This Bill O’Reilly interview on Jon Stewart last night wasn’t necessarily significant for Billo’s typical dross about how Stewart would be “stoned to death” if he ever visited Alabama (because, as you know, Bill does his show four nights a week from Tuscaloosa) or how this is a center-right nation based on traditionalism (though Stewart’s retort about how the tradition of America is the pursuit of individual freedom and gay marriage is the next logical step was pretty good) and how “we’re the noble nation” (submitted without comment). No, the best, most revealing part came at the end. Stewart kicked off the segment by showing a bunch of quotes about how nervous and scared Billo is with the prospect of an Obama Presidency, and then he pulled out the cocoa and marshmallows and a snuggly teddy bear and tried to make him feel more comfortable. Late in the interview, a propos of nothing, O’Reilly starts talking about the bear. I’m putting this moment on the couch. It starts around 5:30.
O’REILLY: As long as I can have the panda, I’m fine.
STEWART: That’s not a panda!
O’REILLY: Sure it is! This is a panda! What do you think it is?
STEWART: You’ve gotta get out of your “luxury Long Island life” and get around and start seeing animals.
It’s really not that he got the name of the animal wrong. It’s that he was so sure of it, and immediately when told he was wrong, he clung to it. That’s not only his knee-jerk reaction, but the entire conservative movement. Their version of what’s right is whatever their opponents say is wrong. Facts are tangential.
I didn’t think we’d ever get such a clear “2+2=5” moment, on national television no less. Maybe I shouldn’t make so much out of it, but I’m instituting this feature into my writing: any time a conservative delivers obvious misinformation, they will be heretofore described as “hugging the panda.” And when you’re in an argument with one of them, over whether this is a center-right nation or whether tax cuts increase revenue or whether the social safety net hurts poor people, remember that these are the kind of people who not only think a teddy bear is a panda, but who insist it even when they are told they are wrong.
Both dday and I have covered the Don Siegelman case over the past year or so and it remains one of the flagship legal atrocities of the Bush Justice Department (and that’s saying something.) Today, Christy Hardin Smith writes about the latest revelation in this Kafkaesque horror. She reports that the US Attorney who had supposedly recused herself (she was married to a campaign operative for Siegelman’s Republican rival) was actually guiding the case. But even worse than that was this:
AUSAs in the case had multiple ex parte communications with jurors, while the jury was deliberating on its verdict — passed through US Marshalls at the courthouse — which were never disclosed to either the judge or opposing counsel. Via Time:
Grimes last year also gave DoJ additional e-mails detailing previously undisclosed contacts between prosecutors and members of the Siegelman jury…. The DoJ conducted its own inquiry into some of Grimes’ claims, and wrote a report dismissing them as inconsequential. But the report shows that investigators did not question U.S. marshals or jurors who had allegedly been in touch with the prosecution. A key prosecution e-mail describes how jurors repeatedly contacted the government’s legal team during the trial to express, among other things, one juror’s romantic interest in a member of the prosecution team. “The jurors kept sending out messages” via U.S. marshals, the e-mail says, identifying a particular juror as “very interested” in a person who had sat at the prosecution table in court. The same juror was later described reaching out to members of the prosecution team for personal advice about her career and educational plans. Conyers commented that the “risk of [jury] bias … is obvious”.
Beyond being incredibly stupid, this is a material breach of ethics. No, and I mean NO, ex parte communications are to occur with jurors which are not immediately disclosed fully and completely to opposing counsel and the judge throughout the trial. Ever. But during the deliberations process where any instance of bias can be crucial to the dynamics on reaching a verdict? You can bet this will come up on appeal. There should also be serious investigation and consideration of severe sanction from the state bar and from the trial judge, whose orders on post-trial juror contact were blatantly violated as well.
This case is so badly tainted on so many levels it’s hard to see how any of the people involved should ever be allowed to practice law again. But the DOJ saying that a juror having a crush on a member of the prosecution and actually communicating with him during deliberations was “inconsequential” is beyond belief.
It doesn’t appear that there will be any follow up on all of these political shennanigans at the Bush justice department and it’s too bad. This particular case will probably result in some slaps on the wrist by the courts and the legal community simply because it’s so high profile. But there’s no telling how much of this sort of thing went on. We know that the highest levels of the Bush administration instructed US Attorneys to use their office for political purposes. Some got fired for failing to follow through. It stands to reason that the others followed orders.
I guess the political establishment feels that Alberto Gonzales’ resignation as Attorney General was symbolic punishment and that should be enough. Irony abounds.
Robert Reich, who I’m glad to have in the room advising President-Elect Obama during the transition, has written a piece about what he calls the “Mini-Depression” and how we can best undo it. The first thing is to understand the nature of the problem.
First, understand that the main problem right now is not the supply of credit. Yes, Wall Street is paralyzed at the moment because the bursting of the housing and other asset bubbles means that lenders are fearful that creditors won’t repay loans. But even if credit were flowing, those loans wouldn’t save jobs. Businesses want to borrow now only to remain solvent and keep their creditors at bay. If they fail to do so, and creditors push them into reorganization under bankruptcy, they’ll cut their payrolls, to be sure. But they’re already cutting their payrolls. It’s far from clear they’d cut more jobs under bankruptcy reorganization than they’re already cutting under pressure to avoid bankruptcy and remain solvent.
This means bailing out Wall Street or the auto industry or the insurance industry or the housing industry may at most help satisfy creditors for a time and put off the day of reckoning, but industry bailouts won’t reverse the downward cycle of job losses.
The real problem is on the demand side of the economy.
Consumers won’t or can’t borrow because they’re at the end of their ropes. Their incomes are dropping (one of the most sobering statistics in Friday’s jobs report was the continued erosion of real median earnings), they’re deeply in debt, and they’re afraid of losing their jobs.
Introductory economic courses explain that aggregate demand is made up of four things, expressed as C+I+G+exports. C is consumers. Consumers are cutting back on everything other than necessities. Because their spending accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s economic activity and is the flywheel for the rest of the economy, the precipitous drop in consumer spending is causing the rest of the economy to shut down.
I is investment. Absent consumer spending, businesses are not going to invest.
Exports won’t help much because the of the rest of the world is sliding into deep recession, too. (And as foreigners — as well as Americans — put their savings in dollars for safe keeping, the value of the dollar will likely continue to rise relative to other currencies. That, in turn, makes everything we might sell to the rest of the world more expensive.)
That leaves G, which, of course, is government. Government is the spender of last resort. Government spending lifted America out of the Great Depression. It may be the only instrument we have for lifting America out of the Mini Depression. Even Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is now calling for a sizable government stimulus. He knows that monetary policy won’t work if there’s inadequate demand.
This doesn’t mean we don’t bail out the auto companies, but that we focus our efforts on the demand side of the equation for once. If we can use government to create jobs and raise income, consumer spending will rise, and then investment will rise, etc. Now, saving the auto industry might be part of that – after all, the carmakers and their parallel industries employ 3 million people. But to meet the scope of the problem we’re going to have to do much more – probably spending up to 4% of GDP. And paradoxically, we’re going to have to spend on things that work at cross purposes with selling more inefficient automobiles; things like transportation infrastructure.
The answer to the second question is mostly “infrastructure” — repairing roads and bridges, levees and ports; investing in light rail, electrical grids, new sources of energy, more energy conservation. Even conservative economists like Harvard’s Martin Feldstein are calling for government to stimulate the economy through infrastructure spending. Infrastructure projects like these pack a double-whammy: they create lots of jobs, and they make the economy work better in the future. (Important qualification: To do this correctly and avoid pork, the federal government will need to have a capital budget that lists infrastructure projects in order of priority of public need.)
Government should also spend on health care and child care. These expenditures are also double whammies: they, too, create lots of jobs, and they fulfill vital public needs.
Which is why an auto industry bailout must be tied to fuel economy, because otherwise, you’re funding new, fast, efficient means of transport that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions AND the old model of 20 mpg and under gas guzzlers. Chris Dodd said yesterday that the votes aren’t there for an auto industry bailout in the lame duck session of Congress. If the guarantees on efficiency are made, I think the votes could be there in January.
But the big emphasis here is on the new energy economy. There can’t be a better way to reindustrialize America with jobs that can’t be shipped away. I know that some believe industrial output has been rising due to productivity, but if you go into the numbers that only holds among a couple sectors – basically, if it wasn’t for the computer we would hardly have any industrial output at all. And so building out a new energy grid that can transmit wind and solar power to anywhere in the United States, building high speed rail that runs on clean electricity, building new renewable facilities, all of these will create jobs that spur demand, and raise wages by giving job-seekers an option outside of the dead-end service sector. The fact that the EPA rightly blocked the new production of coal-fired power plants makes this a practical necessity.
And yes, health care is a part of this. There was hastily dismissed talk of adding health care to the stimulus package yesterday. As Reich says, it’s a double whammy – you create jobs, and fulfill public needs.
Reich finishes by pre-empting the neo-Hooverist argument:
Expect two sorts of arguments against this. The first will come from fiscal hawks who claim that the government is already spending way too much. Even without a new stimulus package, next year’s budget deficit could run over a trillion dollars, given the amounts to be spent bailing out Wall Street and perhaps the auto industry, and providing extended unemployment insurance and other measures to help those in direct need. The hawks will argue that the nation can’t afford giant deficits, especially when baby boomers are only a few years away from retiring and claiming Social Security and Medicare.
They’re wrong. Government spending that puts people back to work and invests in the future productivity of the nation is exactly what the economy needs right now. Deficit numbers themselves have no significance. The pertinent issue is how much underutilized capacity exists in the economy. When there’s lots of idle capacity, deficit spending is entirely appropriate, as John Maynard Keynes taught us. Moving the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits.
The second argument will come from conservative supply-siders who will call for income-tax cuts rather than spending increases. They’ll claim that individuals with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They’re wrong, for three reasons. First, income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people who tend to save rather than spend. Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. Second, even if a rebate could be fashioned, people tend to use those extra dollars to pay off their debts rather than buy new goods and services, as we witnessed a few months ago when the government sent out rebate checks. Third, even when individuals purchase goods and services, those purchases tend not to generate as many American jobs as government spending on the same total scale because much of what consumers buy comes from abroad.
We have had 28 years of supply-side economics, and it has gotten us precisely to this crisis. Shifting this to job creation and wage increases, demand-side economics, would be maybe a quiet revolution for the cable news gasbags who focus on personality, but a revolution nonetheless. And to quote Dick Cheney, not a noted economic scholar but in this case appropriate, “This is our due.”
…UPDATE: See also. We need a stimulus that actually stimulates instead of staves off the inevitable.
(corrected the title, as it had nothing to do with Sid Vicious or Sidney Blumenthal)
Russ Feingold gently suggests that Obama replace all the heads of the intelligence agencies, and for good reason. Get a load of this puerile nonsense:
Barack Obama has been president-elect for barely 10 days but already there are signs of tension among U.S. spy agencies over his intelligence briefings. The squabbling centers around who should get credit for putting the briefings together and for supplying hot information and penetrating analysis to Obama and his national-security team. According to government officials, some of the more obscure and media-shy agencies worry they are not getting enough recognition for contributions they make to the intelligence outlook provided daily to the administration-in-waiting.
The details of this ridiculous little cat fight are simply unbelievable. I was always skeptical that creating this new Director of National Intelligence was anything more than another expensive redundancy in the already bloated national security apparatus. And so it is.
The good news is that Obama is apparently unlikely to keep any of these jerk-offs:
In approving the post-9/11 law setting up an Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Congress hoped to put an end to the rivalries among the 16 fractious and secretive agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence “community.” But the jockeying over the briefings for Obama is a sign that the bureaucratic maneuvering is anything but over. It also leaves open the question of where the agencies will stand—and who will head them—in the incoming Obama administration. Although both McConnell and Hayden expressed a willingness to stay on for some period of time, sources close to the Obama transition say this is unlikely, given that both men zealously defended controversial Bush administration policies—such as the warrantless-wiretapping program—that the incoming Democratic president opposed during the campaign.
Let’s hope that’s the case, although that last part isn’t exactly true, is it?
“There may be certain elements of our audience that turn away between now and the inauguration,” says Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of Fox News. “I think cable numbers overall will drop, although there is a fascination with Obama.” And part of that fascination will now come in the daunting challenges his administration will face: two wars, a financial crisis, soaring national debt, crumbling domestic infrastructure, failing schools. All of which should keep the hyperbolic news cycle spinning almost as fast as it has during the runup to the election. Historically, the dawning of a new administration brings a renewed level of scrutiny from the media and interest from viewers—something Ailes is looking forward to. “I remember when Bill Clinton took over and within a very short time he had to get rid of a couple of appointees,” he says, referring to Zoë Baird and Lani Guinier. “And then he got into gays in the military, and suddenly issues became critical and our ratings started to climb back up. I expect a dip over the next couple of months and then a big return to our numbers in late January, early February.”
That sounds like a threat.
And you’ll notice he goes back to Clinton rather than discussing the more recent transfer of power from Clinton to Bush. Of course, that wasn’t a situation where he needed to “bring a renewed level of scrutiny” was it?
I read with interest Digby’s post about potential Congressional inquiries into Bush Administration abuses, as well as Bush’s own efforts to pre-emptively pardon his whole team and use executive privilege even after leaving the White House. I agree that this is an unlikely course of action for a President-elect already sounding notes of bipartisanship and unity, as well as a Congress which hasn’t mustered the courage to challenge Bush on much of anything during his reign. Obama’s as much as said this:
In addition, Mr. Obama has expressed worries about too many investigations. In April, he told The Philadelphia Daily News that people needed to distinguish “between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity.”
“If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Mr. Obama said, but added, “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”
You’d have to basically play dumb not to assert that crimes have been committed. Based on what we already know, before launching the first investigation, we have a clear sense of what to call the abuses that have taken place. They are war crimes.
There are bound to be casualties when any nation veers from its domestic and international obligations to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on the minds and bodies of many of the 62 former detainees interviewed for this report, many of whom suffered infinite variations on physical and mental abuse, including intimidation, stress positions, enforced nudity, sexual humiliation, and interference with religious practices. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully supported by the United States. The officials and guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving with the tribunal— for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide.
Patricia M. Wald, the writer of that foreward, served on the DC Court of Appeals and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She was also appointed by the Bush Administration to serve on the President’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. This is not a DFH. This is a jurist who has examined the evidence.
So when people like Robert Litt seek to excuse these actions by the executive, it’s very clear what they are excusing – war crimes.
Obama will have to do a careful balancing act. At a conference in Washington this week, former department criminal division chief Robert S. Litt asked that the new administration avoid fighting old battles that could be perceived as vindictive, such as seeking to prosecute government officials involved in decisions about interrogation and the gathering of domestic intelligence. Human rights groups have called for such investigations, as has House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.).
“It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries,” Litt said. “It would really spend a lot of the bipartisan capital Obama managed to build up.”
If you’re arguing that Bush Administration officials should be shielded and protected from prosecution in the name of comity and bipartisanship, you are saying that war crimes aren’t actionable if the President or his staff commits them. Which is fine if you’re Richard Nixon. But that’s not the model people had in mind on Election Day, I gather.
Despite the persistent belief that partisanship is corroding the body politic, actually it’s quite the opposite. It’s “bipartisanship” – or at least the phony rhetoric of it, which is always practiced against progressive change and for the status quo – that has destroyed the rule of law in this country. As Glenn Greenwald notes:
This brazen defense of lawlessness articulated by Litt is now as close to a unanimous, bipartisan consensus across the political establishment as it gets. This is what has been advocated by everyone from David Broder to top Obama adviser Cass Sunstein. There are few things more difficult than finding someone of prominence in the establishment that disagrees with this view. Our political class has decided that high political officials — particularly the President and those closest to him — are literally exempt from the rule of law.
Nobody believes that “policy differences” should be criminalized. That’s a strawman — an obfuscating term — erected by those who are defending presidential lawbreaking license without having the intellectual honesty to admit they’re doing that. This is about having laws in place that clearly and explicitly say that “X shall be a felony,” only to then watch as the President does X, and thereafter have our political establishment announce that it’s more important to avoid partisan anger than it is to hold high political officials accountable under the rule of law.
Here, X = “eavesdropping on Americans with no warrants,” and “torturing detainees,” and “destroying evidence relating to investigations,” and “interfering in criminal prosecutions for political purposes.” Those are crimes — felonies — in every sense of the word, not policy differences. And they are all actions in which Bush officials have clearly engaged […]
As political scientists have documented, one hallmark of tin-pot tyrannies is the belief that political leaders should be liberated from the constraints of law as long as that helps to achieve good results. That’s the defining mentality of those who crave benevolent tyrants — our Leaders have so many Good and Important Things to do for us that they can’t be distracted and weighed down by abstract luxuries like upholding the rule of law. That’s now clearly the prevailing consensus of our political establishment.
Again, I don’t expect much movement against Bush Administration abuses. The moles inside the Justice Department would probably obfuscate and leak and embarrass if anything was attempted, and by the way key Democrats are implicated in the abuses through their complicit silence. In fact, this Robert Litt character himself is defending intelligence officials in ongoing lawsuits and may seek to benefit from a lack of prosecution against his own clients. But it would be nice if anyone owned up to the truth – that “moving on” and “healing the divisions” of the previous eight years is tantamount to a get out of jail free card for war crimes.
Joe Klein has a post up at Swampland about Obama’s energy plans that is spot on:
Obama has said building an alternative-energy economy will be his top priority. The question is, How bold is he willing to be about that? Actually, there are a lot of questions: How much of the stimulus plan he proposes in January will be devoted to immediate middle-class tax relief, and how much to investing in the future? What would a plausible alternative-energy plan look like? For answers, I decided to check in with the Center for American Progress (CAP) — the think tank run by Obama’s transition chief, John Podesta — which has drafted a green-energy stimulus plan of its own. “We identified $50 billion in programs that are ready to go immediately,” says Bracken Hendricks of CAP. “The package would create 2 million jobs across the skill spectrum, from blue collar to high tech, and in almost every area of the country. There was huge congressional appetite for this even before the economic crisis hit.”
He goes on to lay out the detailks and concludes with this, which is what I think is key:
[I]f there is creativity lurking amid the destruction of the economic crisis, it exists at the intersection of national security, economic stimulus and climate change — the gust of innovation and economic growth that will come from breaking our dependence on fossil fuels. Along with finding the right people to staff his Administration, Barack Obama’s most important job now is to find the right words to inspire the nation to undertake this next great cause.
Aside from his ability to reassure the world that America isn’t a rogue superpower, I think this is what excites me the most about the Obama administration. This is the “big thing” that takes a crisis to enable and someone with great inspirational and oratorical gifts to persuade the nation to support. It'[s all in place.
I don’t get too gooey over The Phenomenon (except the kids) but this is what sends a tingle up my leg. If he thinks big enough and pulls this off he can build the foundation of a new economy and possibly lead the way to saving the planet. Now that’s a legacy.
There’s a lot of discussion about what to do about the auto companies and none of the options are very palatable. In today’s New York Times there is an article analyzing the bailout vs bankruptcy talk that’s starting to emerge. I don’t have an opinion on that except to the extent this is used as an excuse to destroy the unions. And that is certainly the theme that’s emerging from the right. Here’s economic expert Michelle Malkin:
Didn’t have time to post an alert beforehand, but I did a brief segment on Fox & Friends this morning on the mega-auto bailout. Reader Alan e-mailed about his experience in the industry:
Dear Michelle,
Thank you for taking the time to read my comments. I worked in the Automotive Industry for most of my career as a supplier to GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda of America, Toyota, Nissan, and BMW.
You were exactly right with your comments on Fox & Friends this morning. The UAW has handcuffed GM, Ford, and Chrysler with unreasonable and unrealistic burdens. Their balance sheets will never improve until they shed this weight.
I suspect this is going to become a drumbeat. I’m reminded of this rant by alleged liberal Wall Street screamer Jim Cramer during the short lived GM strike a couple of years ago:
MATTHEWS: How can you say that, Jim, if you‘re taking the jobs out of America?JIM CRAMER, HOST, “MAD MONEY”: Well, I got to tell you something. First of all, you have got this issue all framed wrong, Chris. This is about breaking the union. You break the union, you save the company. Do you know that, in 1992, Caterpillar broke the union, same union? Caterpillar‘s stock was at $5. Now it‘s at $76. You know, the same month that they broke the union, GM‘s stock an was at $34. Where is today? Thirty-four. If GM wants to be a competitive company in the world marketplace, like Caterpillar is, the number-one maker of earth-moving equipment in the world, it‘s got to break the union.
MATTHEWS: Well, you know, Charles Wilson, head of GM once said, what‘s good for GM is good for America.
You can see the YouTube here. As I said, I don’t have any insight in to the economics of this. It sounds as if there’s no easy answer. But the politics of this are equally complicated and it could be the kind of thing that brings the bi-partisan slumber party to an end before its even started. The Democrats have an obligation to try to keep the recession from getting worse and they must support the unions — bankruptcy will potentially void all the union contracts. On the other hand, bailing out these companies is unpopular and Republicans are starting to see some wedges forming. The Democrats are going to have to be very agile and clever to get something done that won’t give the other side a powerful weapon.
It would be nice if Republicans really did put Country First, but they don’t. And they have none other than Tom Friedman helping them make the case that this mess is all the fault of the unions and the Democrats:
The blame for this travesty not only belongs to the auto executives, but must be shared equally with the entire Michigan delegation in the House and Senate, virtually all of whom, year after year, voted however the Detroit automakers and unions instructed them to vote.
It’s not that he doesn’t have a point. It’s that he is feeding into a meme that unions are to equally culpable for trying to get their workers decent wages and health care (the latter of which wouldn’t be necessary if we lived in a real first world country.) The politicians might pay a price for all this by being voted out of office and the executives might suffer by not being able to keep their vacation homes. Union members pay by losing their communities, their livelihoods, their health and their kids’ futures when those jobs go away.
Friedman goes on to endorse the idea that a bailout should include the right to “tear up” union contracts. (He also thinks Steve Jobs should be hired cuz he’s a magic he-man super-duper fixer of everything which is just what the doctor ordered.)
Bailing out the auto companies is unpopular and Friedman and Cramer and their ilk are already busily turning it into a blood match between unions and Real America. The Democrats are going to be caught between a rock and hard place on this one and it’s going to take some very deft maneuvering if they plan to keep the political base that got them where they are:
* Union voters supported President-elect Barack Obama 67 percent to 30 percent over Sen. John McCain. In the top-tier battleground states the difference was even more stark, with union members going for Obama 69 to 28—a 41-point margin.
* While McCain won among voters ages 65 and up, active and retired union members older than 65 went for Obama by a 46-point margin.
* While McCain won among veterans, union veterans went for Obama by a 25-point margin.
* Working America members, concentrated in key states, supported Obama by 67 percent to 30 percent.
* 60 percent of union members and 56 percent of Working America members said the economy was a top issue.
* Union members got a lot of contact from their unions about the election, with more than 80 percent receiving union mail, more than 80 percent receiving union publications, 59 percent getting live phone calls and 32 percent getting worksite fliers.
In union-heavy Midwestern states, where Bush had come close and McCain campaigned hard, the efforts of union volunteers helped put them solidly in Obama’s column. Obama won by 13 points in Wisconsin, 16 points in Michigan, 10 points in Minnesota and 11 points in Pennsylvania
Unions have put themselves out there time and again for Democrats. When the economy goes south, they don’t expect to be told to “suck on this” by a Democratic majority.
As Emperor Paulson dithers and shuffles papers pretending to look busy implementing the bailout, the lobbyists are lining up for their piece of the bailout cash, and apparently, nobody is keeping tabs on them:
In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury’s massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country’s largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.
Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.
Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.
“It’s a mess,” said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. “I don’t think anyone understands right now how we’re going to do proper oversight of this thing.”
Considering that the Treasury Secretary can hold press conferences pledging to do the exact opposite of what he initially asked for in the bill, considering that his department can change the tax code to provide a huge windfall to banks, telling me there’s “no oversight” seems a bit self-evident.
In fact, the bailout plan itself appears to be working just as the Bush Administration hoped – as a “free-fraud zone” for moneyed interests to get paid off during an economic collapse. They even staffed it with one of the same guys that handed out bricks of cash to contractors in Iraq, before deciding that was too on the nose.
Under cover of an emergency, Treasury is rapidly turning into an economic Green Zone, overrun with private companies collecting lucrative contracts. Fittingly, one of the first to line up at the new trough was none other than the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani — yes, that Giuliani. The firm’s chairman, Patrick Oxford, could scarcely conceal his glee over the prospect of cashing in on the bailout. “This one,” he told reporters, “is very, very big.” At least four times bigger, in fact, than the post-9/11 homeland-security bubble, from which Giuliani and his various outfits have profited so extravagantly. Even bigger, potentially, than the price tag for the Iraq War itself.
See if any of this sounds familiar: As soon as the bailout was announced, it became clear that Treasury officials would hire outsiders to perform their jobs for them — at a profit. Private companies wanting to help manage the bailout were given just two days to apply for massive, multiyear contracts. Since it was such a mad rush — after all, the entire economy was about to implode — there was no time for an open bidding process. Nor was there time to draft rigorous rules to make sure that those applying don’t have serious conflicts of interest. Instead, applicants were asked to disclose their conflicts and to explain — and this is not a joke — their “philosophy in fulfilling your duty to the Treasury and the U.S. taxpayer in light of your proprietary interests and those of other clients.” In other words, an open invitation to bullshit about how much they love their country and how they can be trusted to regulate themselves.
I guess there’s one positive – at least Treasury is hiring!
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) — President George W. Bush today will urge leaders of the world’s biggest industrial and developing economies not to abandon principles of free-market capitalism as they seek an escape from the international financial crisis, calling it the “best system” for delivering growth.
In a speech in New York before weekend talks among leaders from the Group of 20 nations, Bush will say policy makers “should fix the problems we have rather than dismantle a system that has improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world,” according to a statement released by the White House […]
For all his defense of markets, Bush this year extended the reach of government by backing bailouts of American International Group Inc., Bear Stearns Cos., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His administration is also implementing a $700 billion financial rescue program which U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson yesterday shifted toward relieving pressure on consumer credit, scrapping an effort to buy devalued mortgage assets.
Of course, corporate welfare and socialism for the rich IS the “free-market system” that Bush is defending. It’s the only type of economy he has ever known.
Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last. Reagan Democrats in Macomb country voted for a black man(pdf) and Stan Greenberg can finally move on:
# On Election Day Obama carried Macomb by 8 points, 53 percent to 45 percent. This improvement was driven almost entirely by his consolidation of the Democratic base. Obama merely split independents in Macomb, but after earning just 71 percent of the Democratic vote in July, he won 95 percent on Election Day, the same percentage McCain won among his much smaller Republican base.
# Taking a deeper look at the data reveals that Obama’s large personal gains were largely made possible because he accomplished the three main tasks we identified in our July report: 1) reassuring that he would be a president for all Americans, 2) crossing a threshold on security and 3) connecting to voters’ economic anger.
# As in Macomb, Obama was successful in consolidating Democrats in Oakland (winning 93 percent), but he was able to improve on his margin in Macomb by besting McCain among the county’s independent voters by 12 points, 55 percent to 43 percent.
# Oakland voters rated Obama highly on almost every attribute we tested, giving the Democratic nominee very similar ratings to those received in Macomb on Election Day. On the most important attributes; including “shares your values,” “on your side,” “will keep America strong” and “has what it takes to be president;” Obama scored at or near the 60 percent level and he received even higher marks on being seen as patriotic and being able to unite the country
Ever since Greenberg isolated some racist “Reagan Democrats” in Macomb county he’s been obsessed with getting them back and in the process forcing the Democratic party to also obsess over this cohort. Now that they’ve “come home” — to a black president no less — maybe the party can finally let go of the Reagan defeat.
