Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Protean Putz

by digby

I’ve been meaning to link to this masterful post by Batocchio for some time but seeing David Rivkin on TV today reminded me of it. This is just a taste:

I haven’t conducted an exhaustive review of all of Rivkin’s statements, but I’ve caught enough to see him argue that: torture is appalling, waterboarding may not be torture, waterboarding cannot be torture if American personnel undergo it, waterboarding is not torture, waterboarding is torture, and torture works. The protean logic and contradictions are rather dizzying, and that’s precisely their intent. They make much more sense if the person offering them isn’t trying to make a coherent argument – like a good defense attorney, he’s trying to muddy the waters and seed doubt in the minds of jurors.

He goes on to excerpt some of Rivkin’s appearances to illustrate that point and continues:

Foreman picks up on the flaw in Rivkin’s last argument, about waterboarding American personnel in SERE training:

FOREMAN: But we’re waterboarding our own people to give them an idea of what they would encounter if they were captured by somebody else.

RIVKIN: Well, forgive me, as a matter of law and ethics, if the given practice like slavery and prostitution is officially odious, you cannot use it no matter what our goals is, you cannot even use it to volunteers. So, if all forms of waterboarding are torture then we are torturing our own people, and the very same instructor who spoke before Congress the other day about how it’s torture, is guilty of practicing torture for decades. We as a society have to come up with the same baseline using (inaudible) in all spheres of public life instead of somehow singularizing this one thing, which is interrogation of combatants and we need to look at it in a broader way.

Rivkin and others have offered this argument several times. It may not be convincing, but it is inventive. (It seems to have first emerged as an attempted rebuttal of former SERE trainer Malcolm Nance’s authoritative 10/31/07 piece, “Waterboarding is Torture… Period.” Nance, a “former Master Instructor and Chief of Training” at the U.S. Navy SERE School, who testified before Congress, appears to be the “very same instructor” Rivkin’s claiming is hypothetically “guilty of practicing torture for decades.”) Rivkin’s also pulling a fast one here, trying to set up a paradox to befuddle the listener. Torture is odious and immoral. SERE training, while tough, is not. Rivkin tries to skip to his conclusion without proving it. He ignores Foreman’s common sense objection and makes a substitution. Looking at the explicit and implicit claims in this exchange, it goes something like this:

RIVKIN: Waterboarding cannot be torture if we subject American personnel to it.

FOREMAN: But SERE training is not torture.

RIVKIN: Aha! But torture is always wrong! Therefore, you must either prosecute our brave men and women in uniform, or not prosecute Bush officials for authorizing torture!

This is precisely the paradox and uncertainty Rivkin wants to sow in listeners’ minds. Rivkin hasn’t actually addressed Foreman’s point, but pushes past it to offer a statement most everyone will agree with – torture is odious – while pretending that he has proven that SERE training is torture. Comparing torture to slavery and prostitution is fine, but Rivkin’s conclusions depend on accepting the false premise that SERE training is torture. It’s certainly not under U.S. law, and Rivkin can’t honestly believe it is – but he’s trying to defend his “clients” in the Bush administration here. Slavery and prostitution are not at all analogous to SERE training (or military service in general – and Rivkin is implicitly comparing American troops to prostitutes here). Looked at another way, Rivkin’s essentially arguing that all sex is rape or vice versa. He does mention that volunteering doesn’t matter, but argues this in relation to torture, while treating as a given a separate point which Foreman has just directly contested – that SERE training is torture. Rivkin ignores the crucial elements of consent, control, purpose, trust and short duration that differentiates the brief waterboarding in SERE training from the illegal and immoral torture technique of waterboarding. Rivkin’s line of argument is particularly despicable given that SERE training is meant to prepare American military personnel against possible torture upon enemy capture, not to justify the torturing of prisoners under American control. SERE training is a defense against an evil practice, not an endorsement of that evil. Most of the American military do not view torture as either moral or legal, and much of the internal pushback against the Bush administration’s policies of torture, abuse and indefinite detention came from military lawyers, many of them conservatives.

I now have an involuntary reflexive response to people like him and I just start throwing food at the TV when he comes on the screen. If you are less far gone than I am, read batocchio’s whole post for a thorough dismantling of Rivkins disingenuous, insulting arguments.

And speaking of insulting, this article in The Week by Francis Wilkerson asks the question that nobody else has thought to ask: why is Dick Cheney all over television?

In the background, behind all the noise and fury about misspent billions and AIG bonuses, there is the story that won’t go away. President Obama and his aides express no interest in it. Major news reports about it are intermittent at best. Yet in twenty, even fifty years, long after the AIG bonuses are forgotten, today’s background story may be as vivid a historical marker as the Palmer raids or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Slowly, not yet surely, America is moving toward a reckoning with torture.

Few people, in the press or elsewhere, seem to want it. The big news organizations have mustered an army of reporters to sort through the financial wreckage. But the torture beat has been largely relegated to lefty bloggers, The New Yorker and a few outraged conservatives. Americans feel bad enough about the general state of affairs. Who wants to wallow in what, in the end, may turn out to be the biggest national guilt trip since Zippo lighters in Vietnam?

[…]

The medium is not the message in politics, but it can provide clues about intent. Some have speculated that Cheney’s television appearances are an attempt to burnish his legacy. But cable television is not where legacies are cast or reconstructed. For that, there is the publishing industry (President Bush has just signed his book deal); the pages of Foreign Affairs; even the op-ed pages. By contrast, television is immediate—a conduit of today’s battles, not history’s.

Cheney seems determined to establish a real-time record of rancor with the new administration, to write his name in neon on a very public White House enemies list. Perhaps he’s genuinely angry. Or perhaps at some future, still hypothetical, date, his current belligerence might prove a useful shield, allowing the vice president to claim that he is being targeted for his political opposition, being made a scapegoat for denouncing his successors. Perhaps Dick Cheney, too, suspects his days of discussing torture may not be over.

If only.
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Armchair Constitutionalists

by dday

Whenever I hear media stars like Lawrence O’Donnell and Howard Fineman pontificating over whether something is Constitutional or not, I get extremely wary, particularly considering they have spent several years arguing about detainee policy and wiretapping and torture in mostly POLITICAL terms instead of the constitutional aspects. Suddenly when Congress tries to set tax policy toward a particular class of wealthy people the media gets out their social studies texts. I imagine there can be a fair amount of reasonable argument around this, but Scott Lemieux, claims the Constitutional concerns are groundless.

Ed — regrettably echoing the hapless Charles Krauthammer — says that “Bills of attainder” and “ex post facto” are two phrases well-known to high school freshmen taking mandatory civics classes, so they must certainly be known to Congressmen.” The ex post facto clause, however, has been held since the early 19th century to apply exclusively to criminal cases. The prohibition on bills of attainder is even less relevant; it certainly prohibits Congress from convicting AIG traders of criminal offenses without a trial, but says absolutely nothing about Congress’s ability to set tax policy.

Another blogger, in addition to the clearly erroneous claims, asserts that the bill violates the equal protection clause. The obvious problem with this argument, however, is that it proves too much. The tax code discriminates in countless ways — against renters and wage earners and in favor of homeowners and investment income earners, for example. It was been well-settled for decades that such discrimination require only some rational relationship to a legitimate government interest. The policy taxing bonuses for corporations that would have gone bankrupt without public support bears a much clearer relationship to a legitimate public objective than a law preventing anyone but an optometrist or ophthalmologist from putting lenses in glasses frames, which the Supreme Court upheld unanimously.

The debate about whether a large excise tax is good public policy ought to go forward. But let’s be clear what these Constitutional questions are all about. The average salary of practically everyone you see on the teevee is well beyond the national average, and in most cases beyond the $250,000 a year cited in the House bill, and used as a dividing line in Obama’s budget to reset marginal tax rates from 35% to 39%. And so, for Overton Window purposes, characterizing any effort to reduce income inequality as unconstitutional makes a whole lot of sense. Take a look at Mark Haines, CNBC’s latest hero, arguing that no company can be “run well” by anyone making under $250,000 a year. Because they’ve been run so well by the overclass to this point.

Here’s a separate interview between Haines and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA):

HAINES: It does not go far enough, sir?
SHERMAN: Absolutely — it doesn’t deal with the Merrill Lynch bonuses, since they were paid in December, and worse than that it doesn’t deal with million-dollar-a-month salaries. More importantly, we should have AIG in receivership, they should’ve been put in receivership months ago, and we would have saved tens of billions of dollars. We wouldn’t see tens of billions going to the richest on Wall Street, and overseas — and of course, these bonus contracts would have been voided. We need receivership, and we need limits on salaries as well as bonuses.

HAINES: Well, receivership … I think most people agree, that would have caused some systemic problems.

SHERMAN: Most people on Wall Street agree. But most people on Main Street do not.

HAINES: And what do the people on Main Street know about running a financial system?

SHERMAN: What do AIG executives know about running a financial system? [crosstalk] They only know how to destroy one.

HAINES: This is witch-huntery. I’ll be perfectly honest with you.

SHERMAN: We don’t have to hunt the witches. We know who they are.

HAINES: You and people who share your opinions seem to think, you know, let’s hold salaries on Wall Street to $100,000. Do you have any idea what Wall Street would look like if you do that?

SHERMAN: Well, first of all, I wouldn’t set the limit at $100,000.

HAINES: Well, whatever. $250[,000]. All the business would go — all the business would go overseas, that’s the bottom line.

SHERMAN: Obama’s position is $500,000 plus unlimited restricted stock. That’s where I’m at as well, although I was actually at a higher level before Obama’s statement. But for you to assume that Wall Street is acting in the national interest flies in the face of recent reality.

There’s a multi-pronged attack here. Congress cannot tax exorbitant bonuses of companies they bailed out because it’s unconstitutional. Corporations can only be run well by the rich because greed is virtuous. Only investor participation can save the financial system, so government had better not get any ideas about capping executive compensation. And those executives must be kept happy and lavished with gifts because they are so wise in the ways of exotic financial instruments that they are the only ones who can defuse them, a fairly ridiculous idea.

Similar arguments made during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when currencies and stock markets collapsed in much of Southeast Asia, turned out to be a smokescreen to protect the executives who were partly responsible for the mess. Recovery from that crisis required Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand to close or consolidate banks. In all three countries, bankers protested, claiming that their connections with borrowers were critical to recovery.

In South Korea, cozy relationships between banks and the large conglomerates called chaebols were a major reason for the crisis. But after the crisis hit, Korean bankers and companies insisted that the complexity of chaebols like Samsung and LG — with their many separate but interwoven businesses — meant that outsiders would not be able to distinguish good loans from bad.

In Thailand, some argued that the preponderance of family-owned businesses — and the lack of clarity about precisely which family members were really in charge — meant that only bankers already working in big institutions like Bangkok Bank and Siam Commercial Bank could determine which borrowers were creditworthy.

The leaders of Thailand and South Korea did not listen to such arguments, and thank goodness. Some of the leading Thai banks were taken over by the government. After the crisis, a civil servant in charge of one such bank noted that its bad loans were much bigger than had been indicated before the takeover, largely because of an internal coverup. Only when outsiders took over did the public discover the full scope of the losses.

We have a major inequality problem in this country. Wages for workers have stagnated while the rich grow ever richer. It is well within the public interest to address that, and because this has become so extreme as to affect consumer spending and economic activity, it’s more vital now than ever. Wall Street has decoupled salary from performance and perpetuated a culture of greed in the belief that such greed made sense for the overall economy. But an oversized financial sector that produces nothing but imagined wealth actually debilitates a country. Simply put, astronomical profits from making side bets on the economy should be discouraged, making the same profits from inventiveness and innovation would be encouraged in the exchange.

If it turns out that you can make a comfortable living at zombie institutions but can’t earn big bucks there, then smart, confident, ambitious, greedy people will leave their jobs and go do other things. In a good way! Maybe they’ll start small businesses. Maybe they’ll join non-enormous, better-managed firms and help them grow and prosper. That’s the kind of thing smart, confident, ambitious, greedy people ought to be doing. Putting their talents to work in the pursuit of profitable market exchanges. Not putting their talents to work trying to run scams at taxpayer expense.

There are promising signals that the Administration is taking concerns about executive compensation seriously, although there are far better ways than having a secretive institution like the Federal Reserve “oversee” giant corporations (which they failed to do in the run-up to this crisis). Perhaps one way is to actually tie pay to performance through Silicon Valley-style compensation schemes, but the best way is through the tax code with rates at the highest marginal levels (I’d insert an additional rate above $1 million or more) that look more like the pre-Reagan era. Which is why those who wed themselves to the establishment elite get so nervous with clawback provisions like the AIG bonus tax. They don’t want anyone in Washington getting any funny ideas about marginal tax rates. After all, it’s unconstitutional.

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Waking Up

by digby

There was a lot of sturm and drang a week or so ago about the NY Times asking Obama whether or not he was a socialist. (dday wrote a great post on the subject.) The accusation against Obama is, of course, idiotic — something designed to please the wingnut rubes, who react in Pavlovian fashion and don’t have any idea what they are so upset about. But socialism is a real system and it’s practiced in some degree throughout the world. So I’ve wondered why nobody is talking to them right now.

Bill Moyers did that on his show this week, speaking with Mike Davis, professor at UC Riverside an card carrying socialist. He’s also an American and someone who lives in the real world so he doesn’t prescribe strictly socialistic solutions to our current problems, but he had some very interesting things to say about the role of the left at a time like this, which I found very thought provoking.

MIKE DAVIS: Well, I mean, the role of the Left or the Left that needs to exist in this country is not to be to come up with a utopian blueprints and how we’re going to run an entirely alternative society, much less to express nostalgia about authoritative bureaucratic societies, you know, like the Soviet Union or China. It’s really to try and articulate the common sense of the labor movement and social struggles on the ground. So, for instance, you know, where you have the complete collapse of the financial system and where the remedies proposed are above all privileged the creditors and the very people responsible for that, it’s a straightforward enough proposition to say, “Hey, you know, if we’re going to own the banking system, why not make the decisions and make them in alliance with social policy that ensures that housing’s affordable, that school loans are affordable, that small business gets credit?” You know, why not turn the banking system into a public utility? Now, that doesn’t have to be in any sense an anti-capitalist demand. But it’s a radical demand that asks fundamental question about the institution and who holds the economic power. You know, why isn’t the federal government taking a more direct role in decision making? I mean, I believe, for instance, during the Savings and Loan Crisis there was a period when the.

BILL MOYERS: 1980s, late.

MIKE DAVIS: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Late ’80s, right.

MIKE DAVIS: Yeah, I mean, the Resolution Trust Corporation was set up to you know, buy up the abandoned apartments and homes and then sold them at fire sale to private interests. For a year or two it had the means of resolving much of the housing crisis, you know, in the United States. Why shouldn’t the federal government basically turn that housing stock, into a solution for people’s housing needs? Sell them directly to homeowners at discounts you know, rent them out? In other words, the role of the Left is the ask the deeper questions about who has power, how institutions work, and propose alternatives that seem more common sensical in terms of the direct interest of, you know, of satisfying human needs and equality in this society. I think President Obama and the liberal Democrats that still exist should actually welcome a revival of the Left. It only strengthens them in a way. It’s like being Martin Luther King without having Malcolm X. The problem with the Democrats is they fold. The Democrats tend to concede to the Republicans a power and to give them a veto ability that is has shaped legislation that they needn’t to. We need something of the spirit of Roosevelt in 1937, 1938 when he tried to take on you know, the right wing of his own party, the Supreme Court, the right wing of the Republican Party.

BILL MOYERS: He was accused of being a socialist. And they tried to paint him with that. He was accused of conducting class war as, in fact, now Obama is being accused by conservative forces of launching a class war because he wants to return the tax rate to 39.9 percent, which is where it was in the Clinton era. But how do you deal with this charge of class war coming from the “Wall Street Journal” and the Heritage Foundation and others?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, I think you deal with it by saying, yeah, we want class war, too. And here’s what class war means, that the only possibility of getting this country out of the crisis, the only possibility that really deep set reforms can occur, including the protection and renewal of the productive base of the economy is labor has to become more powerful. We need more protests. We need more noise in the street. At the end of the day, political parties and political leaderships tend to legislate what social movements and social voices have already achieved in the factories or the streets or, you know, in the Civil Rights demonstration. And the problem is that so many progressives, so many liberals now treat the new President as if he were, you know, El Commandante. And we line up, follow, you know, follow his leadership. But he’s maneuvering in a relationship of forces where people on the Left, progressives, even the Black Caucus doesn’t account for that much. He’s appeasing Blue Dogs. He’s having to deal with Republicans.

BILL MOYERS: Conservative…

MIKE DAVIS: And to an absolutely unnecessary extent, I think he’s following the template of the Clinton years. And, of course, the Clinton years were years of the closest collaboration between financial industry and the White House that produced financial deregulation. I think the best thing the President has done is the stimulus. The worst thing has been to continue the bailout along the same lines that it was initiated by Treasury Secretary Paulson, a bailout that’s truly rejected by the majority of the American people and seen as a reward you know, to the very people who, you know, ignited this crisis in the first place. But the deep questions about, how do you rebuild the productive economy? The necessary role of the public sector in providing employment, whether fair trade is impossible.

The whole interview is very interesting and provides a view that you just aren’t allowed to hear in the mainstream media.

This crisis is reawakening the left in some ways it hasn’t been tested in some time. It’s been a long series of bubbles and political setbacks over decades and there aren’t a whole lot of people who have been engaged in these issues on a philosophical basis for quite some time. The argument among us took place between the economic neoliberalism of the DLC and lukewarm, leftover Great Society articles of faith. But there is more on the left spectrum than that (or full throated Marxism.) It’s necessary to expand the conversation in a time of crisis.

The right is tapped out — they’ve had free rein for a couple of decades and have tried everything from the old conservatism of reliance on aristocratic institutions to Ayn Rand’s radical pseudo-philosophy of greed. Their run has shown the limitations of unbridled capitalism as vividly as the Soviet experiment showed the limitations of communism. Philosophies which rely on utopian human behavior aren’t very realistic.

Anyway, now is the time for the left to assert itself. As Mike Davis pointed out elsewhere in his interview, the left was vibrant and energetic during the 30s and provided a necessary voice in the political discussion, which influenced many of Roosevelt’s successful policies. Right now, the public is engaged and ready to hear new things. The left needs to be willing to say them.

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“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”

by digby

Jeffrey Sachs writes:

The great scholars of capitalism, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, understood full well that a functioning economic system depends not on greed, but on moral sentiments and an acceptable social contract between the rich and the rest of society. The rich can make money, of course, but they must not flaunt it or consume it frivolously. Instead, they must invest their wealth for social benefit, whether in business or in philanthropy, or in both as in the case of history’s most celebrated capitalist-philanthropists, from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It is only the dangerously arrogant rich or the servants of the rich who believe that morals don’t matter in the great matters of finance

They didn’t believe they were being immoral. And we can blame our chain-smoking, Dexi-popping, overstimulated cougar philosopher Ayn Rand for taking one of the seven deadly sins and calling it a moral system.

The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act of generosity, not of moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental—as disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and the motive power of his life. The Virtue of Selfishness — Ayn Rand.

Alan Greenspan admitted that for forty years he had believed Wall Street actually operated that way — and that that meant that they were incapable of making decisions that would endanger the entire system. After all, they were rational beings doing the most exalted work one can do — make money for themselves. Each one of the people involved in the CDS scheme were rationally making money for themselves and fulfilling their duty to themselves to make as much money as they could. They were being entirely rational and, therefore, extremely virtuous.

Now there is confusion among the masters of the universe. They don’t understand why they should not continue to be rewarded today for their virtuous behavior. It feels as if their whole moral system is askew, they are being unfairly condemned, the “parasites” are taking over. It is not their livelihoods or their reputations or their industry that is under threat. It’s their religion. That’s why they are fighting so hard.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Rorschach/Nixon?

By Dennis Hartley

Love is blue: Akerman and Crudup in Watchmen

I was a weird kid. I never really went for the superhero comic books in a big way. I do vaguely recall going through a Classics Illustrated period (Journey to the Center of the Earth kicked MAJOR ass, and I think I wore out my copy of Treasure Island). Then, when I was around 10 or 11, I discovered MAD magazine…and all bets were off. I made an exception when I was turned on to the Adventures of Tin Tin books, but generally stayed clear of caped crusaders, endowed with Special Powers and clad in skin tight suits.

So, I knew going in that I was likely not a member of the target audience for Watchmen, the latest graphic novel-to-film adaptation from the DC Comics stable. For those unacquainted with the concept of the modern graphic novel, just think Classics Illustrated with hot sex, ultra-violence and just enough substantive exposition to help you convince yourself that you’re reading something more akin to, um, literature (sounds like a great pitch for an HBO series). Despite my misgivings about the genre, I was unexpectedly dazzled by Sin City a few years back; I really dug the atmospheric, alt-noir vibe. I got the impression that Watchmen was in the same ballpark, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Okay…I saw that Carla Gugino (*sigh*) was in this one too, alright? So sue me.

Director Zack Snyder (300) had a formidable task on his hands here; not only did he have to condense a 12 volume series of graphic novels into feature film length, but he had to deliver a product that would both placate the detail-obsessed fan boys and entertain the rest of us without leaving us confounded (or dozing) when the auditorium lights come up.

I can’t speak for the fan boys, but I found the establishing premise of the film intriguing. The story is set in a sort of parallel universe version of mid-1980s America, where an altered course of history has radically changed the socio-political fabric of the country from WW 2 onward. The ‘x’ factor lays in an assortment of free-agent superheroes (and heroines) who have lent their talents to the U.S. armed forces since the 1940s. Actually, super-‘spooks’ might be a more accurate descriptive, as an Oliver Stone style back-story montage under the opening credits seems to indicate (sure to give JFK conspiracy theorists some uneasy chuckles). In this version of history, thanks to the assistance of these caped crusaders, America handily “wins” the Vietnam War (now that definitely establishes this story as pure fantasy). And in the most disturbing turn of all, President Richard M. Nixon has been elected for a fifth term (in this reality, Woodward and Bernstein have been “neutralized”). The Cold War is still in full swing, with a possible nuke-out with the Soviets looming on the horizon. In our post 9-11 world, with the economy on the brink of collapse, this actually plays like a quaint scenario, n’est-ce pas?

With one exception, these superheroes are not necessarily blessed with invulnerability; they are just as fragile and flawed as any schmuck on the street (the moral compass doesn’t always exactly point to Truth, Justice and the American Way, either). By 1985, the vigilantes have fallen out of favor with the fickle public; masked avenging has been subsequently outlawed and most have been driven into retirement, or gone underground. When one of the retirees is brutally murdered, it’s time to get the band back together, spearheaded by one Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley). The mystery, as they say, is afoot.

After this promising start, the story bogs down a bit. The screenplay (adapted by David Hayter and Alex Tse) is admirably complex and cerebral for what is essentially an action film, but (I never thought I’d hear myself saying this) perhaps a bit too much for its own good. Pains are taken to flesh out the back stories of each principal protagonist; this is a good thing, but it can be a double edged sword. On the one hand, it raises the bar on the comparative cardboard characterizations you usually get in a superhero movie. Unfortunately, it also accounts for most of the hefty 162 minute running time. By the time the denouement rolled around, I’d almost forgotten that there WAS a mystery afoot.

Still, there was a lot I liked about the film. It has a great “dark city” noir atmosphere that I’m a real sucker for, as well as great costume and set design. The performances are a bit uneven, but that could be attributed to the sometimes overreaching script. Jackie Earle Haley is a standout as Rorschach; I enjoyed his Chandleresque voiceover performance, which vacillates somewhere between Clint Eastwood’s menacing whisper and Lawrence Tierney’s caustic growl. Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and, uh, Carla Gugino are all quite good. I didn’t recognize Matt “Max Headroom” Frewer as “Moloch the Mystic” until the credits rolled! The film has an interesting soundtrack; although I had mixed feelings about hearing a lengthy lift from Philip Glass’ symphonic score for Koyaanisqatsi(a film I’ve watched at least 25 times).

I believe I have already established that I’m not a huge devotee of films based on comic books, but still, the sci-fi geek/film noir enthusiast inside of me was hooked by the Blade Runner-like mash-up of those two genres (not that I’m suggesting that this is in the same league as Ridley Scott’s cult classic). You can take that as a guarded recommendation.

Previous posts with related themes:

Iron Man
The Dark Knight

Will Regulations Save Us?

by dday

The supposed saving grace of the Obama/Geithner bank bailout is that at least regulations will be imposed that would eliminate the possibility for this to ever happen again. At least that’s Europe’s view, as well as Obama’s long-term position:

But I think the most important thing that we can do is make sure that we put in a bunch of financial regulatory mechanisms to prevent companies like an AIG holding the rest of us hostage. Because that’s — that’s the real problem.

The problem is not just what’s happened over the last six months. The problem is what was happening for years, where people were able to take huge, excessive risks with other people’s money, putting the entire financial system at risk — and there were no checks, there were no balances, there was nobody overseeing the process.

Just enforcing the laws already on the books would represent an improvement over, say, the past thirty years. But any confidence that some kind of regulatory overhaul is imminent gets sapped by the first major “reform”.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board, pressured by lawmakers to change the fair-value rule blamed for worsening the financial crisis, proposed permitting companies to use “significant judgment” in valuing assets […]

Fair-value, also known as mark-to-market accounting, requires companies to set values on most securities every quarter based on market prices. Wells Fargo & Co. and other companies argue the rule doesn’t make sense when trading has dried up because it forces banks to write down assets to fire- sale prices.

What this boils down to is that the government will allow banks to pretend that their worthless assets are worth significantly more than what the market will pay for them. In other words, banks will rescue themselves from insolvency by using the magical power of bullshit.

You can’t blame this one on the Bush Administration.

Meanwhile, the next regulatory move appears to be vesting more power in the Fed, which failed to regulate the banks the last time. I agree with a new authority to oversee massive financial industry risk and their exotic products, but not with an unaccountable and secretive board that won’t even account for the trillions of dollars in hastily printed money they’ve spent on bank assets.

Regulators have plenty of authority right now. Their reticence to really challenge elites and risk a short-term loss in GDP to protect a larger meltdown reflects a lack of will.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight the issue isn’t so much that we needed better “rules” as it is that we needed regulators we took seriously the idea that cracking down on private sector funny business is their job. Instead, we seem to have mostly had regulators who regarded the laws on the books as an unfortunate and anachronistic departure from a pure laissez faire ideal. So you got things like the SEC prosecuting celebrities on tenuous charges, but no real oversight of a mortgage sector run amok. When you look back at the trajectory leading up to the crisis, the problem of “deregulation” isn’t so much that there’s some particular rule that was removed during the Greenspan Era that could have saved us as it is that the mindset that drove the legislative agenda of deregulation ultimately proved paralyzing to policymakers.

Certainly, if anything would destroy the mindset of Randian laissez-faire capitalism, it would be the events of the past six months. But given the clear signs thus far, I’m not so sure.

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Immature Children Control Our Discourse

by tristero

The woman on the right in the picture below is Judith Steinberg Dean, MD. and dates from January, 2004. She is, by all accounts, an excellent and thoroughly dedicated physician. The picture was taken around 10:00 pm, as I recall. She had just come from a long, hard day at her office to watch her husband, one Dr. Howard Dean, on television as he campaigned for president. Here is a link to the front-page Times article accompanying the picture, which all but openly mocks Dr. Steinberg’s refusal to place Dr. Howard Dean’s career ahead of her patients’ health, not to mention her own career.

This picture of the unpretentious and serious Dr. Steinberg is one of the most positive and inspiring pictures of a modern presidential candidate’s wife I’ve ever seen. But it inspired Maureen Dowd to what can only be called jealous rage. She wrote one of her most remarkable columns, remarkable because… well, read it and weep, dear friends, as you recall that MoDo, a deeply troubled soul who has spent an inordinate amount of time trashing people of genuine accomplishment, like Dr. Steinberg – has had regular access for what seems like aeons to some of the most important editorial real estate in the world:

In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband’s side — the anti-Laura. You could easily imagine the din of Rush Limbaugh and Co. demonizing her as a counterculture fem-lib role model for the blue states.

While Elizabeth Edwards gazes up at John from the front row of his events here, while Jane Gephardt cheerfully endures her husband’s ”Dick and Jane” jokes, while Teresa Heinz Kerry jets around for ”conversations” with caucusgoers — yesterday she was at the Moo Moo Cafe in Keokuk at the southernmost tip of the state — Judith Steinberg has shunned the role of helpmeet.

Ahhahahahahahahaha! Snork, snork, snork.

It’s now some five years plus later. And, like the photo of Dr. Steinberg, the extraordinary picture below appeared on the front page of today’s Times; it shows the First Lady of the United States breaking ground on the first garden on White House property since Roosevelt.

On so many levels, this is an amazing image – when histories of this time come to be written, people far more articulate than I will analyze its class, gender, and racial implications; In fact, that some of you may find this image rather dull and ordinary is itself telling and highlights the photo’s importance. Regardless of whether the garden succeeds, or even whether Obama realizes the potential many people believe he has, this image documents a profound change in the country.

But as Digby detailed below, the Village – as dangerously clueless as they were about Bush/Iraq – is already at it again. The garden is a “distraction” – this trenchant observation from the same clutch of morons who carefully covered Young Churchill’s every attempt at brush clearing while he ignored and belittled clear evidence of bin Laden’s murderous plots. Anthony Bourdain’s remarks against Alice Waters, regardless of context, merely revive the commie fistbump elitism charges that are so popular amongst the chatterers. This despite the fact that real elites don’t want vegetables even displayed near their homes. This despite the fact that the most contemptible elitist of all, George W. Bush, ate organic food in the White House, but was soooooooooooo afraid he’d ruin his image as a rufftuffcreampuff, he wouldn’t let his wife or his cooks tell anyone.

So, while type II diabetes and childhood obesity reaches epidemic proportions in this country, the last thing we can expect is a serious response to an exceedingly serious issue from the professional know-it-alls. Nope, we’re gonna get what we got when their peabrains were trained on Dr. Steinberg: tons of smirky smiles and condescension masking their envy of the truly accomplished. Look! Michelle and the kids are having trouble getting the garden started! They don’t know what they’re doing! Hahahahahaha!

Don’t you immature losers get it? That’s her whole point.The entire country, even the president’s family, needs to learn the most basic lessons about making, and eating, delicious, wholesome food.

Clap Louder

by digby

dday gives the state of play on the Geithner plan, below. I don’t have a whole lot to add except that everything I’m reading makes me feel like I’m on the other end of a phone call with Bernie Madoff telling me not to worry my pretty little head about the details, I’m gonna be rich,rich,rich!

The only way to look at this that makes any sense is to believe that the toxic assets are actually worth more than everyone outside the government thinks they’re worth. And that requires that we give ourselves up to the faith-based notions of the last administration, in which we simply buy in because “they must know things we don’t.” Whenever that happens, it’s time to be very, very skeptical.

Krugman says:

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

We are dealing with magical thinking again. There is a way to determine exactly which loans are toxic and properly value all these assets. James Galbraith talks about it in this discussion of the Geithner plan this morning. And it’s spelled out in more detail by William Black here. (This William Black, btw, so he knows a thing or two about corrupt bankers.) But that could result in criminal prosecutions, which is against the rules. Bernie Madoff will be crucified for all their sins.

I’m getting more and more convinced that Matt Taibbi is right: we are officially, royally fucked.

Update: Krugman has more here.

Update II: Atrios has posted a tweet from Stephanopoulos that further validates the “gun to the head” thesis. Either call off the congressional dogs or well kill the financial system once and for all. Of course, they are aiming the guns at their own heads, but nobody ever said they were geniuses. Oh wait …

Update III: Speaking of geniuses, why in the world can’t these people get that they are making things worse and just STFU? It’s nuts.

Buying Off The Banksters

by dday

My college friends and I used to call anything this truly horrific a-good.

The Treasury Department is expected to unveil early next week its long-delayed plan to buy as much as $1 trillion in troubled mortgages and related assets from financial institutions, according to people close to the talks.

The plan is likely to offer generous subsidies, in the form of low-interest loans, to coax investors to form partnerships with the government to buy toxic assets from banks.

To help protect taxpayers, who would pay for the bulk of the purchases, the plan calls for auctioning assets to the highest bidders.

I don’t have to rehash the arguments against this idea, just link to them. Basically, the government will subsidize investors to overpay for bad assets, meaning that cash will simply flow from taxpayers to banks. Instead of shrinking the wealth and value of the financial sector relative to the greater economy, this plan would keep it in place. The White House clearly sees paying off the banksters as equal to saving the economy, making the solution far more expensive than the problem, especially considering that this probably won’t work. John Cole sums it up:

The Illness- reckless and irresponsible betting led to huge losses
The Diagnosis- Insufficient gambling.
The Cure- a Trillion dollar stack of chips provided by the house.
The Prognosis- We are so screwed.

At this point, the only thing we should offer a significant class of banksters is a plea deal. Instead Geithner will preserve the institutions.

If you want to truly fill yourself with dread, consider that the Federal Reserve started buying mortgage-backed securities as early as August 2007, bought up a bunch more in January, and just announced the purchase of even more THIS WEEK. And yet Treasury needs to eat some of this crap as well. That’s how many of these little buggers are out there.

OK, I’m going to go watch college basketball and slowly rock back and forth.

…To those who think the mortgage-backed securities are actually worth more than advertised, consider the concurrent housing plan to reduce loan terms (which is worthwhile) and thus DECREASE the value of mortgages and their securities, which may not even be allowed under the servicing agreements and could lead to mass lawsuits unless dealt with, probably with another bribe to the securities holders. Ugh.

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Power

by digby

The Hill reports:

That didn’t take long. After saying “Rush Limbaugh is meaningless to me” on Thursday, Republican New York Assemblyman Jim Tedisco’s camp walked back the statement on Friday.

Tedisco is facing off against Democrat Scott Murphy in the race for Sen. Kristen Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) former House seat.

Here is the full statement from Tedisco spokesman Adam Kramer:

Jim’s comments were in response to a question about what voters are asking him about on the campaign trail. So far, the concerns he has been hearing from voters on the campaign trail have been local in nature, such as his support for lower property taxes, fiscal responsibility, and his opponents appalling support for the AIG bonus loophole. That was his point and any effort to characterize it otherwise is a distortion of the facts.

He hastened to add that Rush is an exceptionally good looking man, one with immense charm, intelligence and a rugged masculinity. He tugged his forelock and sputtered nervously that Tedisco would be immensely honored to give Lord Limbaugh a foot rub the next time he is fortunate enough to be in his presence.

Rush reportedly nibbled on a chocolate covered cherry and said he would think about it.

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