Month: May 2015

Not even for him


by digby

I cannot say I’m surprised that Tsarnaev got the death penalty.  After all, everyone one on that Boston jury was pro-capital punishment. It’s hard to imagine that people who think capital punishment is a moral act would feel that this case, of all cases, didn’t fit the criteria.  It was baked in the cake from the beginning.

I just wish I understood why anyone thinks that killing someone you have in custody makes any moral sense. I guess it’s just simple revenge, not much more advanced than the crudest tribal retribution. For all of our legal rituals, we haven’t come very far.

I just don’t believe in it under any circumstances. Even for this guy. For anyone. How can more death be the right thing to do?

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The Fear Factor

by digby

Via Kevin Drum I see that the PPP did some polling of Texans to see what they believe about this insane Jade Helm navy-seals-are-sending-death-squads-to-Midland conspiracy theory:

Kevin says:

Apparently a full third of the Republican base believes that President Obama plans to order the military to take over Texas. Booyah! And supporters of Ted Cruz and Rick Perry—who are probably mostly from Texas—believe this idiocy by 60-70 percent.

So what do we take from this? I think there are two main interpretations:

Fox and Rush and the rest of the conservative media have driven conservatives into such a frenzy that a third of them really, truly do believe that President Obama plans a military takeover of Texas.

Poll questions like this no longer have any real meaning. This is basically little more than a survey of mood affiliation that tests how much you hate and distrust President Obama. That is to say, a yes answer has little or nothing to with Jade Helm. It just means you really hate and distrust Obama.

Kevin thinks the second is the most likely, that this is just a way for Republicans to express their extreme loathing for Obama. I’d guess that true. But only for some of them. I think there’s a substantial number of Republicans who really do believe this claptrap. There have always been some who believe this sort of thing. Until Joseph McCarthy held televised hearings and made a total ass of himself 50% of the population thought it was perfectly plausible that commies had infiltrated the government and the military. The oddest thing about this is that these are the same people who will scream in your face “love it or leave it!” and “these colors don’t run, hippie” when anyone on the left criticizes American defense policy. It’s the weirdest thing.

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He oughta know

by digby

Reading the FBI file on SCLC & myself, I am more convinced than ever that we cannot allow government surveillance. pic.twitter.com/EeLPj6Yrxm— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) May 15, 2015

Unless you truly believe that the government was full of “bad guys” back then and is only staffed with “good guys” now, you’ll understand exactly what Lewis is talking about.

Friendly reminder about those “good guys”:

The FBI breached its own internal rules when it spied on campaigners against the Keystone XL pipeline, failing to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened files on individuals protesting against the construction of the pipeline in Texas, documents reveal.

Internal agency documents show for the first time how FBI agents have been closely monitoring anti-Keystone activists, in violation of guidelines designed to prevent the agency from becoming unduly involved in sensitive political issues.

The hugely contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which is awaiting approval from the Obama administration, would transport tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf coast.

It has been strongly opposed for years by a coalition of environmental groups, including some involved in nonviolent civil disobedience who have been monitored by federal law enforcement agencies.

The documents reveal that one FBI investigation, run from its Houston field office, amounted to “substantial non-compliance” of Department of Justice rules that govern how the agency should handle sensitive matters.

Yes, “the system worked”. After the fact, the DOJ looked into this and found that they weren’t following the rules. How nice.

And keep in mind what the rationale for this was:

“Many of these extremists believe the debates over pollution, protection of wildlife, safety, and property rights have been overshadowed by the promise of jobs and cheaper oil prices,” the FBI document states. “The Keystone pipeline, as part of the oil and natural gas industry, is vital to the security and economy of the United States.”

They’re not the first to make that point. Surely that has also motivated some of our various wars in the middle east.

Perhaps Ann Coulter put it best when she spoke to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in 2011:

“Of course we should go to war for oil,” Coulter told an audience of gray-suited national security analysts, speaking in a room decorated with portraits in gilded frames. “It’s like saying, you’re going to war just for oxygen, just for food. We need oil. That’s a good reason to go to war.”

And with that you can justify just about any war you want. And if you can do that, surely a little domestic spying on “environmental extremists” is no big deal. Our very existence is at stake!

They can always find a reason. John Lewis was commie, dontcha know.

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Tweet ‘O the Day

by digby

I sit down with James O’Keefe and talk about the state of journalism today. http://t.co/6hgVV8MNx4

— Judith Miller (@JMfreespeech) May 15, 2015

I’m pretty sure that tweet says everything you need to know about the state of journalism today.

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The juggernaut and the libertarian struggle to escape their ties

by digby

I wrote about Jeb and Rand Paul this morning at Salon. It appears that the political press has finally caught on to the fact that this alleged juggernaut and obvious choice for the presidency has a “W” problem:

Some of us have been pointing out the great big, obvious problem with Jeb Bush’s candidacy for a while now, but it took his fumbling and mumbling these past couple of days to wake the political press to to the fact that being George W. Bush’s brother was going to cause him some very difficult moments on the campaign trail. After all, his name is Bush, the name most closely associated with America’s bedeviled relationship with Iraq for the past 25 years.

So yes, it was inevitable that Jeb would be between Iraq and a hard place in this election, and that he would not have an easy time trying to squeeze out of it. After all, no matter what people may have thought going into the war, there is a strong consensus that it failed:

A September 2014 AP-GfK poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they think history will judge the war as a failure. Among Republicans, that assessment was even more prevalent, with 76 percent saying the war would be seen a failure.

With a result like that, dancing around saying the intelligence was faulty but everyone believed it so and while you wouldn’t do it now you would have done it then isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Here’s one shocked political observer saying what he thinks needs to be said:

“[Joe] Scarborough was in disbelief over Bush’s repeated blunders this week in trying to answer whether he would have invaded Iraq like his brother George W. Bush, knowing what he knows now about the results of the war.

The MSNBC host, who supported the war in 2003, asked contributor and Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin to pose the Iraq question to him.

“No, it was a horrible idea, as bad an idea as sticking your face in a blender, what’s your next question?” Scarborough said, to laughter from the panel.

(Hillary Clinton was a bit less colorful with her mea culpa, but it amounts to the same thing: “I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”)

Scarborough’s not the only one taking shots. Bush’s rivals have all opportunistically stepped up to condemn him for his Iraq comments. Marco Rubio – a certifiable neocon hawk who just a few weeks ago stated that the war was a net positive because Saddam Hussein was a very bad man — this week solemnly declared that he wouldn’t have gone in if he knew the intelligence was wrong. He kindly added that he didn’t think President Bush would have gone in either, which is a joke.

(This piece by Paul Waldman shreds this silly myth that everyone was somehow “fooled” by the intelligence.)

Former “W” staffer Ted Cruz, meanwhile, weighed in with this repudiation of the neoconservative conceit that the whole thing was done to promote democracy (by freeing the Iraqis from their lives). His point of view probably best represents the base of the party: bloodthirsty and vengeful without all that extraneous hoohah about helping the children and letting a thousand flowers grow:

While Cruz said he couldn’t judge then-President Bush’s decision without having seen the intelligence himself, he reiterated his view that America should not get bogged down in nation-building after dispatching threats abroad.

“It is not the job of our soldiers, and sailors and airmen and Marines, to transform foreign nations into democratic utopias, it is the job to hunt down and kill terrorists who want to murder Americans before they can carry out jihad

These people are all distancing themselves however they can from the debacle that was Bush’s war. But the one who is going to have the biggest problem doing that is obviously the guy with the same last name.

Rand Paul is another dynastic scion with a different yet equally difficult problem.

Why Syriza failed; Why Europe may fail with it

by Gaius Publius

I haven’t written much about Greece lately, but there’s quite a story going on. It’s not that difficult to follow, but you have to be careful whom you read. Conventional wisdom (backed by corporate, pro-austerity media outlets here and abroad) says it’s a morality tale — bad Greeks who went into too much debt and now they can’t pay up. Good German bankers want their money and are reluctant to forgive bad deeds because it might encourage other debt-owing entities to seek debt relief as well. They’re calling that “moral hazard,” fear that a bailout might encourage more bad behavior. There must be consequences, or so they think.

The bottom line of those who tell this tale — Greece provides a place for lovers of austerity (like cuts to social programs) to point and sneer. Their refrain, which I’m sure you’ve heard, is “We don’t want to end up like Greece, do we?”

The reality of the Greek situation is different — not hard to understand, just different.

Briefly, the Greek back story is a tale of looting, but by elites. Greek elites looted the economy through their control of government and their tax avoidance; American banks like Chase looted Greece by selling them unaffordable swap deals (the link is to Matt Taibbi’s great reporting) which masked Greek economic problems, for a while; and at the same time, European bankers poured a ton of hot money into the Greek economy (and that of Spain, Italy, Portugal and other “peripheral” countries) looking for fast profit in a bubble.

Then the bubble burst in Europe — in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, everywhere the hot money flowed. And now the European bankers, especially the Germans, want to be made whole. Despite the fact that the country is in depression and on the verge of radical political transformation, Greece, in their minds, must pay its debts. Period. 

All you need to know:

Something is about to break, and it could break very soon. If Greece defaults on its government debt, it will send shock waves around the world. If Greece also exits the euro, the consequences will likely be worse, though maybe not worse for Greece.

How Syriza has painted itself into a corner

With all of that said, I want to send you to the best analytical article I’ve read about Greece and the problem facing Syriza. As you’ll read, they tried to do something very clever. It didn’t work. This comes via Naked Capitalism; please read Yves Smith’s excellent introduction to this analysis, then the analysis itself. A taste (my occasional emphasis):

Why Syriza Failed

Yves here. While the path for the ruling Greek government to make a deal with its creditors is fraught, it is pressing forward to try to come to an agreement by the next Eurogroup meeting, May 11. Greece has an IMF payment due May 12 that it will find difficult to meet. With the new urgency and the, um, realignment of the negotiating team, the odds now look to favor Greece capitulating even in the event of a default even if the ruling coalition tries holding ground on some of its red lines like pensions. If a default were to occur, it’s not hard to imagine that the IMF and the ECB would make Greece an offer it can’t refuse: the IMF would reverse itself on giving Greece a grace period for its payment if it relented on the disputed issues, otherwise the ECB would have no choice in light of the default to remove or limit its support under the ELA [Emergency Liquidity Assistance][.] That would force Greece to impose capital controls, nationalize its banks, and issue drachma to [recapitalize] them. Both the Greek public and most Syriza members are opposed to a Grexit [Greek exit from the eurozone]. …

It’s after May 12 and Greece is still limping along, trying to come up with an accommodation with the big European organizations. In that light, consider the following, which Yves Smith printed it in full in her post. I’m including a portion, with the hope that you go to the source and read the rest. As I mentioned above, this is as enlightened piece on where Greece stands now, and what Syriza has tried (and failed) to do, as I’ve seen anywhere.

From a Washington DC insider

Syriza Has Created a Beg-ocracy Based on Fear

It’s been two months since Syiza took power, which is enough time to
do some sort of evaluation of their governing philosophy. Here’s what we
know. When Alexis Tsipras was elected to head the new Greek state, his
government promised two mutually exclusive objectives. The first was to
stay in the Euro. The second was to repudiate the policies of austerity
and the colonial arrangement of the institutions that manage the Euro.
Both policies represented different wings of the Syriza coalition, and
Tsipras believes both must be placated.

Tsipras’s strategy was not to pick one of these objectives and stick
with it to the exclusion of the other, but to attempt to mesh the two of
them in an audacious attempt to transform the entire Eurozone.

Tsipras decided to make Greece a demonstration project. When he was
elected, he spoke early on of a “European New Deal”, in a nod to
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s new governing arrangements. And indeed, his
early legislative attempts included things like ‘food stamps’ and
electricity for the poor. His finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, talked
of European-wide investment in infrastructure to boost overall European
aggregate demand.

By governing Greece reasonably well and reducing corruption, along
with taking money from those who didn’t need it and giving it to those
who do need it, they were hoping to show European elites and voters that
another way was possible. With the added boost from more European
economic activity, Greece could prosper. Certainly it would grow since
its base state is so depressed.

In other words, Tsipras and Varoufakis sought to ‘save Europe from
itself’ by demonstrating that the austerity policies peddled by European
banking elites were tearing Europe apart….

The European project
is one of the great achievements of humanity. From the fall of the
Roman empire until 1945, [Europe] has basically been one giant warzone,
with varying degrees of violence. The EU was essentially an
American-brokered marriage between France and Germany. This union was
then expanded outwards, with a strong social welfare state undergirding
peace and prosperity. This is the EU that they want to save[.] …

Keep that last in mind. The postwar “European project” is itself an attempt to prevent one more continent-wide disaster. To repeat: “From the fall of the
Roman empire until 1945, [Europe] has basically been one giant warzone,
with varying degrees of violence.” And: “Tsipras and Varoufakis sought to ‘save Europe from
itself’ by demonstrating that the austerity policies peddled by European
banking elites were tearing Europe apart.”

But it’s not working:

Nevertheless, the EU has been inverted. It is now a set of actors going
through a set of austerity policies that in geopolitical terms reflect
the Saw horror films, sadistic conditions imposed by bankers
and Eurocrats who just enjoy the torture. America is absent. Germany is
dominant and malevolent, both corrupt and self-pitying. Nationalism and
greed are increasingly rampant, with fewer and fewer institutional
controls. It is in this environment that Syriza leaders are trying to
negotiate what are essentially fiscal transfers in a structurally
deficient currency union that has been organized to suck wealth from the
periphery and transfer it to German banks.

Which leaves Syriza holding the bag. As the writer says:

What this means is that Tsipras and Varoufakis are now effectively working for bankers. [emphasis in original] They
do not want to govern with an independent power base, they do not
believe in governing along the lines of what they promised unless it is
easy to do so, and they are organizing their governing apparatus as a
beg-ocracy. … It’s
been two months straight of negotiations, which looks more and more like
begging, and they have had no time to take control of the bureaucracies
or to pay attention to what is going on in any area except the
immediate political situation. The Greek economy is not improving,
because the uncertainty has impeded what little commerce there was. …

Syriza leaders … are not
bad people, and in ordinary situations, they might even be good
leaders. But the strategy being pursued is bad and their attitude based
on being afraid of the Europeans is worse. This is a fight over power,
and Greek leaders simply aren’t willing to advocate for their own people
in any serious way. They are deluding themselves about who they are up
against. …

I’ll point you to the rest, and to the writer’s bottom line. Syriza tried to save both Greece and Europe, at least by this analysis (one I think is essentially correct). It looks like Europe, driven by the culture of greed and by German elites, doesn’t want to be saved. Like the hyper-rich everywhere, Europeans just want their money.

There’s an inherent risk in lending, but they don’t want to assume those consequences (talk about the “moral hazard” of never facing consequences). European bankers are doing everything in their power to “make themselves whole,” but it’s not going to work. And in my estimation it’s going to not-work very soon. I agree with the writer: “Time’s about up.”

I’m putting this up so what happens next won’t catch you by surprise. TPP is the biggest hot story in the country right now, and rightly so. But the slow death of Greece, and potentially the “European project,” is the biggest cold story, the one you hear nothing about. Until you do.

The world is collapsing because of greed and the unwillingness of those with billions to part with a dime. People are in debt because they’re broke. Breaking them further just brings us closer to this. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Stay tuned.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Wyoming’s Sergeant Schultz Act
by Tom Sullivan

Wyoming calls it the Data Trespass Bill. But it sounds more like the Sergeant Schultz Act: You will know nothing, see nothing, and hear nothing! Via Charlie Pierce, this mind-bite from Think Progress:

Passed by the Wyoming state government and signed into law by Gov. Matt Mead (R) in March, the law makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any land outside of city boundaries, whether that land be private, public, or federal. Under to the law, “collect” means to “take a sample of material, acquire, gather, photograph or otherwise preserve information in any form from open land which is submitted or intended to be submitted to any agency of the state or federal government.”

Pierce writes:

That last provision is just bizarre. Clearly, it’s meant to punish anyone who submits photographic proof of environmental damage to the responsible federal authorities. It is nullification by a thousand cuts — make it illegal to cooperate with The Government in protecting yourself from being poisoned. The Invisible Hand’s second career as a proctologist is going quite well.

See, ranchers are peeved that groups like the Western Watersheds Project have reported E. coli in Wyoming streams, according to Justin Pidot, an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. “The theory for most of the ranchers is, ‘You were near my land once, so you must have trespassed.’” Pidot writes:

Anyone with a passing familiarity with our Constitution will recognize that the Wyoming law is unconstitutional. It runs afoul of the supremacy clause because it interferes with the purposes of federal environmental statutes by making it impossible for citizens to collect the information necessary to bring an enforcement lawsuit. The Wyoming law also violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech because it singles out speech about natural resources for burdensome regulation and makes it a crime to engage in a variety of expressive and artistic activities. And finally, it specifically criminalizes public engagement with federal and state agencies and therefore violates another right guaranteed by the First Amendment: the right to petition the government.

Ostensibly, this bill and similar ones are about trespassing. Yet as Pidot observes, the strategy itself is a trespass. As with many other laws targeting women’s rights to voting rights, this is conservatives’ game plan: Find the legal line. Step over it. Dare someone to push them back. If they don’t get pushed back, they’ve established a new normal. Do it on enough fronts at once, and opponents won’t have the resources to push back on all of them. It’s how you erode freedom in freedom’s name. While waving a flag. Clutching your pocket Constitution. Brandishing a gun. And singing Lee Greenwood.

A contract with progressives


by digby

Most people probably remember that New York mayor Bill de Blasio recently drew up a progressive manifesto called a Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality based upon the concept Newt Gingrich pioneered with his Contract for America back in 1994. Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and Angela Terkel looked into how closely Hillary Clinton’s policy views and record hews to their agenda:

A look at Clinton’s position on each of de Blasio’s agenda items:

1. Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Clinton has called for raising the federal minimum wage, though she hasn’t explicitly come out in favor of $15 an hour, as former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a likely Democratic challenger, has done. That said, though, the bill currently being pushed by Senate Democrats doesn’t call for that level either, settling instead for $12.

2. Reform the National Labor Relations Act to enhance workers’ rights. Clinton hasn’t made statements on this issue recently, but in the past she has sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have expanded avenues for unionization. And in 2008, she pledged to make “pro-labor” nominations to the NLRB.

3. Pass comprehensive immigration reform. Clinton basically stunned immigration advocates recently by going further than President Barack Obama on deportation relief. She supports comprehensive reform, too.

4. Oppose trade deals that “move power to corporations at the expense of American jobs, workers’ rights, and the environment.” This is probably the biggest TBD on the list. Clinton has avoided discussing the specifics of the trade deal currently being negotiated, but her past statements suggest she’s relatively in line with de Blasio.

5. Pass national paid sick leave. Clinton has spoken out repeatedly in favor of paid sick leave policies, calling it “outrageous” that the United States doesn’t have a guarantee for mothers of newborns and recently calling out the state of Pennsylvania for potentially interfering with Philadelphia’s paid sick leave law.

6. Pass national paid family leave. Clinton’s campaign launch video showcased her advocacy for this policy.

7. Make pre-K, after-school programs and child care universal. In 2007, Clinton unveiled a $5 billion plan to make child care universal and affordable, matched dollar for dollar by state funding. As first lady, she pushed for more federal funding for after-school programs. And Clinton’s history of advocating for dramatic expansions of child care (Head Start, frequently) is too long to detail here.

8. Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC was expanded under the 2009 stimulus and those expansions were extended through 2017 under the American Taxpayer Relief Act. Clinton hasn’t offered an opinion on this recently. But in 2007, she called for expanding and simplifying the EITC.

9. Allow students to refinance student loan debt. Clinton has said she supports this measure, arguing that “the interest rates are still so low for most other debt and they’re still fixed at too high a rate for student loans.”

10. Close the carried interest loophole. She has said she wants to close it.

11. End tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Clinton wants to do this too.

12. Implement the “Buffett Rule” so millionaires pay their fair share. Nothing notable from Clinton on this specific proposal (it came into being while she was at the State Department). But she supported raising the top-end Bush tax rates (which did get raised), and Buffett himself supports her candidacy.

13. Closing the CEO tax loophole that allows corporations to take advantage of “performance pay” write-offs. Again, it’s pretty clear where Clinton stands. In April, she wrote in The Des Moines Register: “Something is wrong when CEOs earn 300 times more than a typical American worker and hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than a truck driver or a nurse.”

I guess I’m not surprised by this. Recall that Clinton was ranked the 11th most liberal Senator back in 2008 when she ran (as compared to Obama, who was ranked 23rd.)

Not that her Senate voting record is the final word. But I have little doubt that on most domestic issues Clinton will be more or less like Obama, perhaps a bit more progressive depending on the outcome of the election in the congress. (If Democrats can take back the Senate with liberal Senators like Russ Feingold, it may be possible to push the center of gravity a bit further left, even with nutballs running the House.) It remains to be seen where she’ll come down on trade. And on women’s issues, I think she is likely to be quite aggressive — they have been the project of her entire adult life.

I still maintain the real action in this election will be on foreign policy and I don’t know yet where she’ll come down. There are many crosscurrents working in that sphere and it’s hard to predict where she and her advisors are going to go. The world is unstable in unpredictable ways right now. Thaty’s not usually a positive when it comes to American policy.  I still hold out a little bit of probably naive hope that she will be better on surveillance and privacy, having been through the mill in her own life as political enemies spent decades digging into her personal business for their own ends. (Yeah, I know — naive.)

Anyway, this is where she fits in de Blasio’s agenda FWIW.

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Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?

by digby

I knew that you could.

I do have to wonder if  Stephanopoulos giving to the Clinton charities is a scandal whether some enterprising reporters might be looking into all the charitable donations by reporters to these causes:

Charles Koch, 78 years old, and his brother, 74-year-old David, are among the nation’s most visible supporters of conservative political causes—a fact that, in many cases, has made their nonpolitical giving a lightning rod for partisan reaction. 

Critics say their extensive donations to higher education and health care, among other causes, are tainted by tea party-friendly politics, and rife with hidden strings and agendas. 

Conservatives call such reactions nonsensical, a product of knee-jerk liberal intolerance.
All of which raises the question: Should nonprofit groups—especially those in a largely liberal city like New York—be concerned with a donor’s political leanings?

You’ll be shocked to learn that the WSJ online poll came up with this answer: