes we must first convince the voters that we will keep America safe.

I believed then and I believe now that Americans deserve better than a false choice between force without diplomacy and diplomacy without force.

(Hillary Clinton said the same thing, FWIW.) How’d that work out for them? For us? To quote the great American orator George W. Bush, “fool me once, fool me twice … won’t get fooled again.”

However, the deal itself is a very good development. We get our norms against chemical weapons use and for international institutions upheld (however tattered and hypocritical those norms are at the moment) and we prevent the US from unilaterally joining a civil war in the middle east. Perhaps most importantly, it gets the Russians to put their credibility on the line, arguably much more important since Syria is their ally and they have a stake in ensuring that they don’t get burned. If the Syrian government uses chemical weapons their Russian sponsors will not be happy. This is real leverage. If Kerry is an accidental diplomatic genius, more power to him.

This truly is the best outcome we can hope for at the moment. The tragedy in Syria isn’t going to be stopped by anything we’ve been proposing so far but at least we are not going to add to it by blowing things up. But I think the president would be wise to withdraw the request for authorization. Even if it’s sold as being just for “leverage” as all the Democrats ludicrously insisted back in 2003, politicians are rightfully wary of being on the hook for a war vote: they could get hit from both the right and the left in the next election.

Also too: I don’t think President Obama really wants to do this.  If that’s correct, he should withdraw the request now because if something goes wrong with this deal authorization will push him into immediate military action, perhaps prematurely.  He should have the request still pending as a backstop to allow some breathing room, just in case.

Update: Ed Kilgore has more on this. Like me, he’s for withdrawing the request for a vote.

International control of Syrian chemical weapons is the right move

by David Atkins

The latest proposal to have international forces take hold of Syrian chemical weapons seems to be a convenient exit strategy for all sides: the President of the United States gets to claim a diplomatic win even as Congressional support for military engagement seems lacking; the Syrian people avoid the further misery of cruise missile strikes; Bashar al-Assad avoids a potentially course-altering action in the Syrian civil war by Western powers; and Russia keeps its client state happy. Some will call it too convenient.

But it’s the right move. International norms on chemical weapons do need to be protected and enforced; the only question has been whether missile strikes were the right way to accomplish that. Only the foolhardy were considering a belligerent campaign to turn the tide of the civil war, while missile strikes seemed to be wildly disproportionate to the comparatively minor objective of preventing future chemical attacks.

Where international law can be strengthened and preserved peacefully with the use of international forces and global support, so much the better. It remains to be seen if the proposal can be made to work, but if it can, it’s a good thing. The Obama Administration will, not without merit, claim that this proposal would not have come into being without the threat of military force. Perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean war footing was appropriate in this case regardless. The stick that drives the Assads of the world to observe international norms must be an international one, not an American one. Drawing a red line in the sand on chemical weapons was an error in retrospect, and upping the ante from there has also been an error.

None of which is to say that the Assads of the world will observe human rights codes without the implicit threat of credible enforcement, any more than your local criminal will observe the law without the threat of police. But for now, without a mechanism for global enforcement it should not fall to the United States alone to play that policeman on the world stage. That allows far too much advantage-seeking by self-interested American politicians, but it also allows the rest of the world to pretend to take the moral high ground, do nothing to help in these situations, and speak ill of the United States while secretly hoping the United States will (hamhandedly) solve these problems for them. That’s an unhealthy codependent relationship that should end with a cooperative effort at building effective multilateral peacekeeping institutions.

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Slave labor is as American as apple pie (which poor people are not allowed to have)

by digby

Ohio is apparently overrun with lazy bums needing food and whatnot. This’ll teach them:

Gov. John Kasich’s administration will limit food stamps for more than 130,000 adults in all but a few economically depressed areas starting Jan. 1.

To qualify for benefits, able-bodied adults without children will be required to spend at least 20 hours a week working, training for a job, volunteering or performing a similar type of activity unless they live in one of 16 counties exempt because of high unemployment. The requirements begin next month; however, those failing to meet them would not lose benefits until Jan. 1.

“It’s important that we provide more than just a monetary benefit, that we provide job training, an additional level of support that helps put (food-stamp recipients) on a path toward a career and out of poverty,” said Ben Johnson, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Right. It’s for their own good to have to work 20 hours a week for an average of $132 a month in food stamps. But hey, slave labor is a great way to replace all those union jobs that Kasich eliminated, isn’t it?

These right wing white guys have always been big fans of slavery. And hunger:

The announcement comes the same week as a federal report showing hunger persists in Ohio despite signs of economic improvement. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1 in 6 Ohio families faced hunger last year, the 10th highest rate in the nation. And over the past decade, the percentage of families forced to skip meals or cut back on what they eat has grown 6.3 percentage points, higher than in all but two other states.

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When a gaffe is an opportunity

by digby

Earlier I posted about this piece in the Atlantic proposing that the government ask “What would the Godfather do?” in trying to solve the Syrian problem. In it the author mentioned this in passing:

Obama’s self-confidence in rejecting what most advisers thought had already been decided—immediate military action—reminds one of JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he refused to choose between what the system insisted were the two, and only two, alternatives: attack or acquiesce.

I have been willing to give President Obama credit for obviously not wanting to rush into this war. Pulling the plug at the last minute on what everyone acknowledges was a decision to start bombing was pretty surprising and it proves to me that this isn’t something he wants to do. Like JFK, he’s skeptical of the bombing hawks, although it likely comes from a different place. (JFK got personally burned by the Bay of Pigs. Obama originally got elected largely because of his opposition to Iraq.)

But remember how the Cuban Missile Crisis was eventually averted (at least according to the legend)? The Kennedy administration took advantage of what was said to be a miscommunication by the Soviets who’d sent two different proposals for ending the stand-off. The US behaved as if they’d only seen the second proposal (which they could live with) instead of the proposal that would lead to war. It was the closest we ever came to nuclear conflagration and it was resolved by taking advantage of a gaffe.

Perhaps this one will offer a similar way out:

A seemingly offhand suggestion by Secretary of State John Kerry that Syria could avert an American attack by relinquishing its chemical weapons received an almost immediate welcome from Syria, Russia, the United Nations, a key American ally and even some Republicans on Monday as a possible way to avoid a major international military showdown in the Syria crisis. A White House official said the administration was taking a “hard look” at the idea.

While there was no indication that Mr. Kerry was searching for a political settlement to the Syrian crisis in making his comment, Russia — the Syrian government’s most powerful supporter — seized on it as a way of proposing international control of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

The reactions appeared to reflect a broad international desire to de-escalate the atmosphere of impending confrontation even as President Obama was lobbying heavily at home to garner Congressional endorsement of a military strike.

Mr. Kerry’s suggestion — and the Russian and Syrian response — also seemed to represent the first possible point of agreement over how to address the chemical weapons issue that has threatened to turn the Syria conflict, now in its third year, into a regional war.

The State Department says that Kerry was just being “rhetorical” and it’s pretty obvious that this wasn’t planned. But if we are sincere that our goal is to preserve the ban against chemical weapons then this should be a welcome possibility. On the other hand, if this whole thing is really just about finding a reason for military strikes so we can get involved in the Syrian civil war, then they won’t be open to anything like this. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Update: well …

.@rhodes44: “If US removes the threat of military action, Syrian gov will never follow through on any commitment…” http://t.co/gxm3Nqq0sg
— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) September 9, 2013

Looks like they’ll say the President now needs the congressional approval for leverage.  And pols will probably go for it.

I would just remind them all that that’s what Hillary Clinton said she was doing when she voted for the Iraq war. It didn’t help her.

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The destructive cult of shareholder value

by David Atkins

I have said and continue to maintain that it will be impossible to fix the economy until we begin to prioritize wages over assets. There are many causes of the problem, but the cult of shareholder value highlighted most recently in a tremendous post by Steve Pearlstein is among the most significant:

In the recent history of management ideas, few have had a more profound — or pernicious — effect than the one that says corporations should be run in a manner that “maximizes shareholder value.”

Indeed, you could argue that much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days — the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods — has its roots in this ideology.

The funny thing is that this supposed imperative to “maximize” a company’s share price has no foundation in history or in law. Nor is there any empirical evidence that it makes the economy or the society better off. What began in the 1970s and ’80s as a useful corrective to self-satisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting, self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, money managers and over-compensated corporate executives.

Pearlstein notes that there is no legal requirement for corporations to “maximize shareholder value” and continues:

How then did “maximizing shareholder value” evolve into such a widely accepted norm of corporate behavior?

The most likely explanations for this transformation are two broad structural changes — globalization and deregulation — which together conspired to rob many major American corporations of the outsize profits they had earned during the “golden” decades after World War II. Those profits were so generous that there was enough to satisfy nearly all the corporate stakeholders. But in the 1970s, when increased competition started to squeeze out profits, it was easier for executives to disappoint shareholders than their workers or communities. The result was a lost decade for investors.

No surprise, then, that by the mid-1980s, companies with lagging stock prices found themselves targets for hostile takeovers by rivals or corporate raiders using newfangled “junk” bonds to finance their purchases. Disgruntled shareholders were only too willing to sell. And so it developed that the mere threat of a possible takeover imbued corporate executives and directors with a new focus on profits and share prices, tossing aside old inhibitions against laying off workers, cutting wages, closing plants, spinning off divisions and outsourcing production overseas. Today’s “activist investor” hedge funds, which have amassed war chests of tens of billions of dollars to take on the likes of Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and Apple, are the direct descendants of these 1980s corporate raiders.

While it was this new “market for corporate control,” as economists like to call it, that created the imperative to boost near-term profits and share prices, an elaborate institutional infrastructure has grown up to reinforce it.

This infrastructure includes business schools that indoctrinate students with the shareholder-first ideology and equip them with tools to manipulate quarterly earnings and short-term share prices.

The corruption of this ideology is total. Lobbyists make politicians afraid to do anything that might disrupt the stock market lest next quarter’s earnings go south; businesses are afraid to invest in long-term stability and real productivity lest some other company use smoke and mirrors to beat them on the next earnings report; and society rots as wages are pushed down while financial trickery and economic inequality increase.

Employee-owned companies can help set this to right, as could stronger corporate responsibility charters–though I’m skeptical of the efficacy of the latter approach. Punishing tax rates on the very highest incomes can reduce the incentives to engage in chicanery. But it’s a complex problem that will likely require multiple solutions to solve.

Be sure to read Pearlstein’s whole piece. Much food for thought there.

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A little bit of blackmail goes a long way #Republicans #Syria

Adopted as part of a 2011 debt limit deal, the [sequestration] cuts slice about $90 billion from government operations, and about half of that comes from defense.

That has irked defense hawks in Congress who say the military is stretched thin.

This weekend Mr. McKeon, California Republican, said undoing those cuts would improve the chances for congressional approval of Mr. Obama’s request for authorization for a military strike on Syria.

“I cannot guarantee that we can get votes for it, but I know that a lot of people have the same concerns that I do. And if we can fix this, it may help some people with their votes.”
Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn, also appearing on CNN, told host Candy Crowley that it is “immoral” to ask the U.S. military to take on a new mission while facing budget cuts.

“Is there anything the president could say that would convince you to say ‘yes’ on this?” Ms. Crowley asked.

“Fix sequestration,” Mr. McKeon said, as Mrs. Blackburn agreed: “Sequesters.”

Keep in mind that they want to reverse the defense sequester but the money will have to be replaced by cuts elsewhere in the budget. So, the idea here is that this war will be paid for by even deeper cuts to vital services for the American people. What a deal.

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Another problem from hell. Self delusion.

by digby

I missed this last week, but it’s really worth noting. Here’s right wing shill Jennifer Rubin talking about UN Ambassador Samantha Power:

In her few weeks in the job she has managed to give voice to the truism that the United Nations is no substitute for the United States. The president we remember all too well came to office (and his Secretary of State John Kerry tried to get into office) with the fantasy that the United States could defer to international bodies, need not act on its own and could just fade into the crowd, the “international community” as he likes to call the illusion of commonality among various nations which in fact have conflicting values and aims.

Speaking in clear and unequivocal tones, Power joins a list of recent ambassadors (e.g. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton) who did not seek consensus but rather clarity — about what the United States stands for, about its commitments to universal values and about which countries stand with us and which do not. Looked at in this fashion, the United Nations becomes not simply a maddening forum for tyrants to pose as respectable players but an opportunity for the United States to articulate to friends and foes its policies and values.

Wow. When the right is enthusiastically comparing you to John Bolton, it’s probably a good idea to step back and reassess.

Powers’ speech was bizarre, in my opinion. Apparently our UN ambassador has little use for the international institutions that have been trying for decades to create universal consensus on issues of violence and human rights and believes the whole thing is a waste of time. Good to know.

I read her book “A Problem From Hell” and was as moved by her passion as anyone. But I didn’t realize she thought the United States had comic super powers to go along with its super responsibilities. Of course, if one sees the most powerful military on the planet as a Super Hero who can save the world from bad men everywhere then I suppose that makes sense. But it’s very hard for me to see how the US warmaking death machine, with a well known propensity to create “collateral damage” (as warmaking death machines inevitably do) is the answer to humanitarian crises. It’s a very crude instrument best reserved as a last resort  in self-defense. One nation, even a powerful one like the US, cannot bear this burden alone and the rest of the world is naturally suspicious of its power if it’s used unilaterally.

This problem from hell requires more than passion and a desire for the US to act as a movie hero that jumps in and saves the day. I realize that the UN and other international institutions are imperfect to this task as well, but they are the foundation of a global mechanism of the future that may be competent to set norms against violence and have the credibility to back it up. Slandering and belittling them as Powers (and others like Bolton and Kirkpatrick did) only weakens the globe’s prospects for changing the way that humans deal with these tragedies. It’s very short-sighted. And we have enough of that among political players, we really don’t need any more of it.

This whole argument among the humanitarian hawks raises the question: at what point do those who believe that violence is the only way to stop violence against innocents become what they despise? I think it’s a very easy line to cross without even knowing it because I suspect that nearly everyone involved in these disputes self-righteously believes they are either acting out of self-defense or in defense of others. Even “the evil ones” believe they are doing what they do for a higher purpose. Everyone who promotes violence as the answer to problem are very sure that they are doing it for all the right reasons. But the reasons on all sides always sound exactly the same.

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Don’t be Sonny, be Michael

by digby

This great essay on the Syria dilemma by Graham Allison in the Atlantic is a must-read. (Allison is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.) Starting from the premise that we all agree that the norm banning the use of chemical weapons should be upheld, he writes:

When analyzing punishment and deterrence of thugs in the course I have taught for many years at Harvard, I ask students to consider “WWGD.” An adaptation of the evangelical saying “What Would Jesus Do?,” it asks: “what would the Godfather do?” When the Godfather wanted to persuade a Hollywood movie mogul to reconsider his decision to reject casting his godson for a star role in a film, the producer awoke to find the severed head of his prized racehorse in his bed. When the Godfather wanted to define an enforceable constraint against incursions into his territory that other competing mobs would observe, he enlisted the leaders of the strongest other mafia families, isolated the two offending dons, and executed them overnight, along with several of their key enforcers.

President Obama should challenge the community of strategic analysts to exercise their imaginations. To strengthen the international taboo against the use of chemical weapons, to punish the Assad regime for violating that rule, and to deter Assad and his military commanders from using these weapons again, what would the Godfather consider? What might be the equivalent for Assad of waking up to the sight of the severed head of the creature he values most? To get the ball rolling, let me offer six clues.

What he offers is very different than anything we’ve seen (which is basically that the only option is to bomb something, with or without the international community, or do nothing.) The lack of creativity in all this is something on which I’ve commented in the past and it’s kind of inspiring to see someone really think outside the box on this.

I have also described this as lazy, but that doesn’t acurately describe the phenomenon. This does:

[T]hose serving in government, even at the highest levels, have no monopoly on strategic imagination. Indeed, because of the tyranny of overloaded inboxes and the maddening difficulty of getting anything decided and done, bureaucratic processes tilt toward what is easy to do. As has often been observed, presidents of all persuasions find themselves gravitating to military options because military officers say: “yes sir” and just do it.

This piece shows the various facets of leadership and pressure that could have been (and still could be) brought to bear on the Assad regime for its (presumed) use of sarin gas.
And just as important, it acknowledges something that supporters of strikes are loathe to admit — Iraq looms large as for very good reasons:

The inescapable fact that Obama’s predecessor took an international coalition to war with Saddam based on claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false cannot be wished away. Assertions that the American intelligence community has “concluded with high confidence” that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons are no longer persuasive in themselves for citizens and governments around the world. Anyone tempted to forget that truth should reflect on the stunning rejection by the parliament of our closest ally, despite British Prime Minister Cameron’s valiant effort to make the case for military action.

That’s the reality of this situation and hectoring skeptics about the difference between bombing Syria because “he gassed his own people” and bombing Iraq because “he gassed his own people” isn’t going to work. This government cried wolf in the most glaring, embarrassing manner possible and the secrecy surrounding the drone war and the NSA surveillance hasn’t helped it gain credibility. You can say that this is completely different all you want but the rhetoric sounds too much the same and the understandable suspicion that there is a bigger, hidden strategic objective in all this is too obvious. As he says, the last ten years cannot be wished away. Nobody on the planet is willing to take the US Government’s word on this stuff anymore. And for good reason.

But there are things that can be done short of adding to the violence. This article challenges the community of strategic analysts to exercise their imaginations and offers some very interesting ideas to that end. I’m sure there are more. The administration needs to start listening to them. If the congress denies it permission to simply go to the military because it will say “yes sir”, it might even do it.

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