LOL I crack myself up. There's lots of good material out there today about how the Republican party continues to eat itself alive (I'm not sure I'll ever tire of that phrase). And so, here I present what I consider the best round up/send up--the creme of the crop, the oped that captures this week's insanity most completely and in all its glory. I mean, he just nails it so thoroughly that I can't even pick parts to bold. If I did, the whole thing would be black. Five star rating on the blog from OmegaZ, here's to you, Paul Jenkins! From the Huffpo...
* * *
"Worst Week Ever: Republicans Unhinged"
by Paul Jenkins
When Republicans suffered a disastrous beating in November's election, it would have been fair to assume that things could not get worse for them: the-most-liberal-Senator was to be president, Nancy-Pelosi-from-San-Francisco was going to lead a massive Democratic majority in the House, and assorted socialists were going to run things. That was bad, yes, but this week, just like the stock market (funny how that goes), Republicans hit yet a new low. In recent days, Republican leaders were called cheesy, off-putting, disastrous, untrustworthy, and inconsequential, not by Democrats, but by their party's own members, from high-profile commentators to Governors.
The highlight of the GOP week was, of course, Governor Bobby Jindal's response to Barack Obama's Congressional address. The best that can be said for Jindal's performance is that it channeled Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock, presumably not the objective, even for someone who willingly changed his name to "Bobby." But the past seven days have offered so many moments of breathtaking inanity by the GOP that our head spins at trying to organize them cohesively. With the country on the verge of being swallowed up in its entirety by the spiraling economy, Republicans obsessed over Obama's citizenship, gay people, pregnant women with HIV, helicopters, primary challenges to their own Senators from porn stars and Christian fundamentalists, registration forms, hopeless recounts, and assorted variations on the 1981 theme of "Government Is The Problem."
In Alabama, Senator Richard Shelby took it upon himself to try to fan the fires set by Republican psychopaths, including Clarence Thomas: Obama is not really American because, Shelby said, he had "not seen any birth certificate." It is quite understandable that Shelby would want to detract our attention from the fact that he chaired the Senate Committee on Banking (!), Housing (!!) and Urban Affairs from 2003 to 2007, but in the end it only serves to increase the focus on the tragic consequences of his ineptitude. On the subject, John McCain this week became preoccupied with the order for a new presidential helicopter fleet, ordered by George W. Bush and, no surprise, dreadfully mismanaged. And, since McCain still can't chew gum and walk, this is now his sole obsession, a "good idea" that would "cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money," making it sound as if building Marine One was somehow akin to, say, the New Deal. Or perhaps akin to testing pregnant women for HIV or extending health care benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian government workers, both of which were decried this week by Republicans in the Colorado Senate because: a) pregnant women with HIV (or is just pregnant women?) are promiscuous and their unborn children should not be protected "from the negative consequences of their actions;" b) homosexuality is murder.
Other Republican nut jobs, convinced that the party lost power because it was too rational, moderate and accommodating, are circling like vultures. In Louisiana, Senator David Vitter, himself a right-wing madman, realized this week that he will likely face a dual primary challenge: by porn star Stormy Daniels (it is still unclear whether she -and we assume it is a she-- was involved in Vitter's pay for sex diaper play, but let's not rule it out); and by Family Research Council Tony Perkins, who is as sexually obsessed as Vitter, and is probably even more insane. Another barmy Republican, Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, whom his Republican colleagues are desperate to get rid of (yes, he is that cuckoo), has threatened to sue his own National Republican Senatorial Committee if they do not support his reelection in 2010. This week, he also said of the head of the Committee: "I don't believe anything John Cornyn says."
The ostensible new leader of the Republican National Committee, Michael "Hip Hop" Steele, also thinks that the party has veered way too far left, this week leaving open the possibility that the three moderate GOP Senators who voted for the Obama stimulus package could face retribution. "Oh, yes, I'm always open to everything, baby, absolutely," he told an interviewer when asked whether he may withdraw funds from those Commie Republicans ("Baby?" It was on Fox News, but still). Is it any wonder that moderates everywhere are mulling party changes? Mortified by his Republican colleagues, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week made sure we realized that he had recently considered leaving the party, although why he did not is unclear. At the same time, New York City Republicans (sounds weird, no?) also took steps to remain out of power forever by refusing to support Mayor Michael Bloomberg's bid for a third term, unless he becomes a card-carrying Republican. Again.
Other GOP members don't bother leaving the Party, they just assault it from the inside. Some do it subtly, such as once-lifelong bachelor Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who said this week that there is "a national leader, his name is President Obama," clearly meaning there are no Republican leaders. Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah also gave us a sense of how low his GOP has sunk, saying of the party's Congressional leaders: "I don't listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential -- completely." This is not from a strange leftover Vermont Republican, it is from the Governor of the most consistently Republican state in the country. In New Hampshire, former Senator Bob Smith, an early victim of the state's leftward tilt, is also intent on destroying any comeback for his Republican party in the state. This week, he appeared to threaten to move back from Florida to New Hampshire (one more sign of his madness if any was needed) to challenge his Republican nemesis, former Sen. John Sununu, himself humiliated just this November in his reelection effort (all very complicated for a small party in a small state.) Not even their favorite cheerleader/pundit Stuart Rothenberg's irrational prediction that "2009 and 2010 could be the beginning of a rebound for the party in the Northeast" (ha!) is likely to save Republicans from their cannibalistic instinct.
That said, Republicans are not only molesting one another. Yes, they are powerless against Obama or Pelosi, but they have shifted their time and money to a Democratic threat even bigger, or at least one they think they have a shot at: Al Franken, who won his challenge to Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman by a slim margin. Coleman, who has already taken a new job but actually seems to want to remain a Republican, this week called for a do-over, and Republicans everywhere are throwing money at his challenge to the November election. From an electoral perspective, it is not entirely clear why, however. Republicans are busy trying to kick out the three Northeastern GOP moderate Judases from the Senate (and surely they know they don't have a shot at replacing them with anything but a Democrat, whatever Rothenberg may hope for), but they are fighting tooth and nail to keep the Minnesota moderate? The truth is, of course, that the GOP's Minnesota focus has to do with the fact that Franken is the author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and that Limbaugh, besides being a big fat drug-addled idiot, is also the actual leader of the Republican Party in 2009. Presumably this would explain why Republicans, to their dying breath, are fighting the slanderous Franken. In return, they can expect various favors to be bestowed by the head big fat idiot, and even be saved from political death. "I love Bobby Jindal [...] he's brilliant," Limbaugh said this week, in what is sure to be the Republicans' determining verdict on Jindal's very Bobby-ish performance.
With the sweet smell of defeat lingering in Republican Washington, three of the party's biggest losers are back. Tom DeLay, run out of the capital because even by its standards he was woefully corrupt, called Obama's Congressional address "the most irresponsible, hypocritical speech I have ever witnessed." This from the man who blamed the Columbine shootings on "school systems [teaching] our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud." Speaking of irresponsible, hypocritical, primordial and muddy, Newt Gingrich is also back and you will be stunned to hear that he is "disappointed" with Obama's performance so far. Mitt "Who Let The Dogs Out" Romney, who drained $100 million on a creepy presidential campaign, this week decided to come to the financial rescue of embattled Republicans who are "standing up for fiscal responsibility and saying no to spending abuse" (ie, the stimulus package). Yes, that's right, the man who spent $400,000 per delegate in the Republican primary is proudly lecturing others about fiscal responsibility. Any moment now, we expect Rudy Giuliani, who outdid Romney by spending $59 million for just one delegate, to share some of his own financial wisdom, probably spicing it up with his usual light-handed touch of 9/11 doomsday.
In just seven days, Republicans have offered up more amusement and fodder for an election campaign than even the most hopeful among us could have expected. What is especially thrilling is that it comes at little expense: Obama is competently in charge, as are, by and large, Democrats elsewhere, and change is happening at a mind-blowing pace. In the long run, yes, there should be concern that having buffoons in opposition is not healthy, but for now let's enjoy the moment. Of course, you ask, what about Sarah Palin, one of the likely buffoons-in-chief in 2012? Well, her very serious documentarian took charge of her faltering public relations this week. He went on national television to tell us emphatically that she is not a "moron."
Friday, February 27, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
A busted economy and the hypocrisy of thems that dun it
Really good article off of Salon.com Many fine valid points. I've bolded a few bits here and there, but the whole thing is worth reading & saving.
* * *
Who is the right calling "loser"?
The GOP is whipping up resentment of Obama and "loafers" who defaulted on home loans. But it crashed the biggest welfare Cadillac in history.
By Gary Kamiya
Feb. 24, 2009 | CNBC stock analyst Rick Santelli instantly became a right-wing hero last week when he launched into a five-minute on-air rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Shouting "This is America," the former derivatives trader attacked President Obama's housing plan as "promoting bad behavior" by rewarding the "losers" who took on more debt than they could afford. Sporadically cheered on by a small group of stock traders in the background, Santelli said Obama was turning America into Cuba, and called for a capitalist "Chicago Tea Party." He finished by calling the floor traders "a pretty good statistical cross-section of America," [Z: you're fucking kidding, right?? Stock traders are a good cross-section? What America is this guy living in?!]a "silent majority" who were opposed to socialist policies that would make "Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin roll over in their grave."
Santelli's diatribe has become the most popular video in the history of CNBC: A copy posted on YouTube had nearly 700,000 viewers. The Drudge Report splashed his remarks on its front page. "Watch for the Palin-Santelli 2012 signs," Kathryn Lopez wrote in a post on the National Review Online, adding: "The reaction to Rick Santelli's Chicago-trading-floor incident this morning echoes the emotional reaction my inbox had to Sarah Palin's convention speech this summer." Right-wing blogs were filled with excited commentary about how "grassroots tax revolts are springing up all over." One of the Web sites that sprang up promoting Santelli's "tea party" exulted, "Our founders have stopped rolling over in their graves. After months of tossing and turning, we have finally taken back the banner of hope that has been hijacked by the 'do-good' saviors."
The right wing hasn't been so excited since Obama used the fateful expression "spread the wealth" in his interview with noted tax analyst and Middle East expert Joe the Plumber. [Z: great dig :)]
None of this is surprising. Whipping up anger at the undeserving poor, whether yesterday's "welfare loafers" or today's irresponsible borrowers, has been a winning Republican political tactic for more than 40 years. In his first national political speech, a televised address he delivered for Barry Goldwater in 1965, Ronald Reagan told an apocryphal story -- the first of many he would tell over the decades -- about a woman who had six children and was pregnant with a seventh, and who wanted to divorce her husband because welfare would pay her $80 more per month than he made. The do-good Democrats, Reagan warned, were preparing to install "socialism" in the U.S.
The right's assault on the undeserving beneficiaries of federal largess has always contained a thinly disguised element of racism. The GOP's successful "Southern strategy," in which it appealed to white Southerners' anger at federal civil rights laws, was all about race. When Reagan in 1976 referred to working people being outraged at a "strapping young buck" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, everyone knew whom he was talking about.
Although it's less explicit, there's also a racial element in the outrage over Obama's housing plan. Banks disproportionately targeted minorities for subprime loans, which of course means that large numbers of the "losers" Santelli ranted about are black or Latino.
No wonder Republicans have embraced Santelli as the new Sarah Palin. All the required elements seem to be in place for a populist revolt: a big-spending liberal federal government getting ready to hand over billions of dollars to a bunch of deadbeat black and brown people. Fire up the outrage, honey: The welfare Cadillac is back!
But this time, the GOP's time-tested tactic isn't going to work outside its hardcore base. Facing an enormous crisis that touches everyone, most Americans can no longer afford the luxury of scapegoating -- and may even have begun to question core conservative assumptions about individual responsibility, the free market and the role of the federal government. As it realizes this, the right wing's anguished shrieks have become increasingly unhinged. But those shrill attacks only make them look even more heartless, and further marginalize them.
In principle, Santelli's resentment is not entirely unjustified. Many people did take on mortgages that they couldn't afford. No matter how uninformed you are about finance, you ought to be aware that when you sign up for an adjustable rate, you're gambling. So it's understandable that some people who were informed and responsible enough to take on mortgages within their means are unhappy at the prospect that the government is bailing out some people who weren't so informed or responsible.
But taking a stand on the bailout right now is like refusing on principle to let firemen save your burning house. In their zeal to punish the "losers," Republicans are ignoring the fact that the whole neighborhood is in flames, and you can't pick and choose which building to save. The entire world is in financial meltdown. Americans are just now beginning to realize that the scope of this crisis is far bigger than they had thought. The problem can no longer be blamed on the undeserving poor and the socialist do-good Democrats who prop them up: The problem is the system itself. It was the system that failed, and that system is based on free markets and a hands-off federal government.
The economic crisis has finally revealed the fundamental contradiction in the right's worship of unfettered capitalism, a fealty neatly summed up by the phrase "greed is good." Conservatives believe that the market is not only the greatest generator of profit but is also morally superior to any other system. It is morally superior to "do-gooder" liberalism because it encourages individual responsibility and hard work. By contrast, liberal redistributionist programs result in moral hazard and encourage malingering and irresponsibility.
But this happy vision in which the hardest, most responsible workers are also the wealthiest has now been shown to be a chimera. In the age of post-industrial, globalized, virtual capitalism, the biggest profits do not accrue to those who work the hardest, but to those who best know how to game the system. We all now know that we have been living in a world of Magic Money, a world of hedge fund managers and derivatives traders who made billions of dollars on arcane transactions they themselves did not understand. Until it all went south, these Masters of the Universe were the gods of the right. As in Calvinist theology, their worldly success proved their moral rectitude.
The problem for conservatives is that the world of Magic Money has now been shown to be utterly amoral. Money for nothing! That was the GOP's theme song. So the GOP can't suddenly attack the poor slobs who signed mortgages that were too good to be true without dethroning its golden idol of greed. You can't argue that Magic Money is good when you win and bad when you lose.
It's the "winners," the super-capitalist heroes of the right, who turned out to be the biggest "strapping young bucks" in history. The Ayn Randian believers in the free market drove the largest welfare Cadillac ever seen, a cosmic Coupe de Ville whose fins were larger than the entire solar system. They made gazillions of dollars playing with unsecured and unregulated credit default swaps, like acid heads who had somehow made it to the finals of the World Monopoly Championship. When it all came crashing down, these brazen welfare loafers came crawling to the federal government to save them. They privatized profit and socialized loss, and they did it to the tune of $300 billion in federal money.
These are the right's poster children. They played the capitalist game exactly the way Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman and George W. Bush drew it up -- without rules, with greed as the only driving force. When their gigantic Ponzi scheme crashed, it took down the U.S. economy with it. Now Americans are supposed to blame everything on the "losers" whose only sin was that they played the Monopoly game with thousands of dollars instead of billions?
The only conservatives who have any credibility to talk about individual responsibility and hard work are the hardcore libertarians who demand that the government should refuse to bail out any "loser" -- whether a defaulting homeowner or a bankrupt bank. This scorched-earth policy -- let the forest fire burn everything, so that new seeds will generate -- is almost universally recognized to be a recipe for a worldwide depression. But at least it's intellectually consistent.
Most of the right did not dare take that purist line. It went along with Bush's $700 billion bailout of Wall Street and incinerated its populist pitchfork. Even those who opposed the bank bailout, like Santelli, did so pretty tamely. Santelli never called John McCain Fidel Castro for supporting the bank bailout: In fact, as Santelli told Chris Matthews, he voted for McCain. Oddly, the right only becomes truly apoplectic when individual "losers" are involved, not enormous institutions. Its principles become mysteriously squishy when the engines of advanced capitalism are involved.
As its internal contradictions strangle it, the pseudo-populist right is becoming so hysterical, so overwrought, that its rhetoric borders on lunacy. Speaking of lunacy, here's what Rush Limbaugh recently said about Obama's economic policies:
I think that what's happening here, there's an anger, there's a rage, and there is an effort here to totally restructure American society and American culture, that there is a desire on the part of the Obama White House, and the liberal Democrats in Congress, to expand the welfare state to include many of the middle class and even some in the upper middle class by so damaging the economy that nobody has any choice but than to take unemployment, welfare checks, what have you, in order to be able to feed their families.
Paranoid, poisonous ravings like this, in the face of a terrible national crisis, are revealing the true face of the contemporary American right -- and it isn't pretty.
Someone must always be to blame: This is the belief -- the emotional attitude -- that has driven the right since Goldwater. The unfit must perish. The unworthy must be thrown out of the boat. It's easy enough to indulge this hyper-individualistic, every-man-for-himself credo when times are good. But when the whole boat is sinking, it only appeals to the mean-spirited. The national pain is too widespread, the national need is too great, and the number of those who are able to indulge in the cheap kicks of demonizing and resentment is shrinking by the day. If there is another Boston Tea Party, the only cargo that will be thrown overboard is the GOP itself.
* * *
Who is the right calling "loser"?
The GOP is whipping up resentment of Obama and "loafers" who defaulted on home loans. But it crashed the biggest welfare Cadillac in history.
By Gary Kamiya
Feb. 24, 2009 | CNBC stock analyst Rick Santelli instantly became a right-wing hero last week when he launched into a five-minute on-air rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Shouting "This is America," the former derivatives trader attacked President Obama's housing plan as "promoting bad behavior" by rewarding the "losers" who took on more debt than they could afford. Sporadically cheered on by a small group of stock traders in the background, Santelli said Obama was turning America into Cuba, and called for a capitalist "Chicago Tea Party." He finished by calling the floor traders "a pretty good statistical cross-section of America," [Z: you're fucking kidding, right?? Stock traders are a good cross-section? What America is this guy living in?!]a "silent majority" who were opposed to socialist policies that would make "Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin roll over in their grave."
Santelli's diatribe has become the most popular video in the history of CNBC: A copy posted on YouTube had nearly 700,000 viewers. The Drudge Report splashed his remarks on its front page. "Watch for the Palin-Santelli 2012 signs," Kathryn Lopez wrote in a post on the National Review Online, adding: "The reaction to Rick Santelli's Chicago-trading-floor incident this morning echoes the emotional reaction my inbox had to Sarah Palin's convention speech this summer." Right-wing blogs were filled with excited commentary about how "grassroots tax revolts are springing up all over." One of the Web sites that sprang up promoting Santelli's "tea party" exulted, "Our founders have stopped rolling over in their graves. After months of tossing and turning, we have finally taken back the banner of hope that has been hijacked by the 'do-good' saviors."
The right wing hasn't been so excited since Obama used the fateful expression "spread the wealth" in his interview with noted tax analyst and Middle East expert Joe the Plumber. [Z: great dig :)]
None of this is surprising. Whipping up anger at the undeserving poor, whether yesterday's "welfare loafers" or today's irresponsible borrowers, has been a winning Republican political tactic for more than 40 years. In his first national political speech, a televised address he delivered for Barry Goldwater in 1965, Ronald Reagan told an apocryphal story -- the first of many he would tell over the decades -- about a woman who had six children and was pregnant with a seventh, and who wanted to divorce her husband because welfare would pay her $80 more per month than he made. The do-good Democrats, Reagan warned, were preparing to install "socialism" in the U.S.
The right's assault on the undeserving beneficiaries of federal largess has always contained a thinly disguised element of racism. The GOP's successful "Southern strategy," in which it appealed to white Southerners' anger at federal civil rights laws, was all about race. When Reagan in 1976 referred to working people being outraged at a "strapping young buck" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, everyone knew whom he was talking about.
Although it's less explicit, there's also a racial element in the outrage over Obama's housing plan. Banks disproportionately targeted minorities for subprime loans, which of course means that large numbers of the "losers" Santelli ranted about are black or Latino.
No wonder Republicans have embraced Santelli as the new Sarah Palin. All the required elements seem to be in place for a populist revolt: a big-spending liberal federal government getting ready to hand over billions of dollars to a bunch of deadbeat black and brown people. Fire up the outrage, honey: The welfare Cadillac is back!
But this time, the GOP's time-tested tactic isn't going to work outside its hardcore base. Facing an enormous crisis that touches everyone, most Americans can no longer afford the luxury of scapegoating -- and may even have begun to question core conservative assumptions about individual responsibility, the free market and the role of the federal government. As it realizes this, the right wing's anguished shrieks have become increasingly unhinged. But those shrill attacks only make them look even more heartless, and further marginalize them.
In principle, Santelli's resentment is not entirely unjustified. Many people did take on mortgages that they couldn't afford. No matter how uninformed you are about finance, you ought to be aware that when you sign up for an adjustable rate, you're gambling. So it's understandable that some people who were informed and responsible enough to take on mortgages within their means are unhappy at the prospect that the government is bailing out some people who weren't so informed or responsible.
But taking a stand on the bailout right now is like refusing on principle to let firemen save your burning house. In their zeal to punish the "losers," Republicans are ignoring the fact that the whole neighborhood is in flames, and you can't pick and choose which building to save. The entire world is in financial meltdown. Americans are just now beginning to realize that the scope of this crisis is far bigger than they had thought. The problem can no longer be blamed on the undeserving poor and the socialist do-good Democrats who prop them up: The problem is the system itself. It was the system that failed, and that system is based on free markets and a hands-off federal government.
The economic crisis has finally revealed the fundamental contradiction in the right's worship of unfettered capitalism, a fealty neatly summed up by the phrase "greed is good." Conservatives believe that the market is not only the greatest generator of profit but is also morally superior to any other system. It is morally superior to "do-gooder" liberalism because it encourages individual responsibility and hard work. By contrast, liberal redistributionist programs result in moral hazard and encourage malingering and irresponsibility.
But this happy vision in which the hardest, most responsible workers are also the wealthiest has now been shown to be a chimera. In the age of post-industrial, globalized, virtual capitalism, the biggest profits do not accrue to those who work the hardest, but to those who best know how to game the system. We all now know that we have been living in a world of Magic Money, a world of hedge fund managers and derivatives traders who made billions of dollars on arcane transactions they themselves did not understand. Until it all went south, these Masters of the Universe were the gods of the right. As in Calvinist theology, their worldly success proved their moral rectitude.
The problem for conservatives is that the world of Magic Money has now been shown to be utterly amoral. Money for nothing! That was the GOP's theme song. So the GOP can't suddenly attack the poor slobs who signed mortgages that were too good to be true without dethroning its golden idol of greed. You can't argue that Magic Money is good when you win and bad when you lose.
It's the "winners," the super-capitalist heroes of the right, who turned out to be the biggest "strapping young bucks" in history. The Ayn Randian believers in the free market drove the largest welfare Cadillac ever seen, a cosmic Coupe de Ville whose fins were larger than the entire solar system. They made gazillions of dollars playing with unsecured and unregulated credit default swaps, like acid heads who had somehow made it to the finals of the World Monopoly Championship. When it all came crashing down, these brazen welfare loafers came crawling to the federal government to save them. They privatized profit and socialized loss, and they did it to the tune of $300 billion in federal money.
These are the right's poster children. They played the capitalist game exactly the way Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman and George W. Bush drew it up -- without rules, with greed as the only driving force. When their gigantic Ponzi scheme crashed, it took down the U.S. economy with it. Now Americans are supposed to blame everything on the "losers" whose only sin was that they played the Monopoly game with thousands of dollars instead of billions?
The only conservatives who have any credibility to talk about individual responsibility and hard work are the hardcore libertarians who demand that the government should refuse to bail out any "loser" -- whether a defaulting homeowner or a bankrupt bank. This scorched-earth policy -- let the forest fire burn everything, so that new seeds will generate -- is almost universally recognized to be a recipe for a worldwide depression. But at least it's intellectually consistent.
Most of the right did not dare take that purist line. It went along with Bush's $700 billion bailout of Wall Street and incinerated its populist pitchfork. Even those who opposed the bank bailout, like Santelli, did so pretty tamely. Santelli never called John McCain Fidel Castro for supporting the bank bailout: In fact, as Santelli told Chris Matthews, he voted for McCain. Oddly, the right only becomes truly apoplectic when individual "losers" are involved, not enormous institutions. Its principles become mysteriously squishy when the engines of advanced capitalism are involved.
As its internal contradictions strangle it, the pseudo-populist right is becoming so hysterical, so overwrought, that its rhetoric borders on lunacy. Speaking of lunacy, here's what Rush Limbaugh recently said about Obama's economic policies:
I think that what's happening here, there's an anger, there's a rage, and there is an effort here to totally restructure American society and American culture, that there is a desire on the part of the Obama White House, and the liberal Democrats in Congress, to expand the welfare state to include many of the middle class and even some in the upper middle class by so damaging the economy that nobody has any choice but than to take unemployment, welfare checks, what have you, in order to be able to feed their families.
Paranoid, poisonous ravings like this, in the face of a terrible national crisis, are revealing the true face of the contemporary American right -- and it isn't pretty.
Someone must always be to blame: This is the belief -- the emotional attitude -- that has driven the right since Goldwater. The unfit must perish. The unworthy must be thrown out of the boat. It's easy enough to indulge this hyper-individualistic, every-man-for-himself credo when times are good. But when the whole boat is sinking, it only appeals to the mean-spirited. The national pain is too widespread, the national need is too great, and the number of those who are able to indulge in the cheap kicks of demonizing and resentment is shrinking by the day. If there is another Boston Tea Party, the only cargo that will be thrown overboard is the GOP itself.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Archbishop Tutu calls on Obama to make Iraq apology
To the best of my knowledge, this story is not being carried by the American media.
* * *
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7895328.stm
Tutu urges Obama apology on Iraq
Tutu speaks of his disbelief and wonder when President Obama was elected
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned Barack Obama of the risk of squandering the goodwill he says the US president's election has generated.
In an article for BBC News, he says it would be "wonderful" if Mr Obama apologised for the invasion of Iraq.
He also says he prays that Mr Obama will be tough on African dictators.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner adds that the UK's standing in the world has suffered because of its co-operation with the US in the "war on terror".
'Dance and shout'
In the exclusive article for BBC News, based on a lecture he will give in London on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the British Council, the former Archbishop of Cape Town speaks of his joy at watching the US election results coming in.
"I wanted to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa on 27 April 1994."
He calls Mr Obama's election an "epoch-making event that filled the whole world with hope that change is possible".
However, he also sounds a note of caution.
He reminds his readers of the outpouring of sympathy that followed 9/11 and how quickly it vanished in the light of the allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
"Obama, too, could easily squander the goodwill that his election generated if he disappoints," he says.
He adds: "It would be wonderful if the US president could apologise for the US-led invasion of Iraq on behalf of the American people."
He urges the president and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to act quickly to reach out to other countries, to build bridges with them and to listen to what they say.
Pointing to the inspirational role of the US during the struggle against apartheid, the veteran campaigner for reconciliation asks President Obama to "come down hard" on African dictators.
UK role
The archbishop says November's election has turned America's image on its head after what he says were seven lean years for those who looked to America for inspiration.
"The Bush Administration managed to rile people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude sadly polarised our world," he says.
But Desmond Tutu is also critical of the role of the British government in the so-called war on terror.
He says the country's standing has been damaged as a result of its close co-operation with the US and that it lacks what he calls the "redeeming Obama factor" to restore the UK's perception abroad.
The archbishop also has some positive words for Britain, and the British Council in particular.
He praises its work in helping the government of Nelson Mandela reform the post-apartheid diplomatic service and train black teachers.
Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council, said: "It is particularly appropriate that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has opened our 75th anniversary lecture series.
"This is also a testament to the long-lasting ties that can be built through cultural relations. We worked in South Africa during the apartheid years, building the foundations for future cooperation and collaboration."
* * *
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7895328.stm
Tutu urges Obama apology on Iraq
Tutu speaks of his disbelief and wonder when President Obama was elected
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned Barack Obama of the risk of squandering the goodwill he says the US president's election has generated.
In an article for BBC News, he says it would be "wonderful" if Mr Obama apologised for the invasion of Iraq.
He also says he prays that Mr Obama will be tough on African dictators.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner adds that the UK's standing in the world has suffered because of its co-operation with the US in the "war on terror".
'Dance and shout'
In the exclusive article for BBC News, based on a lecture he will give in London on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the British Council, the former Archbishop of Cape Town speaks of his joy at watching the US election results coming in.
"I wanted to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa on 27 April 1994."
He calls Mr Obama's election an "epoch-making event that filled the whole world with hope that change is possible".
However, he also sounds a note of caution.
He reminds his readers of the outpouring of sympathy that followed 9/11 and how quickly it vanished in the light of the allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
"Obama, too, could easily squander the goodwill that his election generated if he disappoints," he says.
He adds: "It would be wonderful if the US president could apologise for the US-led invasion of Iraq on behalf of the American people."
He urges the president and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to act quickly to reach out to other countries, to build bridges with them and to listen to what they say.
Pointing to the inspirational role of the US during the struggle against apartheid, the veteran campaigner for reconciliation asks President Obama to "come down hard" on African dictators.
UK role
The archbishop says November's election has turned America's image on its head after what he says were seven lean years for those who looked to America for inspiration.
"The Bush Administration managed to rile people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude sadly polarised our world," he says.
But Desmond Tutu is also critical of the role of the British government in the so-called war on terror.
He says the country's standing has been damaged as a result of its close co-operation with the US and that it lacks what he calls the "redeeming Obama factor" to restore the UK's perception abroad.
The archbishop also has some positive words for Britain, and the British Council in particular.
He praises its work in helping the government of Nelson Mandela reform the post-apartheid diplomatic service and train black teachers.
Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council, said: "It is particularly appropriate that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has opened our 75th anniversary lecture series.
"This is also a testament to the long-lasting ties that can be built through cultural relations. We worked in South Africa during the apartheid years, building the foundations for future cooperation and collaboration."
Friday, February 20, 2009
more history revisionism on the cause of the financial disaster.
I like this one. Not that I have anything against TIME in particular--to me they're just another arm of the MSM. But this article from the huffpo is pretty good about laying blame back at the feet of those to whom it belongs. Long, but worth noting.
* * *
Time Rewrote History With "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis"
by David Fiderer
Much of Time's "25 People to Blame" is a sham. Instead of pinpointing culpability among the key players, it deflects blame away from Republicans and falsely implicates Democrats, to create a muddleheaded "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.
For a sense of how Time distorted the facts, imagine an article on 25 people deserving blame for the Iraq quagmire. And then consider a passage like this: "When he ordered the bombing of Iraqi security targets in December 1998, Bill Clinton began a policy of continuous escalation that led to the full scale invasion in March 2003. Like Clinton, Bush had aggressively supported the U.N. inspection regime, but it can't be denied that the burdens of a 140,0000 troop occupation occurred under his watch." Time's article on the financial crisis is even more misleading.
The article's phony and contrived "balance" serves as fodder to conservative talking heads who, perversely, are given a platform for falsifying the history of the financial crisis. Remember, sixty years ago nobody asked Albert Speer to critique the Marshall Plan, but today Larry Kudlow spins for five hours a week on CNBC.
Here's how Time got it very wrong. But first,
A brief precis about what really happened. (Feel free to skip over this, and go to corrections on the 25 People.)
CNBC's David Faber confirmed that the problems all occurred during the Bush Administration. "There was a precipitous drop in [residential mortgage] lending standards that took place in this country... from 2003 until 2006," Faber told Charlie Rose. "Wall Street [] became a much larger player in those securitization markets, beginning in 2003 right through 2006. They did not apply the same lending standards that did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to originators, and that is where the balance shifted significantly..."
Why was there a drop in lending standards? Several reasons:
The rating agencies stopped performing independent analysis of mortgage pools. In March 2001, Standard & Poor's started rating real state investments without first going through the analytic review process. As reported by Bloomberg, S&P and Moody's would rely on each other's analysis and "substituted theoretical mathematic assumptions for the experience and judgment of their own analysts. Regulators found that Moody's and S&P also didn't have enough people and didn't adequately monitor the thousands of fixed-income securities they were grading AAA."
Then, in August 2004, reports Bloomberg, Moody's took another step to subvert the independent ratings process. It removed the diversification criteria used for rating collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Subprime mortgage CDOs, of which about 3/4 were rated AAA, took off.
The investment community's reliance on AAA ratings cannot be overestimated. Although bankers and regulators are obligated to do independent analyses, they still tend to reference the agencies' opinions as a benchmark. Trillions of dollars of AAA securities were held by banks and others in the belief that they would pay out at close to par.
In 2003 the Bush Administration opened the floodgates to predatory lenders.
"Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye...[though] the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
"In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules...But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks." "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime," By Eliot Spitzer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2008
As for unregulated mortgage lenders, Greenspan ignored his duty to provide regulatory oversight. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, unregulated lenders were becoming a major force in mortgage lending, so in 1994 the Democratic congress passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) directing the Federal Reserve protect the public against predatory lenders. Greenspan, warned repeatedly about the problem, refused to do anything.
How did the drop in lending standards play out?
Fraud and predatory lending took off. The primary participants of the fraud, the mortgage brokers and mortgage lenders, were not subject to any real regulatory oversight. Consumers went to mortgage brokers, who got bigger upfront fees from steering their customers to subprime mortgages. The loans were issued by mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial, which then packaged and sold the loans to investment banks. Because there were no protections against predatory lending, consumers got mortgage loans that they could not afford to repay. Loans had teaser rates of 3% for the first two or three years, before the monthly payments doubled or tripled.
Banks relied on AAA ratings and credit default swaps. The subprime mortgage pools were sliced and diced into mortgage securities that were sold to various investors. About 80% of the securities were rated AAA by S&P or Moody's, and a huge chunk of those securities were held by American and European banks. Why? Bankers thought if a bond is rated AAA, they could always sell it at something close to par. Also, residential home values had held up fairly well during the Great Depression. Finally, because of rules related to regulatory capital, the mortgage bonds received a lower weighting on mortgage securities than on ordinary corporate loans.
The real estate bubble burst and bond prices collapsed. Most subprime mortgages were extended for 80% of the appraised value, but many home buyers in California and elsewhere financed 100% of their home purchase.
Because so many people were buying homes they could not afford, market discipline was lost. California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona experienced a real estate bubble. When the bubble collapsed, almost everyone who bought a home in those markets from 2005 onward saw their home equity wiped out.
Three years after private label mortgage securities took off, they started collapsing. Because of the non-standard documentation, the suspicion of underlying fraud, and the difficulty in restructuring the loans with the borrowers, the securities became very difficult to value and market for them dried up.
How did this steady deterioration suddenly become a global financial meltdown? The two-word answer is Hank Paulson.
9/12 Changed Everything. On September 12, 2008, just as Lehman entered into final negotiations to find a buyer, Hank Paulson announced that the government would not backstop Lehman's solvency. What was the difference between Lehman and Bear Sterns, or between Lehman and the other banks? The prices of mortgage securities had declined since the Bear Stearns bailout, so the level of government support for Lehman would have been higher. Also, Lehman's fiscal quarter ended one month earlier than the other banks, so the magnitude of its problems was disclosed before those of other banks.
Paulson's refusal to support Lehman was extraordinarily reckless, because there was no transparency in the financial markets, given that vast amounts of money tied up in hedge funds and credit default swaps. Markets became destabilized right after Lehman declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.
Lehman suddenly defaulted on 900,000 derivatives, hedge fund assets were frozen, and countless hedged positions suddenly became unhedged. Nobody knew who was solvent and who was not. The different capital markets started freezing up in succession: the interbank lending market, money market funds, the commercial paper market. Banks cut back on extending trade letters of credit, thereby slowing down shipping and the trade of raw materials around the world, and further pushing down commodity prices. Global trade declined for the first time since World War II.
Paulson's TARP bait and switch. To stabilize the markets, Congress forked over $700 billion to Paulson, who then gave the banks another sucker punch on November 12, one week after Obama was elected. Paulson said he would not apply TARP funds to help abate the foreclosure crisis, and the prices of mortgage securities plunged further, effectively forcing the largest banks into insolvency.
Fact Checking Time's List of 25 People to Blame
1. Angelo Mozilo Bottom Line: Countrywide's CEO deserves to be on the list, but not in the top five.
Time's Conspicuous Omission: Roland Arnall This omission is egregious because, as reported in Chain of Blame, Arnall popularized "no income no asset" loans that opened the doors to the fraud that eventually overwhelmed the mortgage markets. His firm, Ameriquest, was more like a vast criminal enterprise, operating as a boiler room that preyed on the elderly and fixed property appraisals. Arnall had powerful Republican friends, including George Bush, who appointed him Ambassador to The Netherlands over the objections of many in Congress.
The media has deemed Angelo Mozilo to be Arnall's stand-in, the poster child of all corrupt mortgage lenders. But there's really no comparison between Arnall and Mozilo. Arnall was far more corrupt. Why do reporters keep coming back to Mozilo and forget Arnall? The real reasons, I suspect, are: (a) Mozilo looks like a character from The Sopranos, (b) Roland Arnall died last year, (c) Arnall's firm, Ameriquest, shut down in 2007, and (d) Arnall was chairman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
2. Phil Gramm Bottom Line: He deserves to be at the top of the list. It's hard to overestimate the damage he caused.
Unmentioned by Time: Gramm slashed the SEC's budget, stacked the CFTC with his cronies, helped emasculated investor protections under the SEC acts.
3. Alan Greenspan Bottom Line: Time sanitizes Greenspan's record.
Greenspan recklessly ignored parts of his job description, which included correcting the regulatory loopholes that allowed predatory lenders like Ameriquest to flourish. And he recklessly ignored evidence of the risks. After the S&L crisis of the early 1990s, everyone knew the hazards of unregulated mortgage lending. (Greenspan had championed S&L deregulation and was a big booster of Charles Keating.) Everyone knew that subprime mortgage lending was fraught with peril and could lead to financial disaster by June 2000, when First Union wrote down its entire $2.8 billion investment in The Money Store, a subprime lender acquired two years earlier. But Time gives it all a "mistakes-were-made" spin, merely noting that "his long-standing disdain for regulation underpinned the mortgage crisis."
Time's Conspicuous Omission: The Republican Congress.
"Federal lawmakers didn't pose much of a threat to the subprime industry in recent years. Members of Congress received at least $645,000 in donations from Ameriquest and large sums from other big subprime lenders, Federal Election Commission records indicate. They debated new oversight of the industry, but took no action." The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2007
4. Chris Cox Bottom Line: Time got it right.
5. American Consumers Bottom Line: Part of the phony "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.
"We really enjoyed living beyond our means... Household debt in the U.S.--the money we owe as individuals--zoomed to more than 130% of income in 2007, up from about 60% in 1982... Now we're out of bubbles." Time neglects to mention how those bubbles were inflated with artificially low interest rates and a new tax exemption on dividends during the run up to the 2004 election.
Time's Conspicuous Omission: Republican Tax Cuts. In terms of living beyond our means, consider this. In 2000 Federal revenues (excluding social security) were $1.54 trillion versus $1.46 trillion in outlays. In 2003, long past a recession that ended in November 2001, Federal revenues were $1.26 trillion (an 18% decline) versus outlays that were $1.8 trillion. Revenues had declined three years for three years in a row, something unprecedented since the Great Depression. And this was before we started tallying the cost of the Iraq war.
6. Hank Paulson Bottom Line: Time get's it right, though Paulson should be in the top 3.
"Paulson was too late in battling the crisis, and letting Lehman fail was a pivotal mistake that rapidly eroded confidence. His attempt to fix the problem--a bailout that netted $700 billion from Congress--has been a wasteful mess."
7. Joe Cassano Bottom Line: AIG's CDS maven was one of many.
8. Ian McCarthy (a shady homebuilder) Bottom Line: A small player that should not be on the top 10.
9. Frank Raines (Fannie Mae CEO) Bottom Line: A defamatory smear that plays off of ethnic and partisan stereotypes.
This passage should be taught in schools as a case study in dishonest writing.
"Raines [...] was at the helm when things really went off course. A former Clinton Administration Budget Director, Raines was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took the helm in 1999. He left in 2004 with the company embroiled in an accounting scandal just as it was beginning to make big investments in subprime mortgage securities that would later sour. Last year Fannie and rival Freddie Mac became wards of the state."
Reality check: Fannie Mae expanded because of the successful securitization of loans to prime borrowers under strict underwriting standards. When exotic private label securities started proliferating, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lost market share, down from 76% in 2003 to 43% in 2006. The move to regain market share was undertaken by Raines' successor, Daniel Mudd. "Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed at least $270 billion in loans to risky borrowers -- more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined," reported The New York Times. The accounting scandal, which related to amortization of upfront fees, is a red herring that had nothing to do with Fannie's financial strength or its credit risk policies, which were revised by Mudd. The losses that wiped out Fannie's equity were attributable by decisions by Mudd.
So why was Raines, rather than Mudd, singled out? The only two plausible explanations is that Time wanted to include "a former Clinton Administration Budget Director [who] was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company."
10. Kathleen Corbet (S&P CEO) Bottom Line: The ratings agencies should be in the top 5. Time fails mention Bloomberg's reporting, which showed that the agencies stopped performing bona fide analysis.
11. Dick Fuld (Lehman CEO) Bottom Line: Fuld was in denial, like a lot of his peers, but the damage caused by Lehman's collapse is attributable to Paulson.
12. Marion and Herb Sandler (former owners of World Savings) Bottom Line: These proponents of option ARM mortgages should be higher up on the list.
13. Bill Clinton Bottom Line: Another smear job with a weaselly disclaimer at the end.
Again, dishonest writing like this should be studied in schools.
"President Clinton's tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and financial deregulation, which in many ways set the stage for the excesses of recent years. Among his biggest strokes of free-wheeling capitalism was [A] the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. [B] He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by [C] rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. It is the subject of heated political and scholarly debate whether any of these moves are to blame for our troubles, but they certainly played a role in creating a permissive lending environment."
A. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, which prevented common ownership of commercial banks and investment banks, had almost nothing to do with the crisis per se. (The concentration of market share among Chase, B of A and Citi is something else altogether.) This is another one of those "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" red herrings.
B. Here's the proof that Time pulled out all the stops to come up with an excuse to include Clinton. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act was introduced in the Republican House on December 14, 2000, and in the Republican Senate on December 15, 2000 . It was inserted into an 11,000 page long omnibus budget bill that Clinton had to sign on December 21, 2000, after Congress had recessed for Christmas and one month before he left office, to keep the parts of the government running. Clinton was in no position to veto anything. But Time attributes the Act to Clinton so that the blame becomes bipartisan.
C. As for the Community Reinvestment Act, Slate's Daniel Gross explained, "The right blames the credit crisis on poor minority homeowners. This is not merely offensive, but entirely wrong."
14. George W. Bush Bottom Line: Sugarcoats Bush's record. He should be on the top 5.
Time writes that Bush's "philosophy of deregulation... trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which in turn eased off on banks and mortgage brokers." Actually, they interfered with the actions taken by 50 state attorneys general (see Spitzer's op-ed above.) Time misrepresents the battle in Congress over regulating Fannie and Freddie ("he stumped for tighter controls"). As Rep. Michael Oxley explained, the legislation passed in the House and pending in the Senate was opposed by White House 'ideologues' who wanted to privatize Fannie and Freddie and who opposed a bigger government role.
Bush's tax cuts wrecked the government's finances while never stimulating strong employment growth. From 9/12 onward, he was virtually MIA, letting Paulson, Bernacke and Congress do all the heavy lifting. In terms of fault, the bottom line is a lot worse than it happened under his watch.
15. Stan O'Neal (former Merrill Lynch CEO) Bottom Line: O'Neal was like most on Wall street, who believed the AAA ratings for CDOs. But his shop specialized in them, and his legacy was Merrill's eventual insolvency.
16. Wen Jiabao Bottom Line: Part of Time's phony, "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative. China brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, provided an engine for global growth, and bought trillions of Treasuries to finance the Bush deficits, but Wen Jiabao deserves to take a lot of the blame.
17. David Lereah (economist of real estate industry) Bottom Line: An industry cheerleader is a pivotal player in the crisis? Time was looking for a cheap shot.
18. John Devane (ran a hedge fund) Bottom Line: He was one among many.
19. Bernie Madoff Bottom Line: Time got it right, but Madoff should be in the top 10.
20. Lew Ranieri Bottom Line: Another smear used for Time's "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.
Time blames Ranieri for inventing mortgage-backed securities. But Ranieri had relied on the 30-year history of prime mortgages underwritten according to the tested underwriting standards of Fannie and Freddie, whom he called 'the gatekeepers." He had nothing to do with the exotic offshoots that corrupted the market. Time's designation is especially offensive because, since 2006, Ranieri has been sounding the alarm about the dangers of CDOs and subprime securities.
21. Burton Jablin Bottom Line: An especially trivial example of the "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative. Jablin is the HGTC programmer who put on shows that glamorized real estate. Somebody else's editorial judgement could use an extreme makeover.
22. Fred Goodwin (Royal Bank of Scotland CEO) Bottom Line: Like a lot of bankers, Goodwin relied on the AAA ratings and debt-financed expansion.
23. Sandy Weill Bottom Line: No way that Weill should be on the list. Citigroup was undone by mortgage securities, not its acquisition binge. I'm sure Sandy Weill has a lot to answer for, but he left Citigroup in 2003, before the toxic CDOs enveloped his company.
24. David Oddsson (Iceland's President) Bottom Line: Time confuses cause and effect. A small country expands by relying on foreign capital that dries up in a crisis. Oddsson's policies were misguided and his country is collateral damage in the meltdown, but he didn't cause the crisis to happen.
25. Jimmy Cayne (Bear Sterns CEO) Bottom Line: Cayne should be further up on the list, since Bear Sterns was a leader in private label mortgage securitizations.
Overall, the Time piece exemplifies what did in Wall Street. Too many people relied on rehashed superficial analysis, instead of digging deeper for the unvarnished truth.
* * *
Time Rewrote History With "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis"
by David Fiderer
Much of Time's "25 People to Blame" is a sham. Instead of pinpointing culpability among the key players, it deflects blame away from Republicans and falsely implicates Democrats, to create a muddleheaded "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.
For a sense of how Time distorted the facts, imagine an article on 25 people deserving blame for the Iraq quagmire. And then consider a passage like this: "When he ordered the bombing of Iraqi security targets in December 1998, Bill Clinton began a policy of continuous escalation that led to the full scale invasion in March 2003. Like Clinton, Bush had aggressively supported the U.N. inspection regime, but it can't be denied that the burdens of a 140,0000 troop occupation occurred under his watch." Time's article on the financial crisis is even more misleading.
The article's phony and contrived "balance" serves as fodder to conservative talking heads who, perversely, are given a platform for falsifying the history of the financial crisis. Remember, sixty years ago nobody asked Albert Speer to critique the Marshall Plan, but today Larry Kudlow spins for five hours a week on CNBC.
Here's how Time got it very wrong. But first,
A brief precis about what really happened. (Feel free to skip over this, and go to corrections on the 25 People.)
CNBC's David Faber confirmed that the problems all occurred during the Bush Administration. "There was a precipitous drop in [residential mortgage] lending standards that took place in this country... from 2003 until 2006," Faber told Charlie Rose. "Wall Street [] became a much larger player in those securitization markets, beginning in 2003 right through 2006. They did not apply the same lending standards that did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to originators, and that is where the balance shifted significantly..."
Why was there a drop in lending standards? Several reasons:
The rating agencies stopped performing independent analysis of mortgage pools. In March 2001, Standard & Poor's started rating real state investments without first going through the analytic review process. As reported by Bloomberg, S&P and Moody's would rely on each other's analysis and "substituted theoretical mathematic assumptions for the experience and judgment of their own analysts. Regulators found that Moody's and S&P also didn't have enough people and didn't adequately monitor the thousands of fixed-income securities they were grading AAA."
Then, in August 2004, reports Bloomberg, Moody's took another step to subvert the independent ratings process. It removed the diversification criteria used for rating collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Subprime mortgage CDOs, of which about 3/4 were rated AAA, took off.
The investment community's reliance on AAA ratings cannot be overestimated. Although bankers and regulators are obligated to do independent analyses, they still tend to reference the agencies' opinions as a benchmark. Trillions of dollars of AAA securities were held by banks and others in the belief that they would pay out at close to par.
In 2003 the Bush Administration opened the floodgates to predatory lenders.
"Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye...[though] the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
"In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules...But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks." "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime," By Eliot Spitzer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2008
As for unregulated mortgage lenders, Greenspan ignored his duty to provide regulatory oversight. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, unregulated lenders were becoming a major force in mortgage lending, so in 1994 the Democratic congress passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) directing the Federal Reserve protect the public against predatory lenders. Greenspan, warned repeatedly about the problem, refused to do anything.
How did the drop in lending standards play out?
Fraud and predatory lending took off. The primary participants of the fraud, the mortgage brokers and mortgage lenders, were not subject to any real regulatory oversight. Consumers went to mortgage brokers, who got bigger upfront fees from steering their customers to subprime mortgages. The loans were issued by mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial, which then packaged and sold the loans to investment banks. Because there were no protections against predatory lending, consumers got mortgage loans that they could not afford to repay. Loans had teaser rates of 3% for the first two or three years, before the monthly payments doubled or tripled.
Banks relied on AAA ratings and credit default swaps. The subprime mortgage pools were sliced and diced into mortgage securities that were sold to various investors. About 80% of the securities were rated AAA by S&P or Moody's, and a huge chunk of those securities were held by American and European banks. Why? Bankers thought if a bond is rated AAA, they could always sell it at something close to par. Also, residential home values had held up fairly well during the Great Depression. Finally, because of rules related to regulatory capital, the mortgage bonds received a lower weighting on mortgage securities than on ordinary corporate loans.
The real estate bubble burst and bond prices collapsed. Most subprime mortgages were extended for 80% of the appraised value, but many home buyers in California and elsewhere financed 100% of their home purchase.
Because so many people were buying homes they could not afford, market discipline was lost. California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona experienced a real estate bubble. When the bubble collapsed, almost everyone who bought a home in those markets from 2005 onward saw their home equity wiped out.
Three years after private label mortgage securities took off, they started collapsing. Because of the non-standard documentation, the suspicion of underlying fraud, and the difficulty in restructuring the loans with the borrowers, the securities became very difficult to value and market for them dried up.
How did this steady deterioration suddenly become a global financial meltdown? The two-word answer is Hank Paulson.
9/12 Changed Everything. On September 12, 2008, just as Lehman entered into final negotiations to find a buyer, Hank Paulson announced that the government would not backstop Lehman's solvency. What was the difference between Lehman and Bear Sterns, or between Lehman and the other banks? The prices of mortgage securities had declined since the Bear Stearns bailout, so the level of government support for Lehman would have been higher. Also, Lehman's fiscal quarter ended one month earlier than the other banks, so the magnitude of its problems was disclosed before those of other banks.
Paulson's refusal to support Lehman was extraordinarily reckless, because there was no transparency in the financial markets, given that vast amounts of money tied up in hedge funds and credit default swaps. Markets became destabilized right after Lehman declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.
Lehman suddenly defaulted on 900,000 derivatives, hedge fund assets were frozen, and countless hedged positions suddenly became unhedged. Nobody knew who was solvent and who was not. The different capital markets started freezing up in succession: the interbank lending market, money market funds, the commercial paper market. Banks cut back on extending trade letters of credit, thereby slowing down shipping and the trade of raw materials around the world, and further pushing down commodity prices. Global trade declined for the first time since World War II.
Paulson's TARP bait and switch. To stabilize the markets, Congress forked over $700 billion to Paulson, who then gave the banks another sucker punch on November 12, one week after Obama was elected. Paulson said he would not apply TARP funds to help abate the foreclosure crisis, and the prices of mortgage securities plunged further, effectively forcing the largest banks into insolvency.
Fact Checking Time's List of 25 People to Blame
1. Angelo Mozilo Bottom Line: Countrywide's CEO deserves to be on the list, but not in the top five.
Time's Conspicuous Omission: Roland Arnall This omission is egregious because, as reported in Chain of Blame, Arnall popularized "no income no asset" loans that opened the doors to the fraud that eventually overwhelmed the mortgage markets. His firm, Ameriquest, was more like a vast criminal enterprise, operating as a boiler room that preyed on the elderly and fixed property appraisals. Arnall had powerful Republican friends, including George Bush, who appointed him Ambassador to The Netherlands over the objections of many in Congress.
The media has deemed Angelo Mozilo to be Arnall's stand-in, the poster child of all corrupt mortgage lenders. But there's really no comparison between Arnall and Mozilo. Arnall was far more corrupt. Why do reporters keep coming back to Mozilo and forget Arnall? The real reasons, I suspect, are: (a) Mozilo looks like a character from The Sopranos, (b) Roland Arnall died last year, (c) Arnall's firm, Ameriquest, shut down in 2007, and (d) Arnall was chairman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
2. Phil Gramm Bottom Line: He deserves to be at the top of the list. It's hard to overestimate the damage he caused.
Unmentioned by Time: Gramm slashed the SEC's budget, stacked the CFTC with his cronies, helped emasculated investor protections under the SEC acts.
3. Alan Greenspan Bottom Line: Time sanitizes Greenspan's record.
Greenspan recklessly ignored parts of his job description, which included correcting the regulatory loopholes that allowed predatory lenders like Ameriquest to flourish. And he recklessly ignored evidence of the risks. After the S&L crisis of the early 1990s, everyone knew the hazards of unregulated mortgage lending. (Greenspan had championed S&L deregulation and was a big booster of Charles Keating.) Everyone knew that subprime mortgage lending was fraught with peril and could lead to financial disaster by June 2000, when First Union wrote down its entire $2.8 billion investment in The Money Store, a subprime lender acquired two years earlier. But Time gives it all a "mistakes-were-made" spin, merely noting that "his long-standing disdain for regulation underpinned the mortgage crisis."
Time's Conspicuous Omission: The Republican Congress.
"Federal lawmakers didn't pose much of a threat to the subprime industry in recent years. Members of Congress received at least $645,000 in donations from Ameriquest and large sums from other big subprime lenders, Federal Election Commission records indicate. They debated new oversight of the industry, but took no action." The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2007
4. Chris Cox Bottom Line: Time got it right.
5. American Consumers Bottom Line: Part of the phony "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.
"We really enjoyed living beyond our means... Household debt in the U.S.--the money we owe as individuals--zoomed to more than 130% of income in 2007, up from about 60% in 1982... Now we're out of bubbles." Time neglects to mention how those bubbles were inflated with artificially low interest rates and a new tax exemption on dividends during the run up to the 2004 election.
Time's Conspicuous Omission: Republican Tax Cuts. In terms of living beyond our means, consider this. In 2000 Federal revenues (excluding social security) were $1.54 trillion versus $1.46 trillion in outlays. In 2003, long past a recession that ended in November 2001, Federal revenues were $1.26 trillion (an 18% decline) versus outlays that were $1.8 trillion. Revenues had declined three years for three years in a row, something unprecedented since the Great Depression. And this was before we started tallying the cost of the Iraq war.
6. Hank Paulson Bottom Line: Time get's it right, though Paulson should be in the top 3.
"Paulson was too late in battling the crisis, and letting Lehman fail was a pivotal mistake that rapidly eroded confidence. His attempt to fix the problem--a bailout that netted $700 billion from Congress--has been a wasteful mess."
7. Joe Cassano Bottom Line: AIG's CDS maven was one of many.
8. Ian McCarthy (a shady homebuilder) Bottom Line: A small player that should not be on the top 10.
9. Frank Raines (Fannie Mae CEO) Bottom Line: A defamatory smear that plays off of ethnic and partisan stereotypes.
This passage should be taught in schools as a case study in dishonest writing.
"Raines [...] was at the helm when things really went off course. A former Clinton Administration Budget Director, Raines was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took the helm in 1999. He left in 2004 with the company embroiled in an accounting scandal just as it was beginning to make big investments in subprime mortgage securities that would later sour. Last year Fannie and rival Freddie Mac became wards of the state."
Reality check: Fannie Mae expanded because of the successful securitization of loans to prime borrowers under strict underwriting standards. When exotic private label securities started proliferating, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lost market share, down from 76% in 2003 to 43% in 2006. The move to regain market share was undertaken by Raines' successor, Daniel Mudd. "Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed at least $270 billion in loans to risky borrowers -- more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined," reported The New York Times. The accounting scandal, which related to amortization of upfront fees, is a red herring that had nothing to do with Fannie's financial strength or its credit risk policies, which were revised by Mudd. The losses that wiped out Fannie's equity were attributable by decisions by Mudd.
So why was Raines, rather than Mudd, singled out? The only two plausible explanations is that Time wanted to include "a former Clinton Administration Budget Director [who] was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company."
10. Kathleen Corbet (S&P CEO) Bottom Line: The ratings agencies should be in the top 5. Time fails mention Bloomberg's reporting, which showed that the agencies stopped performing bona fide analysis.
11. Dick Fuld (Lehman CEO) Bottom Line: Fuld was in denial, like a lot of his peers, but the damage caused by Lehman's collapse is attributable to Paulson.
12. Marion and Herb Sandler (former owners of World Savings) Bottom Line: These proponents of option ARM mortgages should be higher up on the list.
13. Bill Clinton Bottom Line: Another smear job with a weaselly disclaimer at the end.
Again, dishonest writing like this should be studied in schools.
"President Clinton's tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and financial deregulation, which in many ways set the stage for the excesses of recent years. Among his biggest strokes of free-wheeling capitalism was [A] the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. [B] He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by [C] rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. It is the subject of heated political and scholarly debate whether any of these moves are to blame for our troubles, but they certainly played a role in creating a permissive lending environment."
A. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, which prevented common ownership of commercial banks and investment banks, had almost nothing to do with the crisis per se. (The concentration of market share among Chase, B of A and Citi is something else altogether.) This is another one of those "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" red herrings.
B. Here's the proof that Time pulled out all the stops to come up with an excuse to include Clinton. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act was introduced in the Republican House on December 14, 2000, and in the Republican Senate on December 15, 2000 . It was inserted into an 11,000 page long omnibus budget bill that Clinton had to sign on December 21, 2000, after Congress had recessed for Christmas and one month before he left office, to keep the parts of the government running. Clinton was in no position to veto anything. But Time attributes the Act to Clinton so that the blame becomes bipartisan.
C. As for the Community Reinvestment Act, Slate's Daniel Gross explained, "The right blames the credit crisis on poor minority homeowners. This is not merely offensive, but entirely wrong."
14. George W. Bush Bottom Line: Sugarcoats Bush's record. He should be on the top 5.
Time writes that Bush's "philosophy of deregulation... trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which in turn eased off on banks and mortgage brokers." Actually, they interfered with the actions taken by 50 state attorneys general (see Spitzer's op-ed above.) Time misrepresents the battle in Congress over regulating Fannie and Freddie ("he stumped for tighter controls"). As Rep. Michael Oxley explained, the legislation passed in the House and pending in the Senate was opposed by White House 'ideologues' who wanted to privatize Fannie and Freddie and who opposed a bigger government role.
Bush's tax cuts wrecked the government's finances while never stimulating strong employment growth. From 9/12 onward, he was virtually MIA, letting Paulson, Bernacke and Congress do all the heavy lifting. In terms of fault, the bottom line is a lot worse than it happened under his watch.
15. Stan O'Neal (former Merrill Lynch CEO) Bottom Line: O'Neal was like most on Wall street, who believed the AAA ratings for CDOs. But his shop specialized in them, and his legacy was Merrill's eventual insolvency.
16. Wen Jiabao Bottom Line: Part of Time's phony, "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative. China brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, provided an engine for global growth, and bought trillions of Treasuries to finance the Bush deficits, but Wen Jiabao deserves to take a lot of the blame.
17. David Lereah (economist of real estate industry) Bottom Line: An industry cheerleader is a pivotal player in the crisis? Time was looking for a cheap shot.
18. John Devane (ran a hedge fund) Bottom Line: He was one among many.
19. Bernie Madoff Bottom Line: Time got it right, but Madoff should be in the top 10.
20. Lew Ranieri Bottom Line: Another smear used for Time's "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.
Time blames Ranieri for inventing mortgage-backed securities. But Ranieri had relied on the 30-year history of prime mortgages underwritten according to the tested underwriting standards of Fannie and Freddie, whom he called 'the gatekeepers." He had nothing to do with the exotic offshoots that corrupted the market. Time's designation is especially offensive because, since 2006, Ranieri has been sounding the alarm about the dangers of CDOs and subprime securities.
21. Burton Jablin Bottom Line: An especially trivial example of the "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative. Jablin is the HGTC programmer who put on shows that glamorized real estate. Somebody else's editorial judgement could use an extreme makeover.
22. Fred Goodwin (Royal Bank of Scotland CEO) Bottom Line: Like a lot of bankers, Goodwin relied on the AAA ratings and debt-financed expansion.
23. Sandy Weill Bottom Line: No way that Weill should be on the list. Citigroup was undone by mortgage securities, not its acquisition binge. I'm sure Sandy Weill has a lot to answer for, but he left Citigroup in 2003, before the toxic CDOs enveloped his company.
24. David Oddsson (Iceland's President) Bottom Line: Time confuses cause and effect. A small country expands by relying on foreign capital that dries up in a crisis. Oddsson's policies were misguided and his country is collateral damage in the meltdown, but he didn't cause the crisis to happen.
25. Jimmy Cayne (Bear Sterns CEO) Bottom Line: Cayne should be further up on the list, since Bear Sterns was a leader in private label mortgage securitizations.
Overall, the Time piece exemplifies what did in Wall Street. Too many people relied on rehashed superficial analysis, instead of digging deeper for the unvarnished truth.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
A yellow-cake payoff?
Excellent. Of course, the evidence for prosecution of Bush Co. has been ample for quite some time. Still, any new bit of evidence is welcome news to my eyes.
Fromm the huffpo...
* * *
Helicopters, Cover-ups and War Crimes
Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere
"Obama Confronts a Choice on Copters" read this week's New York Times . The President soon "will have to decide whether to proceed with some of the priciest aircraft in the world -- a new fleet of 28 Marine One helicopters that will each cost more than the last Air Force One....The choice confronting Mr. Obama encapsulates the tension between two imperatives of his nascent presidency, the need to meet the continuing threats of an age of terrorism and the demand for austerity in a period of economic hardship."
This is a gross misrepresentation of the choice Obama faces. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) and others have alleged that the contract for 28 Marine One helicopters was awarded to the Italian firm Finmeccanica as a thank you for Italy's participation in the Iraq War. The evidence, however, indicates that the contract was more specifically a payoff to the Italian government for supplying the forged documents showing Saddam had obtained weapons grade uranium from Niger. President Bush famously used this fraudulent "yellowcake" intelligence to justify launching the war.
When reviewing the helicopter contract, President Obama can either be actively complicit by continuing with Finmeccanica; he can duck and cover by simply switching to the proper supplier, Sikorsky; or he can use the mandated review of this purchase decision to root out those in military, the aerospace industry and Congress who were willing to compromise the security of all subsequent American presidents so that Bush could cover up his core war crime.
Officials up and down the chain who awarded the contract knew that they were doing something extraordinarily wrong. The rigged bidding process bypassed, for example, Marine One pilots who repeatedly sought to give input. They had many safety concerns. At the time of the bid, the helicopter chosen was not certified to fly in the U.S. It was an old model made of heavy materials; this flew in the face of why the President supposedly needed a new fleet: i.e., so many extra security devices had been added to Marine One after 9/11, it was struggling to lift off. In its losing bid, the Connecticut-based Sikorsky, which had manufactured virtually all presidential helicopters since Eisenhower first ordered one, proposed a new model made of much lighter, composite materials.
But the Marine One pilots' prime objection, which was raised repeatedly by many other officials in private, was national security. Finmeccanica was doing business with Iran, China and Libya. Why outsource so sensitive a project? At the time of the bid, the security clearance necessary to manufacture and maintain Marine One required U.S. citizenship and prohibited Marine One team members from being married to citizens of another country.
After the bid was awarded, John Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, told us: "Analyzing the defense industry for nearly 30 years, I try to stay calm and nonpartisan. But the Finmeccanica deal raised every hair on my neck. Apparently no one else sees the irony in a foreign military contractor building Marine One and Ayatollah One."
Many others did see the irony but were intimidated or paid off. For example, right after Finmeccanica won the contract, Kim Weldon, the daughter of then-Congressman Curt Weldon (R - Pa), landed a full-time job with the company. Previously she'd been a social worker. Finmeccanica also paid consulting money to Weldon's real estate agent, who subsequently pled guilty for attempting to destroy bribery evidence sought by the FBI. Weldon's chief of staff, his wife and other Weldon aides were given free trips to Italy. The chief of staff subsequently pled guilty for failing to disclose income funneled to his wife. Like many other Congressmen, however, Weldon looks as if he will escape unscathed.
At Finmeccanica promotional events, Weldon was accompanied by Giovanni Castellaneta, the Italian ambassador to United States and simultaneously a Finmeccanica vice president. Today Castellaneta sits on Finmeccanica's Board of Directors on behalf of the Italian Government. Ambassador Castellaneta is the key figure in Italy's exchange of forged intelligence for U.S. defense dollars.
According to Italy's La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of the Italian spy agency SISMI, had failed to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers. Giovanni Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy at the time. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and was confirmed by White House officials.
"It is completely out of protocol for the head of a foreign intelligence service to circumvent the C.I.A.," former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi told Vanity Fair's Craig Ungar. "It is uniquely unusual. In spite of lots of people having seen these documents, and having said they were not right, they went around them."
"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. and State Department analyst said to Ungar. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew."
Nonetheless, after the White House meeting that Castellaneta arranged for Pollari, the story of the yellowcake shipments to Saddam was treated as hard proof despite multiple attempts by America's top spies to discredit it.
Especially when no WMDs were found, President Bush needed to find a way he could control to repay the Italians for their help. Bush pressed for a new fleet of Marine Ones. He demanded the contract be awarded through an expedited bidding process because of heightened security concerns. A senior Finmeccanica executive told us that long before the Navy announced the award in January 2005, he and other company executives were told that the fix was in.
Finmeccanica hid the payoff by cutting U.S. companies Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin into the deal. Although Lockheed doesn't make helicopters, it acted as the ostensible lead partner.
"Lockheed pimped itself out," says Lt. Col. Gene T. Boyer, a retired Army pilot who flew three presidents in Marine One for 10 years. Boyer thinks the mushrooming of the Marine One fleet is a disgrace. "Many of the Marine Ones are used just to ferry around Washington VIPs who brag afterwards that they've flown in the same chopper used by the president."
Boyer believes that the Pentagon officials and members of Congress who pushed this contract through should be investigated not just because of the massive cost overruns, but "because they didn't cover the country's back."
The ballooning of Finmeccanica's contract from $6.1 billion to $11.2 billion ($400 million per chopper) was predictable given Bush's push to bypass procedures and sign a deal with Finmeccanica. The massive cost overruns now compel the Secretary of Defense to re-certify to Congress that this acquisition program is essential to national security. It isn't. President Obama needs to appoint an independent, public commission to examine who drove the Marine One procurement process, which many officials say (off the record) was the most secretive, rigged award they've ever seen. Put all officials involved on the record, and under oath. Rarely does one bloated contract connect both to military fraud and to the corruption of our intelligence agencies. Fiscal austerity and our future safety demand a full accounting.
Fromm the huffpo...
* * *
Helicopters, Cover-ups and War Crimes
Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere
"Obama Confronts a Choice on Copters" read this week's New York Times . The President soon "will have to decide whether to proceed with some of the priciest aircraft in the world -- a new fleet of 28 Marine One helicopters that will each cost more than the last Air Force One....The choice confronting Mr. Obama encapsulates the tension between two imperatives of his nascent presidency, the need to meet the continuing threats of an age of terrorism and the demand for austerity in a period of economic hardship."
This is a gross misrepresentation of the choice Obama faces. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) and others have alleged that the contract for 28 Marine One helicopters was awarded to the Italian firm Finmeccanica as a thank you for Italy's participation in the Iraq War. The evidence, however, indicates that the contract was more specifically a payoff to the Italian government for supplying the forged documents showing Saddam had obtained weapons grade uranium from Niger. President Bush famously used this fraudulent "yellowcake" intelligence to justify launching the war.
When reviewing the helicopter contract, President Obama can either be actively complicit by continuing with Finmeccanica; he can duck and cover by simply switching to the proper supplier, Sikorsky; or he can use the mandated review of this purchase decision to root out those in military, the aerospace industry and Congress who were willing to compromise the security of all subsequent American presidents so that Bush could cover up his core war crime.
Officials up and down the chain who awarded the contract knew that they were doing something extraordinarily wrong. The rigged bidding process bypassed, for example, Marine One pilots who repeatedly sought to give input. They had many safety concerns. At the time of the bid, the helicopter chosen was not certified to fly in the U.S. It was an old model made of heavy materials; this flew in the face of why the President supposedly needed a new fleet: i.e., so many extra security devices had been added to Marine One after 9/11, it was struggling to lift off. In its losing bid, the Connecticut-based Sikorsky, which had manufactured virtually all presidential helicopters since Eisenhower first ordered one, proposed a new model made of much lighter, composite materials.
But the Marine One pilots' prime objection, which was raised repeatedly by many other officials in private, was national security. Finmeccanica was doing business with Iran, China and Libya. Why outsource so sensitive a project? At the time of the bid, the security clearance necessary to manufacture and maintain Marine One required U.S. citizenship and prohibited Marine One team members from being married to citizens of another country.
After the bid was awarded, John Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, told us: "Analyzing the defense industry for nearly 30 years, I try to stay calm and nonpartisan. But the Finmeccanica deal raised every hair on my neck. Apparently no one else sees the irony in a foreign military contractor building Marine One and Ayatollah One."
Many others did see the irony but were intimidated or paid off. For example, right after Finmeccanica won the contract, Kim Weldon, the daughter of then-Congressman Curt Weldon (R - Pa), landed a full-time job with the company. Previously she'd been a social worker. Finmeccanica also paid consulting money to Weldon's real estate agent, who subsequently pled guilty for attempting to destroy bribery evidence sought by the FBI. Weldon's chief of staff, his wife and other Weldon aides were given free trips to Italy. The chief of staff subsequently pled guilty for failing to disclose income funneled to his wife. Like many other Congressmen, however, Weldon looks as if he will escape unscathed.
At Finmeccanica promotional events, Weldon was accompanied by Giovanni Castellaneta, the Italian ambassador to United States and simultaneously a Finmeccanica vice president. Today Castellaneta sits on Finmeccanica's Board of Directors on behalf of the Italian Government. Ambassador Castellaneta is the key figure in Italy's exchange of forged intelligence for U.S. defense dollars.
According to Italy's La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of the Italian spy agency SISMI, had failed to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers. Giovanni Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy at the time. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and was confirmed by White House officials.
"It is completely out of protocol for the head of a foreign intelligence service to circumvent the C.I.A.," former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi told Vanity Fair's Craig Ungar. "It is uniquely unusual. In spite of lots of people having seen these documents, and having said they were not right, they went around them."
"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. and State Department analyst said to Ungar. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew."
Nonetheless, after the White House meeting that Castellaneta arranged for Pollari, the story of the yellowcake shipments to Saddam was treated as hard proof despite multiple attempts by America's top spies to discredit it.
Especially when no WMDs were found, President Bush needed to find a way he could control to repay the Italians for their help. Bush pressed for a new fleet of Marine Ones. He demanded the contract be awarded through an expedited bidding process because of heightened security concerns. A senior Finmeccanica executive told us that long before the Navy announced the award in January 2005, he and other company executives were told that the fix was in.
Finmeccanica hid the payoff by cutting U.S. companies Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin into the deal. Although Lockheed doesn't make helicopters, it acted as the ostensible lead partner.
"Lockheed pimped itself out," says Lt. Col. Gene T. Boyer, a retired Army pilot who flew three presidents in Marine One for 10 years. Boyer thinks the mushrooming of the Marine One fleet is a disgrace. "Many of the Marine Ones are used just to ferry around Washington VIPs who brag afterwards that they've flown in the same chopper used by the president."
Boyer believes that the Pentagon officials and members of Congress who pushed this contract through should be investigated not just because of the massive cost overruns, but "because they didn't cover the country's back."
The ballooning of Finmeccanica's contract from $6.1 billion to $11.2 billion ($400 million per chopper) was predictable given Bush's push to bypass procedures and sign a deal with Finmeccanica. The massive cost overruns now compel the Secretary of Defense to re-certify to Congress that this acquisition program is essential to national security. It isn't. President Obama needs to appoint an independent, public commission to examine who drove the Marine One procurement process, which many officials say (off the record) was the most secretive, rigged award they've ever seen. Put all officials involved on the record, and under oath. Rarely does one bloated contract connect both to military fraud and to the corruption of our intelligence agencies. Fiscal austerity and our future safety demand a full accounting.
The red herring about socialism
Sean Hannity's Ridiculous War Against Socialism
by Bob Cesca
(Sean Hannity is a FOX News 'anchor')
When I watched the video of Sean Hannity's Tuesday night show, I was half expecting him to leap out of his chair, grab his producer by the lapels and scream something about a goblin on the wing of the airplane -- all puffy and bloodshot, hair mussed, tie undone, spittle and sweat flying all around.
There was Sean Hannity on television: breathlessly announcing the red dawn of "socialism you can believe in." "The New America." He called the recovery bill, "a liberal hijacking of the American way of life." Uh-huh. Hijacking. Terrorists rather than goblins on the wing. I get it. And even though we just wrapped up eight years of the largest government expansion in our country's history, Hannity derided the recovery bill as "the largest government expansion in our country's history."
But, unbelievably, that wasn't the most ludicrous part of the show. The frantic announcement was preceded by a newsreel-style montage featuring video of the various congressional floor debates about the bill, footage of Boehner throwing down the bill and, naturally, President Obama signing the bill. All backed with the frighteningly pulse-pounding choir chants of the apocalyptic anthem "O Fortuna."
There's no gray area in what he was suggesting. Socialism is here, said Hannity, and it's really scary. The choir music said so.
Hannity is once again joined in this crusade by very serious pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Steve Doocy, Alex Castellanos, Joe Scarborough, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck who, at one point, claimed that President Obama is both a socialist and a fascist -- a feat that calls to mind an old George Carlin joke about how it's physically impossible to "put your seat-back forward."
The message is clear. The voices on the far-right are unanimous.
Therefore, I'm calling upon Sean Hannity to use his prime time television program as a platform to rally Republican politicians, cable news hacks and citizens alike to refuse delivery of not just recovery bill spending, but all so-called "socialist" government programs. Send it all back. End American socialism now! All of it.
Refuse to send your kids to socialized public schools and universities; refuse to use socialized roads and highways; refuse to call upon socialized police and fire departments; shut down the socialized air traffic control; refuse to visit socialized national parks; tell grandma that her Social Security and Medicare will have to be sent back to the government; demand the immediate dismantling of our socialized American military. Sarah Palin and her supporters in Alaska should refuse all forms of "redistributed wealth" by sending back their checks from the socialized oil program there.
Send it all back. I'm sure the entire roster of Neo-McCarthyite pundits enumerated above -- Limbaugh, Scarborough, Hannity and the like -- have already forgone their usage of these socialist services so we can assume they've figured out a ways to get by. How hard can it be really? I mean, who needs roads when there are hot-air balloons and jet packs. Socialist fire departments? A house fire will eventually burn itself out, won't it? As for the pre-socialist 50-percent poverty rate for the elderly? If we can put a man on the Moon (also a socialist program), we can invent some bootstraps that'll fit over grandma's therapeutic stockings.
As for the recovery bill, the states aren't forced by law to accept the funding. They're entirely within their rights to, borrowing Hannity's spasmodic metaphor, thwart the hijacking.
Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is apparently mulling the idea of refusing the recovery funds. Paul Begala, in his weekly column, has already dared Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina to send it back.
Meanwhile, on her MSNBC show Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow asked Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota if he would refuse his state's share of the recovery plan. Pawlenty hemmed and hawed and finally relented that he wasn't totally opposed to the recovery bill -- just the yucky parts. I assume Pawlenty meant the totally nonexistent parts like the fake ACORN thing and the fake mouse thing, both of which were entirely conjured from thin air by the Republicans. Or did he mean the part of the bill that's otherwise known as, you know, the largest middle class tax cut in American history? Was he opposed to that part?
The recovery bill is expected to create or rescue an estimated 50,000 jobs in Louisiana, and Jindal would be refusing $7.68 billion in federal funds. The recovery bill allocates $7.7 billion and 50,000 jobs for South Carolina. $9.34 billion and 66,000 jobs for Minnesota. John Boehner's home state of Ohio will be receiving $20.09 billion and the recovery bill is projected to create or save somewhere in the range of 133, 000 jobs. Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky? $7.18 billion and 48,000 jobs. John McCain's Arizona? $10.27 billion and 70,000 jobs. In Rush Limbaugh's adopted home state of Florida? $28.33 billion and 206,000 jobs. Glenn Beck's home state of Washington? $10.41 billion and 75,000 jobs.
Send it all back.
But if the money somehow gets through Hannity's blockade and steams its way to socialist Republican governors like Charlie Crist and Arnold Schwarzenegger (embracing "economic girly man" status), and if those jobs are created anyway, Sean Hannity ought to heroically command his viewers in these states to not accept those jobs. They're socialist jobs, after all.
While he's at it, Hannity might as well refuse delivery on the president's new socialized home rescue plan as well. I wonder how many McCain-Palin voters who ripped into Barack Obama for "redistributing the wealth" will actually participate in the program.
Funny what happens to ridiculous Neo-McCarthyite sloganeering when the shit really hits the fan. I expect that a year from now we'll be able to look at statistics indicating that zero dittoheads and zero occupants of Hannity's America chose to have their homes rescued by the socialist federal government.
No?
Of course not. It'll never happen because it turns out that most Americans are, to some degree, closeted socialists, especially when they're suddenly confronted by the darker realities of free market capitalism and the destructive long-term effects of both Reaganomics and Bush Republicanism. In practice, this week's cover of Newsweek is only half right. We've always been socialists (with some obvious and necessary limits). A system in which the federal government provides commonly held services while also regulating industry isn't a brand new concept in America, no matter how apoplectic Hannity pretends to be on his show. Hell, even the Republicans who voted against the recovery bill are scrambling to make sure they get their chunk.
But if, in fact, Hannity is right and I'm missing the big picture on this thing, then every Republican who voted against the recovery bill and every Republican dittohead who is currently joining with the far-right talkers in this red scare uprising has an obligation for the sake of consistency to send it all back.
If it makes them feel better, they can even play some scary music via our socialist radio airwaves while they're doing it.
by Bob Cesca
(Sean Hannity is a FOX News 'anchor')
When I watched the video of Sean Hannity's Tuesday night show, I was half expecting him to leap out of his chair, grab his producer by the lapels and scream something about a goblin on the wing of the airplane -- all puffy and bloodshot, hair mussed, tie undone, spittle and sweat flying all around.
There was Sean Hannity on television: breathlessly announcing the red dawn of "socialism you can believe in." "The New America." He called the recovery bill, "a liberal hijacking of the American way of life." Uh-huh. Hijacking. Terrorists rather than goblins on the wing. I get it. And even though we just wrapped up eight years of the largest government expansion in our country's history, Hannity derided the recovery bill as "the largest government expansion in our country's history."
But, unbelievably, that wasn't the most ludicrous part of the show. The frantic announcement was preceded by a newsreel-style montage featuring video of the various congressional floor debates about the bill, footage of Boehner throwing down the bill and, naturally, President Obama signing the bill. All backed with the frighteningly pulse-pounding choir chants of the apocalyptic anthem "O Fortuna."
There's no gray area in what he was suggesting. Socialism is here, said Hannity, and it's really scary. The choir music said so.
Hannity is once again joined in this crusade by very serious pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Steve Doocy, Alex Castellanos, Joe Scarborough, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck who, at one point, claimed that President Obama is both a socialist and a fascist -- a feat that calls to mind an old George Carlin joke about how it's physically impossible to "put your seat-back forward."
The message is clear. The voices on the far-right are unanimous.
Therefore, I'm calling upon Sean Hannity to use his prime time television program as a platform to rally Republican politicians, cable news hacks and citizens alike to refuse delivery of not just recovery bill spending, but all so-called "socialist" government programs. Send it all back. End American socialism now! All of it.
Refuse to send your kids to socialized public schools and universities; refuse to use socialized roads and highways; refuse to call upon socialized police and fire departments; shut down the socialized air traffic control; refuse to visit socialized national parks; tell grandma that her Social Security and Medicare will have to be sent back to the government; demand the immediate dismantling of our socialized American military. Sarah Palin and her supporters in Alaska should refuse all forms of "redistributed wealth" by sending back their checks from the socialized oil program there.
Send it all back. I'm sure the entire roster of Neo-McCarthyite pundits enumerated above -- Limbaugh, Scarborough, Hannity and the like -- have already forgone their usage of these socialist services so we can assume they've figured out a ways to get by. How hard can it be really? I mean, who needs roads when there are hot-air balloons and jet packs. Socialist fire departments? A house fire will eventually burn itself out, won't it? As for the pre-socialist 50-percent poverty rate for the elderly? If we can put a man on the Moon (also a socialist program), we can invent some bootstraps that'll fit over grandma's therapeutic stockings.
As for the recovery bill, the states aren't forced by law to accept the funding. They're entirely within their rights to, borrowing Hannity's spasmodic metaphor, thwart the hijacking.
Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is apparently mulling the idea of refusing the recovery funds. Paul Begala, in his weekly column, has already dared Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina to send it back.
Meanwhile, on her MSNBC show Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow asked Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota if he would refuse his state's share of the recovery plan. Pawlenty hemmed and hawed and finally relented that he wasn't totally opposed to the recovery bill -- just the yucky parts. I assume Pawlenty meant the totally nonexistent parts like the fake ACORN thing and the fake mouse thing, both of which were entirely conjured from thin air by the Republicans. Or did he mean the part of the bill that's otherwise known as, you know, the largest middle class tax cut in American history? Was he opposed to that part?
The recovery bill is expected to create or rescue an estimated 50,000 jobs in Louisiana, and Jindal would be refusing $7.68 billion in federal funds. The recovery bill allocates $7.7 billion and 50,000 jobs for South Carolina. $9.34 billion and 66,000 jobs for Minnesota. John Boehner's home state of Ohio will be receiving $20.09 billion and the recovery bill is projected to create or save somewhere in the range of 133, 000 jobs. Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky? $7.18 billion and 48,000 jobs. John McCain's Arizona? $10.27 billion and 70,000 jobs. In Rush Limbaugh's adopted home state of Florida? $28.33 billion and 206,000 jobs. Glenn Beck's home state of Washington? $10.41 billion and 75,000 jobs.
Send it all back.
But if the money somehow gets through Hannity's blockade and steams its way to socialist Republican governors like Charlie Crist and Arnold Schwarzenegger (embracing "economic girly man" status), and if those jobs are created anyway, Sean Hannity ought to heroically command his viewers in these states to not accept those jobs. They're socialist jobs, after all.
While he's at it, Hannity might as well refuse delivery on the president's new socialized home rescue plan as well. I wonder how many McCain-Palin voters who ripped into Barack Obama for "redistributing the wealth" will actually participate in the program.
Funny what happens to ridiculous Neo-McCarthyite sloganeering when the shit really hits the fan. I expect that a year from now we'll be able to look at statistics indicating that zero dittoheads and zero occupants of Hannity's America chose to have their homes rescued by the socialist federal government.
No?
Of course not. It'll never happen because it turns out that most Americans are, to some degree, closeted socialists, especially when they're suddenly confronted by the darker realities of free market capitalism and the destructive long-term effects of both Reaganomics and Bush Republicanism. In practice, this week's cover of Newsweek is only half right. We've always been socialists (with some obvious and necessary limits). A system in which the federal government provides commonly held services while also regulating industry isn't a brand new concept in America, no matter how apoplectic Hannity pretends to be on his show. Hell, even the Republicans who voted against the recovery bill are scrambling to make sure they get their chunk.
But if, in fact, Hannity is right and I'm missing the big picture on this thing, then every Republican who voted against the recovery bill and every Republican dittohead who is currently joining with the far-right talkers in this red scare uprising has an obligation for the sake of consistency to send it all back.
If it makes them feel better, they can even play some scary music via our socialist radio airwaves while they're doing it.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The lies about Palin continue
Ah, conspiracies. One of my favorite pastimes. For those who aren't aware, there was MUCH speculation during the McCain/Palin campaign that Gov. Palin's recently born child had actually been that of her teenaged daughter and that the cover-up ensued to prevent what was already a damaging story from becomming even more so. Makes a lot of sense to me. How does a 40+ year old woman keep a pregnancy secret anyway? And are you really serious that she took a plane back to Alaska AFTER her water broke? As the saying goes, PUH-LEASE! But, as the Truth Movement knows well, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth.
'New' mother Bristol Palin is in the news lately thanks to an interview on FOX where she stubbled through answers and essentially admitted that abstinence-only education doesn't work. Well, thanks for the newsflash, Bristol! You're only living proof of it, girl! I mean, file under 'D' for DUH! But there are still plenty of little hints that serve only to reaffirm what so many have suspected. This blurb was in the middle of an article on Salon.com:
"Fox instead couched much of the story as a cutesy-poo introduction to Tripp (who seems temporarily to have replaced Trig, Sarah Palin's night-owl infant, as the family football), whom Bristol described as both "awesome" and "very, very, very cute.""
Things that make you go 'hmm' eh? Link to the article is below:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/02/18/bristol_palin/
'New' mother Bristol Palin is in the news lately thanks to an interview on FOX where she stubbled through answers and essentially admitted that abstinence-only education doesn't work. Well, thanks for the newsflash, Bristol! You're only living proof of it, girl! I mean, file under 'D' for DUH! But there are still plenty of little hints that serve only to reaffirm what so many have suspected. This blurb was in the middle of an article on Salon.com:
"Fox instead couched much of the story as a cutesy-poo introduction to Tripp (who seems temporarily to have replaced Trig, Sarah Palin's night-owl infant, as the family football), whom Bristol described as both "awesome" and "very, very, very cute.""
Things that make you go 'hmm' eh? Link to the article is below:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/02/18/bristol_palin/
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Yes, we really are sadists. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
From the Huffpo...
* * *
Cheney: Chief of Churls
by John Seery
I feel sick to my stomach as I write this.
This morning I read the interview with the former Guantanamo guard who describes in excruciating detail how Gitmo prisoners were allegedly subjected to anal rape as well as other forms of sexual abuse, torture, humiliation, and other atrocities, all at the hands of their U.S. captors, in some cases under the supervision of U.S. medical personnel. It is a ghastly account.
Over the weekend, I decided to view the Alex Gibney's 2007 documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, a film that narrates similar detainee maltreatment -- in some cases, resulting in outright homicide -- at Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The film incorporates gruesome Abu Ghraib photos that have not been widely displayed to the general public. I guess the reason I hadn't yet watched Taxi to the Dark Side is that, like many others, I just wanted to move on past this dark national episode, especially once the Bush perpetrators were out of office: Who, after all, really wants to dwell on the topic of U.S. torture? Besides, I knew that my former Pomona College colleague, the late Frank Gibney, makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film - -which is dedicated to his memory, as the filmmaker recalls his father's principled patriotism - -and I just didn't want to engage in double grieving, personal and political.
Evidence of these Bush-era war crimes will, no doubt, continue to leak out. It's becoming clearer and clearer that these official acts of cruelty had little to do, either in intent or effect, with enhancing national security or producing reliable intelligence. Those rationalizations, those cover stories, will not pass the test of time, the scrutiny of history, the light of evidence and reasoned judgment.
Let me put a general name to today's sickening news: These were acts of government-sponsored sadism. In some cases, especially at Abu Ghraib and now, apparently, also at Guantanamo, the sadism was explicitly sexualized. But by identifying U.S. policy as sadistic, I also mean to cover a more general range of perverse behaviors in our recent past, all united by a wanton delight, to call it that, in dominating, degrading, bullying, browbeating, and threatening others, as a matter of policy.
The initial tendency will be to try to personalize, in order to contain, such sadism, as a supposedly isolated aberration perpetuated by bad-apple individuals. It is easy, perhaps a natural temptation, to depict, for example, Dick Cheney -- the clipped-wing bird hunter -- as the poster boy of U.S. sadism. He became the bragging ringleader for policies that exceeded the bounds of respectable military strategy (and/or domestic partisanship) in order to inflict special psychological damage on all perceived adversaries within earshot: the terrifying talk about WMD, ticking time bombs, and mushroom clouds; the bombast about the need for preemptive war; the lying about an incontrovertible link between 9-11 and Saddam; the shocking and awing; the insistence on waterboarding; the indecent disdain for the Geneva Conventions; the Plamegating of critics; the spying without warrant; the legal approval for squeezing a child's testicles; and so on. Last week, several commentators roundly condemned Cheney's most recent remarks as a macabre exercise in domestic fear mongering, a not-so-subtle ill-wishing for calamity to be visited upon the body politic. They wished in turn that he would simply remain quiet, or else just go away, sinking into oblivion, never to be heard from again.
But I'm more concerned about Cheney's (and others') sadism as government policy (not with his personal pathology as such) and with the lingering question about what we are to do about it now. Cheney insisted again last week that the U.S. must use dastardly and extra-constitutional (and un-Christian) techniques because, "These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." And he faulted the new administration for being naive about all of this: "The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I'm not at all sure that that's what the Obama administration believes."
Let's be clear about Cheney's devious words here, which hardly conceal his underlying sadism: He thinks the U.S. will be "respected" if and only if it is willing to meet evil with evil. That position goes well beyond Machiavelli's infamous "it is better to be feared than loved" maxim or Hobbes' "covenants, without the sword, are but words" or Carl Schmitt's contention that modern politicians ought not extend liberal tolerance toward their enemies. Cheney and his ilk clearly abide by an unchecked belief that our adversaries must be beaten, raped, degraded, and humiliated, not just thwarted and defeated. He condones torture, not because it makes us safer (he knows better), but because it produces the kind of "respect" he seeks.
Let us put aside the obvious rejoinder that such imaginary "victories" are Pyrrhic. Instead, what are we to do now with the residual current of compliant, complementary masochism that condoned, sustained, perpetuated, and even celebrated Bush and Cheney's sadistic horrors? I don't agree with those who believe we can repress and postpone indefinitely confronting such national crimes against humanity. In my view, it would be better for the days of such reckoning to come sooner, rather than later (the election wasn't sufficient to that gravely moral end). If we wait too long, who among us will still have the resilience to be able to write the next Oresteia, the next Beloved, or the next Eichmann in Jerusalem?
* * *
Cheney: Chief of Churls
by John Seery
I feel sick to my stomach as I write this.
This morning I read the interview with the former Guantanamo guard who describes in excruciating detail how Gitmo prisoners were allegedly subjected to anal rape as well as other forms of sexual abuse, torture, humiliation, and other atrocities, all at the hands of their U.S. captors, in some cases under the supervision of U.S. medical personnel. It is a ghastly account.
Over the weekend, I decided to view the Alex Gibney's 2007 documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, a film that narrates similar detainee maltreatment -- in some cases, resulting in outright homicide -- at Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The film incorporates gruesome Abu Ghraib photos that have not been widely displayed to the general public. I guess the reason I hadn't yet watched Taxi to the Dark Side is that, like many others, I just wanted to move on past this dark national episode, especially once the Bush perpetrators were out of office: Who, after all, really wants to dwell on the topic of U.S. torture? Besides, I knew that my former Pomona College colleague, the late Frank Gibney, makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film - -which is dedicated to his memory, as the filmmaker recalls his father's principled patriotism - -and I just didn't want to engage in double grieving, personal and political.
Evidence of these Bush-era war crimes will, no doubt, continue to leak out. It's becoming clearer and clearer that these official acts of cruelty had little to do, either in intent or effect, with enhancing national security or producing reliable intelligence. Those rationalizations, those cover stories, will not pass the test of time, the scrutiny of history, the light of evidence and reasoned judgment.
Let me put a general name to today's sickening news: These were acts of government-sponsored sadism. In some cases, especially at Abu Ghraib and now, apparently, also at Guantanamo, the sadism was explicitly sexualized. But by identifying U.S. policy as sadistic, I also mean to cover a more general range of perverse behaviors in our recent past, all united by a wanton delight, to call it that, in dominating, degrading, bullying, browbeating, and threatening others, as a matter of policy.
The initial tendency will be to try to personalize, in order to contain, such sadism, as a supposedly isolated aberration perpetuated by bad-apple individuals. It is easy, perhaps a natural temptation, to depict, for example, Dick Cheney -- the clipped-wing bird hunter -- as the poster boy of U.S. sadism. He became the bragging ringleader for policies that exceeded the bounds of respectable military strategy (and/or domestic partisanship) in order to inflict special psychological damage on all perceived adversaries within earshot: the terrifying talk about WMD, ticking time bombs, and mushroom clouds; the bombast about the need for preemptive war; the lying about an incontrovertible link between 9-11 and Saddam; the shocking and awing; the insistence on waterboarding; the indecent disdain for the Geneva Conventions; the Plamegating of critics; the spying without warrant; the legal approval for squeezing a child's testicles; and so on. Last week, several commentators roundly condemned Cheney's most recent remarks as a macabre exercise in domestic fear mongering, a not-so-subtle ill-wishing for calamity to be visited upon the body politic. They wished in turn that he would simply remain quiet, or else just go away, sinking into oblivion, never to be heard from again.
But I'm more concerned about Cheney's (and others') sadism as government policy (not with his personal pathology as such) and with the lingering question about what we are to do about it now. Cheney insisted again last week that the U.S. must use dastardly and extra-constitutional (and un-Christian) techniques because, "These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." And he faulted the new administration for being naive about all of this: "The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I'm not at all sure that that's what the Obama administration believes."
Let's be clear about Cheney's devious words here, which hardly conceal his underlying sadism: He thinks the U.S. will be "respected" if and only if it is willing to meet evil with evil. That position goes well beyond Machiavelli's infamous "it is better to be feared than loved" maxim or Hobbes' "covenants, without the sword, are but words" or Carl Schmitt's contention that modern politicians ought not extend liberal tolerance toward their enemies. Cheney and his ilk clearly abide by an unchecked belief that our adversaries must be beaten, raped, degraded, and humiliated, not just thwarted and defeated. He condones torture, not because it makes us safer (he knows better), but because it produces the kind of "respect" he seeks.
Let us put aside the obvious rejoinder that such imaginary "victories" are Pyrrhic. Instead, what are we to do now with the residual current of compliant, complementary masochism that condoned, sustained, perpetuated, and even celebrated Bush and Cheney's sadistic horrors? I don't agree with those who believe we can repress and postpone indefinitely confronting such national crimes against humanity. In my view, it would be better for the days of such reckoning to come sooner, rather than later (the election wasn't sufficient to that gravely moral end). If we wait too long, who among us will still have the resilience to be able to write the next Oresteia, the next Beloved, or the next Eichmann in Jerusalem?
Monday, February 16, 2009
More strong words for the Republicans
from the huffingtonpost.com
In Praise of New Republican Leadership
by Paul Jenkins
There is John McCain, the Republicans' failed presidential candidate, as incapable since the election as he was before. There is John Boehner, the party's leader in the House and Ohio's own George Hamilton (the tan, not the affair with his stepmother when he was 12). We now also have Michael "Drill Baby Drill" Steele, the party's inspiration-challenged chairman, who is supposed to lead the GOP back to victory despite his own electoral incompetence. And Eric Cantor, the party's shiny new star who idolizes Newt Gingrich, presumably for shutting down the government in an ego-driven tizzy, not for leaving his cancer-ridden first wife or dumping his second one for a Congressional aide 23 years his junior.
With the kind of inept leadership that would make even Merrill Lynch shudder, the Republican Party has nowhere to go but down, even though, at 19% approval, there is not much of a cushion left. More worrisome for Republicans are their recruiting prospects: if you were, say, a bright young thing in your 20s or 30s, would you rather hitch yourself to Mitch McConnell's star or Barack Obama's? Is there anything that the Republicans have said or done in the past few months that would inspire anyone who has a choice to join their crusade to nowhere? Do you know anyone who proudly supports the GOP? Actually, do you know anyone who understands what the GOP is even about?
And that is precisely the problem: there is so little substance to the Republican Party that, like Citibank, it would wither into oblivion before merging with, say, the Alaska Independence Party, were it not too big to fail. The US electoral system is rigged so that no matter how much it deserves to disappear, the Republican Party will be propped up. It has been so for over 150 years, and is likely to remain so for another 150,000. And so we are stuck with them. This is sad because we do deserve a spirited, intelligent debate about the ominous issues that face the country and the world. Forget even about solutions to the economic crisis or any kind of practical positions on anything of importance, Republicans are unable to begin to articulate the underlying values justifying their existence. And no, "lowering taxes" and "defending traditional marriage" are NOT philosophies. The former is, at best, a means to an end, and the latter a short-term tactic.
Perhaps Republicans were inspired by Obama's enchantingly vague promises of hope and change, not realizing that behind them was a solid set of beliefs in the role of government, and a deep understanding of the American experience. The lack of foundation of the Republican Party is a bigger problem than many of us realize because it means there is no constructive opposition and, thus, little discussion of any value. A number of people are dubious about the success of the stimulus package and would have liked to see arguments from both sides about the consequences of spending close to $1 trillion, or of doing nothing. But with a moribund, intellectually lazy Republican Party, we heard little more than sniping about an earmark here and there, and a fetishistic mantra about lower taxes. What we would like to hear is what role the GOP sees for the government in a crisis of this magnitude, and what role the government could have played to prevent it. It's that simple, and until Republicans can develop coherent answers to such basic questions, they will not regain power.
For eight years, the GOP has been an ugly knot of extreme contradictions, unable to find even the slightest thread of consistency in policies that called for financial rigor but grew public spending to record levels; resisted "nation-building," but drained $25,000 from each American household to attempt to recreate a country 6,000 miles away; wanted the government out of our lives, but proceeded to try to control our conversations, our relationships and our bodies. This utter fiasco is now described by party leaders as a time during which the GOP "lost its way." America is the land of endless redemption, normally a reasonably healthy process, but right now the salvation thing is over the top: from Republican leaders to Wall Street bankers to auto industry executives, everyone seems to realize that they had "lost their way," and that this new consciousness is enough to lead them back to the righteous path. No, it's not: they are all corrupt losers who need to be replaced and sent into internal exile, or worse. It goes without saying that we need new leadership in banking and industry (and perhaps compensation caps will achieve that), but we also need strong, smart, new leadership in the GOP, no matter how much we enjoy the prospect of another Republican electoral disaster in 2010. Without an adequate opposition, there is a noxious lack of rational debate, and endless risks to the democratic process. Also, it's not fun: do we really want to be the basketball team that won 100 to 0?
In Praise of New Republican Leadership
by Paul Jenkins
There is John McCain, the Republicans' failed presidential candidate, as incapable since the election as he was before. There is John Boehner, the party's leader in the House and Ohio's own George Hamilton (the tan, not the affair with his stepmother when he was 12). We now also have Michael "Drill Baby Drill" Steele, the party's inspiration-challenged chairman, who is supposed to lead the GOP back to victory despite his own electoral incompetence. And Eric Cantor, the party's shiny new star who idolizes Newt Gingrich, presumably for shutting down the government in an ego-driven tizzy, not for leaving his cancer-ridden first wife or dumping his second one for a Congressional aide 23 years his junior.
With the kind of inept leadership that would make even Merrill Lynch shudder, the Republican Party has nowhere to go but down, even though, at 19% approval, there is not much of a cushion left. More worrisome for Republicans are their recruiting prospects: if you were, say, a bright young thing in your 20s or 30s, would you rather hitch yourself to Mitch McConnell's star or Barack Obama's? Is there anything that the Republicans have said or done in the past few months that would inspire anyone who has a choice to join their crusade to nowhere? Do you know anyone who proudly supports the GOP? Actually, do you know anyone who understands what the GOP is even about?
And that is precisely the problem: there is so little substance to the Republican Party that, like Citibank, it would wither into oblivion before merging with, say, the Alaska Independence Party, were it not too big to fail. The US electoral system is rigged so that no matter how much it deserves to disappear, the Republican Party will be propped up. It has been so for over 150 years, and is likely to remain so for another 150,000. And so we are stuck with them. This is sad because we do deserve a spirited, intelligent debate about the ominous issues that face the country and the world. Forget even about solutions to the economic crisis or any kind of practical positions on anything of importance, Republicans are unable to begin to articulate the underlying values justifying their existence. And no, "lowering taxes" and "defending traditional marriage" are NOT philosophies. The former is, at best, a means to an end, and the latter a short-term tactic.
Perhaps Republicans were inspired by Obama's enchantingly vague promises of hope and change, not realizing that behind them was a solid set of beliefs in the role of government, and a deep understanding of the American experience. The lack of foundation of the Republican Party is a bigger problem than many of us realize because it means there is no constructive opposition and, thus, little discussion of any value. A number of people are dubious about the success of the stimulus package and would have liked to see arguments from both sides about the consequences of spending close to $1 trillion, or of doing nothing. But with a moribund, intellectually lazy Republican Party, we heard little more than sniping about an earmark here and there, and a fetishistic mantra about lower taxes. What we would like to hear is what role the GOP sees for the government in a crisis of this magnitude, and what role the government could have played to prevent it. It's that simple, and until Republicans can develop coherent answers to such basic questions, they will not regain power.
For eight years, the GOP has been an ugly knot of extreme contradictions, unable to find even the slightest thread of consistency in policies that called for financial rigor but grew public spending to record levels; resisted "nation-building," but drained $25,000 from each American household to attempt to recreate a country 6,000 miles away; wanted the government out of our lives, but proceeded to try to control our conversations, our relationships and our bodies. This utter fiasco is now described by party leaders as a time during which the GOP "lost its way." America is the land of endless redemption, normally a reasonably healthy process, but right now the salvation thing is over the top: from Republican leaders to Wall Street bankers to auto industry executives, everyone seems to realize that they had "lost their way," and that this new consciousness is enough to lead them back to the righteous path. No, it's not: they are all corrupt losers who need to be replaced and sent into internal exile, or worse. It goes without saying that we need new leadership in banking and industry (and perhaps compensation caps will achieve that), but we also need strong, smart, new leadership in the GOP, no matter how much we enjoy the prospect of another Republican electoral disaster in 2010. Without an adequate opposition, there is a noxious lack of rational debate, and endless risks to the democratic process. Also, it's not fun: do we really want to be the basketball team that won 100 to 0?
Clueless Republicans (Feb edition)
Hmm, the NY Times has some good OpEds these days. Guess they're trying to make up for all those articles of war propaganda or something :-)
* * *
They Sure Showed That Obama
by Frank Rich
Published: February 14, 2009
AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”
Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.
But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.
On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.
“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”
The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”
For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”
Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.
A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.
The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.
This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.
In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.
At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.
Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.
This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.
As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.
But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.
Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.
* * *
They Sure Showed That Obama
by Frank Rich
Published: February 14, 2009
AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”
Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.
But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.
On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.
“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”
The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”
For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”
Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.
A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.
The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.
This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.
In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.
At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.
Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.
This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.
As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.
But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.
Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.
No Wealth Creation Under GOP Rule
This author doesn't specifically blame the Repbulicans, just talks about what happened, but they WERE in charge the whole time.
From the New York Times...
* * *
Decade at Bernie’s
by Paul Krugman
Published: February 15, 2009
By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.
Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.
At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?
Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.
Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.
So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.
For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.
And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.
Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral,” says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser.
In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.
There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what’s needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.
Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.
From the New York Times...
* * *
Decade at Bernie’s
by Paul Krugman
Published: February 15, 2009
By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.
Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.
At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?
Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.
Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.
So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.
For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.
And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.
Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral,” says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser.
In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.
There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what’s needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.
Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
What the hell is wrong with America?
I've asked that question to Google a number of times. Today, on the huffpo, someone actually had an answer. Read on...
* * *
James Moore, The End Time Chronicles
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."
- John Updike
Rich people are stupid. Or maybe they're smart. Who the hell knows? Watching A-Rod grimace through his interview with Peter Gammons on ESPN, it was hard not to think about Bernie Madoff and what his answers might be to reasonable inquiries. Rodriquez and Madoff both seem to have responded to the uniquely American notion that everything goes forever upwards; profits are endless and records will all be broken. That's nonsense, of course; the 100 meters will always require a certain amount of time to be traversed and the record will eventually reach human capacity. And markets, as every economist will concede, are not endlessly upward bound. Capitalism is imperfect.
Rodriquez seems to be implying that it's our fault he cheated. He said the reason he took steroids was because he had "the weight of the world" on his shoulders and there were "great expectations because I had just signed this enormous contract." What crap. How did Gammons not laugh at this guy? This is the moral equivalent of your sixth grader getting caught looking at his desk mate's test paper during an exam. "Gee, dad, I knew you really wanted me to do well and had great expectations that I would get an A but I hadn't studied and I didn't want to let you down." "Thanks, son. I'm proud you did what was necessary to succeed."
His other excuse was, "It was just the culture of that time." Ah good one, Alex. Not enough character to know the difference between right and wrong, eh? That's kind of the Nazi war criminal defense. "I didn't really feel like killing those people but it was our culture at that time." Like the old Texas Ranger said, "Right is still right even if nobody's doing it and wrong is still wrong even if everybody's doing it." The distinctions aren't subtle, A-Roid. They are pretty stark and obvious.
A Rod, of course, is easy to hate. He's right out there in front of us being a Yankee and hitting the baseball. When I was a kid and hating the Yankees on the radio as Mantle and Maris decimated the Tigers and broke my Motown heart, I gave them their grudging respect. Maris' forearms didn't look much bigger than my own bird-like appendages and made me think anything was possible and I still may yet make it to the big leagues. Even the uninitiated knew The Mick was a bit of freak but Maris' performance confirmed that mechanics and hard work created possibilities for lesser creatures. A-Rod, Clemens, and McGuire did too; they simply added controlled substances to the equation. Who wants to let down America?
Bernie Madoff has no playing field but he saw a sucker in our culture's obsession with risk-free and assured profit and the need to win. Maybe he thought anyone stupid enough to believe in that deserved to lose their money so he drew silly graphs with endlessly ascending red lines and reassured the doubtful. Wall Street didn't do anything much different than Madoff by bundling up nonsensical dreams and then spinning them out to buyer after buyer on a credit swap swirl. Are we this stupid and greedy? Do we deserve our present economic peril or are some of us victims?
Too much of our population has now grown cynical from the lies and cheating and stealing that they do not expect any change. We no longer anticipate much from congress and the senate and our media beyond entertainment, and they don't even do that well. Watching Republicans wail about the stimulus plan is laughable after their silent acquiescence over the Wall Street bailout of hundreds of billions. The markets must be saved even though the homeowners and workers can be sacrificed. Things couldn't have been too bad, actually, if some of those firms receiving bailout money decided to pay it back right away when they learned that salaries were to be capped by congress at $500,000. The Democrats, for their part, seem almost as if they can't think of anything to do but print more money and give it away to different interests, along with more bankers.
Oh sure, none of this is our fault. America is not to blame. There are just some bad actors in high profile positions. Really? Our sports heroes are gone, exposed as liars and cheaters. The people we trust with our money turn out to be thieves of a magnitude not known to history. Our president lies us into war, ruins damned near every institution of our government with political folly, and then retires safe from the law in the western sun. You can't even ask the question "What the hell's wrong with us?" because the answer requires decades of explanation. An increasing number of Americans wonder if our country will even survive and a scary proportion of those have asked the troubling follow up question as to whether we deserve to survive and have entered our final decline.
I don't know anything except for the fact that I hate the Yankees.
* * *
James Moore, The End Time Chronicles
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."
- John Updike
Rich people are stupid. Or maybe they're smart. Who the hell knows? Watching A-Rod grimace through his interview with Peter Gammons on ESPN, it was hard not to think about Bernie Madoff and what his answers might be to reasonable inquiries. Rodriquez and Madoff both seem to have responded to the uniquely American notion that everything goes forever upwards; profits are endless and records will all be broken. That's nonsense, of course; the 100 meters will always require a certain amount of time to be traversed and the record will eventually reach human capacity. And markets, as every economist will concede, are not endlessly upward bound. Capitalism is imperfect.
Rodriquez seems to be implying that it's our fault he cheated. He said the reason he took steroids was because he had "the weight of the world" on his shoulders and there were "great expectations because I had just signed this enormous contract." What crap. How did Gammons not laugh at this guy? This is the moral equivalent of your sixth grader getting caught looking at his desk mate's test paper during an exam. "Gee, dad, I knew you really wanted me to do well and had great expectations that I would get an A but I hadn't studied and I didn't want to let you down." "Thanks, son. I'm proud you did what was necessary to succeed."
His other excuse was, "It was just the culture of that time." Ah good one, Alex. Not enough character to know the difference between right and wrong, eh? That's kind of the Nazi war criminal defense. "I didn't really feel like killing those people but it was our culture at that time." Like the old Texas Ranger said, "Right is still right even if nobody's doing it and wrong is still wrong even if everybody's doing it." The distinctions aren't subtle, A-Roid. They are pretty stark and obvious.
A Rod, of course, is easy to hate. He's right out there in front of us being a Yankee and hitting the baseball. When I was a kid and hating the Yankees on the radio as Mantle and Maris decimated the Tigers and broke my Motown heart, I gave them their grudging respect. Maris' forearms didn't look much bigger than my own bird-like appendages and made me think anything was possible and I still may yet make it to the big leagues. Even the uninitiated knew The Mick was a bit of freak but Maris' performance confirmed that mechanics and hard work created possibilities for lesser creatures. A-Rod, Clemens, and McGuire did too; they simply added controlled substances to the equation. Who wants to let down America?
Bernie Madoff has no playing field but he saw a sucker in our culture's obsession with risk-free and assured profit and the need to win. Maybe he thought anyone stupid enough to believe in that deserved to lose their money so he drew silly graphs with endlessly ascending red lines and reassured the doubtful. Wall Street didn't do anything much different than Madoff by bundling up nonsensical dreams and then spinning them out to buyer after buyer on a credit swap swirl. Are we this stupid and greedy? Do we deserve our present economic peril or are some of us victims?
Too much of our population has now grown cynical from the lies and cheating and stealing that they do not expect any change. We no longer anticipate much from congress and the senate and our media beyond entertainment, and they don't even do that well. Watching Republicans wail about the stimulus plan is laughable after their silent acquiescence over the Wall Street bailout of hundreds of billions. The markets must be saved even though the homeowners and workers can be sacrificed. Things couldn't have been too bad, actually, if some of those firms receiving bailout money decided to pay it back right away when they learned that salaries were to be capped by congress at $500,000. The Democrats, for their part, seem almost as if they can't think of anything to do but print more money and give it away to different interests, along with more bankers.
Oh sure, none of this is our fault. America is not to blame. There are just some bad actors in high profile positions. Really? Our sports heroes are gone, exposed as liars and cheaters. The people we trust with our money turn out to be thieves of a magnitude not known to history. Our president lies us into war, ruins damned near every institution of our government with political folly, and then retires safe from the law in the western sun. You can't even ask the question "What the hell's wrong with us?" because the answer requires decades of explanation. An increasing number of Americans wonder if our country will even survive and a scary proportion of those have asked the troubling follow up question as to whether we deserve to survive and have entered our final decline.
I don't know anything except for the fact that I hate the Yankees.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
'The Reader' is a great film
I just read a blurb on Slate.com calling 'The Reader' "The Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made". I really really disagree. I don't think it's the best, and I haven't seen enough to judge. But I have seen this movie, and it was great. Fantastic. So fantastic, I just have to take a moment to give one of my rare actual bloggings instead of just copying a news story.
The author of the slate article bitched about how the film wants us to empathize with Winslet's character. I disagree. The film isn't about saying the Nazi's did what they had to do. It's about us, the viewers, needing to struggle with the fact that the Nazi's were human beings. And, as I'm fond of reminding people, human beings are capable of terrible things. Not because we're bad, because we are human.
That, to me, is what makes it so great. We watch Winslet (who better damn well get the Oscar she's been nominated for) through the whole picture--she's shut down, hardened, not quite getting it until the very end of her life that what she did in the past was wrong. And for those who would argue that the Nazi's 'did what they had to' I really must point out that that is the EXACT same argument that people are using these days to justify the Bush administration's use of torture in their so-called War on Terror. Maybe some Nazis did do what they had to do. Maybe they chose to do what they were ordered to do because otherwise they themselves would have been killed, or their families would have been killed.
I know from my psychology studies that humans can and will do terrible things under certain circumstances. The circumstances don't even have to be terrible. A study recently came out that showed--yet again--that people will electroshock a subject for no other reason than because an authority figure has told them to do so. Even when it's obvious that the subject is in horrible pain. Even when the shocker is aware of the fact that the shock they are administering may/will cause death. It is one of the unfortunate truths of being human: we are capable of terrible, horrible things. Every one of us.
The point of The Reader, it seems to me, is to explore this aspect of ourselves. David Kross, who plays the young Michael Berg, is horrified to learn that the woman he had loved so intensely, had had such 'good' emotions for, is capable of something so terrible. This does not change the fact that he loved her. The fact of how Winslet's character exits the movie does not absolve her of her guilt in murdering several hundred Jews. Nor does the restitution she makes make up for the harm she caused.
But it is the look on Ralph Fiennes' face as he tries to explain to the Jewish woman who had been a child survivor of the incident that really gets me. He wants desperately to explain to this hardened woman--a woman who lost her family, her people, that her captors were human beings, and she will not acknowledge it.
It to easy to simply dismiss what the Nazis did as evil. To think that something so horrible could have happened and that it would never happen again is irresponsible denial. What of the current situation (situations??) in Africa? What of the treatment the Palistinians continue to receive at the hands of Israel? And what of our own past? At what point will the citizens of the United States take responsibility for the decimation of the native american population? We pretty much killed them all.
The optimist in me would like to believe that if we could somehow learn that EVERYONE is a human being, these so-called 'evil' crimes would stop taking place. That if blacks can be seen by whites as human beings, if gays could be seen by straights as human beings, that somehow the murder would stop. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't.
But 'The Reader' is a fantastic film for getting down to the nitty-gritty of something so many of us like to fool ourselves into believing--that the Nazis were simply evil and that's the end of the story. It isn't. And to retreat into that perspective is an unfortunate denial. Perhaps even dangerous. Because it leads down the path of thinking, "we're not like that. We're not evil. We could never do anything so horrible." We can. And we have. Whether it is dismissed as early settlers slaying savages for sport (native american genocide), or with the mantra of 'we did what we have to in order to protect ourselves' (torture in the WOT). And in some parts of the world, they are already referring to the US occupation of Iraq as a genocide. Millions upon millions of lives have been destroyed. Does it really matter that they still live? Does that somehow make it less evil?
In a word, no.
The author of the slate article bitched about how the film wants us to empathize with Winslet's character. I disagree. The film isn't about saying the Nazi's did what they had to do. It's about us, the viewers, needing to struggle with the fact that the Nazi's were human beings. And, as I'm fond of reminding people, human beings are capable of terrible things. Not because we're bad, because we are human.
That, to me, is what makes it so great. We watch Winslet (who better damn well get the Oscar she's been nominated for) through the whole picture--she's shut down, hardened, not quite getting it until the very end of her life that what she did in the past was wrong. And for those who would argue that the Nazi's 'did what they had to' I really must point out that that is the EXACT same argument that people are using these days to justify the Bush administration's use of torture in their so-called War on Terror. Maybe some Nazis did do what they had to do. Maybe they chose to do what they were ordered to do because otherwise they themselves would have been killed, or their families would have been killed.
I know from my psychology studies that humans can and will do terrible things under certain circumstances. The circumstances don't even have to be terrible. A study recently came out that showed--yet again--that people will electroshock a subject for no other reason than because an authority figure has told them to do so. Even when it's obvious that the subject is in horrible pain. Even when the shocker is aware of the fact that the shock they are administering may/will cause death. It is one of the unfortunate truths of being human: we are capable of terrible, horrible things. Every one of us.
The point of The Reader, it seems to me, is to explore this aspect of ourselves. David Kross, who plays the young Michael Berg, is horrified to learn that the woman he had loved so intensely, had had such 'good' emotions for, is capable of something so terrible. This does not change the fact that he loved her. The fact of how Winslet's character exits the movie does not absolve her of her guilt in murdering several hundred Jews. Nor does the restitution she makes make up for the harm she caused.
But it is the look on Ralph Fiennes' face as he tries to explain to the Jewish woman who had been a child survivor of the incident that really gets me. He wants desperately to explain to this hardened woman--a woman who lost her family, her people, that her captors were human beings, and she will not acknowledge it.
It to easy to simply dismiss what the Nazis did as evil. To think that something so horrible could have happened and that it would never happen again is irresponsible denial. What of the current situation (situations??) in Africa? What of the treatment the Palistinians continue to receive at the hands of Israel? And what of our own past? At what point will the citizens of the United States take responsibility for the decimation of the native american population? We pretty much killed them all.
The optimist in me would like to believe that if we could somehow learn that EVERYONE is a human being, these so-called 'evil' crimes would stop taking place. That if blacks can be seen by whites as human beings, if gays could be seen by straights as human beings, that somehow the murder would stop. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't.
But 'The Reader' is a fantastic film for getting down to the nitty-gritty of something so many of us like to fool ourselves into believing--that the Nazis were simply evil and that's the end of the story. It isn't. And to retreat into that perspective is an unfortunate denial. Perhaps even dangerous. Because it leads down the path of thinking, "we're not like that. We're not evil. We could never do anything so horrible." We can. And we have. Whether it is dismissed as early settlers slaying savages for sport (native american genocide), or with the mantra of 'we did what we have to in order to protect ourselves' (torture in the WOT). And in some parts of the world, they are already referring to the US occupation of Iraq as a genocide. Millions upon millions of lives have been destroyed. Does it really matter that they still live? Does that somehow make it less evil?
In a word, no.
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