Now's as good a time as any to announce that I'm working for Alan Grayson (FL-8) as his senior policy advisor.
The Financial Services Committee had a hearing yesterday with a variety of witnesses, and one of them was the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Donald Kohn. The Fed has lent out $1.2 trillion over the last few months in response to the credit crisis, and won't tell anyone who they lent the money to.
If you haven't already, watch this clip, it gets good.
We need your help. About a half hour after this hearing, I got a call from the VP of Public Policy for a major bank, who assured me that they have taken no capital aside from ordinary discount window financing from the Fed.
Where do you think this money went? What kinds of questions should we pursue?
(I wanted more people to see this, and not just because I am running errands today and won't be able to blog until later. Best wishes to Matt, who for three years has been the best writing partner I could ask for. If our efforts to create a progressive governing majority are to succeed, we need people organizing on the inside, too. Also, Open Left isn't going anywhere, and over the next couple of days, we will have a series of announcements on our new content. Stay tuned
- promoted by Chris Bowers)
Well, I suppose I had to make the announcement at some point, so here goes. I won't be blogging at OpenLeft for some time. I've taken a job inside the House of Representatives (more on that when I've cleared what I can say) to see how the place works and to help create the space for more progressive policies.
Ultimately what I've learned, from many of you as much as from the task of writing for the public for the last five years, is that there is a serious leadership gap in this country. And by leadership gap, I mean something very specific, so specific that I'm going to give it a name. I call it a 'rootsgap'. A rootsgap occurs when a leadership is dramatically out of step with its base or the public at large. In the 1970s, the conservative base felt consistently sold out by its politicians, like Gerald Ford, who pushed centrist unpopular pieces of legislation, like the Panama Canal Treaty, through the levers of government. Birth control, abortion, public sector unions, civil rights, consumer rights, the Equal Rights Amendment - all of these provoked a fierce reaction from the conservative base who felt betrayed by the Republican politicians who did not oppose liberalization fast enough.
Happy New Year, OpenLeft. I know Chris left a thread for the New Year, but I figured you'd enjoy one with a picture of a tourist-y yet beautiful Hawaii beach.
Time for some vacation. I'm going to Kauai with my girlfriend for a week to rest and relax before the next session. Any tips or suggestions for what we should do?
If you're on the island, drop me a line at stoller at gmail.com.
I'm on a flight so there will be little blogging today, but I did read this piece on Moveon member priorities.
What they chose: universal health care; economic recovery and job creation; building a green economy; stopping climate change; and end the war in Iraq.
What they didn't: holding the Bush administration accountable; fighting for gay rights and LGBT equality; and reforming campaigns and elections.
MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser says that this happy alignment with Barack Obama's agenda - and fortuitous absence of conflict with same - comes in part because "the people he's listening to and the people we're listening to are the same people."
This is a very interesting problem. Moveon has never been a particularly left-wing organization, it's mostly a collection of base Democrats with moderately liberal sympathies. It collected people angry about Clinton's impeachment, 9/11, the war in Iraq, PBS, Bush, and now Obama supporters. This is a mainstream group, and it's going to continue to act like a mainstream group.
We must measure progress not by the agendas of interest groups but by whether the American people experience results. We must focus not on ideology but on drawing the best ideas from all quarters. That is why, for example, in key sectors such as energy, Obama is pushing for both public investments and the removal of barriers to private investment.
This is the main substance of the plan.
A key pillar of the Obama plan is job creation. In the face of deteriorating economic forecasts, Obama has revised his goal upward, to 3 million. For one thing, significantly fewer positions would be created in the absence of any recovery plan. Second, more than 80 percent of these 3 million jobs will be in the private sector, including emerging sectors such as environmental technology. This is a bold goal.
Creating lots of private sector jobs is fine, I'm all for that. Public sector, private sector, whatever sector, this economy needs jobs. But it certainly seems like bragging about private sector job creation is an ideological goal, isn't it? I mean, let's say that credit totally dries up, but the choice is between creating 3 million jobs without creating one new private sector job.
Ideologies are like accents. Other people have them, you just talk normal.
I'm with Kos. Nadler would be an excellent choice for Senator from New York City.
REP. JERROLD NADLER: Well, I think all the candidates think they're the most qualified. I think my record in Congress is a very progressive and forward-looking record. I think I've shown very good judgment. I was one of the few downstate people who voted against the war, against the PATRIOT Act. I've taken a leadership role on civil liberties, on economic development. And I led the battle against the--I led the battle for eight years against the Bankruptcy, so-called, Reform Act of 2005, which we now recognize as probably responsible for maybe a third of the foreclosures that are going on in this country.
Nadler is a an aggressive and noisy progressive who nonetheless has good relations within the Democratic caucus, just the kind of guy who can represent a state like New York in the Senate.
Here's Karl Rove, bragging about Bush's literary tastes.
Mr. Bush's 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900," James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," and Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower." Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton's "Next," Vince Flynn's "Executive Power," Stephen Hunter's "Point of Impact," and Albert Camus's "The Stranger," among others.
Turning to the Bush clan, we learn in Kitty Kelley's book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty that New Yorker writer Brendan Gill was once a guest of George H.W. and Barbara Bush at their summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Stumbling through the place late at night in search of something to read, the only volume he could find was The Fart Book.
I sort of understand Rove's strategy of insisting that George W. Bush is an intellectual heavyweight, even though he's obviously just a dolt that loves fart jokes. Rove enjoys tweaking liberals by preying on their insecurities, which he used to do when he was powerful and the Bush administration was taken seriously by insisting that they were effete eggheads out of touch with the real America. Only, now, there's nothing whatsoever admirable about the Bush Presidency and no one really believes Rove is a political genius, and so Rove is reduced to pretending that Bush is some sort of bookworm. Take that, liberals! Or something like that.
I think someone should establish a musty hospice for the careers of dated political operatives, and stick Rove there. Oh wait, an embarrassing political attic already exists, and it's called Fox News.
Al Kamen of the Washington Post becomes the latest reporter to be used by people in the 'intelligence community', reporting falsely about torture supporter and Obama advisor John Brennan who withdrew his name from consideration for a high level intelligence appointment, citing criticisms from bloggers as the rationale.
Meanwhile, the incoming administration is still looking hard for someone to be CIA director. Everyone's apparent first choice, John Brennan, a former deputy director, ran into a firestorm of Internet criticism when word circulated of his near-pending nomination. Liberal bloggers argued that Brennan had tolerated aggressive interrogation techniques or even torture while at the agency. Brennan withdrew.
"No one went to bat for him," a source said. Insiders call this the first example of a "blogocide."
The episode bothered a lot of Brennan fans in the Obama operation, where he still heads the CIA transition team. "If we're afraid of bloggers," one transition observer quipped, "how can we take on al-Qaeda?" Various names have popped up since for the job, including Washington lawyer and former agency general counsel Jeff Smith.
Fascinating stuff. Over the past year or so, I've grown a bit more skeptical that what we're doing is a movement. It may or may be comparable to what the right did in the 1970s in terms of rebuilding partisan apparatus, though there has been no national success story akin to the Panama Canal Treaty or Prop 13. The Obama campaign used movement a lot, not sure what that means.
When it comes to Rahm Emanuel, there is more than one fish story. All of Washington knows the tale of the dead fish: how he delivered one, Corleone style, to a polltaker he didn't like. But few know the grilled-fish chronicles: the private, off-the-record dinners he has hosted in recent years for a bipartisan posse of his fellow congressmen.
Known primarily, but incompletely, as the Democratic Party's foulmouthed enforcer, Emanuel as a member of Congress also was a nonideological, convivial centrist, eager to trade backroom intelligence with like-minded Republicans. "The wine flowed, the food was good and we all talked candidly," says Rep. Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan. "Everyone agreed that if things leaked, we'd disband it. Nothing ever did." The dinnertime ties paid off, Upton says, in support for legislation like the banking bailout. "Rahm works every angle," says Upton, "often in ways that people don't expect."
$800 billion is a lot of money, so you'd think that it would see more reporting than the stupid Blago story, which reveals more about the insipid priorities of the traditional media than anything about the Obama administration. Alas, we have the media that soap companies pay for, not one that we pay for. There is however some reporting on the package - this Washington Post piece on the stimulus by Paul Kane and Michael D. Shear sticks out for three reasons. One, they actually try to explain some of the substance of the package and delve into the internal debates within the Democratic caucus and the Obama team. It's basically a fight between people who want to build environmentally sustainable public works projects and those who want more roads and highways in exurban dying areas. The advantage of building roads and highways is that you can put shovels in the ground today, the advantage of smart growth projects is that they are, well, better.
Of course, it's the Blue Dogs who want roads and highways, and progressives and labor people who want sustainable infrastructure.
But the green-collar proposals have also come under fire. Hill, the incoming Blue Dog co-chairman, said he opposes including these proposals and the medical technology project in the stimulus plan, suggesting that "somewhere down the road" they be considered under the normal legislative process.
This is the result of a two week long backroom political fight.
Resistance is emerging among Democratic officials against Caroline Kennedy as she pursues Hillary Rodham Clinton's seat in the United States Senate, with Gov. David A. Paterson bristling over suggestions that her selection is inevitable, according to his advisers, and other leading Democrats concerned that she is too beholden to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
Following up on Chris's earlier post on Obama retaining Bush officials to staff the Pentagon, it's worth noting that there are substantial policy differences between people on the left of the Democratic Party and those soon to be in power (yes, Ed, we like to clarify). Ultimately it's these policy differences that matter. Here are a few.
Afghanistan: Joe Biden says that withdrawing troops from Iraq is imperative so that the administration can put more troops in Afghanistan. Steve Clemons, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Vague think that we should cut deals with the local Taliban, perhaps do some economic development, and leave.
Iraq: Obama's current plan is to leave a residual force in Iraq (which John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman praise). A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq called for no residual troops, as did Bill Richardson.
The $700 Billion Bailout: Obama whipped House members aggressively for the Treasury to establish the TARP program. Opposition to the bailout was spread out among populists on the right and the left, without coherent form.
Infrastructure: Biden is talking about the transportation part of the infrastructure stimulus going to roads and bridges, many of us want SUPERTRAINS and less investment in the oil-dependent sprawlconomy.
There are probably a lot more splits, as well as areas of alignment, but starting out with a big split on war and peace in Afghanistan isn't a small deal, with all that killing. Domestically and abroad, we just don't know what policies the Obama administration is going to put forward, and so we have to guess. This is actually by design, as Biden makes clear.
According to local news reports millions of yards of ashy toxic sludge broke through a dike at TVA's Kingston coal-fired plant Monday, covering hundreds of acres, knocking one home off its foundation. Coal ash can carry toxic substances that include mercury, arsenic and lead, according to a federal study.
Greenpeace is calling today for there to be a criminal investigation into the matter. "Every facility like this is supposed to have a spill contingency plan to prevent this kind of disaster," said Rick Hind, Greenpeace Legislative Director.
This is not an ordinary environmental disaster; 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash spilling into the drinking water of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama is going to kill a lot of people. Eastern Kentucky saw a similar spill in 2000 due to negligence from coal companies, and the Bush administration covered it up.
The region still hasn't recovered, with much of the waters and lakes unable to support fish or wildlife. And it may never recover. Just watch the video above, it's rather breathtaking. 500 million gallons of mercury, arsenic, and coal dust is now a permanent part of Tennessee's ecosystem, and probably part of the DNA of the people that live there and drink the water.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden is worried about the "exceedingly high expectations" the world community has for Barack Obama's presidency.
He believes he and Obama must follow through with action to show how they're different than George W. Bush, Biden told CNN's Larry King Monday.
"I have been contacted by so many world leaders. Their expectation for Barack's presidency is overwhelming," Biden said. "They are so hungry to have an American leader who they think has a policy that reflects our stated values as well as one they can talk to."
At the same time, Biden expressed sympathy for Bush over the Baghdad shoe-throwing incident - a day after Biden and Vice President Dick Cheney traded shots on the Sunday shows. "I feel somewhat badly for him," Biden said. "I think the incident in Iraq was - was unfortunate, that guy throwing the shoes. It was just uncalled for . . .and I think that President Bush and, unlike Vice President Cheney, is, upon reflection beginning to acknowledge some of the serious, if not mistakes, misjudgments that he made."
Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.
They are key leaders in the progressive movement? Really? What is this 'movement' of which she speaks? Third Way's 'honorary' Senate Chairs are Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, Tom Carper, Mark Pryor, Ken Salazar, Claire McCaskill. The group's 'honorary' House Chairs are Jane Harman, Ellen Tauscher, Joseph Crowley, Artur Davis, Melissa Bean, and Gabrielle Giffords.
This is not, to put it mildly, a 'progressive' group of politicians. Blanche Lincoln is the only Democrat publicly wavering on the Employee Free Choice Act, Evan Bayh is starting a Blue Dog caucus in the Senate, Mark Pryor and Ken Salazar were in the 'Gang of 14', and all of these Senators voted for cloture for Alito, with the exception of Even Bayh who was running for President at the time and Clair McCaskill, who wasn't in the Senate yet. Every single one voted to immunize telecom companies against against unlawful behavior in warrantless wiretapping Americans. Every single one voted for the Iraq supplemental bill to fund the war in April, 2007. In other words, this is a group of conservative Democrats that have consistently voted for war funding, illegal wiretapping of Americans, a hyper-conservative Supreme Court, and broadly, a reactionary and extreme political agenda.
