Tag: Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

There is room to cut defense spending, if it is done with prudence and innovation.

If you listen to defense industry lobbyists, hawks in Congress and the Pentagon, the sky is falling and with it, American security. It isn’t. The failure of the “supercommittee” to reach a deficit agreement is supposed to trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in federal spending over the next decade, nearly $500 billion of that from the basic Pentagon budget. Many Republicans, and some Democrats, are already talking about getting the Pentagon off the hook. Representative Howard McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has promised legislation to prevent the cuts from taking effect. We are no fans of the supercommittee process, but if the Pentagon’s spending is wrestled back into rationality, it will be progress. Walking away would be a blow to Washington’s financial credibility. There is room to cut, if it is done with prudence and innovation.

Maureen Dowd: Fire and Ice Fire

Will it be a blood match between one candidate whose blood boils over and another who is bloodless?

A match between Gingrich and Obama would be fascinating: two men who grew up without their hot-tempered, hard-drinking fathers, vying to be the nation’s patriarch.

The Drama Queen versus No Drama Obama. The apocalyptic prophet versus the ambiguous president.

One hot, one cold. One struggles to stop setting fires as the other struggles to get fiery. One who’s always veering out of control, one who’s too tightly controlled. One reining it in, one letting it rip. One tamping down his pugilistic side, the other ramping it up. One channeling Ronald Reagan to seem more genial; the other channeling Harry Truman to have more spine.

One pretending to be a populist when he can’t drag himself out of Tiffany’s; the other pretending to be a populist when he’d like to be at Davos with Jamie Dimon.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Andrew Cuomo and the Spirit of Occupy

How Occupy Wall Street made Andrew Cuomo act less like Chris Christie.

For a few weeks last month, the main outpost of Murdoch-ism in the US-the New York Post-ran the same headline on its opinion page day after day: “Read Andrew’s Lips.” It was the Post’s way of reminding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of his “no new taxes” pledge, and the potential harm that would befall him if he reneged on it. [..]

Fast forward six months to today. The Post is in a rage, calling the Governor a “rate-fink” and-even more odious in their eyes-comparing him to his father, the first Governor (Mario) Cuomo. They’re fuming and frothing at Cuomo’s change of heart over the last week that resulted in a partial re-establishment of the millionaire’s tax. It’s almost as if after eleven months of governing like New Jersey’s Republican Governor Christie, he converted back to the Democratic principles of Connecticut’s Dan Malloy. For his part, Cuomo has cited the state’s worsening fiscal situation as the reason for the change of heart, and no doubt that played a part. But the deeper reason, and the more interesting reason, was Occupy. As the WFP’s Dan Cantor wrote recently, and as many others have likewise noted, the Occupy movement changed the conversation in America “from austerity to inequality.” And this new tax deal in Albany, which will manifestly improve the lives of many working and poor people, is a result of that changed conversation and atmosphere.

Vivian Gornick: Emma Goldman Occupies Wall Street

This is the second time in living memory that an American movement protesting social injustice has embraced her.

One afternoon in mid-October a young woman-dressed in a white Victorian shirtwaist, long black
skirt and rimless glasses shorn of earpieces-stood up in
Zuccotti Park to announce that she was Emma Goldman and that she had traveled through time to tell those gathered in the park that she loved what they were doing. Nothing in the way of OWS street theater could have better invoked the spirit of the protest than the appearance of a principled anarchist, born nearly a century and a half ago, who never considered herself more American than when she was denouncing the brutish contempt in which capitalism held the feeling life of the individual.

“Feeling” was a key word for Emma Goldman. She always said that the ideas of anarchism were of secondary use if grasped only with one’s reasoning intelligence; it was necessary to “feel them in every fiber like a flame, a consuming fever, an elemental passion.” This, in essence, was the core of Goldman’s radicalism: a lifelong faith, lodged in the nervous system, that feelings were everything. Radical politics, in fact, was the history of one’s own hurt, thwarted, humiliated feelings at the hands of institutionalized authority.

Stephen N. Xenakis: Healers, Torture and National Security

In 2004, the news that Americans had committed abuse and mistreatment in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was shocking. Even more alarming, were the revelations that physicians, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals had assisted with interrogations that bordered on torture.

In the span of just two generations, the United States had drifted from condemning Nazi physicians at the Nuremberg Trials for their collusion with torture, inhuman experimentation and cruel mistreatment to justifying waterboarding in the pursuit of better intelligence.

As a retired brigadier general and Army psychiatrist, committed to a strong military and national defense, I find these scandals to be most disturbing. The complicity of psychiatrists and other physicians clearly deviated from the fundamental ethical principles of the medical profession and military medicine. My generation of soldiers, who had served during the Vietnam War, vowed not to repeat the misdeeds of the My Lai massacres and rampant indiscipline we witnessed.

The political, military industrial, corporate class in Washington DC continues to re-make our constitutional republic into a powerful, unaccountable military empire. Yesterday the U.S. Senate voted 93 to 7 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 which allows the military to operate domestically within the borders of the United States and to possibly (or most probably) detain U.S. citizens without trial. Forget that the ACLU called it “an historic threat to American citizens”, this bill is so dangerous not only to our rights but to our country’s security that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, the National Intelligence Director and the U.S. Defense Secretary! For the first time in our history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial.

The government would be able to decide who gets an old fashioned trial (along with right to attorney and right against self-incrimination) and who gets detained without due process and put into a modern legal limbo. Does anyone remember that none of the first thousand people the FBI rounded up after 9-11, and which were imprisoned for several months (some brutalized) were ever charged with terrorism? Does anyone remember that hundreds of the Gitmo detainees who were handed over to their American military captors in exchange for monetary bounties were found, after years of imprisonment, to have no connection to terrorism?

Laura Flanders: Heat from the Arts on Mayor Mike Bloomberg

It was Glass war, not class war, at Lincoln Center Thursday night, and Glass won, composer Philip Glass. It should come as no surprise that the maestro of mesmeric repetition has a knack for the “human mic.”

Occupy Museums, a group of roughly two hundred OWS-inspired protesters showed up outside the last performance of Glass’s Satyagraha Thursday. Satyagraha the opera tells the story of M.K. Gandhi’s early struggle against colonialism and segregation in South Africa. “Satyagraha” the word means “truth force.” Said the protesters to the opera-goers: “Mic Check. Mic Check: Let’s tell the truth… let’s tell the truth. Join US!”

It’s a pretty elite OWS spin-off for sure, but there was a precise policy target. In their call to action, organizers pointed up the irony of Satyagraha being performed at Lincoln Center, where in recent weeks people have been arrested and forcibly removed when they attempted to protest colonization of the arts by .001 percenter David Koch. (One of the theaters now bears his name.)

George Zornick: Keystone XL Isn’t Dead Yet

This week, Republicans in Congress have launched two different attempts to resurrect the delayed, and possibly dead, Keystone XL pipeline. One was clearly a public relations stunt, but the other could present a much more serious problem for pipeline opponents.

Early in the week, leading Republicans gathered to promote a bill by Indiana Senator Richard Lugar that would direct President Obama to act within sixty days on Keystone XL. The administration’s current policy is to push back action until early 2013 as alternate routes are studied, but the Republicans called for an immediate decision: “If the administration would simply get out of the way and let it go forward, it would create jobs almost immediately. Lots of jobs,” said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. (This is not true, unless you have a very low bar for defining “lots.”)

Lugar’s bill has thirty-seven Republican co-sponsors, but isn’t really that dangerous-it won’t find enough Democratic support to pass the Senate. It’s really just a way to publicly whack Obama for delaying the project, not a viable attempt to get it going again.

Frank Bruni: And Now … Professor Gingrich

OF all the please-God-not-Mitt surges in the Republican contest, Newt Gingrich’s is the strangest.

And that’s not because of his marital mishaps. Or his lobbying that’s somehow magically something other than lobbying. Or his peevishness, comparable to that of an 18-month-old separated from the lollipop he snatched when Mommy’s back was turned.

It’s Gingrich’s braininess – or at least his preening assertion of such – that doesn’t quite fit, breaking the Republican pattern of late. How does an ostentatious know-it-all fare so well in a party supposedly hostile to intellectuals and intellectualism?

Most political analysis of America’s awful economy focuses on whether it will doom President Obama’s reelection or cause Congress to turn toward one party or the other. These are important questions, but we should really be looking at the deeper problems with which whoever wins in 2012 will have to deal.

Not to depress you, but our economic troubles are likely to continue for many years – a decade or more. At the current rate of job growth (averaging 90,000 new jobs per month over the last six months), 14 million Americans will remain permanently unemployed. The consensus estimate is that at least 90,000 new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the labor force. Even if we get back to a normal rate of 200,000 new jobs per month, unemployment will stay high for at least ten years. Years of high unemployment will likely result in a vicious cycle, as relatively lower spending by the middle-class further slows job growth.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: From Alexandria To Zuccotti Park: They’ve Been Destroying Books For 2,000 Years

Fahrenheit 451: The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.

They’re back.

But then, they’ve never gone away. The Book Killers have always been with us. Before recorded history they were with us, murdering the scholars and storytellers and mystics of every tribe they ever conquered.

They were there when Great Library burned in Alexandria 2,000 years ago. They destroyed the library known as the House of Wisdom when the Mongol Empire invaded Baghdad in 1258. They say the invaders took the books from every ruined library in Baghdad and piled them into the Tigris River, to serve as a bridge for their soldiers and chariots.

They say the river ran black with ink for years.

In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq with an indifference, incompetence, and arrogance that led to anarchy in the streets. There was widespread rioting, vandalism, and looting of priceless ancient antiquities and manuscripts. The National Library burned, and the flames lit the skies for miles around.

Seven centuries later, the great library of Baghdad died again.

Michelle Chen: Washington’s Debt Panic and the Real Social Debt in America

In the wake of the Congressional super committee’s collapse, we finally have consensus on both sides of the aisle: the lawmakers orchestrating the partisan drama are, behind the scenes, happy to collaborate on destroying economic security for all but the wealthiest Americans.

Though the debt hysteria made good political theater, the main immediate impact on the budget is simply to prolong the sense of doom hovering over struggling households. The budget problem those families face isn’t some theoretical future debt crisis but the possibility of losing unemployment checks when a year-end legislative deadline hits.

Coleen Rowley: Celebrating Spiritual Death On Black Friday

How many remember that this “Black Friday” marks the 10th anniversary of George Bush’s famous presidential advisory just after 9/11 for citizens to do their patriotic duty by pushing their worries aside and going shopping? The idea of asking the American people to make sacrifices in the face of the coming “War on Terror” was too ’70s, too Jimmy Carter. [..]

By incessantly pushing on the emotional hot-buttons of fear, hate, greed, false pride and blind loyalty (in that order), warmongers and flim-flam men have, since time immemorial, sought to bring out the worst in human beings. Up to now the propaganda has worked, persuading most Americans to accept with minimal visible coercion the enormous corruption and cruelty at the heart of the corporate-military-industrial-congressional-media complex.

Robert Naiman: Saving lives – and billions – in Afghanistan

The Merkley amendment to withdraw troops will save American lives and money – and it’s in line with public opinion.

Washington, DC – If Senator Jeff Merkley’s “expedite the drawdown from Afghanistan” amendment to the National Defense Authorisation Act makes a strong showing, it could tip the Obama administration towards a faster drawdown.

That would likely save hundreds of US and Afghan lives – not to mention all the people who wouldn’t be physically and psychologically maimed – and could easily save the US hundreds of billions of dollars, at a time when the alleged need for fiscal austerity is being touted as a reason to cut Social Security benefits and raise the Medicare retirement age.

Everyone knows the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.” It’s a great motto to try to live by. But, unfortunately, in this life on Earth, “do no harm” isn’t always on the menu at the restaurant. Sometimes, you’re already doing harm, and there’s no feasible immediate path to zero harm. Sometimes the best you can do in the short run is to reduce the harm as much as possible. And if that’s the best you can do, then that is what you must do. It’s not politically feasible, unfortunately, to end the war tomorrow.

But we could take a big bite out of it in the next week. And that would save many lives and real money.

The 2012 election is almost a full year away and nobody knows who is running against President Obama, but that didn’t stop Mary Kay Henry, the D.C.-based National President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), from announcing last week that her organization endorses President Obama for re-election. That’s not surprising – while many unions have exhibited political independence, SEIU officials have long been among Obama’s closest and most loyal allies in Washington – but what was notable here was how brazenly Henry exploited the language of the Occupy movement to justify her endorsement of the Democratic Party leader: “We need a leader willing to fight for the needs of the 99 percent . . . .Our economy and democracy have been taken over by the wealthiest one percent.”

But now SEIU’s effort to convert and degrade the Occupy movement into what SEIU’s national leadership is – a loyal arm of the DNC and the Obama White House – has become even more overt, s Greg Sargent reports today:

One of the enduring questions about Occupy Wall Street has been this: Can the energy unleashed by the movement be leveraged behind a concrete political agenda and push for change that will constitute a meaningful challenge to the inequality and excessive Wall Street influence highlighted by the protests?

A coalition of labor and progressive groups is about to unveil its answer to that question. Get ready for “Occupy Congress.”

New York Times Editorial: Reneging on Justice at Guantánamo

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo Bay prisoners who are not American citizens have the right of habeas corpus, allowing them to challenge the legality of their detention in federal court and seek release.

The power of the ruling, however, has been eviscerated by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The appellate court’s wrongheaded rulings and analyses, which have been followed by federal district judges, have reduced to zero the number of habeas petitions granted in the past year and a half.

The Supreme Court must reject this willful disregard of its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, and it can do so by reviewing the case of Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif, a Yemeni citizen imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since 2002.

Nicholas D. Kristoff: Occupy the Agenda

YOU have to wonder: Could Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police chiefs around the country be secretly backing the Occupy Wall Street movement?

The Occupy protests might have died in infancy if a senior police official had not pepper-sprayed young women on video. Harsh police measures in other cities, including a clash in Oakland that put a veteran in intensive care and the pepper-spraying of an 84-year-old woman in Seattle, built popular support.

Just in the last few days, Bloomberg – who in other respects has been an excellent mayor – rescued the movement from one of its biggest conundrums. It was stuck in a squalid encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park: antagonizing local residents, scaring off would-be supporters, and facing months of debilitating snow and rain. Then the mayor helped save the demonstrators by clearing them out, thus solving their real estate problem and re-establishing their narrative of billionaires bullying the disenfranchised. Thanks to the mayor, the protests grew bigger than ever.

George Zornick: Memo Reveals How Seriously Powerful Interests Take OWS

This morning, Up With Chris Hayes unveiled a major scoop: the show obtained a written pitch to the American Bankers Association from a prominent Washington lobbying firm, proposing a $850,000 smear campaign against Occupy Wall Street.

The memo, issued by Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, described the danger presented by the burgeoning movement, saying that if Democrats embraced Occupy, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street…. It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Furthermore, it notes that “the bigger concern…should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

CLGC was pitching an $850,000 campaign of opposition research and targeted campaigns against politicians who supported the movement. It was written by two firm partners with close ties to House Speaker John Boehner: Sam Geduldig joined CLGC before Boehner became speaker, and Jay Cranford left Boehner’s office this year to join the firm. Another partner at CLGC is reportedly “tight ” with the speaker.

The continent is destroying the weak to protect the strong. But will that be enough?

The eurozone crisis is a bank crisis posing as a series of national debt crises and complicated by  reactionary economic ideas, a defective financial architecture and a toxic political environment, especially in Germany, in France, in Italy and in Greece.

Like our own, the European banking crisis is the product of over-lending to weak borrowers, including for housing in Spain, commercial real estate in Ireland and the public sector (partly for infrastructure) in Greece.  The European banks leveraged up to buy toxic American mortgages and when those collapsed they started dumping their weak sovereign bonds to buy strong ones, driving up yields and eventually forcing the whole European periphery into crisis. Greece was merely the first domino in the line.

Robert Reich: Why We May Be In Store for a Passionless Presidential Race

Polls show Americans angrier and more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War. That’s not surprising. We have the worst economy since the Great Recession and the worst politics in living memory. The rise of the regressive right over the last three decades has finally spurred a progressive reaction. Occupiers and others have had enough.

Yet paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionless as they come.

President Obama will be supported by progressives and the Democratic base, but without enthusiasm. His notorious caves to Republicans and Wall Street – failing to put conditions on the Street’s bailout (such as demanding the Street help stranded home owners), or to resurrect Glass-Steagall, or include a public option in health care, or assert his constitutional responsibility to raise the debt limit, or protect Medicare and Social Security, or push for cap-and-trade, or close Guantanamo, or, in general, confront the regressive Republican nay-sayers and do-nothings with toughness rather than begin negotiations by giving them much of what they want – are not the stuff that stirs a passionate following.

This week was a sharp reminder that the ancient ideal of democracy is just as threatened — and to some, just as threatening — as it’s ever been. In government offices in Athens, G20 meeting rooms in Cannes, and “Super Committee” chambers in Washington, we learned that there are still places where the will of the people can be overruled by the whims of the powerful.

From the Parthenon to the Potomac, it was the same story: Elites still hold veto power over the democratic process, and they’re not afraid to use it.

Fred Wison: The XL Pipeline Is a Dog That Can’t Hunt

As thousands get ready for a big last push on President Obama against the XL Pipeline in Washington DC this weekend, decision makers should remember Elvis Presley’s sage advice: “When things go wrong, don’t go with them.” If, or when, XL goes down, how many politicians, businessmen and labour leaders will get pulled under with it?

By any measure, TransCanada Pipeline’s Keystone XL project has gone horribly wrong. This $7 Billion project was supposed to have been under construction seven months ago. It has yet to receive critical US state approvals, and the once expected pro-forma approval from the White House is now very much in question.

Paul Krugman: A Brave New World Wide Web of Economics

Ryan Avent, the economics writer at The Economist, and I have been corresponding about the role of the economics blogosphere, for the Christmas issue of the magazine.

I don’t know what parts of our conversation will actually show up there, but having assembled my thoughts I might as well put some of them here.

The concern, or maybe just issue, is whether the rise of econoblogs is undermining the gatekeepers – whether any old Joe can now weigh in on economic debate, whereas in the good old days you had to publish in the journals, which meant getting through the refereeing process.

My take is that the system never worked like that – or at least not in my professional lifetime. And when you consider how economic discussion actually used to work, you see the blogs in a different and more favorable light.

Alejandro Reuss: The 99%, the 1%, and Class Struggle

Between 1979 and 2007, the income share of the top 1% of U.S. households (by income rank) more than doubled, to over 17% of total U.S. income. Meanwhile, the income share of the bottom 80% dropped from 57% to 48% of total income. “We are the 99%,” the rallying cry of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, does a good job at calling attention to the dramatic increase of incomes for those at the very top-and the stagnation of incomes for the majority.

This way of looking at income distribution, however, does not explicitly focus on the different sources of people’s incomes. Most people get nearly all of their incomes-wages and salaries, as well as employment benefits-by working for someone else. A few people, on the other hand, get much of their income not from work but from ownership of property-profits from a business, dividends from stock, interest income from bonds, rents on land or structures, and so on. People with large property incomes may also draw large salaries or bonuses, especially from managerial jobs. Executive pay, though treated in official government statistics as labor income, derives from control over business firms and really should be counted as property income.