Tag: TMC Politics

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Chris Hayes: A few of Chris’s guests are Jack Abramoff, Bob Herbert, and Katrina vanden Heuvel.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Stephen Colbert will be George’s guest. He’ll explain the reason for his tossing his hat into the ring of his home state of South Carolina’s primary. You don’t have to watch the rest.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: I’m already sick of Republican clown show. On to FLOTUS poutage about a book

The Chris Matthews Show: More of the same from different faces.

Meet the Press with David Gregory:A slight break from the primary tedium with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on the coming congressional year.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley:CNN has sold its soul to the sinking Tea Party ship. They’re right up there with Fox

Watch Hayes. He was awesome Saturday morning talking about Guantanamo and an interview with former detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene. I’ll have the videos on that later

ek update: Herr Doktor Professor on Fareed Zakaria and This Week.

Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. It then must follow that Germany’s Chancellor, Andrea Merkel has got to be insane.

Eurozone in new crisis as ratings agency downgrades nine countries

Standard & Poor’s strips France of its AAA credit rating, rekindling fears in the markets over future of single currency

S&P said austerity was driving Europe even deeper into financial crisis as it also cut Austria’s triple-A rating, and relegated Portugal and Cyprus to junk status.

The humiliating loss of France’s top-rated status leaves Germany as the only other major economy inside the eurozone with a AAA rating, and rekindled financial market anxiety about a possible break-up of the single currency.

S&P brought an abrupt end to the uneasy calm that has existed in the eurozone since the turn of the year by downgrading the ratings of Cyprus, Italy, Portugal and Spain by two notches. Austria, France, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia were all cut by one notch.

The agency said that its actions on eurozone ratings were “primarily driven by insufficient policy measures by EU leaders to fully address systemic stresses”. It added that fiscal austerity alone “risks becoming self-defeating“.

Germany,too may be facing a downgrade as it slips into recession as its economy is contracting in the face of the deflationary economic policy of the euro zone. So what does Frau Merkel do? You got it, more austerity.

Merkel: Europe Faces ‘Long Road’ to Win Back Trust

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Standard and Poor’s downgrades of nine countries underline the fact that the eurozone faces a “long road” to win back investors’ confidence, pushing Saturday for it to move quickly on a new budget discipline pact and a permanent rescue fund.

I agree with Chris in Paris at AMERICAblog that the ratings agencies should be rendered useless considering their part in the current economic crisis but they are right about austerity. The Europeans led by Merkel are ignoring reality.

On Saturday MSNBC’s Chris Hayes aired an exclusive taped interview with former Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene. Boumediene, , a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was arrested with five Algerian men in Bosnia in October, 2001 and charged with plotting to blow up the American embassy in Sarajevo. He was held for seven years at Guantanamo without charges or explanation. Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush, a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision that Guantanamo detainees have the right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. federal courts. He and the five other detainees were released from Guantanamo on May 15, 2009 after a US Federal Judge found that “the Bush administration relied on insufficient evidence to imprison them indefinitely as ‘enemy combatants.

Through a translator, Boumediene explains life as a Guantanamo prisoner, about his torture, and his life after his release.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

New York Times Editorial: A Long Bleak Winter

The European Central Bank’s cheap lending to euro-area banks may have briefly stabilized the financial markets. But the respite won’t last. The decision by Standard & Poor’s on Friday to downgrade the credit ratings of nine euro-zone countries, including France, Italy and Spain, should remind European leaders that their economic strategy based on austerity for all is just not working.

After umpteen rescue plans, Europe remains a long way from coming to grips with its mushrooming debt crisis. Greece, which negotiated a second $165 billion bailout plan with its European neighbors in October, is back on the brink of a financial collapse. Even the new technocratic Italian government, appointed in November with strong German backing to execute a policy of fiscal austerity, says it is an illusion to believe the crisis can be overcome through budget cuts alone.

Paul Krugman: Deliberate Deception in the US: Blaming Fannie and Freddie for Crisis

Joe Nocera gets mad. And it’s a beautiful thing to see.

In a Dec. 23 column in The New York Times, Joe once again went after the Big Lie – the claim that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis – and drove home the point that the people advancing this story aren’t just wrong but are acting with intent, engaging in deliberate deception. [..]

Basically, Joe is arriving where I’ve been since 2000: what’s going on in the discussion of economic affairs (and other matters, like justifications for war) isn’t just a case where different people look at the same facts but reach different conclusions. Instead, we’re looking at a situation in which one side of the debate just isn’t interested in the truth; in which alleged scholarship is actually just propaganda.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Paul Krugman: America Isn’t a Corporation

“And greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.

Amy Goodman: Guantanamo at 10: The Prisoner and the Prosecutor

Ten years ago, Omar Deghayes and Morris Davis would have struck anyone as an odd pair. While they have never met, they now share a profound connection, cemented through their time at the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Deghayes was a prisoner there. Air Force Col. Morris Davis was chief prosecutor of the military commissions there from 2005 to 2007.

Deghayes was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the U.S. military. He told me: “There was a payment made for every person who was handed to the Americans. … We were chained, head covered, then sent to Bagram [Afghanistan]-we were tortured in Bagram-and then from Bagram to Guantanamo.”

At Guantanamo, Deghayes, one of close to 800 men who have been sent there since January 2002, received the standard treatment: “People were subjected to beatings, daily fear … without being convicted of any crime.”

The current case that Iran is developing enriched uranium for a bomb is hardly conclusive and the evidence is sketchy at best. There used to be but it was abandoned under international pressure in 2003. Former member of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team in 2003 and nuclear engineer, Robert Kelley writes in Bloomberg News that the charges against Iran are no “slam dunk”:

(T)he issue is not whether there is evidence of such a program, but whether there is evidence that it was restarted after being shut down in 2003.

The Nov. 8, 2011, report of the IAEA, under the leadership of Director General Yukiya Amano, is long on the former and very short on the latter. In the 24-page document, intended for a restricted distribution but widely available on the Internet, all but three of the items that were offered as proof of a possible nuclear-arms program are either undated or refer to events before 2004. The agency spends about 96 percent of a 14- page annex reprising what was already known: that at one time there were military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.

What about the three indications that the arms project may have been reactivated?

Two of the three are attributed only to two member states, so the sourcing is impossible to evaluate. In addition, their validity is called into question by the agency’s handling of the third piece of evidence.

That evidence, according to the IAEA, tells us Iran embarked on a four-year program, starting around 2006, to validate the design of a device to produce a burst of neutrons that could initiate a fission chain reaction. Though I cannot say for sure what source the agency is relying on, I can say for certain that this project was earlier at the center of what appeared to be a misinformation campaign.

In 2009, the IAEA received a two-page document, purporting to come from Iran, describing this same alleged work. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was then the agency’s director general, rejected the information because there was no chain of custody for the paper, no clear source, document markings, date of issue or anything else that could establish its authenticity. What’s more, the document contained style errors, suggesting the author was not a native Farsi speaker. It appeared to have been typed using an Arabic, rather than a Farsi, word-processing program. When ElBaradei put the document in the trash heap, the U.K.’s Times newspaper published it.

Appearing on “Face the Nation with Bob Scheiffer”, Secretary of Defense Robert Panetta let it slip that Iran is not trying to build nuclear weapons but is pursuing a “nuclear capability”:

“I think the pressure of the sanctions, the diplomatic pressures from everywhere, Europe, the United States, elsewhere, it’s working to put pressure on them,” Panetta explained on Sunday. “To make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they’re doing. Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is, do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”

Republicans have been beating the drums of war in recent weeks as tensions in the Iranian gulf have soared. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil transport hub crucial to global industry, if U.S. warships return to monitor their activities. [..]

The International Atomic Energy Agency said late last year that Iran had carried out tests that suggested they may be taking the first steps toward building a nuclear weapon, but former agency insiders disputed the claim as being misleading.

Reality check. This is not, nor has it ever been, just about nuclear weapons. It’s also about oil and securing the strategic passage from the major oil fields that surround the Persian Gulf. Now closing the Strait of Hormuz is a “red line” that would provoke an American response, according to United States government officials.  

The current policy of austerity that is being forced on the European Union by Germany and England has been called “financially futile, economically erroneous, politically puzzling and socially irresponsible” by economists and monetary experts. Author and derivatives expert, Satyajit Das, writes in the first part of his series on “The Road to Nowhere, Part 1 – Fiscal Bondage” at naked capitalism that the December 2011 European summit to resolve the euro crisis was a failure:

The proposed plan is fundamentally flawed. It made no attempt to tackle the real issues – the level of debt, how to reduce it, how to meet funding requirements or how to restore growth. Most importantly there were no new funds committed to the exercise.[..]

The plan may result in a further slowdown in growth in Europe, worsening public finances and increasing pressure on credit ratings. This is precisely the experience of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Britain as they have tried to reduce budget deficits through austerity programs. This would make the existing debt burden even harder to sustain. The rigidity of the rules also limits government policy flexibility, risking making economic downturns worse.[..]

The fiscal compact did not countenance any writedowns in existing debt. It also did not commit any new funding to support the beleaguered European periphery. Germany specifically ruled out the prospect of jointly and severally guaranteed Euro-Zone bonds. Instead, there were vague platitudes about working towards further fiscal integration.[..]

Instead of dealing with the financial problems of the central bailout mechanism (the EFSF – European Financial Stability Fund), European leaders chose the re-branding option.

Actions, or rather inactions, have consequences.

As I predicted in a message to Credit Writedowns Pro subscribers on Monday, statistics have shown that the German economy has finally succumbed to the deflationary economic policy of the euro zone.

   Germany showed first signs of feeling the pain from the euro zone’s debt crisis as the economy shrank in the last three month of 2011, despite outperforming its peers for main part of the year thanks to strong domestic demand and exports.

   Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 3.0 percent in 2011, preliminary Federal Statistics Office data showed on Wednesday, below the previous year’s growth rate of 3.7 percent – the fastest since reunification – and in line with a Reuters poll estimate.

   But GDP contracted by around 0.25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, an official from the Statistics Office added.

   “Germany cannot isolate itself so easily from tensions within the euro zone. In addition the export sector is facing a difficult period given the fall in global demand,” said Joerg Zeuner, chief economist at VP Bank.

Harrison wrote in November in the New York Times

that Europe is already in a double-dip recession. Already two months ago, the Markit Eurozone Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index, which measures activity across Europe in services and manufacturing, had fallen to 50.4, the lowest since September 2009. The divider between expansion and contraction is 50, so Europe was still expanding. But last Wednesday, Markit data indicated that the situation has since deteriorated; the latest data showed a drop in private sector activity in the euro zone for the first time since July 2009. Moreover, the data are poor in the core of the euro zone as well as in the periphery, with Germany and France’s economies stalling as well. The sovereign debt crisis and the fiscal consolidation implemented to deal with it have taken their toll.[..]

Until the banks take substantially more credit write-downs and recapitalize, this crisis will continue and get worse.

The downward spiral is evident throughout Europe with even the strong German economy feeling the effects of erroneous policies

The German economy expanded faster than any other Group of 7 nation last year, official data showed Wednesday, but the stress of the euro crisis and a slowing global economy appear to be already weighing on output.

Germany expanded by 3 percent last year from 2010, the Federal Statistical Office said in Wiesbaden. It noted, however, that the growth came mostly in the first half of 2011, and estimated that the economy actually contracted by about 0.25 percent in the fourth quarter from the prior three months.

Some economists now predict another contraction for Germany in the first three months of 2012, which would meet the usual definition of a recession as two consecutive quarterly declines in output.

And austerity measures in Greece are making their budget deficits even worse:

Greece’s budget deficit widened last year as an austerity-fuelled recession cancelled out much of the extra revenues the government was hoping to raise through emergency taxes, data showed on Thursday. The central government budget gap widened 0.8 percent year-on-year to 21.64 billion euros ($27.45 billion) last year, according to figures from the finance ministry.

David Dayen at FDL News Desk thinks it is probably worse since “the EU uses a different measure to assess the Greek budget.”  He points out that even with increased taxes, the fall in tax compliance from an already lax system has reduced income. It all looks good on paper but that’s not the reality of what is actually in the treasury.

There is some hope that Europe’s leader are waking up to reality that there needs to be a growth strategy, although it may not be enough, or soon enough, to reverse the spiral.

It is a crisis in the € zone. The divergent trends in the € zone are too large. It is not an “optimum currency area”

It’s not just government, to “sovereign debt” but also excesses in the financial sector, real estate etc.

We must do everything to avoid recession. … We need a fiscal strategy that is “growth friendly”

Fiscal consolidation will not tell us to say “no” to all or which is cut everywhere. We must “prioritize”

We ask each member state to establish a “job plan”, we make commitments we can evaluate

The next meeting of the Eurozone member is the end of this month where a tax on financial transactions will be considered and, hopefully, they will discuss job creation and debt reduction.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Jeff Cohen: Obama, Sarkozy and Taxing Wall Street

With U.S. media obsessing on the fight here at home among conservatives vying to become president, most of them missed some big news about France, which already has a conservative president.  This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take the lead – even go it alone within Europe, if need be – in introducing and pushing a Financial Transaction Tax in his country.

That’s right – the conservative president of France wants to tax the financial traders and speculators.

Referring to the tax as a “moral issue” and blaming deregulation and speculation for the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy has said that traders must “repay for the damage they have caused.”

What does it tell us about U.S. politics that the conservative president of France – on this issue and others – is way to the left of President Obama?  The U.S. president has not publicly promoted a Wall Street transaction tax (even though US financial institutions, not the French, were largely responsible for the global financial crisis).

Michael Ratner: Guantánamo at 10: The Defeat of Liberty by Fear

The unprecedented executive powers assumed by both presidents since 9/11 have crippled America’s body politic

On 11 January 2002, the United States began showing major signs of what I call “Guantánamo syndrome”, after one of the ailment’s first and most enduring symptoms. That was the day when the Bush administration transferred the first 20 detainees to Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after being assured by its Department of Justice that the location placed detainees outside of US legal jurisdiction.

But the first hint of our national illness appeared earlier, in the weeks following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers, when the Bush administration took the lid off unlimited executive power. This is the lid that nobles, who had endured centuries of rulers imprisoning anyone who ticked them off and holding them indefinitely without having to state or prove any kind of case, affixed in 1215 with the Magna Carta. It’s the lid that the original framers tightened to the specifications of the United States when they ratified the Constitution in 1790.

President Obama’s recent exercise of his constitutional authority to make recess appointments to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and filling vacancies the National Labor Relations Board has created some dilemmas for himself and congressional Republicans. Republicans, of course, will continue to block confirmation of any Presidential appointee but are split as to how to address President Obama’s dismissal of the sham “pro forma” sessions and his four recess appointments.

With the appointment of Jack Lew as Chief of Staff, there is now a vacancy to head the Office of Budget and Management but the bigger issue may be the vacancy for a new director to the Federal Housing Finance Administration. That institution has been without a confirmed director for over two years, since David Lockhart left. The president is being pressured by the House Congressional Delegation from California to replace the Republican acting director of the FHFA, Ed DeMarco, who they say has been obstructing efforts to stem the housing market collapse and help keep owners in their homes. David Dayen at FDL News Desk reports that he is of two minds on DeMarco:

(DeMarco) has interpreted his mandate very narrowly. It’s a bad thing when he refuses to engage in principal reductions for troubled borrowers, even though that would make more money for Fannie and Freddie in the long run, because he doesn’t want to take the short-term financing hit. But it’s a good thing when he sues 17 banks over misrepresentations of the mortgages in the securities they sold to Fannie and Freddie, with the hope of forcing repurchases of those mortgage pools.

There have been signs that DeMarco is warming to a more activist stance. He agreed to the changes to HARP, which is more of a stimulus program than a program that will save homes, but which will allow expanded refinancing come March of this year on GSE-owned properties. Freddie Mac just initiated a program for a 12-month forbearance (where the borrower can skip payments) for unemployed borrowers, although Democrats maintain that not everyone eligible will receive that forbearance.

Most promisingly, DeMarco is considering a principal pay-down program put forward by a California Democrat, Zoe Lofgren, that would allow underwater homeowners with GSE loans to have their mortgage payments go entirely to equity for five years, waiving the interest payments. DeMarco said he would look into the idea back in October, and there have been leaks since then suggesting that principal pay-down would happen. However, there has been no final word, and officially FHFA “continues to evaluate” the Lofgren proposal, even though in a meeting with House Dems they promised an assessment within two weeks.

Meanwhile those poor Republican obstructionists have a headache, as Brian Buetler at TPMDC reports:

Scores of House Republicans have signed on to a non-binding resolution disapproving of Obama’s four winter recess appointments – Cordray, and three members of the National Labor Relations Board – all fodder for conservatives, who are furious about the existence of these agencies, let alone the recess appointments themselves.

“It’s astounding to me that the president is claiming these are recess appointments and within his authority, when Congress was not in fact in recess,” said Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) who authored the resolution. “These appointments are an affront to the Constitution. No matter how you look at this, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I hope the House considers my resolution as soon as we return to Washington so we can send a message to President Obama.”

This creates an election-year dilemma for GOP leaders who may not want to make a big show of their opposition to the one person in Washington tasked with protecting consumers from predatory financial actors.

But with so many key vacancies, President Obama has his own dilemma headache, not just to make more recess appointments but how to do it:

[T]he breaks between the last week in January and the first week in August will be very brief ones. Which means that if Obama declines to use his recess appointment power in the next several days, he’ll have three options, none ideal: He can fight it out with Congress and push for regular confirmations; he can wait until August, when Congress goes home for over a month; or he can broaden the parameters of his own precedent, and use the recess appointment during brief one-week vacations between now and then.

Republicans will likely keep holding pro forma sessions during those breaks, challenging Obama to take things further than he already has. [..]

As far as the Constitution and the Senate rules are concerned, there wouldn’t be much difference between a recess appointment in, say, April, and the recess appointments he announced last week. But their public rationale for the January appointments wouldn’t really stand in April. And after attacking President Obama’s supposed power grab, Republicans would slip the precedent in their back pocket, to be deployed when they control the White House.

We shall see if the president has finally abandoned all hope of getting any bipartisan cooperation from the Republicans.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day

Katrina vanden Heuvel; Extremist in pinstripes

Mitt Romney’s dead heat with Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses bolstered the media narrative that Mitt Romney may not be conservative enough for Republican primary voters. This characterization serves Romney well. His rivals carve up each other, hoping to emerge as the conservative “alternative” to Romney. And vast swaths of the media discount his reactionary views, anticipating his “pivot” to more moderate positions once the nomination is secured. In reality, Romney is a remarkably reactionary candidate, camouflaged in corporate pinstripes.

On social issues, Romney embraces all of the right’s litmus tests. He pledges to repeal President Obama’s health-care reform, even though it was modeled on the plan Romney signed as Massachusetts governor. He favors repealing Roe v. Wade, outlawing women’s right to choose. He supports an amendment to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional. He’s for building a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border, opposes any path to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country and rails against the Texas policy to offer in-state college tuition for the children of undocumented workers. Advised on legal matters by the reactionary crank Robert Bork, he repeatedly calls for more judges in the activist right-wing tradition of the gang of four – Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.

Michelle Chen: States Attempt to Instill ‘Work Ethic’ by Rolling Back Child Labor Protections

It’s been a long time since the engines of American industry were driven by tiny fingers. So when Newt Gingrich recently proclaimed, “Young people ought to learn how to work,” and suggested that children could develop a strong work ethic by working as janitors in their own schools, many Americans probably missed the throwback to the early twentieth century, when hundreds of thousands of children toiled in factories. But after decades of campaigns against youth exploitation, the right is rekindling vestiges of the sweatshop era with legislation aimed at rolling back child labor laws.

While they didn’t go so far as to recruit tweens back to the factory floor, throughout 2011 state legislators pushed bills to erode regulation of youth employment. Maine Republicans sought to ease protections for young workers with amicably named legislation to “Enhance Access to the Workplace by Minors.” The original bill, introduced by State Representative David Burns, would remove some limits on working hours for teenagers and expand the number of days a youth under 20 could work for $5.25 an hour-to about half a year. That would be a bargain for employers, who pay adult Mainers a minimum wage of $7.50. Last summer, a more limited teen labor bill passed, which only eased restrictions on working hours.