Month: September 2013

Larry Summers vetting report

by digby

Here’s a nice piece in the Prospect by Robert Kuttner, written in the guise of a “memo to the president” from his political staff.  The first part lays out the particulars on the Summers controversy on policy, which is pretty damning.  And then it lays out the politics which are even worse:

Politically, our efforts to create a sense of inevitability for Summers over the past several weeks seemed to be working. But then, contrary to the White House story about an easy confirmation, three leading Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, advised us that under no circumstances will they vote for Summers, and that was leaked to the press. See this piece from last Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times also weighed in with a blistering anti-Summers editorial.

Even if we hold all other Democrats on the committee, that makes us reliant on the Republicans to get Summers out of committee. As you know, we have redoubled our efforts to get our Wall Street friends to lobby Republicans to support Summers.

Other things being equal, Republicans should be favorable to Summers because of his soft views on regulation and his concerns about inflation. But other things are not equal. Most Republicans do not like him personally. They will be torn between giving Wall Street a vote for a friendly Fed chairman and embarrassing the White House. If they smell blood in the water, we probably cannot count on their support.

It’s not at all clear whether we would prevent a runaway hearing. We have Committee Chairman Tim Johnson’s commitment to try to keep the lid on. Johnson has the back office operations of big banks in his home state of South Dakota thanks to their lax consumer laws and is one of the most Wall Street-friendly Democrats in Congress.

However, Johnson is not going to short-circuit a hearing if he has several committee members pressing for a full investigation. That would make him look bad for trying to railroad the nomination through.

We don’t yet know who will ask to testify. But the list could include several high-powered and prestigious people, such as other senators, former regulators, and senior Harvard officials, both present and former—people who could not be dismissed lightly. The hearing might drag on for days. We withdrew Tom Daschle as our Health and Human Services nominee for a lot less. It would not paint a pretty picture.

To reiterate, despite numerous conversations, we can’t know which way the Republicans will play this. In principle, there is no “linkage” between the Fed nomination and other pending battles. But in practice, you don’t have very many IOUs to call in with the Republicans and you need to consider if it makes the most sense to spend your limited bipartisan political capital on Summers.

One of our strongest cases for Summers is that he will reassure financial markets. But a confirmation hearing that turned out to be a donnybrook would do just the opposite. By contrast, we have unearthed nothing on the other leading candidate, Janet Yellen. A confirmation hearing for Yellen would be decorous, and the main opposition would be from monetary conservatives.

This raises one final question. The economy is still a lot softer than your economic team forecast. The Fed has been making noises about pulling back on monetary stimulus in the next month or two, a policy that would slow down the recovery. Summers has been more favorably inclined towards a pullback, while Yellen has stressed the need for continued stimulus to create jobs. Though she is not as personally well known to you and our economic team as Summers is, Yellen might actually pursue economic policies more in the administration’s political interest.

That last, almost throwaway concern, is the most important. I still can’t get over the fact that people are cheering 7+% unemployment for years on end.  There was a time when we considered that a very bad number.

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Is the public waking up from a generation of economic mugging?

by David Atkins

National Journal has a great story on the context and consequences of the mayoral election in New York City. It’s the first election in decades in which the progressive economic character of the city hasn’t been masked by concerns over crime and terrorism:

De Blasio’s progressive surge is remarkable in a city that hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in 24 years. It’s not that New York is conservative, of course. (President Obama won 81 percent of the vote in 2012.) But crime and safety have driven New York politics into the hands of Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani and tough-on-crime Democrats such as Ed Koch. With crime down, New Yorkers are free to turn to progressive issues such as income inequality and affordable housing. It’s telling that curtailing, not beefing up, the police force is a key issue this year.

“This election is not going to be about crime, as some previous elections were,” de Blasio told National Journal last month. “It used to be in New York you worried about getting mugged. But today’s mugging is economic. Can you afford your rent?” With the influx of moneyed professionals into urban cores in Manhattan, D.C., and elsewhere, the issues at play in this race could be a harbinger of political battles elsewhere…

Now that New Yorkers are no longer focused on their personal safety—whether threatened by robbers or terrorists—they have the liberty to focus on the kinds of issues that de Blasio is raising in what he incessantly dubs his “Tale of Two Cities” campaign. He’s called for a tax on those earning more than $500,000. He was an early critic of Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy, under which police have dramatically increased the number of individuals detained on probable cause. By making himself the anti-Bloomberg, de Blasio is not only leading the pack, he’s also got a shot at avoiding a runoff election.

There’s plenty to back up de Blasio’s claim of inequality. By one index, Gotham is the most unequal city in the U.S., and inequality has grown four times faster than in the rest of the country since 1980. These days, just 1 percent of New Yorkers take in one-third of the city’s income—about twice the national average. The high cost of housing has exacerbated the differences. The question for New York and the nation is what to do about it. Through any number of policies, such as proposals to implement a surtax on higher incomes and to stop funding cuts to schools and hospitals, de Blasio wants to rebuild the middle class.

But the trends that have driven inequality nationally, even globally—among them, the cost of higher education, global competition, and punishing conditions for dropouts—aren’t easily remedied. In New York, the explosive growth of the financial sector, even after the banking crisis, has helped widen the divide. De Blasio is not Huey Long and he’s not wonky, but he’s got a good knack for finding symbols of the new Gilded Age, recently tweeting about one chic spot offering a $350 steak. His opposition to Bloomberg’s “congestion pricing” tax for cars entering Manhattan helps him gain currency in Queens and Staten Island.

Of all the (often overstated) disappointments of the Obama presidency, chief among them must be the unfulfilled promise of economic progressivism, subverted for over a generation by fearmongering based on race resentment and xenophobia. After the financial crisis and the election of the first African-American president, a majority of Americans were ready to turn their attention to the great unraveling of the social compact. A number of Democratic activists had even chosen him over the Clinton team precisely to that purpose.

The political transition that should have happened at the national level failed to materialize. But there are signs that it is materialized belatedly in the Massachusetts Senate, in New York City, in California and elsewhere.

It’s about time.

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Monday Night Vigil

by digby

You can find your vigil here.

Smarter than your smart phone


by digby

Here is the latest story from Laura Poitras in der Spiegel. It’s about the NSA’s spying capability on smart phones, which is substantial. Not that we couldn’t have suspected it already — clearly, they are leaving no stones unturned. However there is some good news:

The material viewed by SPIEGEL suggests that the spying on smart phones has not been a mass phenomenon. It has been targeted, in some cases in an individually tailored manner and without the knowledge of the smart phone companies.

Note the ad at the lower left of the story:

Sure, I’ll use my iPhone to read der Spiegel. I just can’t use it for anything I don’t want the government to see.

Reporters should probably be especially careful about this from now on. The government has already shown its willingness to conflate terrorism, espionage and journalism. Anything on those iPhone’s could easily be seen as fair game.

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QOTD: Juan Williams

by digby

“It’s gone baby, it’s in your head. That’s the only place.”

He’s talking about Benghazi.And he’s right that it’s all in their heads. But it’s also in every wingnuts head, the same way the “Whitewater” was in their heads. You don’t have to understand the details or believe them on the off chance you do. It’s just a scandal brand name.

They’re prepping for Clinton-time.

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Please stop us before we spy without warrant again (well, until we need to)

by digby

Wait, what?

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, and that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used
[…]
The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant. 

So, in 2008 the government requested that the FISA Court impose an explicit ban on searching through its database without a warrant and then got them to reverse it three years later?  I thought they had reassured us that they weren’t searching through all the stored data they have on Americans without warrants.

And why would the government ask the court to ban them from doing anything? Have they no agency to simply not do things? In fact, if it has to be explicitly banned from doing things it shouldn’t do we are in much deeper trouble than we think.

The question, once again, comes down to what the meaning of the word “target” is:

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later.

“The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But then they never say, ‘We turn around and deliberately search for Americans’ records in what we took from the wire.’ That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.”

The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion.

So they can gather information on all of us and keep it in a data base without a warrant. And everyone says that’s cool because they aren’t looking at anything specific so it doesn’t need one. However, when they do want to look at something specific they don’t need a warrant because the information they gathered for this data base wasn’t targeted. Joseph Heller would be laughing his ass off.

Oh, but you don’t need to worry. Even though the government asked the FISA court to stop them before they surveilled without warrant again — and then asked it to reverse it three years later — all of this is subject to the NSA’s “privacy” guidelines.

Update: Turns out Emptywheel was on this two months ago. And she has some very interesting analysis.

As she always does.  She’s doing a fundraiser.  Please donate if you can.  Her work is invaluable.

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Once again, Modo reduces war to a girls locker room spat

by digby

Leave it to Maureen Dowd to make me want to toss my Emo-Prog medals at the White House steps and join Obama’s army:

In his head, is Barry at war with the commander in chief?
[…]
When it came time to act as commander in chief, he choked and reverted to Senator Barry — even though many lawmakers in both parties privately wish the president had just gone ahead and hurled a few missiles, Zeus like, and not put them on the spot.

Now the president who saw no benefit in wooing Democrats on the Hill is desperate for their love. Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco peacenik, will have to win Barry the right to bomb.

Those around him say that, after the British poodle slipped its leash, Obama faced a gut check on his decision to have a strike. He had to dig deep and decide “This is who I am,” and be true to himself. To be Barry, editor of the Harvard Law Review.

In some ways, his reaction reflects his tendency toward mixing high principles with low motives. He believes it is proper to get Congressional approval and let the people chime in. But he also wanted to make life difficult for Congressional Republicans who like to “snipe,” using his word, from the sidelines with no accountability. He wanted to call their blustery bluff.

But who is going to get bluffed?

How is it possible that they pay her an ample six figure salary to write the same vacuous, irrelevant column over and over again, year after year? Why would anyone think this is even remotely interesting at this point?

From all reports, Obama has been reluctant to get into Syria from the beginning. He obviously bet that by declaring a Red Line he could intimidate the players in Syria not to cross it and risk the US getting involved. He lost that bet and now he’s faced with following though on a threat to do something he really doesn’t want to do. That happens.

In the wake of the British refusing to sign on, he sent the decision to congress to get legitimacy for that decision, which is the right thing to do. (It’s always the right thing to do.)We don’t know right now if he will get it, but if he doesn’t I think it’s highly unlikely that he will go ahead. After all, the vote in the House will be bipartisan and it’s going to be very hard for them to “carp” as Dowd says if he doesn’t ignore their wishes.

None of this is a sign of bad character, psychological disorder or some sort of dual personality. And it’s daft to think he’s doing this to make Republicans uncomfortable. All of that is puerile nonsense that has no place in this debate. As someone who isn’t the biggest fan of this administration in a dozen different ways, I don’t see this one as being an awful example of poor leadership. It’s clear to me that he is not eager to get into this war but circumstances (and the decades long US position as Imperial Police) have led him to this place. I wish he had been more creative in dealing with it and had withstood the pressure to fall back on sending messages through bombing, but it doesn’t seem to me to be an example of either warmongering or eagerness to get the US involved in another quagmire.

This certainly does not strike me as being in the same category as the drone war, the kill list or NSA surveillance, which the president has been quite eager to do and enthusiastic about defending. It’s clear to me that he wanted to change the nation’s national security posture from the traditional role of bombing raids and invasion to one of high tech, global clandestine military operations. I happen to think that’s not a huge improvement and may actually make our nation more loathed as despised over the long haul, but it is different from the overt warmongering of the Bush administration.

Not that simplistic wags like Dowd care about such nuances. She’s more interested in doing armchair psychology lifted from the pages of Oprah’s magazine. What a waste of journalistic real estate her column is. There are so many other interesting and insightful ways to look at the world than the high school cheerleaders cafeteria table.

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A very helpful primer from Bill Moyers


by digby

This piece from Bill Moyers on the Syria situation brings many of the necessary reads into one place. Read it and send it to friends and family who are confused about the history, the situation on the ground, the stakes:

We’re not the only polarized country

by digby

… fighting over the same things:

Australia’s opposition has crushed the governing Labor party in a general election that has returned the Liberal-National coalition to power for the first time in six years…

Under Mr Rudd, Labor initially saw its figures improve. But Mr Abbott, who enjoyed the strident support of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, then widened the gap again.

“From today I declare Australia is under new management and Australia is now open for business”, Mr Abbott told a cheering crowd as he delivered a victory speech.

He said that he would put the budget back into surplus, and stop boats bringing migrants from Asia.

As you can see, this victory is something like a Ted Cruz victory would be here. (That’s not an exact comparison, obviously. But this guy is pretty far right.)

The kind of economic dislocation we are seeing (and in America’s case, endless military engagement as well) makes people unhappy. And when they are unhappy they vote against the status quo. And sometimes it’s not pretty.

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What are we trying to accomplish in Syria, again?

by David Atkins

Ummmm:

An al Qaeda-linked rebel group has wrested control of the historic Christian town of Maaloula from regime forces, opposition groups said Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the hardline Islamist rebels of the al-Nusra Front seized control Saturday night.

Videos posted on YouTube in recent days showed fighting between rebels and government forces in the tiny sleepy town, an hour’s drive from the capital Damascus.

“We cleansed Maaloula from all the Assad dogs and all his thugs,” a rebel commander shouts at the camera in a video posted online over the weekend.

What the capture will mean for the Christian residents waits to be seen.

As the 18-month-long Syrian conflict festers, the government and the opposition welcome and need Christian support.

But some Christians fear radical Islamists have been swelling rebel ranks.

They also fear the same fate as a number of Christians during the war in Iraq, where militants targeted them and spurred many to leave the country.

I personally don’t care what religion any of them belong to. The enemy is fundamentalism of any kind, not one religion or another.

But it brings to light again the question of what goal would be desired from bombing Syria? Is it just to enforce a norm against chemical weapons? Or is it to turn the tide of the civil war? If the latter, are the rebels truly better than the Assad regime? What happens if and when Assad falls?

I haven’t heard anyone make a solid case for what exactly would be accomplished by bombing. I haven’t heard anyone make a solid case for what exactly would be accomplished by turning the tide of war to the rebels. A ceasefire and justice for war criminals would be optimal, but it won’t work unless the whole world is behind it and ready to make it happen. Saudi Arabia would rather try to get the U.S. to do its dirty work, most of Europe would prefer to tut tut and avert their eyes, Russia would prefer to keep their client state, China would prefer to see the United States stymied, and far too many U.S. politicians would like to drop bombs for the sake of, well, dropping bombs, even as most war-weary voting Americans are taking a “not our problem” approach.

OK, fine. But let’s stop pretending that anyone actually cares about the plight of the Syrian people, or that any of the proposed “solutions” solve anything at all. They don’t. Least of all a series of bombings that will either be ineffectual or open a Pandora’s Box of consequences.

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