Shortly after taking office, President Obama announced he'd close CIA prisons and end abusive interrogations of terrorism suspects by U.S. officials. But the Obama administration has notably preserved the right to continue "renditions" - the abduction and transfer of suspects to U.S. allies in its "war on terror," including allies notorious for the use of torture.
Although the Obama Administration in 2009 promised to monitor more closely the treatment of suspects it turned over to foreign prisons, the disturbing case of Gulet Mohamed, an American teenager interrogated under torture in Kuwait, casts doubt on the effectiveness of those so-called "diplomatic assurances." It's also raised questions about whether the "extraordinary rendition" program conducted by the Bush administration has now been transformed into an equally abusive proxy detention program run by its successor.
Last Thurday, in Salon's War Room, Michael Barthel tried to explain "Why we ignored two huge stories"--the Washington Post "secret government" story about the vast expansion of the intelligence sector--particularly the private intelligence sector--since 9/11, and the Wikileaks Afghanistan War logs. "In the last two weeks, two major newspapers reported two major stories, but Americans mostly yawned," the sub-head read. But his reasons are mostly unvincing, and the subhead indicates why: it's not so much that the American people yawned, it's that most of the rest of the media did.
Barthel gives four explanations, which we'll examine more closely in minute:
They lacked a simple, relatively novel takeaway point....
They did not have a direct, obvious impact on readers....
They lacked compelling visuals....
They didn't play into current political narratives....
Note that the first and last reasons are somewhat in tension, if not contradiction with one another: the first speaks of novelty, the last of familiarity. But before exploring further, consider how Salon's own Glenn Greenwald decribed the neglect of the first story the Friday before:
Remember how The Washington Postspent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it. Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one? After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin -- most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this -- the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas.
Any doubt about whether there'd be any meaningful (or even cosmetic) changes as a result of the Post exposé (it was really more a compilation of already known facts) was quickly dispelled by the reaction of the political class: not just one of indifference, but outright contempt for the concerns raised by this story. On Tuesday -- 24 hours after the first installment appeared -- the Senate's Homeland Security Intelligence Committee removed a provision from the Intelligence Authorization Act which would have provided some marginally greater oversight over the Government's secret intelligence programs, because Obama was threatening to veto any bill providing for such oversight. Then, Obama's nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, Ret. Lt. Gen. James Clapper, all but laughed at the Post's work, dismissing it during his Senate confirmation hearing as "sensationalism," praising the bureaucratic redundancies as "competitive analysis," and insisting that the National Security and Surveillance State are perfectly "under control." The Post's Jeff Stein today documents how Congressional Democrats can barely rouse themselves to the pretense that they intend to do anything to impose any restraints or accountability on Top Secret America. And it was revealed this week by McClatchy that our vaunted "withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq" will be accomplished only by assembling a privatized militia that will serve as the State Department's "army in Iraq" long after our actual army "withdraws."
Political elites don't even feel compelled to pretend to be able or willing to do anything about this. Just think about this: on Monday, the Post documents a vast Secret Government bequeathed with unimaginable secrecy and unaccountability, and the rest of the week is filled with stories of the administration's blocking greater oversight and plans to escalate the privitization of our National Security and Surveillance State. That's why there was so little government angst over the Post's "revelations": aside from the fact that it revealed little that wasn't already known (Priest and Arkin withheld substantial amounts of information at the Government's request), even the impact of having the Post trumpet these facts was not a threat to much of anything, since there's nobody in a position to do much about this even if they wanted to. And few people seem to want to.
There is some slight overlap between Barthel's explantions and Greenwald's: the story did not fit with prevailing preferred elite narratives. But Greenwald provides a coherent explanation for what this means and why it so (in the paragraphs following the excerpt above). Barthel provides nothing similar, virtually no analysis at all--and, indeed, he actually adds to the obfuscations of hegemony, as we will see below.
Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?
Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?
--Florence Reece, 1931*
There are sides in history--although the powers that be will always deny it. And if they cannot deny it, they can at least minimize it, trivialize it, dissolve it into a mass of muddled details... or so they seem to think. We've seen this once again this week.
Following Bill Halter's narrow loss to Blanche Lincoln in the run-off Tuesday, Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing analysis, the bare bones of which ran roughly thus:
The run-off between Democratic Senate incumbent Blanche Lincoln and challenger Bill Halter, which culminated on Tuesday night in Lincoln's narrow victory, brightly illuminates what the Democratic Party establishment is.... Obama loyalists constantly point to the Blanche Lincolns of the world to justify why the Party scorns the values of their voters: Obama can't do anything about these bad Democratic Senators; it's not his fault if he doesn't have the votes, they insist.
So what did the Democratic Party establishment do when a Senator who allegedly impedes their agenda faced a primary challenger who would be more supportive of that agenda? They engaged in full-scale efforts to support Blanche Lincoln....
Ordinarily, when Party leaders support horrible incumbents in primaries, they use the "electability" excuse.... That excuse is clearly unavailable here. As Public Policy Polling explained yesterday, Lincoln has virtually no chance of winning in November against GOP challenger John Boozman....
What happened in this race also gives the lie to the insufferable excuse we've been hearing for the last 18 months from countlessObamadefenders: namely, if the Senate doesn't have 60 votes to pass good legislation, it's not Obama's fault because he has no leverage over these conservative Senators. It was always obvious what an absurd joke that claim was; the very idea of The Impotent, Helpless President, presiding over a vast government and party apparatus, was laughable. But now, in light of Arkansas, nobody should ever be willing to utter that again with a straight face. Back when Lincoln was threatening to filibuster health care if it included a public option, the White House could obviously have said to her: if you don't support a public option, not only will we not support your re-election bid, but we'll support a primary challenger against you. Obama's support for Lincoln did not merely help; it was arguably decisive....
I am not going to pretend that I live inside the head of President Obama and his advisors, and thus understand their rationale for this move. Maybe they are doing it because they think it will help Democratic electoral chances. Maybe they actually think it is good policy. Maybe it is some combination of both.
The rationale, however, does not matter. We are not engaged in a debate about what goes on inside the minds of the leading figures in the administration, including Obama himself. What does matter is that this move will cost jobs in the middle of an ongoing employment crisis. Not only will this add to widespread hardship in this country, but it will have negative effects on the Democratic electoral position exceeding whatever minimal media optics the Obama administration will receive from this move.
On one level this is perfectly correct. What really matters is not what politicians think or say, but what they do, and the results their actions produce. But on another level, it matters enormously that we have no idea why Obama says and does the things he does. After all, the basis of democracy is that people deliberate and decide on what they will do collectively in the way of self-government. Proper deliberation depends upon open presentation of all the facts and arguments available. When things are hidden, deliberation is hindered, at the very least, if not corrupted, and ultimately destroyed. Leaders who honestly explain their actions foster democracy, whether one agrees with their positions or not. Leaders hide or deceive their motives and reasoning undermine democracy, even if one agrees with their actions.
This was one of the most central problems with the Bush Administration. One could quibble endlessly, splitting hairs over whether Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq, for example. Did he know for certain that what he said was not true? But all that was beside the point, as Lakoff pointed out in arguing that the basic issue was betrayal of trust, and as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega pointed out in arguing that Bush should be impeached for perpetrating fraud in taking us to war.
Outright lying is just one of many ways that a government can erode the foundations of democratic legitimacy, and restoring that legitimacy was one of the most powerful motivations there was for ending the Bush regime. It was one of the most fundamental mandates that was bestowed on Barack Obama with his election--and it is a mandate that he has fundamentally ignored. Indeed, it is a mandate that he has betrayed.
To take just one example--albeit a very large, very central, very ugly one--consider Glenn Greenwald's column from the same day, "A growing part of the Obama legacy", in which he wrote:
The word "myth" has two distinct, but related meanings. One is "a compelling interpretive framework", the other is "a lie." Many myths are both, to varying degrees. The myth of Obama as Rorschach test is one of them.
virtually everything that Dawn Johnsen said about executive power, secrecy, the rule of law and accountability for past crimes made her an excellent fit for what Candidate Obama said he would do, but an awful fit for what President Obama has done.
and thus, finally, one can hope, the myth of Obama as Rorschach test can be set aside. It had a certain credibility once, but by now it simply comes down to the fact that Obama blurs and distorts his image as needed, just like every other politician does.
Greenwald goes on to elaborate, perhaps most effectively by quoting Johnsen herself:
all one really has to do is to read the last paragraph of her March, 2008 Slate article -- entitled "Restoring Our Nation's Honor" -- in which she outlines what the next President must do in the wake of Bush lawlessness:
The question how we restore our nation's honor takes on new urgency and promise as we approach the end of this administration. Wemust resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists. . . .
Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation's honor be restored without full disclosure.
What Johnsen insists must not be done reads like a manual of what Barack Obama ended up doing and continues to do -- from supporting retroactive immunity to terminate FISA litigations to endless assertions of "state secrecy" in order to block courts from adjudicating Bush crimes to suppressing torture photos on the ground that "opennees will empower terrorists" to the overarching Obama dictate that we "simply move on." Could she have described any more perfectly what Obama would end up doing when she wrote, in March, 2008, what the next President "must not do"?
The situation with Johnsen and Obama's radical shift on civil liberties from Candidate Obama to President Obama is not an isolated example. How could it be?
Glenn Greenwald has written up yet another damning critique of Democrats' dishonest attempts to claim public support for a public option while doing everything they can to kill it.
I'll quote three paragraphs, the first ones, in Greenwald's column. It's revealing how the distraction and circus that is the furor over eliminating the filibuster provided cover for senators looking for any excuse they can muster to prevent real health care reform, and for Democratic partisans falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats: all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster: sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted. Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents. In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.
But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill. That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) -- including the addition of the public option -- would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had. Great news for the public option, right? Wrong. As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished. Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it. Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed -- a "majority rule" system -- they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes.
All of that was bad enough, but now the scam is getting even more extreme, more transparent. Faced with the dilemma of how they could possibly justify their year-long claimed support for the public option only now to fail to enact it, more and more Democratic Senators were pressured into signing a letter supporting the enactment of the public option through reconciliation; that number is now above 40, and is rapidly approaching 50. In other words, there is a serious possibility that the Senate might enact a public option if there is a vote on it, because it's very difficult for these Senators to vote "No" after pretending all year long -- on the record -- that they supported it. In fact, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim yesterday wrote: "the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It's only a matter of will."
In a post on Salon today, Glenn Greenwald reveals to readers the essential tactic of the Democratic Party leadership. It's not trying to get Republican support, it's not filibuster reform, it's not registering people to vote. It's much more manipulative than that.
It is an explanation for the "lack of spine" that Democrats are often said to have - which, we can now see, is merely a convenient illusion for prominent Democrats. It is a scapegoat that they can use so that progressives will continue voting for them even though we get nothing that we ask for, and instead have to take whatever crumbs are given to us.
So what is it?
This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it.
"This is purely a Bush v. Gore-type grab." - John Dean on "Live from the Left Coast", KPFK ~ 12:08 PST today.
In my previous diary, "Constitutional Beanball" I went to some lengths to describe some contrasting views of how political actors seek to radically change the constitutional order. The reason for doing so was to (a) better understand what was happening with the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC and (b) better understand what is wrong with "liberal" (that is, both actually and apparently liberal) advocates supporting the ruling.
As I said after the oral arguments, I don't have any strong objection to the Court's ruling that the restrictions placed on showing Hillary: the Movie were unconstitutional. Such a holding would be quite defensible even under a legal framework that tried to balance First Amendment interests and the importance of fair elections. The real question was whether the case would be decided in narrow or broad terms, and alas it's very much the latter. The Court overruled both a 20-year precedent permitting greater restrictions on corporate speech and parts of a more recent ruling upholding the McCain-Feingold Act, and has essentially held that for-profit corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.
On a related note, it seems worth noting again that Chief Justice Roberts's purported "minimalism" -- so often touted by his defenders, including liberals who should know better -- is an empty fraud. At least in this case -- unlike previous campaign finance rulings -- the Court was willing to overturn precedents explicitly. But, certainly, this should serve as a reminder that it's farcical to claim that modern judicial conservatives stand for substantive "minimalism" or "judicial restraint."
The central line of argument in Justice Kennedy's majority opinion -- that the First Amendment does not permit distinctions based on the identity of the speaker -- is superficially attractive. The problem is, there's no reason to believe that any of the justices believe it. In addition to the examples in Justice Stevens' superb dissent, consider Morse v. Frederick, a decision denying a free speech claim which all 5 of the justices in today's majority also joined. Obviously. Nobody would dispute that an ordinary citizen who unfurled a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner could be sanctioned by the state; the punishment was upheld solely based on Frederick's identity as a student, which meant that his free speech rights had to be balanced against a school's interest in preventing drug use (and could be denied even if there was no plausible argument that his speech actually would promote drug use). If this kind of balancing test is permissible, surely Congress should be permitted to place some weight on the importance of fair elections when considering the First Amendment rights of for-profit corporations.
This brief survey hits a number of high points in terms of basic contradictions between (a) the purported judicial minimalism of Roberts in particular, (b) the purported general abhorrence of "judicial activism" by conservatives in general, (c) the purported respect for precedent by conservatives in general and the actual practice of conservative justices when they can get away with it. It also takes note of the conservative's eager embrace of limiting free speech for (potentially) doper students, but not for cigarette companies, corporate polluters and the like. As Scott notes, this is not mere minor carping, this decision vividly gives the lie to the claim that "modern judicial conservatives stand for substantive 'minimalism' or 'judicial restraint'"--which is, in essence, the core argument that conservatives have been making ever since they blew their tops over Brown v. Education 56 years ago.
The conclusion here is obvious: if substantive "minimalism" and "judicial restraint" weren't the issues, then obviously racism was (I'm shocked! Shocked!) What's more, the entire conservative legal movement is based on lies. This is clearly an element in what I call "constitutional beanball", in contrast to Tushnet's concept of "constitutional hardball." Tushnet's concept essentially presumes good faith disagreement, albeit between (at least potentially) irreconcilable viewpoints. Beanball encompasses-but does not require-cases in which people are bad-faith actors, liars, cheaters, fraudsters, law-breakers, etc.
Two key lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Ron Paul (R-TX), are pushing to authorize a full, comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. The plan has sparked fury from both the Fed and the corporate banking industry, but the proposal is so appealing that the controversy is almost laughable.
The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful economic institutions in the world, but most of its operations are conducted in total secrecy. The Fed's rescue activities have dwarfed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, but without any public accounting. Some of these efforts may have been entirely appropriate, but we don't even know who the Fed is helping. That fact is a major barrier to establishing effective and fair economic policy.
"The Fed is a typical Washington institution that operates un-democratically and in virtually total secrecy, and a Congressionally-mandated audit that they (and much of the DC establishment) desperately oppose would be a serious step towards changing the dynamic of how things function. At the very least, it would provide an important template for defeating the interests which, in Washington, almost never lose."
Under the Grayson-Paul plan, which is offered as an amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act of 2009, the Government Accountability Office would be given the authority to audit all of the Federal Reserve's activities, just as it can audit other public programs and institutions.
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee approved the audit-the-fed bill, despite opposition from panel Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), who tried to gut the plan. Even on the Financial Services Committee, where the banks concentrate their campaign contributions, Grayson was able to convince 14 other Democrats to stand up to the financial establishment.
The vote of approval scarcely registered on mainstream media's radar, and even then, the Grayson-Paul legislation was portrayed as an assault on the Fed's "political independence." As Dean Baker notes for Talking Points Memo, it's hard to see how a simple, public accounting can be construed as a political hit on the Fed's policy-making.
By setting interest rates, the Fed has enormous power to do almost anything under the economic sun, from fueling quick growth to destroying jobs. All of these powers have useful functions under the right circumstances, and we really don't want Congress to make decisions about the economy based on the interests of powerful lobby groups. The Grayson-Paul bill wouldn't do anything of the sort. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, audits of sensitive economic policy decisions would be subject to a six-month lag before they could be publicly released. If the Fed needs to act fast, Congress won't be able to get in its way. The public will eventually know how its own money is being spent, however, and learn how a public institution is conducting itself.
"In other words, this is about simple transparency, which everyone should favor," Nichols writes.
The White House and the Congressional Democratic leadership need to support a full and comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. It's an issue of basic democratic accountability. There is no good reason why economic policy should be conducted in secret.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Unemployment figures in the U.S. are staggering: The official rate stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. A broader measure that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for work is at 17.5%. That's a full-blown economic emergency.
But, as Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, President Barack Obama's response to the unemployment crisis has not matched the urgency of his response to the crisis on Wall Street. This isn't just unfair, it's bad economics.
"It's important to understand that the economic crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a function of a shaky financial system but of a crash in consumption that's come along with the evaporation of $14 trillion worth of the wealth of American families," Holland writes.
Widespread joblessness can be every bit as damaging to the economic structure as a financial crisis. When people are out of work, they buckle down on household expenses. When several million people cut back at the same time, the economic machine grinds to a halt. If people are not buying and selling stuff, the economy isn't working.
As Mary Kane explains for The Washington Independent, about 40% of families don't have enough money to cover expenses through a three-month stretch of unemployment-even if one member of the household is receiving unemployment benefits. Kane highlights a Brandeis University study that reveals the haggard state of the American household and the unfair distribution of wealth along racial lines. A full 66% of African-American and Latino families can't afford three months without work. At a time when 5.6 million workers have been jobless for at least six months, the study highlights just how dire finances have become for many households.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses potential labor market remedies with economist Dean Baker and The Nation's John Nichols. Baker suggests a work-share arrangement, in which employers cut back on their workers' hours to allow more people to work. To prevent losses for households, the government would step in and pay for the shortfall in hours. Employers would have more part-time jobs available, but the government would make sure everyone was paid as if they were working full-time. Baker also endorses a public jobs program, which he says could be especially useful in cities like Detroit and Cleveland that have been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn.
Nichols highlights the political consequences of failing to fix the unemployment mess. Unemployment directly affects the lives of voters. If widespread joblessness persists through November 2010, Democrats will net huge Congressional losses. If Obama thinks it's hard to garner bipartisan support for his legislative priorities now, imagine a few dozen more Republican obstructionists.
It's not that Obama failed to respond to the unemployment crisis. He did. That's what the stimulus package was all about. Today's 10.2% unemployment is a catastrophe, but it would be more like 12% without the stimulus package. But, given the seriousness of the issue, Obama is not giving unemployment enough attention.
In fact, Obama's economic priorities are a mirror-image of his campaign promises, as Robert Scheer argues in both a column for TruthDig and an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! After talking tough about reining in recklessness on Wall Street and making the financial system more accountable, Obama has hired many of the very policy makers who pushed through the deregulatory agenda back in the 1990s. Top Obama administration officials like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Gary Gensler and Neal Wolin helped make this mess in the first place.
"This is not a minor criticism," Scheer says. "I think the guy is betraying his own presidency."
Obama's timid efforts to rein in Wall Street and heal the ailing job market are setting the stage for a political disaster. If Obama and Congressional Democrats can't take strong action to fix the economy, they will find themselves with much narrower majorities next November. The economy, and the public institutions that support it, are supposed to work for everyone, not just the financial elite.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
This is more of a sports metaphor, but h/t to Jerry Sullivan, one of my favorite Buffalo News writers, for the title
Some items of note around the country today:
I just got an e-mail from Rep. Eric Massa with the ominous title "An Important Announcement About The 2010 Election", with the text:
The Founding Fathers designed the House of Representative as the People's House, and as such the citizens of this great Nation have the duty to elect their member of Congress every two years. While people sometimes get sick of campaigns, this cycle of frequent elections gives the people the best and most immediate tool possible to hold their member of Congress accountable and make their voices heard.
Accountability is a value that I hold near and dear, and it is with this spirit of service that I write you today.
On Saturday, 10/10 at 10:00 am, I will be making a formal announcement about the 2010 election. I would like to invite all of you, friends of old and new, to join me at Centerway Square in Corning NY on this morning.
It has been my honor and privilege to serve the families of this region and I hope to see you on Saturday in my hometown of Corning.
I called Massa's comm people for comment, and they declined to do so initially. Will update if warranted.
I don't like the sound of it, though. Massa knows it's a tough district (he lost his first race in 2006, which I worked on for a bit, and it's my grandpa's district), so perhaps it's just to prime the pump for a big crowd for his re-election announcement. I can't imagine he's running for higher office- certainly not Gov or Senator, and I don't really see him in something like a primary for comptroller or AG (or even qualified). The worst possibility is that he's not running again, something that would really disappoint me. I've been a huge fan of Massa's, particularly on his pushing for the House health care bill to be more progressive, and on his very strategic ways of talking about health care to constituents. He spent 45 minutes with a group of us NYers at Netroots Nation talking about that, and also hit some nails on the head when speaking at panels, too.
But one term and done would really piss me off, considering how hard the district is and how hard many of us worked for him, and that many of you contributed close to $1 million overall on ActBlue- including several thousand for standing firm on a public option. I hope he stays.
At the polar opposite of one term and done, former four-term Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad is running again. I asked former Iowa political operative Mike Lux for comment, to which he replied "I thought we got rid of that m*****f*****."
Last night, the defense authorization bill with the LGBT hate crimes amendment beat a motion to recommit (an effort by the Republicans to strip out the amendment), 178-234. Those are solid numbers, in addition to the fact that the Senate version already has it in by amendment. So we should be all set. HRC reports the conference report should be voted on in both houses by the end of next week before going to Obama's desk. We're close to the first major legislative achievement for LGBT rights in this term.
Glenn Greenwald has a fantastic piece documenting how Anne Kornblut violates the WaPo's own rules by using anonymous sourcing sixteen different times in one piece on the Obama Admin's national security policies, and journalistic ethics in general, as well as some on national security issues.
Yesterday, the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009, which would legalize marriage equality in the District, was introduced with much fanfare and 10/13 councilmembers co-introducing it. If you're looking for legislative and process details going forward, I wrote a piece last week on it here, and my friend Michael Crawford of DC for Marriage also has a piece today.
If you live in California, there are two LGBT bills before the Governor- one that would recognize Harvey Milk Day (which he's vetoed before, prior to the movie I believe) and one that would clarify that same-sex couples married out-of-state before Prop. 8 are recognized in CA, and that couples married after Prop 8 are entitled to the same rights. I know a lot of LGBT couples who marry in other states and have talked about moving to California one day- this would ensure they are entitled to marriage recognition. Equality California has phone numbers here of your local office- call Arnold and tell him to sign the bills.
Robert Harding at TAP reports the Rochester D&C is running another column by David Sirota, his latest on Afghanistan, which is a great sign. I wrote a bit last week on the D&C, a staid, center-right newspaper with far too many right-wingers on the ed page and a center-right ed board in a solidly Dem city with some hubs of progressivism. They're considering adding David permanently to the ed page. Take a second and drop an e-mail to Editorial Page Editor James Lawrence at jlawrenc@democratandchronicle.com and tell him that you want to see David Sirota's column made permanent.
Glenn Greenwald has recently posted a very abstract jeremiad about our corrupt "establishment," with multiple concurring citations from Atrios,Paul Krugman,Matt Taibbi,Armando, (Big Tent Democrat on TalkLeft), and even Eliot Spitzer, recently returned from the dead by a collective realization that he was right about everything.
Our "establishment" is corrupt, and public outrage about the AIG bonuses is a very good thing, because it scares the corrupt "elite," and fear is the only force that can control those monsters.
This is only half right, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough, and stops at a politically safe distance from the Oval Office, which is exactly where the buck is supposed to stop, and where Barack Obama continues to enable and support the most corrupt financial "establishment" since exactly the same corrupt "establishment" produced the Great Depression.
The whole chorus is singing in unison about the corruption of Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner, and somehow forgetting that Mr. Obama was already supporting humongous give-aways to corrupt banks in their most blatant conceivable manifestation, during his last debate with John McCain, when he endorsed Paulson's grab at an absolutely unrestricted mountain of money, $700 billion, and it wasn't just a blank check that Obama wanted Congress to sign over to Paulson... it even included pre-emptive immunity from prosecution!
Last September, Treasury Secretary Paulson, from Goldman Sachs, drew up a terse 3-page memo outlining his bailout proposal. The plan specified that whatever he and other Treasury officials did (thus including his subordinates, also from Goldman Sachs), could not be challenged legally or undone, much less prosecuted. This condition enraged Congress, which rejected the bailout in its first incarnation.
It now looks as if Paulson had good reason to put in a fatal legal clause blocking any clawback of funds given by the Treasury to AIG's counterparties. This is where public outrage should be focused.
Instead, the leading Congressional shepherds of the bailout legislation - along with Obama, who came out in his final, Friday night presidential debate with McCain strongly in favor of the bailout in Paulson's awful "short" version - have been highlighting the AIG executives receiving bonuses, not the company's counterparties.
So Obama was already on board the gravy train for Goldman Sachs and AIG on October 15, 2008, and celebrating "the financial rescue plan that Senator McCain and I supported," with zero accountabilty, and not even the foggiest idea where the money would go, except wherever Henry Paulson wanted to put it.
And now that Mr. Obama is driving that gravy train, instead of just tooting its whistle in Congress and Presidential debates, it just keeps rolling faster and faster, with yet another trillion dollars on track for "quantitative easing," yet another exotic financial device that almost none of us had ever heard of, only a few weeks ago.
I'm glad that the AIG bonuses have finally waked up a little outrage in the slumbering public, and I'm glad that Krugman and James Galbraith and Glenn Greenwald and Atrios are denouncing the corruption of our governing "elite," or "establishment," or whatever they choose to call it, but it's absurd to denounce so many soldiers and under-bosses of our homegrown financial mafia, and yet leave out the kingpin of the whole operation, the capo di tutti i capi, Barack Obama, the infinitely generous godfather of the most blatantly corrupt mob of financiers since an almost identical gang of thieves produced the Great Depression.
First off, Greenwald noted (in his diary title, no less), "There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer," first noting how Cramer had obediently served as a stenographer for the rich and powerful, only to be lied to repeatedly, then pointing out:
But there's absolutely nothing about Cramer that is unique when it comes to our press corps. The behavior that Jon Stewart so expertly dissected last night is exactly what our press corps in general does -- and, when compelled to do so, they say so and are proud of it.
Second, Glenn pointed out that Cramer was actually better than most. At least he felt some sense of responsibility--no little thing in contrast to most:
At least give credit to Cramer for facing his critics and addressing (and even acknowledging the validity of) the criticisms. By stark contrast, most of our major media stars simply ignore all criticisms of their corrupt behavior and literally suppress it (even if the criticisms appear as major, lengthy front-page exposés in The New York Times).
Greenwald pointed at length to the record on the Iraq War, and here Matthews has his own shameful past to live down, which he tries to obscure by saying he opposed the war--notwithstanding his worshipful adulation of Codpiece's flight suit moment. Yet, here we are, 6 years down the road, and he still can't get his arms around what happened then, as he give Ari Fleischer the floor for one more round of Bush revisionism--this time it's for the ages!--all the while posing as the tough-guy interrogator, not quite realizing he's actually the patsy.
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....
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.
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