Budrocket Blog

Um...really?

budrocket — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:37:16 EST

Would the Obamaphiles now telling us to "give President Obama a chance" with this decision and/or defending Obama's escalation of the Afghan war - would these same people be saying we should "give President McCain a chance" and/or defending President McCain's escalation if he was the one in office making this decision?

I'm confused: Is this hope or change?

What if Democrats behaved more like Republicans?

budrocket — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:33:34 EDT

http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/08/18/tomo/index.html

Obama AIDS policy reversal

budrocket — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:19:01 EDT

Thursday, July 09, 2009

AIDS activists shut down US Capitol rotunda over Obama reversal on AIDS policy

by John Aravosis (DC) on 7/09/2009 12:35:00 PM

UPDATE: That White House Web site pledge to support repeal of the federal ban on needle exchange? It appears to be gone.

Woah. Joe and I got wind of this last night. (Great picture on the home page of Roll Call.)

A group of 26 AIDS activists chained themselves to each other in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday morning, startling visitors, shutting down the landmark area and prompting their arrest by Capitol Police.

The group, which was protesting President Barack Obama’s failure to get rid of a ban on funding needle exchange programs, arrived at the Rotunda around 10 a.m.

Candidate Obama said he would help overturn the ban on needle exchange. President Obama reversed himself and banned federal funding for needle exchanges in his budget this year.

The quote from Obama's spokesman is priceless:

Obama, during the primary campaign, pledged his support of needle exchange programs to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS. When he took over the White House, the administration website affirmed: "The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users."

Yet Obama's budget includes language that bans spending federal money on needle-exchange programs.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the administration isn't yet ready to lift the ban - but Obama still supports needle exchange.

"We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change," he said.

Let's see...

1. The candidate promised to lift the ban.
2. The White House Web site reaffirmed the president's commitment to lifting the ban.
3. The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.
4. The president now refuses to lift the ban.
5. The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting defending the ban.
6. The spokesman reiterates the president's support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.

Sound familiar?

It's 2:30 a.m. – do you know where your $2 billion is?

budrocket — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:33:44 EDT

Unless we stop it, Congress could vote as soon as TOMORROW to spend more than $2 billion of your money on a fighter jet that even the Pentagon doesn't want. President Obama called for an end to 'weapons as usual' contracting at the Pentagon - including ending production of the F-22 fighter jet. But in a 2:30 a.m. vote, the weapons contractors were able to get enough Republican and Blue-Dog Democrat votes to slip it back in.(1)

Congressman Barney Frank is leading the fight for Obama's Pentagon budget, but the showdown is now and he doesn't have the votes yet. Call your member of Congress right now and tell him or her to cut these wasteful warplanes.

http://www.truemajority.org/callin/index.php?district=VA09&callid=4&email=budrocket1@prodigy.net

You've probably heard about the F-22 before. Designed to fight the next generation of Soviet airplanes in a war that never happened, it has never been flown in combat and has never been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.(2) And at a cost of $351 million per plane we simply can't afford this kind of pork-barrel spending.(3)

We need the money to repair our crumbling schools and put people to work building a green-energy economy. But we can't shift our priorities unless we first stop pouring money into useless weapons projects like the F-22.

We're working with people like Vote Vets, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, and others to cut these needless warplanes.4 These allies give us a chance to win, but they're counting on us to deliver a grassroots call for change that Congress can't ignore. Call right now and tell Congress to get with the program and start investing in True Security for America.

- Darcy
Darcy Scott Martin
TrueMajority / USAction

1 - nytimes.com/2009/06/20/opinion/20sat2.html?_r=1
2 - huffingtonpost.com/jon-soltz/will-congress-put-useless_b_218853.html
3 - armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/022609_fy10_topline_systems_to_watch/
4 - truesecurity.usaction.org/f22letter.pdf

Mission Shrink

budrocket — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:49:07 EDT

Mission Shrink: We've Gone From Saving Wall Street in Order to Save Main Street to Just Saving Wall Street

Arianna Huffington
Posted: June 18, 2009 07:20 PM

Remember how, back when taxpayers were being asked to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street, we were told it was essential to saving Main Street?

Well, in just a few months, we've gone from saving the banks in order to save the economy to just saving the banks. It's the opposite of mission creep.

In announcing his proposed "overhaul of the financial regulatory system," President Obama said, "Financial institutions have an obligation to themselves and to the public to manage risks carefully. And as president, I have a responsibility to ensure that our financial system works for the economy as a whole."

But parsing through his 85-page plan, it's not clear how these reforms will ensure that our financial system works for the economy as a whole.

"The Obama plan," writes Joe Nocera in the New York Times, "is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself." For Obama's plan to have any lasting value, says Nocera, "he is going to have to make some bankers mad."

We are already hearing the usual whining from the financial industry about too much regulation and the dampening of incentives. And we are already seeing a concerted push from the banking lobby to kneecap the newly proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But, all in all, there is little there to make bankers mad.

I don't expect there will be too many on Wall Street unhappy with the massive loophole the new plan leaves by calling for so-called plain vanilla derivatives to be traded on an exchange but allowing customized derivatives -- which were at the heart of the financial meltdown -- to remain largely unregulated. This is very good news for the wheelers and dealers who helped turn Wall Street into a casino.

The larger problem continues to be the administration's habit of conflating the health of the Wall Street economy with the health of the real economy -- when, in fact, the two economies have become decoupled. The Dow may be up 30 percent since March, but the numbers that matter most to everyday Americans continue to tell a very different tale.

Unemployment, the single most important statistic when it comes to taking the temperature of the real economy, is at a 26-year high. Yes, the number of people filing continuing claims last week dropped for the first time since January, but the number of new people seeking unemployment benefits rose -- as did the number of people receiving benefits under the emergency federal program that extended benefits beyond the 26-week program offered by most states. All told, over 9 million people are getting some form of unemployment compensation. And most economists are expecting unemployment to continue to rise, hitting 10 percent -- some even say 11 percent -- by 2010.

Another indication of the troubled state of the real economy is the record high credit card default rates reported in May. The numbers are staggering. Bank of America's default rate hit 12.5 percent -- up from 10.4 percent in April. Citigroup wrote off over 1-out-of-10 of its credit card loans last month. American Express did the same. If the numbers stay around these levels, credit card issuers stand to lose over $70 billion this year. And it's worth noting that a number of the biggest banks are reporting default rates higher than the "worst-case scenario" numbers from the Treasury's recent stress tests. Tim Geithner's team might need to come up with some new terms: "worst-case -- and this time we really mean it -- scenario"; "even worse than worst-case scenario"; "can't imagine a worse case -- and believe us we tried -- scenario".

On the housing front, in May foreclosures dipped 6 percent from April -- but the 321,480 homes lost was still the third-highest total on record. May was the third consecutive month with over 300,000 foreclosed properties -- the first time that's happened since RealtyTrac began tracking foreclosure numbers. Nevada, California, and Florida were the hardest hit states. In Nevada, one out of every 64 homes received a foreclosure filing last month. Nationwide, one out of every 398 homes received a foreclosure note. That's a whole lot of people looking for some place to live.

And lending -- the increase of which was supposedly the primary reason for the bank bailout -- is also down. "If the banks aren't lending money," Jeffrey Rosen, deputy chairman of Lazard told me, "the economy can't get going." But, according to the Treasury's latest report on lending by the top 21 recipients of government money, consumer and commercial lending fell 7 percent in April -- with nearly 75 percent of the banks reporting a decline in loan originations.

Despite this gloomy picture of the real economy, the administration prefers to focus on the rising sense of consumer confidence -- even though this confidence hasn't translated to greater consumer spending.

"Everyone feels mildly better about where the economy is going," is how Joe Biden put it earlier this week. Perhaps the vice president needs to get out more. There are 9 million out-of-work workers, thousands of former credit card holders, and 321,480 newly homeless homeowners (and their families) who might say otherwise.

So the economic bubble continues to be deflated, but the rhetorical bubble is being pumped with plenty of hot air. Maybe we could use one of the many green shoots the administration is marveling at to pop it.

If the Wall Street economy is ever going to be recoupled with the real economy, we'll have to start by recoupling rhetoric with reality.

Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff

The Gay Guide to Obama's Remarks Today

budrocket — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:03:39 EDT

The Gay Guide to Obama's Remarks Today

Lane HudsonBlogger; exposed emails that began 2006 Mark Foley scandal
Posted: June 17, 2009 09:49 AM

Late yesterday, in the White House's daily guidance email to the press corps, one of the items caught people off guard:

In the evening, the President will deliver brief remarks and sign a Presidential Memorandum regarding federal benefits and non-discrimination in the Oval Office. This event is pooled press.
The networks scrambled to make sense of it and the print media posted conflicting reports of what it meant. What's the difference between an Executive Order and a Presidential Memorandum? Will the extension of benefits include health care and retirement? Will the transgender community receive employment protections in the Federal Workforce? Does Obama plan to announce his plan to honor his promises to the LGBT community?

These are all great questions. Some of them have been answered through the night and others will be answered throughout the day. What is certain is that there is a limit to what the President can do with the stroke of his pen.

What is uncertain is the extent of what he can do with the power of his word. What the President says today will be far more consequential than what he does. Last year, candidate Obama issued a strong statement and his words today should be judged against the vision he laid out for the LGBT community. Here are excerpts just as a reminder:

I'm running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all ‐ a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It's wrong to have millions of Americans living as second‐class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.
...

As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat
same‐sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws.

...

I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA). Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and
lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to
repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting
American Families Act so we can afford same‐sex couples the same rights and
obligations as married couples in our immigration system.

...

The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When it
comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science.
While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use
common sense.

...

We also need a president who's willing to confront the stigma ‐ too often
tied to homophobia ‐ that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.

...

I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT
Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need
to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together.

...

Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for
what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality
for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership
that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will
provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all
Americans, gay and straight alike.

So there we have it. In his own words, he reflects not only ending nearly every instance of discrimination in Federal law, but also to be vocal in ending stigmas and stereotypes. He promises to provide the leadership to make this all possible. Thus far, that leadership has been missing. In fact, his Administration has taken backward steps away from fulfilling the vision he laid out.

Today marks the first time he has spoken about the gay community since his election. That's a step forward, but only a very small step in and of itself.

Here are a few things that could make the President's remarks today a home run:

1. Extending the full range of benefits (whatever they may include) to same sex partners of Federal employees in a lasting Executive Order. According to Chuck Todd of NBC News, a Presidential Memorandum will not last past his Presidency.
2. Calling on the Congress to immediately pass legislation that would extend the balance of benefits not able to be extended via Executive Order.
3. Announcing that he will instruct the Department of Justice not to defend section 3 of DOMA, which deals with Federal benefits, that is being challenged in a federal lawsuit by the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) in Massachusetts.
4. Signing an Executive order that bans employment discrimination against transgender persons in the Federal workforce.
5. Announcing a concrete path forward on repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell
6. Calling on Congress to pass the far too long delayed Employment Non-Discrimination Act and Federal Hate Crimes Legislation.
7. Urging Congress to include the Uniting American Families Act in immigration reform legislation to be considered this year.
8. Committing the National Institute of Health to undertake a new effort for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and the Department of Health and Human Services to commit to new efforts on prevention of HIV/AIDS.

It's not asking too much. It's taken this long for the White House to address our community. There is much to be done to end discrimination and this would be a great start. The President could announce everything on this list today. Don't ask, don't get.

Bill Maher Tells Olbermann Why He's Criticizing Obama

budrocket — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:05:17 EDT

Bill Maher Tells Olbermann Why He's Criticizing Obama

Huffington Post
First Posted: 06-15-09 09:15 PM | Updated: 06-16-09 12:17 PM

Bill Maher appeared on "Countdown" on Monday night to discuss his disappointment with President Obama, asserting that if Obama doesn't act boldly on health care reform and other progressive issues, the Democrats could lose the midterm elections in 2010.

He was critical of Obama's speech to the American Medical Association today, since they're a lobbying group that he claims has obstructed previous efforts at health care reform.

"When I heard the president get that round of applause at the AMA today, that's when I knew we were in trouble."

Maher said that his editorial criticizing Obama on "Real Time With Bill Maher" on Friday night was greeted with cheers, which surprised him since his "very liberal Southern California audience" usually boos when he goes after the president.

"They're getting to the point where they're saying 'Yeah, we still like Obama. He's our guy. We're glad he's our president. But where's the beef?" And it's easy to make speeches. What's hard to do is stand up to corporations. Corporations and their incredible strength are what have ruined this country so far. And this president we thought might be the one to stand up to them. I'm losing hope. I still have audacity but my hope is fading."

Maher repeated his concerns that Obama was "caving in to corporations and lobbyists. The track record so far is not good," slamming the president for "not putting it on the line and standing up to the energy companies, the health care industry, the banks."

The lack of initiative could cause political harm, warned Maher. "If he doesn't act boldly, then he's probably going to lose the midterm elections. If he can't shove some progressive legislation down their throats now, I don't know when it's going to happen."

As he did on Friday night, Maher said that Obama could use a little of Bush's decisiveness - without the misguided policies.

"When he wanted to get something done, he got it done... If Bush could go to war in Iraq when nobody was thinking about it, how come this president can't get through something like health care reform in a way that the people really want when people are actually for it."

Watch the video:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/31378220#31378220

Still No End to Bush Policies...

budrocket — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:31:40 EDT

White House Browbeats Dem Freshmen On War Money: "You'll Never Hear From Us Again"

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won't get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday.

"We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen. She wouldn't say who is issuing the threats, and the White House didn't immediately return a call. [UPDATE: White House spokesman Nick Shapiro says Woolsey's charge is not true.]

Woolsey said she herself had not been pressured because the White House and leadership know she's a firm no vote. But she had heard from other members about the White House pressure.

"Nancy's working with it. It's going to be a very close vote," Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Penn.), a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday. "We don't have any Republican leeway, so far we have no Republican going to vote for it."

"We'll pass it, but it'll be a close vote. Every vote will count," Murtha said.

Woolsey and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) are both ardent opponents of the war and no friends of the IMF, which is in line for a $100 billion extension of credit in the same bill. Both pointed out that the Democratic leadership didn't bring the bill up for a vote on Friday, indicating they weren't confident they had the votes.

"It says something that this hasn't been brought up yet," Kucinich said. "I will tell you there's a good number of members holding solid. That's why this thing hasn't passed yet."

Kucinich said he's whipping the 51 Democrats who previously voted against the war funding and also whipping Democrats who have voted against the IMF in the past. He said that tremendous pressure was being exerted on the folks leaning against it.

"This is politics, you know, there's a lot of pressure put on members," he said. "But from what I can see, people are concerned that when they go back home, they're going to have to explain why they voted for the war if their constituency's opposed to it. People who have consistently opposed the war are going to have difficulty explaining why they switched."

"There are a lot of progressives who don't like the IMF," said Woolsey. Kucinich is making the case to colleagues that the IMF loan is merely a backdoor bailout of European banks.

Woolsey, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she held a meeting earlier this week among Democrats opposing the package but is not actively whipping against it.

The GOP is also objecting to the inclusion of IMF money in the war bill. Kucinich recalled that the last time progressive Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat a Democratic agenda item came in 1999, when 26 Democrats sided with Republicans to block President Clinton's continuing bombing of Serbia.

"Republicans had their own agenda," recalled Kucinich.

The White House may be forced to drop the IMF provision and fight for it another day, but it's a top administration priority.

"That may happen," said Kucinich. "But as long as it's in there, it's a force that's moving in the direction of defeat of the bill."

UPDATE: The Netroots are pushing increasingly hard against the war bill and have compiled a whip count.

Jeff Muskus contributed reporting

Ryan Grim is the author of the just-released book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

MORE BROKEN PROMISES

budrocket — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:51:27 EDT

Whither the sacred campaign promise?

David Sirota, Creators Syndicate Inc., Friday, June 5, 2009

Though not (yet) having children of my own, I often consider what my future offspring won't know about and will find humorous. I fantasize that they will have no idea what gasoline-powered cars or private health insurance policies are. But I also worry they will guffaw in disbelief when I tell them politicians once knew that breaking campaign promises without explanation had consequences.

Historically, Americans generally held campaign promises sacred. We understood that republican democracy makes us rely on pledges of future action as the metric for choosing representatives; we knew that politicians reneging on pledges without adequate reason were desecrating that democracy; and we therefore often punished promise breakers accordingly.

I'm not idealizing halcyon days that never were - just ask George H.W. Bush, who lost re-election in 1992 after trampling his "no new taxes" guarantee. Indeed, breaking campaign pledges was one of the surest ways for politicians to hurt themselves - until 2006.

That year's highest-profile campaign was Connecticut's U.S. Senate race between incumbent Joe Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont - a race signaling a tectonic shift.

Lieberman had broken two key promises: He was violating an explicit term-limits pledge, and he vowed to "help end the war in Iraq" while working to continue it. And yet he was re-elected without ever explaining his reversals.

I'd like to think that result was merely a symptom of momentary shell shock. Perhaps an electorate so numbed by Republicans' then-recent attacks on John Kerry's changing positions was temporarily unable to process discussions of "flip-flopping."

But then behavior by President Obama suggests a more systemic assault on the campaign promise is under way.

It started in December, when he was asked why he was making Hillary Rodham Clinton his chief diplomat after criticizing her qualifications and promising Democratic primary voters that his views on international relations were different than hers. He responded by telling the questioner "you're having fun" trying "to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign." The implicit assertion was that anyone expecting him to answer for campaign statements must just be "having fun" - and certainly can't be serious.

A few months later, in reversing a 5-year-old commitment to support ending the Cuban embargo, Obama offered no rationale for the U-turn other than saying he was "running for Senate" at a time that "seems just eons ago" - again, as if everyone should know that previous campaign promises mean nothing.

At least that was a response. After the New York Times recently reported that "the administration has no present plans to reopen negotiations on NAFTA" as "Obama vowed to do during his campaign," there was no explanation offered whatsoever. We were left to recall Obama previously telling Fortune magazine that his NAFTA promises were too "overheated and amplified" to be taken literally.

It's true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity.

We once respected democracy by at least demanding explanations - however weak - for unfulfilled promises. Then we became a country whose scorched-earth campaigns against flip-flopping desensitized us to reversals. Now we don't flinch when our president appears tickled that a few poor souls still expect politicians to fulfill promises and justify broken ones.

The worst part of this devolution is the centrality of Obama, the prophet of "hope" and "change" who once said that "cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom." If that's true, then he has become America's wisest man - the guy who seems to know my kids will laugh when I tell them politicians and voters once believed in democracy and took campaign promises seriously.

David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover" (2006) and "The Uprising" (2008). Find his blog at openleft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle

OBAMA SIDES WITH BUSH AGAINST VALERIE PLAME

budrocket — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:56:30 EDT

Obama: Plame Lawsuit Should Not Be Reconsidered By Supreme Court

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

CREW learned today that the Obama administration is opposing our request that the Supreme Court reconsider the dismissal of the lawsuit, Wilson v. Libby, et al. In that case, the district court had dismissed the claims of Joe and Valerie Wilson against former Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Richard Armitage for their gross violations of the Wilsons' constitutional rights.

Agreeing with the Bush administration, the Obama Justice Department argues the Wilsons have no legitimate grounds to sue. It is surprising that the first time the Obama administration has been required to take a public position on this matter, the administration is so closely aligning itself with the Bush administration's views.

In fact, the Obama administration has gone one step further, suggesting Mr. Wilson failed to provide any evidence that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rove or Mr. Libby harmed him. This is particularly ironic because the government had moved to have the case dismissed before the Wilsons had the opportunity to uncover the details of how Ms. Wilson’s covert identity was revealed.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of CREW and one of the Wilsons’ attorneys, said:

We are deeply disappointed that the Obama administration has failed to recognize the grievous harm top Bush White House officials inflicted on Joe and Valerie Wilson. The government’s position cannot be reconciled with President Obama’s oft-stated commitment to once again make government officials accountable for their actions.

Time to Stand Up as Congress Stands Down with War Funding Bill

budrocket — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:17:46 EDT

Time to Stand Up as Congress Stands Down with War Funding Bill

Tom Andrews, former Member of Congress, Maine

Posted: May 15, 2009 11:49 AM

How is it that, after winning the White House and strong Congressional majorities in 2008, Democrats are still playing defense when it comes to national security? How is it that those same politicians who were handed a mandate for change in November are, just a few months later, losing the fight to close the Guantanamo Bay prison? How is it that someone as widely discredited as Dick Cheney is setting the terms of debate on national security?

For years, Congressional Democrats urged patience from their progressive, anti-war base. Without the White House and strong Congressional majorities, they argued, there was only so much that could realistically be done to change our nation's disastrous course.

So in 2008 progressives once again pulled out every stop to organize and mobilize for the elections. Candidates, starting with President Obama, embraced our vision and our issues-from ending torture and shutting down Guantanamo Bay prison, to ending the scandal that, in America, "health care system" has become an oxymoron, to the demand that Americans return to work rebuilding our economy on a foundation of clean air and energy independence.

But while Democrats won big in November, they are losing in May.

Exhibit A: One of the most discredited and least popular political figures in America, former Vice President Dick Cheney, has Democrats on the defensive about closing the Guantanamo Bay prison and ending a disgrace that has blighted our nation's moral standing in the world. Democrats responded by quietly stripping the supplemental appropriations bill of the funds President Obama needed to close Guantanamo while ordering the administration to come up with a plan for handling the detainees.

Republicans seized their advantage and gleefully pounded away on the floor of the House and their various media perches and echo chambers that Democrats were hell bent on shipping international terrorists from Guantanamo Bay right into American neighborhoods. Why, if Democrats have their way, you might very well look out your window next week and see Abu Zubaydah mowing the lawn next door!

Meanwhile, Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern sought to include in the bill a call for the administration to provide Congress with an exit strategy from what many of us fear could become the next American quagmire -- the war in Afghanistan. That modest proposal never got to see the light of day. Congressman McGovern instead had to introduce it yesterday as a free standing bill with 76 original co-sponsors and will fight to have it included in the 2010 Defense Authorization bill.

House Democrats need to hear from us. If the war spending bill passed yesterday is the best they think they can do with control of the White House and strong majorities in both chambers of Congress, we have a lot of work to do.

And there is no time to lose-Congressional action on the 2010 Defense Authorization bill is only weeks away.

The Defense Authorization bill will start making its way through the House Armed Services Committee soon and will likely be on the floor of the House as early as next month. In addition to providing an opportunity for Congress to endorse Congressman McGovern's Afghanistan exit language, it will also be Congress's first crack at President's plan to cut obsolete weapons systems. But even here, Democrats are on the defensive: Despite proposing cuts in the most obscene examples of Pentagon waste, the 2010 Democratic defense budget is still tens of billions of dollars larger than the largest Defense budget ever proposed by President George W. Bush!

And, even this budget is under fire! The weapons lobby is working overtime to cut deals and keep those dollars flowing. Meanwhile, many of the same Members of Congress - including Democrats -- who will attempt to revive this obscene weapons spending are wringing their hands and telling us that clean air and health care for all Americans is simply beyond what Congress can afford.

Is this the change we can believe in?

The news yesterday wasn't all bad, though. Congressman Sam Farr was able to get language included into the war funding bill that endorses the president's time-line to remove all troops from Iraq and requires the Pentagon to provide ongoing reports to Congress on its progress in implementing that time-line. This was necessary to push back against pressure from some in the military, including the U.S. commanding general in Iraq, Ray Odierno, to slow the pace of a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in light of the recent uptick in violence. The fact is, there will likely be an uptick in violence whenever the U.S. pulls out of Iraq, particularly if the Maliki government continues to refuse compromise with his Sunni rivals. The issue is not whether Iraq will be peaceful and stable. It won't, at least for the foreseeable future. The issue is whether Iraqis will have sovereignty over their own country.

Yet what happened on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday should serve as a wake-up call to all progressives. Democrats in Washington can do much better; it's our job to make sure that they do.

That Didn't Take Long

budrocket — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:56:15 EDT

Insurance Industry Breaks Promise To President Obama

by Jason Rosenbaum

Posted: May 15, 2009 09:57 AM

Just four days after standing next to President Obama and declaring their commitment to control health care costs to the tune of $2 trillion over 10 years, the insurance industry, drug and medical device makers, and hospital groups are backing off their promise:

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies' trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country.
...
Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.
"There's been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members," said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. "I've spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it."

First, these groups are showing their true, dishonest colors. AHIP, the main insurance industry lobby group, sent out this press release from their fake grassroots campaign after the announcement:

By reducing the rate of growth in health care spending by 1.5% each year, the nation can achieve a savings of $2 trillion over the next decade. This effort will have a direct effect on the budgets of individuals and families and will also go a long way in ensuring that every American have access to affordable, high-quality health care. Stay tuned for more information on this important initiative in the weeks and months ahead.

Sounds like they made a commitment, right? Well, that commitment is now pretty soft (emphasis on the softness added):

He and other health care executives said they had agreed to squeeze health spending so the annual rate of growth would eventually be 1.5 percentage points lower.
...
One of the lobbyists, Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, said the savings would "ramp up" gradually as the growth of health spending slowed.
David H. Nexon, senior executive vice president of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a trade group for makers of medical devices, said "there was no specific understanding" of when the lower growth rate would be achieved.
"It's a target over a 10-year period," Mr. Nexon said.

So we've gone from commitments to eventualities, targets, and non-specific understandings.

This just proves what the American people have known all along: You can't trust the insurance industry with health care reform.

Why have these commitments gone soft? It's about profits. Every dollar of health care "waste" in the system, every dollar that goes somewhere other than to your health, that's a dollar more in the pockets of a rich hospital administrator or insurance industry CEO. For health care costs to come down, somebody's profits have to come down as well.

Now, in a good reform plan, every player in the system would be squeezed a little bit to help alleviate the crushing cost on the patient. Doctors, hospitals, and other providers would charge a bit less for care and be paid based on quality, not quantity. Drug and medical device makers would be forced to sell their products at a discount in volume. And the insurance industry would trim overhead and profits to keep costs in line. Then, employers and government would pitch in to cover all individuals. It would be a system of shared responsibility.

Clearly, the insurance industry, hospitals, and drug makers aren't interested in shared responsibility. They don't want to be squeezed a bit. The want to protect their profits so much that they show their two-faced nature: Standing next to the President of the United States, promising responsibility, and then backpeddling as fast as they can four days later.

That's why we need to make them do it. Voluntary agreements are not enough. We need regulation and we need real cost control, and that means a public health insurance option that will force these awful companies to earn their keep through stiff competition, something they've avoided for far too long.

They're liars. They're cheats. They're greedy. They're untrustworthy. They cannot be trusted to come up with a health care reform plan that works for you and me. We must make them do it.

Jason Rosenbaum is an activist living in Washington, DC, and works for Health Care for America Now

Health care's enigma in chief

budrocket — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:20:30 EDT

Health care's enigma in chief

by David Sirota, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Friday, May 15, 2009

The most stunning and least reported news about President Obama's press conference with health industry executives this week wasn't those executives' willingness to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat's eagerness to involve those executives in a discussion about health care reform even as they revealed their previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans.

That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle administration officials called a health care "game changer": In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year from the country's medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, health care companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers, and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry's business is based not on respectable returns but on grotesque profiteering and waste - the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.

Chief among the profiteers at the White House event were insurance companies, which have raised premiums by 119 percent since 1999, and one obvious question is why - why would Obama engage those particular thieves?

It's a difficult query to answer, because Obama is a health care mystery, struggling to muster consistent positions on the issue.

Listening to a 2003 Obama speech, it's hard to believe he has become such an enigma. Back then, he declared himself "a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program" - i.e., one eliminating private insurers and their overhead costs by having government finance health care. Obama's position was as controversial then as today - which is to say, controversial among political elites, but not among the public. ABC's 2003 poll showed almost two-thirds of Americans desiring a single-payer system "run by the government and financed by taxpayers," just as CBS' 2009 poll shows roughly the same percentage today.

In that speech six years ago, Obama said the only reason single-payer proponents should tolerate delay is "because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."

This might explain why when Illinois contemplated a 2004 health care proposal raising insurance lobbyists' "fears that it would result in a single-payer system," those lobbyists "found a sympathetic ear in Obama, who amended (read: gutted) the bill more to their liking," according to the Boston Globe. Maybe Obama didn't think single payer was achievable without a Democratic Washington. And when, in a 2006 interview, he told me he was "not convinced that (single payer) is the best way to achieve universal health care," perhaps he was following the same rationale, considering his insistence that he must "take into account what is possible."

Of course, even as a senator aiming for the "possible" in a Republican Congress, Obama promised to never "shy away from a debate about single payer." And after the 2008 election fulfilled his single-payer precondition of Democratic dominance, it was only logical to expect him to initiate that debate.

That's why the White House's current posture is so puzzling. As the Associated Press reports, Obama aides are trying to squelch any single-payer discussion, deploying their health care point-person, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to announce that "everything is on the table with the single exception of single-payer."

So it's back to why - why Obama's insurance industry-coddling inconsistency? Is it a pol's payback for campaign cash? Is it an overly cautious lawmaker's paralysis? Is it a conciliator's desire to appease powerful interests? Or is it something else?

For a president who spends so much time on camera answering questions, these have become the biggest unanswered questions.

David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Hiring the Foxes to Watch the Henhouse...AGAIN

budrocket — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:02:09 EDT

Neal Wolin, Top Geithner Pick, Joins The March From Wall Street To Treasury

by Arthur Delaney and Ryan Grim | HuffPost Reporting From DC

As Dick Durbin watched his effort to stave off home foreclosures get slaughtered in the Senate by bank lobbyists earlier this month, he concluded that the financial industry "frankly owns the place."

They obtained that ownership partly through tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to members of both parties. But they also buy the staff, a crucial investment when a few words deep in the text of a bill can mean billions to an industry.

Staffers aren't bought outright with manila envelopes filled with cash. Instead, they see for themselves what fruit awaits a staffer loyal to the banking industry. And then they return to lawmaking.

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee takes up the nomination of Neal Wolin to be Timothy Geithner's number two at the Treasury Department. During the Clinton administration, Wolin worked under Larry Summers as the Treasury Department's top lawyer, where he helped write the deregulation bill -- Gramm-Leach-Bliley -- that undid Depression-era reforms and is partly blamed for the financial meltdown.

The Bush years were good to Wolin, who became head of the lobby shop at Hartford Financial Services Group, where, according to the company website, he "oversaw the company's legal, government affairs, [and] corporate relations." Now Geithner wants him back in the administration.

"Neal wasn't on Wall Street. He was in the insurance industry," said Treasury spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter in an e-mail.

He'll join Mark Patterson, Geithner's chief of staff, a former top lobbyist with Goldman Sachs. (Cutter points out that Patterson also worked for former senator Tom Daschle. "He's got an extensive policy career," Cutter writes.)

Goldman Sachs didn't have to look far for a lobbyist to replace Patterson. It tapped Michael Paese, who has been a top lobbyist for the past year for the Wall Street trade group SIFMA -- the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. A Goldman spokesperson confirmed the Paese hiring but declined to comment further.

Before joining the bankers' lobby, Paese wrote laws for Democratic Rep. Barney Frank's House Financial Services Committee. In 2007, he and Rick Delfin, another Democratic committee aide, worked closely with SIFMA to neuter a bill aimed at preventing banks from bundling up and selling fraudulent, subprime loans, according to Business Week (jump to page four) and confirmed by the Huffington Post.

The changes to the bill requested by SIFMA effectively gave banks operating in the "secondary market" a get-out-of-jail-free card for making, bundling and selling bad loans. The bill was watered down and the market for the securitized loans was allowed to continue as it was. The secondary market was almost completely exempted from rules governing liability for bogus loans.

It is the securitization process that prevents homeowners from selling their home for less than is owed on it, forcing them into foreclosure instead. Securitized loans are at the very heart of the financial collapse, as the process allowed banks to shed responsibility for bad loans by bundling them and shipping them off.

After their work on SIFMA's bill, Delfin and Paese went to work for SIFMA. Often in Congress it is the prospect of future riches -- rather than money already delivered -- that can have the most impact. It's a drunken conga line snaking through the party, starting at the staff level, shuffling to K Street and then shaking it over the White House. All a staffer needs to do is get up and dance.

"We are grateful for the opportunity to have provided insight and input throughout the legislative process," Marc Lackritz, SIFMA president and CEO, said before the vote on the bill. Regrettably, he said, he still couldn't support it, because it might cramp the subprime lending market.

"The bill could severely restrict home loans for a segment of consumers striving to reach the American dream of home ownership," he said. "Firms may choose to abandon the market for making loans to individuals with less than perfect credit -- an end result that would restrict credit to the very borrowers this legislation aims to help. It's regrettable that such a well-intentioned bill, if made law, could have the adverse effect of constraining the mortgage credit market, making it harder for families to own their own home."

The bill was a total failure and led to but a handful of mortgage modifications. It did not stop or even slow the subprime lending market, which continued to burn hotly, right up until it scorched the global economy.

After it passed a similar but undeniably tougher mortgage reform bill last week, the House Financial Services Committee patted itself on the back, saying that if "Congress had enacted these long overdue mortgage lending reforms, which Democrats have been advocating since 1999, the subprime lending meltdown could have been avoided altogether."

But the Center for Responsible Lending, in an otherwise laudatory press release, pooh-poohed the bill for coming up short on securitization.

The bill "does not sufficiently fix the misalignment of incentives throughout the mortgage market that led to the current crisis," it said. As they did at the last dance, the industry found a way to carve out generous exemptions for itself. "Moreover, in some very important ways, the bill exempts from its scope those loans that have been bundled into mortgage-backed securities -- the very loans that are proving most problematic as we try to address the foreclosure crisis."

Obama To Fire His First Gay Arabic Linguist

budrocket — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:30:30 EDT

Obama To Fire His First Gay Arabic Linguist

Aaron Belkin

Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Palm Center at UCSB

Posted May 7, 2009 | 04:52 PM (EST)

Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about to fire him. Why? Because he came out of the closet as a gay man on national television.

Some readers might think it unfair to blame Obama. After all, the president inherited the "don't ask, don't tell" law when he took office. As Commander-in-Chief, he has to follow the law. If the law says that the military must fire any service member who acknowledges being gay, that is not Obama's fault.

Or is it?

A new study, about to be published by a group of experts in military law, shows that President Obama does, in fact, have stroke-of-the-pen authority to suspend gay discharges. The "don't ask, don't tell" law requires the military to fire anyone found to be gay or lesbian. But there is nothing requiring the military to make such a finding. The president can simply order the military to stop investigating service members' sexuality.

An executive order would not get rid of the "don't ask, don't tell" law, but would take the critical step of suspending its implementation, hence rendering it effectively dead. Once people see gays and lesbians serving openly, legally and without problems, it will be much easier to get rid of the law at a later time.

I spent a day with Dan Choi last month, and he is not someone we want to fire from the military. He loves the armed forces. He served bravely under tough combat conditions in Iraq. His Arabic is excellent, and he used his language skills to diffuse many tough situations and to save lives, both Iraqi and American. All of his unit mates know he is gay, and they have been very supportive of him. But he doesn't want to live a lie.

Obama has been praised for delaying efforts to get rid of "don't ask, don't tell," and some major gay rights groups are actively lobbying to delay consideration of the issue. They seem to believe that Obama should focus on other gay-rights issues first, and that he shouldn't spend his precious political capital trying to ram a repeal bill through Congress.

This misses the point. Obama could sign an executive order today. With roughly three-quarters of the public, including a majority of republicans, in favor of open gay service, a meaningful public backlash is unlikely. A slight majority of service members prefer that the policy be left in place, but polls also show that only a tiny minority of them care strongly about the issue, and that the vast majority of service members are comfortable interacting with gays.

Obama may believe he has nothing to lose by waiting. But what about Dan Choi's career? Is this really the right time to fire military officers who are fluent in Arabic?

Major defeat for Bush/Obama position on secrecy

budrocket — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:24:48 EDT

By Glenn Greenwald

Tuesday April 28, 2009 14:52 EDT

The first sign that the Obama DOJ would replicate many of the worst and most radical arguments of the Bush DOJ was in the Jeppesen case, a lawsuit brought by five victims of the CIA's rendition and torture program (including Binyam Mohamed). The Bush administration had argued that the entire "subject matter" raised by the lawsuit (the rendition program) was such a gravely important "state secret" that the court could not consider any lawsuit relating to that issue. That argument was a by-product of one of the Bush DOJ's most controversial actions: its radical expansion of the "state secrets" doctrine. Whereas that privilege was once an evidentiary privilege enabling the Government to declare specific documents too secret to use in litigation, the Bush DOJ converted it into an all-purpose shield allowing them to have entire lawsuits dismissed even wherethe lawsuit alleged that the President's conduct was illegal.

The District Court in Jeppesen had accepted the Bush DOJ's argument and dismissed the lawsuit, and on appeal in February, the Obama DOJ -- to the obvious surprise of the judges and in a reversal of everything Democrats claimed they believed during the Bush presidency -- told the Ninth Circuit panel that they embrace the Bush DOJ "state secrets" position in full (a position they've since repeated in other cases).

Today, in a 26-page ruling (.pdf), the appellate court resoundingly rejected the Bush/Obama position, holding that the "state secrets" privilege -- except in extremely rare circumstances not applicable here -- does not entitle the Government to demand dismissal of an entire lawsuit based on the assertion that the "subject matter" of the lawsuit is a state secret. Instead, the privilege only allows the Government to make specific claims of secrecy with regard to specific documents and other facts -- exactly how the privilege was virtually always used before the Bush and Obama DOJs sought to expand it into a vast weapon of immunity from all lawsuits challenging the legality of any executive branch program relating to national security

In rejecting this radical secrecy theory, the court emphasized how the Bush/Obama doctrine, if accepted, would essentially place the President above and beyond the rule of law:

Read that last sentence -- that, said the court, is the power of lawlessness which the Obama administration was attempting to preserve for itself.

Critically, the court went on to note that the Government's interests in maintaining secrecy "is not the only weighty constitutional values at stake." Quoting the Supreme Court's language in Boumediene -- which in 2008 declared unconstitutional the Military Commission Act's attempt to abolish habeas corpus -- the court today noted that equally imperative for the court is to preserve "freedom's first principles [including] freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers." The court concluded that applying the secrecy privilege on a document-by-document basis, rather than allowing the Government to abuse the privilege to bar citizens from vindicating their legal rights in court, preserves all of those competing interests. In short, presidential assertions of secrecy are neither absolute nor supreme.

Today's decision is a major defeat for the Obama DOJ's efforts to preserve for itself the radically expanded secrecy powers invented by the Bush DOJ to shield itself from all judicial scrutiny. Given how Obama recently emphasized how committed he is to defending government secrecy powers in court, it it highly likely the Obama DOJ will attempt to appeal this ruling further -- to a full 9th Circuit panel and/or to the Supreme Court -- but in the meantime, the case will return to the District Court for a document-by-document assessment of what is and is not truly "secret" (and the court today held that a mere decision by the President to classify certain documents is insufficient; the court is required to exercise independent judgment as to whether secrecy is truly warranted). Finally, these 5 torture victims will have their day in court.

* * * * *

I'll have an interview posted shortly with the ACLU's Ben Wizner, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in this case.

UPDATE: My interview with Wizner about today's ruling -- which is roughly 10 mintues long and which I highly recommend -- can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below. He does a superb job of explaining why this victory is so crucial to anyone concerned with basic civil liberties, accountability and checks on executive power abuses. He also notes -- and I agree entirely -- that the court's decision is a model of clarity and logical reasoning, and really seems to have been designed to convey as clearly as possible, to lawyers and non-lawyers alike, why the secrecy theories defended by the government here are so dangerous and distorted. Reading the court's relatively short decision is also highly recommended.

Go here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/28/secrecy/index.html

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DEFENDS ABILITY TO IMPRISON DETAINEES INDEFINITELY

budrocket — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:08:36 EDT

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DEFENDS ABILITY TO IMPRISON DETAINEES INDEFINITELY:

Early this month, a federal judge ruled that "some prisoners held by the United States military in Afghanistan have a right to challenge their imprisonment," citing the legal right to habeas corpus that the U.S. Supreme Court granted to detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

However, on Friday, the Obama administration said it would appeal the ruling, signaling that it "was not backing down on its efforts to maintain a the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight."

In an editorial slamming the Obama administration's position, the New York Times today wrote, "In the absence of a fair review process that complies with international and military law, there is no reason to feel confident that everyone detained at Bagram deserves to be there."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald remarked on Obama's evolution on the issue, noting that when the Supreme Court granted habeas rights to Guantanamo prisoners last fall, Obama praised the Court's "rejection of the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo." In fact, speaking on the Senate floor in 2006, Obama declared, "But restricting somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe."

'Message Discipline'

budrocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:54:09 EDT

Published on Friday, April 10, 2009 by RebelReports

Rahm Emanuel's Think Tankers Enforce 'Message Discipline' Among 'Liberals'

The White House is ‘helping’ liberal groups to get their political messages in sync with the official line.

by Jeremy Scahill

Over the past several weeks, independent journalists and anti-war activists have tried to shine a spotlight on how groups like the Center for American Progress and MoveOn, which portrayed themselves as anti-war during the Bush-era, are now supporting the escalation and continuation of wars because their guy is now commander-in-chief. CAP has been actively pounding the pavement in support of the escalation in Afghanistan, the rebranding of the Iraq occupation and, more recently, Obama's bloated military budget, which the group said was "on target." MoveOn has been silent on the escalation in Afghanistan and has devoted substantial resources to promoting a federal budget that includes a $21 billion increase in military spending from the Bush-era.

What is clear here is that CAP and MoveOn are now basically psuedo-official PR flaks targeting "liberals" to support the White House agenda. This, though, should not come as a shock to those who have closely monitored these groups. They were the primary force behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), "a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war." Now, according to John Stauber, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the Center for American Progress is now running "Progressive Media which was begun by Tom Matzzie and David Brock in 2008 and now ‘represents a serious ratcheting up of efforts to present a united liberal front in the coming policy wars....' [These groups] are working hard to push Obama's policies, including rationalizlng or defending his escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "sustainable security."

On Wednesday, Ben Smith at Politico reported on the latest development in this White House-coordinated campaign to use these think-tankers to whip up support for its agenda. It is a newly formed coalition, the Common Purpose Project, which blogger Jane Hamsher describes as "one of the many groups Rahm Emanuel has set up to coordinate messaging among liberal interest groups." This one includes the direct participation of White House officials, according to Smith:

The Common Purpose meeting every Tuesday afternoon at the Capitol Hilton brings together the top officials from a range of left-leaning organizations, from labor groups like Change to Win to activists like MoveOn.org, all in support of the White House's agenda. The group has an overlapping membership with a daily 8:45 a.m. call run by the Center for American Progress' and Media Matters' political arms; with the new field-oriented coalition Unity ‘09; and with the groups that allied to back the budget as the Campaign to Rebuild and Renew America Now.
Unlike those other groups, however, the Common Purpose meeting has involved a White House official, communications director Ellen Moran, two sources familiar with the meeting said. It's aimed, said one, at "providing a way for the White House to manage its relationships with some of these independent groups."

Common Purpose was founded by Erik Smith, a former aide to Dick Gephardt. The group's political director is former Obama aide, Miti Sathe. "Common Purpose is formed as a 501(c)(4), which leaves it focused on policy, rather than electoral, work," notes Smith. "Part of the group's role is to enforce a kind of message discipline." He tells the story of how last month "some of the more liberal members of the coalition" were launching a campaign against conservative Democrats under the banner "Dog the Blue Dogs." The White House, Smith alleged, "was in the midst of discussions with members of the congressional Blue Dog caucus, and objected to the slogan, which was promptly changed, and the page describing the drive is gone from CAF [Campaign for America's Future, a participant in the Common Purposes calls]'s website."

Hamsher, who wrote an interesting response to the Politico report with a different spin on the above story, concluded:

There's a big problem right now with the traditional liberal interest groups sitting on the sidelines around major issues because they don't want to buck the White House for fear of getting cut out of the dialogue, or having their funding slashed. Someone picks up a phone, calls a big donor, and the next thing you know...the money is gone. It's already happened. Because that's the way Rahm plays.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Enabler

budrocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:45:33 EDT

Published on Friday, April 10, 2009 by Ted Rall.com

Barack Obama, Torture Enabler

by Ted Rall

America is a nation of laws--laws enforced by Spain.

John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith wrote, authorized and promulgated the Justice Department "torture memos" that the Bush Administration used for legal cover. After World War II, German lawyers for the Ministry of Justice went to prison for similar actions.

We've known about Yoo et al.'s crimes for years. Yet--unlike their victims--they're free as birds, fluttering around, writing op/ed columns...and teaching. At law school!

Obama has failed to match changes of tone with changes in substance on the issue of Bush's war crimes. "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards," he answered when asked whether he would investigate America's worst human rights abuses since World War II. Indeed, there's no evidence that Obama's Justice Department plans to lift a finger to hold Bush or his henchmen accountable.

"They should arrest Obama for trying to impersonate a President," one wag commented on The San Francisco Chronicle's website.

Fortunately for those who care about U.S. law, there are Spanish prosecutors willing to do their job. Baltasar Garzón, the crusading prosecutor who went after General Augusto Pinochet in the '90s, will likely subpoena the Dirty Half Dozen within the next few weeks. "It would have been impossible to structure a legal framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo]" without Gonzales and his pals," argues the criminal complaint filed in Madrid.

When the six miscreants ignore their court dates (as they surely will), Spain will issue international arrest warrants enforceable in the 25 countries that are party to European extradition treaties. All hail King Juan Carlos I!

Which brings us to a leaked report by the Red Cross, famous for its traditional reticence to confront governments. Which means that physicians are enjoined to do no harm. Doctors are prohibited by their ethical code of conduct from attending, much less participating in, torture. (What does this have to do with Bush's lawyers? Hold on. I'm getting there.)

The Red Cross found that CIA doctors, nurses and/or paramedics "monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls," reports The New York Times.

"Even if the medical worker's intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury," the report said, they would have violated medical ethics. But they weren't there to protect anyone but the CIA. They even "condoned and participated in ill treatment....[giving] instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods." Charming.

Since 1945, at least 70 doctors around the world have been prosecuted for participating in torture. But not Bush's CIA torture facilitators. Not by this president. Asked to comment on the Red Cross report, a spokesman for CIA director Leon Panetta replied that Panetta "has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished." (There's the lawyer connection.)

Which is similar to what Obama said about the torturers: "At the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up." Don't you just hate being micromanaged when you're torturing people?

Ah, the great shell game of American justice. You can't prosecute the torturers because their lawyers advised them that torture was OK. You can't prosecute the lawyers because all they did was theorize--they didn't torture anyone. You can't prosecute the president and vice president who ordered the torture because they have "executive privilege" and, anyway, who would put a head of state on trial? What is this, Peru?

What's the flip side of a victimless crime? A perpless crime?

It's a neat circle, or would be if it fit, but drink some coffee and let the caffeine do its thing and it soon becomes apparent that it doesn't come close. The trouble for the Bushies, and now for Obama--they're his torturers now--is that lawyers are bound by a higher code than following orders.

Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Gonzales, Haynes and Feith were asked by the White House to come up with legal cover for what they knew or ought to have known were illegal acts under U.S. law, international law, and treaties including the Geneva Conventions (which were ratified by the U.S. and therefore hold the force of U.S. law). Since they don't deny what they did--indeed, they continue to justify it--their presumed defense if they wound up on trial in Europe would be that they were just following orders.

However, the decision in the 1948 trials of German attorneys immortalized in the fictionalized film "Judgment at Nuremberg" makes clear that a lawyer's duty is to the law--not his government. And not just his own country's law--international law.

The Nuremberg tribunal acknowledged that Nazi Germany was an absolute dictatorship in which everyone answered to Adolf Hitler and could be shot for disobeying. Nevertheless, the court ruled, "there were [German] restrictions for Hitler under international law." Despite his total legal authority within Germany, Hitler "could issue orders [that violated] international law." Obeying a direct order from Hitler, in other words, was illegal if it violated international law. And German lawyers went to prison for doing just that.

The six lawyers about to face charges in Spain didn't have to worry about Nazi firing squads. They were rank opportunists trying to advance their careers in an Administration that viewed laws as quaint, inconvenient obstacles. Here's how not scared they are: Feith recently penned an op/ed in The Wall Street Journal daring--double-daring--Obama's Justice Department to go after him.

"If President Barack Obama and the prosecutors see a crime to be prosecuted, they can act," Feith wrote.

One can only hope. In the meantime, we'll always have Spain.

Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

A Plea To Obama

budrocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:30:38 EDT

Published on Friday, April 10, 2009 by YES! Magazine

A Plea To President Obama: Don't Bankrupt America!

by Sarah van Gelder

President Obama's massive giveaway to Wall Street threatens to bankrupt the federal government and undermine the agenda that got him elected. Here are some first steps needed to change course.

Dear President Obama,

I'm getting a sinking feeling. Watching your appointees' latest bank bailout makes me wonder if all your administration's good work on health care, education, and jobs will be swept away by the extraordinary giveaway of trillions in taxpayer money to a group of powerful Wall Street operatives, who appear willing to bankrupt our country to continue building their wealth and power.

Could this be happening on the watch of someone who, like yourself, came to Washington with the promise of personal integrity and a concern for the common good?

From outside the Beltway it looks pretty clear: Your financial team's identification with Wall Street corporations is compromising their ability to advise you on what can save our country. Please listen to some of today's most astute independent analysts:

Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist:

"Two weeks ago, I posted an article showing how the Geithner-Summers banking plan could potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks. ... In fact, the situation is even potentially more disastrous than we wrote. Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers."

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary:

"So you and I and other taxpayers have kept these hedge-fund honchos flush enough to be able to reap the bonanza that Geithner now wants to bestow on them for cleaning up the mess they and others on Wall Street made -- a bonanza to be financed by you and me and other taxpayers, who are taking on all the risk."

David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy, and board chair of YES! magazine:

"Wall Street will continue to play out its extortion racket so long as the public is willing to put up with the bailout-first, reform-later capitulation of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC. There must be a strong and immediate public demand to restructure first."

William Greider, writer for The Nation, formerly with The Washington Post, and author of some of today's best books on the economy:

"If Wall Street gets its way, the 'reforms' may further consolidate power and ratify a corporate state--a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. The reform ideas announced by Geithner would plant the seeds by creating a 'systemic risk' regulator, presumably the Federal Reserve, to oversee the largest, most politically adept banks and financial firms that qualify as 'too big to fail.' Capitalism, with its inherent tendency toward monopoly, would have the means to monopolize democracy."

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter:

"If we do not immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. ... The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs."

And here's William Black, a regulator who takes bank regulation seriously, in an interview with Bill Moyers:

"We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. ...Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. ... There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks."

It's not too late, Mr. President. We can still keep these corrupt financial institutions from bankrupting America. We need you to stand up to the Wall Street insiders in your own administration who might understand what boosts the profits of banks, but not what helps our economy. Please replace them with independent advisors, who haven't spent their careers working for investment banks, hedge funds, and the Federal Reserve.

We don't need to re-inflate the disastrous bubble casino and we don't need to pump more taxpayer dollars into the too-big-to-fail institutions that have caused this mess. Instead, it's time to take a long, cold look at these banks, which George Soros says are now "basically insolvent."

Nationalize them. Reorganize them. And decentralize them -- make sure none are too big to bring down our economy. And make sure we never again find ourselves in the bizarre circumstance of having the biggest failures -- the ones whose actions threaten to destroy the economy -- calling the shots in Washington. Instead, reorganize these banks so that all of them are linked into the real economies they should be serving, not undermining -- the locally rooted enterprises that provide the sustainable livelihoods we need.

Yes, we can! Mr President. And for the sake of our country, we must.

Sincerely, Sarah van Gelder YES! Magazine

If you share these concerns, please:

Forward this message to the White House and to your lists, and repost.
Get involved in the work of "A New Way Forward," a group organizing protests around the country on April 11.
Explore more ways to rebuild our economy, while making it more sustainable, at YES! Magazine's Path to a New Economy.

Sarah van Gelder is the Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

Obama sides with racist banks

budrocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:08:24 EDT

OBAMA SIDES WITH BANKS ACCUSED OF RACISM:
The administration defends lenders that allegedly bilked minority customers. What gives?

—By Stephanie Mencimer
Tue April 7, 2009 9:30 AM PST

A number of big national banks stand accused of systematically bilking black and Latino borrowers. And the administration of our first black president is siding with the banks.

At the end of April, the Obama administration will go before the US Supreme Court to argue that those banks—including bailout recipients Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase—should be allowed to duck a state investigation into their lending practices. If that sounds like the politics of the past, it is. The Obama administration has opted to maintain the stance of the Bush administration—one opposed by the NAACP and other major civil rights groups. And it won't be some Bush holdover making the arguments in Cuomo v. The Clearing House Association (an industry group whose membership includes the world's largest banks). Instead, the banks will be defended by the office of Obama's new solicitor general, former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan, whom some conservatives have branded a "radical leftist" because of her record opposing military recruitment on college campuses.

The case got its start in 2005, when then-New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer discovered that many banks operating in his state were issuing a disproportionate number of high-interest loans to African Americans and Hispanics. Invoking state anti-discrimination laws, Spitzer wrote to those banks, politely asking for more information about their lending practices. He didn't even issue a subpoena. Rather than respond to the request, the banks sued Spitzer. They argued that they were legally entitled to blow him off because federal banking law preempted the state investigation—that is, only the feds could make such a request, not some lowly state AG.

To make their case, the banks sought help from the Bush administration, through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC is a little-known federal bank regulator that over the past decade has become increasingly active in helping those banks and their subsidiaries squash state efforts to rein in abusive predatory lending practices. The OCC joined the banks in the case as a plaintiff, asserting that a Civil War-era banking law made the OCC the only sheriff in town. When it came to big national banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, only the OCC, it argued, could force the banks to comply with state consumer protection laws like those banning racial discrimination in lending.

With the OCC's backing, the banks prevailed in the trial court and the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. New York's current attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments in late April. Kagan's office will be representing the OCC. The administration's position in Clearing House stands in sharp relief to other parts of the US government, where financial system regulators have recently come out in opposition to shielding banks from state consumer protection laws and enforcement.

In March, on the same day Kagan was confirmed as solicitor general, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair Sheila Bair, a Bush appointee, told the Senate banking committee that "it is time to examine curtailing federal preemption of state consumer protection laws…it has now become clear that abrogating sound state laws, particularly regarding consumer protection, created an opportunity for regulatory arbitrage that frankly resulted in a race-to-the-bottom mentality."

Yet in their briefs in Clearing House, lawyers for the OCC and Obama's solicitor general say that the OCC has used its authority appropriately and has done a terrific job of protecting consumers from abusive bank practices. It's a dubious claim at best. Until 2008, the OCC had never taken a public consumer protection action against a major bank. In fact, the OCC's light touch with national banks prompted many state-chartered banks to switch their charters just so they could evade stricter state regulation.

In an amicus brief in Clearing House, lawyers for consumer advocates cite the example of Capital One, a company whose deceptive and unfair credit card practices were investigated for several years by the West Virginia attorney general. Three years into the investigation, the bank changed its status from a state-charted bank to an OCC-chartered bank. Less than two weeks later, Capital One asked a federal court to halt the attorney general's investigation, arguing that the OCC was now the only entity that could initiate such a probe. The judge who heard the suit recognized that the bank was simply trying to evade the attorney general. Nonetheless, he believed the law required him to stop the state investigation.

Over the years, the OCC has tried to prevent state consumer protection actions against all sorts of shady practices. For instance, the OCC has intervened to prevent states from cracking down on telemarketing fraud and misbehavior by car dealerships, an unlicensed trade school, an air-conditioning company, and a mall that issued gift cards—all because each of these entities had a financing relationship with OCC-chartered banks. The OCC's track record in enforcing anti-discrimination laws like those at the heart of the Clearing House case is equally dismal. In their amicus brief, consumer lawyers note that the OCC has brought only four formal enforcement actions under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act since 1987. And during the Bush administration, it didn't refer a single discriminatory mortgage lending case to the Justice Department. Yet in her brief, Kagan argues that the OCC "vigorously enforces fair lending laws against national banks."

Kagan's brief appears as if it were largely written during the last administration, which it no doubt was. It touts the supposedly great work done by the OCC's Customer Assistance Group, which Kagan and the OCC say has facilitated the recovery of tens of millions of dollars by injured consumers. Back in 2005, I filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the OCC for information about how many people in this group actually investigated and resolved consumer complaints. The answer I eventually got many, many months later? Three, in an agency that fields more than 70,000 complaints a year from bank customers. In years past, the group has recouped less than $8 million annually for consumers—a drop in the bucket compared to the billions banks collect via abusive credit card practices or overdraft fees.

By comparison, the state attorneys general the OCC has tried to neutralize have successfully gone after many lending institutions for sleazy practices and recouped sums that dwarf anything the OCC has recovered. During the past decade, attorneys general in various states banded together and settled cases against Household and Ameriquest Mortgage Company, once some of the nation's biggest subprime lenders. The AGs recouped more than $800 million for consumers, but they were often prevented from bringing similar cases against big banks because of OCC interventions. And in Clearing House, the Obama administration is now defending the OCC's turf-conscious obstructionism.

The administration's brief in Clearing House was due only six days after Kagan was confirmed. Reversing course in a case this far along would have been both legally and administratively problematic for her and the administration. But consumer advocates have seen a few hints between the lines of her brief that the administration intends to change its regulatory policy at the OCC. It is hard to imagine that Obama would really want to usurp the states and remake the OCC as the nation's preeminent financial consumer protection agency. That would make the federal banking regulator ultimately responsible for policing thousands of unscrupulous car dealers, air-conditioning installers, trade schools, or even mall gift-card programs, simply because they had financing relationships with national banks. Not only does the OCC not have the resources to do all that; it has enough on its plate right now just keeping the banks afloat. As Daniel Mosteller, litigation counsel to the Center for Responsible Lending, observes, "Is the OCC really going to start investigating malls?"

The Best Investment Money Can Buy!

budrocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:22:41 EDT

When you're in, you're in

byDavid Sirota

Friday, April 10

Feeling sorry for yourself? Struggling to get by? Wondering how you can get a bailout? Well, stop moping, because it's not too late!

I may not have Suze Orman's verve or Billy Mays' voice. But I've discovered a revolutionary risk-free investment plan straight from those who brought us the economic meltdown. So in this column-fomercial, I won't waste your time with Ginsu knives or cash-for-timeshare schemes — I'm going to help make you rich beyond your wildest dreams!

Look, we've all heard about Wall Street's losses. But you probably didn't hear about Corporate America's newest sure thing: a path to financial freedom far more reliable than any decent-paying job. It's something so old-fashioned that even amateur investors can understand it!

It's called graft — a surefire wealth creator that takes your investments, modifies laws, and delivers returns that the best stock trader could never dream of. This is the ShamWow of strategies, the Flowbee of economics, the Ronco of investing. Just look at the profits it generates!

In the last decade, the financial industry's $5 billion investment in campaign contributions and lobbyists resulted in deregulation, which delivered trillions to executives. And when the bubble burst, there was another boatload of free money! By Bloomberg News' account, $12.8 trillion worth of taxpayer loans, grants and guarantees — all to Wall Street!

But wait ... there's more!

The Associated Press this week reports that "companies that spent hundreds of millions lobbying successfully for a tax break enacted in 2004 got a 22,000-percent return on that investment" — $100 billion in all. That could be you!

Of course, the secret is investing heavily in specific political stocks.

For example, the banking industry recently paid Rahm Emanuel $16 million for about two years of work. That investment was recently paid back when, as President Obama's chief of staff, Emanuel led the January campaign to release another $350 billion in bank bailout funds. Turning a $16 million down payment into a $350 billion payout — that's huge!

Likewise, Goldman Sachs hired former Senate aide Mark Patterson as one of its lobbyists — an investment that proved a huge winner when Patterson became the Treasury Department's chief of staff and the agency subsequently killed proposals to limit executive compensation at bailed-out banks. Cha-ching!

And the hedge fund industry paid economist Larry Summers $5.2 million in 2008 for part-time work — an investment that hit pay dirt when Summers became Obama's top economic aide and the administration resisted tough international hedge fund regulations that some G-20 countries wanted. Show me the money!

That's right, the surest way to make big cash is not to invest in people with proven business experience or in valuable entrepreneurial ventures, but in blue-chip members of Permanent Washington — career politicos and bureaucrats who inevitably get back into positions of power and payback!

Now I know you think that I sound like the guy in the question-mark suit and that my plan seems like a scam. But it's perfectly legal!

So how much would you pay for this kind of opportunity? $100 trillion? $50 trillion? What if I said you could get all this for just a few billion in pocket change? Because that's all it takes to start no-risk investing! It's that easy!

Why let the corporate guys make all the money off government? Why waste time working for companies that make stuff when you can buy the one company that simply prints cash?

Order now and try my product! It's not available in stores, but if you call within the next 15 minutes, we'll throw in free congressional and White House phone directories valued at $49.95! Operators are standing by!

David Sirota is a bestselling and a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

Economists Warn: Geithner Plan A Major Rip-Off

budrocket — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:42:06 EDT

Geithner Bank Plan Faces New Wave Of Criticism

Two weeks after being introduced, Timothy Geithner's bank rescue plan is facing a new round of withering criticism from economists who say the proposal is likely to produce major losses for taxpayers as banks and investors game the system.

In public writings and interviews with the Huffington Post, some of the same figures that issued early warnings about the current financial crisis now say that Geithner's designs for alleviating toxic assets from the nation's banks are inherently flawed. As evidence, they point to the massive amount of federal funding, in the form of FDIC backing, being offered to prospective buyers of toxic assets. It is the "closest thing to risk-free investing -- with leverage! -- around," wrote Andrew Ross-Sorkin of the New York Times.

More specifically, they have highlighted the seeming ease with which a bank could effectively drive up the price on an asset it already owns by creating subsidiary entities to bid on those assets. "The amount of potential rip-off in the Geithner-Summers plan is unconscionably large," said Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs.

These critiques have produced a Washington rarity: the re-sparking of a debate that, in the wake of positive reviews from Wall Street, had largely subsided. Just as Geithner seemed to be finding his political footing, the spotlight has been placed right back on his cornerstone proposal, with critics calling into question both his projections and past testimony on the matter.

Geithner has long insisted that his hybrid plan -- which supplements private investors with large amounts of public funding as a way to create a market for toxic assets -- is the best way to clean the banks at minimal taxpayer risk. Indeed, during a relatively overlooked portion of Capitol Hill testimony on February 10, he insisted that the government would not be guaranteeing any portion of the private investor's purchase:

SENATOR CRAPO: So there will not be any aspect of the federal guarantee of the asset purchase?

GEITHNER: Not as we envision it in this proposal. In fact, part of the virtue of this proposal, again, is to try to bring a structure that allows a market mechanism to help catalyze market solutions to clean up these legacy assets.
CRAPO: .... But would simply the financing that you're talking about -- do you believe that that would have an impact on the purchase price, in terms of the federal government being involved in some way of subsidizing the price?
GEITHNER: Well, I wouldn't think it requires a subsidy. I think you're absolutely right. In a solution where the government is either purchasing or providing insurance or capping losses on a portfolio of assets, then you're acutely vulnerable to the risk that the government is taking risks that it can't understand, cannot manage, may get wrong, may end up providing a level of subsidy to the institution that is not appropriate. We're trying to avoid that risk by using this kind of structure. And, again, by providing financing alongside private capital with private asset managers, we think we're going to -- likely to put ourselves in a better position to avoid that risk, very important to try to avoid that risk.

The testimony largely pacified members of Congress at the time. Senator Crapo's office declined to comment for this story. Looking back now, however, several economists take umbrage with Geithner's remarks, saying it was either too rosy or vague. "At the very least he is engaging in double talk," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "Obviously this proposal limits the downside risk, since the investor can get an upside gain on an amount that is seven times their investment, whereas they can't lose more than their investment on the downside."

To be sure, others note that Geithner was technically correct: there is no 100 percent "guarantee" in his proposal. Investors using mostly federal money to purchase a toxic asset could still lose the money they themselves put in, a Treasury official confirmed. But in conversations with several leading progressive economists, the consensus seems to be that this is a distinction without much difference.

The downside they see in the Geithner plan is the same problem that led to trouble in the housing market: it is a system of far-to-excessive purchasing leverage. Buyers get highly favorable loans to, in essence, bet on the future of a specific asset. This allows the lender to either profit greatly or get stuck on the hook.

Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon, offers the following example:

The buyer of the toxic asset worth $100 today puts up $10 of his own money and borrows $90 to purchase toxic assets. The toxic assets are collateral against the loan... On the day the loan is due, the borrower can (1) pay the loan... or, (2) exercise the put option (default on the loan). The owner of the asset always has, in essence, the option of selling the asset back to the government and walking away. Now suppose, for example, that the price of the asset falls from $100 to $30. The owner can simply give up the asset to the government, and walk away. This is the put option. The government can then sell it, and reduce losses to $60 [the difference between the $90 initially put up for the asset and the $30 sale].

... The buyer gives up the asset of $30 in return for being forgiven the loan of $90. So it's not that any of the initial $10 is protected, it's losses over and above that that are eliminated. It does limit losses. It's just like putting a 10% down payment on a house. If you walk away, you lose the value of the house, but that is less than you'd lose by paying off the loan.

Taking the hypothetical a step further, University of Texas Professor James Galbraith, who raised some of the earliest critiques of Geithner's plan, notes:

The buyer [of a toxic asset] will need to pay the loan back to the government. Now if the asset is worth less than 90 dollars that he was loaned, then he has a choice: he can continue to pay his loan, but he has taken the loss on himself... or he can stop paying a loan, in which case the asset defaults to the government. In that situation, the economical thing to do would be to default... Otherwise he is holding on to an asset worth 30 dollars in cash and still owes 90 dollars.

In short: if the toxic assets prove to be worth less than current face value, the likelihood is high that the government will end up with a bunch of defaulted loans (on top of owning those bad assets).

To be certain, Sheila Blair, chair of the FDIC, has insisted that such a money-wasting scenario won't happen. "We project no losses," she told Ross-Sorkin, saying that assets purchases won't be backed unless they are deemed profitable. "Our accountants have signed off on no net losses." Others, meanwhile, have argued that the prospects for profit are great enough that private investors won't bolt.

"If the fund does well over the next five years - returns profits of 9% per year -private investors get a market rate of return on their very risky equity investment and the equivalent of an "annual management fee" equal to 2% of assets under management," wrote economist Brad DeLong, "If the portfolio does less well - profits of 4% per year - the managers still get a healthy but sub-market return of 10% per year on their equity. And if the portfolio does badly - loses 1% per year - they lose roughly 70% of their investment. Those are attractive odds."

But for many economists, the invitation for risk inherent in Geithner's plan is simply too great. Indeed a second critique being forcefully raised by economists is that the system Treasury is putting in place can easily be gamed.

In his Monday column, Sachs outlined this very prospect: Citibank, theoretically, has a toxic asset on its books with a face value of $1 million but no probability of payout. The bank sets up a Public-Private Investment Fund (PPIF) to bid the full $1 million for that worthless asset. That PPIF borrows $850,000 from the FDIC, gets an additional $75,000 from Treasury, and puts up $75,000 of is own money to make up the bid. In the end, Citi gets a profit of $925,000 (the $1 million it receives of the bid minus the $75k its related entity had to put up).

Such a scenario is indicative of the flaws in the Geithner plan, argued former senior Clinton commerce official Rob Shapiro. There is, in fact, a guarantee.

"The Feds guarantee the 5/6 leverage used to buy the assets," he said, "so if the assets tank and the buyer defaults on the loan (no $ to pay it back, since the assets really were worthless), the feds (taxpayers) make it up to the lender."

Under The Radar...

budrocket — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:11:49 EDT

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION INVOKES 'STATE SECRETS' CLAIM TO DEFEND BUSH'S WIRETAPPING PROGRAM: The Obama administration is "invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration's wiretapping program" against a lawsuit brought by AT&T customers who claim "federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records."

Justice Department lawyers yesterday demanded a dismissal of the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit against former Bush officials, arguing that the information constitutes privileged "state secrets." Moreover, the DOJ claims the Patriot Act bars lawsuits against "illegal government surveillance unless there is 'willful disclosure' of the illegally intercepted communications." The San Francisco Chronicle reports that disclosure of the information sought by the customers "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security," according to Justice Department lawyers.

Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for the customers, said the filing was disappointing, particularly after the Obama presidential campaign's "unceasing criticism of Bush-era secrecy and promise for more transparency."

Worse Than We Thought...

budrocket — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:20:57 EDT

Jeffrey Sachs

Director of the Earth Institute, Economics Professor, Columbia University

Posted April 6, 2009 | 12:38 PM (EST)

The Geithner-Summers Plan is Even Worse Than We Thought

Two weeks ago, I posted an article showing how the Geithner-Summers banking plan could potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks. The same basic arithmetic was later described by Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times (April 1) and by Peyton Young in the Financial Times (April 1). In fact, the situation is even potentially more disastrous than we wrote. Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers.

Here's how. Consider a toxic asset held by Citibank with a face value of $1 million, but with zero probability of any payout and therefore with a zero market value. An outside bidder would not pay anything for such an asset. All of the previous articles consider the case of true outside bidders.

Suppose, however, that Citibank itself sets up a Citibank Public-Private Investment Fund (CPPIF) under the Geithner-Summers plan. The CPPIF will bid the full face value of $1 million for the worthless asset, because it can borrow $850K from the FDIC, and get $75K from the Treasury, to make the purchase! Citibank will only have to put in $75K of the total.

Citibank thereby receives $1 million for the worthless asset, while the CPPIF ends up with an utterly worthless asset against $850K in debt to the FDIC. The CPPIF therefore quietly declares bankruptcy, while Citibank walks away with a cool $1 million. Citibank's net profit on the transaction is $925K (remember that the bank invested $75K in the CPPIF) and the taxpayers lose $925K. Since the total of toxic assets in the banking system exceeds $1 trillion, and perhaps reaches $2-3 trillion, the amount of potential rip-off in the Geithner-Summers plan is unconscionably large.

The earlier criticisms of the Geithner-Summers plan showed that even outside bidders generally have the incentive to bid far too much for the toxic assets, since they too get a free ride from the government loans. But once we acknowledge the insider-bidding route, the potential to game the plan at the cost of the taxpayers becomes extraordinary. And the gaming of the system doesn't have to be as crude as Citibank setting up its own CPPIF. There are lots of ways that it can do this indirectly, for example, buying assets of other banks which in turn buy Citi's assets. Or other stakeholders in Citi, such as groups of bondholders and shareholders, could do the same.

Several news stories suggest some grounding for these fears. Both Business Week and the Financial Times report that the banks themselves might be invited to bid for the toxic assets, which would seem to set up just the scam outline above. What is incredible is that lack of the most minimal transparency so far about the rules, risks, and procedures of this trillion-dollar plan. Also incredible is the apparent lack of any oversight by Congress, reinforcing the sense that the fix is in or that at best we are all sitting ducks.

The sad part of all this is that there are now several much better ideas circulating among experts, but none of these seems to get the time of day from the Treasury. The best ideas are forms of corporate reorganization, in which a bank weighed down with toxic assets is divided into two banks -- a "good bank" and a "bad bank" -- with the bad bank left holding the toxic assets and the long-term debts, while owning the equity of the good bank. If the bad assets pay off better than is now feared, the bondholders get repaid and the current bank shares keep their value. If the bad assets in fact default heavily as is now expected, the bondholders and shareholders lose their investments. The key point of the good bank -- bad bank plans is an orderly process to restore healthy banking functions (in the good bank) while divvying up the losses in a fair way among the banks' existing claimants. The taxpayer is not needed for that, except to cover the insured part of the banks' existing liabilities, specifically the banks' deposits and perhaps other short-term liabilities that are key to financial market liquidity.

Cynics believe that the Geithner-Summers Plan is exactly what it seems: a naked grab of taxpayer money for Wall Street interests. Geithner and Summers argue that it's the least bad approach to a messy situation, in which we need to restore banking functions but don't have any perfect ways to do that. If they are serious about their justification, let them come forward to confront their critics and to explain to the American people why the other proposals are not being pursued.

Let them explain the hidden and not-so-hidden risks to the American taxpayer of the plan that they have put forward. Let them explain why they are so intent on saving the banks' bondholders, even the long-term unsecured creditors who clearly knew they were taking market risks in buying Citibank bonds. Let them work with their critics to fashion a less risky and less costly plan. So far Geithner and Summers tell us that their plan is the only option, but without a word of further explanation as to why.

Is Obama Wrong?

budrocket — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:40:02 EDT

Published on Monday, March 30, 2009 by Salon.com

Is Obama Wrong?

by Joan Walsh

When I left on vacation, the right was calling Barack Obama a socialist. When I got back, the new slur was "fascist." The politically impotent Dick Armey pronounced, "For the first time I have a president that scares me." At least, unlike Rush Limbaugh, Armey didn't sound an alarm about having to "bend over, grab the ankles" for Obama. Thanks, Dick, for keeping your sexual insecurities out of the debate this time and sticking to generic fearmongering. (Still, I'm so damn glad I'm not married to that guy.)

Clearly Republicans are trying a desperate strategy of displacement, to convince the country that Obama, not our devastated economy, is the monster we should fear. But it's not working. While Beltway journalists ponder big, important questions like whether Obama laughs too much during interviews or over-uses his teleprompter, the American people overwhelmingly approve of the job Obama is doing, and even trust him to get the economy back on track.

Meanwhile, Newsweek is headlining its current cover "Obama Is Wrong" -- but this time it uses Paul Krugman, not the normal cast of village idiots, to indict the new Democratic president. What a novel idea. I had to suppress my instinct to defend Obama -- Krugman doesn't think Obama is wrong about everything, folks -- because I think Krugman is alarmingly right on the key issue at hand: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's subsidizing private investors to take can't-lose "risks" and buy up the banks' "legacy assets." (Don't call them toxic!)

Krugman has colorfully labeled the plan "cash for trash," and on Sunday, he went head-to-head (sort of ) with Geithner, appearing after the treasury secretary on ABC's "This Week" and deriding his "plan to rearrange the deck chairs and hope that that keeps us from hitting the iceberg." For his part, Geithner insisted, "To get out of this we need banks to take a chance on businesses, to take risks again," and argued it was better for taxpayers to have private firms bear at least some of the cost of the bank overhaul (as opposed to Krugman's proposal that the government temporarily nationalize troubled banks).

Krugman isn't the only smart person raising these concerns. If Evan Thomas' smug tone in the Newsweek piece turns you off, take the time to read Simon Johnson's terrifying Atlantic piece, "The Quiet Coup," which lays out the foundation of our current mess and then comes to similar conclusions as Krugman about the drastic steps needed to recover: The government must take over unhealthy banks, dramatically restructure them, save the ones that can be saved and later sell them back to private investors. (The piece was apparently written before Geithner's plan was released so it doesn't comment on it directly.)

Coming out of vacation, I'm a little late to Johnson's opus -- Glenn Greenwald wrote about it here -- but I don't think it can get too much attention. Johnson traces the growing political and economic clout of the financial industry in the last 20 years, and how that power, in turn, distorted both politics and the economy. In the '70s and early '80s, Johnson found, "the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits." This decade that percentage soared to 41 percent. Likewise, financial sector salaries used to be roughly comparable to other domestic private industries, but they rocketed to 181 percent of the "average" private-sector salary in 2007.

Meanwhile, as the right and the left debate what, exactly, caused the current mess, Johnson shows that every single possible culprit had one thing in common: It benefited the increasingly powerful financial sector, the monster that ate the American economy:

"Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better-in a "buck stops somewhere else" sort of way-on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for "safety and soundness" were fast asleep at the wheel.
But these various policies-lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership-had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector's profits-such as Brooksley Born's now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998-were ignored or swept aside."

All of that might seem like ancient history -- Obama's moving to clean up the mess, right? Except Johnson, like Krugman, believes that the continued power of the financial oligarchy makes real reform impossible. A former chief economist for the IMF, Johnson sees scary similarities between the behavior of U.S. political and business leaders, and the titans of the corrupt and ultimately bankrupt economies the IMF had to work over during his time there:

"Elite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them....
The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary."

Strangely, or not, on the same morning I read Johnson, a smart reader took the time to send me this 1999 New York Times piece about the way leading Democrats, including Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and Obama economic czar Larry Summers, hailed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that kept banks out of the insurance and broker businesses. It's as tough to read as Simon Johnson's piece, in its way.

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy....''
Administration officials and many Republicans and Democrats said the measure would save consumers billions of dollars and was necessary to keep up with trends in both domestic and international banking. Some institutions, like Citigroup, already have banking, insurance and securities arms but could have been forced to divest their insurance underwriting under existing law. Many foreign banks already enjoy the ability to enter the securities and insurance industries.
''The world changes, and we have to change with it,'' said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who wrote the law that will bear his name. "Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer....''
''If we don't pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the world,'' said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. ''There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.''

Oy. A few Democratic heroes spoke against the bill -- North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan and, not surprisingly, the late Paul Wellstone. ''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' Dorgan said presciently.

The article confirmed a feeling I've had for a while, that the Democrats can't get us out from under this mess until they are forced to reckon with their role in creating it. Every time I see Chuck Schumer on television pretending to be a populist scourge of Wall Street, I remember his role in blocking higher taxes for hedge fund managers and repealing Glass-Steagall. I can't help thinking that Tim Geithner is too close to the industry that took over -- and took down -- the economy to tame it. A large part of the Democrats' resurgence in the last four years, ironically, has been its success raising money from Wall Street, which undermines its populist street cred at a time like this. Fortunately for the party, Republicans are just as compromised, so it's not too late to for Democrats to take leadership in bucking the financial oligarchy and develop real solutions to the financial crisis.

But if you believe Simon Johnson, it may almost be too late. That's what we should be debating, not Obama's teleprompter use, or whether Paul Krugman has it in for the new president. So I'm glad to be back from vacation, really; we have a lot of work to do.

Joan Walsh joined Salon in 1998 to become the first full-time news editor, and succeeded the irreplaceable David Talbot as editor in chief in February 2005.

The Revival Of Reaganism

budrocket — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:46:11 EDT

Obama's Bailout Double Standard And The Revival Of Reaganism

By David Sirota
Campaign for America's Future, 3/30/09

I appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show last night to discuss the seeming double standard between the Obama administration's treatment of car companies and Wall Street firms. You can watch the clip here:There is clearly a double standard at work:

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031431/obamas-bailout-double-standard-and-revival-reaganism

Just a few days ago, Wall Street executives were hosted at the White House for a cheery photo op and reassurance that they will be getting hundreds of billions more in no-strings-attached bailout cash. Then this week, Obama demanded the firing of GM's CEO, and said he may withhold the mere $30 billion or so that the automakers are requesting.

I'm not saying that automakers don't deserve to be pushed around, nor am I saying even that GM's CEO shouldn't have been fired. What I am saying, however, is that there are two different standards at work here.

Why? Shockingly, the Politico quotes "a Democratic official close to the White House" as saying the president has "more confidence in the leadership on the banking side - that there are people in place who understand what went wrong and the steps necessary to deal with this disaster." How anyone could have confidence in banking executives at a time like this is, as I said, shocking. But, then, this is a White House chock full of longtime Wall Street allies - a White House that appointed corporate raider Steve Rattner to head the auto bailout, a White House who the Wall Street Journal today reports is aiming to use the bailout to force autoworkers to accept cuts to their health care benefits.

What's fascinating about all this is the surprising revival of tactics first pioneered by Ronald Reagan.

Last year, you may recall that Obama took some flack for seeming to idealize The Gipper. However you felt about those comments, I think we're seeing that they previewed an effort to emulate Reagan's tactics - in particular, when it comes to bailouts.

Reagan famously backed a massive increase in the defense budget and corporate welfare while pretending to be a budget hawk by bemoaning the supposed wastefulness of programs like welfare - programs whose expenditures were tiny in comparison to those on the Pentagon and corporate welfare.

Likewise, we've seen Obama support giving away hundreds of billions of dollars - no strings attached - to Wall Street banks while simultaneously presenting himself as getting tough on Corporate America with his promise to hold the auto industry accountable for its failures. Of course, the automakers are asking for a tiny fraction of what Wall Street has already gotten.

It's the same paradigm. Hand out huge sums of cash to powerful political constituencies (for Reagan, defense contractors; for Obama, Wall Street), withhold a relatively small amount of cash from disempowered political constituencies (for Reagan, welfare recipients; for Obama, struggling automakers) - then cite the latter action as proof of "toughness," and hope nobody remembers the former largesse.

Again, I'm not saying the auto industry doesn't deserve to be pushed around - but I am saying that in embracing this brazen double standard, the Obama administration (at least when it comes to the issue of bailouts) is resurrecting the fundamentally dishonest tenets of Reaganism, and that's not a good sign.

----------------------------
DAVID SIROTA
Columnist, Creators Syndicate
Author, The Uprising (2008) and Hostile Takeover (2006)
Fellow, Campaign for America's Future
Blog: http://www.openleft.com
Website: http://www.davidsirota.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=601756120
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidsirota

Obama’s Moment is Passing Quickly

budrocket — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:15:24 EDT

Published on Friday, March 20, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Obama’s Moment is Passing Quickly

by Dave Lindorff

The actions of Obama's Chief Financial Adviser Larry Summers and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in permitting the payment of $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives (Summers, according to the Wall Street Journal, actually pressed Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT, to secretly remove a bar to the payment of such bonuses from the bailout bill) and the storm of public outrage that has followed public disclosure of those payments, provides President Obama, whose administration is stumbling badly on many fronts, to turn things around and avoid political disaster.

He should promptly demand Geithner's and Summers' resignations, and should also fire the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy (as 80% owner of AIG, the US has the power to do that anytime). It would also be a good idea at the same time to fire the CEOs of all the leading banks that are at this point surviving on government bailouts.

This would allow Obama to correct the fundamental mistake he made during the transition period following the November election in installing a bunch of Clinton-era economic advisors and Bush holdovers to be his economic team.

The US economy is in disastrous shape, and it is going to take new ideas, and people untarnished by the last 30 years of deregulatory excess and unsavory links to Wall Street, to rescue it. Obama has no shortage of good people to turn to: Nobel economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz and economist James Galbraith all spring immediately to mind as people who could offer new and better approaches to addressing both the immediate crisis and the longer-term challenge of restoring the health of the nation's economy, and of making it work for everyone, instead of just the wealthy few.

Of course, it could be that Obama is really not interested in radically changing the US economy, and its financial system. He has certainly accepted the tarnished coin of the Wall Street establishment during his campaign, and could simply be doing their bidding, but one has to operate on the hope that this is not the case. After all, the Obama campaign also raised an unprecedented amount of cash from ordinary folks, and if money is influence, he owes those little people big time.

In any event, it seems clear that if this president who spoke during his campaign of "hope and change" continues to cater to the bankers and the corporate interests that want to see no major revamping of the economic system and the regulatory apparatus, he is headed for a one-term presidency--and a sad and failed one at that.

The voters who sent Obama to Washington have been willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when he made his almost uniformly lousy cabinet picks. They were willing to grant that he had been handed a disastrous situation by the last administration.

But as each week passes, the disaster becomes less Bush's and Cheney's, and more Obama's.

The same can be said of Obama's other big crisis: the two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, Obama has largely retained and accepted the advice of the same people who helped run these huge policy disasters during the Bush/Cheney years, and is buying the basic assumptions of those two wars. He is most certainly not ending the Iraq conflict, and is now talking about leaving as many as 50,000 US troops in Iraq for years--as many as were in Vietnam in the fall of 1965. He is reportedly talking about doubling the number of troops in Afghanistan to over 60,000, and about expanding the war into Pakistan, and not just the tribal areas, but Baluchistan province, a heavily populated part of that country. This latter decision, which could lead to an explosion in Pakistan, and the collapse of the central government, could lead to an huge demand for more US troops in the area--perhaps hundreds of thousands more--and even to India's entry into the conflict.

This is as outrageous and doomed a strategy as is his economic program of trying to salvage the nation's zombie banks while nickel-and-diming a "stimulus" program for ordinary people.

He should seize the moment, shitcan his corrupt and inept economic team and sack his military advisers, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his Centcom commander David Petraeus, and bring in people who will tell him how to get the US out of both conflicts pronto.

If he fires and replaces his economic and military teams, and announces both a quick end to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the immediate break-up of the country's big failed national banks and financial institutions, he has a chance to become a great president. If he does not, it is as predictable as the rising of the seas that his presidency will be a failure. We are nearing a point where the American public is going to lose patience with the half measures, the continuing pouring of national treasure down the twin sinkholes of the failed financial institutions and the two endless wars in the Middle East, and the tone-deaf behavior of cabinet secretaries and advisors who don't have a clue about how average Americans are living these days.

This is President Obama's moment for action. Firing Geithner and Summers would be a good start.

Americans should make an effort to let President Obama know that they want more than token stimulus programs. (Just consider this: official unemployment is now 8.1 percent, but only 4.5% of American workers are able to collect unemployment benefits, and meanwhile, real unemployment is closer to 18 percent. That's a lot of hurt, and not a lot of help.)

A good idea would be to join a march on the Pentagon set for this Saturday, March 21, (http://natassembly.org/MarchOnPentagon.html) and a two-day program of demonstrations against Wall Street set for April 3 and 4 in New York City (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/).

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Take Action!

budrocket — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:25:22 EST

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020711/stimulus-success

TAKE ACTION: Help Pass the Stimulus Right Now

By David Sirota
Campaign for America's Future, 2/12/09

Let me say up front: I'm not happy that the stimulus bill was made less stimulative by reactionary Republicans and embarrassingly incoherent "centrist" Democrats. I'm also not happy that direct spending on infrastructure/social programs comprises a miniscule 4.6% of all the government funds spent to deal with this economic crisis. However, considering how far progressives have pushed the debate, I'd say the final deal just announced today on the economic stimulus package is a huge victory. Now, we need to push it over the goal line.

Remember, only months ago, the incoming administration and the Congress were talking about passing a stimulus bill at around $350 billion. Remember, too, that Obama started out pushing a stimulus package chock full of odious tax cuts. Now, we've got a bill that's $790 billion (including a sizable downpayment for major progressive priorities) and stripped of the worst tax cuts.

To those who said we should have just shut up and fallen in line from the beginning, and to those who said we should have just quieted down and "trusted" President Obama to "do the right thing," I respectfully counter that you're equation has been proven to be bankrupt by the results that our movement has helped create. Had progressives simply shut up and fallen in line - had we simply succumbed to subservient Dear Leader-ism - this bill clearly would have been far smaller and far worse.

It's not perfect - not by a long shot. And the key term is "downpayment" - we're going to have to keep pushing for the kind of sustained investment in public priorities (infrastructure, education, health care, etc.) as Wall Street tries to crowd out those priorities with demands for more bailouts. But right now, we should be high fiving. Our voices, our work, and our pressure helped create the "Make Him Do It" Dynamic on the stimulus. That is, we helped forced them all - the Congress and the White House - to move forward what (upon expected final passage) looks like a solidly good if unspectacular outcome.

Now, we need one last push for passage. We're hearing that right-wing talk radio and conservative organizations are firing up the Republican base and flooding Capitol Hill with telephone calls demanding lawmakers water down or kill the stimulus. If you have a moment today, call or email your Member of Congress and tell him/her to immediately pass this stimulus. You can find your House member and Senator's contact info at these two links:

http://www.house.gov/house/ MemberWWW_by_State.shtml
http://senate.gov/general/ contact_information/senators_ cfm.cfm

Alternately, you can use this email tool from the Campaign for America's Future:

http://ga3.org/campaign/econ_ recovery_now

Take five minutes today and make your voice heard - it's important.

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Team of Zombies

budrocket — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:45:10 EST

Despite Obama's promises, rival views are scrubbed from White House

by DAVID SIROTA, Creators Syndicate, Friday, February 6, 2009

Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a "team of rivals." America was told that finally, after years of yes-men running the government, we were getting a president who would follow President Abraham Lincoln's lead, fill his administration with varying viewpoints, and glean empirically sound policy from the clash of ideas. Little did we know that "team of rivals" was what George Orwell calls "newspeak": an empty slogan "claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts."

Obama's national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, but also 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. The only "rivalry" is between those who back increasing the already bloated defense budget by an absurd amount and those who aim to boost it by a ludicrous amount.

Of course, that lockstep uniformity pales in comparison to the White House's economic team - a squad of corporate lackeys disguised as public servants.

At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama's National Economic Council. As President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Timothy Geithner (now Obama's Treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama's chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a "cash for trash" scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry's bad loans. It's another ploy "to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms," says economist Dean Baker - and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a "rival" voice inside the White House.

That's not an oversight. From former federal officials like Robert Reich and Brooksley Born, to Nobel prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to business leaders like Leo Hindery Jr., there's no shortage of qualified experts who have challenged market fundamentalism. But they have been barred from an administration focused on ideological purity. In Hindery's case, the blacklisting was explicit. Despite this venture capitalist establishing a well-respected think tank and serving as a top economic adviser to Obama's campaign, Politico.com reports that "Obama's aides appear never to have taken his bid (for an administration post) seriously." Why? Because he "set himself up in opposition" to Wall Street's agenda.

The anecdote highlights how, regardless of election hoopla, Washington is the same one-party town it always has been - controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by Kleptocrats (i.e., thieves). Their ties to money make them the undead zombies in the slash-and-burn horror flick that is American politics: No matter how many times their discredited theologies are stabbed, torched and shot down by verifiable failure, their careers cannot be killed. Somehow, these political immortals are allowed to mindlessly lunge forward, never answering to rivals - even if that rival is the president himself.

Remember, while Obama said he wants to slash "billions of dollars in wasteful spending" at the Pentagon, his national security team is demanding a $40 billion increase in defense spending (evidently, the "ludicrous" faction got its way). Obama also said he wants to crack down on the financial industry, strengthen laws encouraging the government to purchase American goods, and transform trade policy. Yet, his economic team is not just promising to support more bank bailouts, but also to weaken "Buy America" statutes and make sure new legislation "doesn't signal a change in our overall stance on trade," according to the president's spokesman.

Indeed, if an authentic "rivalry" were going to erupt, it would have been between Obama's promises and his team of zombies. Unfortunately, the latter seems to have won before the competition even started.

David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Bipartisanship (is) for Dummies

budrocket — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:37:59 EST

Josh Nelson

Editor, theseminal.com

Posted February 5, 2009 | 08:07 AM (EST)

Bipartisanship (is) for Dummies

You hear a lot of talk these days about the necessity of bipartisanship. But Democrats and Republicans in Congress can't seem to agree on the meaning of the word. For Democrats, it apparently means compromising on everything and watering legislation down until a few Republicans are willing to vote for it. For most Republicans it means finding unity in opposition, threatening to filibuster, constantly contradicting yourself and generally being assholes. For Judd Gregg it means doing a highly partisan back room deal on Monday afternoon and denouncing bipartisanship Tuesday morning.

Paul Krugman is absolutely right:

Obama may be able to get a few Republican Senators to go along with his plan; or he can get a lot of Republican votes by, in effect, becoming a Republican. There is no middle ground.

That isn't the change we were promised.

Stirling Newberry notes:

For all of the pandering, the "moderates on both sides" are now getting ready to gut the budget, and prove that the only thing the[y] believe in is a failed ideology of "supply side economics." Cut taxes, raise defense spending, screw the poor. The budget will magically balance itself.

That isn't the change we were promised.

Markos Moulitsas observes:

During the Bush years, the best interests of our country took a back seat to the GOP's failed ideology. Right now, it looks like the best interests of our country are taking a back seat to the failed ideology of "bipartisanship".

That isn't the change we were promised.

Despite all of this, Democrats and the political press remain enamored with this elusive concept of bipartisanship. Here are some examples from the past few days:

President Obama, on 2.3.09:

With the stakes this high, we cannot afford to get trapped in the same old partisan gridlock.

Harry Reid:

"There are efforts being made at this time on a bipartisan basis to take certain things out of the bill," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., acknowledged. Democrats could also be open to incorporating Republican ideas...

Dick Durbin, on 2.3.09:

Democratic leaders conceded they may soon be obliged to cut billions of dollars from the measure. "It goes without saying if it's going to pass in the Senate, it has to be bipartisan," said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democratic leader.

The fact is, you don't need much in the way of bipartisanship to pass a bill. 60 is 60 no matter how you put it together. Obama's apparent desire to get 80 votes in the Senate was clearly way off base.

I agree with Bowers:

Let's drop futile attempts to appease those who caused our problems in the first place, and stay focused on cleaning up the mess they left.

What is needed now is genuine political courage, not bipartisanship for the sake of political cover. If Republicans in the Senate really want to filibuster this vitally necessary stimulus package: Obama should call them on their bluff. They have made it perfectly clear that they have no intention of voting for anything other than tax cuts, so why involve them in the process?

If we are going to get any of the transformational "change" we were promised throughout the campaign, President Obama is going to have to take the gloves off at some point. With the economy cratering and seemingly getting worse daily, now might be a good time to do so. This idea that we can turn this economy around by caving to the feckless demands of those who screwed it up in the first place is utterly bankrupt.

Finally, after a week of disappointments, President Obama has taken a step in the right direction, at least rhetorically. In an Op-Ed in today's Washington Post, the president writes:

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.
I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We've seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.
Every day, our economy gets sicker -- and the time for a remedy that puts Americans back to work, jump-starts our economy and invests in lasting growth is now.

The true test will come in conference committee next week, where I'm hearing the White House plans to have a disproportionate role in shaping the final version of the recovery package. It is time for President Obama to reject the idea that tax cuts will save the economy in practice, rather than just in theory.

Originally posted at The Seminal.

Forgive & Forget...again??

budrocket — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:16:06 EST

Published on Friday, January 16, 2009 by The New York Times

Forgive and Forget?

by Paul Krugman

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. "I don't believe that anybody is above the law," he responded, but "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

I'm sorry, but if we don't have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years - and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama's remarks to mean that we won't - this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don't face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let's be clear what we're talking about here. It's not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation's security. The fact is that the Bush administration's abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for "right-thinking Americans" - their term, not mine - and there's strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq - an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security - in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let's also not forget that country's failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There's much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years - in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn't we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn't there be some penalty for the Bush administration's politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we're told that we don't have to dwell on past abuses, because we won't repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration's political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won't do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we've already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it's giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off - which isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it's true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we'll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it's probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he's going to swear to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." That's not a conditional oath to be honored only when it's convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that's not a decision he has the right to make.

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal [1], and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics .

Ho-hum...Bailout Bidness As Usual

budrocket — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:02:34 EST

Obama pushing bailout without solid plan in place

Friday, January 16, 2009

The veto is the legislative equivalent of a nuclear warhead - a rarely used instrument of devastating force that singularly vaporizes the votes of 535 elected representatives. So when a president-elect issues a veto threat before being sworn into office, it sets off a particularly big explosion because it is a deliberate agenda-setting edict about priorities for the next four years.

That's why every American who isn't a financial industry executive should be nervous.

After President Bush this week asked Congress to release the bank bailout fund's remaining $350 billion, Obama pledged to veto any bill rejecting the request, meaning he is beginning his presidency not by "turn(ing) the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street," as he once pledged. Instead, he is promising a mushroom cloud unless lawmakers let taxpayer cash continue flowing to the biggest of Big Money interests.

Amid paeans to "new politics," we're watching old-school paybacks from a politician who raised more Wall Street dough than any other - a president-to-be whose inauguration festivities are being underwritten by the very bankers who are benefiting from the bailout largesse. Safely distanced from electoral pressure, Obama has appointed conservative economists to top White House positions; floated a tax cut for banks; and is now trying to preserve corporate welfare that almost exclusively benefits the political donor class.

This isn't much-ballyhooed "change" - it's money politics by a different name. How do we know? Because neither Obama nor anyone else is genuinely trying to justify the bailout on its merits - and understandably so. Even the most basic queries prove such merits don't exist.

Has the bailout increased bank lending, as was its stated objective? "Hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into the marketplace with no demonstrable effects on lending," says a new report by the congressional panel charged with overseeing the money.

Do federal officials have a solid plan to improve the bailout? The report raises alarms about "the shifting explanations of its purposes," noting that the government has "not yet explained its strategy."

Is the cash being spent responsibly? The report says a lack of transparency means the public "still does not know what the banks are doing with taxpayer money."

But the most damning question isn't even being voiced: Is a bank bailout the best way to boost the economy?

Somehow, immediately releasing more bailout funds is being portrayed as a self-evident necessity, even though the New York Times reported this week that "the Treasury says there is no urgent need" for additional money. Somehow, forcing average $40,000-aires to keep giving their tax dollars to Manhattan millionaires is depicted as the only "serious" course of action. Somehow, few ask whether that money could better help the economy by being spent on health care or public infrastructure. Somehow, the burden of proof is on bailout opponents who make these points, not on those who want to cut another blank check.

This bizarre dynamic is anything but the "pragmatism" Obama rhetorically fetishizes - and America's anti-bailout majority knows it.

Sure, Obama might believe he's deft enough to seem courageously populist while using his White House to perpetuate kleptocracy. Perhaps he thinks the gravity of a veto threat will, for a second time, trick the nation into reluctantly accepting theft.

Or maybe before attempting more sleight of hand, Obama should take a moment away from studying Lincoln's speeches and Roosevelt's fireside chats and recall the irrefutable sagacity in one of the most (in)famous Bushisms of all.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee," the outgoing president said early in his first term. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me (twice) - you can't get fooled again."

David Sirota is a syndicated columnist, author and a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future.

BANKRUPTCY REFORM

budrocket — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:18:48 EST

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Pass Bankruptcy Reform NOW

by: David Sirota Mon Jan 12, 2009 at 11:17

Back in December, I published a newspaper column looking at a little-noticed Federal Reserve Bank report showing that the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 is now causing 32,000 foreclosures every quarter. Well, now there's a move afoot on Capitol Hill to amend bankruptcy laws to finally help homeowners and reshape the fundamentally unfair dynamics afflicting the economy - and you can help make this key reform a reality.

Here's the Democratic Dear Colleague letter I just got my hands on that is being circulated in the House:

Dear Chairman Frank, Obey and Spratt:
A record ten percent of all American homeowners with mortgages are either facing foreclosure or otherwise delinquent on their payments. Credit Suisse now estimates that 8.1 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure by the end of 2012. If the recession becomes severe, which seems increasingly possible every day, the number of foreclosures could rise to 10.2 million. Current voluntary efforts to modify delinquent mortgages are simply not working. Earlier this week, the chief regulator of national banks acknowledged that most U.S. mortgages modified in a voluntary effort to keep struggling borrowers in their homes and stem foreclosures fell back into delinquency within six months.
Voluntary mortgage modifications do not work in part because many mortgages have been securitized, which makes reaching an agreement among all those who have an interest in a mortgage extremely difficult. The problem is further compounded by the fact that some investors have sued while others have threatened to sue servicers if they modify these loans.
That is why the January stimulus package must include a provision to allow judicial modification of mortgages on primary residences. Under current bankruptcy law virtually every type of loan can be modified (including loans secured by a car, boat, farm or vacation home), except home mortgages. By correcting this anomaly, Congress will help between one quarter and one third of homeowners facing foreclosure save their homes. In addition, many others will be in a better position to negotiate a consensual agreement with their lenders, knowing that juducial modification is available. And, this measure will not cost American taxpayers a single penny.
Sincerely,

Giving bankruptcy judges the power to modify the terms of home loans would follow in the best tradition of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal - the tradition that "gives a group a market power it did not have before," as John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his theory of the "countervailing power."

OPEN LETTER FROM NADER

budrocket — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:45:47 EST

Published on Friday, January 9, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Open Letter to President-Elect Obama

by Ralph Nader

Dear President-Elect Obama:

You have been receiving a great deal of advice since November 4, 2008 from people and groups who either want you to advance policies not covered in your campaign or who want you to be more specific about initiatives you emphasized.

There are two suggestions which may not be among your store of recommendations that need to be considered before you take office on January 20, 2009.

First, the public would benefit from a concise recounting of the state of the union and where the Bush Administration has left our country. As is your style, you can render such a bright line of serious problems inside and outside the government in a matter-of-fact manner. Otherwise, a blurring of who was responsible for what can taint your presidency.

Second, you need to make a clean break from the Bush regime’s law of rule to our declared commitment to the rule of law as in the firm adherence to constitutional requirements and statutory and treaty compliance. There is a Bush-Cheney stream of criminal and unconstitutional actions which are on auto-pilot day after day. You have pointed out some of these abominations such as a policy and practice of torture and violations of due process and probable cause. The task before you is to break these daily patterns just as soon as you ascend to the Presidency or be held increasingly responsible for them. This can be significantly accomplished by executive orders, agency or departmental directives, whistle-blower protections, enforcement actions and explicit legislative proposals.

With Americans wishing you well in this most portentous of times, the last thing they want to see is you tarnished by the preceding rogue regime and its ruthless monarchical forays. To avoid this contagion of power over law and its contiguous accountabilities at a time when you are striving for a “clean slate” administration, you must be decisive and eschew any excessive harmony ideology which has seemed to be your nature vis-à-vis those who are powerful but are opposed to your views.

One possible impediment to your making a comprehensive clean break for restoring the rule of law is that you have too easy an act to follow. There are a long list of violated civil liberties that need to be restored (the American Civil Liberties Union has compiled a list of immediate actions for you to take), and resolute commitments must be made so that it is clear the United States, for example, will not engage in, or countenance, torture. Only a few restorations, however, would produce a sense of relief and flurry of accolades -- but they are hardly sufficient.

There are also regulations and interpretations of statutes that scholars believe to have been erroneous as a matter of law. As one guide for your new era of overdue regulation or reregulation—given the corporate wrongdoing these days—you may wish to refer to the Center for Progressive Reform’s report By the Stroke of the Pen.

The Bush lawlessness and state terrorism are like a contagious disease. If you do not remove their sprawling incidence, you will become their carrier. This means you must move fast to eject the mantle of war criminality and repeated unconstitutional outrages committed in the name of the American people here and abroad.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader [1] is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions [2].

CONYERS: NO ON GUPTA

budrocket — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:05:22 EST

Sam Stein stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

Conyers: Obama Should Not Nominate Sanjay Gupta

January 8, 2009 12:49 PM

Rep. John Conyers has written a letter to Democratic colleagues urging them to join him in publicly opposing the nomination of Dr. Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General.

Conyers, the veteran Judiciary Committee chairman, writes that Gupta "lacks the requisite experience needed to oversee the federal agency that provides crucial health care assistance," and requests that fellow Democrats join him "in signing a letter to President-Elect Barack Obama that Dr. Sunjay Gupta not be nominated for the post."

Here's the bulk of the Dear Colleague letter:

I join in opposition with respected Noble Peace Prize award wining economist Paul Krugman, who has very serious concerns with having Dr. Gupta be the nation's Surgeon General. [...]
Also, there are highly experienced medical professionals who question whether Dr. Gupta has the necessary experience or even the medical background to be in charge of some 6,000 physicians or more who work in the United States Public Health Service. Gerard M. Farrel, Executive Director of the Commissioned Officers Association, stated in the January 7, 2008 Washington Post that Dr. Gupta will certainly face a "credibility gap" because he never served in the National Health Service Corp, and furthermore, does not have the "experience or qualifications to be the leader of the nation's public health service." Clearly, it is not in the best interests of the nation to have someone like this who lacks the requisite experience needed to oversee the federal agency that provides crucial health care assistance to some of the poorest and most underserved communities in America.

Conyers' letter represents one of the first critical takes on the potential Gupta nomination to come from the Hill. In most quarters, reports about the CNN medical correspondent have been greeted as a smart, if not provocative, pick. Howard Dean, a doctor himself, noted that Gupta's responsibilities would be much the same as those in his current job: explaining medical issues of public concern in a manner that the public could understand.

Outside of government, however, some have begun questioning whether the CNN correspondent has the proper qualifications to be Surgeon General. Krugman, in his post noted that Gupta accused filmmaker Michael Moore of inaccuracies, "when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong." Others have questioned whether he is the right conduit for Obama's health care agenda, and whether or not he has ethical conflicts of interest stemming from the corporate sponsors of his show.

But while Conyers and these individuals have doubts, it's unclear whether the post of Surgeon General will elicit much of a fight, since no Senators (who must confirm the nomination) have spoken critically of Gupta.

The Gupta Problem

budrocket — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:27:58 EST

Jason Linkins jason@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

Sanjay Gupta Problem: Paul Krugman

January 7, 2009 09:55 AM

Lest you think the appointment of dreamboat doctor Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General was going to be all peaches and cream, direct your attention today to the New York Times Paul Krugman, who reminds his readers of the famous beef that Gupta got into with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore over his movie, Sicko:

You don't have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore "fudged his facts", when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he's uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It's sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less "serious" than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it's a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

I did like Moore's film, up to a point -- specifically the point at which I was presented with the thought exercise that I could have good universal health care if I was willing to live like a Cuban, a premise that a) I am not prepared to accept and b) undermined the logical point of highlighting the health management success of places like Canada and England. But I am with Krugman on "getting things wrong in a socially acceptable way." It is, for example, the inane belief of Ruth Marcus that torture is the sort of thing an upright citizen can also get "wrong in a socially acceptable way." This, too, is a premise I am not prepared to accept!

In reviving the Gupta/Moore tiff, Krugman's point might have been better served if he had delved into the facts of the dispute, which was resolved when CNN issued various retractions and Moore called a truce. For the thorough exegesis of the spat, I direct your attention to our own Rachel Sklar, who gave a detailed accounting of the matter back in July of 2007 -- which I assure you, I could not improve upon, beginning with the first line: "Does it compromise my journalistic objectivity to say that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a dick?"

Via John Aravosis at AmericaBlog, the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR2U_SAWHdQ&eurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/07/sanjay-gupta-problem-paul_n_155888.html&feature=player_embedded

ACTIVISTS PLAN TO BACK PROGRESSIVES

budrocket — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:50:47 EST

Ryan Grim ryan@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

Dem Activists Plan 'PCCC' To Back Progressives

January 7, 2009 10:05 AM

On Tuesday, Tom Perriello was sworn in as a freshman member of Congress. Sam Bennett was not.

The divergent courses these two progressive candidates took were not driven by the political winds. Perriello won in a deeply conservative rural Virginia district controlled by a veteran Republican and was considered by insiders to have almost no chance of victory. Bennett, meanwhile, lost in an Allentown, Pennsylvania district that has gone for Barack Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore over the past three cycles.

"Sam was bold and progressive, but her campaign went through four campaign managers, which is a disaster," says Adam Green, formerly MoveOn.org's Director of Strategic Campaigns. Further south, Perriello acted early to put together a staff that had a grasp of the connection between technology and grassroots campaigning.

A group of progressive operatives from MoveOn and labor circles have teamed with a prominent Internet pioneer to try to give the Sam Bennetts of the world the final push they need -- and send even more Perriellos to Congress. The organization will be the first of its kind exclusively to focus on electing progressive Democrats in congressional elections.

It won't focus its energy on unseating conservative Democrats, but Green, a cofounder, didn't rule out the possibility. Instead, it will prioritize competitive open-seat primaries and help general election candidates like Bennett and Perriello run effective campaigns.

The group's first forays are likely to be in the Illinois district vacated by Rahm Emanuel, who left to become Obama's chief of staff. Green says the group is in talks with a progressive labor lawyer, Tom Geoghegan, in that district. Another potential target: the California district emptied by Hilda Solis, who's been tapped to be labor secretary.

"Our belief is there are many more Tom Perriellos out there who are on the cusp of winning," says Green. "There's a pattern of progressive candidates who are written off in the beginning and who come inches away from victory, but lose due to inefficient campaigns."

The organization will be dedicated to finding progressive candidates who might have an outside shot at winning and "take them under our wing," in Green's words. The group's name -- the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, or the P-triple-C -- is a reference to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which financially backs Democratic candidates it thinks have a shot to win but does not prioritize progressive Democrats over conservative Democrats. The DCCC has had a patchy relationship with the liberal blogosphere, which charges it with relying too heavily on old-school expensive Democratic consultants and not being willing to take chances on progressive candidates.

"You cannot expect any progressive candidate to quote-on-quote do it all," says Bennett, making the case for why the PCCC is needed. "My main challenge was on campaign management." The first of Bennett's four campaign managers was a consultant who worked from Washington and represented other candidates -- a common but less than ideal situation. With her time spent doing media, mailings, filling out 35 different questionnaires, fundraising and seeking endorsements, she didn't have the time to find the right kind of staff or craft the broad strategy of the campaign.

The PCCC aims to be something of a guiding resource for first-time candidates like Bennett. By helping candidates find good campaign staff and make more effective use of the Internet, the group thinks candidates could save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees. Whereas consultants might charge thousands to record and pump out robo-calls, for instance, the PCCC could show a candidate how to do it in-house, online, for a fraction of the cost. "Anybody who pays ten thousand dollars to a consultant for a YouTube video doesn't know what they're doing," said Green.

Aaron Swartz is another cofounder and the co-inventor of RSS, which has changed the way people consume information online. Swartz co-founded Reddit, a popular Web 2.0 site depends on user interaction. Staff from Perriello's campaign, as well as that of Washington's Darcy Burner, are also involved. Stephanie Taylor ran Perriello's get out the vote campaign and is a former online strategist for the Service Employee's International Union, AFL-CIO, Democratic National Committee and MoveOn. Mudcat Arnold was Burner's field director and Michael Snook was data and finance director for Perriello.

The group expects to raise and spend around $650,000 this year and more in the next. It has already gotten MoveOn backing and is meeting soon with SEIU and AFL-CIO representatives. The goal is to raise money from outside sources rather than to charge candidates, though some type of fee may be involved.

The PCCC does not plan to be a left-wing Club for Growth, which backs its candidates with large independent expenditures. PCCC won't rule out such campaigns, but Green said that it wouldn't be the bulk of his group's effort. Instead, the PCCC will play a more hands-on role with candidates.

Perriello, who managed to win a recount by just a handful of votes, said a group like PCCC could have helped him avoid some of the blunders a political novice makes early on. Going from the nonprofit sector to politics, he said, is a daunting move. "I made some mistakes and paid some money [to consultants] and had to fire some people," he said. "You think to yourself, the conventional wisdom must dominate for a reason. This is a world the pros must know."

BURRIS "GOOD GUY"?

budrocket — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:58:56 EST

John R. Bohrer Posted January 5, 2009 | 08:21 PM (EST)

Enough About 'Roland Burris, Good Guy'

Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Roland Burris are meeting in Washington on Wednesday to discuss ending the distraction that is Rod Blagojevich's attempt to make an appointment, and Lynn Sweet has "a well-informed hunch that if Burris wants to [be accepted by the Senate], he needs to say he won't run for the seat in 2010."

For his part, Reid would not rule out that Burris might be seated after Wednesday's meeting. He even stood up for the man's character on Meet the Press. "I think everyone that I've talked to said that Burris is a good guy," he said.

Really? How has Roland Burris' actions in the last two weeks not proven how flexible his integrity is?

Sure, he may not have done anything illegal, but the guy is absolutely complicit in a crooked man's scheme to cling to power and embarrass President-elect Obama at the expense of attention toward the real problems facing this country. He's even stooped to having his spokesperson smear Reid as a racist for talking up Tammy Duckworth and Lisa Madigan in his conversation with Blagojevich.

Meanwhile, Reid says, "I don't know a thing wrong with Mr. Burris."

Come on.

Frankly, it doesn't matter how clean his record was when he was in office a decade ago or if he didn't pay a cent for his appointment: Roland Burris is a willing pawn in a very corrupt game. He's already made a bad deal for the people of Illinois, lending Blagojevich his credibility for a chance to be a United States Senator. How can Majority Leader Reid think he wouldn't lie to get his way?

Burris has previously been unwilling to cede his chance at a full term, saying he'll be a strong contender since, "I'm the incumbent." He will probably be singing a different tune on Wednesday if that's what he thinks Reid and Durbin want to hear. They simply cannot trust him and any agreement that fails to keep Burris out of the Senate is as morally bankrupt as the man who sent him there.

John R. Bohrer is currently writing a book about the young aides to Senator Robert Kennedy. Write to Jack at jrb.blog at gmail.com.

PANETTA TO HEAD CIA?

budrocket — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:54:02 EST

Leon Panetta: Obama's CIA Director, Reports Say

The Huffington Post | January 5, 2009 02:47 PM

News networks are reporting that Leon Panetta, former congressman and White House chief of staff, will be President-elect Barack Obama's CIA director.

The New York Times adds some background:

Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been buffeted since the Sept. 11 attacks by leadership changes and morale problems.

...
Given his background, Mr. Panetta is a somewhat unusual choice to lead the C.I.A., an agency that has been unwelcoming to previous directors perceived as outsiders, such as Stansfield M. Turner and John M. Deutch. But his selection points up the difficulty Mr. Obama had in finding a C.I.A. director with no connection to controversial counterterrorism programs of the Bush era.

On his managerial experience, ABC News' Jake Tapper writes:

Panetta, who served in Congress from 1977 until 1993, is regarded as a good manager. Author of the Hunger Prevention Act of 1988 and the Fair Employment Practices Resolution which extended civil rights protections to employees of the House of Representatives, Panetta chaired the House Committee on the Budget from 1989 until 1993.

Panetta criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign last winter in a New York Observer interview, saying they had underestimated Obama.

Panetta spoke out against distortion of intelligence and use of torture in an editorial on "fear tactics" last March.

Fear exacts a terrible toll on our democracy. Five years ago, America went to war in Iraq over the false fear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Even though we now know that there were intelligence officials who questioned the assertion, few leaders were willing to challenge this argument for war because they knew it might undermine public support for the president's decision to invade Iraq.
More recently, President Bush vetoed a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the same rules on torture as contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual.

A biography of Panetta can be found on his own website.

Krugman: Obama's Massive Tax Cuts "Bad News"

budrocket — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:45:49 EST

Krugman: Obama Relying Too Much On Tax Cuts?

The Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner | January 5, 2009 09:35 AM

In a blog post, economist Paul Krugman worries that President-elect Barack Obama is relying too much on tax cuts in his stimulus plan in an effort to appease Republicans.

[T]here's a reasonable economic case for including a significant amount of tax cuts in the package, mainly in year one.
But the numbers being reported -- 40 percent of the whole, two-year plan -- sound high. And all the news reports say that the high tax-cut share is intended to assuage Republicans; what this presumably means is that this was the message the off-the-record Obamanauts were told to convey.
And that's bad news.

Politico reported Sunday night that 40 percent of the plan's cost will come from tax breaks.

"Obama strategists say he wants to get 80 or more votes in the 100-member Senate, and the emphasis on tax cuts is a way to defuse conservative criticism and enlist Republican support," Mike Allen relays.

The Wall Street Journal adds:

The Obama tax-cut proposals, if enacted, could pack more punch in two years than either of President George W. Bush's tax cuts did in their first two years. Mr. Bush's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut of 2001, considered the largest in history, contained $174 billion of cuts during its first two full years, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. The second-largest tax cut -- the 10-year, $350 billion package engineered by Mr. Bush in 2003 -- contained $231 billion in 2004 and 2005.
The largest piece of tax relief in the new plan would involve cuts for people who pay income taxes or who claim the earned-income credit, a refund designed to lessen the impact of payroll taxes on low- and moderate-income workers. This component would serve as a down payment on the "Making Work Pay" proposal Mr. Obama outlined during his election campaign, giving a credit of $500 per individual or $1,000 per family.

Obama is expected to detail his economic vision in a meeting Monday with congressional leaders. While the president-elect was hoping to have a stimulus package on his desk by January 20, but now leaders on the Hill are saying it will take until at least mid-February. Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs calls a bill by inauguration "very, very unlikely."

Obama met with Speaker Nancy Pelosi Monday to work on his economic plan.

"The reason we are here today is because the people's business cannot wait," Obama said. "The speaker and her staff have been extraordinarily helpful in working with our team so we can shape an economic recovery plan and start putting people back to work."

RICHARDSON'S LIES

budrocket — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:33:23 EST

Geoffrey Dunn

Award-winning journalist, filmmaker and historian

Posted January 4, 2009 | 09:05 PM (EST)

Richardson's Lies Have Finally Caught Up to Him

Bill Richardson and Barack Obama have always seemed a bit like an odd couple.

When the New Mexico governor stabbed his former patrons Bill and Hillary Clinton in their backs last March by endorsing Obama over Hillary, everyone knew that Richardson was simply making a calculated political wager by throwing his support Obama's way. After serving in the 1990s as both Bill Clinton's Ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of Energy, Richardson desperately wanted to be back in the big show.

For his act of betrayal, the "Ragin' Cajun" James Carville dubbed him "Judas Iscariot." Carville has never backed down from the charge.

Today, Richardson's penchant for lying and unsavory associations has finally caught up to him. His withdrawal as Obama's nominee to serve as Commerce Secretary because of an ongoing grand jury investigation into whether he traded New Mexico government contracts for campaign contributions should come as no surprise. Richardson has always been only a step or two ahead of trouble. And there are reports coming out that he wasn't entirely candid with Obama's transition team about the nature of the investigation.

Richardson made national headlines a few years ago when he claimed he had been drafted during his youth by baseball's Kansas City Athletics. He knew better, and Richardson--a mediocre small-college pitcher--finally had to admit he concocted the story. The lie had nothing to do with politics, but it shed a great deal of light on his character.

A more troubling tale took place on the campaign trail last year when Richardson embellished a story about a young American soldier from New Mexico, Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin, who had been killed in Iraq. During his campaign, Richardson often claimed that he had an emotional conversation with Austin's mother, saying she thanked him for the federal death benefits she had received and even showed him the government check.

Only one problem. Mrs. Austin said she never had the conversation with Richardson. It was yet another of his self-serving embellishments.

Richardson has also been caught fudging facts about illegal immigration. He lied about opposing Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository. He's been caught distorting facts about health insurance. Moreover, as Secretary of Energy, he was chastised by members of both parties for the role he played in falsely charging Wen Ho Lee in the nuclear espionage scandal at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Chinese American activists in California had previously organized against his nomination.

Richardson also played a central role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, during which time he offered Lewinsky a job at the U.N. in order to get her out of the White House. Evidence suggests that he knew far more about her relationship with Clinton than he let on at the time.

Just this past year, Mother Jones reported on Richardson's unsavory ties to big oil and his peripheral participation in the Peregrine Systems scandal, in which the San Diego company, on whose outside board Richardson served (his wife was also the sister in-law of Pergegrine's CEO), was "engaged in various acts of financial impropriety, including masking the severity of Peregrine's losses with phony accounting."

And he also worked as a lobbyist for Henry Kissinger's DC-based lobbying firm, Kissinger McLarty Associates.

Back in New Mexico, Richardson maintained a close relationship with well-known painter R.C. Gorman, who was suspected of being a pedophile for more than 40 years. An FBI report released after Gorman's death indicated that the agency had uncovered "credible evidence that Gorman participated in child sexual abuse," though the only provable cases had occurred many years prior to the five-year statute of limitations. Richardson, who was aware of the charges, used Gorman's art work "Mystic Mesa" as recently 2002 in his campaign poster. Richardson's own "inappropriate" behavior around women also dogged him on the campaign trail.

In his current imbroglio, Richardson, who says he did nothing "improper," is being investigated in a pay-to-play scheme involving a Beverly Hills firm, CDR Financial Products Inc., which won two consulting contracts in 2004 worth about $1.4 million to advise New Mexico on a large bond issue.

CDR Financial Products has been investigated twice in recent years by federal agents regarding irregularities in the municipal bonds marketing industry--in which government officials have supposedly received under-the-table payments from companies selling municipal bonds.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Geoffrey Dunn is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and historian. Raised in a working-class, Italian-American fishing colony in Santa Cruz, California, Dunn was a Rhodes Scholar nominee and the recipient of a John L. Senior Fellowship at Cornell University’s Graduate School of Government. He also played semi-pro baseball and boxed as a welterweight in college.

SAY IT AIN'T SO

budrocket — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:43:23 EST

Lee Camp Posted December 29, 2008 | 07:00 PM (EST)

Obama Going Easy on Bush? Say It Ain't So

Bill Clinton lies about having an affair. Result: he's brought to trial and nearly kicked out of office.
Richard Nixon conspires to cover up a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters. Result: he's forced to resign just before he would have been booted from the presidency.
George W. Bush invades a sovereign country while lying to the American people and the United Nations. He breaks the Geneva Conventions, illegally wiretaps American citizens, and commits treason by allowing or encouraging the outing of a CIA agent (among other extra curricular activities). Result: nothing more than shitty approval ratings.

However, if Bush had invaded a female (with her consent) instead of a country, he would've at least lost his job. Right, Gov. Spitzer? If Bush had stolen a $1 candy bar from a convenience store rather than extorting Iraq out of billions of dollars of oil, he might have been sentenced to 16 years in jail as Kenneth Payne was in Texas. Let that be a lesson to Mr. Payne: if you want to avoid serving hard time, shoot for the billions in oil, not the Butterfinger.

After having a few drinks, Dick Cheney shoots a man, Harry Whittington, in the face nearly killing him. Result: the victim gives a press conference on the steps of the hospital apologizing for causing his would-be killer so much grief. Cheney will live out the rest of his life in a mansion in an undisclosed location swimming through a pool of gold coins.
Plaxico Burress shoots himself in the leg. Result: he is charged with criminal possession of a firearm. He will likely spend time in jail.

The difference between these two incidents seems to be that unlike Harry Whittington, Plaxico Burress was shot by a black man.

George W. Bush is an accomplice to the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people (at least). In fact, he gave the order that started the killing. Result (if Barack Obama stops any prosecution of Bush): the former president will live out his days on a ranch in the middle of Texas where he will hopefully finally finish reading the U.S. Constitution. He has told friends that he found the first half very intriguing.
In Texas a man named Kenneth Foster drives a car with his friend. His friend gets out the car, gets in a fight, and kills a man. Result: as an accomplice to murder, Foster is scheduled to be put to death. The governor commutes his death sentence just hours before, and Foster will instead spend the rest of his life behind bars

The lesson here is if you're going to be an accomplice to a crime, better it be international war crimes. Perpetrators of war crimes are generally rewarded rather than punished.

Martha Stewart is convicted for lying to federal prosecutors about insider trading and stock sales. Result: she spends five months in prison.
During the 2000 presidential election Dick Cheney retires from Halliburton with a severance package worth $36 million and declares he will cut financial ties with his former company. Between then and 2004 he receives about $200,000 from them every year. Over the course of the occupation in Iraq, Halliburton receives many no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars. Result: Cheney's stock options in Halliburton increase by around 3,000%.
Without any weapons or threats, Ricky Kiser of Virginia goes to a pharmacy and hands the clerk a note demanding methadone, to which he is addicted. Result: a judge sentences him to 120 years in prison.

If only Ricky Kiser had been helplessly addicted to money like Vice President Cheney, he might be a free man right now.

The Bush administration permits the use of dogs in interrogation and torture of suspected terrorists. This is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Result: none except that Bush's Scottish terrier Barney occasionally gives him the stink eye.
Michael Vick gets convicted of helping to run a dog fighting ring. Result: he's sentenced to 23 months in federal prison.

So if you use dogs to harm dogs, you're sentenced to jail time. If you use dogs to harm humans, you receive no repercussions except a moderate grilling on Meet The Press.

Barack Be Good

budrocket — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:39:59 EST

Published on Friday, December 26, 2008 by The New York Times

Barack Be Good

by Paul Krugman

Times have changed. In 1996, President Bill Clinton, under siege from the right, declared that "the era of big government is over." But President-elect Barack Obama, riding a wave of revulsion over what conservatism has wrought, has said that he wants to "make government cool again."

Before Mr. Obama can make government cool, however, he has to make it good. Indeed, he has to be a goo-goo.

Goo-goo, in case you're wondering, is a century-old term for "good government" types, reformers opposed to corruption and patronage. Franklin Roosevelt was a goo-goo extraordinaire. He simultaneously made government much bigger and much cleaner. Mr. Obama needs to do the same thing.

Needless to say, the Bush administration offers a spectacular example of non-goo-gooism. But the Bushies didn't have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can't do anything right.

The Obama administration, on the other hand, will find itself in a position very much like that facing the New Deal in the 1930s.

Like the New Deal, the incoming administration must greatly expand the role of government to rescue an ailing economy. But also like the New Deal, the Obama team faces political opponents who will seize on any signs of corruption or abuse - or invent them, if necessary - in an attempt to discredit the administration's program.

F.D.R. managed to navigate these treacherous political waters safely, greatly improving government's reputation even as he vastly expanded it. As a study recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research puts it, "Before 1932, the administration of public relief was widely regarded as politically corrupt," and the New Deal's huge relief programs "offered an opportunity for corruption unique in the nation's history." Yet "by 1940, charges of corruption and political manipulation had diminished considerably."

How did F.D.R. manage to make big government so clean?

A large part of the answer is that oversight was built into New Deal programs from the beginning. The Works Progress Administration, in particular, had a powerful, independent "division of progress investigation" devoted to investigating complaints of fraud. This division was so diligent that in 1940, when a Congressional subcommittee investigated the W.P.A., it couldn't find a single serious irregularity that the division had missed.

F.D.R. also made sure that Congress didn't stuff stimulus legislation with pork: there were no earmarks in the legislation that provided funding for the W.P.A. and other emergency measures.

Last but not least, F.D.R. built an emotional bond with working Americans, which helped carry his administration through the inevitable setbacks and failures that beset its attempts to fix the economy.

So what are the lessons for the Obama team?

First, the administration of the economic recovery plan has to be squeaky clean. Purely economic considerations might suggest cutting a few corners in the interest of getting stimulus moving quickly, but the politics of the situation dictates great care in how money is spent. And enforcement is crucial: inspectors general have to be strong and independent, and whistle-blowers have to be rewarded, not punished as they were in the Bush years.

Second, the plan has to be really, truly pork-free. Vice President-elect Joseph Biden recently promised that the plan "will not become a Christmas tree"; the new administration needs to deliver on that promise.

Finally, the Obama administration and Democrats in general need to do everything they can to build an F.D.R.-like bond with the public. Never mind Mr. Obama's current high standing in the polls based on public hopes that he'll succeed. He needs a solid base of support that will remain even when things aren't going well.

And I have to say that Democrats are off to a bad start on that front. The attempted coronation of Caroline Kennedy as senator plays right into 40 years of conservative propaganda denouncing "liberal elites." And surely I wasn't the only person who winced at reports about the luxurious beach house the Obamas have rented, not because there's anything wrong with the first family-elect having a nice vacation, but because symbolism matters, and these weren't the images we should be seeing when millions of Americans are terrified about their finances.

O.K., these are early days. But that's precisely the point. Fixing the economy is going to take time, and the Obama team needs to be thinking now, when hopes are high, about how to accumulate and preserve enough political capital to see the job through.

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.

Feinstein: Bad Choice

budrocket — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:52:51 EST

Published on Saturday, December 27, 2008 by Foreign Policy In Focus

Feinstein: Bad Choice for Intelligence

by Stephen Zunes

Ignoring the pleas of those calling for a more credible figure, Senate Democrats have instead chosen Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to lead the Senate Committee on Intelligence. Feinstein was among those who falsely claimed in 2002 despite the lack of any apparent credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had somehow reconstituted Iraq's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, as well as its nuclear weapons program.

She used this supposed threat to justify her vote in October 2002 to grant President George W. Bush the unprecedented authority to invade Iraq. Most congressional Democrats voted against the resolution. So it is particularly disturbing that Democrats would award the coveted Intelligence Committee chair to someone from the party's right-wing minority.

She took this extreme hawkish position out of her own predilection, not because of political pressure. Indeed, Senator Feinstein acknowledged at the time of her vote that calls and emails to her office were overwhelmingly opposed to her supporting Bush's war plans. She decided to ignore her constituents and vote in favor of the resolution anyway.

Background to the Vote

Public opinion polls in the fall of 2002 showed a majority of Americans would support a U.S. invasion of Iraq only if it posed a serious threat to the national security of the United States. Unfortunately for Senator Feinstein and others eager for the United States to conquer that oil-rich country, Iraq wasn't a threat to the United States. Though Iraq once had an arsenal of chemical weapons as well as an active chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons development program, these were all destroyed or otherwise eliminated by the mid-1990s, as were their missiles and other delivery systems. With strict sanctions prohibiting imports of requisite technologies and raw materials, and a lack of adequate internal capacity to produce them in Iraq, it was physically impossible for the Iraqis to have reconstituted its "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs).

Former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter had briefed Senator Feinstein before the 2002 vote, and presented evidence that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament and could in no way be a threat to U.S. national security. According to Ritter, "I had her look me in the eye and I asked her if she had seen any credible evidence contradicting my conclusions. She said she had not."

Similarly, I was among a number of scholars, arms control analysts, and other constituents who briefed her staff on how given the ongoing strict international sanctions imposed on that country and rigorous UN inspections through the end of 1998 there was no way for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to have reconstituted his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs. Citing reports from the UN, reputable think tanks, and recognized arms control experts as well as articles from respected peer-reviewed academic journals we thought we had made a convincing case that Iraq was no longer a threat to the United States or its neighbors.

Despite all this, Senator Feinstein insisted that Iraq somehow remained a "consequential threat" to the national security of the United States and claimed that Iraq still possessed biological and chemical weapons. And, in an effort to defend Bush's call for a U.S. invasion, she tried to discredit the UN inspections regime that had successfully disarmed Iraq by falsely claiming that "arms inspections, alone, will not force disarmament."

Similarly, even though the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency had correctly noted in 1998 that Iraq's nuclear program had been completely eliminated, Feinstein also falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein "is engaged in developing nuclear weapons."

When asked about such exaggerated claims regarding Iraq's military prowess, she insisted that she was somehow "privy to information that those in California are not." However, despite repeated requests to her office to make public what she was supposedly privy to, the only information her office provided has been the White House's summary of a 2003 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Based on the testimony of a handful of disreputable Iraqi exiles, this NIE met with widespread derision at the time of its release for its clearly inaccurate and politicized content.

Feinstein's supporters insist that her false claims about Iraqi WMDs were an honest mistake. But Ritter and other critics argue that it wasn't just ignorance and stupidity that led Feinstein to make these false statements about Iraq's military capabilities. She may very well have lied about the WMDs in order to frighten the public into supporting a U.S. takeover of that oil-rich country. Whether out of deceit or unawareness, however, Feinstein is clearly not suited to chair the committee.

Consequences of the Vote

I was also among a number of scholars specializing in the Middle East who warned Senator Feinstein that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would likely spark a disastrous armed insurgency, sectarian violence, and an increase in anti-American extremism in the Middle East and beyond. Despite this awareness of the likely consequences, however, she insisted that the United States should invade Iraq anyway. Such a decision raises serious questions as to whether she has the ability to rationally assess the costs and benefits of national security policies, which someone chairing the Intelligence Committee presumably should possess.

If her real goal was to protect our country from Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction," however, she would have presumably called for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops once they invaded and occupied Iraq and discovered that there really weren't such weapons after all. It should have also been obvious that the longer U.S. troops stayed in that country, with its long tradition of resistance to foreign invaders, the more likely it would provoke a major armed insurgency and the rise of extremists groups. Despite this, Feinstein called on American troops to remain in Iraq for more than four years after the invasion. She voted to send hundreds of billions of dollars worth of taxpayers' money to support Bush's war effort even as California sank deeper and deeper into fiscal crisis.

During this occupation, U.S. authorities helped to rewrite the country's economic laws to allow American corporations to take over Iraqi industries and repatriate 100% of profits. Under U.S. tutelage, the new Iraqi government slashed corporate taxes and provided generous oil concessions to American conglomerates. In this way, the war has been extremely profitable for some giant corporations. Among these were the firms URS and Perini, both of which Feinstein's husband served as the majority owner. The Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, under her leadership, steered government contracts to these very companies.

The Democratic Party's decision to appoint as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee someone with such a history of dubious judgment on intelligence matters is hardly new. The party chose Jay Rockefeller (WV) who is leaving his post to chair the Commerce Committee to chair the Intelligence Committee in January 2007, although he also made false claims about Iraq's WMD programs similar to those of Feinstein in order to justify his vote in favor of the invasion.

In the world of Senate Democrats, therefore, it appears that the quickest path to leadership in Intelligence comes from getting things wrong.

Stephen Zunes is a Foreign Policy In Focus [1] senior analyst and a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.

BERNIE SANDERS: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

budrocket — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:48:40 EST

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Where Do We Go From Here?

by Bernie Sanders

When Barack Obama is sworn in as president of the United States on Jan. 20, he will inherit a series of problems more severe than at any time since the Great Depression. Here are just a few of the issues that he, the Congress and all Americans must confront:

The middle class is continuing its steep decline with unemployment soaring, and millions of people in danger of losing their homes, savings and health insurance. The dream of a college education is fading away for many working families as college costs go up while incomes go down. This year, as a result of the economic downturn, the bailout of Wall Street, ongoing tax breaks for the very rich and the war in Iraq, our nation will have a record-breaking deficit and a huge $10.4 trillion dollar national debt.

As a result of Wall Street greed, recklessness and dishonesty, our entire financial system is in danger of collapsing. The taxpayers of this country have seen trillions of their dollars placed at risk in the largest bailout in world history.

Our health care system is disintegrating. Despite spending far more per capita than any other country, 47 million Americans have no health insurance, even more are underinsured and we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

We are currently involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which cost us not only the lives and well-being of our soldiers, but over $10 billion a month. These wars are also stretching the Army and our National Guard to the breaking point.

Despite the reality of global warming we have not broken our dependency on fossil fuel and foreign oil, and have made only slight advances in moving toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

Those are some of our problems. There are solutions. Where do we go from here?

The very good news is that we are finally seeing the end of the most incompetent and reactionary administration in the modern history of this country. It is my hope and expectation that, in very short order, President Obama will begin moving this country in a very different direction from where Bush has led us, and I look forward to working with him in that effort. The time is long overdue for the U.S. government to begin representing the needs of our middle-class and working families, and not just the greedy, the wealthy and the powerful.

Here are some of the initiatives that I will be fighting for as soon as the new Congress reconvenes in January:

A major economic recovery program which invests at least $400 billion in each of the next two years to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our infrastructure and moving us toward energy independence, sustainable energy and energy efficiency. In Vermont and throughout the country our roads and bridges are crumbling, our water systems and wastewater plants need major repair and older schools need to be modernized. Millions of homes and buildings are wasting huge amounts of energy and need to be properly weatherized, and we must be aggressive in improving and expanding our public transportation. Further, we now have the opportunity to create many new jobs by advancing such renewable technologies as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass.
An investigation as to how the greed and recklessness of Wall Street financiers caused the greatest financial collapse since the 1920s. Those who are responsible for this debacle must be held accountable, and not be allowed to walk away with huge fortunes while the middle class bails them out. Most importantly, we must build a new financial system which discourages short-term and reckless profiteering and re-establishes proper governmental safeguards and regulations.
Legislation to provide health care to every man, woman and child as a right of citizenship. In addition, we need to greatly expand our primary health care capabilities by educating and sending more doctors, nurses, dentists and other health professionals into rural areas and other medically underserved parts of our country.
An orderly process to bring our troops home from Iraq as soon as possible. We also need a national conversation about the best way to proceed in Afghanistan.

Vermonters often ask me whether I am pessimistic about the future of our country. My honest answer is that I am not. Difficult times often bring out the best in people. Now, in this moment of great national crisis, I am confident that with new national leadership and strong grass-roots participation we can come together and create the kind of nation that all of us know America can be.

Bernie Sanders is a United States Senator from Vermont.

WHAT TO EXPECT

budrocket — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:20:04 EST

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

What To Expect While We're Expecting: Politics In the Time of Obama

by David Michael Green

So who is Barack Obama?

Not only do we still not know, but in a very real sense, I don't think he knows either. Presidencies have a nasty habit of being shaped by external events and pressures that can sometimes be completely unanticipated.

I think the greatest parallels to this moment and this president are not so much to JFK or Lincoln in their times, but to 1932 and the Roosevelt presidency. FDR turned out to be one of America's greatest presidents (he's actually at the very top of my own list) and a very liberal "traitor to his class", but neither of those seminal attributes of his presidency were much anticipated by many.

Similarly, Barack Obama strikes me as something of an ideological chameleon, coming into office in a moment very similar to 1932, though obviously not (yet, anyhow) as dire. Like FDR, he enters the presidency inheriting a massive economic crisis, the proportions of which we still don't know, other than that it is already very, very big. Like FDR, he inherits this from a discredited Republican Party which has effectively ruled the country for decades. Like FDR, enormous hopes are riding on this rather unknown quantity about to be sworn in as president of the United States.

And, like FDR, I expect that this combination of conditions will give Obama wide latitude to govern, and even to fail to produce quick results, provided he is at least seen to be trying. I mean, think about it. If you wanted to follow any president in American history, who would it be? Look at what happened to John Adams, Andrew Johnson and Harry Truman, each of whom followed the most renowned and most revered of American presidents. Adams, one of the great patriots of the Revolution, one of the top handful of members in the Founders pantheon, couldn't win a second term. Johnson got impeached, in part for not being Lincoln. And Truman was run from office in 1952 with job approval ratings that matched those of a certain chimp-like character with whom we're all too familiar today.

On the other hand, look at who the great presidents followed. Washington came after George III and the Articles of Confederation. If you were Washington's chief political strategist, you couldn't write a script that good. Lincoln succeeded James Buchanan, the guy who was, until 2001, widely considered the worst president in American history. FDR followed Herbert Hoover, a president who refused to do anything while the country melted into poverty. People began naming the cardboard shanties in which they were forced to live after that guy. In short, Obama's going to have a lot of good will and latitude by virtue alone of having the good fortune to follow the most disastrous cock-up of a president in American history. Anything will be a relief after Bush. It's the Beatles coming on stage after the local beer hall cover band with the wasted drummer and out-of-tune guitarist, not the other way around.

For this reason and others, then, Obama is going to have a solid and likely long honeymoon, I suspect. And if he gets through the first two years looking good, he'll also likely keep and possibly even increase his Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. That is traditionally not so easy. With rare exception over the last century, the party controlling the White House loses seats in midterm elections (particularly the sixth year of a presidency). But I'd bet money right now, a month before Obama is even sworn-in, that Democrats do well in 2010. Not because they're so brilliant, of course. They're not. But because of the conditions described above, because of certain characteristics I see in Obama discussed below, and because the Republican Party has dug itself into a massive pair of holes.

The first of these holes is one of form. The GOP has run ugly campaign after ugly campaign since the days of Joe McCarthy, and as recently as the McCain-Palin attempt to turn Obama into a socialist who pals around with terrorists. I don't think the public is much in the mood right now for another round of insanely-divorced-from-reality carping, brought to them by the very folks who created these ugly disasters, while their president is making reasonable and centrist efforts to rescue them from sinking out of the middle class. Personally, I hope the Republicans continue to make this most egregious of mistakes, as they have been doing lately by running hysterical ads concerning the non-existent Obama-Blagojevich scandal. When even Newt Gingrich criticizes the stupidity of the party's move, you know you're hurtin', eh? But I say, bring it on, fellas! Please, please, go ahead and self-destruct. Er, self-destruct more, that is.

Of course, their other problem - a substantive one - is even more intransigent. This is the party and the ideology that delivered the country into the perfect storm of multiple simultaneous crises. Hey, would you buy a used government from the same people who brought you 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, global warming, skyrocketing national debt, torture, isolation from our allies, hatred of the world, and now what is - at the very least - the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression? If you think I'm just being cute here, ask yourself this question: Which prominent Republicans have you heard calling for a wholesale restructuring of their party's ideological commitments? Or even partial reform? Better yet, have you heard even one of them take a significant shot at George W. Bush, the very personification of regressive politics? No, we haven't heard that. Indeed, pretty much all we've heard is some mumblings about how the GOP needs to become more ‘conservative'.

Not only do these guys not intend to change, but they fundamentally cannot. The party has become nothing more than a vehicle for plutocratic kleptocracy, run on the backs of an army of scary-monster, sex-obsessed, religious freaks who act as shock troops for the money boys. My guess is that the latter group has long ago now left the sinking ship and is already fast cozying up to the new bosses in town, the ones with D's after their names on the ballots. These thieves couldn't possibly care less about which party they buy - they're happy to do business with anyone. Heck, they're probably relieved not to have to attend those stinking prayer breakfasts anymore in order to keep their marionettes convinced that they give a shit.

But, of course, with the kleptocrats out the door, that leaves the religious right in full ownership of the GOP, and they ain't letting go, brother. This crowd would rather lose elections than their principles, and so they will. And, indeed, so they have been. Yes, it's true, ladies and gentlemen - Republicans will no doubt continue to be a force to be reckoned with in Utah and Mississippi for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, though, the rest of the country appears to have come to its senses. As a side note, that creates some interesting new political dynamics with potentially far-reaching consequences. I can't recall during my lifetime a moment more ripe for the development of semi-viable third and even fourth parties in America, but that will only happen, if it does, a few years out. Meanwhile, one senses that the national GOP leadership needs at least one or two more solid electoral drubbings to disabuse them of their sorry ways, by which time it will probably be too late.

But what of the Democrats and Obama? I suspect that one of the primary reasons that the Democrats have been so disappointing to progressives these last two years is that their years in the wilderness have made them ‘smart'. Of course, another explanation is that they're also nearly as bought-off as the GOP, but what I mean by this is that they have learned from their past experience and have therefore resisted doing anything remotely courageous with their majority powers - like basic oversight, investigation, impeachment, ending the war in Iraq or national healthcare, for instance. From the perspective of a political party seeking only to aggrandize power, one might see why. The old adage applies well here: when your opponent is busy self-destructing, get out of the way. From the perspective of the country's needs, however, this has been something less than a powerful agenda for progress.

But, more than anything, I think Democrats have learned lessons from three unhappy experiences ranging from the Carter to the Lil' Bush years: what happens when you go off on your own without your president, what happens when your president goes off on his own without you, and what happens when you not only don't have a president, but are additionally stuck in the minority in Congress. Because they will be anxious, above all, not to repeat the latter experience, because the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis of this world are nothing like a Sam Rayburn or a Henry Clay, and because they seemed to easily be able to stomach rolling over for George Bush, I doubt seriously we're going to be seeing much in the way of strained relations between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Congress, and especially Democrats, have gotten good at deference, and they'll be happy to defer to Barack Obama as he helps them cement a generation-long realignment of American politics these next two, four and eight years.

And what of Obama himself? There are many laudatory words that come to mind when thinking about this supernova who has burst over the American landscape. Smart, articulate, inspiring, eloquent, balanced, grounded and thoughtful are just some of them. But what think most people have not yet fully appreciated is quite how wise he is. Wisdom is a bit like being smart, but definitely not the same. Both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were the smartest guys around. Both had mediocre presidencies, at best. Wisdom is perhaps best understood as applied smarts. In any case, it surely involves having a keen understanding of what works, what motivates people, what the public wants, and how to make decisions effectively. Look at Obama. He's been doing some enormously difficult things for two years now, under the most powerful competition and scrutiny there is. And, not only has he succeeded in ways that nobody imagined he could, he has made nary a significant mistake. That's a record unmatched in our time.

Yep, when it comes to political wisdom, this guy turns it up to eleven. That's why I think he's going to have a very successful presidency, and in doing so, he is going to cement in place a center-left, solid Democratic majority in Congress and out in the country. There will be mistakes, to be sure, and there will be ugly bummers far removed from the administration's control exploding in their faces. But what I don't think we'll see is pitched battles among the top staff, as in Carter's White House. I don't think we'll see a focus on trivial issues or personal immaturity, as in the Clinton White House. And I don't think we'll see the president trying to solve every problem all at once, as in both these precedents.

I don't know Obama's politics well enough to say for sure at this point, but I suspect he's going to be too centrist for my taste (most any president who could be president in today's America probably would). But, at the same time, I feel very confident in his competence and wisdom. That, coupled with all the other favorable conditions for him (which include many unfavorable ones for the country, chiefly Bush and his legacy) will probably make this the most successful presidency since Roosevelt. Maybe we'll even amend the Constitution to give him a third term!

Talk about getting ahead of yourself...! I know, I know. Sorry about that. Meanwhile, back on terra firma, of particular concern to progressives is the shape of the administration as it has now come together over the weeks since the election. Not only are there few progressives on Obama's team, but there are no name progressives at all. You won't find Maxine Waters there, or Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich or Mario Cuomo, or even Russ Feingold. Indeed, it's actually worse than that. It is no exaggeration to say that Republicans are better represented on this team than are progressive Democrats. And we are the ones who made Obama president, while they, of course, had a slightly different plan. And then, with the Rick Warren fiasco, it manages to get even worse still.

There is, in short, good reason for suspicion and even anger on the left. I'm not there yet, and hope not to be. Not because I'm a Barack groupie. Far from it. My attitude toward him and anyone else is to wait and see before judging. In any case, I remain still rather hopeful for two reasons. One is that conditions are already pushing the new administration and the country inexorably to the left. And the other is that, within some minor limitations, I really don't care who is secretary of this or secretary of that. What I care about is policy, and the broad strokes of policy are typically made by the guy sitting behind the sign that notes where the buck stops. So if Obama ends the Iraq war but has Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates staff it out, I'm happy. If he makes major efforts to rebalance the distribution of wealth in this country but Timothy Geithner is Secretary of the Treasury, I don't much care, to be honest.

Indeed, there is every possibility that his cabinet picks and other decisions are yet another demonstration of the wisdom that is Barack Obama, in a sort of ‘keep your enemies even closer' kind of way. How soon, and how ardently, do you think Rick Warren is going to be out there criticizing the new administration? And if Obama does more such coopting of the center and even center-right, as he has in fact already been doing quite effectively, how much more ridiculous will the loonies of the GOP and the freaks on the radio look, off by themselves, trying to tear him down?

So I'm hopeful. All the conditions are there. A country demanding change, if not rescue. A thoroughly repudiated opposition. A public and in fact an entire world strongly committed to the success of the Obama presidency. And a skilled and wise occupant of the Oval Office about to be handed the keys to government.

Of course, I remain wary and gimlet-eyed for the moment. Everyone should. This is, after all, government we're talking about, and these are, after all, politicians. Moreover, Obama has already given us some minor reasons to be concerned.

At the same time, this is the most hopeful political moment of my life.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Obama Adviser Aligns with Bush over Israel

budrocket — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:08:11 EST

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by the Guardian/UK

Obama Adviser Aligns with White House in Criticism of Rocket Attacks on Israel

by Ewin MacAskill

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama yesterday appeared to line up behind the Bush administration in support of Israel's attack on Gaza.

Speaking on CBS's Face the Nation, his chief adviser, David Axelrod, initially repeated the Obama team's formula that there could only be one president at a time and that president was George Bush.

But he went on to recall comments that Obama made in July at Sderot, the Israeli town that is the target of rocket attacks from Palestinian militants in Gaza.

At the time, Obama said : "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

A similar sentiment was expressed by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, on Saturday. She said: "The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza." She added: "The ceasefire should be restored immediately. The United States calls on all concerned to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the innocent people of Gaza."

Gordon Johndroe, the White House security spokesman, also blamed Hamas, whom he referred to as terrorists and thugs. Rice briefed Obama by phone for about eight minutes on Saturday and further calls are planned to ensure he is up to speed on the issue by the time he takes office.

Although Obama has repeatedly said he would not comment on policy matters until he becomes president on 20 January, he has largely abandoned this in relation to the economic crisis, on which he has spoken regularly over the last few weeks, often at odds with Bush. So far, Obama has given no hint on his policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though he has said finding a peace plan would be an early priority of his administration.

Before running for president, he provoked suspicion among Israelis and some US Jewish groups when he expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. But after winning the Democratic nomination earlier this year he veered in the other direction, voicing strong support for Israel in a speech in Washington to the Israeli lobby group Aipac.

Yesterday , the Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior Bush administration official saying he thought the Israelis launched the attack because of uncertainty over Obama's policy. The official said the Israelis acted "because they want it to be over before the next administration comes in". He added: "They can't predict how the next administration will handle it. And this is not the way they want to start with the new administration."

Israeli officials denied this, saying the Israeli election in February was more a factor than Obama's take-over.

Bush started his presidency determined not to expend much effort on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after watching his predecessor, Bill Clinton, devote his last months in office in a futile attempt to bring peace.

Over the last year, Bush has made half-hearted attempts at reheating peace plans.

Obama's proposed secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and various other foreign policy advisers would like to mount another attempt at resolving the conflict. But Obama has other foreign policy issues competing for his attention such as the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and the escalating conflict in Afghanistan.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Dodge the Taxman

budrocket — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:04:52 EST

Wealthy Americans Continue To Dodge The Taxman

Millionaires and corporations continue to convince lawmakers to shield them from the taxman and balance budgets on the backs of everyone else. That's what's going on in revenue-starved states right now: Governors are preparing to slash middle-class programs and are resisting calls to raise taxes on the wealthy.

By David Sirota, Syndicated Columnist

For most of us, Benjamin Franklin's words in 1789 still apply: "Nothing is certain but death and taxes."

However, millionaires, by definition, are not most of us. While they can't stave off the grim reaper, they can convince lawmakers to shield them from the taxman and balance budgets on the backs of everyone else.

That's what's going on in revenue-starved states right now: governors are preparing to slash middle-class programs and are resisting calls to raise taxes on the wealthy. Nowhere is this class war more pronounced than in New York — the home of the financial thieves who killed the economy.

Having halved its top tax rate over the last three decades, New York today faces a $15.4 billion deficit. In response, Democratic Gov. David Paterson might have asked his state's Gordon Gekkos to pay higher taxes, especially considering the idea's popularity in polls and the news that Wall Street's elite are still swimming in money. Indeed, according to CBS News, the allegedly beleaguered financial industry is so flush with cash it plans to dole out $14 billion in executive bonuses this year.

Yet, far from forcing robber barons to pay their fair share, Paterson told The New York Times that taxing millionaires is "the last place you want to go." Instead, he proposes to punish Joe and Jane Six-pack by hiking the taxes and cutting the programs that disproportionately impact them. Specifically, he wants to increase sales taxes, college tuitions and licensing fees and slash education and low-income health programs.

Paterson defended his proposals by telling PBS's Bill Moyers "that when you tax the wealthy in the downturn of an economy, you have an automatic link of a loss of job opportunities and then a loss of population." The rationale sounds intelligently pragmatic — until you peruse the relevant data.

When New Jersey recently raised taxes on the wealthy, Princeton University researchers found that most of those who later left the state moved to places with higher taxes, meaning there is no causative link between levies on the rich and residential flight. Likewise, when New York temporarily raised high-income taxes after 9/11, the state added 127,000 jobs, meaning no link exists between higher taxes on the rich and job loss.

During times of surpluses, governors could get away with the unsubstantiated nonsense Paterson is peddling. But now, 43 states confront shortfalls, and because states cannot run deficits, the dollars and sense of these arguments matter. Lawmakers must choose what policy will create the best chances for economic recovery: spending cuts or tax increases, and if the latter, on whom?

The answer isn't rocket science. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says, "Reductions in government spending on goods and services (are) likely to be more damaging to the economy in the short run than tax increases focused on higher-income families."

That's because government cuts automatically decrease the consumptive spending programs that broadly stimulate the economy whereas tax increases, when aimed at the wealthy, more often impact funds socked away in savings. "The more that the tax increases (are) focused on those with lower propensities to consume (i.e., the rich)," Stiglitz notes, "the less damage is done to the weakened economy."

Incredibly, Paterson acknowledges how destructive his budget is, admitting that his own "education cuts are draconian, the health-care cuts are prohibitive [and] the taxes that are being levied ... are not fair."

So why would he — or any governor — nonetheless try to legislate such idiocy? Because millionaires are the ones who finance gubernatorial candidacies, and their campaign contributions buy tax protection. The result is what another New York royalist promised.

"Only the little people pay taxes," said Leona Helmsley — a doctrine that will exacerbate this recession if states keep making it true.

David Sirota's new book is "The Uprising." He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota

2008, Creators Syndicate, Inc.

OUT OF THE COUNTRY

budrocket — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:57:24 EST

Sam Stein stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

Emanuel Heads To Africa As Blagojevich Report Drops

December 23, 2008 11:32 AM

With the Obama transition team set to release an internal report regarding the extent of its interactions with embattled governor Rod Blagojevich, one of the key figures in the mix is heading out of the country.

Incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel left on Tuesday for a "long planned family vacation in Africa," a transition official confirmed to the Huffington Post.

The internal review by the Obama team is expected to clear Emanuel of any impropriety regarding the Blagojevich scandal, and Emanuel's departure suggests he feels comfortable enough to be out of the country (and not doing damage control) on the day the report drops. Obama, meanwhile, is vacationing in Hawaii -- another indication that the president-elect's team is not exactly sweating out the matter.

Already reports have surfaced that Emanuel talked only a handful of times to the Illinois governor and his chief of staff, mostly about who would replace Emanuel in the House of Representatives. Never, these reports suggest, did the two have a conservation that could implicate Obama in the pay-to-play scheme that Blagojevich was allegedly pursuing to choose Obama's Senate replacement.

The Obama transition's internal report is set to be released Tuesday at 4:30 pm.

Emanuel's choice of destination is also noteworthy. Transition officials did not specify where in Africa he went, though another source said the family would be going on a safari. Nevertheless, it's an interesting choice for a holiday vacation. Certainly it is not beyond the realm of reason to see this trip having minor geopolitical ripples given Obama's renowned status on the continent.

TARP This

budrocket — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:18:28 EST

Published on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

TARP This: Paulson's Bailout Plan Riddled With Deception

How a Program To Save The Economy Ended Up Enriching Big Banks

by Danny Schechter

Talk about crazy making. How do we believe anything Hank Paulson says?

First, he needed $700 Billion, and fast, to buy up troubled assets or the skies would fall and we would be pressed to impose martial law. He found an appropriate acronym, TARP, to manage the money with a skeletal staff of 28 headed up by one of his former protégés at Goldman Sachs.

So Far, So Good,

But then he had himself a rethink, realizing that no one has a clue about how to price troubled assets considered practically worthless. So he had to a make a shift, "in the light of new facts," even though Congress never authorized the shift.

So Far, So Good.

He claimed this showed flexibility and a willingness to respond to new information. Never mind that that information was not new and kind of obvious to anyone paying close attention to the subprime fiasco.

So Far, So Good

Then Congress pumped a three-page proposal into a four hundred-page package. Once it was 'enhanced' will all kinds of pork and earmarks it was passed. Legislators screamed about the absolute necessity of oversight and transparency; after all, this is taxpayer's money. But then, they took a break to run for re-election without naming anyone to oversee Hank's new TARP or the taxpayer money. There seems to have been an oversight of oversight?

So far, Less Good

Paulson, then changed the playbook and started pumping a few billion here, and a few billion there into the coffers of financial institutions, many with lots of money already to recapitalize banks. The goal, we were told was to get them lending again.

There was a problem, though. Most banks didn't start lending because of fears of the risks to their own survival in the current economic free fall.

Partly that was because the government was not requiring any concessions except NON-Voting stock which gives it little leverage. The auto industry was expected to outline a reorganization plan to get the money. The banks had no such requirement.

A New York Times report from London explained:

"Some analysts said the idea that recapitalizing banks would repair the lending market was flawed from the beginning because it was contradictory. On the one hand, the policy was meant to make banks reduce risk. On the other, it pressured them to lend more which meant taking more risks."

So instead they diverted some of the money to satisfy their internal needs. An Associated Press investigation found: "Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year." Many other banks would not disclose what they did with the money. Many of them have tightened credit, rather than loosened it.

Oops, not so good

"Treasury has bought preferred stock with no control rights," writes former Fed governor Alan Blinder. "...There are no public-purpose quid pro quos, such as a minimal lending requirement. So banks can just sit on the capital, which is what most of them have done, or use it to make acquisitions, as a few have....

So here we are, looking at an all-too-familiar story. The administration that brought you the Iraq war and the Katrina response is locking in another disaster before it leaves town."

Yikes...

"TAMING WILD BEASTS"

Historian Howard James goes further indicting the measures governments have been taking which he calls a "crescendo of ad hoc measures that several governments took throughout the fall: injecting liquidity, purchasing toxic assets, capitalizing banks, and, finally, nationalizing entire banking systems." He's skeptical that they will work.

"The $700 billion bailout announced by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in late September was designed to remove from banks' balance sheets mortgages and other securities that in some way corresponded to real houses. But it is still unclear today how these assets are to be valued or how that valuation might wind up benefiting or hurting their new owners. In the United States and in Europe, the hope is that governments will assume many of the risks inherent in this uncertain valuation -- and tame the wild beasts of the financial jungle through state-backed and state-run banking systems. To some, this is profoundly ironic.

As Russian President Dmitry Medvedev put it in September, the experience shows that "the move from self-regulating capitalism to financial socialism is only one step." American free-market capitalism was not supposed to look like this.

Recently, I met Princeton Professor James, who was speaking at an elite forum on the economy at the Council of Foreign Relations. I asked if he shared my belief that our financial system is permeated with crime, and that the financial crisis was engineered by banksters and white collar criminals. (This was before the Bernard Madoff revelations.) I expected the panel to be dismissive of such a "crude" suggestion in a room full of finance professionals, but he wasn't, and agreed publically that the problem is fraud problem is serious but that in times of prosperity, exposes are rarely pursued.

He now sees the US now emulating China-which is having a hard time too-with more state intervention. He thinks this is the direction we will be forced to move in and sees Beijing more than Washington as key to solving what is now a global mess.

This thought upsets guardians of the free market like finance expert Peter Schiff, Ron Paul's economic advisor and the man who was laughed at on TV when he warned of the current collapse. I spoke to him recently for the film I am making on the economic crisis based on my book, Plunder. He thinks the government has to stay out of markets even if that means businesses will collapse.

SCHIFF: What is happening right now, the credit crunch, the collapse of the real estate stocks, all these companies going bankrupt, this is not the problem. This is actually the solution. This is the consequence of the problem. The problem was that for years we ran this funny economy where we borrowed money to consume.
SCHECHTER: How could that be the solution? So many people are out of work, people are losing homes?
SCHIFF: Well, we have to rebalance our economy

The clash over macro-economic policy is mirrored in a debate over specific policies. Congress finally found an oversight person in Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Professor and critic of consumer rip-offs. She says Paulson is not disclosing enough and just published a report with tough questions about Paulson's TARP.

Already the banking industry is fighting back, questioning her judgment and implying she is some kind of commie. Hedge Funder Tom Clark derides her concerns but doesn't refute them:

"The Professor doesn't just quibble with this lending practice or that one. She thinks the entire industry is diabolical. Warren apparently believes consumer lenders have some mystical, systematic advantage over consumers, which they see as their duty to exploit at every turn. Or, as she puts it, ‘Credit products aimed at both middle class and poor families are designed to trick them, trap them, and otherwise pick their pockets.'"

And so, as the Obama Administration is poised to take over, we have radically conflicting ideas of what to do. Should we help people or banks, Main Street or Wall Street, take new initiatives or recycle old ones, use interventionist government power or put all our eggs in ‘the market rules' basket?

The President-Elect's centrist appointments suggest he is buying into the prevailing Washington-Wall Street consensus that tilts towards the private sector with Wall Streeters as key advisors.

To be fair, the Obama Plan has yet to be spelled out. The Washington Post reports he has expanded it with a massive federal stimulus package and now hopes to create or preserve 3 million jobs over the next two years. He also has said Wall Street needs "adult supervision." Great phrase, but they will need more than that. Many banks are basically bankrupt; any recovery seems far off.

The only good news in this bleak picture is that Paulson, the Goldman Sachs miracle worker turned Donald Rumsfeld of the economy, is leaving soon, stage right. Despit his feverish initial demands, however, he just announced that he doesn't need another $350 Billion... at least for now. That was yesterday. Maybe he changed his mind.

That ball has been kicked into Barack's court.

Have the Bush-Paulson-Bernanke policies worked? Did the economy turn around on their watch or through the trillions spent by the Fed?

Not even close and maybe its time to TARP them all.

So far, not good at all.

--------------------------------

News Dissector Danny Schechter wrote SQUEEZED, an e-book chronicling the crisis and calling for better media coverage. He is also "blogger-in chief" of Mediachannel.org, His new film is IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before the Bubble Burst (Indebtwetrust.com) Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org

BAD COMPANY

budrocket — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:10:19 EST

Published on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 by The Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

Bad Company: US Fails Gay, Lesbian Citizens

by Clay Evans

You can hardly blame the gay-and-lesbian community for being upset these days.

President-elect Barack Obama, for whose election many members of the gay community worked hard, has invited the Rev. Rick Warren -- who has compared gay marriage to incest and child rape -- to deliver the inaugural invocation. (And don't get us started on Warren's spittle-flecked support of Republican overreaching in the tragic case of Terry Schiavo in 2005; he compared removing the brain-dead woman's feeding tube to Nazism).

Meanwhile, over at the U.N., the United States stood alone among major Western nations in refusing to sign a nonbinding declaration calling for a worldwide decriminalization of homosexual activity.

The U.S. mission to the U.N. said it continued to condemn human-rights violations toward homosexuals, but claimed it couldn't sign because it could conflict with state laws. In some states, incredibly, it is still legal for landlords and employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

So with whom did America stand? Democratic stalwarts such as Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Sudan and four other nations that don't just deny housing to gay people -- they execute them.

The U.S. refusal to join its more courageous Western counterparts to protect gay people is by far worse than the Warren prayer. Warren, a long-time acquaintance of Obama's, isn't joining the cabinet; after the inauguration, he'll go back to his mega-church where he can preach anti-gay rhetoric to the converted.

Here's hoping the president-elect will demonstrate his support of the gay and lesbian community by reversing the official U.S. position at the United Nations.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

budrocket — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:38:51 EST

Raymond J. Learsy

Scholar and Author of 'Over a Barrel: Breaking Oil’s Grip on Our Future'

Posted December 22, 2008 | 01:36 AM (EST)

Hillary Clinton, Saudi Arabia and "Foggy Bottom"

Last Thursday Bill Clinton disclosed his complete donor list of contributors to his foundation that funds his library and charitable work, in an effort to abate concerns of conflicts of interest should Senator Hillary Clinton be confirmed as President-elect Obama's Secretary of State.

Does it, or does it just raise additional and potentially disturbing issues? According to Bloomberg, the Clinton foundation collected at least $41 million from foreign nations. Leading the list of open-handed generosity was a donation of between $10 and $25 million from Saudi Arabia. And that of course is singularly worrisome as it raises the question of whether our putative Secretary of State would be, in any way, beholden to Saudi Arabia.

We have come to realize that Saudi donations and contributions both direct and indirect, have achieved insidious influence on the American Government extending from the price and supply of oil to U.S. policies toward the Persian Gulf states, Iran and Iraq. The incestuous relationship between the American government and Saudi Arabia, seeded by President George H.W. Bush and his appointees, has reached its apogee under the presidency of George W. Bush. During these years the nation has endured the embarrassment of having Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, treat the Oval Office as an annex of the Saudi Embassy.

The relationship with Saudi Arabia has had debilitating cost to the United States in lives and fortune. 9/11 came and went, and under President George W. Bush Saudi Arabia has never been held to account for the fact that the majority of hijackers who carried out their murderous attack were Saudis. Nor has there been a serious American policy of bringing to an end the billions of Saudi money from Saudi citizens and charities that are flooding Wahhabi schools and cultural centers in Pakistan and around the world, forming today's and tomorrow's extremists, while teaching young minds hatred of Shiites, Hindus, Christians and Jews. Not to speak of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan where Saudi Jihadists are part and parcel of the irredentist fabric of murder and pillage.

And then of course there is the issue of oil where Saudi Arabia, in its leadership role within OPEC, has led OPEC to the promised land of $147 barrel oil. This, while our administration continued to stock up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve irrespective of price or market perception, nor effectively initiating meaningful programs for alternative energy nor significantly reducing our fossil fuel consumption. And of course never seriously confronting the Saudis on their manipulative production and pricing policies, much to the pleasure of the administration's friends in the oil industry, and at enormous cost to the nation as a whole.

On December 17, 2008 the Financial Times would categorize Saudi Arabia's pricing influence within OPEC, and I quote, "Saudi Arabia's willingness to sacrifice market share should consolidate its power as the only country able to influence the price of oil and therefore the world's economic health."

A benign and cooperative American administration toward OPEC is key to the Saudis and their focused policies for ever higher oil prices. We are in effect the de facto protectors of their independence and we have extended that protection under an amenable Bush administration without any meaningful quid pro quo. Herein the State Department of the next administration will have to play a key role.

Senator Hillary Clinton is a personage of outstanding ability and extensive experience. If Bill Clinton's brush with the Saudis makes her more pious than the pope in encouraging arms length monitoring of Saudi issues and limiting Saudi access, so much the better. It is long past time that our relationship with Saudi Arabia be based on clear cut national interests and not clouded by Saudi access, influence, and personal relationships at the highest levels -- influence that is forever at the expense of this nation and its citizens and to the benefit of the Saudis and its royals. That has been the case these last eight years, and to some degree before. Can Hillary Clinton assure us that there will not be any Saudi preferential access to Foggy Bottom in spite of the myriad millions visited on the Clinton foundation? That there will be no preferential treatment given to that telephone call seeking to jump the line coming from Riyadh or the Saudi Embassy, even if its 3 A.M.?!

Obama Likely To Follow Bush

budrocket — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:19:42 EST

Condoleezza Rice: Obama Likely To Follow Bush On Foreign Policy

Cites Iran Nukes, North Korea, And Israel-Palestinian Issue

By Daniel Dombey in Washington

Published: December 21 2008 23:19 | Last updated: December 21 2008 23:19

Barack Obama might have little option but to follow George W. Bush’s approach on a range of foreign policy issues, including Iran, said Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state.

Ms Rice told the Financial Times the new administration was likely to follow Mr Bush’s lead in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme. During the president’s second term, the US has co-ordinated its approach with the European Union, Russia and China.

“When I talk to our allies they believe that that is the structure with which this is ultimately going to be resolved,” Ms Rice said, while acknowledging that the Obama administration would generally “do things in their own way”.

She said: “The reason why there might be some elements of continuity is that what we’ve tried to do is to arrange or organise international groupings that can first manage and then resolve these very difficult problems in a multilateral way.” She was referring not just to the administration’s efforts over Iran but also its approach to North Korea and the Israel-Palestinian issue.

Ms Rice’s words could damp expectations that the incoming administration will represent a complete break with its predecessor on foreign policy.

They also highlight the obstacles facing the new team as it seeks breakthroughs for problems the Bush administration has failed to resolve. In an echo of the current administration’s rhetoric, Mr Obama promises to use carrots and sticks to push Iran to rein in its nuclear programme.

But in spite of a sustained sanctions drive by the US and its allies and an offer of talks, Iran has stepped up uranium enrichment and is widely reckoned to be moving closer to nuclear weapons capability.

While Mr Obama has promised a radically different approach to the outgoing administration on issues such as climate change, and Guantanamo Bay, many of his cabinet picks are centrists who have won praise from Republicans.

Although Ms Rice has described herself as “especially proud” of Mr Obama’s election as the first African American president, she consistently declines to say for whom she voted.

Ms Rice expressed concern over the expected appointment of a series of special envoys for world hotspots, saying it was important not to cut ambassadors and diplomats out of the loop.

INSULTING

budrocket — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:55:21 EST

RICK WARREN IS AN INSULTING CHOICE: Preacher's views are simply too extreme for Obama's supporters

by Katha Pollitt, published on Monday, December 22, 2008 by The Los Angeles Times

To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton -- or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.

Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters -- feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community -- by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead.

Most Americans who've heard of Warren know him as the teddy-bearish, Hawaiian-shirted head of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County and the author of "The Purpose Driven Life." Perhaps they also know he's the rare right-wing Christian pastor who sometimes talks about poverty and global warming and HIV. His concern for those issues has given him a reputation as a moderate and has made him the darling of Democratic Party think tanks, ever hoping to break the Republican lock on the white evangelical vote.

But on the signal issues of the religious right he is, as he himself has said, as orthodox as James Dobson.

And as inflammatory. Warren doesn't just oppose gay marriage, he's compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn't just want to ban abortion, he's compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial. (Hmmm ... If a fertilized egg is as precious as a born Jewish human being, does that mean a born Jewish human being is only as valuable as a fertilized egg?)

Speaking of Jews, Warren has publicly stated his belief that they will burn in hell, presumably along with everyone else who hasn't accepted his particular brand of Christianity (i.e., the vast majority of people in the world). And forget about evolution -- the existence of homosexuals, he's argued, disproves Darwin. And while we may not know how old the Earth is, the Saddleback website assures us that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

Warren claims that his views are mainstream, pointing out that in 30 states, the majority of voters have banned gay marriage. Popular doesn't mean right, of course, but regardless of what Americans think about gay marriage, on other so-called social issues, he's way out in far-right field.

Take abortion. Most Americans, whatever their personal feelings, are pro-choice. On election day, anti-choice initiatives went down to defeat in all three states where they were on the ballot. Most Americans do not think the one-third of American women who terminate a pregnancy are running a concentration camp in their wombs, and would have no trouble choosing between saving a Jew from a gas chamber and a fertilized egg from a fire at the clinic.

Or take marriage. At his Saddleback Church, wifely submission is official doctrine: The church website tells women to defer to their husband's "leadership" even when he's wrong on important issues, such as finances. Never mind if she's an accountant and he flunked long division, or if she wants to beef up the kids' college fund and he wants to buy shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The godly answer is supposed to be "yes, dear." Is elevating this male chauvinist how President-elect Obama thanks women, who gave him more than half his votes?

Or take foreign policy. In electing Obama, Americans overwhelmingly rejected President Bush's Wild West approach to foreign policy. Apparently Warren didn't get that memo either. Unlike many evangelical preachers, he issued a statement against torture, but despite his access to Bush, he told Beliefnet.com that he never raised the subject of torture with him. ("I just didn't have the opportunity," he said -- although he apparently found plenty of time to lecture Obama about abortion.)

On "Hannity & Colmes," he agreed that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be killed because "the Bible says God puts government on Earth to punish evildoers." Really? The Bible says the United States should murder the leaders of other sovereign states? How many other heads of state does Warren want to do away with? If Ahmadinejad, who is, after all, a more-or-less democratically elected leader, had shared his inauguration with an imam who had called on national television for the assassination of President Bush, Americans would be calling for the nuking of Tehran.

In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: "It is important for the country to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues." That's all very well, but excuse me if I don't feel all warm and fuzzy. Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who've spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration's wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.

I'm all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama's base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.

DEMS COMPLICIT IN SPYING

budrocket — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:36:32 EST

Cheney says Top Congressional Democrats Complicit in Spying

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Dick Cheney's interview yesterday with Fox's Chris Wallace [1] was filled with significant claims, but certainly among the most significant was his detailed narration of how the administration, and Cheney personally, told numerous Democratic Congressional leaders -- repeatedly and in detail -- about the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. And, according to Cheney, every one of those Democrats -- every last one -- not only urged its continuation, but insisted that it be kept secret:

WALLACE: Let's drill down into some of the specific measures that you pushed - first of all, the warrantless surveillance on a massive scale, without telling the appropriate court, without seeking legislation from Congress.
Why not, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the spirit of national unity, get approval, support, bring in the other branches of government?
CHENEY: Well, let me tell you a story about the terror surveillance program. We did brief the Congress. And we brought in...
WALLACE: Well, you briefed a few members.
CHENEY: We brought in the chairman and the ranking member, House and Senate, and briefed them a number of times up until - this was - be from late '01 up until '04 when there was additional controversy concerning the program.
At that point, we brought in what I describe as the big nine - not only the intel people but also the speaker, the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate, and brought them into the situation room in the basement of the White House.
I presided over the meeting. We briefed them on the program, and what we'd achieved, and how it worked, and asked them, "Should we continue the program?" They were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike. All agreed - absolutely essential to continue the program.
I then said, "Do we need to come to the Congress and get additional legislative authorization to continue what we're doing?" They said, "Absolutely not. Don't do it, because it will reveal to the enemy how it is we're reading their mail."
That happened. We did consult. We did keep them involved. We ultimately ended up having to go to the Congress after the New York Times decided they were going to make the judge to review all of - or make all of this available, obviously, when they reacted to a specific leak.
But it was a program that we briefed on repeatedly. We did these briefings in my office. I presided over them. We went to the key people in the House and Senate intel committees and ultimately the entirely leadership and sought their advice and counsel, and they agreed we should not come back to the Congress.

Cheney's reference to the "additional controversy concerning the program" that arose after 2004 and that led to additional Congressional briefings is ambiguous and creates a somewhat unclear time line: is he referring to late 2004, when the White House learned that The New York Times knew about the NSA program and was considering writing about it (only to then obey the President's orders to keep it a secret), or is he referring to the time when, more than a full year later [2], in December 2005, the NYT finally got around to writing about it, once Bush was safely re-elected?

Either way, Cheney's general claim is as clear as it is incriminating. According to him, key Congressional Democrats were told about the illegal NSA spying program in detail, and they not only actively approved of it, but far beyond that, they insisted that no Congressional authorization should even be sought, based on what was always the patently inane claim [3] that to discuss the fact that the administration was eavesdropping on our conversations without warrants (rather than with warrants, as the law required) would be to reveal our secrets -- "our playbook" -- to Al Qaeda.

It is certainly true that Dick Cheney is not exactly the most scrupulously honest public servant around. In fact, he's almost certainly the opposite. Still, what he said yesterday was merely an expanded and more detailed version of what has previously been publicly reported [4] and, to some degree, confirmed [5] about the knowledge and support of Democratic leaders for the NSA program. Cheney's claims encompasses the following key Democrats:

Nancy Pelosi (Ranking Member, House Intelligence Committee, House Minority Leader);
Jane Harman (Ranking Member, House Intelligence Committee);
Jay Rockefeller (Ranking Member, Senate Intelligence Committee);
Harry Reid (Senate Minority Leader).

Unsurprisingly, Pelosi, Harman and Rockefeller all voted last July to legalize warrantless eavesdropping and to immunize telecoms from liability, thereby ensuring an end to the ongoing investigations into these programs. And though he ultimately cast a meaningless vote against final passage, it was Reid's decisions as Majority Leader [6] which played an instrumental role in [6] ensuring passage of that bill.

One would think that these Democratic leaders would, on their own, want to respond to Cheney's claims about them and deny the truth of those claims. After all, Cheney's statement is nothing less than an accusation that they not only enthusiastically approved, but actively insisted upon the continuation and ongoing secrecy, of a blatantly illegal domestic spying program (one that several of them would, once it was made public, pretend to protest). As Armando says [7], "The Democratic members who participated in this meeting have two choices in my mind - refute Cheney's statements or admit their complicity in the illegal activity perpetrated by the Bush Administration."

I'm going to spend the day calling these members and trying to get some response to Cheney's claim. If I'm unable to obtain any responses, I'll post their numbers and encourage everyone to make similar calls. As I wrote on Saturday [8] -- and documented before [9]: "As a practical reality, the largest barrier to any route to prosecution -- including this one -- is that the Congressional Democratic leadership was complicit, to varying degrees, in the illegal programs." That's true not only of the NSA program, but also the Bush/Cheney torture program [10].

One last point: there is much consternation [11] over Dick Cheney's "Nixon/Frost moment [12]" yesterday, where he expressly endorsed the idea that, as a "general proposition," a "wartime" President can do anything he wants -- even if it violates duly enacted statutes -- as long as it's justified in the name of national security. In one sense, Cheney was being so explicit yesterday about his belief in Bush's lawbreaking powers in part because he's taking pride in being so defiant on his way out the door -- daring a meek and impotent political class to do anything about his lawlessness -- and also because Chris Wallace conducted one of the best interviews (and, revealingly, one of the only interviews) about the Bush/Cheney view of executive power.

But that this was the Bush administration's central operating principle is something that -- as was true for Cheney's involvement in America's torture regime -- was long known. As I wrote all the way back in December, 2005 [13], days after the NSA scandal was first revealed:

These are not academic questions. Quite the contrary, it is hard to imagine questions more pressing. We are at a moment in time when not just fringe ideologues, but core, mainstream supporters of the President -- not to mention senior officials in the Administration itself - are openly embracing the theory that the President can use the power and military force of the United States to do whatever he wants, including to and against U.S. citizens, as long as he claims that it is connected to America's "war" against terrorists - a war which is undeclared, ever-expanding, and without any visible or definable end.
While Bush advocates have long been toying with this theory in the shadows, the disclosure that Bush ordered warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in undeniable violation of a Congressional statute has finally forced them to articulate their lawless power theories out in the open. Bush got caught red-handed violating the law, and once it became apparent that no argument could be made that he complied with the law, the only way to defend him was to come right out and say that he has the right to break the law. So that debate -- over the claimed limitlessness of George Bush's power -- can't be put off any longer.

By itself, the long-disclosed September 25, 2001 Yoo Memorandum left no doubt [14] that our Government had formally and explicitly adopted an ideology of lawlessness. As a country, we just chose to ignore all of that, chose to do nothing about it. The absues and extremism of the last eight years began as a Bush administration initiative, but it culminated as something for which both political parties, our leading political and media institutions, and our citizenry generally bear collective responsibility.

* * * * * On a somewhat related note, this creepy little post [15] inserted onto Matt Yglesias' Center for American Progress blog by Jennifer Palmieri, the CEO of CAP's "Action Fund", is a vivid exhibit illustrating how Washington works, for reasons which Matt Stoller [16], Markos Moulitsas [17], and Brendan Nyhan [18] all describe. Matt very well may not consider it to constitute interference with his editorial autonomy, but it nonetheless illustrates the potential constraints that can come from writing for an organization like that.

When I first joined Salon, the commitment they made, which for me was non-negotiatiable, was absolute editorial independence. Though that's an unusual commitment for a magazine to make, they did make it, and they never once -- in almost two years of my being here -- even came close to violating it. Even as I've waged quite acrimonious mini-wars with friends and former colleagues of top editors and officers here, and even as I've aggressively advocated views that were, at times, the opposite of the ones top editors here were advocating, there's never been a hint of interference or even pressure, and I couldn't even fathom their doing anything like sticking a note onto my blog of the type Palmieri just inserted onto Matt's blog.

Editorial independence is quite rare and quite valuable. It's still one of the key distinguishing features between blogs/alternative media outlets and establishment media. As Atrios suggests [19]: "contemplate the issue of editorial independence, and the various revenue models which make it possible or not." It's worth supporting the bloggers who practice it and the media venues that allow and encourage it.

UPDATE: As I said, Cheney's time line is unclear, and it's possible, when he references an "additional controversy," he's referring to the DOJ's objections to the NSA program in March, 2004 -- not anything having to do with the New York Times. That would mean the detailed, expanded briefings he's describing would have included then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle, but not Harry Reid (who only became Minority Leader in 2005, once Daschle lost). If Cheney is describing 2005 briefings, they would have included Reid. That's all the more reason why responses from leading Democrats here is required.

That key Democrats were briefed on the NSA program is anything but new. USA Today [20] reported in 2006 that Democratic leaders including Pelosi were repeatedly briefed on the program. There is some marginal dispute about what they were and weren't told, but no dispute about the existence of the briefings and the complete lack of any real efforts by Democrats to stop it or even object.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act? [21]," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy [22]", examines the Bush legacy.

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/22-1

AGREE TO DISAGREE?

budrocket — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:51:55 EST

Paul Jenkins

Posted December 19, 2008 | 12:37 PM (EST)

Mr. Obama Disagrees

You can disagree about the propriety of the auto industry bailout. You can disagree about free trade. You can disagree about a lot of things. But when you say gay people are pedophiles and rapists, that is not a simple disagreement: it is a stupid, hateful position that, say, a President-elect should stay miles away from.

Barack Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration is dreadful. His explanation is, if possible, even worse. He shrinks Warren's grotesque comparisons down to a "disagreement," as if we were talking about ethanol subsidies. But we are not. In fact, we are not even talking about marriage rights, we are talking about demonizing an entire group of Americans for the purpose of religious indoctrination, political gain and financial profit. Or doing so out of sheer hatred and idiocy. Or both.

During this year's primary, Obama suddenly realized after 20 years that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said things that were so beyond the pale that it was worth throwing him under the political bus, and shunning him forever. What those things were, besides loud snippets taken out of context, is not clear, but I am pretty sure Wright has never falsely accused anyone of pedophilia, rape, incest and bestiality, no matter how over-the-top his style may occasionally be. But Wright was scary to lots of people, most of them white, whose fear of a black planet overrode any rational analysis (starting with the fact that if the bourgeois Obamas attended Trinity, that in itself was a pretty sure bet that the church was not fomenting an Afro-centric revolution.) But Obama did what he had to do not to lose too badly in Pennsylvania and Ohio, kicking Wright to the curb, ostensibly because he was "outraged" by the pastor's comments.

That Wright appears to have been replaced by Warren in Obama's heart says a lot about the president-elect's rootlessness and shifting identity. Within a year, he has gone from relying on the advice of a virulently progressive African-American pastor in a Chicago church, to being "friends" with an arch-conservative, bigoted, white pastor from Orange County, and handing the latter the most visible platform a religious leader in America can behold, the presidential inauguration.

Obama's inclusiveness was always conditional, as evidenced by the Wright affair. Obama says we have to "create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable;" but is there anything more disagreeable than being called an incestuous rapist pedophile? There are plenty of people who are not invited to the inauguration, are not part of Obama's circle, and are certainly not asked to give the invocation. If not, we would all be howling at the presence of the good people from the Aryan Nation, the Nation of Islam and sundry other groups. But these groups make the mistake of not only being deeply homophobic, but also of spewing hatred towards a whole slew of other segments (women, Jews, African-Americans, Catholics, Christians, white people, etc). Were they to stick to vilifying gay people, as Warren does, they would be golden, and may even find a place at the all-inclusive Obama table. There is clearly no group in America, perhaps besides Muslims, who could be vilified so openly and officially, and be told to get over it in the name of agreeing to disagree.

Obama's clinical interpretation of his "disagreement" with Warren's hate-speech makes it sound as if he and the pastor are Ron Kirk and Hilda Solis, respectively the nominated US Trade Representative and Labor Secretary, jauntily sparring over free trade with Colombia. That shows a horrible misunderstanding of the state of gay America, or perhaps a case of political cynicism gone way, way too far, even by Washington's loose standards. Two weeks ago a man was killed in New York for being gay, "a lynching in Brooklyn," the New York Times called it. Gay people and those perceived to be gay make up one in six of all reported hate crimes in the United States (and far more go unreported.) Do we really think that there is not a cause and effect between demonizing gay people and the beatings and maimings and murders they suffer disproportionately for being hated? And does Obama really want to be complicit in this persecution? And does he really want to be known as a chief contributor to the well-oiled campaign to deprive gay people of some of the most basic of rights?

We are told that Joseph Lowery, the prominent African-American minister and civil rights leader, will also be involved in the inauguration, and he is a strong supporter of gay rights, including marriage. That's good, but what is this inauguration, some kind of daytime talk show (or CNN at any time for that matter) where every time a gay (or gay friendly) person is featured, there has to be a counterpoint, usually someone who thinks gay people should all die because it says so in the bible? By the way, we are also told that FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME there will be a gay marching band at the inauguration. Now that really makes up for being called a pedophile.

Obama, smooth talker that he is, stumbled in his response to questions about Warren's involvement, finally mumbling something about his "consistent" support of "equality for gay and lesbian Americans." Even that meek pronouncement was a bit of an overstatement: if he opposes same-sex marriage, he is by definition not in favor of equality. Perhaps more importantly, you definitely lose all right to call yourself a supporter of gay rights when you associate yourself so closely with a man who hates gay people. There is nothing more for Obama to say on the subject, except to apologize, explain that he was misguided and/or misinformed, withdraw his invitation to Warren, and never be seen with him again.

In one fell swoop, even before his inauguration, Obama has succeeded in matching Bill Clinton's single worst moment of cynicism, his gratuitous attack on Sister Souljah. And that is exactly what is most painful about Obama's elevation of Warren to "America's pastor:" the gratuitousness of it all. If all goes well, he is four years away from his next election. He received far more backing in time and money from gay people and their supporters than he ever could from Warren's congregation, as Jane Smiley aptly put it. At least Clinton was in some trouble (wasn't he always?) when he lashed out at Sister Souljah. This of course does not make it better, but one could at least pretend that his desperate need to cling to power blinded him to the racism of the occasion.

Obama, by contrast, is on top of the world. What does he need Warren for at this very moment? The small, short-term advantage he gets from associating so closely with a hate-mongerer gives us a pretty good idea of where gay people stand in the president-elect's moral and political calculations. It wasn't always so of course, as I recall at least one fundraising event at the home of a gay couple where Obama raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars at one of the roughest moments of his campaign. There were also the millions of hours of volunteer work put in by gay people all over the country, and endless donations and endorsements.

And we did all this despite sometimes profound misgivings about Obama's position on same-sex marriage, with which he "disagrees." He never could really tell us why, or wouldn't tell us why, hiding behind the circular argument that marriage is between "a man and a woman." It is high time that instead of simply swallowing our pride, we put our money and votes where our mouth is, and that is simply not with those whose opposition to our rights is based in political calculation, cynicism, or a highly misplaced injection of religion into public policy. When we have misgivings, let's listen to them and act on them. Let's not take a wink-wink nod-nod approach to securing our rights: it makes us look weak and does not work. Let those who "disagree" with our very being do so at their own expense. And let those who disagree with hate do so loudly, clearly and consistently, or fail to do so at their own expense. And let us start by walking away from an inauguration at which we will have to sit (or stand a mile away) and watch the man we put so much hope into betray us so deeply in the first seconds of his presidency. For those who insist on going, a hotel room and two train tickets from New York to Washington are newly available.

GUNS, BUTTER & OBAMA

budrocket — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:00:44 EST

Published on Friday, December 19, 2008 by Foreign Policy in Focus

Guns, Butter, and Obama

by Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus

Over the next several months there will be a battle for hearts and minds, but not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The war will be here at home, waged mostly in the halls of Congress, where grim lobbyists for one of the top 15 economies in the world are digging in to preserve their stake in the massive U.S. military budget. With the country in deep recession and resources dwindling for the new administration's programs on health care, education, and the environment, the outcome of this battle may well end up defining the next four years.

But coming to grips with the issue, as one military analyst noted, is likely to resemble the worst of World War I trench warfare. "It will be like the British Army at the Somme," Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information (CDI) told [1] the Boston Globe, "you will just get mowed down by the defense industry."

Up Against the Industry

For starters, there are 185,000 corporations behind those metaphorical machine guns, and a few are formidable indeed: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Alliant Techsystems, United Technologies, Textron, Teledyne, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Texas Instruments, just to name a few.

The World Policy Institute found [2] that dozens of high Bush administration officials were former arms company executives, consultants, or shareholders, and that this network of influence reaches deep into Congress. The combination of lobbying and PAC money that pours into election coffers every two years gives the arms industry enormous influence over the actions of the executive and legislative branches.

The reason is simple: the money at stake is staggering, although nailing down exactly what this country spends on the military is extremely difficult. "Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable," defense expert Chalmers Johnson points out [3]. "All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect."

While the "official" 2009 U.S. military budget is $516 billion, that figure bears little resemblance to what this country actually spends. According to CDI [4], if one pulls together all the various threads that make up the defense spending tapestry - including Home Security, secret "black budget" items, military-related programs outside of the Defense Department, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and such outlays as veterans' benefits - the figure is around $862 billion for the current fiscal year. Johnson says [3] spending is closer to $1.1 trillion.

Even these figures are misleading, since it does not project future costs. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, when the economic and social costs of the Iraq War are finally added up - including decades of treatment for veterans disabled by traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder - the final bill could reach [5] $5 trillion.

Cuts in the Offing?

Given the current economic crisis, even the defense establishment recognizes that some cuts are inevitable. A recent study [1] by a Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Business Board, says that current defense spending is "not sustainable" and recommends scaling back or eliminating some big-ticket weapon systems.

Canceling Lockheed Martin's F-22 stealth fighter and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Virginia Class submarine, the V-22 Osprey, the Zumwalt Class destroyer, and Boeing and Raytheon's missile defense system, combined with some judicious reductions in other budget items, would save [6] $55 billion annually, according to FPIF's Unified Security Budget.

The problem with U.S. military spending isn't just expensive weapons, but the underlying philosophy that the use of force is a valid policy tool. And on that question, the incoming Obama administration has yet to break from the past.

While Obama has pledged [7] to stress diplomacy over warfare, he has also promised to "maintain the most powerful military on the planet" and to increase the armed forces by some 90,000 soldiers. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that will cost at least $50 billion [8] over five years.

The most disturbing initiative, however, is a recent push to "reshape" the armed forces. A recent Defense Department directive elevates [9] "IW" (irregular warfare) to a level "as strategically important as traditional warfare," arguing that for the "foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremists will the central objective of U.S. policy."

This concept is no different than the "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy that failed so disastrously in Southeast Asia two generations ago. The directive assumes that military disasters result from impatience and poor tactics. If you're willing to fight a "Long War," don't kick in too many doors, lunch with the locals, and hand out lots of candy to the kids, you win.

Occupational Hazards

But the key to understanding why the U.S. and NATO are losing in Afghanistan and Iraq is the word "occupation."

Writing almost a century ago, T.E. Lawrence laid out [10] what he called the algebra of occupation: "Rebellion must have an unassailable base...it must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to dominate the whole area. It must have a friendly population...sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Granted mobility, security...time and doctrine...victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical [sic] factors are in the end decisive."

Lawrence was writing about the British occupation of Iraq, but he might as well have been channeling the future. His conclusion should give the Obama administration pause about its plans for a "surge" of troops into Afghanistan: "Against them [the algebraic factors], perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

History is replete with examples of Lawrence's formula too numerous to list. Indeed, the few examples of successful counterinsurgency - the Americans in the Philippines and the British in Malaya - were the result of unique historical factors that that have never transferred well.

The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has been a financial and diplomatic disaster for the United States, devastated the countries we invaded, and is spreading the war to Pakistan and India. The recent terrorist assault on Mumbai was very similar to the September bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, both of them almost certainly "blowback" from the growing involvement of Indian forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and the Pakistani Army in the northwest frontier and tribal territories.

Won't adding 90,000 troops trained in counterinsurgency warfare create pressure to use those troops in places like the Sudan, Somalia, the Gulf of Guinea, Colombia, or any number of regions where U.S. interests collide with local aspirations?

In an article [11] in the most recent Foreign Affairs, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lays out his roadmap for a new U.S. military: "What is dubbed the war on terror is...a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign - a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation. Direct military force will continue to play a role in the long-term effort against the terrorists and other extremists. But over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory."

Gates' strategy embodies the possibility of both hope and disaster. If the United States chooses to keep the military on its current footing - including adding more troops and focusing on the use of "direct military force" - then future wars and occupations will almost certainly torpedo Obama's plans to deliver a more equal and humane society.

If, however, diplomacy and negotiations takes the place of F-16s and Special Forces, then there is yet hope that the world can take a step back and look for alternatives that avoid Lawrence's grim calculations.

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus [12] columnist.

MYTHMAKING

budrocket — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:48:10 EST

Published on Friday, December 19, 2008 by Consortium News

Obama v. Washington Mythmaking

by Robert Parry, Consortium News

Over the years, Washington has evolved into a city of deceptions where semantics cloud reality and where a hazy mix of lies, half-truths and mythology can combine to unleash the devastating military might of the United States for no good reason.

Indeed, if there were to be a serious effort to "change the mindset" that got the United States into the Iraq War - as Barack Obama has promised - one place to start would be to force Official Washington to take a long hard look in the mirror.

During George W. Bush's presidency alone, language has been routinely twisted to justify everything from aggressive war to torture. Those two international crimes were turned into "preventive war" and "alternative interrogation techniques."

But "preventive war" is nothing but a grotesque Orwellian euphemism, since it makes no sense to claim that you're preventing a war by starting a war.

The accurate phrase, especially in the context of the Iraq invasion, would be "aggressive war." That phrase, however, would force an uncomfortable judgment that President Bush and many well-dressed neocons at Georgetown dinner parties were "war criminals" deserving of hanging.

Under the legal standards applied to the Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Tribunals, "aggressive war" was deemed the "supreme international crime" because it sets loose all the atrocities of warfare.

However, rather than liken Bush and the neocons to the Nazis, Official Washington replaced "aggressive war" with the ever-so-much-nicer choices of "preventive" or "preemptive" war.

Official Washington also disdains the word "torture" when it describes actions approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration. It's so much more comforting to talk about "alternative interrogation techniques." [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "Torture Trail Seen Starting with Bush [1]."]

There's also that pleasant denial of reality when one hears reassurances from Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials that "the United States doesn't torture."

So what if simulated drowning from waterboarding, forced nudity, stress positions, sleep deprivation, use of extreme temperatures and similar techniques have long been regarded as torture, especially when used by U.S. enemies or against American troops? If U.S. officials now say those methods aren't torture, then it's time to go with different phrasing.

False narratives play an important role, too, in Washington's self-delusions, by casting U.S. government actions in the most favorable light and those of its enemies in the most negative.

At one level, you have Bush answering the American public's post-9/11 question "why do they hate us?" with the fairy-tale explanation that Islamic extremists "hate our freedoms." Other times, you get outright lying.

For instance, President Bush began insisting in July 2003 that he had no choice but to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to let the United Nations arms inspectors in - even though any cursory reading of recent history would show that Hussein did let the inspectors in, in fall 2002.

It was Bush who forced the inspectors to leave in March 2003 so he could proceed with his shock-and-awe invasion. Yet Bush has continued to invoke this made-up history about Hussein barring the inspectors as recently as Dec. 1 when he spun the tale to ABC News' Charles Gibson.

Like many big-name journalists before him, Gibson didn't contradict Bush's historical revisionism. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Still Lies About Iraq War [2]." For more on the history of Washington deceptions, see Robert Parry's Lost History [3].]

Change with Obama?

The big question now is whether President Obama will bring any meaningful change to the deceptive mindset of the Washington Establishment. Or will Obama bend to Washington's potent conventional wisdom which incorporates these pleasing narratives?

So far, it appears the Washington Establishment is winning out. Obama's transition has been so much to the liking of the power elite that everyone from Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger to the many neoconservative writers on the Washington Post and New York Times editorial pages have been pinching themselves to make sure they're not dreaming.

They have cheered lustily over Obama's national security picks, particularly the decision to retain Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who oversaw President Bush's "surge" of about 30,000 troops in Iraq in 2007-2008 after Donald Rumsfeld balked at doing so [4].

The Gates choice is especially heartwarming to the neocons because it reinforces an important argument as they rehabilitate themselves in the wake of the Iraq fiasco. By keeping Gates, Obama is acquiescing to the myth of the "successful surge," which the neocons see as crucial in validating their war judgment and discrediting their critics.

The "successful surge" myth is built around the widely accepted conventional wisdom that the increase in U.S. troop levels in 2007 brought Iraqi violence under control and carried the United States to the verge of "victory" in Iraq.

This analysis is now considered a nearly indisputable fact by Bush's defenders and most of Washington's elite news media, although it is shared by very few military experts who credit the drop in violence to a variety of other developments, many of which - like the switching of sides among Sunni tribes in Anbar province and the killing of al-Qaeda's murderous leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - predated the "surge."

Other non-surge security factors included:

--The surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia;

--The vicious ethnic cleansing that separated Sunnis and Shiites while forcing several million Iraqis to become refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own;

--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas, "cantonizing" Baghdad.

--The detention of thousands of "military age males" who were rounded up often indiscriminately;

--The cumulative effect of five years of concentrated U.S. firepower on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders, leaving countless thousands dead.

--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the extraordinary trauma affecting Iraqi society has caused many Iraqis to simply look toward their own survival.

Besides being only one of many factors in the reduced violence, the "surge" also failed to bring about the political-economic reconciliation in Iraq that Bush had promised when he announced the build-up in January 2007. Nor has it led to the expected drawdown of troops to below pre-surge levels, with almost 150,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq, about 16,000 more than before the "surge."

Yet, the myth of the "successful surge" has proved extraordinarily powerful.

During the campaign, Obama faced hectoring from media interviewers, such as CBS News' Katie Couric and ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, demanding that he admit he was wrong to oppose the "surge."

For weeks, Obama held firm, insisting that the issue was more complicated than his interviewers wanted to admit. He argued that there were many factors behind Iraq's changed security environment. But ultimately he caved in while being interrogated on Sept. 4 by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.

"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama confessed to O'Reilly. "It's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

Obama may have judged that continued resistance was futile. But his surrender on the "successful surge" myth may have other long-term consequences.

Sizing Up Obama

Having watched him succumb to media pressure - and then seeing him accept Establishment favorite Robert Gates as a Republican holdover in the new Cabinet - the U.S. high command in the Middle East appears to be getting ready to roll over the incoming President on his central campaign promise of a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq.

Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have outlined to Obama a scheme for a modest withdrawal of about 7,000 to 8,000 troops in the first six months of 2009 - bringing the total down to levels that still might be higher than those before the surge two years ago - and then keeping the numbers there until at least June 2009 when additional judgments would be made, the New York Times reported [5] Thursday.

Rather than "change you can believe in," the generals seem to have in mind something closer to Bush's old "stay the course."

Gen. Odierno, who is commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, also said on Dec. 13 that American combat troops will remain in Iraqi cities after June 30, 2009, the date of their scheduled relocation away from the cities under a new "status-of-forces agreement" with the Iraqi government. Odierno said these troops would be "transition teams" advising Iraqi forces.

Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for Odierno, later amplified [6] on the general's comments, characterizing U.S. troops staying behind in the cities as "enablers to Iraqi security forces."

Iraqi critics of the status-of-forces agreement were quick to criticize these American word games of redefining U.S. troops as "transition teams" and "enablers."

"This confirmed our view that U.S. forces will never withdraw from the cities next summer, and they will never leave Iraq by the end of 2011," said Ahmed al-Masoudi, a spokesman for a Shiite parliamentary bloc close to al-Sadr.

The status-of-forces agreement, which is intended to govern the actions of U.S. military forces in Iraq after Dec. 31, 2008, also calls for a complete American military withdrawal by the end of 2011. However, many Iraqis are dubious that the United States intends to live up to its word - and Odierno has noted that the deadline can be renegotiated.

"Three years is a very long time," Odierno told reporters.

In other words, the top U.S. commanders for Iraq have taken the measure of the President-elect and decided that they can openly flout his central campaign promise - that he would give them new orders on his first day in office to begin a monthly withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, culminating after 16 months with only a modest residual force left behind.

Now on Day One, Obama can expect to face clear opposition to his withdrawal plan from the lead generals in the region and from Defense Secretary Gates, who also has spoken out against Obama's timetable. If he presses ahead on a pullout, Obama can expect strong institutional resistance and leaks critical of his leadership.

However, if he reneges on his campaign promise and succumbs to the power play by these Bush holdovers, Obama will be sending another troubling signal - that he can be "handled" - a message that will resonate across Washington and around the world.

Rehabilitating Bush

Besides undercutting Obama, the myth of the "successful surge" has fueled a new narrative favorable to George W. Bush, that his decision to liberate Iraq may have suffered from many problems of execution but he bravely stuck with it until he came upon a winning strategy.

To celebrate this story line, Bush secretly flew to Iraq on Dec. 14 to sign the status-of-forces agreement and boast about an impending U.S. victory.

However, reality reasserted itself when Bush was forced to dodge two shoes thrown by an angry Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, who upstaged Bush's self-congratulatory rhetoric with shouts about the death and destruction that the near-six-year-old war has inflicted on Iraq.

"This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" al-Zaidi shouted as he threw his second shoe (before being wrestled to the ground and beaten by Iraqi security personnel).

Now, Barack Obama must decide if he wants to buy into Bush's war in Iraq, even while vowing to increase U.S. forces in Bush's other war in Afghanistan.

If he does, Obama may find himself equally in need of euphemisms to explain his reversal of a key campaign promise - and to justify the additional widows and orphans who will surely be created over the next several years in Iraq.

The question now is whether Obama will change Washington or whether Washington already has begun to change Obama?

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush [7], was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' [8].

VERY DISAPPOINTED

budrocket — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:42:06 EST

Barney Frank's Rick Warren Statement: "Very Disappointed"

The Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner | December 19, 2008 11:40 AM

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), one of only three openly gay members of the House of Representatives, released a statement harshly criticizing Barack Obama's decision to have Rev. Rick Warren deliver the invocation at his inauguration:

"I am very disappointed by President-elect Barack Obama's decision to honor Reverend Rick Warren with a prominent role in his inauguration. Religious leaders obviously have every right to speak out in opposition to anti-discrimination measures, even in the degrading terms that Rev. Warren has used with regard to same-sex marriage. But that does not confer upon them the right to a place of honor in the inauguration ceremony of a president whose stated commitment to LGBT rights won him the strong support of the great majority of those who support that cause.

"It is irrelevant that Rev. Warren invited Senator Obama to address his congregation, since he extended an equal invitation to Senator McCain. Furthermore, the President-Elect has not simply invited Rev. Warren to give a speech as part of a series in which various views are presented. The selection of a member of the clergy to occupy this uniquely elevated position has always been considered a mark of respect and approval by those who are being inaugurated."

And Joe Solmonese, the president of Human Rights Watch, wrote in the Washington Post Friday about his own disappointment:

It is difficult to comprehend how our president-elect, who has been so spot on in nearly every political move and gesture, could fail to grasp the symbolism of inviting an anti-gay theologian to deliver his inaugural invocation. And the Obama campaign's response to the anger about this decision? Hey, we're also bringing a gay marching band. You know how the gays love a parade.

Yes, the Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of the humongous, evangelical Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., has a sound message on poverty. And certainly, in the world of politics, there is a view that Barack Obama owes Warren for bringing him before fellow evangelicals, despite fierce opposition during the heat of the presidential campaign.
But here's the other thing about Warren, the author of the bestselling book "The Purpose Driven Life": He was a general in the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8, which dissolved the legal marriage rights of loving, committed same-sex couples.
For that reason, inviting Warren to set the tone at the dawn of this new presidency sends a chilling message to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. It makes us uncertain about this exciting, young president-elect who has said repeatedly that we are part of his America, too.

THE TROUBLE WITH CAROLINE

budrocket — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:16:17 EST

Published on Thursday, December 18, 2008 by The Nation

The Trouble With Appointing Caroline Kennedy

by John Nichols

Anyone who purports to be seriously concerned that an untested Caroline Kennedy might "inherit" the U.S. Senate seat from New York has not been paying attention.

Of course, there is something unseemly about the prospect that John F. Kennedy's daughter -- not to mention the niece of Robert and Ted -- might be appointed to the seat being vacated by Secretary of State-designee Hillary Clinton. Most New Yorkers didn't even know that this particular Kennedy lived in the state. And if she has been known for anything until this year it has been for studiously avoided not just the political stage but most serious public-policy debates.

But the notion that Senate appointments go to the most experienced, or qualified, or honorable, or even most politically-appealing contenders is comic in the extreme.

It is not as if Rod Blagojevich was the first governor to think of bartering off a Senate seat to the highest bidder. The governor of Illinois may stand accused of putting a "for sale" sign on a Senate seat, but the only thing that distinguished him from his appointing peers is that he actually dealt in numbers.

When governors are given the authority to fill vacant Senate seats on a whim, the whim will necessarily be a self-serving one. To think otherwise is to imagine that politicians do not worry about whether they will be reelected, about who will support them with money and endorsements, about how to undermine opponents and help friends.

If New York Governor David Paterson ditches Kennedy and appoints another member of a big-name political family, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, to the Senate seat, it won't be because he thought the edgy AG would be the best senator. It will be to eliminate a potential rival at the state level. And so it goes down the appointment list.

The problem is not Caroline Kennedy, or Andrew Cuomo for that matter. It's not Rod Blagojevich or Paterson. It's the fact that governors get to appoint senators.

When a U.S. House seat goes vacant -- due to death or resignation -- the Constitution requires that a special election be held.

When a U.S. Senate seat goes vacant, a Constitutional loophole allows governors in most states to start wheeling and dealing.

It's a lousy loophole.

Governors should not be in the business of appointing senators, be they Kennedys, Cuomos, Smiths or Jones.

The people should make the pick.

The Constitution should be amended to require that all Senate vacancies be filled by special elections.

Then, if Caroline Kennedy wants to become a senator, she can ask the voters to give it to her -- just as her father did in 1952, just as her uncle did in 1962, just as her other uncle did in 1964, and just as Hillary Clinton did in 2000.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Pro-Ethanol, Agribusiness Ex-Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack

budrocket — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:47:36 EST

December 18, 2008

Obama Picks Pro-Ethanol, Agribusiness Ex-Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack to Head Agricultural Department

President-elect Barack Obama has officially nominated former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the Agriculture Department. The pro-ethanol Vilsack will manage a staff of more than 105,000 and a budget of more than $95 billion. We discuss Vilsack’s nomination with Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association and Brian Moore of the National Audubon Society.

Guests:

Brian Moore, Director, Budget and Appropriations, National Audubon Society.

Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Today, we will spend the hour discussing some of President-elect Barack Obama’s latest picks for his cabinet. On Wednesday, Obama officially nominated former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the Agriculture Department and Colorado Senator Ken Salazar to serve as Secretary of the Interior Department.

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA: Together, they will serve as guardians of the American landscape on which the health of our economy and the well-being of our families so heavily depend.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We will discuss the nomination of Ken Salazar in a few minutes, but first we turn to Tom Vilsack.

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA: To lead a Department of Agriculture that helps unlock the potential of a twenty-first century agricultural economy, I can think of no one better than Tom Vilsack. As governor of one of our most abundant farm states, he led with vision, promoting biotech to strengthen our farmers and fostering an agricultural economy of the future that not only grows the food we eat, but the energy that we use. Tom understands that the solution to our energy crisis will be found not in oil fields abroad, but in our farm fields here at home. That’s the kind of leader I want in my cabinet.

JUAN GONZALEZ: As Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack will manage a staff of more than 105,000 and a budget of more than $95 billion.

From 1999 to 2007, Vilsack served as the Democratic governor of Iowa. After a brief run for the presidency in 2007, he worked as an attorney for a corporate law firm that has represented food giants Cargill and ConAgra. He is a strong backer of biofuels and genetically engineered crops. In 2001, the Biotechnology Industry Organization named Vilsack Governor of the Year. On the issue of farm subsidies, he has supported reducing government subsidies of factory farms.

This is part of what Tom Vilsack said on Wednesday after being nominated to be Agriculture Secretary.

TOM VILSACK: As a small-town lawyer, I had the responsibility of helping farm families during tough economic times. I know these people. America’s farmers and ranchers deserve a Secretary of Agriculture that respects them for the contribution they make to all of us every day. I hope to be that secretary. I look forward to working with congressional leaders who share the President-elect’s vision of bringing hope to rural America, of being good stewards of our natural resources, of providing American leadership on climate change, and making America a nation truly dedicated to health and nutrition.

AMY GOODMAN: One of Tom Vilsack’s most vocal supporters has been Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. If Vilsack is confirmed, it will mark the first time the Agriculture Secretary and the Senate Agriculture Committee chair are both Iowans.

We are joined right now by two guests. Ronnie Cummins is with us, the executive director of the Organic Consumers Association. He’s joining us via Skype from the town of Finland, Minnesota. We’re also joined in Washington, D.C. by Brian Moore of the National Audubon Society.

Brian Moore, let’s begin with you. What do you think of Governor Vilsack as the pick for Secretary of Agriculture?

BRIAN MOORE: Well, good morning, Amy. Thanks for having the Audubon Society on.

We’re encouraged by the pick of Governor Vilsack, and for various reasons. First of all, we believe it’s someone we can work with. This governor, as governor and as a presidential candidate, has said he would like to reduce global warming emissions by 70 percent by 2050, a nice environmental position, conservation position on reducing global warming gases. He’s also been a supporter of changing the large subsidy scale, large subsidy system, within the Department of Agriculture and, in fact, moving some of that money to the natural resources conservation programs that they run.

And I think there’s something maybe a lot of people don’t understand about the Department of Agriculture and its importance for conservation, for the environment. Two agencies there, the Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, are very large, very large federal agencies, the Natural Resources Conservation Service with, I believe, an office in every county in America and well over a $3 billion budget, which may be the largest conservation budget in the federal government, with the purpose solely of taking private land and putting it in conservation of one way, shape or form. And Governor Vilsack has been a big supporter of those things, was as a presidential candidate. And we look forward to working with him on these really important conservation issues, if he is to become the Secretary of Agriculture.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Brian Moore, do you have any concern about his close relationship with some of these huge agribusiness companies? For instance, he’s been known to fly on Monsanto jets on more than one occasion.

BRIAN MOORE: Well, it’s an interesting question, but agribusiness and agriculture are things—you know, I understand agriculture, while agribusiness is something different. And I believe it’s important to have a Secretary of Agriculture that understands the agriculture system in the United States, and agribusiness is part of that. So the assumption that the nominee for the Secretary of Agriculture is in bed with these people, I’m not sure about it. My assumption is that this is someone from a farm state who understands agriculture and, more importantly for me, understands conservation, understands the need to reduce greenhouse gases.

AMY GOODMAN: Ronnie Cummins, you are executive director of Organic Consumers Association. Your response to Governor Vilsack and Brian Moore’s depiction of him?

RONNIE CUMMINS: Well, the organic community and sustainable ag community are very disappointed in the appointment of Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. You know, Obama promised us change. What he’s given us here at best is small change. We’ve got a big problem; we need big change.

This notion that genetically engineered crops can feed the world or that, you know, corn-based ethanol and soybean-based biofuels can solve the energy crisis are, of course, completely discredited. If they’re serious about solving the climate crisis, they need to take note of the fact that American industrial agriculture uses about 19 percent of all of our fossil fuels and cranks out about 37 percent of our climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases. So if we’re going to solve the climate crisis with a 80 or 90 percent reduction in greenhouse pollution, not 70 percent, we’re going to have to transform America’s energy-intensive, chemical-intensive genetically engineered agricultural system into an organic [inaudible] in transition to organic system, which can sequester 40 percent of all of our greenhouse gases in the soil, which uses 30 to 50 percent less energy and which can produce healthy food, as opposed to the, you know, current food system, which is subsidized factory farms and junk food.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And could you expand particularly on what have been Vilsack’s stands when it comes to genetically modified foods?

RONNIE CUMMINS: Yes. Vilsack has been an ardent promoter, not only of genetically engineered foods and crops, but also of the extremely controversial biopharmaceutical crops, which involves [inaudible] pharmaceutical drugs or industrial chemicals into food crops. Even, you know, quite a few people in the biotech industry are alarmed by these biopharmaceuticals, since you could get dangerous drugs throughout the food supply. But Vilsack supported biopharm crops when he was governor.

He went further than that. In the year 2005, Vilsack championed a law in Iowa that’s been introduced all over the country, backed by Monsanto and the Farm Bureau. This law, this preemption law, as they’re called, basically takes away the right of municipalities or counties to regulate genetically engineered crops. Vilsack rammed this through, even though it’s extremely unpopular with not only consumers, but small farmers. Vilsack has repeated the myth of the biotech industry that genetically engineered crops can help feed the world, when in fact genetically engineered crops do not produce a higher yield. And he’s spoken about their environmental benefits, when the sum total of ten years of genetically engineered crops in the United States have increased the use of pesticides, not decreased them.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to just clarify, Ronnie Cummins is speaking to us via Skype. And those of you who use Skype know sometimes it can get hung up a bit, but it’s quite remarkable to talk to him and see him, for those who are watching TV, at—are you at your home now in Finland, Minnesota?

RONNIE CUMMINS: I’m in our office in Finland, Minnesota.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s executive director of Organic Consumers Association. Brian Moore, in studio in the nation’s capital, in Washington, D.C., with the National Audubon Society. Your response to Ronnie Cummins’s critique of Vilsack?

BRIAN MOORE: Well, Audubon doesn’t claim to be experts in genetically modified foods, and we certainly see issues with the increased ability and increased opening up of new lands, lands, native grass prairies, marginal lands, that have provided fantastic wildlife benefit over the last—you know, over the history of our nation, lands that have never been broken into crop. And certainly the invention of some new frost-resistant, drought-resistant food strains and seeds concerns us, because it’s taking what was once a native grass prairie or native grassland, or maybe land that’s not—hasn’t been suitable for agriculture in the past, and causing, of course, tillage, runoff, extra nutrients, those types of things. And so, we’re very concerned about opening up new land and losing wildlife habitat.

At the same time, there are government programs that try to help mitigate that. And we’re big supporters of those. They’re the Natural Resource Conservation Service programs. They’re the Conservation Reserve Program. They’re the Wetlands Reserve Program. They’re Sodbuster, Sodsaver. These programs say, if you do decide to break new ground, ground that has no cropping history, then you’re no longer eligible for subsidies of any kind on that land. So, we are concerned about those things. We come at it from an environmental/wildlife point of view, where we want to provide as much habitat for birds and other wildlife as possible. Row crops and increased row crops certainly have contributed to the loss or the decline of the population of common birds in America. And so, it’s a great concern to us.

But we’re encouraged that Governor Vilsack is someone that we’ll be able to work with and talk with about these issues and encouraged by signs that he has given in previous statements that he is going to be a champion of conservation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Brian Moore, those who reluctantly are supporting Vilsack say that some of the other choices that were being floated out there were even more objectionable. Could you talk about that at all?

BRIAN MOORE: Well, at Audubon, we’re of course nonpartisan, and I know there was a handful of other possible nominees for this position coming from within the House, possibly from within the Senate, or other folks, who, in our opinion, would have taken a much less conservation-minded stance on these issues than Governor Vilsack. So we’re encouraged by his nomination, especially given the very, very important role of the Secretary of Agriculture in conservation and in providing habitat and stopping the flow of nutrient and sediment through our waterways. So, out of the lot, we’re very encouraged that this is the pick.

AMY GOODMAN: Ronnie Cummins, while the Audubon Society is applauding the choice of Governor Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary, he still has to go through the confirmation process in the Senate. What are your plans?

RONNIE CUMMINS: Well, we had an online petition campaign in mid-November to stop Vilsack, and we got about 20,000 people to sign it. And then Vilsack announced on November 24th he was no longer a candidate for the appointment, so we stopped the campaign. Well, we’ve cranked it up again as of yesterday at stopvilsack.org. We intend to get 100,000 or more organic consumers and sustainable ag-minded folks across—[no audio]

AMY GOODMAN: Just repeat your last—Ronnie Cummins, just repeat your last two sentences, please. You just got a little hung up there.

RONNIE CUMMINS: OK. We’ve started an online campaign at stopvilsack.org. We need to send a message from hundreds of thousands of organic consumers and sustainable-minded Americans to Obama, to the Senate and to Vilsack, that we want big change, not small change, and that we need to start moving this country toward an energy-efficient, carbon-sequestering, healthy food and farming system that is organic and in transition to organic. We don’t need these biofuels. We don’t need genetically engineered crops. We need to take the climate crisis, the public health crisis, the food crisis seriously and do something about it. We need major change, not small change.

AMY GOODMAN: Ronnie Cummins, thanks for being with us, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association, speaking to us from his office in Finland, Minnesota via Skype. Brian Moore, you’ll stay with us to talk about the pick of Ken Salazar as head of—well, Secretary of the Interior. Brian Moore, with the National Audubon Society.

TINKERER

budrocket — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:20:30 EST

Jeffrey Feldman

Posted December 18, 2008 | 12:28 PM (EST)

On Civil Rights, Obama Must Lead, Not Tinker

News that Obama invited Rick Warren to say a prayer at the inauguration is a troubling sign for a president elected to be a new kind of leader. The decision suggests that on civil rights issues, Barack Obama might be more of a tinkerer than a leader.

So far, Obama has shown himself to be a bold leader on the economy. His proposal to spend a trillion dollars in public works projects is nothing less than visionary in the current environment. Not all policy experts will agree with the fine print of Obama's economic appointments or proposals, but the fact that he sees investment public works as a key to national recovery tips the Reagan era of trickle down economics over. In a time of economic upheaval that sends people back to The Grapes of Wrath to understand what comes next, Obama's public works proposal shows real leadership.

On civil rights, however, the same cannot be said. Rather than lead, he seems to be tinkering.

Marriage equality for gays and lesbians is not just some "social issue" akin to school uniforms, warning labels on music or smoking in restaurants. It is the current epicenter of the civil rights movement in America.

That has not always been the case. When Lincoln took office, the abolition of slavery was the epicenter. When Wilson took office, the women's suffrage movement was the epicenter. When FDR took office, poverty was the epicenter. When Kennedy took office, segregation was the epicenter.

Thinking about Obama's presidency in terms of an 'epicenter' of civil rights changes how we think about Rick Warren speaking at the inauguration.

Rick Warren is not just a pastor opposed to gay rights. He is a highly political leader of a mega-church who has compared abortion to the Holocaust and opposed marriage reform in terms equivalent to the bigoted plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia -- the landmark 1967 civil rights case overturning anti-miscegenation marriage laws. In an era where gay rights are the epicenter, Rick Warren is a widely recognized voice arguing against those rights.

Translating Rick Warren into the terms of previous civil rights eras is the key to seeing why his role at Obama's inauguration is so troubling. By comparison, if this were Lincoln's inauguration, Rick Warren would have been the equivalent pro-slavery pastor giving the invocation. If this were Wilson's inauguration, Rick Warren would have been the equivalent of an anti-women's suffrage pastor saying a prayer. For FDR, he would have been the same as inviting a pastor opposed to rights for the poor. For Kennedy, he would have been the same as inviting a pastor who spoke out repeatedly about the dangers of desegregation.

In each of these cases, for the president-elect to invite the a voice known for arguing against progress -- and to do so in the name of political peacemaking, as Barack Obama has done with Rick Warren -- would have revealed a tinkerer on civil rights, not a leader.

The denial of marriage rights for certain Americans is not, of course, a "social issue," as President-elect Obama has argued. Like the denial of citizenship to African-Americans, the denial of voting rights to women, the denial of basic needs to the impoverished, and the refusal to dismantle Jim Crow laws, the denial of marriage rights is a persistent failure in our system. It is a failure that cannot be fixed by tinkering with politics. It can only be fixed by persistent vision and leadership.

On this crucial subject of civil rights leadership in a flawed system, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote the following in 1987:

I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever "fixed" at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago. (T. Marshall 1987)

The lesson Marshall taught us then is still valuable, today. To all those who argue that our nation's perfection was cast in stone from the start -- and that we must maintain all first principles if we are to survive -- you are wrong. The government that the framers first devised was weak with contradictions from the start, and as a result we have had to go through painful periods of correction, sometimes to make it work. Anyone saying that definitions and institutions should not be allowed to grow to achieve greater justice for all is either unaware of Marshall's wisdom or working actively to undermine it.

In the context that Marshall defined, each president is faced with a choice: to lead the nation towards greater justice or to tinker with the current system and leave the leadership to someone else.

If President-elect Obama wants to speak to Rick Warren under the guise of leadership on civil rights this can be done quite easily without including him in the inauguration program. Obama can initiate a 'Civil Rights Dialogue' as president and invite Warren to come forward to air his views on that public stage. In that context, Obama can make it clear that he views Warren's anti-civil rights positions as impediments to the contemporary effort to end government sanctioned injustice.

For now, putting Rick Warren on the inauguration dais is tantamount to leaving that civil rights leadership to someone else. After 8 years of George W. Bush emboldening opponents to equal rights, Americans deserve a President who seizes every opportunity to champion justice for all.

And as it just so happens, that is exactly the kind of president a majority of Americans think they chose in November.

So make it right, Mr. President-elect. Put your outreach to Warren in a context that shows your commitment to greater and greater justice in America, and take him off the inaugural program.

On civil rights, Americans are tired of tinkers.

(cross-posted from Frameshop)

WAR CRIMES

budrocket — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:06:29 EST

Published on Thursday, December 18, 2008 by The Nation

Will War Crimes Be Outed?

by Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

As the officials of the Bush administration pack up in Washington and move into their posh suburban homes around the country, will they be able to rest easy, or will they be haunted by the fear that they will be held accountable for war crimes committed during their reign?

There are many reasons to anticipate that the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress will let sleeping dogs lie. Attention to criminal acts by the former administration would probably anger Republicans, whose support Obama is hoping to win for his first priority, his economic program. Democratic Congressional leaders have known a great deal about Bush administration lawlessness, and in some cases have even given it their approval--making an unfettered review seem unlikely.

Some of Obama's own top appointees would undoubtedly receive scrutiny in an unconstrained investigation--Obama's reappointed defense secretary Robert Gates, for example, has had responsibility not only for Guantánamo but also for the incarceration of tens of thousands of Iraqis in prisons in Iraq like Camp Bucca, which the Washington Post described [1] in a headline as "a Prison Full of Innocent Men," without even a procedure for determining their guilt or innocence--unquestionably a violation of the Geneva Conventions in and of itself.

But the repose of the Cheneys, Bushes, Gonzaleses and Rumsfelds may not turn out to be so undisturbed. In his notorious torture memo, Alberto Gonzales warned about "prosecutors and independent counsels" who may in the future decide to pursue "unwarranted charges" based on the US War Crimes Act's prohibition on violations of the Geneva Conventions. While no such charges are likely to be brought anytime soon, neither are they likely to vanish. In the short run, Obama and his team face inescapable questions about the legal culpability of the Bush administration. And in the long run, such charges are likely to grow only more unavoidable once the former officials of that administration have lost the authority to quash them.

In April Obama said that if elected, he would have his attorney general initiate a prompt review of Bush-era action to distinguish between possible "genuine crimes" and "really bad policies."

"If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," Obama told [2] the Philadelphia Daily News. He added, however, that "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."

Obama's nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, speaking to the American Constitution Society in June, described [3] Bush administration actions in terms that sound a whole lot more like "genuine crimes" than like "really bad policies":

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.... We owe the American people a reckoning."

A Reckoning?

While attention has focused on whether, once president, Obama will move quickly to close Guantánamo, shut down secret prisons, halt rendition and ban torture, there's a less visible struggle over whether and how to provide a reckoning for war crimes past.

A growing body of legal opinion holds that Obama will have a duty to investigate war crimes allegations and, if they are found to have merit, to prosecute the perpetrators.

In a December 3 Chicago Sun-Times op-ed [4], law professors Anthony D'Amato (the Leighton Professor at Northwestern University School of Law) and Jordan J. Paust (the Mike & Thersa Baker Professor at the Law Center of the University of Houston) ask whether president-elect Barack Obama will have "the duty to prosecute or extradite persons who are reasonably accused of having committed and abetted war crimes or crimes against humanity during the Bush administration's admitted 'program' of 'coercive interrogation' and secret detention that was part of a 'common, unifying' plan to deny protections under the Geneva Conventions."

They answer, "Yes."

"Under the US Constitution, the president is expressly and unavoidably bound to faithfully execute the laws." The 1949 Geneva Conventions "expressly and unavoidably requires that all parties search for perpetrators of grave breaches of the treaty" and bring them before their own courts for "effective penal sanctions" or, if they prefer, "hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party."

The statement is particularly authoritative--and particularly striking--because Paust is also a former captain in the United States Army JAG Corps and member of the faculty at the Judge Advocate General's School.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights says [5] that one of Barack Obama's first acts as president should be to "instruct his attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush Administration officials who gave the green light to torture."

Parallel to the legal community, members of Congress and president-elect Obama are trying to chart a strategy [6] that avoids the appearance of seeking to punish Bush administration officials without appearing blatantly oblivious to their apparent war crimes. According to [7] the AP's Lara Jakes Jordan, "Two Obama advisors say there's little--if any--chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage." Instead, "Obama is expected to create a panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission to study interrogations, including those using waterboarding and other tactics that critics call torture."

Asked if Bush administration officials would face prosecution for war crimes, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy flatly said [8], "In the United States, no," but he does intend to continue to investigate [9] Bush administration officials and their interrogation policies. "Personally, I would like to know exactly what happened. Torture is going to be a major issue."

Continue the Cover-Up?

President-elect Obama may well seek to delay taking a stand for or against such accountability actions. But he is likely to be confronted early in his administration by choices about whether to continue or terminate legal cover-up operations the Bush administration currently has under way.

For example, the Bush administration has blocked the civil suit against US officials by Canadian Maher Arar [10] for his "rendition" to Syria and his torture there by invoking the "state secrets" privilege. According to Christopher Anders [11], senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, they have appointed a prosecutor to investigate the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations, but the investigation is limited only to whether crimes were committed in relation to the destruction of the tapes--not whether what was being videotaped is a crime. The administration has refused [12] to cooperate with the trial of twenty-six Americans, mostly CIA agents, who kidnapped a terrorism suspect in Milan and flew him to Egypt where, he says, he was tortured. And they have refused to provide secret documents to the British High Court in the case of Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed that may demonstrate that US officials were complicit in his torture in Morocco.

If the Obama administration continues the Bush administration's efforts to prevent investigators from investigating and courts from hearing such cases, it will rapidly become part of the cover-up. If it begins to, at a minimum, stop obstructing such proceedings, the result could be a rapid crumbling of the wall of silence the Bush administration has tried so assiduously to build around its "war on terror."

A bipartisan report [13] issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 11 will make it far more difficult to evade the responsibility of holding Bush administration officials legally accountable for war crimes. Released by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain after two years of investigation, the report concluded:

The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own.... The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.... Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.

In an interview [14] published in the Detroit News, Senator Levin said he was not responsible for deciding whether officials should be prosecuted for authorizing torture, but he admitted that there is enough evidence that victims of abuse could file civil lawsuits against their assailants. Levin also suggested that the Obama administration "needs to look for ways in which people can be held accountable for their actions."

An Accountability Movement

Outside the Beltway, a movement to hold Bush administration officials accountable for torture and other war crimes after they leave office is gradually emerging. It received a boost when over a hundred lawyers and activists met in Andover, Massachusetts on September 20 at a conference [15] entitled "Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals." The conference created an ongoing committee to coordinate accountability efforts. At the close, conference convener Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law noted more than twenty strategies and specific actions that had been proposed, ranging from the state felony prosecutions proposed by former district attroney Vincent Bugliosi to the international prosecutions pioneered by the Center for Constitutional Rights' Rumsfeld cases; and from impeaching Bush appointees like Federal Judge Jay Bybee to public shaming of torture-tainted former officials like ohn Yew, now a professor at the University of California Law School.

One of proposals discussed at the Andover conference was the creation of a citizens' War Crimes Documentation Center, modeled on the special office set up by the Allied governments before the end of World War II to investigate and document Nazi war crimes. Such a center could be the nexus for research, education and coordination of a wide range of civil society forces in the US and abroad that are demanding accountability. It could bring together the extensive but scattered evidence already available, to compile a narrative of what actually happened in the Bush administration. It could help or pressure Congress to conduct investigations to fill in the blanks. It could pull together high-profile coalitions to campaign around the issue of accountability for specific crimes like torture. If Obama does initiate some kind of investigating commission, such a center could provide it with information and help hold it accountable.

A Moral Education

There are a myriad of reasons for urgently holding the Bush regime to account, ranging from preventing unchallenged executive action from setting new legal precedent to providing a compelling rationale for the immediate cessation of bombing civilians in the escalating Afghan war.

But the issue raised by Bush administration war crimes is even larger than any person's individual crimes. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." The long history of aggressive war, illegal occupation, and torture, from the Philippines to Iraq, have given the American people a moral education that encourages us to countenance war crimes. If we allow those who initiated and justified the illegal conquest and occupation of Iraq and the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to go unsanctioned, we teach the world--and ourselves--a lesson about what's OK and legal.

As countries like Chile, Turkey and Argentina can attest, restoration of democracy, civic morality and the rule of law is often a slow but necessary process, requiring far more than simply voting a new party into office. It requires a wholesale rejection of impunity for the criminal acts of government officials. As Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) put it [16], "We owe it to the American people and history to pursue the wrongdoing of this administration whether or not it helps us politically.... Our actions will properly define the Bush Administration in the eyes of history."

Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below, and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond [17] (Metropolitan/Holt). He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work. He is a co-founder of WarCrimesWatch.org. [18]

Brendan Smith is a legal analyst whose books include Globalization From Below and, with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, of In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan). He is current co-director of Global Labor Strategies [19] and UCLA Law School's Globalization and Labor Standards Project, and has worked previously for Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and a broad range of unions and grassroots groups. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, CBS News.com, YahooNews and the Baltimore Sun. Contact him at smithb28@gmail.com.

OBAMA'S TALKING POINTS

budrocket — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:39:11 EST

Sam Stein stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

Obama's Talking Points On Rick Warren

December 18, 2008 11:13 AM

At his press conference on Thursday, Barack Obama for the first time addressed the flurry of protest that has erupted over the choice of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.

Stressing his own advocacy of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, the president-elect raised a relevant anecdote from his biography as a defense.

"A couple of years ago I was invited to Rick Warren's church to speak despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion," he said. "Nevertheless I had an opportunity to speak, and that dialogue I think is part of what my campaign's been all about, that we're not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans."

The remarks came after progressives and, in particular, the gay and lesbian community criticized the president-elect's decision to give such a prominent role to a pastor whose views on torture, gay rights, and stem cell research don't align with Obama's stated agenda.

Indeed, the backlash against the Warren selection has been swift and fierce, putting Obama's inauguration team largely on the defensive. A source sent over a copy of talking points making the rounds among the president-elect's staff in order to rebut these critiques. A transition official would not confirm or dispute the material, but did acknowledge that it sounded "an awful lot like what I have been saying."

• This will be the most open, accessible, and inclusive Inauguration in American history.

• In keeping with the spirit of unity and common purpose this Inauguration will reflect, the President-elect and Vice President-elect have chosen some of the world's most gifted artists and people with broad appeal to participate in the inaugural ceremonies.

• Pastor Rick Warren has a long history of activism on behalf of the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. He's devoted his life to performing good works for the poor and leads the evangelical movement in addressing the global HIV/AIDS crisis. In fact, the President-elect recently addressed Rick Warren's Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health to salute Warren's leadership in the struggle against HIV/AIDS and pledge his support to the effort in the years ahead.
• The President-elect disagrees with Pastor Warren on issues that affect the LGBT community. They disagree on other issues as well. But what's important is that they agree on many issues vital to the pursuit of social justice, including poverty relief and moving toward a sustainable planet; and they share a commitment to renewing America's promise by expanding opportunity at home and restoring our moral leadership abroad.

• As he's said again and again, the President-elect is committed to bringing together all sides of the faith discussion in search of common ground. That's the only way we'll be able to unite this country with the resolve and common purpose necessary to solve the challenges we face.

• The Inauguration will also involve Reverend Joseph Lowery, who will be delivering the official benediction at the Inauguration. Reverend Lowery is a giant of the civil rights movement who boasts a proudly progressive record on LGBT issues. He has been a leader in the struggle for civil rights for all Americans, gay or straight.

• And for the very first time, there will be a group representing the interests of LGBT Americans participating in the Inaugural Parade.

The inclusion of Rev. Joseph Lowery, an icon of the civil rights movement and a respected progressive voice is, perhaps, the Obama team's most obvious defense. One progressive pastor I spoke with on Wednesday, who was critical of the Warren selection, said she would have been fine had the two pastors merely switched spots in the program.

But the inclusiveness of the inauguration is an important point to stress as well. At his 2005 inaugural, George W. Bush tapped Rev. Dr. Louis Leon to deliver the invocation. Like Obama and Warren, the two shared a commitment to combating AIDS in Africa, as well as a friendship from time spent in each other's company. But Leon was and is a progressive voice. And his selection in '04 sparked a lot of interest, though little of the outrage that we see with Warren.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

budrocket — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:07:06 EST

Published on Thursday, December 18, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

Rick Warren: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

by Michelle Goldberg

If nothing else, Rick Warren is a miracle worker in the realm of public relations. He is a man who compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn't believe in evolution. He recently dismissed the social gospel - the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality - as "Marxism in Christian clothing". Yet thanks to his amiable attitude and jocular tone, he has managed to create a popular image for himself as a moderate, even progressive force in American life, a reasonable, compassionate alternative to the punitive, sex-obsessed inquisitors of the religious right.

And Barack Obama, who should know better, has helped him do it.

Yesterday brought the news that Warren would be giving the invocation at Obama's inauguration. For Warren, this is a bit of a coup, since he seems to aspire to be the country's unofficial national pastor, a role once occupied by Billy Graham. He already played an unprecedented role in the 2008 presidential election when he conducted back-to-back interviews with John McCain and Obama, which essentially made him the moderator, and his church the stage, for the first joint event of the campaign season. By participating in that exercise, Obama lent Warren undeserved legitimacy as a kind of national moral arbiter.

Still, his taking part could be defended as an act of canny political outreach. After all, one of the great things about Obama was the way he tried to connect with audiences that hadn't previously been receptive to Democratic messages. It made sense for Obama to try and win the vote of Warren's followers. But honouring Warren by giving him a major role at the inauguration does not make sense. It is a slap in the face to many of Obama's staunchest supporters.

That's especially true given how bittersweet the election was for many gay people, who largely cheered the new president while grieving the loss of same-sex marriage in California. Warren supported the ballot initiative that stripped gay Californians of their marriage rights. He made the absurd argument that legalised gay marriage constituted a threat to the first amendment rights of religious conservatives.

If gay marriage were to remain legal, Warren claimed, those who opposed it could somehow be charged with hate speech should they express their views. This is an utterly baseless canard, but one with great currency in the religious right, the milieu from which Warren consistently draws his ideas.

Recently, Democrats have been much concerned with wooing religious voters, and with pushing back against the conservative calumny that they are a party hostile to faith. But the way for a progressive party to do that should be to enlarge the scope of discussion about morality in American life, not to pander to the same prejudices as the religious right. Democrats could foreground religious leaders who articulate the moral imperative of fighting poverty, torture and inequality. They don't need to get religion by becoming more hostile to gay people and to reproductive rights. Rather, they need to empower the many religious voices who support both.

Warren is sometimes credited with broadening evangelical activism to transcend religious right preoccupations, but that's a bit deceptive. Much has been made of his work on HIV/Aids in Africa. In fact, though, Warren has taken the standard Christian conservative approach to the epidemic, which favours abstinence and prayer over condoms and sex education. I once attended Sunday services at the church of Martin Ssempa, one of Warren's protégés in Uganda and a major force in that country's devastating move away from safe-sex campaigns. It is a heartbreaking thing to watch a tongue-speaking faith-healer promise a room full of sobbing people - many of them poor, many infected with HIV - that Jesus can cure them, if only they believe in him unconditionally (belief demonstrated, of course, in part by tithing generously).

Meanwhile, while Warren says he opposes torture, he doesn't treat the subject with anything like the zeal he accords gay marriage and abortion. As he recently told Beliefnet.com, he never even brought up the subject with the Bush administration, where he had considerable access. Just before the 2004 election, he sent out an e-mail to his congregation outlining the five issues that he considered "non-negotiable". "In order to live a purpose-driven life - to affirm what God has clearly stated about his purpose for every person he creates - we must take a stand by finding out what the candidates believe about these five issues, and then vote accordingly," he wrote. The issues were abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning and euthanasia. Torture, apparently, is something that decent Christians can disagree on.

One doesn't expect Obama to surround himself only with spiritual advisers that meet some liberal litmus test. It is savvy to try and co-opt Warren, who seems to love proximity to power and who might otherwise be a strong critic.

Nevertheless, further elevating this terribly powerful man necessarily comes at the expense of gay people, secularists, religious minorities and feminists. Rick Warren is a deeply polarising figure, and has said things far more offensive than anything that ever passed the lips of Jeremiah Wright. He has every right to preach as he pleases and to build his fortune, but he does not belong at the centre of American civic life, and Obama shouldn't put him there.

Shoes

budrocket — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:17:23 EST

Published on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

If Obama Wants Them To Keep Their Shoes On

by CommonDreams.org

by Tom Gallagher

While everyone else is trying to figure out how Muntadar al-Zeidi got that second shoe off so fast or whether it was just that Iraqi security didn't bother to tackle him until he ran out of shoes, President-elect Obama might want to figure out when the shoes might start flying in his direction. After all, on January 20, Bush's Iraq War becomes his. And so does his Afghanistan War, which could prove the greater problem.

By all appearances, Obama is in for something of a honeymoon so far as Iraq is concerned. He did, after all, oppose the war when Bush first proposed it, even if he did vote to fund it once he arrived in the US Senate. And given his antiwar campaign stance, combined with the Bush Administration's recently negotiated agreement for a broader withdrawal of US forces than Obama himself campaigned on, the American public will likely cut him some slack for some time.

After all, when even the left-wing Nation magazine is only calling on him to stick to his sixteen month withdrawal timetable, a broad movement for immediate withdrawal doesn't seem in the offing.

All this, of course, only holds if nothing changes significantly in Iraq and the public response to Bush's shoe-ducking is a good reminder of just how strong the hostility to the occupation runs there. But if American casualties remain low, Obama can likely go a considerable period of time before being seriously challenged on this front. The fact is, that while John McCain could hardly have stated his position more poorly in speaking of a potential hundred year occupation of Iraq, his assessment that Americans could live with a long-term military presence in the country so long as it was pacified was probably right. There are, after all, no demonstrations calling for the removal of American troops from South Korea and that war ended over fifty years ago.

Obama will not and should not get a grace period on Afghanistan, however. He calls it a "good war" and supports sending more troops. And it is far from clear that the worst doesn't lay before us. Afghanistan has always been a sticky matter for the American antiwar movement, though. For one thing, there were many who opposed the Iraq War but actually supported the Afghanistan invasion, at least at the outset. And even as more people started to see it as a reflex reaction to 9-11, a war entered into to make someone pay for that attack, the larger and more heinous Iraq War drew away much of the attention that might have gone there. For the antiwar movement it's been pretty much remained an add-on: We oppose the War in Iraq (and Afghanistan.) But the new Administration's enthusiastic embrace of this war seems to leave the antiwar movement little choice but to confront it, ready or not.

If anything, the White House (regardless of occupant) has an even better enemy in the Taliban than it did in Saddam Hussein and that goes a long way. But they don't have much more than that. It is largely forgotten today that the Taliban offered to turn Osama bin-Laden over to a third party for trial if he was captured because their offer was instantly dismissed as unacceptable, if not simply absurd. America would find bin-Laden and America would try him. But seven years later, what have we achieved? Bin-Laden remains at large and the Taliban is resurgent.

It's hard to know what to make of Obama's stance on this. Does he really believe in this war or was it mostly campaign rhetoric? But we have little choice but to take him at his word and start to push the outlines of an argument against the war into mainstream debate. Opponents do have a couple of strong cards to play. One is history. Here there are two stories. The first is that of prior US support for fundamentalist groups like Al Queda as part of an effort to defeat the Soviet Union in its Afghanistan war and the devastating blowback it has brought. The other is the Soviet Union's ultimate military failure, despite its relative advantage of geographic proximity compared to us. Were our goal to convince fundamentalists that the US wishes to engage in a worldwide conflict with Islam, this war might work, but we are unlikely to succeed in much else.

But the trump card may be economic. The new Administration rides in on high hopes that are only magnified by the deepening economic crisis, to the point where talk of a Second New Deal has become a commonplace. The surest way to derail those hopes will be to continue pouring what now amounts to trillions of dollars into the sinkholes of the wars initiated by the Bush Administration. And if Barack Obama doesn't want to some day himself be pelted with shoes, or whatever they throw in Afghanistan, he'll figure that out – fast.

Tom Gallagher is an antiwar activist living in San Francisco. He may be reached at TGTGTGTGTG@aol.com [1], although he hopes that anyone considering sending along unpleasantries will take it out on their significant other instead

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Obama is just hewing to the old Dem tactic to end depressions - Get a war.

I'm afraid that he is just a 'smarter Bush' with upgraded handlers from the MIC and ruling corporate oligarchy calling the shots. One has only to closely examine his appointees.

But I could be wrong ! - AND hope I am...