Yves Smiths’s post Tuesday summarizes the challenges of reigning in (pun intended) the One Percent and of running a blog with that purpose. Knowing your opponent is key, but mastering the gory details of finance is its own challenge. It is a worthwhile read.
You need to be a soldier in the war to demystify finance, because its supposedly arcane and impenetrable nature is one of its biggest weapons. It’s easy to dismiss critics if they can be depicted as ignorant. There are costs to citizenship. One such cost is knowing your enemy, their strategies, their tactics, and the terrain on which they fight. That requires not passing familiarity with finance, but knowledge of it.
A key piece of that knowledge is “private equity is a government sponsored enterprise.” From tax subsidies to investments in government pension funds to sovereign wealth funds, these investments make money using the government, she writes, and,
… close to half the investment capital in private equity funds is contributed directly by government entities. In this respect, private equity is little different than companies like Fannie, Freddie, and Solyndra that are regularly criticized in the media as recipients of government subsidies.”
It no longer seems magic once the audience knows how the trick is done. That’s why private equity masters cloak their methods in arcana:
And this process explains the hypersensitivity of financiers like Tom Perkins and Steve Schwarzman, who become outraged by even mild criticisms of or attempts to regulate their industry. They recognize that the biggest threat to them is delegitimation. As long as they can maintain the illusion that their profits are fairly earned by their own effort (as opposed to extensive government subsidies and backstops), that all of their services, as currently configured, are essential for commerce, and that it’s all so complicated and difficult that no one can replace them, they will continue to have the whip hand. Over you. And your pension, if you have one. And your workplace, if they buy it for one of their asset-stripping projects.
That is why it is important to penetrate their veils of secrecy and complexity. Pay attention to these men behind the curtain. They don’t have superpowers and their know-how is not as lofty as they pretend. Their secrecy and sleight of hand are meant to disguise that many of their services are socially destructive (like most over-the-counter derivatives, which are used for tax or accounting gaming) or extractive by virtue of being overpriced, which might be defensible in a truly private industry but not one that is even more heavily supported by the government than the defense industry. In other words, your apathy and resignation play straight into the hands of the banksters. Do you really want to make their lives easier?
So broadcast the trick. Call them socialists. Make them own it. When even financiers are doing it, the term is, as George Will writes this morning in his forumlaic snark, “a classification that no longer classifies.“
You’ve got to be a serious psycho to do this. Unfortunately, the world is full of them:
When California rescue group Ranch Dog Rescue found this 5 month old Husky, they found him in terrible conditions The 11-pound pup had had his muzzle tied shut with rubber bands for so long that the scars went down to the bone. His back legs had been broken, and his teeth were rotten. His owners, a married couple of Marines, are now being held for investigation at Camp Pendleton.
The good news:
Kane has had surgery to repair his legs and is now in recovery. “I could not have asked, or hoped, for a better prognosis. All three veterinarians who treated Kane agree that the extent of his injuries are a clear sign of neglect and the result of severe abuse,” says Maureen Keo, founder of Ranch Dog Rescue. After posting the beautiful pup’s picture on their Facebook page, Ranch Dog Rescue had many people offering to take the pup in and give him a loving home. Keo says, “In six weeks or so, when the beautiful baby boy has recovered from surgery, Kane will join a loving family experienced with special needs pets.”
The Fox News debut of The Greg Gutfeld Show fell surprisingly short in the 25-54 demographic ratings this Sunday evening, losing to CNN, MSNBC, and HLN in that all-important category.
During the 10 p.m. ET premiere, the former Red Eye host’s new comedic talk show brought in 118k viewers in the 25-54 demo.
That was enough to finish in fourth place across all cable news, behind CNN’s High Profits (first place with 188k), MSNBC’s Investigates (179k), and two blocks of HLN’s half-hour Forensic Files (which averaged 148k for the full hour).
The Greg Gutfeld Show was one of Fox’s most hotly-anticipated debuts in recent memory, with a promotional appearance for the host on NBC’s Today Show and a plethora of promotional graphics throughout Fox’s daytime programming.
The bad news? All the older white male viewers did tune in and there a bunch of them. I guess they don’t like Game of Thrones …
Despite its demo loss, however, The Greg Gutfeld Show did finish first in total viewership, delivering 792k viewers and besting MSNBC’s 433k, HLN’s 388k, and CNN’s 306k.
Here’s the big punchline though. All the right wingers think Gutfield’s puerile humor is the conservative answer to John Oliver. I’m not kidding.
The fall of Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, to the Islamic State last month has frayed nerves in Washington, but what few appear to grasp is that ISIS’s May offensive has given Ramadi back to its former owners — the ex-Baathist Sunni terrorists known as the Former Regime Loyalists. The FRLs, as they’re called, were Saddam Hussein’s most ardent followers, the same fighters whom the United States fought non-stop for eight years. Their resurgence has implications not just for the United States but for ISIS itself. For while these forces may fly the ISIS flag today, their ultimate plans for Iraq are quite different than those of the “caliphate.”
ISIS’s roots in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party are deep — many of the group’s most devoted commanders, advisers and fighters started out as Baathists. The ex-Baathists essentially run ISIS, and their past is evident in the tactics they are using now.
After the 1963 coup that first gave the Baathists a share of power in Iraq’s government, Saddam became head of the secret Jehaz Al-Khass, or Special Branch, and collected meticulous dossiers on friends and enemies alike. Saddam used these dossiers to carry out a political putsch in the mid-sixties, as well as the bloodless 1968 coup that brought his party to full control of Iraq. From 1968 until 2003, Baathists controlled every aspect of Iraqi life and generalized the surveillance techniques that Saddam had used so effectively in his rise to power.
The Baath government amassed millions of personal records and forced its citizens to spy on family and friends for Saddam’s intelligence agencies. Those agencies, staffed almost exclusively by Sunnis, were masters at collecting and using the most intimate details of the lives of individual Iraqis. Stasi-level minutiae about family structure, births, deaths, relations and the aspirations of everyone who lived under the regime were documented and filed. The regime then used all its information to compel compliance, the alternative to which was death. After the invasion, the Baathists held the key to the human terrain of Iraq. All of these Saddamist traditions have been carried on by his disciples in ISIS.
One of these is Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, usually known as Haji Bakr, a former spy for Saddam who became chief of military operations for ISIS.
From as early as 2004, al Qaeda in Iraq gradually sought to transfer control of the Iraqi jihad from foreign fighters like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri to local Iraqi commanders like Abu Umar al-Baghdadi. AQI became the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2006, just as many local captives were being released from U.S. military prisons such as Camp Bucca. One of them was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the future caliph of ISIS. As an Iraqi, he had been held not with the high-value al Qaeda terrorists, but with low-level FRL and Iraqi religious extremist insurgents. At Bucca, al-Baghdadi formed bonds and apparently conceived the model that would eventually become ISIS, a consolidated force of Iraqi Sunni FRLs, joined with al Qaeda’s foreign fighters, that would take back their traditional tribal lands and then form a caliphate. That’s where he connected with Haji Bakr.
Der Spiegel magazine recently obtained Haji Bakr’s handwritten notes and organizational diagrams for creating an ISIS spy agency based on Saddam’s own intelligence agencies. The notes, the magazine reported, confirmed what American intelligence agencies had assumed for well over a decade — that the ex-Baathists ran almost everything in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Since 2003 these ex-Baathists have been ruthlessly pulling the strings of the jihadists in Iraq. First they facilitated al Qaeda’s entry into the insurgency, then they built them hundreds of car bombs and provided intelligence on American operations.
In case you were wondering about the decision to disband the Iraqi army, even Paul Bremer, the viceroy at the time won’t take responsibility for that decision anymore.
So who did make the decision? It’s one of the enduring mysteries. The New York Times tried to unravel it a while back:
Fateful Choice on Iraq Army Bypassed Debate
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD — When President Bush convened a meeting of his National Security Council on May 22, 2003, his special envoy in Iraq made a statement that caught many of the participants by surprise. In a video presentation from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III informed the president and his aides that he was about to issue an order formally dissolving Iraq’s Army.
The decree was issued the next day.
The broad outlines of the decision are now widely known, defended by proponents as necessary to ensure that Saddam Hussein’s influence did not outlive his ouster from power.
But with the fifth anniversary of the start of the war approaching, some participants have provided in interviews their first detailed, on-the-record accounts of a decision that is widely seen as one of the most momentous and contentious of the war, assailed by critics as all but ensuring that American forces would face a growing insurgency led by embittered Sunnis who led much of the army.
The account that emerges from those interviews, and from access to previously unpublished documents, makes clear that Mr. Bremer’s decree reversed an earlier plan — one that would have relied on the Iraqi military to help secure and rebuild the country, and had been approved at a White House meeting that Mr. Bush convened just 10 weeks earlier.
The interviews show that while Mr. Bush endorsed Mr. Bremer’s plan in the May 22 meeting, the decision was made without thorough consultations within government, and without the counsel of the secretary of state or the senior American commander in Iraq, said the commander, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan. The decree by Mr. Bremer, who is known as Jerry, prompted bitter infighting within the government and the military, with recriminations continuing to this day.
Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.
Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.
“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”
The author of this article goes through the possible list of decision makers and comes up with this theory by process of elimination:
Abstract.In May 2003 Paul Bremer issued CPA Orders to exclude from the new Iraq government members of the Baath Party (CPA Order 1) and to disband the Iraqi Army (CPA Order 2). These two orders severely undermined the capacity of the occupying forces to maintain security and continue the ordinary functioning of the Iraq government. The decisions reversed previous National Security Council judgments and were made over the objections of high ranking military and intelligence officers.
The article concludes that the most likely decision maker was the Vice President.
Would anyone be surprised to learn that Dick Cheney was instrumental in the creation of ISIS?
[I]f it’s protection from NSA snooping you want, note that there is another presidential candidate who is every bit as opposed the spy agency’s collection of your phone activity as is the neo-Confederate from the Bluegrass State, but who also supports the rights of women and people who aren’t white. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is pretty good at the speechifying himself, but when it comes to carrying out his responsibilities in the World’s Greatest Deliberative body, he apparently doesn’t see the need to throw water balloons off an overpass to show the world that he can cause a pile-up.
I guess he must not be as cute or something …
Paul is Paul and he does his thing. I’m ok with his grandstanding not because I believe it was particularly effective but because it’s better than nothing. But the truth is that it was the Democrats holding fast, even the usual suspects, against McConnell’s attempts to push the Patriot Act to expiration and force a vote to either extend it or add a bunch of horrible amendments to the USA Freedom Act. His gambit didn’t work and the mild reforms in the USA Freedom Act were passed. Paul’s actions were pretty irrelevant to that outcome. Unlike some commentators, I don’t think Republicans as a whole give a flying flack about NSA surveillance and it won’t help him at all in the presidential race. When they say they are anti-government, they are anti government run by Democrats for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t look like them. They are very much pro-government spying on “bad people” (of color) and killing foreigners.
It has often been my observation that every African American Republican must be on cable TV. There aren’t very many but that’s only because there are almost no African American Republicans at all. This is not to say that black conservatives aren’t sincere in their political beliefs. It’s just that they represent a vanishingly small minority of the African American constituency: According to Gallup, only 2 percent identify as Republican. That is a major hill to climb for the GOP and it makes you wonder why they would even try to present themselves as an integrated party.
Historically, African Americans were Republican, of course. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and you can imagine that that was as strong a validator for them as you can get. GOP hacks love to dredge this up as some sort of proof that black Americans are more naturally Republican but that’s just as ludicrous as saying that Martin Luther King was a conservative. The fact is that African Americans were Republicans from the post-Civil War period until the turn of the century. After all, the Democratic Party’s stronghold was in the South, where most blacks lived. It was white supremacist and didn’t allow black people to vote at all.
Franklin Roosevelt attracted a lot of black votes, although his deals with the the Southern Democrat devils often excluded them from his programs. But they liked his philosophy, as most of America did, and by 1936 he was getting 70 percent of the black vote. It wasn’t until the late 40s that a majority called themselves Democrats, though, and that was tied to a particular set of policies: in 1948, Harry Truman integrated the military and the federal civil service. But Republicans still got 30% of the African American vote until the mid-60s when Lyndon Johnson got civil rights legislation passed.
Now, Republicans could have greeted that migration to the Democratic Party a number of different ways, perhaps most logically by trying to beat the Democrats at their own game. But they let their African American constituency go slowly at first and then all at once by making a fateful decision. In 1964 Barry Goldwater’s campaign decided to oppose civil rights legislation. And by 1968, the party fully committed to a Southern Strategy to appeal to white southerners and their brethren in the north who were hostile to civil rights and African Americans in general. And that strategy led to decades of race baiting and dog-whistling and “law and order” campaigns designed to divide white America from black America.
This recent history is all disputed by conservatives, of course, who think they’re being clever by pointing out that it was Southern Democrats who instituted and fought for Jim Crow so African Americans should by all rights be Republicans even today. Let’s just say they aren’t as clever as they think they are and African Americans certainly aren’t that dumb.
But the Republican party isn’t really trying to get black votes (or at least they’re not willing to make any concessions in their basic policies to make that happen.) However, they have a problem with a constituency they do need to vote for them: decent white people. And decent white people don’t want to be complicit in racism. (Granted, most decent white people are complicit in racism in a thousand different ways even if they don’t fully realize it, but voting for a party that is overtly racist is so obviously wrong that many of them will balk at such an association.) And since the Republicans have alienated virtually all Americans of color, they must get a large percentage of whites in order to win political power.
It goes on to show some of their other attempts at outreach most recently a very sad affair in which they tried to honor black music and Rence Priebus, chairman of the RNC, ditched the event at the last minute. Sad.
They’ve got a serious problem nationally and it’s going to get worse. The question is whether their ongoing attempts to suppress the votes and the influence of racial minorities will outweigh the votes of racial minorities and decent white folk. In the short run they may be able to eke out some advantage. Long term they’re in trouble.
(This is an updated version of a piece that first appeared here. Comments in [square brackets] indicate latest changes.)
As you may know, the Fast Track legislation needed to force TPP, the next NAFTA-style trade deal, through the Congress has passed in the Senate. (Fast Track is officially called “Trade Promotion Authority” or TPA. There are way too many acronyms in this part of the world, as you’ll soon see.)
If Fast Track becomes law, TPP will be almost impossible to stop, since Fast Track gives the current president and the next one the right to “fast track” through Congress anything she or he calls a “trade deal” — no legislative delays, no filibuster, no amendments, little time for debate. Just an up or down vote with the clock ticking.
If Fast Track fails, you’ll never hear of TPP again, or read its language. TPP is a secret now — which should tell you how toxic it is — and if it never gets introduced, it will stay a secret. (Even if it does get introduced, it will stay a secret from anyone who isn’t in Congress and from any staffer without a sufficient security clearance. Yes, you read that correctly.)
TPP — the “free trade” deal that isn’t about freedom and isn’t about trade. What is it about? Higher prices, Internet watchdogs, fewer jobs. Watch to learn more.
The fate of the Fast Track bill is now in the hands of members of the U.S. House.
Where TPP and Fast Track Stand in the House
I’ll keep this summary brief, but as specific as I can. I’ve consulted a number of sources, many in print and many privately. Here’s what we know:
▪ The House vote is being delayed until later in June.
After several near death experiences in the Senate, the trade agenda that President Barack Obama is pushing as a second term capstone faces its biggest hurdle yet in the more polarized House.
Anti-trade forces [sic] have struggled to ignite public outrage over Obama’s bid to enact new free-trade agreements, but Democratic opposition in Congress remains widespread.
The outcome may turn on Republicans’ willingness to hand the president a major win in his final years in office. Underscoring the difficulties, House leaders are looking at the second or third week of June to schedule a vote, even though House members return from recess on Monday.
Did you note the phrase “anti-trade forces” in the second paragraph? That tells you the AP is in the tank for TPP. No one on the anti-TPP side is “anti-trade” — this is Obama administration spin and nothing else. And yes, there is widespread public outrage, despite some misleading polls out lately. The misinterpretation of those polls is Obama spin also.
▪ There aren’t enough votes in the House to pass Fast Track. [Update: Alan Grayson names 18 Democrats, with phone numbers (!), as perps in a letter to his list. Obama is claiming he has 20 Democratic votes in a piece in The Hill. See this article for Democrats that Obama is “wooing.” With 20 Democratic Yes votes, Republicans still need fewer than 47 or 48 defections.]
The delay in the vote tells you all you need to know. They don’t have enough Yes votes in the House. So let’s look at the numbers.
There are 433 members in the House of Representatives at the moment — 245 Republicans and 188 Democrats and two vacancies — so it takes 217 members to pass a bill. I’ve heard that the number of Democratic Yes votes is as low as 17 (NY Times); “about 20” (AP again); or “more than 20 votes, possibly 25 or 27” (via some trade publications). We know for sure that 17 Democrats announced they will vote Yes. The number of on-the-fence Democrats is either as low as seven (NY Times); no higher than a “dozen” (AP); or “dozens” (The Hill). I think the lower number is more accurate.
Press reports put Republican No votes at “40 to 50” (AP, same link), but I’ve heard that the number could be as high as 70. Democrats friendly to the White House are working hard to move their members, but Pelosi is reportedly not helping (see below). Republicans are also working on their members, and there’s a separate “whip” operation just for this bill, so the numbers could obviously change.
One group to watch on the Republican side is Heritage Action, which is strongly opposed to the trade assistance bill, TAA, described below, as an “egregiously ineffective welfare program.” Heritage Action could “peel off 10-15 Republican votes” if it whips strongly (a proprietary trade publication).
Despite these unknowns, we can still do the math. They have at least 17 Democratic Yes votes, but they don’t have enough Republicans to pass TPA. This means the number of Republican No votes is greater than 45, at least at the moment, and again, could be as high as 70.
Bottom line — However many Democratic votes they need, they don’t have them. When Obama and Boehner have the numbers to pass TPA, they’ll vote before you could blink. They’re not voting. If there really are at least seven Democrats on the fence or secretly in favor, that makes 24 Democratic votes — which they don’t have. That logic puts the Republican No votes at 52 or more.
▪ Pelosi told Boehner she won’t help him find the votes.
[Update: But maybe the Times piece is spin. Later reports say Pelosi is a TPP enabler — a perp — she may organize a Yes vote while voting No herself(!). Her phone number: (202) 225-4965. I’ll return to this.]
This is from the same NY Times article linked above (my emphasis):
Only 17 Democrats out of 188 have come out in favor of so-called fast-track authority — and many of them are being hounded by labor and environmental groups to change their minds. Opponents of the trade deal say just seven Democrats remain truly undecided.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, who has yet to declare her position, has told House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio that he will have to produce 200 Republican votes to win the 217 he needs. In other words, she is not promising a single new convert.
Three things to note about this. First, Pelosi is relying on the list of announced supporters for her estimate of 17 Democratic Yes votes. As noted, other estimates are higher.
Second, Nancy Pelosi is saying she won’t whip for the bill — she won’t do anything to convince those seven or more undecided Democrats. Pelosi may still want “a path to yes,” as she was quoted earlier as saying (and shame on her for that), but a path to yes at this point means surrender to the President — no currency manipulation provision that has teeth (otherwise Japan won’t sign), for example, and no anti-slavery language that has teeth (or Malaysia won’t sign).
Third, look at the Republican numbers. If there really are close to 70 No votes on the Republican side, Fast Track is in trouble. With 50 Republican No’s, Obama and Boehner need 22 Yes Democrats. With 70 Republican No’s, they need 42 Yes Democrats. It may be that the number of Yes Democrats is fixed by now, so it’s up to the Republicans. However many Yes Republicans they need, they don’t have them yet.
If you live in a purple district with a Republican representative, call now and often, and say “Fast Track will determine my 2016 vote.” House phone numbers here.
Every member of the House will be up for election in 2016. The results this November could change the electoral fortunes of a great many members of both parties, turning a quite a few into lobbyists. (Could DC absorb that many lobbyists in one cycle? We may find out.)
▪ The deal could come apart in other ways as well.
David Dayen and I talked on a recent Virtually Speaking Sundays show about all of the poison pills in the cluster of bills around the Fast Track (TPA) bill.
One is strong currency manipulation language, another is the way Medicare is currently used to pay for “trade assistance” benefits for workers who need retraining and other help. Trade assistance is handled in a separate bill, called TAA, which is currently tied to the Fast Track, or TPA, bill. (See what I mean about acronyms?) The trade assistance bill is itself a poison pill for many Republicans, who hate anything to do with worker compensation or assistance.
And then there’s the “slavery” issue that Obama and Boehner need to ignore in order to get the Malaysians to sign TPP. (For a look at why, see here.) As Dayen pointed out on Virtually Speaking, if weak anti-slavery language passes this Congress, it would be the first time a slavery compromise was passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Another feather in the legacy cap of the first black president? The irony writes itself.
According to some publications, four bills will move in tandem through the House — Fast Track, TAA and two side bills — to address these concerns. The bill’s supporters are looking for a way to let House members vote for something that looks like their conscience, while not letting those other votes have any real effect on Fast Track itself. How all that will work is anyone’s guess at the moment.
The proponents’ bottom line is simple — make sure the only bill Obama cares about, Fast Track, comes out of the House with the same language that it entered with, thus avoiding a conference with the Senate and a second House vote. Everything else is window dressing and conscience balm for House members as they vote to enable or disable the next NAFTA.
▪ The clock is ticking.
Though the goal is simple, the maneuvering is complicated, and the clock is ticking. This can’t drag out forever. Can a trade bill pass in an election year? Will our trade “partners” lose faith in Obama and walk away?
The end of July might be the deadline for Obama’s top legislative priority. When lawmakers return to Washington after the August recess, the presidential election will have heated up, and it could be impossible politically to navigate the trade debate.
This is as interesting as Congress has been in a while, unless you look at the “NAFTA on steroids” scale of suffering that TPP will cause. Then it’s not interesting at all; just an exercise in consciencelessness. Stay tuned.
Here’s what he said about the bill coming to him for signature that bans abortions after 20 week with no exceptions for rape or incest:
I mean, I think for most people who are concerned about that, it’s in the initial months where they’re most concerned about it,” Walker said of pregnancies caused by rape and incest.
“In this case, again, it’s an unborn life, it’s an unborn child and that’s why we feel strongly about it,” Walker said. “I’m prepared to sign it either way that they send it to us.”
I suspect normal people are appalled that he would force a 12 year old girl to give birth to her rapist father’s child — her own sibling. (And we know that this 12 year old girl or 16 year old girl or however old she might be would be loathe to report her pregnancy in the “initial months” when Walker thinks women are “concerned” about being pregnant by their rapist.) So, sure he’s made a big mistake with people of compassion everywhere.
But what about the hardcore Christian right he’s trying to please with this barbaric bill? Guess what? They aren’t going to like what he’s said there either. Trying to have it both ways, as he clumsily does over and over again, Walker has just implied that wanting these exceptions are understandable in the “initial months” of pregnancy which is absolutely wrong in the eyes of the anti-abortion zealots. There are no exceptions in their view. You can see that Walker knows this with his attempt at recovery by saying “it’s an unborn life and unborn child” which is supposed to soothe any zealots who are afraid he’s going wobbly on abortion with that implication.
I’m not sure it works. I wrote about his troubles with the Christian Right recently discussing a recent meeting in Washington where leaders put him on notice. This bill is an important step for him to solidify his bona fides with them — it doesn’t help that he tried to soothe the pro-choice people in his comments. That’s the last thing they want him to do.
Republican presidential candidates have to walk a delicate line on this issue and the Christian Right isn’t making it easy for them. Walker is unusually awkward about it — but then, he’s unusually awkward about everything.
BREAKING: Obama signs bill reshaping NSA's phone records program, renewing powers that had expired.— The Associated Press (@AP) June 3, 2015
Passage of the USA Freedom Act does not end the debate about privacy and government spying. It is hardly a speed bump. The FBI surveillance flights reported yesterday demonstrated that. As Digby observed last night, “And just wait until the drone fleet gets going…”
The last time the press exposed a fleet of government aircraft operating behind shellcorporations, the aircraft were ferrying terrorism suspects to exotic CIA “black sites” or foreign prisons for torture.
But the debate in the Senate over the Patriot Act was not about that. What Dan Froomkin wrote last week about the Patriot Act debate and
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell bears repeating:
Anybody paying attention knows it’s not a policy debate. The reasons McConnell and others cite for wanting to extend the program as is — despite the fact that it’s flatly illegal, essentially useless, and spectacularly invasive — are laughable. In fact, the compromise they’re willing to fight to the death to oppose was actually proposed by the NSA.
The issue is they just don’t want Snowden officially vindicated, by an act of Congress.
That is to say, they damned well don’t care that what’s being done is illegal. They only care that it got exposed. Which is something, I guess. Wall Street doesn’t even care that much.
The Republican “meltdown” over failure to renew the Patriot Act included what Sen. Barbara Boxer described on All In with Chris Hayes last night as a temper tantrum by McConnell. The Senate Majority leader even committed a messaging faux pas by repeating a headline calling his failure “a resounding victory for Edward Snowden.” Bad move.
The Guardian this morning calls the reforms’ passage a vindication for Snowden. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden noted that more needs to be done:
“This is the only beginning. There is a lot more to do,” Wyden told reporters after the vote. “We’re going to have very vigorous debate about the flawed idea of the FBI director to require companies to build weaknesses into their products. We’re going to try to close the backdoor search loophole – this is part of the Fisa Act and is going to be increasingly important, because Americans are going to have their emails swept up increasingly as global communications systems begin to merge.”
He also pointed to a proposal in the House “to make sure government agencies don’t turn cell phones of Americans into tracking devices” as another target for NSA reformers.
Zach Beauchamp at Vox made a smart simple observation about Iraq which seems to elude just about everyone. But then he makes a mistake.
To understand why the Middle East is in chaos today, and why the Obama administration seems to lack a playbook for how to respond, you need to understand the failed US strategy behind Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. It was emblematic of a huge shift in US strategy in the Middle East — one that had disastrous results.
Bush wanted to remake the Middle East: replace the region’s autocracies with democracies, and solve America’s terrorism problem in the process. But the plan failed. Iraq became embroiled in a vicious civil war. Iran grew in strength, kicking off an increasingly sectarian fight with Saudi Arabia that has fueled conflict throughout the region.
When the Arab Spring protests toppled governments in the region, it added to the chaos, and provided new theaters of conflict. Neither Bush’s new plan nor the Cold War-era strategy that preceded it had any good answers for these problems.
This collapse in American strategy didn’t cause the Arab Spring, or all of the chaos that followed it. But it was a huge contributor to the problems the region faces today — and explains why the United States seems totally unable to do anything about it.
All of that seems right to me. But he goes on to say that Bush administration believed after 9/11 that the middle east needed to be remade in order to stop jihadism and Iraq was the most logical place to start. But that’s not the way it was. The policymakers in the Bush administration had been lobbying to go into Iraq long before there was any fear of jihadism. In fact, they barely acknowledged jihadism existed. Now it’s true that they wanted to remake the middle east but it was for a host of reasons that had to do with maintaining American hegemony, oil, Israel etc. Jihadism wasn’t even on their radar, hence the August 6th memorandum to which Bush replied, “ok you’ve covered your ass…”
There are many reasons why various players wanted that war. But it’s fair to say that those who wanted it most fervently all agreed with this quote from PNAC fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht:
“We have no choice but to re-instill in our foes and friends the fear that attaches to any great power…. Only a war against Saddam Hussein will decisively restore the awe that protects American interests abroad and citizens at home”.
Let’s just say that didn’t exactly work out the way they planned it.
Setting motivations aside Beauchamp certainly gets this part right:
Iraq’s collapse created a civil war that sucked in the region’s powers and sowed sectarian strife around the region. That situation presaged America’s current problems in the Middle East after the Arab Spring — and, in some ways, helped create them. And neither America’s traditional Middle East policy nor Bush’s revisionist strategy offered a way to respond to the chaos.
American policymakers were caught totally flat-footed by the freedom agenda’s collapse. Administration officials had no plan for dealing with an Iraq consumed by sectarian civil war. “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Dick Cheney famously said just before the invasion.
Iraq wasn’t the only place Bush’s strategy backfired. At the US’s behest, the Palestinian Authority held elections in 2006. The militant group Hamas won, eventually resulting in a Palestinian civil war and schism, with Hamas in charge of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority limited to the West Bank.
Bush’s freedom agenda held no answers to these problems. While the US could topple dictatorships and force elections, it had no real ability to get Sunni Iraqis to trust a Shia-dominated Iraqi state. Hence why the 2007 troop surge, heralded as a success at the time, managed only to temporarily reduce violence rather than solve the sectarian grievances that would eventually drive Iraqi Sunnis into ISIS’s arms.
Likewise, the US couldn’t reform the deeply corrupt Palestinian Authority practices that fueled Hamas’s popularity. Bush’s democracy agenda didn’t come with a plan B.
Bush’s freedom agenda held no answers to these problems because it wasn’t a real agenda. It was a PR campaign designed to make Americans feel good about themselves for invading a country that hadn’t attacked us. And, to be fair, there were neoconservatives who actually wanted to believe this drivel about the “birthing of democracy.” I’m fairly sure that Bush was one of them. (I used to always refer to them as “starry-eyed neocons.”) But you can bet Cheney and Rumsfeld didn’t believe a bit of it — they were part of a hardocre, imperial clacque that went all the way back to the 70s. To the extent they signed on to the “lighter side” of neoconservatism it was purely for propaganda purposes. Their motives were about showcasing American power, period.
It’s dreary having to talk about this again. But the results in Iraq are what they are. Many people predicted it would come to something like this and maybe it was inevitable at some point. But regardless of their “true motivations” Bush’ neoconservative cronies had been pushing for this thing since the first gulf war and knew they’d never have a better opportunity.
