There's nothing original about them. They've all been with us a good long while. But there are three big lies wrapped up in the Citizens United decision. Take them away, and there's nothing left. They are:
(1) Money is speech.
(2) Corporations are people.
(3) Lies (1) and (2) are not the inventions of conservative judicial activism.
I wrote an earlier diary that was critical of Glenn Greenwald's take on the decision, but the basic thing wrong with Greenwald's approach was that it flat out ignored the fundamental mendacity involved-not to mention what was going on behind the mendacity, what virtually everyone knows this decision is really about: brute power, not speech. Indeed, brute power that has the inherent ability to stiffle speech.
On Friday, it didn't take more than a minute or so for guest, Monica Youn--who directs the money in politics project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice--to set the record straight:
BILL MOYERS: Now, comedians can be funny and journalists can be facetious, but in very plain language, who won the Supreme Court decision?
MONICA YOUN: Well, corporations clearly won this decision. I mean, essentially, what the court does is it awards monopoly power over the First Amendment to corporations. You can think about the last couple of elections as, you know, the slow rise of the grassroots. And as a result, the political parties, for the first time, had an incentive to start reaching out to small donors, to start cultivating grassroots organizing networks. And you saw what happened in the last election. Now, what the Supreme Court has done here is really a power play. It takes power away from the grassroots, and it puts it squarely back in the hands of corporate special interests.
It threatens to make these grassroots networks irrelevant. To say, you know, it's no longer going to be worthwhile for, you know, parties to look for fundraising opportunities, $20, $100, even $2,400 at a time, if they can just have multimillion dollar support directly from corporate treasuries.
The problem with Greenwald's type of analysis is that it takes the First Amendment argument seriously, it accepts the first two big lies identified above, rather than realizing that this decision is a reductio ad absurdum refutation of them. In contrast, Youn simply looks at what's happening right in front of us. It's a classic case of "Who are going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"
On Wednesday, Democracy Now! featured an interview with Stan Brock, formerly with the long-running tv show, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and founder of Remote Area Medical , "a non-profit, volunteer, airborne relief corps dedicated to serving mankind by providing free health care, dental care, eye care, veterinary services, and technical and educational assistance to people in remote areas of the United States and the world." Brock first got the idea when he had a bit of a mishap in the Amazon, and one of the Wapishana Indians with whom he was living told him, "Well, the nearest doctor is twenty-six days on foot from here." For years the organization served people around the world, but then Brock realized how many people here in America needed the exact same services. Today, he explained, "64 percent of everything we do is now right here in America."
Then, on Friday, Bill Moyers had an extended conversation with journalist Trudy Lieberman and Dr. Marcia Angell-- a remarkably blunt, straight-forward discussion that stood in stark contrast to almost everything else you'll see on tv about health care reform. Taken together, these two programs threw into sharp relief just how abysmally Obama has failed to deliver on his promise, and how easily he could have done much, much better.
First, there is Brock, telling us about his organization's patented field expeditions, and pointing out the tremendous media opportunity that Obama could take advantage of to galvanized public opinion... if only Obama were interested in that:
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what, for example, you're about to do this weekend, this expedition that you've got in Wise, Virginia. In fact, you're about to start sending off supplies just after we speak.
STAN BROCK: Yeah. Well, it will be the 575th Remote Area Medical expedition. The 574th ended just last Sunday. And we see many, many hundreds and often thousands of people at these operations. In fact, last year at Wise, Virginia, we did 5,586 patient encounters, with 1,584 volunteers in just two-and-a-half days. And to give you some idea of the volume of medical work that goes on in one of these RAM expeditions, we pulled 3,896 bad teeth there last year, but we did save 1,888 teeth by filling them, so that was an improvement over the year before.....
What I would like to suggest is that somebody from the administration, perhaps even President Obama himself-what an opportunity to come to one place where there will be-I'm going to give out 1,500 numbers every morning starting Friday and Saturday of this weekend. You're going to have thousands of patients all gathered in one place. You're going to have over 1,500 volunteers, doctors and support workers all in one place. What an opportunity to ask these people about their lives and what they need and their aspirations. But, unfortunately, so far, nobody seems to be taking notice of this. And we've done 574 of these opportunities.
Add to that Obama's oratory and charismatic presence, and you want to tell me he couldn't mobilize a powerful grassroots force to change the dynamics in Washington, if that were really what he wanted to do?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary, "The Recovery Myth", warning about the risks of ignoring longer-term economic prospects for short term upticks. This diary continues that theme (and is fully in tune with Mike's recent diary, "We Need a Jobs Package, Not a Stimulus Package").
A rising tide of voices are warning that optimism over a coming recovery--the promise of "green shoots"--is looking increasingly questionable. Typical of these are Dean Baker's "The Green Shoots Are Dead", hence my diary title. The subhead to his article explains:
The latest jobless figures show America's economy is stuck in the doldrums. The US urgently needs a new stimulus injection
Krugman argues along similar lines in his July 9 column, "The Stimulus Trap"
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan - this was before Inauguration Day - some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration's economic stewardship. There's now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed....
In a recession this deep, recovery doesn't depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery....
This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.
Meanwhile, Bonddad is on a counter-contrarian kick at DKos, writing "The Economic Free Fall is Over", which I believe is instructively mistaken. It's true in one sense, but it misses the point in a larger one (after all, FDR reversed the downward plunge of the GDP within his first two years, but unemployment remained crushing until WWII came along). More on all of these viewpoints--and more viewpoints as well--on the flip.
Last night, Bill Moyers Journal featured a long discussion (transcript here) focused on Pakistan with Juan Cole, and Shahan Mufti. While it had many interesting facets to it, the main thrust cannot be emphasized enough: rumors of Pakistan's death have been greatly exaggerated, and they tell us more about ourselves than about Pakistan. Perhaps one of the most arresting (and obvious, once you think about it) observations made was this:
JUAN COLE: You know, in the past two years, the Pakistani public has demanded an end to a military dictatorship. On the grounds that it was violating the rule of law. They demanded free and fair parliamentary elections. They accomplished them. They voted the largest party they put in is the left of center or centrist secular party. They then went to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the secular civil Supreme Court. And you've had, really, hundreds of thousands of people involved in this movement for the restoration of democracy and the restoration of the rule of law. If this had happened any other place in the world, it would be reported in Washington as a good news story. Here, we've been told that it's a crisis. That it's a sign of instability and nuclear armed nation. I don't understand that.
At the risk of seeming impertinent, I think I understand it perfectly, Juan. They've shown us what a real democracy would look like, and it totally freaks us out.
The fact is, Pakistan has a really lousy political culture, as bad or worse than ours in many ways, and yet the Pakistani people have simply refused to take it lying down. And for that, they are deserving of the absolutely highest respect.
From Friday's Show, first, the liberal response from Mark Danner--what was once the standard liberal response, and then the conservative response from Bruce Fein--what was once if not quite the "standard conservative response" at least the canonical conservative response: it's the rule of law, stupid!
BILL MOYERS: The President had a press conference on Wednesday night in which he was asked two questions about torture. If you'd been there, Mark, what would you have asked him?
MARK DANNER: I would have asked him to get out in front of the country this whole debate about torture. Why it was done. Whether it really protects the country. What we've lost and what we've gained. Because I think the losses have been very, very great.
But until the country is convinced and understands how great the losses have been, and parts with the notion that torture is necessary to protect us, we still are going to be having this continuing debate about torture as a necessity to protect the country, which I think is very harmful.
BRUCE FEIN: I would have asked him, since he's agreed that what was done was torture, and that the United States criminal code makes torture a crime. And there's no national security exception, no exception if you get useful information. And because we had impeached, in the House Judiciary Committee, a former President, called Richard Nixon, for failing faithfully to execute the laws. How he can justify not moving forward with an investigation when we have a former President and Vice President openly acknowledging they authorized water boarding, what he has described as torture, is a crime.
Or in the alternative, if he thinks that there are mitigating circumstances, and there's body language suggests that, then he should pardon them like Ford did Richard Nixon. And the reason why the difference between a pardon and non-prosecution is important, is because a pardon requires the recipient to acknowledge guilt. That there was wrongdoing. There was a crime. Just forgetting and sweeping it under the rug suggests this wasn't illegal.
The day after the April 15 "Tea Parties", rightwing enabler extraordinaire Ross Douthat wrote:
They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think.
So many lies, so little time. But it's not the lies per se I'm concerned with-it's the misperception that there's really any difference in kind between Douthat and the Tea-Bagging yahoos with their "show me your REAL birth certificate" signs. They weren't out there protesting economic policy policy-as anyone reading their signs could plainly see.
They were out their in an identity politics rage, the bottom line of which was "Don't believe your lyin' eyes! Barack Obama is evil! Evil! Evil! And not a real 'Murican like us!
And Douthout was in there, in The Atlantic's august electronic tower, saying, "Don't believe your lyin' eyes! They're rational, salt-of-the-earth political actors. They're real 'Muricans same as you or me!"
The notion that this pathetic band of yahoos--drummed up by weeks of rants on Fox News and talk radio-had anything in common with the tens of millions who protested against Bush's war is just the sort of ludicrous lie that's intended to distract from the core fraud being perpetrated here-the fraud that Douthout and the mob are anything but the fingers and the opposable thumb of the same bloody fist. It's just like when William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell wrote their book defending Joe McCarthy while he was in full frothing-at-mouth-mode. They exist only to work together as one, and all their pretense to higher learning, critical analysis and sophistication is nothing but a sham.
BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.
BILL MOYERS: In your book, you make it clear that calculated dishonesty by people in charge is at the heart of most large corporate failures and scandals, including, of course, the S&L, but is that true? Is that what you're saying here, that it was in the boardrooms and the CEO offices where this fraud began?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.
This is the great truth that cannot be spoken: what we're seeing here is massive elite criminality. And it, of course, the natural result of 30+ years of virtualy unfettered elite rule. This is what the Democrats ought to be standing militantly against. If they were, the GOP would dissolve within a few election cycles, as the Federalists did during the Monroe Presidency. But, of course, the Democrats are almost as deeply aligned with the criminals are the Republicans are--and Giethner, Summers and Rubin are the proof of the pudding. This is not a question of right vs. left. It's a question of left vs. wrong. Because calling a banker a criminal makes you a Commie, right? Even if it's true.
On Friday, Bill Moyers Journal featured a nearly hour long interview with Karen Armstrong, religious scholar, former nun and author of books such as Muhammad: A Biography Of The Prophet, The Bible: A Biography, and The Battle for God. A major focus of the interview was her focus on compassion.
In his introduction, Moyers, "Karen Armstrong is now on a mission to bring compassion, the heart of religion, as she sees it, back into modern life."
BILL MOYERS: Last year, at an annual gathering of the leaders in technology, entertainment and design, she received their highly prestigious TED Prize, a $100,000 cash award that, like the genie in the lamp, also grants the recipient a wish.
Clip:
KAREN ARMSTRONG: I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion -- crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule.
BILL MOYERS: The Golden Rule: "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." That universal principle of empathy and respect is at the core of all major religions.
Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion was launched last year with an interactive website, charterforcompassion.org. There, people of all faiths can submit their ideas about what the Charter should say.
Recently, she traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, and gathered with a group of international religious leaders to draft the guiding principles of her charter for compassion. Karen Armstrong, it's good to see you again.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: It's great to be back. Thank you.
While this was not the only topic of their discussion, it was a central element. Woven together with it were a number of other important ideas, or perspectives, which are not new for those familiar with her earlier work. These include an insight into fundamentalism that is sorely needed in our world today, which was the subject of her book, The Battle for God. Some of this she clearly restated, some remained implicit, and a small part, I think, was a bit mis-stated. But it is all important, because it provides a radically different way of understanding the clashing belief systems behind what Bush had branded the "war on terrorism."
If I could summarize these points-a bit too briefly, perhaps-in my own words, they would be:
(1) Fundamentalism is a response to wounding and alienation.
(2) Violent fundamentalism is a political movement.
(3) Violent fundamentalists are at war with their moderate co-religionists.
(4) Moderates in all religious traditions must restore compassion to its central place in their religious practice, both for themselves and the world, and to draw fundamentalists back into fruitful dialogue.
Although Armstrong did not discuss it, there is an important, though implicit distinction between violent fundamentalist extremists and fundamentalists who may support violent extremists, but can also turn against them. This distinction is extremely important in trying to think clearly about how to deal with the mess we've inherited from the Bush regime, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Friday, on Bill Moyers Journal there were a couple of remarkable segments (transcript here). I doubt I'll have time to discuss the segment with Eric Foner, one of America's top historians, but it was really excellent, a sharp contrast to the almost endless mindless blather one routinely hears about Abraham Lincoln. Foner comes at Lincoln as an historian who's written extensively about much more ordinary people of that time, and so he carries a perspective that much more in tune with how the blogosphere sees power today. But I want to focus on the other segment, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen.
What was so good about the segment was not the content per se, which most of us are generally familiar with, but they way they were able to convey it in the tv medium, in a very distilled, but not dumbed-down manner. And I'd like to use that distilled presentation to link what they were saying to a couple of excellent books from the 1990s that can further illuminate the historical background of what we're living through and fighting against.
They began with a discussion of the Daschle affair....
In addition to his segment on Obama's Vietnam this Friday, Bill Moyers also focused on funding for public education with Vartan Gregorian. The situation with public education is virtually identical with that of public infrastructure-30 years of underfunding and neglect, thanks largely to the movement conservative "tax revolt." In fact, the two are really one and the same, since an educated public is the human infrastructure on which our country is built. And conservatives don't give a damn about any of it.
BILL MOYERS: All across the country it's the same. State governments are staring down the barrel at $300 billion worth of deficits for the next two years. Twenty-six states already have either cut their budgets for higher education, raised tuition fees, or done both. When it comes to college affordability, this report from The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education gives a failing grade of "F" to 49 of the 50 states. Tuition at public four-year colleges is up an average of more than $6,500, at two-year schools, almost $2,500. Yet even with the increases, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION reports that many college buildings are outdated, inefficient, even crumbling. So what's to be done? Some took hope when President Obama spoke up for higher education in his inaugural address.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
BILL MOYERS: If the colleges and universities do wind up big winners in Washington, no one will be happier than this man, or more responsible. Long a dynamo for the cause of public education, Vartan Gregorian bears testament to the value of a lifetime of learning.... Last October, Gregorian convened a group of educators to urge whoever would become our next president to invest in higher education. Their meeting later resulted in this two-page newspaper ad, an open letter to then President-elect Obama asking that whatever economic stimulus package comes out of Washington, five percent of it - around 40 to 45 billion dollars - go to higher public education.
Considering that the Treasury and the Fed combined have already given trillions to the financial sector, $40-50 billion to higher public education is less than a pittance. It's an insult, really. But it's what they're asking for.
On Friday, Bill Moyers had the International President of the United Steelworkers, Leo Gerard, on as his guest for the greater part of the hour. The Steelworkers are the largest industrial union in North America. As Moyers said in his introduction, "They're the dominant union in paper, forestry products, steel, aluminum, tires and rubber, glass, chemicals and petroleum." It's remarkable, really, how rare it is to see a union leader on national tv, and telling that it was public tv, at that. Unions are far and away the largest democratic institutions in civil society, yet their elected leadership is rarely heard from directly. This was a welcome exception.
First off, about Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor:
BILL MOYERS: So we have a new president, a new administration, and a new secretary of labor. And I know you have been excited by Obama's nomination of Congresswoman Solis. Why the enthusiasm for her in particular?
LEO GERARD: I think from my point of view, I can relate to her because I grew up like she did. I grew up in a in a union household where my dad made very little money. And when he needed the drill bits for the mine or he needed what they called oilers, which is the rubber-wear you work they took it off his paycheck. Congresswoman Solis grew up in a union family. Her parents were immigrants, didn't make a lot of money. So my personal thing is that
BILL MOYERS: She's one of you.
LEO GERARD: Well, not necessarily just one of me. But she can feel what I feel. So and that way there's a there's a relation there. But through her career she hasn't been an extremist on either side. She's been for working people. She's been for good jobs. She's been for good pay. She's been for opening the green jobs. She's been for making sure that workers are going to get trained and get an opportunity to get into the good jobs. So all of the things that she's fought for are the things that ordinary Americans would be supporting.
Last night, Glenn Greenwald appeared on Bill Moyers Journal. For those of us familiar with his writing, there was really no new ground broken. It was simply supremely satisfying to see him talking sanely with Bill Moyers for a spell.
But there was one thing that stood out for me--not a new thought, but an aptly articulated one:
GLENN GREENWALD: ...it was only once I saw how radical of a war was being waged on the rule of law and our constitutional values by this administration, justified by the 9/11 attacks, that I think that political activism was necessary....
BILL MOYERS: ...all wartime presidents expand the powers of the office. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon. I mean, there's something inherent in war and the expansion of powers. Are you saying that Bush and Cheney took it further?
GLENN GREENWALD: I'm saying they took it to an entirely different level. What we have, in the last eight years, is not merely a case of individual and isolated law breaking. It's a declaration of war on the whole idea of a law itself, on the idea that our political leaders are constrained in any way by the limitations of the American people imposed through our Congress. The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist. And that I do think is quite new.
Indeed, it didn't start with 9/11. It started with Bush v. Gore, with the utterly lawless Supreme Court decision that put Bush in the White House in the first place. But Glenn puts the problem perfectlty: "The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist." And there's a term to describe a society in which that happens. We call it a "failed state."
America today is a failed state.
The country in need of our nation-building attention today is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It's the USA.
Last night, on Bill Moyers Journal (transcript here), we saw both sides of Bill Moyers. In Part 1, I wrote about the good side, his interview with George Soros. Now, I'm writing about his not-so-good side, his interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson and her drum-beat "balanced" criticism of the presidential campaign.
As I noted in that first diary, Jamieson actually does some very good work, and is sometimes extremely sharp. But this time, not so much, as she showed her more conventional, intellectually lazy, sloppy side, and her addiction to the "balance" narrative, equating the McCain campaign's William Ayers attack ad with Barack Obama's Keating 5 web video.
Last night, on Bill Moyers Journal (transcript here), we saw both sides of Bill Moyers. We saw him, if not at his very best, then certainly very, very good, and better than most folks ever get on tv. He interviewed George Soros, and they covered a wide range of big topics in very straight-forward, demystifying terms.
Then in the second half, we saw his bad side. Not the worst, by any means, but the worst in terms of regular features, which is to say, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and her drum-beat "balanced" criticism of the presidential campaign. Jamieson actually does some very good work, and is sometimes extremely sharp. But she also gets lazy, sloppy and/or thoughtlessly conventional at times, and that was certainly the case last night. I'll deal with her segment in a second, briefer diary. But for now, I want to look at the good--not perfect, not spectacular, but definitely quite good side of what Moyers had to offer last night.
It's not really that amazing. But it's clearly stated, and it comes from a guy who's as rich as sin, so calling him a DFH just rolls off his back like water off a duck.
No, I'm not being premature here. If you want to win an election, it does help to have some idea what governing will mean. Republicans are accustomed to having little or no relationship between the two. But we don't want to be like them, now do we?
Last night on Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers had a long conversation with former GOP uber-guru, Kevin Phillips (here, skip down). In the course of that conversation, Phillips identified a number of significant problems facing a potential Obama presidency. A few he specifically identified in this manner, others were problems facing America as a whole. For simplicity sake, I'm going to streamline the list, and focus on four of them, grouped as follows:
(1) The Democrats have no idea what they're going to do. No one does, because this is not like 1929-1932. This is worse. It's worse because we were the emerging dominant world power then, and we're at the end of our dominance now. Our prosperity depends on world markets, and we've run up a huge debt with them.
(2) The Democrats will be taking power (hopefully) in midst of the melting down process (not so hopefully), rather than toward the end of it. And we're taking power before the political/analytical debate has come anywhere close to thrashing things out.
(3) The Democrats are tightly connected to the gang that caused the problem in the first place. The Bob Ruben wing. This is particularly inhibiting to the necessary process of standing back and trying to figure out what's needed for the country, not just them. This is the vision problem.
(4) The Democrats are deeply divided internally. As Phillips put it, "the flesh of the Democratic Party carries a lunchbox. But the new soul of the Democratic Party wears a pinstripe suit." This is the political problem.
Last night saw one of the most amazing programs in the history of Bill Moyers Journal. Really, one of most amazing programs Moyers has done, period, in all his years on television. His guest for the hour was Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired colonel with 23 years in the Army, and author of several books, including The Limits Of Power: The End Of American Exceptionalism, just released this week. Here's a distillation of their conversation:
As I suggested in my diary earlier today, "We're So Lame" , the Democrats would be much better off scrapping their "national security" lineup full of disgraced Iraq War hawks, and replacing the whole lot with Bacevich. More reasons why on the flip--and a suggestion about how we might change the direction of our country.
