Tell Me Again, Why Is Obama Being Popular With Our Allies a Bad Thing?
Posted July 21, 2008 | 06:20 PM (EST)
I understand why John McCain's campaign is desperately looking for negatives in Obama's overseas trip. But why have so many in the media internalized the McCain campaign's claptrap?
Here is the McCain line on Europe, delivered via Politico by a nameless campaign aide: "I don't know that people in Missouri are going to like seeing tens of thousands of Europeans screaming for The One."
And here was Gloria Borger on CNN, responding to Wolf Blitzer's assertion that Obama seemed to be on top of his game by pulling out the Straight Talk talking points (and leaving logic and rational thinking in a pile on the studio floor):
...as the McCain campaign points out, he can't appear to be seen as running for the president of Europe. He's going to be really cheered in Europe, he's going to give a huge speech. He's going to have a lot of support there. But he's running for the president of the United States. And so they have to walk a very, very fine line here because they don't want to be seen having too many adoring people after him in Europe because he's running for president of the United States.
What do Borger and the McCain campaign think would play better in Missouri, Obama getting off the plane in Germany and having the locals throw tomatoes at him? Would that endear him to the people in Middle America -- who, in McCain World, are like an insecure girlfriend, panicked by just the thought of someone else finding their guy attractive?
Sadly, this absurd line of thinking is spreading fast. Here is the L.A. Times' Michael Finnegan:
In Europe, where he is highly popular, Obama plans a speech in Berlin on U.S. relations with allies. He will probably find a warm, even rapturous, reception -- which poses its own challenges. 'There's such a thing as being too popular overseas,' said [William] Galston, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 'And that may create some misgivings here at home.'
The Baltimore Sun's Washington bureau chief Paul West ominously warns: "European adulation for Obama will make him the continent's poodle."
And even Maureen Dowd appears to have bought into the McCainites' Euro-phobia, suggesting Obama "can't be seen as too insidery with the Euro-crats" lest Obama-wary Americans "wonder what he's doing there, when they can't pay for gas, when the dollar is the Euro's chew toy, when Bud is going Belgian and when the Chrysler Building has Arab landlords." And don't forget all those German cars on our roads. Which we can't afford to drive because gas is too expensive (for which, according to McCain, we can blame Obama).
Of course, at no point does the McCain campaign or anyone in the media point out what, exactly, is the danger to America if our closest allies actually, you know, don't hate us.
They also fail to mention that along with being our allies, the European countries Obama is visiting are also democracies -- so it's a lot easier for their leaders to make nice with us if their constituents don't view our president as an object of disdain and ridicule.
And, as Jason Linkins points out, George Bush keeps giving them reasons for ongoing disdain and ridicule. As does McCain. Is it really better for America's standing in the world to have a president who doesn't know that Czechoslovakia no longer exists and who thinks there is a border between Iraq and Pakistan?
Iraq has shown us what an essentially go-it-alone war looks like.
And the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan -- resulting in more U.S. troop fatalities there in May and June than in Iraq -- is a tragic reminder of the consequences of a U.S. military spread too thin, and of not having our allies fully backing our efforts.
Given a recent poll showing the German public prefers Obama to McCain 67 percent to 6 percent, it's no surprise that McCain would try to spin his opponent's popularity there as a black mark on his record. It's also no surprise that McCain isn't willing to admit that our allies' antipathy toward Bush and his policies -- exacerbated by the contempt the Bushies always seemed to delight in directing at them (see Rummy on "Old Europe") -- has cost us dearly in blood, treasure, and goodwill. But it is a surprise that the media are so eagerly parroting the "popular is a problem" meme.
Thankfully, most Americans understand that having a president who is lauded around the world is infinitely better than having one who is loathed.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Bob Herbert - N.Y. Times (July 22, 2008)
July 22, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Madness and Shame
By BOB HERBERT
You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.
In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.
She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror — regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say — was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.
This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”
Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused — that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it — rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”
When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.
To get a sense of the heights of madness scaled in this anything-goes atmosphere, consider a brainstorming meeting held by military officials at Guantánamo. Ms. Mayer said the meeting was called to come up with ways to crack through the resistance of detainees.
“One source of ideas,” she wrote, “was the popular television show ‘24.’ On that show as Ms. Mayer noted, “torture always worked. It saved America on a weekly basis.”
I felt as if I was in Never-Never Land as I read: “In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer ‘gave people lots of ideas’ as they sought for interrogation models.”
Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst.” A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.
“After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees’ cases in depth,” she said, “they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”
The U.S. shamed itself on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s watch, and David Addington and others like him were willing to manipulate the law like Silly Putty to give them the legal cover they desired. Ms. Mayer noted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, believed that “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”
After reflecting on major breakdowns of law that occurred in prior administrations, including the Watergate disaster, Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.”
Americans still have not come to grips with this disastrous stain on the nation’s soul. It’s important that the whole truth eventually come out, and as many of the wrongs as possible be rectified.
Ms. Mayer, as much as anyone, is doing her part to pull back the curtain on the awful reality. “The Dark Side” is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth.
Op-Ed Columnist
Madness and Shame
By BOB HERBERT
You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.
In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.
She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror — regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say — was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.
This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”
Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused — that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it — rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”
When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.
To get a sense of the heights of madness scaled in this anything-goes atmosphere, consider a brainstorming meeting held by military officials at Guantánamo. Ms. Mayer said the meeting was called to come up with ways to crack through the resistance of detainees.
“One source of ideas,” she wrote, “was the popular television show ‘24.’ On that show as Ms. Mayer noted, “torture always worked. It saved America on a weekly basis.”
I felt as if I was in Never-Never Land as I read: “In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer ‘gave people lots of ideas’ as they sought for interrogation models.”
Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst.” A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.
“After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees’ cases in depth,” she said, “they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”
The U.S. shamed itself on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s watch, and David Addington and others like him were willing to manipulate the law like Silly Putty to give them the legal cover they desired. Ms. Mayer noted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, believed that “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”
After reflecting on major breakdowns of law that occurred in prior administrations, including the Watergate disaster, Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.”
Americans still have not come to grips with this disastrous stain on the nation’s soul. It’s important that the whole truth eventually come out, and as many of the wrongs as possible be rectified.
Ms. Mayer, as much as anyone, is doing her part to pull back the curtain on the awful reality. “The Dark Side” is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Robert Creamer - Huffington Post (July 21, 2008)
The Significance of Obama's Foreign Trip
Posted July 21, 2008 | 10:38 AM (EST)
Sometimes it pays to be careful what you wish for. John McCain's challenge to Barack Obama to visit Iraq and Afghanistan created the premise for Obama's trip to the Middle East and Europe this week. That trip may become a major watershed event in the presidential contest.
It may also one day be viewed as a significant event in the broader history of our country's relationship with the rest of the world.
How can a foreign trip affect Obama's domestic presidential campaign?
Of course it doesn't hurt that on the first day of Obama's journey, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki edged very close to endorsing his plan for American troops to withdraw from Iraq. In an interview in Der Spiegel he is quoted as saying: "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes".
The trip will highlight the fact that it isn't just the American people who want us to leave Iraq -- all of the polls of the Iraqi people want us out as well -- and now so does the U.S.-backed Prime Minister of Iraq. That leaves Bush, McCain and the neo cons as the only people around still committed to their reckless program of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq far into the future. It puts in full relief McCain's flawed judgment when it comes to foreign policy.
Of course, by making his first stop the front lines in Afghanistan, Obama also emphasized once again how Bush, McCain and the neo cons have taken their eye off the ball by diverting resources to an "elective" war in Iraq and away from the central front where terrorist cells intent on attacking the United States are actually organized.
But there's more. Swing voters are eager to vote for change, but one of the questions holding them back is whether Barack Obama can lead America in a dangerous world. More than anything else, this week's trip will allow them to imagine Barack Obama as Commander in Chief -- to get a sense of how he looks on the world stage.
Obama's "world stage presence" should do more than simply reassure them. It will provide a demonstration of how fundamentally Obama will improve the way people around the globe -- and especially young people -- view the United States.
Obama's calm, friendly, but decisive style is perfectly suited to the world of international politics. If he is elected, his own story and background will instantly engage the imagination of young people -- especially the 80% of young people who live in India, China and the developing world. The very fact that our country would elect a person of color -- someone like them -- to lead us will say more to them about the soul of our people than thousands of pronouncements of policy or millions of dollars spent on "public diplomacy."
Obama's ability to inspire will do more than anything else to turn him -- and America -- once again into a beacon of hope and possibility for the billions of people who desperately hope for a better life.
People's fundamental life-long views are shaped when they are young. The mental frames they use to place the political world around them into context -- to understand the meaning of what they see and hear -- are largely formed when they are in their late teens and early twenties.
Nothing is more critical to our own national security than assuring that future generations of leaders around the world think of America as a progressive force that will benefit their lives rather than an "evil empire" intent on dominating them and preventing them from achieving their own aspirations. Like it or not, it is this latter message that George W. Bush has sent to young people world-wide.
The Bush years have convinced vast numbers of young people around the globe that America is the country of neo con unilateralism and preemptive war. It will be very difficult for us to change those perceptions as the current generation of young people ages and takes on responsibilities for running their countries. When it comes to public perception we will pay the price for George W. Bush for years to come. Those perceptions will damage our security for many years.
We can't afford to lose another generation. Obama's election -- especially if it is decisive -- would go some distance to shock even those in the "Bush generation" into re-evaluating the way they view America.
In the United States, presidents are more than decision-makers and leaders. They are Chiefs of State, symbolic embodiments of the values that define our country. This week Americans -- and people around the globe -- will get a glimpse of what it would be like if Barack Obama becomes the personal embodiment of America in the 21st Century. I believe they will like what they see.
Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book "Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win," available on Amazon.com.
Posted July 21, 2008 | 10:38 AM (EST)
Sometimes it pays to be careful what you wish for. John McCain's challenge to Barack Obama to visit Iraq and Afghanistan created the premise for Obama's trip to the Middle East and Europe this week. That trip may become a major watershed event in the presidential contest.
It may also one day be viewed as a significant event in the broader history of our country's relationship with the rest of the world.
How can a foreign trip affect Obama's domestic presidential campaign?
Of course it doesn't hurt that on the first day of Obama's journey, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki edged very close to endorsing his plan for American troops to withdraw from Iraq. In an interview in Der Spiegel he is quoted as saying: "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes".
The trip will highlight the fact that it isn't just the American people who want us to leave Iraq -- all of the polls of the Iraqi people want us out as well -- and now so does the U.S.-backed Prime Minister of Iraq. That leaves Bush, McCain and the neo cons as the only people around still committed to their reckless program of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq far into the future. It puts in full relief McCain's flawed judgment when it comes to foreign policy.
Of course, by making his first stop the front lines in Afghanistan, Obama also emphasized once again how Bush, McCain and the neo cons have taken their eye off the ball by diverting resources to an "elective" war in Iraq and away from the central front where terrorist cells intent on attacking the United States are actually organized.
But there's more. Swing voters are eager to vote for change, but one of the questions holding them back is whether Barack Obama can lead America in a dangerous world. More than anything else, this week's trip will allow them to imagine Barack Obama as Commander in Chief -- to get a sense of how he looks on the world stage.
Obama's "world stage presence" should do more than simply reassure them. It will provide a demonstration of how fundamentally Obama will improve the way people around the globe -- and especially young people -- view the United States.
Obama's calm, friendly, but decisive style is perfectly suited to the world of international politics. If he is elected, his own story and background will instantly engage the imagination of young people -- especially the 80% of young people who live in India, China and the developing world. The very fact that our country would elect a person of color -- someone like them -- to lead us will say more to them about the soul of our people than thousands of pronouncements of policy or millions of dollars spent on "public diplomacy."
Obama's ability to inspire will do more than anything else to turn him -- and America -- once again into a beacon of hope and possibility for the billions of people who desperately hope for a better life.
People's fundamental life-long views are shaped when they are young. The mental frames they use to place the political world around them into context -- to understand the meaning of what they see and hear -- are largely formed when they are in their late teens and early twenties.
Nothing is more critical to our own national security than assuring that future generations of leaders around the world think of America as a progressive force that will benefit their lives rather than an "evil empire" intent on dominating them and preventing them from achieving their own aspirations. Like it or not, it is this latter message that George W. Bush has sent to young people world-wide.
The Bush years have convinced vast numbers of young people around the globe that America is the country of neo con unilateralism and preemptive war. It will be very difficult for us to change those perceptions as the current generation of young people ages and takes on responsibilities for running their countries. When it comes to public perception we will pay the price for George W. Bush for years to come. Those perceptions will damage our security for many years.
We can't afford to lose another generation. Obama's election -- especially if it is decisive -- would go some distance to shock even those in the "Bush generation" into re-evaluating the way they view America.
In the United States, presidents are more than decision-makers and leaders. They are Chiefs of State, symbolic embodiments of the values that define our country. This week Americans -- and people around the globe -- will get a glimpse of what it would be like if Barack Obama becomes the personal embodiment of America in the 21st Century. I believe they will like what they see.
Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book "Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win," available on Amazon.com.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Frank Rich - N.Y. Times (July 20, 2008)
July 20, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid
By FRANK RICH
THE best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.
“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.
Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.
In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.” Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.
Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.
Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s “mental recession,” Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as “almost certainly” the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.
But no one in the news media seemed to notice Mr. Gramm’s naked expression of the mind-set he’d bring to a McCain White House. And few journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary’s post-Senate history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost 70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the subprime lending market. It’s now fending off federal investigation for helping the megarich avoid taxes.
Mr. McCain made a big show of banishing Mr. Gramm after his whining “gaffe,” but it’s surely at most a temporary suspension. When the candidate said back in January that there’s nobody he knows who is stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the truth. Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina — Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain’s latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.
In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.
Mr. McCain’s plan for Social Security reform is “along the lines that President Bush proposed.” Or so he said in March. He came out against such “privatization” in June (though his policy descriptions still support it). Last week he indicated he isn’t completely clear on what Social Security does. He called the program’s premise — young taxpayers foot the bill for their elders (including him) — an “absolute disgrace.”
Given that Mr. McCain’s sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in public relations at his father-in-law’s beer distributorship, he comes by his economic ignorance honestly. But there’s no A team aboard the Straight Talk Express to fill him in. His campaign economist, the former Bush adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, could be found in the June 5 issue of American Banker suggesting even at that late date that we still don’t know “the depth of the housing crisis” and proposing that “monitoring is the right thing to do in these circumstances.”
Ms. Fiorina, the ubiquitous new public face of McCain economic policy, adds nothing to the mix beyond her incessant display of corporate jargon, from “trend lines” to “start-ups.” Before she was fired at Hewlett-Packard, its stock had declined 50 percent during her five-plus years in charge. She missed earning projections — by 23 percent in one quarter — much as she now misrepresents both the Obama and McCain records. This month she said Mr. McCain wanted to require insurance plans to cover birth control medications along with Viagra, when in fact he had voted against it.
Ms. Fiorina received a $42 million payout (half in cash) from H.P., according to a shareholders’ subsequent lawsuit. With this inspiring résumé, she now aspires to be Mr. McCain’s running mate. So does the irrepressible Mitt Romney, who actually was a business whiz before serving as Massachusetts’s governor. Beltway wisdom has it that the addition of such a corporate star will remedy Mr. McCain’s fiscal flatulence.
But Mr. Romney, while more plausible than Ms. Fiorina, is hardly what America wants at this desperate time. His leveraged buyout dealings as co-founder of Bain Capital induced plant closings, mass layoffs and outsourcing. If Mr. McCain truly intends to “put our country’s interests” above politics and reach across the aisle to move the nation forward, as he constantly tells us, why not go for a vice president who’s the very best fit for the huge challenges at hand?
The obvious choice would be Michael Bloomberg — who, as a former Republican turned independent, would necessitate that Mr. McCain reach only halfway across the aisle, and to someone who is his friend rather than a vanquished rival he is learning to tolerate.
Romney vs. Bloomberg is not a close contest. Bloomberg L.P. has roughly three times the revenues and employees of Bain & Company, where Mr. Romney ultimately served as chief executive. Mr. Romney rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics while running it in 2002, but Mayor Bloomberg revitalized New York, the nation’s largest metropolis, after the most devastating attack in our history. The city he manages has more than twice the budget of Mr. Romney’s state.
Yes, Mr. Bloomberg is a closet Democrat and an alpha dog who doesn’t want to be a second banana. And his views on gay civil rights and abortion would roil the G.O.P. base. But Mr. Romney shared some of those same views before he flip-flopped, and besides, these are not ordinary times. Millions of Americans are losing their homes and jobs. Whole industries are going belly up. The national crisis at hand, not yesterday’s culture wars, should drive the vice-presidential pick.
Mr. McCain reminds us every day how principled he is. That presumably means he’d risk a revolt by his party’s dwindling agents of intolerance and do everything in his power to persuade Mr. Bloomberg to join his ticket in the spirit of patriotic sacrifice. The politics could be advantageous too. A Bloomberg surprise could impress independents and keep the television audience tuned in to a G.O.P. convention that will unfold in the shadow of Mr. Obama’s address to 75,000 screaming fans in Denver.
But this is fantasy political baseball, not reality. Mr. McCain, sad to say, hung up his old maverick’s spurs the day he embraced the Bush tax cuts he had once opposed as “too tilted to the wealthy.” And Mr. Bloomberg? It’s hard to picture a titan who built his empire on computer terminals investing any capital, political or otherwise, in a chief executive who is still learning how to do, as Mr. McCain puts it, “a Google.”
Op-Ed Columnist
It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid
By FRANK RICH
THE best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.
“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.
Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.
In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.” Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.
Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.
Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s “mental recession,” Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as “almost certainly” the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.
But no one in the news media seemed to notice Mr. Gramm’s naked expression of the mind-set he’d bring to a McCain White House. And few journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary’s post-Senate history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost 70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the subprime lending market. It’s now fending off federal investigation for helping the megarich avoid taxes.
Mr. McCain made a big show of banishing Mr. Gramm after his whining “gaffe,” but it’s surely at most a temporary suspension. When the candidate said back in January that there’s nobody he knows who is stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the truth. Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina — Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain’s latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.
In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.
Mr. McCain’s plan for Social Security reform is “along the lines that President Bush proposed.” Or so he said in March. He came out against such “privatization” in June (though his policy descriptions still support it). Last week he indicated he isn’t completely clear on what Social Security does. He called the program’s premise — young taxpayers foot the bill for their elders (including him) — an “absolute disgrace.”
Given that Mr. McCain’s sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in public relations at his father-in-law’s beer distributorship, he comes by his economic ignorance honestly. But there’s no A team aboard the Straight Talk Express to fill him in. His campaign economist, the former Bush adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, could be found in the June 5 issue of American Banker suggesting even at that late date that we still don’t know “the depth of the housing crisis” and proposing that “monitoring is the right thing to do in these circumstances.”
Ms. Fiorina, the ubiquitous new public face of McCain economic policy, adds nothing to the mix beyond her incessant display of corporate jargon, from “trend lines” to “start-ups.” Before she was fired at Hewlett-Packard, its stock had declined 50 percent during her five-plus years in charge. She missed earning projections — by 23 percent in one quarter — much as she now misrepresents both the Obama and McCain records. This month she said Mr. McCain wanted to require insurance plans to cover birth control medications along with Viagra, when in fact he had voted against it.
Ms. Fiorina received a $42 million payout (half in cash) from H.P., according to a shareholders’ subsequent lawsuit. With this inspiring résumé, she now aspires to be Mr. McCain’s running mate. So does the irrepressible Mitt Romney, who actually was a business whiz before serving as Massachusetts’s governor. Beltway wisdom has it that the addition of such a corporate star will remedy Mr. McCain’s fiscal flatulence.
But Mr. Romney, while more plausible than Ms. Fiorina, is hardly what America wants at this desperate time. His leveraged buyout dealings as co-founder of Bain Capital induced plant closings, mass layoffs and outsourcing. If Mr. McCain truly intends to “put our country’s interests” above politics and reach across the aisle to move the nation forward, as he constantly tells us, why not go for a vice president who’s the very best fit for the huge challenges at hand?
The obvious choice would be Michael Bloomberg — who, as a former Republican turned independent, would necessitate that Mr. McCain reach only halfway across the aisle, and to someone who is his friend rather than a vanquished rival he is learning to tolerate.
Romney vs. Bloomberg is not a close contest. Bloomberg L.P. has roughly three times the revenues and employees of Bain & Company, where Mr. Romney ultimately served as chief executive. Mr. Romney rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics while running it in 2002, but Mayor Bloomberg revitalized New York, the nation’s largest metropolis, after the most devastating attack in our history. The city he manages has more than twice the budget of Mr. Romney’s state.
Yes, Mr. Bloomberg is a closet Democrat and an alpha dog who doesn’t want to be a second banana. And his views on gay civil rights and abortion would roil the G.O.P. base. But Mr. Romney shared some of those same views before he flip-flopped, and besides, these are not ordinary times. Millions of Americans are losing their homes and jobs. Whole industries are going belly up. The national crisis at hand, not yesterday’s culture wars, should drive the vice-presidential pick.
Mr. McCain reminds us every day how principled he is. That presumably means he’d risk a revolt by his party’s dwindling agents of intolerance and do everything in his power to persuade Mr. Bloomberg to join his ticket in the spirit of patriotic sacrifice. The politics could be advantageous too. A Bloomberg surprise could impress independents and keep the television audience tuned in to a G.O.P. convention that will unfold in the shadow of Mr. Obama’s address to 75,000 screaming fans in Denver.
But this is fantasy political baseball, not reality. Mr. McCain, sad to say, hung up his old maverick’s spurs the day he embraced the Bush tax cuts he had once opposed as “too tilted to the wealthy.” And Mr. Bloomberg? It’s hard to picture a titan who built his empire on computer terminals investing any capital, political or otherwise, in a chief executive who is still learning how to do, as Mr. McCain puts it, “a Google.”
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Thinkprogress.org (July 19, 2008)
McCain camp reacts to Maliki’s call for withdrawal: Voters don’t care what Iraqi leaders say.
In response to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s clear statement in support of a 16-month redeployment from Iraq, a senior McCain official tells Marc Ambinder “[V]oters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.” A “prominent Republican strategist” who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said more candidly, “We’re fucked.” Recall, this is what McCain said in 2004:
QUESTION: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.
McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq — and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.
In response to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s clear statement in support of a 16-month redeployment from Iraq, a senior McCain official tells Marc Ambinder “[V]oters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.” A “prominent Republican strategist” who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said more candidly, “We’re fucked.” Recall, this is what McCain said in 2004:
QUESTION: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.
McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq — and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.
Bob Herbert - N.Y. Times (July 19, 2008)
July 19, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Yes We Can
By BOB HERBERT
As I was listening to Al Gore on the telephone, I was thinking: “Uh-oh, the naysayers will have a field day with this one.”
The former vice president was giving me an advanced briefing on the speech that he delivered on Thursday, calling on the United States to behave like a great nation and actually do something real about its self-destructive and ultimately unsustainable reliance on carbon-based fuel for its 21st-century energy needs.
“I’m going to issue a strategic challenge that the United States of America set a goal of getting 100 percent of our electricity from renewable resources and carbon-constrained fuels within 10 years,” he said.
“One hundred percent?” I said.
“One hundred percent.”
Mr. Gore’s focus is primarily on solar, wind and geothermal energy. His belief is that a dramatic, wholesale transition to these abundant and renewable sources of energy is not just doable, but essential.
My view of Mr. Gore’s passionate engagement with some of the biggest issues of our time is that he is offering us the kind of vision and sense of urgency that has been so lacking in the presidential campaigns. But the tendency in a society that is skeptical, if not phobic, about anything progressive has been to dismiss his large ideas and wise counsel, as George H. W. Bush once did by deriding him as “ozone man.”
The naysayers will tell you that once again Al Gore is dreaming, that the costs of his visionary energy challenge are too high, the technological obstacles too tough, the timeline too short and the political lift much too heavy.
But that’s the thing about visionaries. They don’t imagine what’s easy. They imagine the benefits to be reaped once all the obstacles are overcome. Mr. Gore will tell you about the wind blowing through the corridor that stretches from Mexico to Canada, through the Plains states, and the tremendous amounts of electricity that would come from capturing the energy of that wind — enough to light up cities and towns from coast to coast.
“We need to make a big, massive, one-off investment to transform our energy infrastructure from one that relies on a dirty, expensive fuel to fuel that is free,” said Mr. Gore. “The sun and the wind and geothermal are not going to run out, and we don’t have to export them from the Persian Gulf, and they are not increasing in price.
“And since the only factor that controls the price is the efficiency and innovation that goes into the equipment that transforms it into electricity, once you start getting the scales that we’re anticipating, those systems come down in cost.”
The correct response to Mr. Gore’s proposal would be a rush to figure out ways to make it happen. Don’t hold your breath.
When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.
When was it?
Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.
In his speech, delivered in Washington, Mr. Gore said: “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet.”
He described carbon-based fuel as the thread running through the global climate crisis, America’s economic woes and its most serious national security threats. He then asked: “What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?”
Americans are extremely anxious at the moment, and I think part of it has to do with a deeply unsettling feeling that the nation may not be up to the tremendous challenges it is facing. A recent poll by the Rockefeller Foundation and Time magazine that focused on economic issues found a deep pessimism running through respondents.
According to Margot Brandenburg, an official with the foundation, nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel that America’s best days are in the past.”
The moment is ripe for exactly the kind of challenge issued by Mr. Gore on Thursday. It doesn’t matter if his proposal is less than perfect, or can’t be realized within 10 years, or even it if is found to be deeply flawed. The goal is the thing.
The fetish for drilling for ever more oil is the perfect metaphor these days. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging.
Op-Ed Columnist
Yes We Can
By BOB HERBERT
As I was listening to Al Gore on the telephone, I was thinking: “Uh-oh, the naysayers will have a field day with this one.”
The former vice president was giving me an advanced briefing on the speech that he delivered on Thursday, calling on the United States to behave like a great nation and actually do something real about its self-destructive and ultimately unsustainable reliance on carbon-based fuel for its 21st-century energy needs.
“I’m going to issue a strategic challenge that the United States of America set a goal of getting 100 percent of our electricity from renewable resources and carbon-constrained fuels within 10 years,” he said.
“One hundred percent?” I said.
“One hundred percent.”
Mr. Gore’s focus is primarily on solar, wind and geothermal energy. His belief is that a dramatic, wholesale transition to these abundant and renewable sources of energy is not just doable, but essential.
My view of Mr. Gore’s passionate engagement with some of the biggest issues of our time is that he is offering us the kind of vision and sense of urgency that has been so lacking in the presidential campaigns. But the tendency in a society that is skeptical, if not phobic, about anything progressive has been to dismiss his large ideas and wise counsel, as George H. W. Bush once did by deriding him as “ozone man.”
The naysayers will tell you that once again Al Gore is dreaming, that the costs of his visionary energy challenge are too high, the technological obstacles too tough, the timeline too short and the political lift much too heavy.
But that’s the thing about visionaries. They don’t imagine what’s easy. They imagine the benefits to be reaped once all the obstacles are overcome. Mr. Gore will tell you about the wind blowing through the corridor that stretches from Mexico to Canada, through the Plains states, and the tremendous amounts of electricity that would come from capturing the energy of that wind — enough to light up cities and towns from coast to coast.
“We need to make a big, massive, one-off investment to transform our energy infrastructure from one that relies on a dirty, expensive fuel to fuel that is free,” said Mr. Gore. “The sun and the wind and geothermal are not going to run out, and we don’t have to export them from the Persian Gulf, and they are not increasing in price.
“And since the only factor that controls the price is the efficiency and innovation that goes into the equipment that transforms it into electricity, once you start getting the scales that we’re anticipating, those systems come down in cost.”
The correct response to Mr. Gore’s proposal would be a rush to figure out ways to make it happen. Don’t hold your breath.
When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.
When was it?
Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.
In his speech, delivered in Washington, Mr. Gore said: “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet.”
He described carbon-based fuel as the thread running through the global climate crisis, America’s economic woes and its most serious national security threats. He then asked: “What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?”
Americans are extremely anxious at the moment, and I think part of it has to do with a deeply unsettling feeling that the nation may not be up to the tremendous challenges it is facing. A recent poll by the Rockefeller Foundation and Time magazine that focused on economic issues found a deep pessimism running through respondents.
According to Margot Brandenburg, an official with the foundation, nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel that America’s best days are in the past.”
The moment is ripe for exactly the kind of challenge issued by Mr. Gore on Thursday. It doesn’t matter if his proposal is less than perfect, or can’t be realized within 10 years, or even it if is found to be deeply flawed. The goal is the thing.
The fetish for drilling for ever more oil is the perfect metaphor these days. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging.
Reuters (July 19, 2008)
Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan
Sat July 19, 2008 7:23am EDT
BERLIN, July 19 (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.
In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.
"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."
It is the first time he has backed the withdrawal timetable put forward by Obama, who is visiting Afghanistan and us set to go to Iraq as part of a tour of Europe and the Middle East.
Obama has called for a shift away from a "single-minded" focus on Iraq and wants to pull out troops within 16 months, instead adding U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan.
Asked if he supported Obama's ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.
"Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems."
Maliki, who is due to visit Germany this week, has suggested a timetable should be set for a U.S. withdrawal but U.S. officials have been more cautious, despite an improving security situation.
The White House said on Friday President George W. Bush and Maliki had agreed that a security deal under negotiation should set a "time horizon" for meeting "aspirational goals" for reducing U.S. forces in Iraq.
"The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't," Maliki told Der Spiegel.
Some five years after the U.S.-led invasion, there are still some 146,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. (Reporting by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Jon Boyle)
Sat July 19, 2008 7:23am EDT
BERLIN, July 19 (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.
In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.
"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."
It is the first time he has backed the withdrawal timetable put forward by Obama, who is visiting Afghanistan and us set to go to Iraq as part of a tour of Europe and the Middle East.
Obama has called for a shift away from a "single-minded" focus on Iraq and wants to pull out troops within 16 months, instead adding U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan.
Asked if he supported Obama's ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.
"Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems."
Maliki, who is due to visit Germany this week, has suggested a timetable should be set for a U.S. withdrawal but U.S. officials have been more cautious, despite an improving security situation.
The White House said on Friday President George W. Bush and Maliki had agreed that a security deal under negotiation should set a "time horizon" for meeting "aspirational goals" for reducing U.S. forces in Iraq.
"The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't," Maliki told Der Spiegel.
Some five years after the U.S.-led invasion, there are still some 146,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. (Reporting by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Jon Boyle)
Friday, July 18, 2008
Bill Moyers & Michael Winship - Truthout.org (July 18, 2008)
Mother's Milk of Politics Turns Sour
Friday 18 July 2008
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Once again we're closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone. In Washington, the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people's need for money. And like Rip Van Winkle, Congress is finally waking up from a long doze under the warm sun of laissez-faire economics. That's French for turning off the alarm until the burglars have made their getaway.
Philosophy is one reason we do this to ourselves; when you worship market forces as if they were the gods of Olympus, then the gods can do no wrong - until, of course, they prove to be human. Then we realize we should have listened to our inner agnostic and not been so reverent in the first place.
But we also get into these terrible dilemmas - where the big guys step all over everyone else and the victims are required to pay the hospital bills - because we refuse to recognize the connection between money and politics. This is the great denial in democracy that may ultimately mean our ruin. We just don't seem able to see or accept the fact that money drives policy. It's no wonder that Congress and the White House have been looking the other way as the predators picked the pockets of unsuspecting debtors. Mega banking and investment firms have been some of the biggest providers of the cash vital to keeping incumbents in office. There isn't much appetite for biting - or regulating - the manicured hand that feeds them.
Guess who gave the most money to candidates in this 2007-08 federal election cycle? That's right, the financial services and real estate industries. They stuffed nearly $250 million into the candidate coffers. The about-to-be-bailed-out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together are responsible for about half the country's $12 trillion mortgage debt. Lisa Lerer of Politico.com reports that over the past decade, the two financial giants with the down-home names have spent nearly $200 million on campaign contributions and lobbying. According to Lerer, "They've stacked their payrolls with top Washington power brokers of all political stripes, including Republican John McCain's presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis; Democrat Barack Obama's original vice presidential vetter, Jim Johnson, and scores of others now working for the two rivals for the White House."
Last Sunday's New York Times put it as bluntly as anyone ever has: "In Washington, Fannie and Freddie's sprawling lobbying machine hired family and friends of politicians in their efforts to quickly sideline any regulations that might slow their growth or invite greater oversight of their business practices. Indeed, their rapid expansion was, at least in part, the result of such artful lobbying over the years."
What a beautiful term: "artful lobbying." It means honest graft. Look at any of the important issues bogged down in the swampland along the Potomac and you don't have to scrape away the muck too deeply to find that campaign cash is at the core of virtually every impasse. We're spending more than six percent of our salaries on gasoline, and global warming keeps temperatures rising, but the climate bill was killed last month and President Bush just got rid of his daddy's longtime ban on offshore drilling. Only in a fairy tale would anyone believe it's just coincidence that the oil and gas industries have donated more than $18 million to federal candidates this year, three-quarters of it going to Republicans. They've spent more than $26 million lobbying this year - that's seven times more than environmental groups have spent.
Follow the money - it goes from your gas tank to the wine bars and steak houses of DC, where the payoffs happen. Or ponder that FISA surveillance legislation that just passed the Senate. It let the big telecommunications companies off the hook for helping the government wiretap our phones and laptops without warrants. Over the years those telecom companies have given Republicans in the House and Senate $63 million and Democrats $49 million. No wonder that when their lobbyists reach out and place a call to Congress, they never get a busy signal. Do the same without making a big contribution, and you'll be put on "hold" until the embalmer shows up to claim your cold corpse.
The late journalist Meg Greenfield once wrote that trying to get money out of politics is akin to the quest for a squirrel-proof birdfeeder. No matter how clever and ingenious the design, the squirrels are always one mouthful ahead of you. Here's an example. Corporations are limited in how much they can contribute to candidates' campaigns, right? But someone's always figuring out how to open another back door. So Democrats have turned to Steve Farber. He's using the resources of his big K Street law and lobbying factory to help raise $40 million for the Democratic National Convention. Half a dozen of his clients have signed up, including AT&T, Comcast, Western Union and Google. Their presence at the convention will offer lots of opportunities to curry favors at private parties while ordinary delegates wander Denver looking for the nearest Wendy's. By the way, just as you pay at the gas pump for those energy lobbyists to wine and dine your representatives in Washington, you'll pay on April 15 for Denver - corporations can deduct their contributions.
Another back door - one quite familiar to Steve Farber and his ilk - leads to presidential libraries. Bill Clinton's in Arkansas required serious political bucks, and we're not talking penny ante fines for overdue books. Again, there's no limit to the amount donors can give and no obligation to reveal their names. Clinton's cost $165 million and we still don't know the identities of everyone who put up the dough, even though four years ago a reporter stumbled on a list that included Arab businessmen, Saudi royals, Hollywood celebs and the governments of Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei and Taiwan. Hmmm ...
Once George W. is out of the White House, he, too, plans what one newspaper described as a "legacy polishing" institute - a presidential library and think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas costing half a billion dollars. Last Sunday, The Times of London released a remarkable video of one of the president's buddies and fund raisers - Stephen Payne, a political appointee named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
The Times set him up in a video sting, and taped a conversation in which Payne offers an exiled leader of Kyrgyzstan meetings with such White House luminaries as Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice - provided he makes a whopping contribution to the Bush Library, and an even bigger payment to Payne's lobbying firm. Payne tells him, "It will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush Library.... That's gonna be a show of 'we're interested, we're your friends, we're still your friends.'" The White House denies any connection between library contributions and access to officials, and harrumphed at the preposterous idea that Payne had a close relationship with the president. Unfortunately, there's at least one photo of Payne with the president, cutting brush at Bush's Crawford ranch. There's also one of Payne demonstrating more guts than common sense, on a rifle range with Deadeye Dick Cheney.
Payne, who now is supporting John McCain, says he's done nothing wrong, but a Congressional investigation intends to find out. So, from the financial meltdown brought on by predatory lending to global warming to tax breaks and other favors, the late California politician Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh got it right: Money is the mother's milk of politics. He knew what he was talking about, because Big Daddy swigged it by the gallon. Now it has curdled into a witch's brew.
--------
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Friday 18 July 2008
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Once again we're closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone. In Washington, the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people's need for money. And like Rip Van Winkle, Congress is finally waking up from a long doze under the warm sun of laissez-faire economics. That's French for turning off the alarm until the burglars have made their getaway.
Philosophy is one reason we do this to ourselves; when you worship market forces as if they were the gods of Olympus, then the gods can do no wrong - until, of course, they prove to be human. Then we realize we should have listened to our inner agnostic and not been so reverent in the first place.
But we also get into these terrible dilemmas - where the big guys step all over everyone else and the victims are required to pay the hospital bills - because we refuse to recognize the connection between money and politics. This is the great denial in democracy that may ultimately mean our ruin. We just don't seem able to see or accept the fact that money drives policy. It's no wonder that Congress and the White House have been looking the other way as the predators picked the pockets of unsuspecting debtors. Mega banking and investment firms have been some of the biggest providers of the cash vital to keeping incumbents in office. There isn't much appetite for biting - or regulating - the manicured hand that feeds them.
Guess who gave the most money to candidates in this 2007-08 federal election cycle? That's right, the financial services and real estate industries. They stuffed nearly $250 million into the candidate coffers. The about-to-be-bailed-out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together are responsible for about half the country's $12 trillion mortgage debt. Lisa Lerer of Politico.com reports that over the past decade, the two financial giants with the down-home names have spent nearly $200 million on campaign contributions and lobbying. According to Lerer, "They've stacked their payrolls with top Washington power brokers of all political stripes, including Republican John McCain's presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis; Democrat Barack Obama's original vice presidential vetter, Jim Johnson, and scores of others now working for the two rivals for the White House."
Last Sunday's New York Times put it as bluntly as anyone ever has: "In Washington, Fannie and Freddie's sprawling lobbying machine hired family and friends of politicians in their efforts to quickly sideline any regulations that might slow their growth or invite greater oversight of their business practices. Indeed, their rapid expansion was, at least in part, the result of such artful lobbying over the years."
What a beautiful term: "artful lobbying." It means honest graft. Look at any of the important issues bogged down in the swampland along the Potomac and you don't have to scrape away the muck too deeply to find that campaign cash is at the core of virtually every impasse. We're spending more than six percent of our salaries on gasoline, and global warming keeps temperatures rising, but the climate bill was killed last month and President Bush just got rid of his daddy's longtime ban on offshore drilling. Only in a fairy tale would anyone believe it's just coincidence that the oil and gas industries have donated more than $18 million to federal candidates this year, three-quarters of it going to Republicans. They've spent more than $26 million lobbying this year - that's seven times more than environmental groups have spent.
Follow the money - it goes from your gas tank to the wine bars and steak houses of DC, where the payoffs happen. Or ponder that FISA surveillance legislation that just passed the Senate. It let the big telecommunications companies off the hook for helping the government wiretap our phones and laptops without warrants. Over the years those telecom companies have given Republicans in the House and Senate $63 million and Democrats $49 million. No wonder that when their lobbyists reach out and place a call to Congress, they never get a busy signal. Do the same without making a big contribution, and you'll be put on "hold" until the embalmer shows up to claim your cold corpse.
The late journalist Meg Greenfield once wrote that trying to get money out of politics is akin to the quest for a squirrel-proof birdfeeder. No matter how clever and ingenious the design, the squirrels are always one mouthful ahead of you. Here's an example. Corporations are limited in how much they can contribute to candidates' campaigns, right? But someone's always figuring out how to open another back door. So Democrats have turned to Steve Farber. He's using the resources of his big K Street law and lobbying factory to help raise $40 million for the Democratic National Convention. Half a dozen of his clients have signed up, including AT&T, Comcast, Western Union and Google. Their presence at the convention will offer lots of opportunities to curry favors at private parties while ordinary delegates wander Denver looking for the nearest Wendy's. By the way, just as you pay at the gas pump for those energy lobbyists to wine and dine your representatives in Washington, you'll pay on April 15 for Denver - corporations can deduct their contributions.
Another back door - one quite familiar to Steve Farber and his ilk - leads to presidential libraries. Bill Clinton's in Arkansas required serious political bucks, and we're not talking penny ante fines for overdue books. Again, there's no limit to the amount donors can give and no obligation to reveal their names. Clinton's cost $165 million and we still don't know the identities of everyone who put up the dough, even though four years ago a reporter stumbled on a list that included Arab businessmen, Saudi royals, Hollywood celebs and the governments of Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei and Taiwan. Hmmm ...
Once George W. is out of the White House, he, too, plans what one newspaper described as a "legacy polishing" institute - a presidential library and think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas costing half a billion dollars. Last Sunday, The Times of London released a remarkable video of one of the president's buddies and fund raisers - Stephen Payne, a political appointee named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
The Times set him up in a video sting, and taped a conversation in which Payne offers an exiled leader of Kyrgyzstan meetings with such White House luminaries as Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice - provided he makes a whopping contribution to the Bush Library, and an even bigger payment to Payne's lobbying firm. Payne tells him, "It will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush Library.... That's gonna be a show of 'we're interested, we're your friends, we're still your friends.'" The White House denies any connection between library contributions and access to officials, and harrumphed at the preposterous idea that Payne had a close relationship with the president. Unfortunately, there's at least one photo of Payne with the president, cutting brush at Bush's Crawford ranch. There's also one of Payne demonstrating more guts than common sense, on a rifle range with Deadeye Dick Cheney.
Payne, who now is supporting John McCain, says he's done nothing wrong, but a Congressional investigation intends to find out. So, from the financial meltdown brought on by predatory lending to global warming to tax breaks and other favors, the late California politician Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh got it right: Money is the mother's milk of politics. He knew what he was talking about, because Big Daddy swigged it by the gallon. Now it has curdled into a witch's brew.
--------
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Thinkprogress.org (July 18, 2008)
McCain missed every single Afghanistan hearing his committee held.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), “the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has attended zero of his committee’s six hearings on Afghanistan over the last two years,” ABC News reports:
A review of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings as listed on the committee Web site for the past two years reveals that McCain’s committee has held six hearings that included the word “Afghanistan” in the title or Central Command — which overseas U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
McCain missed them all.
The McCain campaign said the senator’s “previous foreign policy experience make up for his recent lack of attendance at hearings.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), “the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has attended zero of his committee’s six hearings on Afghanistan over the last two years,” ABC News reports:
A review of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings as listed on the committee Web site for the past two years reveals that McCain’s committee has held six hearings that included the word “Afghanistan” in the title or Central Command — which overseas U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
McCain missed them all.
The McCain campaign said the senator’s “previous foreign policy experience make up for his recent lack of attendance at hearings.”
Larry Hunter - N.Y. Daily News (July 16, 2008)
I think Mr. Hunter is dead wrong regarding Obama's tax and economic policies but he offers some interesting perspective:
I'm a lifelong conservative activist and I'm backing Barack Obama
BY LARRY HUNTER
Wednesday, July 16th 2008, 7:39 PM
I'm a lifelong Republican - a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole's presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp's Empower America.
This November, I'm voting for Barack Obama.
When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that's antithetical to almost everything I believe in?
The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies - this is the difference between venial and mortal sins.
Taxes, economic policy and health care reform matter, of course. But how we extract ourselves from the bloody boondoggle in Iraq, how we avoid getting into a war with Iran and how we preserve our individual rights while dealing with real foreign threats - these are of greater importance.
John McCain would continue the Bush administration's commitment to interventionism and constitutional overreach. Obama promises a humbler engagement with our allies, while promising retaliation against any enemy who dares attack us. That's what conservatism used to mean - and it's what George W. Bush promised as a candidate.
Plus, when it comes to domestic issues, I don't take Obama at his word. That may sound cynical. But the fact that he says just about all the wrong things on domestic issues doesn't bother me as much as it once would have. After all, the Republicans said all the right things - fiscal responsibility, spending restraint - and it didn't mean a thing. It is a sad commentary on American politics today, but it's taken as a given that politicians, all of them, must pander, obfuscate and prevaricate.
Besides, I suspect Obama is more free-market friendly than he lets on. He taught at the University of Chicago, a hotbed of right-of-center thought. His economic advisers, notably Austan Goolsbee, recognize that ordinary citizens stand to gain more from open markets than from government meddling. That's got to rub off.
When it comes to health care, I am hoping Obama quietly recognizes that a crusade against pharmaceutical companies would result in the opposite of any intended effect. And in any event, McCain's plans in this area are deeply problematic, too. Take drug reimportation. McCain (like Obama) says he's perfectly comfortable with this ill-conceived scheme, which would drive research and development dollars away from the next generation of miracle cures.
But overall, based on his embrace of centrist advisers and policies, it seems likely that Obama will turn out to be in the mold of John Kennedy - who was fond of noting that "a rising tide lifts all boats." Over the last few decades, economic growth has made Americans at every income level better off. For all his borderline pessimistic rhetoric, Obama knows this. And I believe he is savvy enough to realize that the real threat to middle-class families and the poor - an economic undertow that drags everyone down - cannot be counteracted by an activist government.
Or maybe not. But here's the thing: Even if my hopes on domestic policy are dashed and Obama reveals himself as an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool, big-government liberal, I'm still voting for him.
These past eight years, we have spent over a trillion dollars on foreign soil - and lost countless lives - and done what I consider irreparable damage to our Constitution.
If economic damage from well-intentioned but misbegotten Obama economic schemes is the ransom we must pay him to clean up this foreign policy mess, then so be it. It's not nearly as costly as enduring four more years of what we suffered the last eight years.
Hunter is the former staff director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and president of the Social Security Institute.
I'm a lifelong conservative activist and I'm backing Barack Obama
BY LARRY HUNTER
Wednesday, July 16th 2008, 7:39 PM
I'm a lifelong Republican - a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole's presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp's Empower America.
This November, I'm voting for Barack Obama.
When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that's antithetical to almost everything I believe in?
The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies - this is the difference between venial and mortal sins.
Taxes, economic policy and health care reform matter, of course. But how we extract ourselves from the bloody boondoggle in Iraq, how we avoid getting into a war with Iran and how we preserve our individual rights while dealing with real foreign threats - these are of greater importance.
John McCain would continue the Bush administration's commitment to interventionism and constitutional overreach. Obama promises a humbler engagement with our allies, while promising retaliation against any enemy who dares attack us. That's what conservatism used to mean - and it's what George W. Bush promised as a candidate.
Plus, when it comes to domestic issues, I don't take Obama at his word. That may sound cynical. But the fact that he says just about all the wrong things on domestic issues doesn't bother me as much as it once would have. After all, the Republicans said all the right things - fiscal responsibility, spending restraint - and it didn't mean a thing. It is a sad commentary on American politics today, but it's taken as a given that politicians, all of them, must pander, obfuscate and prevaricate.
Besides, I suspect Obama is more free-market friendly than he lets on. He taught at the University of Chicago, a hotbed of right-of-center thought. His economic advisers, notably Austan Goolsbee, recognize that ordinary citizens stand to gain more from open markets than from government meddling. That's got to rub off.
When it comes to health care, I am hoping Obama quietly recognizes that a crusade against pharmaceutical companies would result in the opposite of any intended effect. And in any event, McCain's plans in this area are deeply problematic, too. Take drug reimportation. McCain (like Obama) says he's perfectly comfortable with this ill-conceived scheme, which would drive research and development dollars away from the next generation of miracle cures.
But overall, based on his embrace of centrist advisers and policies, it seems likely that Obama will turn out to be in the mold of John Kennedy - who was fond of noting that "a rising tide lifts all boats." Over the last few decades, economic growth has made Americans at every income level better off. For all his borderline pessimistic rhetoric, Obama knows this. And I believe he is savvy enough to realize that the real threat to middle-class families and the poor - an economic undertow that drags everyone down - cannot be counteracted by an activist government.
Or maybe not. But here's the thing: Even if my hopes on domestic policy are dashed and Obama reveals himself as an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool, big-government liberal, I'm still voting for him.
These past eight years, we have spent over a trillion dollars on foreign soil - and lost countless lives - and done what I consider irreparable damage to our Constitution.
If economic damage from well-intentioned but misbegotten Obama economic schemes is the ransom we must pay him to clean up this foreign policy mess, then so be it. It's not nearly as costly as enduring four more years of what we suffered the last eight years.
Hunter is the former staff director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and president of the Social Security Institute.
David Sirota - Truthdig.com (July 17, 2008)
‘Centrists’ Running the Asylum
Posted on Jul 17, 2008
By David Sirota
In the asylum that is American politics, beware a candidate like Barack Obama when he is lauded for moving to “the center”—because usually that means he is drifting away from it.
Over the last month, the Democratic presidential nominee has backed a measure to permit warrantless wiretapping and protect telecom companies when they violate customers’ privacy; sent conflicting signals about whether he will reform the NAFTA trade model; and threatened to revise his timetable for ending the war in Iraq. Universally, reporters have billed this dance as a move to the middle. As the Associated Press claimed in a typical description, Obama’s shifts are designed “to appeal to the center of the electorate.”
However, empirical data prove “the center of the electorate” is exactly the opposite:
-- Polls by Quinnipiac University and the Mellman Group found majorities support warrant requirements for wiretaps and oppose immunity for companies that released private consumer information without such warrants.
-- Surveys by Fortune magazine, CNN and The Wall Street Journal report that most Americans oppose NAFTA-style trade policies.
-- For years, major polls have consistently shown Americans want a firm timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. As just one of many examples, five separate USA Today surveys since 2007 have shown majorities want the president to “set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq and to stick to that timetable regardless of what is going on in Iraq.”
So, the undebatable evidence tells us precisely where the center of public opinion is. Yet when a presidential candidate moves away from the center, we are told he is moving toward it. What gives?
Part of the up-is-down distortion reflects perspective—or lack thereof.
Most politicians and journalists who set the parameters of our political debate live in Washington and make six-figure salaries. They are geographically, financially and socially isolated from the blood-and-guts consequences of today’s two wars—the one in Iraq and the one on the middle class. That insulation skews viewpoints.
Indeed, the center of opinion in the nation’s capital is very different from the center of opinion in the country at large. In elite D.C., a moderate is one who backs job-killing trade deals, legal immunity for corporate wrongdoers, and wars for oil, regardless of casualties. And so when Obama embraces those positions, Beltway opinion-makers really think he’s being a “centrist”—regardless of how far away from the actual center he’s moving.
But, then, not all politicians and pundits are completely ignorant of life outside the palace walls. A calculated Jedi mind trick is at work here, too.
When regular folks talk to friends and neighbors, we sure feel like our desire for privacy, disgust with NAFTA and opposition to the Iraq war are mainstream majority positions—and they are. But then comes the barrage.
Day after day, smiling anchormen, blow-dried correspondents and silver-tongued congressmen follow the Big Lie theory of indoctrination, taking to our televisions, radios and newspapers insisting that crazy is normal, the majority is the minority and—most important—the fringe is the “center.” This is no accident.
These voices of the status quo do not want the status quo challenged. They deliberately broadcast messages crafted to get us—the mainstream—to question our mainstream-ness, while convincing politicians that the Establishment’s extremism represents a responsible middle ground.
More Aldous Huxley than George Orwell, these are the methods of modern propaganda, with the celebration of Obama’s “centrism” the latest doublespeak. In this brave new world, language is sculpted to skew the “center,” intimidating the majority from demanding concrete change for fear of looking like lunatics. It is a slickly packaged process of marginalization and demoralization—one with an underlying goal: keeping the real lunatics running the asylum.
David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” was released in June. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota
Posted on Jul 17, 2008
By David Sirota
In the asylum that is American politics, beware a candidate like Barack Obama when he is lauded for moving to “the center”—because usually that means he is drifting away from it.
Over the last month, the Democratic presidential nominee has backed a measure to permit warrantless wiretapping and protect telecom companies when they violate customers’ privacy; sent conflicting signals about whether he will reform the NAFTA trade model; and threatened to revise his timetable for ending the war in Iraq. Universally, reporters have billed this dance as a move to the middle. As the Associated Press claimed in a typical description, Obama’s shifts are designed “to appeal to the center of the electorate.”
However, empirical data prove “the center of the electorate” is exactly the opposite:
-- Polls by Quinnipiac University and the Mellman Group found majorities support warrant requirements for wiretaps and oppose immunity for companies that released private consumer information without such warrants.
-- Surveys by Fortune magazine, CNN and The Wall Street Journal report that most Americans oppose NAFTA-style trade policies.
-- For years, major polls have consistently shown Americans want a firm timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. As just one of many examples, five separate USA Today surveys since 2007 have shown majorities want the president to “set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq and to stick to that timetable regardless of what is going on in Iraq.”
So, the undebatable evidence tells us precisely where the center of public opinion is. Yet when a presidential candidate moves away from the center, we are told he is moving toward it. What gives?
Part of the up-is-down distortion reflects perspective—or lack thereof.
Most politicians and journalists who set the parameters of our political debate live in Washington and make six-figure salaries. They are geographically, financially and socially isolated from the blood-and-guts consequences of today’s two wars—the one in Iraq and the one on the middle class. That insulation skews viewpoints.
Indeed, the center of opinion in the nation’s capital is very different from the center of opinion in the country at large. In elite D.C., a moderate is one who backs job-killing trade deals, legal immunity for corporate wrongdoers, and wars for oil, regardless of casualties. And so when Obama embraces those positions, Beltway opinion-makers really think he’s being a “centrist”—regardless of how far away from the actual center he’s moving.
But, then, not all politicians and pundits are completely ignorant of life outside the palace walls. A calculated Jedi mind trick is at work here, too.
When regular folks talk to friends and neighbors, we sure feel like our desire for privacy, disgust with NAFTA and opposition to the Iraq war are mainstream majority positions—and they are. But then comes the barrage.
Day after day, smiling anchormen, blow-dried correspondents and silver-tongued congressmen follow the Big Lie theory of indoctrination, taking to our televisions, radios and newspapers insisting that crazy is normal, the majority is the minority and—most important—the fringe is the “center.” This is no accident.
These voices of the status quo do not want the status quo challenged. They deliberately broadcast messages crafted to get us—the mainstream—to question our mainstream-ness, while convincing politicians that the Establishment’s extremism represents a responsible middle ground.
More Aldous Huxley than George Orwell, these are the methods of modern propaganda, with the celebration of Obama’s “centrism” the latest doublespeak. In this brave new world, language is sculpted to skew the “center,” intimidating the majority from demanding concrete change for fear of looking like lunatics. It is a slickly packaged process of marginalization and demoralization—one with an underlying goal: keeping the real lunatics running the asylum.
David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” was released in June. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota
N.Y. Times (July 18, 2008)
July 18, 2008
Editorial
No Friend of the Workers
It should surprise no one, at this point, that an arm of the Bush administration charged with protecting Americans’ rights or safety is not doing its job. Even so, a government report and a Congressional hearing this week painted a disturbing picture of a Labor Department that simply is not standing up for workers.
President Bush has filled top posts across his administration with people who do not agree with the missions of their organizations. His Environmental Protection Agency has failed to protect the environment; his Justice Department has promoted injustice.
To lead the Department of Labor, Mr. Bush appointed Elaine Chao, who took office in 2001 arguing that states should be able to opt out of the federal minimum wage — a terrible idea that would drive down wages for the lowest-paid employees. For more than seven years, Ms. Chao has run a department that has tilted toward employers and failed to properly enforce labor laws.
In a report released this week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office took a close look at a sampling of cases handled — or, rather, mishandled — by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department. It found that the division failed to adequately investigate complaints that workers were not paid the minimum wage, were denied mandatory overtime or were not paid their last paychecks.
In one case, a delivery truck driver complained that he was not being paid for overtime that he had earned. The complaint languished for more than 17 months before an investigator was assigned. Then, the case was soon closed because the statute of limitations was about to run out.
The division dropped another case, in which disabled children were allegedly being paid cash by a trucking company to operate large machinery in violation of child-labor laws, because its investigators could not locate the employer. The G.A.O. had little trouble finding a company that appears to be the one cited in the complaint.
The G.A.O.’s findings suggest that the government is not doing its job of going after employers who “cheat their employees out of their hard-earned wages,” said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the committee that held this week’s hearing.
The Labor Department responded, as The Times’s Steven Greenhouse reported, that the “Wage and Hour Division is delivering pay for workers, not a payday for trial lawyers.” The department has it exactly backward. By failing to enforce the law, it is creating more work for trial lawyers, who can turn what should be simple administrative procedures into full-blown lawsuits.
Attacking trial lawyers is a classic Republican talking point. Its use in response to complaints from hard-working Americans that they are being cheated is a giveaway that the real problem at the department is not one of competence, but of ideology.
The first step in getting the nation’s laws enforced again will be entrusting enforcement to people who believe in them. We hope the next president will do that.
Editorial
No Friend of the Workers
It should surprise no one, at this point, that an arm of the Bush administration charged with protecting Americans’ rights or safety is not doing its job. Even so, a government report and a Congressional hearing this week painted a disturbing picture of a Labor Department that simply is not standing up for workers.
President Bush has filled top posts across his administration with people who do not agree with the missions of their organizations. His Environmental Protection Agency has failed to protect the environment; his Justice Department has promoted injustice.
To lead the Department of Labor, Mr. Bush appointed Elaine Chao, who took office in 2001 arguing that states should be able to opt out of the federal minimum wage — a terrible idea that would drive down wages for the lowest-paid employees. For more than seven years, Ms. Chao has run a department that has tilted toward employers and failed to properly enforce labor laws.
In a report released this week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office took a close look at a sampling of cases handled — or, rather, mishandled — by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department. It found that the division failed to adequately investigate complaints that workers were not paid the minimum wage, were denied mandatory overtime or were not paid their last paychecks.
In one case, a delivery truck driver complained that he was not being paid for overtime that he had earned. The complaint languished for more than 17 months before an investigator was assigned. Then, the case was soon closed because the statute of limitations was about to run out.
The division dropped another case, in which disabled children were allegedly being paid cash by a trucking company to operate large machinery in violation of child-labor laws, because its investigators could not locate the employer. The G.A.O. had little trouble finding a company that appears to be the one cited in the complaint.
The G.A.O.’s findings suggest that the government is not doing its job of going after employers who “cheat their employees out of their hard-earned wages,” said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the committee that held this week’s hearing.
The Labor Department responded, as The Times’s Steven Greenhouse reported, that the “Wage and Hour Division is delivering pay for workers, not a payday for trial lawyers.” The department has it exactly backward. By failing to enforce the law, it is creating more work for trial lawyers, who can turn what should be simple administrative procedures into full-blown lawsuits.
Attacking trial lawyers is a classic Republican talking point. Its use in response to complaints from hard-working Americans that they are being cheated is a giveaway that the real problem at the department is not one of competence, but of ideology.
The first step in getting the nation’s laws enforced again will be entrusting enforcement to people who believe in them. We hope the next president will do that.
N.Y. Times (July 18, 2008)
Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said
By JAMES RISEN
Shoddy work by private contractors is causing more deaths and injuries on U.S. military bases in Iraq than previously acknowledged, according to documents.
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/world/middleeast/18contractors.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By JAMES RISEN
Shoddy work by private contractors is causing more deaths and injuries on U.S. military bases in Iraq than previously acknowledged, according to documents.
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/world/middleeast/18contractors.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com (July 18, 2008)
The right-wing understanding of Government
A former White House aide and current CEO of Freedom's Watch thinks that the President is the "client" of the Attorney General.
By Glenn Greenwald
Full article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/18/blakeman/
A former White House aide and current CEO of Freedom's Watch thinks that the President is the "client" of the Attorney General.
By Glenn Greenwald
Full article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/18/blakeman/
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