For what it’s worth, I thought Joe Sestak did an admirable job explaining why we need to change funding of the military based on the wars we fight and the threats we face, not based on the threat of a USSR that doesn’t exist.
Which is fine, but he dances around the larger point that, for example, we don’t NEED 187 F-22 fighters, which is the level AFTER this shift in emphasis in the Pentagon budget. I would go further and hint that we don’t need troops based in 130 countries either, unless we are planning a major imperial expansion anytime soon. Similarly, Robert Gates explained, to his credit, that we don’t need each armed service to have duplicative machinery and personnel when fighting jointly in a theater, but he nonetheless has increased the Pentagon budget even when accounting for this duplication, or at least being mindful of it for the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review.
Now, Matthew Yglesias makes a moderately compelling argument that you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run, on this issue.
I would urge progressives who are having trouble getting themselves excited about this fight to recognize two points. One is that it really is nice to reorient a given quantity of military spending in more useful directions even if it doesn’t lead to cuts in the headline number. But the other is that if you ever do want to see further-reaching reform, we need to pass something like this budget first. It’s a key political test of whether it’s even possible to defy what the defense contractors and the joint chiefs want. If that does prove possible, then in years to come many things are possible, including a long-term trajectory that has defense declining as a percent of GDP. If it’s not possible then nothing is possible, and no future president will tackle it.
I recognize the first point and strongly disagree with the second, especially in light of the initial reaction. Conservatives and those who want to protect their parochial interests were ALWAYS going to characterize this as a cut. They know they can score political points off of it, and furthermore they have sufficiently brainwashed the media into believing that military spending is magic and doesn’t affect the budget. In this way, Republicans can very easily call spending on giant weapons programs stimulus after arguing for months that federal spending isn’t stimulative. They have wired the political establishment to orient themselves this way. Heck, they have media embeds who extoll the virtues of various weapons systems in the media without having to disclose how they profit off of them.
That being the case, why would anyone want to have this fight TWICE? If you’re going to provoke the reaction that your Administration is cutting military spending, why not actually cut military spending in the process? This is a familiar Democratic technocrat argument, where they argue for a half-measure and a go-slow approach because we’ll have the upper hand on talking points. “See, it’s really an INCREASE!” And thus progress gets delayed and eventually denied.
It may hold that the Obama Administration doesn’t actually want to cut military spending, which is my view, based on the fact that as a candidate, the President consistently said that he would increase the budget. While I appreciate the logic behind transformation and the need for more efficiently orienting our military toward actual things that could happen, I don’t appreciate so-called progressives assuring me that this is some step toward a less insane balance in the military budget as a percentage of GDP. There’s no evidence for that whatsoever, and it strikes me as the typical Democratic skittishness to actually embrace real change.
I think I mentioned this here in passing once, but it deserves a fuller rendering. The outcry over the President’s expansive use of the state secrets privilege to shut down lawsuits against illegal wiretapping has escalated. TPM Muckraker finds a series of experts willing to acknowledge that this is no different from Bush’s policy to get these lawsuits tossed out.
Ken Gude, an expert in national security law at the Center for American Progress, supported the administration’s invocation of the state secrets claim when it was made earlier this year in an extraordinary rendition case. But its position in Jewel is “disappointing,” Gude told TPMmuckraker, calling himself “frustrated.”
Gude confirmed that the Obama-ites were taking the same position as the Bushies on state secrets questions. “They’ve taken the maximalist view that the judge has hardly any role in determining whether national security” would be compromised by the release of classified information,” he said. “There’s going to be people who are very unhappy, and justifiably so.”
He added: “I’m very uncomfortable with the notion that the people who get to decide [whether national security would be jeopardized] is the government.”
Gude’s general view was echoed by Amanda Frost, an associate professor at Washington College of Law who has written extensively about issues of government transparency. Frost made clear that she hadn’t followed the Jewel case, but called the Obama administration’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in a similar high-profile wiretapping case involving an Oregon-based Arabic charity “indefensible.” The NSA, she said, has already acknowledged the existence of the wiretapping program, and some of its details are publicly known, so the claim that national security would be jeopardized merely by allowing the trial to proceed doesn’t hold water. The government is making that argument in both the Oregon case and Jewel.
There are more at the link. Even the traditional media are starting to openly questionObama officials on these points – and the officials are maintaining that the President fully supports the invocation of the state secrets privilege on expansive national security grounds to dismiss lawsuits. Dan Froomkin calls it utterly un-American. And this find by Greg Sargent makes clear the official hypocrisy at work:
Obama attacked Bush’s use of (the state secrets privilege on the grounds of national security) during the campaign. Indeed, Obama’s campaign Web site still identifies Bush’s use of the tactic as a “problem” that created undo “secrecy” and needs to be changed.
Congress can actually act here. Russ Feingold has carried legislation that would sharply limit the ability of the executive to use the state secrets privilege. Far from being the work of “America-haters” or based on a knee-jerk antipathy to George Bush, civil liberties advocates were always adamant that the standard of the rule of law be equally applied in all cases. No executive, Republican or Democratic, should have the untrammeled power to essentially supersede the courts and act above the law. Here’s Feingold’s statement, reflective of this belief:
I am troubled that once again the Obama administration has decided to invoke the state secrets privilege in a case challenging the previous administration’s alleged misconduct. The Obama administration’s action, on top of Congress’s mistaken decision last year to give immunity to the telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in the warrantless wiretapping program, will make it even harder for courts to rule on the legality of that program. In February, I asked for a classified briefing so that I can understand the reasons for the Department’s decision to invoke the privilege in another case, and I intend to seek information on this new case as well. I also encourage the greatest possible public accounting of the use of the state secrets privilege and welcome the Attorney General’s statement that he hopes to share his review with the American people.
Beyond the particular case at issue here, it is clear that there is an urgent need for legislation to give better guidance to the courts on how to handle assertions of the state secrets privilege. The American people must be able to have confidence that the privilege is not being used to shield government misconduct. That is why I am working with Senators Leahy, Specter, and others to pass the State Secrets Protection Act as soon as possible.
This is truly ugly stuff, and the worst aspects of the Obama Administration thus far, in fact almost all of them, have been when they have sought to participate in what amounts to a cover-up. They should not have the tools to do so, at least in this case. And while state secrets invocations are generally successful in the courts, the continual smackdowns by federal judges to the Bush Administration’s attempted capture of more and more expansive executive power should at the least caution Obama’s team not to follow down the same path. But they are now fully implicated in this, and will have to face the consequences.
I was going to mention this little discussion between Neil Cavuto and Glenn Beck on Fox News yesterday, but I figured there was only so much crazy you could handle before you started to throw up on your keyboards. Think Progress has more video, if you think you can take it, but here’s the upshot of the conversation: these protests, which are allegedly making “the Left” angry, are a spontaneous uprising of regular folks who are mad as hell and aren’t gonna take it anymore. And FoxNews is repeating it dozens of times a day as it promotes these gatherings.
Here’s the thing. The right lost it’s ability to be spontaneous sometime back when Phyllis Schlaffley was pounding the ERA. They require structure and leadership in order to function, which is one reason why their movement and their party are so stuck. (They proudly call themselves dittoheads, after all.)
So, it’s no surprise to learn this:
Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests:
– Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters, contacting conservative activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.” – Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida. – Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media. – Freedom Works has severaldomain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests. – Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.
This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey, the former Republican Majority Leader who now leads Freedom Works and is a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper. Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.
If any members of the press are reading this, I hope they can see that this is the story, not the sad little dupes who are voluntarily calling themselves tea-baggers.
Remember last summer, when Russia and Georgia waged war over two breakaway republics? Pretty much every five minutes on cable news you’d see Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the US-educated darling of the neocons, who played the perfect martyr for his people. He was seen as the benevolent leader gallantly facing down the Russian Bear. John McCain almost immediately picked up his struggle and termed it “the most severe international crisis since the Cold War,” and pledged American solidarity with the Georgian people.
They crammed into the streets by the tens of thousands Thursday, students and pensioners and merchants. They stood on the same scrap of ground, in front of the Stalinist stone hulk of the Georgian parliament building, demanding democracy and screaming the same slogan: Tzadi! (Go!)
This time, adoring crowds were not gathered to sweep the young, flamboyant Mikheil Saakashvili to power. Little more than five years after they cheered the U.S.-backed politician into the presidency, people returned with an air of disgust, in the hope of shaming him into a resignation.
Saakashvili is besieged by protest in his own capital, with a broad consortium of opposition figures — including some former members of his government and onetime political allies — vowing to keep the crowds in the street until he steps down. Opposition leaders insulted and reviled the president Thursday, calling him a coward and a womanizer and mocking his moments of public fear […]
Against a backdrop of growing popular disaffection, Saakashvili’s presidency has been punctuated by moments of scandal. His government has shut down critical news media, beaten and tear-gassed peaceful demonstrators, and, most disastrously, charged into an ill-advised war with Russia that in effect left Georgia’s two breakaway republics under Russian occupation.
The Bush Administration basically propped up this guy when he swept into power, and he immediately became dictatorial in the name of democracy. And while the protests are partially a function of the economic crises gripping Eastern Europe, they also betray a personal enmity for this guy made the symbol of the people here in the US during that conflict with Russia.
First he pours “gasoline”on top of some guy, using his patented snotty whimper to run down all the alleged atrocities. Then he actually says this:
President Obama, why don’t you set us on fire? Do you not hear? Do you not hear the cries of people who are saying STOP! We would like some SANITY in our country for a SECOND.
We didn’t vote to lose the republic. We didn’t VOTE for any of this stuff. We voted for CHANGE. You know what that change was? The change we wanted was an end to the GAMES! We wanted the games to be ended. We want people to say what they mean and mean what they say. We want people just to be honest. We want the parties to actually STAND for something. We want the SPENDING that is out of control, you’re building bridges that lead to nowhere, you’re spending MONEY that leads only to slavery! We just want some common sense. That’s all we want.
We can disagree with each other on policies. But good lord almighty man, some of us don’t agree with all of the policies. We’d like to have a country left at the end of four years. No need to set us on fire.
That’s just one little excerpt.
It’s kind of like listening to a five year old in the backseat sing a stream of consciousness story about monsters. Except for the psychotic parts.
I can see why people enjoy this, though. They tune in to see if the guy will projectile vomit or put out one of his own eyes for ratings. It’s a new kind of reality show: Will He Or Won’t He Lose It On The Air?
I’m at Center For Inquiry’s World Congress where Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, Sylvia Kahan, and myself will be presenting a short program of excerpts from The Origin. There are going to be a bunch of wonderful speakers and panelists, including my friend, Barbara Forrest and a lot of other friends to catch up with. Say hello if you’re attending.
Am I the only one who finds it a little bit laughable that in response to the visit with Castro by the CBC members, Republicans are demanding (pdf) that prisoners in Cuba be released before the US normalizes relations?
Here’s Congressman Chris Smith’s heartfelt plea earlier today, in which he castigates the congressmen and women for failing to visit Cuba’s political prisoners:
Long ago I learned that when the US government embraces and coddled dictators and turns its back on political prisoners, the jailers taunt the prisoners with this. They tell them — “you are forgotten, no one knows you are here! No one is trying to help you.” The beatings actually increase.
“You are forgotten and abandoned” is a terrible thing to hear — to be taunted with — when you are in Combinado e Este prison, eating worm infested rice in a cell the size of a closet, standing in open sewage, trying to keep up your spirits to survive another day of punches and beatings. But I am afraid the prisoners are hearing just that after the congressional visit that ended this week.
I couldn’t agree more. But it’s a bit unseemly to make that argument when Americans are holding their own prisoners in Cuba, some of whom have tried to kill themselves out of despair that they will never even be given a trial or know if they will see the outside world again. I assume they don’t have worms in their rice, but they have, by all accounts suffered quite a few beatings and worse. And many of them are innocent.
I think American congressmen who to Cuba probably need to be a little bit circumspect about lecturing anyone about wrongfully imprisoning anyone. Shamefully, the US doesn’t exactly have a lot of credibility on this issue.
I should note that Secretary of State Clinton took quite a bit of heat for moving human rights to the back burner when she was in China. I agree that it’s a terrible thing to do, but she can’t credibly do anything else as long as we are running prisons like Guantanamo and Bagram and covering up the extent of the torture and kidnapping that was done during the Bush administration.
Until the US cleans its own dirty laundry, it’s hardly in a position to go around telling other people how to behave. That’s why it is so vital that President Obama fix this mess and quickly. Until he does it, his foreign policy will be hamstrung and eventually will be seen to be hypocritical and dishonest. His recent trip showed that the world wants to give him a chance and see him as a positive change from George W. Bush. But I’m not sure that’s going to last long if his government has to soft-peddle human rights and international law — or sound like these Republican dolts did today. If you take away moral authority all that’s left is brute force. And that’s the Cheney Gang’s foreign policy.
For the last eight weeks, nearly 200 federal examiners have labored inside some of the nation’s biggest banks to determine how those institutions would hold up if the recession deepened.
What they are discovering may come as a relief to both the financial industry and the public: the banking industry, broadly speaking, seems to be in better shape than many people think, officials involved in the examinations say.
That is the good news. The bad news is that many of the largest American lenders, despite all those bailouts, probably need to be bailed out again, either by private investors or, more likely, the federal government. After receiving many millions, and in some cases, many billions of taxpayer dollars, banks still need more capital, these officials say.
….Regulators say all 19 banks undergoing the exams will pass them. Indeed, they say this is a test that a bank simply will not fail: if the examiners determine that a bank needs “exceptional assistance,” the government, that is, taxpayers, will provide it.
….Regulators recognize that for the tests to be credible, not all of the banks can be winners. And it is becoming increasingly clear, industry insiders say, that the government will use its findings to press certain banks to sell troubled assets. The hope is that by cleansing their balance sheets, banks will be able to lure private capital, stabilizing the entire industry.
If a bank needs “exceptional assistance,” they either haven’t passed the stress test, or the test isn’t stringent enough to account for that possibility. If the banks need to be bailed out again, then they too have not passed the stress test, designed to see, as far as I can tell, that banks can survive on their own. In other words, the stress test isn’t a stress test at all but a check of how much more money will need to be plowed into the system.
Here’s Kevin:
So what have we learned here? First: all 19 banks will pass. Second: not all the banks can be winners. Third: the ones that pass — but aren’t winners! — will be propped up by taxpayers. Fourth: no, they won’t be propped up by taxpayers, they’ll be forced to sell assets and raise private capital.
Huh? Which is it? If by “pass,” regulators merely mean that a bank won’t be instantly seized and its management defenestrated, then I guess this makes sense. Awards for all! On the other hand, the prospect of a bank getting a “needs improvement” grade and then successfully selling a big stock issue to raise private capital is just fanciful. Even banks that pass with flying colors will have trouble doing that.
So what’s going on here? Why are Treasury officials privately telling reporters that everyone is going to pass but that some banks will receive a pass-minus and may be required to do things that are almost certainly impossible? Are they just trying to lay the groundwork for failure and temporary nationalization later on? Or what?
Any leak at this stage would of course give the impression that everything is fine. Wouldn’t want to roust the “animal spirits” and get everyone panicking again. But just that very fact points to the outsized influence of the financial industry in driving US policy. The financial sector is simply too big relative to the rest of the economy, and the consequences are immense.
But what caused the fall and rise of inequality? A lot of very high incomes, both in the pre-1930 world and now, have been in the finance sector. A recent paper by Phillipon and Reshef (cited today by Gillian Tett in the FT) traces the path of relative compensation in finance, and ties it to regulation and deregulation. Here’s the key figure:
OK, correlation does not imply causation yada yada. The move to regulate in the 1930s was part of a broader crackdown on rampant capitalism, and the deregulation since 1980s was similarly part of a broader phenomenon. But it’s a good bet that finance is a key part of the story of how we got to where we are.
Over the past couple weeks, as this argument has become more prominent, the pushback from the banks is that the “level-headed” people must rein in the impulses of the “pitchfork” crowd, because economic recovery depends on a healthy banking sector. In other words, the same economic terrorism argument (“Keep us fat and happy or we’ll blow this economy to bits!”). Simon Johnson deconstructs this nonsense.
You might think the “anti-pitchfork” strategy might work, particularly as it has in the past (e.g., in the early Clinton years). The problem for this strategy now is not just the fragile state of banks – by itself this can be ignored for a long while through forbearance, behind a smokescreen of complicated schemes with confusing acronyms – but the ways in which the markets they created now operate […]
The technocratic options are simple, (1) assume a better regulator, of a kind that has never existed on this face of this earth, (2) make banks smaller, less powerful, and much more boring.
In other words, a dash of new regulation and a solemn promise from the banksters never to break the economy again won’t cut it anymore, as the system has grown too big and too destructive. What we need is a different conception of the system of providing capital, one balanced against the size of the industries they can support, which actually produce goods and create jobs.
I know that the teabaggers have their own TV network and have sucked up all the political oxygen with their series of demonstrations, but the New Way Forward events happening this weekend are important. Not because street actions are necessarily valuable in the 21st century, but because the organizers behind this effort have a clear message that pushes against the simple left-right lens and really seeks a reinvention of our economic realities. Here’s how honorary co-chair Mike Lux describes the effort:
I agreed this week to become an honorary co-chair of A New Way Forward, a spontaneous grassroots movement that is reminding me of the early days of Moveon.org. This impressive group of passionate organizers got involved because they were listening to progressive economists and business leaders talk about alternatives to the Geithner plan on re-building the banking system, and they decided to get involved. Some of these organizers are old hands like Joe Trippi (who truly is an old hand — I met Trippi when he was helping Walter Mondale in Iowa in 1983, and he already seemed like an old hand then) and Zephyr Teachout of Dean campaign fame, and some are relative youngsters like Tiffiniy Cheng.
I agreed to become a co-chair in part (of course) because I strongly support the principles for banking policy that they have laid out — the same ones supported by all of the economists and economic policy thinkers I respect the most, people like Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, Joe Stiglitz, William Greider, Simon Johnson, Jamie Galbraith, Leo Hindery, and Rob Johnson. But I also agreed to help because the spontaneous passion and obvious organizing skill, completely unsupported with money or institutional DC help, reminded me of the early days of Moveon.org. Before there was ever the online organizational giant of Moveon.org, it was a simple internet petition written and put online in the living room of Wes Boyd and Joan Blades and forwarded to a few of their friends. Wes and Joan didn’t know anything about how Washington D.C. works, or how a PAC operated, or how a poll was conducted. They didn’t have any money or institutional support when they started, although a few of us in DC recognized their potential and lent a helping hand. All they had was their passion about an issue (in that case, the impeachment fight), and great instincts about online organizing.
Somehow I got listed among their supporters, and it’s a pleasure to be put in the company with the others on the list. Ultimately what will be important is not this series of rallies but what they spark. However, it would be nice to see a good counterpoint to next week’s nonsense, so please join the demonstration in your area.
When the McCain Palin people started blathering on about Obama being a socialist I wondered whether it would blow back on the conservatives. After all, only old people like me, who grew up during the cold war, still have that reflexive freakout over the word. Young people just see it as another political ideology.
So, when the rightwingers went nuts and startedcalling this very popular young president a socialist, rather than tarring him with an unpopular label, they ended up validating socialism by applying it to a popular, mainstream politician.
I see this poll as even more evidence of how widespread the American people’s rejection of conservative values has become. Ever since Sarah Palin ceased to be an attractive-but-unknown face from Alaska, conservatives have railed against any attempt to use government spending to mitigate the present economic downturn, labeling it “Socialism!” The alternative, they say, is to double-down on George W. Bush’s policies, cut taxes on the super-rich, and rely on the invisible hand of the market to make everything all better again. In other words, the American people have been subjected to a months-long campaign which defines President Obama’s popular policies to improve the economy as “socialism,” and George W. Bush’s disastrous policies as “not socialism.” Is it any shock, then, that many Americans no longer find the word “socialism” very scary? One irony of this turn of events is that the conservative campaign to redefine Keynesian economics as “socialism” may have the effect of legitimizing actual socialists. Not that long ago, anyone who was properly labeled as a socialist was appropriately excluded from the American economic debate—virtually no one, including myself, has any interest in nationalizing the entire private sector. Now that conservatives have associated the word with the popular President Obama, however, I fear that real socialists now have an opportunity to latch on to the President’s popularity and ride it to greater relevance.
I don’t fear that, myself. I think it would be a very good thing to have some real socialists participate in our political discourse. As long as we have disaster capitalists holding the kind of political sway they clearly hold, there is a need for balance from the other side of the ideological spectrum. We’ve seen the results of allowing the Big Money Boyz to have their way in all things. A little dose of socialism (or fear of socialism, anyway) might mitigate their influence a little bit . And it would serve the wingnuts right for dredging up what was essentially a dead ideology in America and applying it to the politician whom young people nearly worship. Bad tactic all around. But then that’s their specialty these days.
I guess Michael Steele sent out an RNC fundraising letter accusing ACORN of conspiring to rig the Census. They forgot Americans for Democratic Action, NBC News, the Teamsters and most of the cast of the Broadway production of “Rent”. It’s a division of labor.
But I have to agree with this letter about the implications of demonizing the Census, an activity resulting in people coming to your home to count the population.
Michael Steele is playing a dangerous game with that fund-raising letter, and people are going to die because of it.
Nine years ago, my wife worked for the Census, knocking on people’s doors and gathering information. There’s no way she’ll do it again next year. Steele is making it too dangerous.
Census takers put themselves in vulnerable positions. They don’t know who or what is on the other side of the door. The door might be opened by a sexual predator, or someone who’s not in control of a vicious dog. Or the door could be opened by someone with a gun in one hand and Steele’s letter in the other, seething with hatred for liberals and ACORN.
I was a teenager in Southeast Pennsylvania in 1990, and Census enumeration (following up at homes that had no form returned) paid relatively well, wasn’t too taxing and got me a sticker for my car that said “Official Government Business” that allowed me to park wherever I wanted. And one day, I walked to a house on my list, went around the back to knock on the fence to see if I could find anyone in the residence, and a man with a rifle yelled “Get off my property” and pointed the barrel in my direction. Somehow I got him to give up the number of people living in the house and I took off.
One letter politicizing the Census won’t cause an “kill your enumerator” uprising of anti-government cranks. In fact, if conservatives want to sit out the Census and depress their own apportionment numbers, more power to them. But I don’t think we can ignore the steady drumbeat of demonization of normal government functions, hard-wired into the modern conservative movement, and where that anger can export itself. In fact, it has to go somewhere.
