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Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President 

In many of the president-elect’s international development ventures, his business partners have close ties to foreign governments.

MANILA — On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for. 

In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States. 

After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect’s children, who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr. Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works, including Trump-branded resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie Antonio said. 

“We will continue to give you products that you can enjoy and be proud of,” the elder Mr. Antonio, one of the richest men in the Philippines, told the 500 friends, employees and customers gathered for his star-studded celebration in Manila. 

Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its relationship with the United States and the president-elect — is hardly inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table. 

Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a separation” from the United States and has called for American troops to exit the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting criticism from the Obama administration.

Just as an aside, recall this from Trump on the trail:

“The world hates our president,” Trump told his supporters Friday in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “The world hates us. You saw what happened with the Philippines after years and years and years; they’re now looking to Russia and China, because they don’t feel good about the weak America.” 

During a diplomatic visit to China on Thursday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared “a separation from the United States both in military but economics also.” 

“I mean, I realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to [President Vladimir] Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines and Russia,” Duterte was quoted as saying in a transcript of his speech. 

Trump said such foreign policy declarations underscore America’s weakness on the world stage.

“America has grown weak, so weak that the Philippines have broken with decades of pro-American foreign policy to instead leave for the orbit of China and Russia,” the real estate tycoon said. “Why is Obama campaigning? He ought to be out working.”

I’d guess that Duterte and Trump are going mend fences. And Trump will take credit for making America “loved” again. (By violent psychopaths, but that’s beside the point.)

 Anyway, the NY Times continues:

Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite. 

“It is uncharted territory, really in the history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and before that at the Defense Department.

The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders. 

In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Mr. Trump boasted again about the global reach of his business — and his family’s ability to keep it running after he takes office. 

“I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world,” Mr. Trump said, adding later: “I don’t care about my company. It doesn’t matter. My kids run it.” 

In a written statement, his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said Mr. Trump and his family were committed to addressing any issues related to his financial holdings. 

“Vetting of various structures and immediate transfer of the business remains a top priority for both President-elect Trump, his adult children and his executives,” she said. 

But a review by The Times of these business dealings identified a menu of the kinds of complications that could create a running source of controversy for Mr. Trump, as well as tensions between his priorities as president and the needs and objectives of his companies. 

In Brazil, for example, the beachfront Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro — one of Mr. Trump’s many branding deals, in which he does not have an equity stake — is part of a broad investigation by a federal prosecutor who is examining whether illicit commissions and bribes resulted in apparent favoritism by two pension funds that invested in the project.
Several of Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures in India — where he has more projects underway than in any location outside North America — are being built through companies with family ties to India’s most important political party. This makes it more likely that Indian government officials will do special favors benefiting Mr. Trump’s projects, including pressuring state-owned banks to extend favorable loans. 

In Ireland and Scotland, executives from Mr. Trump’s golf courses have been waging two separate battles with local officials. The most recent centers on the Trump Organization’s plans to build a flood-prevention sea wall at the course on the Irish coast. Some environmentalists say the wall could destroy an endangered snail’s habitat — a dispute that will soon involve the president of the United States. 

And in Turkey, officials including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a religiously conservative Muslim, demanded that Mr. Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. More recently, after Mr. Trump came to the defense of Mr. Erdogan — suggesting that he had the right to crack down harshly on dissidents after a failed coup — the calls for action against Trump Towers have stopped, fueling worries that Mr. Trump’s policies toward Turkey might be shaped by his commercial interests. 

Mr. Trump has acknowledged a conflict of interest in Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” he said during a radio interview last year with Stephen K. Bannon, the Breitbart News executive who has since been designated his chief White House strategist. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one. It’s two.” 

Trump says he doesn’t care about his business. But hey, if he happens to become the richest man in the world while he’s president, well that’s just gravy.

And, needless to say, whether he “cares” about it isn’t the only question, is it?  it may be that other people care about it, including foreign leaders and businessmen with a financial stake.

And then there’s the fact that the Trump name, emblazoned all over buildings throughout the world, are now synonymous with the United States. What could wrong? And how much money are taxpayers going to have to spend to protect them? Hell, just look at what we’re going to be spending to protect Trump Tower in NYC, the official headquarters of the Trump Organization?  Sweet …

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Sunday funnies

by digby

And this from MacLeans on the Republican debates:

Let’s get you up to date. Remember Ted Cruz? He’s the one with the voice of Marvin the Martian and the world view of Yosemite Sam. During a recent debate, Marco Rubio called Cruz a liar. Then Donald Trump called Cruz “the single biggest liar”—because to Trump, everything is always the single biggest anything. Cruz later called Rubio and Trump whiners. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush called his mom and asked if he could stop trying to be president now.

Things have been tough for Rubio since Iowa, where he gave a memorable victory speech (it was memorable primarily because he finished third). A political algorithm in a suit, Rubio has been assailed for repeating his talking points, word for word, time after time, without care as to whether the message fits the context. Here’s a typical exchange:

Marco: “Let’s dispel this notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Speaker box: “Um, I just asked if you want fries with that.”

To his credit, Mr. Robot got through the last debate without falling into a programming loop, which is good news for his campaign and terrible news for humanity. This means it’s learning. Soon it will become self-aware and then there’s no stopping the Rubio-Skynet ticket.

Anyway, all that stuff about who’s the lyingest liar? Turns out that was the classy part of the debate. Later on, Trump defended having referred to Cruz as a “pussy”—saying it wasn’t so bad because, FYI, Bush had publicly threatened to “take off his pants and moon everybody.” It was around this time that the moderator interjected: “We’re in danger of driving this into the dirt.” In danger? The Republican race is a tire fire wrapped in a train wreck inside The Adventures of Pluto Nash. We’re watching as one of the world’s most successful political parties goes Dumpster diving for a leader.

The news networks are struggling to adapt. They still cover the race as though it’s a normal campaign. It’s not. We’ve passed into some next-level Narnia-talking-animal strangeness. Still, every night you can find on CNN a pundit confidently predicting Donald Trump’s demise. But Trump never demises! Everything that should kill him politically only makes him stronger. And, weirdly, oranger.

Let’s engage in a brief thought experiment: How would Donald Trump describe his immigration plan if he were eight years old? He’d probably say something like, “I am the strongest on the borders and I will build a wall, and it will be a real wall.” That sounds like the boast of an eight-year-old, right? It also happens to be the exact words Trump used. Let us savour the fact a presidential candidate felt the need to emphasize his wall would be neither metaphorical nor imaginary. It’s a savvy move: Many Americans still feel burned by the failed promises of President Pink Floyd.

I don’t mean to suggest this entire race is without upside. For instance, Ben Carson’s achievements as a neurosurgeon seem even more impressive now that we know he spends 40 per cent of his waking hours with his eyes closed. (My favourite line from the campaign remains the following declaration from Carson, a man who is trying to become president: “I’m not a politician, and I’m never going to become a politician.” Uh, yeah, that’s probably a safe bet now, Ben.)

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is also running for president (I believe that’s his slogan: “I am also running for president!”), called on Barack Obama to name a Supreme Court nominee who could win the support of all Americans. Who is this magical person? Does Betty White have a law degree?

Kasich, who seems like a reasonable man and therefore doesn’t have a chance, pleaded to voters: “The world is desperate for leadership. The world needs us.” John, on behalf of everyone in the world who’s seen what the Republicans have to offer, let me assure you: We’re good.

Never say inevitable

by Tom Sullivan

Hillary Clinton’s New York troops are figetting, waiting for a formal declaration, yet still organizing. Meanwhile, writes Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, their “candidate” remains silent. On the Keystone pipeline. On NSA reform.

But, despite the clear remarks about Ferguson and immigration, Clinton’s views on many crucial issues remain opaque. She seems to be repeating the same mistake that she made in 2008, when the inevitability of her candidacy overwhelmed its justification.

At the Ready for Hillary festival, Mitch Stewart, one of Obama’s top organizers in the 2008 contest, suggested that Clinton needed to be careful to develop a message and stick to it. He noted that she had failed to do that in the 2008 primaries. “Every six weeks, there seemed to be a new slogan, and there was nothing people could wrap their arms around,” Stewart said.

Mainstream Democratic candidates have a thing for repeating mistakes. Like the many that ran away from their president and their own brand a few weeks ago and lost big. Like Al Gore did in 2000. Eight years we endured George W. Bush.

Paging George Santayana. Or at least a campaign adviser who knows who the hell he is.

Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

The Occupy Wall Street protests are doing more than just galvanizing anger against the predatory practices of the financial sector. They are also providing the latest excuse for the left to self-immolate in the most recent version of the same argument that has been tearing natural allies apart since at least the turn of the millennium. Most of the players in this conflict position themselves along the same battle lines as the combatants in the so-called “Obama Wars” that have been all the rage on the left for the last two years.

In one camp are the more institutional lefties who tend see the protesters in New York as misguided idealists who don’t understand that banging drums and shouting slogans in a public park will do nothing to create real change. According to followers of this line of thinking, the protests will be useless until and unless the energy behind the protests is at least partially redirected toward electoral activism to elect more (and hopefully better) Democrats.

On the other side are a combination of old-school issue activists and new progressive movement types who insist that electoral politics are useless, and that only a mass popular movement to raise global class-based consciousness will accomplish needed goals. According to subscribers to this line of thought, Democrats and Republicans alike are equally guilty of subservience to Wall Street, and change will come about entirely outside the realm of electoral politics, which has failed utterly to create needed changes.

Just as in the tired “Obama wars,” both sides are right. And both are wrong.

The institutionalists are wrong for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is the obvious reality that the last 30 years of adherence to neoliberal ideology, anti-government fetishism and kowtowing to the financial sector has occurred under Democratic and Republican administrations alike in an unending continuum from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama. It has occurred under divided government and single-party-majority governments alike, on both Republican and Democratic watches. Bill Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act and declared the era of big government to be over. Wall Street bailouts occurred in a bipartisan fashion, and in fact garnered more support from Democrats than from Republicans. And then President Obama, rather than try to pursue the sort of change his supporters believed in, proceeded to put the likes of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of his economic policy, rather than the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Volcker and Paul Krugman.

The notion that electing more Democrats alone will solve any of the grievances enumerated by the protesters is comical. So when institutionalists argue that protesters should channel their activism into electoral politics, they come off as 1) clueless about what is actually motivating the protesters; 2) in the dark about the bipartisan nature of the subversion of democracy beneath the iron fist of deregulatory ideology; and at worst 3) self-serving hacks attempt to co-opt legitimate frustration in the service of their own careerist ends. The institutionalists bring these sorts of accusations on themselves, despite the fact that most of them volunteer their time for institutional activism with little or no hope of personal return, and the fact that many of the Democrats in Congress actually agree with most of the protesters’ platform.

On the other hand, those who completely reject electoral politics are almost equally misguided. They either vastly overestimate the power of popular protest to effectuate change, or vastly underestimate the utter determination of conservatives in power to stop any changes from taking place. They fail to account for the fact that politicians in the United States have never acted out of fear of mass popular revolt alone, and that year after year after year of gigantic protests against the Vietnam War did little to stop the needless bloodshed in Southeast Asia.

They also do themselves no favors by deeply maligning the many activists who agree 100% with their platform, but have taken a more institutional approach to resolving their grievances. This includes a large number of Democrats toiling in Congress and statehouses nationwide who are attempting to do their best to resolve these problems within the framework the U.S. Constitution allows, and receive nothing but scorn from these activists in return.

It is especially important for anti-institutional progressives to take into account that there are a large number of politicians in this country who are accountable to an electoral base that is, as matter of cultural identity, directly opposed to the protesters’ beliefs and deaf to their concerns. They will not be persuaded, they will not be moved and they cannot be reached. The latest GOP presidential debates are not being showcased on behalf of big money donors, but on behalf of a large swath of Americans who actually agree with the insanity being peddled on stage.

So for the anti-institutionalists, realizing one simple point is crucial: as long as Republicans are in power, no amount of protest will affect the American government. Over a million people could camp out on the National Mall for months at a time, and nothing would change. Speaker Boehner and his caucus of Tea Party nutcases simply will not be moved except by one action and one alone: booting them out of office. The chances of their addressing the grievances of the majority of the American People are less than nil, regardless of the public pressure placed upon them.

And yet, for the institutionalists, it’s also critical to recognize just how damaging the last 30 years of Democratic acquiescence to conservative ideology has been for not only the Democratic brand, but for the nation’s belief in the power of electoral politics to create change.

It is quite literally impossible to say with a straight face that working to elect more or even better Democrats will actually create the change necessary to address the grievances being expressed in Zuccotti Park. It’s laughable. That ship has been sailing away for decades, and disappeared completely over the horizon with the disappointment of January 2009 through November 2010 and beyond. It is painfully obvious that electoral politics alone are utterly inadequate to deal with the nation’s problems.

The reality is that putting Democrats in power is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating real change in this country.

Republicans are ideologically opposed to creating the necessary changes, and are more afraid of being primaried by an even more crazy conservative, than of even the biggest protest movements from the left. Democrats, meanwhile, are ideologically compatible with most of the changes, but are variously stymied by the system, blinkered by a desire for “compromise,” fearful of conservative anger, or corrupted by the influence of big money.

In order for change to take place, good Democrats do need to be in power. But only an angry and motivated populace angry with both Parties and strongly intent on holding Democrats accountable will scare and motivate Democrats enough to do what they were elected to do.

LBJ wouldn’t have been pushed to do the right thing for civil rights without MLK. But neither would MLK have brought his dream to fruition without a president in power with the courage to enforce desegregation.

Ultimately, the institutionalists need to allow the Occupy Wall Street protests to develop organically without attempting to convert them into electoral activism in any form. Supporting the protests is perhaps the most important thing progressives can be doing right now. As Robert Cruickshank tweeted:

We need to focus on generating the waves, not recruiting people to surf them.

But on the other hand, it would behoove movement progressives not to dismiss the arena of electoral politics and those who engage in it. If Mitt Romney becomes president or John Boehner remains the House Speaker, it won’t matter how big or successful the protests become. For things to really work, Democrats will have to be in power and a powerful progressive protest movement with a healthy distrust of institutional Democrats will need to be in place to hold them accountable.

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Civilized Dictatorship

by digby

This is how the civilized people handle these messy situations:

When Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement began its demonstrations in Pearl Square last month, Atif Abdulmalik was supportive. An American-educated investment banker and a member of the Sunni Muslim elite, he favored a constitutional monarchy and increasing opportunities and support for the poorer Shiite majority.

But in the past week or two, the nature of the protest shifted — and so did any hope that demands for change would cross sectarian lines and unite Bahrainis in a cohesive democracy movement. The mainly Shiite demonstrators moved beyond Pearl Square, taking over areas leading to the financial and diplomatic districts of the capital. They closed off streets with makeshift roadblocks and shouted slogans calling for the death of the royal family.

“Twenty-five percent of Bahrain’s G.D.P. comes from banks,” Mr. Abdulmalik said as he sat in the soft Persian Gulf sunshine. “I sympathize with many of the demands of the demonstrators. But no country would allow the takeover of its financial district. The economic future of the country was at stake. What happened this week, as sad as it is, is good.”

To many around the world, the events of the past week — the arrival of 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and other neighbors, the declaration of martial law, the forceful clearing out of Pearl Square, the military takeover of the main hospital and then the spiteful tearing down of the Pearl monument itself — seem like the brutal work of a desperate autocracy.

But for Sunnis, who make up about a third of the country’s citizenry but hold the main levers of power, it was the only choice of a country facing a rising tide of chaos that imperiled its livelihood and future.

“How can we have a dialogue when they are threatening us?” Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, the foreign minister and a member of the royal family, asked Friday night at a news conference.

Absolutely. No country could allow the takeover of it’s financial district. That goes without saying. This sounds like something you could have heard any afternoon on CNBC:

What also troubles Mr. Abdulmalik, the banker, is the way in which Bahrain has been grouped recently in discussions abroad with Libya and Yemen. The elite here think of their country as more like the Persian Gulf’s version of Singapore — a liberal, sophisticated place that is culturally far more open than its neighbors…

“Bahrain has always been open, and we don’t want to see it turned into another Iran,” Ms. Khalifa said. In the nearby cultural center her foundation runs, philosophers, poets and thinkers from around the world have taken part in a weekly lecture program. But the program and others like it have ground to a halt because of the recent troubles; a large Unesco meeting that Bahrain was planning to host has been suddenly moved to Paris.

Much of the push for democratic reform here, as elsewhere in the region, has come from economic hard times. Bahraini supporters of the government note that in this country there is free education, free medical care, heavily subsidized housing as well as no taxes. Budgetary troubles meant home construction was delayed, pushing some of the poor to join the demonstrations.

“The last few years were very difficult because of the financial crisis,” said Mr. Abdulmalik, the banker. “But that crisis was not so bad because we were dealing with facts. In the last month, we have been dealing with emotions. I told the demonstrators, ‘This country is developing, and you will stifle it.’ Something had to be done, and it was.”

Dear me. It appears they staved off the riff raff in the nick of time.

Luckily our friends took care of all that messiness with a swift crackdown. Otherwise this whole thing have gotten embarrassing for the people who matter. (And I think you know who those people are.)

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Presumptuous Maverick

by digby

Yglesias says:

[I]t looks like Mikhail Saakashvili thought it meant something when John McCain proclaimed America and Georgia to be identical:

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

Bush came through for McCain and Saakashvili:

The United States of America stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia…I have directed a series of steps to demonstrate our solidarity with the Georgian people and bring about a peaceful resolution to this conflict.

You’ll recall that both Bush and Obama were far more circumspect in their language when this thing first started. McCain came charging out of the gate with chest thumping bellicosity and soon Bush (and Obama, to a lesser degree) followed. Events certainly changed perspectives, but there’s no doubt who is the leader of American foreign policy on this matter — Senator John McCain.

Now, Russia too has called the US on its loose talk:

Russia accused the United States on Wednesday of playing a dangerous game in the Caucasus by backing Georgia and denied Moscow was not doing enough to prevent looting.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Washington had to choose between partnership with Moscow and the Georgian leadership which he described as a “virtual project”.

“We understand that this current Georgian leadership is a special project of the United States, but one day the United States will have to choose between defending its prestige over a virtual project or real partnership which requires joint action,” Lavrov told reporters.

John McCain was the first one out of the box with the evil empire crap and it very well may have led the Bush administration to follow for political — and maybe personal — reasons. (Bush is being dinged by the wingnuts for failing to show enough machismo.)

I remember reading some stuff recently about how it was unseemly for Barack Obama to go on an overseas trip. Why, he was acting like he’d already won! Now, we have McCain making statements on television that are having an actual impact on an international crisis, and which might even be illegal, and I’m hearing gasbags say he looks very presidential. It looks more like presumptuousness to me.

But then a grizzled old veteran’s presumptuousness isn’t the same as a young, African American upstart’s, is it?

Update: Even Jonathan Martin at the Politico sees something amiss with this one:

I think Greg Sargent is on to something regarding McCain’s announcement at his press conference today that Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman — his two closest friends in the Senate — will be heading to Georgia soon.

Yes, they’re both members of the Armed Services Committee. But McCain’s declaration has something of a shadow government feel to it, as though he’s sending his own emissaries into the war zone.

Try to imagine if Obama had announced that he was sending Biden and Levin to the war zone.

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The Blithering Idiocy of the DC Establishment

by dday

The Village, via Cokie Roberts, gives their very serious assessment of Iraq on ABC’s This Week:

STEPHANOPOLOUS: But this is going to be a split in the party. You all (at The Nation) are backing a plan that a lot of Congressional challengers are backing (The Responsible Plan) saying, immediate withdrawal, unconditional…

VANDEN HEUVEL: that’s right…

(crosstalk)

VANDEN HEUVEL: There are 42 Congressional challengers…

ROBERTS: But no major Presidential candidates are saying that, because they’re sitting there saying look, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we think it’s an irresponsible thing to do.

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw.

(you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point)

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions. And Cokie, Americans are already behind this, 2/3 of Americans believe this war was a mistake to fight. And when Dick Cheney said to ABC’s Martha Raddatz last week, “I don’t care what Americans think.” The contempt, the disdain for Americans and for what this war has done to the military, to our economy, and to our future as a nation. If you care about responsible…

Well, Katrina Vanden Heuvel handled that a bit better than I, because I don’t think I would have been able to hold down the bile after hearing Duchess Cokie of Versailles blather on about what Americans would prefer. Not that she’s likely to have talked to anyone who’s had to serve in this war or felt the burdens of this war, of course, but she just feels it in her very sensible and serious gut.

She doesn’t have a clue what the hell she’s talking about, and if she’s being informed about Iraq by “Sunni, Shi’a, po-tay-to po-tah-to” McCain and his man-servant Huckleberry Graham it’d be a wonder if she could pick the country out on a map. We have an important week coming up with A Man Called Petraeus and Ryan Crocker testifying before Congress, and if this is the sober analysis we can expect out of that, we’re all doomed. Because in point of fact, Iraq is at a major crossroads. The Basra offensive was a complete failure, as large swaths of the five-years-in-the-making Iraqi Army essentially refused to fight. Now Maliki is basically forming his own militia from the pro-Iranian Badr Brigade, and the intra-Shiite warfare is raging, with US troops dying today inside the Green Zone and at forward operating bases in Baghdad. The political situation is stalemated, tensions are rising within the Sadrist Shia and the Sunni Awakening groups and practically everyone else, and whatever gains have been made by the surge have vanished.

We’re going to hear a lot of crap in the next week out of the Administration and their spinners, and robots like Cokie are going to lap it up because, you know, “Americans would prefer to win.” That’s just an ignorant and dismissive remark, and it sadly represents the depth of understanding of the tragedy in Iraq inside The Village. Of course, Cokie’s just repeating what “real Americans” think; that it happens to line up with establishment opinion and helps provide cover for their epic mistake of going along with the initial invasion is just a nice perk.

In the chaotic environment of Iraq, leaving 80,000 troops to babysit the Iraqis will do about as much as having 160,000 troops do the same; in other words, nothing at all (Russ Feingold understands this). Until the fundamental question – whether a continued presence in Iraq is making America safer now and in the future – is addressed, we’re doing nothing but spinning our wheels. Keeping troops in the region to try and put a lid on violence until George Bush is safely tucked away creates a huge moral hazard that simply adds to the potentially dangerous outcomes.

This explains why the Kagans’ “Iraq 4-Ever” strategy is actually worse than withdrawal. The Bush/Kagan strategy is simply to keep the maximum number of troops in Iraq as long as possible in the hopes a pony will appear. To maintain political support for the Pony Strategy, they need to peddle worse-case scenarios and paint pictures of genocide and all-out civil war.

I’ll fully concede that such events are possible – anyone who doesn’t is being dishonest. But my point is that our occupation makes them more likely, for the reasons explained above. Specifically, the longer and more indefinitely we stay, the greater the moral hazard we produce. As long as we stay indefinitely, parties will act more recklessly than they otherwise would. These actions, in turn, will have profound, unpredictable, and irreversible consequences.

The plan that Vanden Heuvel was referencing, the Responsible Plan, reflects a significant and growing wing of the Democratic Party that simply is not willing to wait around anymore while the leadership tries to come up with a coherent endgame strategy. Darcy Burner, the driving force behind the plan, has substantially improved her electoral position as a result. I don’t know how that fits in with Duchess Cokie’s pronouncements, other than the obvious fact that it doesn’t. Well over 50 Congressional challengers have endorsed the plan, understanding that a comprehensive strategy to end the war and repair the broken institutions that enabled the disaster not only makes political sense but is absolutely vital to our national security. Ilan Goldenberg sums up the plan nicely.

For the past two years, Democrats have been offering plan after plan to end the war in Iraq. But this one is different. As opposed to the usual broad language, combined with a laundry list of policy proposals that make up traditional party platforms, the plan has a sharp focus, with a clear strategic logic focused around two fundamental principles. First, the United States must find a way to sensibly end its military mission in Iraq–and use the political, diplomatic, humanitarian, and economic tools at its disposal to mitigate the negative consequences of the war. Second, the Iraq War has done irreparable damage not just to Iraq but to our country, and the time has come to reform our institutions and put the checks and balances in place to ensure that these mistakes are not repeated […]

Too often, candidates running for Congress make very specific proposals about foreign policy that are far outside of their purview. The “Real Security” plan of 2006 was ultimately about the executive branch; it was backed by a 120-page smattering of documents and reports that criticized the Bush Administration and catalogued hundreds of pieces of legislation that would reshape American foreign policy, but were, on the whole, too unwieldy to act as an agenda vehicle.

“A Responsible Plan” would instead serve as the congressional corollary to a Democratic presidency. It doesn’t include elements over which Congress has little control, but it does push for 15 pieces of existing legislation, which focus on issues such as improving healthcare for a new generation of veterans and phasing out our reliance on military contractors such as Blackwater. Only the president can end the war in Iraq, but Congress can do its share by focusing on institutional repair and funding the right programs.

This approach is apparent in the most creative part of the document, titled “Preventing Future Iraqs.” These policies focus on checking presidential authority and ensuring that Congress can’t easily give the president a free hand to go to war. It calls for incorporating war funding into the regular defense budget instead of using “emergency supplementals”; eliminating the president’s use of signing statements to alter the substantive meaning of a law passed by Congress; repealing parts of the Military Commissions Act that suspended habeas corpus; and ending the use of wiretapping without a FISA warrant. These are good policies for both Republican and Democratic presidents to abide by.

Without a robust Congressional counterbalance to executive power, we will not be able to stop more Iraqs. Darcy Burner and the dozens of endorsers are not only running to enter Congress but to restore the institution itself.

This Wednesday I’m helping host a low-dollar fundraising event for Darcy, where she will be flanked by a number of netroots activists (including myself and Digby) and at least two California candidates who have endorsed the plan, Ron Shepston (CA-42) and Mary Pallant (CA-24). If you want to reward and recognize true leadership and courage, and make Cokie Roberts cry, join me in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. All the information is at this ActBlue page, and you can donate at the link as well. Alternatively, if you’re not in the Southern California area, you can donate to Darcy and some of our other great progressive candidates at Blue America.

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All Hail Falafel Day

by digby

Seeing as today is Falafel Day, in honor of Billo’s threat to “destroy Kos” it seems like a good time to reprise one of my favorite Billo posts:

Semper Falafel

O’Reilly understands that war is hell:

Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash. If that wounded insurgent had a grenade or other explosive device, the entire marine squad and the photographer could be dead right now. In a killing zone, one cannot afford the luxury of knowing what is certain.

As with all literary greats like Mailer, Jones and Heller, O’Reilly has memorialized his scorching experiences in his novel, “Those Who Trespass” a murder mystery set in Argentina during the hell on earth that was the Falklands war:

The policemen were clearly frightened. Their fascist powers were being brazenly challenged. Standing directly in front of the police were nearly ten thousand very angry Argentine citizens screaming curses and revolutionary slogans:

ALa gente unida venceramos!

AMuera la Junta!

AMuera Galtieri!

GNN News Correspondent Shannon Michaels translated the chant and wrote it into his notebook: “The people, united, will never be defeated! Death to the Junta! Death to the dictator Galtieri!” Shannon and his video crew stood behind the police, five hundred strong crowded together in a massive show of force. Their assignment was to guard the presidential palace, called the Casa Rosada–the Pink House–and to protect President General Leopoldo Galtieri. But the crowd was getting more and more aggressive, pushing toward the large metal gate that provided access to the palatial grounds. Shannon saw that The Plaza de Mayo, the huge square in front of the Casa Rosada, was now filled to capacity. Something very ugly was going to happen, Shannon thought, and happen soon.

The sky was clear, but clouds were assembling in the west. Shannon ran his fingers through his thick mane of wavy brown hair. His teal blue eyes were locked on the agitated crowd. It was his eyes that most people noticed first–a very unusual color that some thought materialized from a contact lens case. But Shannon, the product of two Celtic parents, didn’t go in for cosmetic enhancements. His 6′ 4 frame was well toned by constant athletics, and his pale white skin was flawless–another genetic gift. Shannon’s looks, which he thoroughly capitalized on, made him a natural for television.

As the mob continued its boisterous serenade, Shannon slowly shook his head. Most wars were foolish, he thought, but this one was unusually idiotic. The Argentine Junta, a group of military thugs led by General Galtieri, had ordered an invasion of the British-administered Falkland Islands on April Fool’s Day, 1982. The government claim was that the islands, which the Argentines called the Malvinas, became a part of Argentina through a Papal declaration in 1493. The British disagreed. So, nearly five hundred years after the grant of land, the Argentine Army swarmed ashore, startling eighteen hundred British subjects and tens of thousands of bewildered sheep.

[…]

During his seven-year career as a TV news correspondent, Michaels had seen rank stupidity, but this moronic government strategy boggled the mind. Anyone who read a newspaper knew that the British Parliament, and especially Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, would never allow British honor to be besmirched. It took the Brits just three months to thoroughly humiliate the Junta, further angering the Argentine citizenry. No wonder they were now filling the streets in passionate demonstration against the Galtieri government.

Sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it? Has anyone matched this kind of searing prose in the Falklands chronicles? I don’t want to ruin the story by revealing the fiery hell that our blue eyed Celtic hero had to endure. Let’s just say that that marine in Falluja won’t know what hell is until he’s had to film a news story with his flawless white skin covered in dust and dirt. It just makes you sick to even think about it.

The horror…

Talking Big

Daniel Munz sitting in over at Ezra Klein’s place takes issue with Matt Welch’s post in which he says:

There’s a better and arguably more attractive ideological option than being anti–”pro–free market,” and it’s sitting right in front of the Democrats’ noses. When the party you despise controls most of the levers of government, it’s an excellent time to run against government.

Disparate threads of limited-government rhetoric have begun to pop through the seams of the New Old Left unity. In the wake of the gay marriage wipeout and unpopular federal laws concerning the environment and medical marijuana, many Blue Staters are rediscovering the joys of federalism. “Fiscal responsibility” has cemented itself as boilerplate Democratic rhetoric, and not just as an excuse to jack up tax rates: Rising Democratic star Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, has been drawing praise from Cato for slashing his state’s income taxes, and pushing his fellow Democratic governors to follow his lead.

Munz disagrees entirely saying:

Unless we’re willing to abandon things like Medicare, Social Security, and good public education, we’ll never be able to take the argument to its logical conclusion. Opponents will say we’re half-assing an ideological commitment because it polls well. And if we adopt any strategy that garners Megadittoes from the guys at Cato, they’ll be right. More importantly, it’s not who we are. Liberals don’t dislike government. To many liberals, Reagan’s declaration that “government is the problem” amounted to political hate speech. I still bristle at Clinton’s “era of big government” schtick.

Just to make it confusing, I’ll agree and disagree with both of them.

I think Muntz is right that any tack to the right on “big government” will just further enable the wingnuts. We’ve gone as fur as we can go. (Richardson, in my opinion, is further degrading the liberal philosophy with his harping on more tax cuts.) Munz offers “We are the party of Real Solutions That Help Real People,” as a slogan. It’s not bad but I think liberalism is a lot bigger than that and we can make a much more compelling case.

Liberal beliefs are rooted in a belief in civil liberties and the American ideals of justice, fairness and equality, which offer a bit more inspiration than just saying that government helps people. American liberalism holds that democratic government is the only institution that can guarantee those ideals. Our concept of social justice follows from that. I think it’s important that we continuously marry these concepts together so the principles are entwined in people minds along with the practical result. People need to feel that their politics are tied to big ideas, even if it’s really just “freedom plus groceries” as Matt Yglesias so prosaically summed it up. And, in fact, liberalism is tied to big principles that we should constantly reinforce in our rhetoric. One of the reasons our politicians sound dull as dishwater is our laundry list style of communication.

In a practical sense, however, I think that Welch is right to say that there are some attractive ideological options presenting themselves but they have nothing to do with the specific issues he discusses. They are interesting in that they come from a slightly different direction than the usual liberal agenda, but they are representative of liberal first principles and give us a fresh opportunity to talk about our beliefs in a bigger sense. (Some of you are aware that I’m intrigued by the idea of forming a privacy/civil liberties coalition within the party to work on splitting off certain western MYOB types from the southern conservative evangelical base of the GOP and I think this might be helful to that end as well.)

This Choice Point scandal, for instance, is just the tip of the iceberg regarding corporate intrusion into people’s personal business without their knowledge and then selling the information to anyone who asks for it. This is a huge unregulated business that illustrates once again how dangerous the market can be to the individual when there is no government oversight. This issue represents an opportunity for us to make an affirmative case for regulation and consumer rights, pulling our belief in a personal right to privacy into the argument.

It also dovetails with the Republican assault on the Bill of Rights (the second amendment excepted, of course.) Liberals have a long and illustrious history of fighting for civil liberties. Freedom is not a word that traditionally belongs to conservatives except when it comes to property. As we see them willing to justify shredding the 4th amendment with a sweeping redefinition of executive branch power, I think we have every right to question whether their alleged commitment to liberty as expressed in the Bill of Rights, and the principles they represent, is anything more than an elaborate marketing scheme.

Whether or not there is any practical point in appealing to certain libertarian impulses in the American character is debatable but I think it is incumbent that we bring our big principles into the argument in some way. The bible isn’t the only source of “values” symbols and I would argue that liberals actually have a greater claim to the shared American symbols of the founding documents.

Here’s a little insight into how the GOP plans to “market” liberty from Frank Luntz:

As you are well aware, communication does not exist solely in our words, either written or spoken. Americans draw upon a shared well of symbols, images that evoke concepts fundamental to our country. As our politics are produced with these concepts in mind — freedom, liberty, opportunity — there are timeless American images that match them. Communicating policies within that context and harnessing these symbols to match their principles is perhaps the most powerful form of communication there is.

When you speak of the 2005 legislative agenda, do not be afraid to wax poetic about this link between American icons of freedom and opportunity and the very legislation that you are discussing. It will not seem trite. It will not appear sordid. Indeed, will resonate with a power that cannot match that of your words and phrases. Language is your base. Symbols knock it out of the park.

He’s right. But rather than being cheap and manipulative and trying to finesse words like fairness to mean “equality of opportunity” let’s just tell it like it is. I’ll give it a stab.

The case for responsive government that provides services to the people and keeps the market functioning in a healthy way springs from the liberal belief in justice, equality and liberty. The bill of rights is the founding document of American liberalism.

We believe that while property rights are fundamental to American law, liberty means more than property rights only. There is a reason that Thomas Jefferson wrote “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” instead of the more familiar (at the time) “life liberty and property” in the declaration. Even then, America was about more than this cramped view that freedom is nothing more than freedom from taxes. Freedom is also the inherant right of each individual to dominion over his or her identity, body and mind.

We believe in free speech and freedom of religion with almost no exceptions because no individual can be trusted to make such distinctions without prejudice. We believe in the right to a fair trial and we believe that those who represent the government must be held to a very high standard due to the natural temptations the government’s awesome judicial and police power can present. We cannot have a free society where government does not adhere to the rule of law.

We have fought for universal suffrage, labor laws, civil rights and the right to privacy among many other things because we believe in fairness, equality and social justice. We believe those principles require a society such as ours to ensure that all people can live a decent and dignified life. We think that democratic government, being directly accountable to the people, is the best institution through which those pinciples can be successfully translated into action. We are always on the side of progress, looking forward, stepping into the future.

The founding fathers were liberals. Our tradition is as American as apple pie.

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