Tag: Open Thread

Sixty Minutes‘ December 11, 2011 interview of President Obama included a claim by Obama that, unfortunately, did not lead the interviewer to ask the obvious, essential follow-up questions.

   “I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn’t illegal.”

Obama did not explain what Wall Street behavior he found least ethical or what unethical Wall Street actions he believed was not illegal. It would have done the world (and Obama) a great service had he been asked these questions. He would not have given a coherent answer because his thinking on these issues has never been coherent. If he had to explain his position he, and the public, would recognize it was indefensible. I offer the following scale of unethical banker behavior related to fraudulent mortgages and mortgage paper (principally collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)) that is illegal and deserved punishment. I write to prompt the rigorous analytical discussion that is essential to expose and end Obama and Bush’s “Presidential Amnesty for Contributors” (PAC) doctrine. The financial industry is the leading campaign contributor to both parties and those contributions come overwhelmingly from the wealthiest officers – the one-tenth of one percent that thrives by being parasites on the 99 percent.

Robert Sheer: Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt

Hitch is dead. Not, obviously, his brilliant body of work, or the stunning examples of a grand and unfettered intellect that will forever survive him, as will the indelible record of his immense wit and passion. But, sadly, a life force that I had assumed as an indissoluble part of our political and literary landscape, as well as my own close circle of friends, has ended, and with it an indispensable element of our collective moral code.

Christopher Hitchens could be wrong; we had harsh public debates about the Iraq war, but I never doubted that, even then, he was coming from a good place of humane concern. In that instance, he allowed his great compassion for the Kurds and his justifiable loathing of Saddam Hussein to overwhelm a lifetime of opposition to the arrogant assumptions of America’s neo-colonialism. Despite the vehemence of our debates, both public and personal, he and his saving grace and wife, Carol Blue, held a gathering at their home to discuss a book I wrote on the subject. This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.

That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Eugene Robinson: Been There, Thought That

Can we please bury the notion that Newt Gingrich is some kind of deep thinker? His intellect may be as broad as the sea, but it’s about as deep as a birdbath.

I’m not saying the Republican presidential front-runner is unacquainted with ideas. Quite the contrary: Ideas rain through his brain like confetti, escaping at random as definitive pronouncements about this or that. But they are other people’s ideas, and Gingrich doesn’t bother to curate them into anything resembling a consistent philosophy. Given enough time, I’m convinced, he will take every position on every issue.

Bill Boyarsky: Bernie Sanders Explains Why Congress Fears Citizens United

It took just 12 minutes and 29 seconds on the Senate floor Sunday for Sen. Bernie Sanders to expose the real power of corporate America over our elections. It should be a rallying cry for the embattled minority trying to clean up the system.

Sanders, the Senate’s only Independent, was speaking on behalf of his proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s devastating Citizens United decision, which permits corporations, unions and issue advocacy organizations to spend unlimited amounts of money from their own funds to support or oppose candidates.

George Zornick: Republicans Intensify Attacks on the Nuclear Safety Chief

If there was any doubt that an imbroglio around the leadership of Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would be used to try to force his ouster from that agency, a Wednesday hearing before a House panel removed it.

All five members of the NRC appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is chaired by Representative Darrell Issa. Four commissioners publicly aired their grievances about Jaczko’s leadership, which include charges of bullying and intimidation of staff, along with refusing to share information with fellow commissioners.

Jaczko said he did nothing wrong, and cited a report from the NRC inspector general clearing him of legal wrongdoing when it came to sharing information among his colleagues. But Republicans went directly for the jugular.

Joe Conason: The Republican Closet That Won’t Stay Closed

If these are the last weeks of Rick Perry’s ridiculous presidential campaign, his desperation is turning him into a nasty clown indeed. By publicly attacking the gays and lesbians who have chosen to serve their country in uniform, the Texas governor seems to have gained ground in Iowa. But at what cost did he win a few points that still leave him well below the top tier? His pollster and consultant Tony Fabrizio has been “outed,” rightly or wrongly-and worse still, the swinging closet door of the Republican Party has been flung open again. Who else will be found inside?

From the days of the Cold War, when reigning mischief-maker Roy Cohn was bedding boys and denouncing gays as “sissies,” through the hidden homosexual history that leads from Marvin Liebman, co-founder of the National Review to Arthur Finkelstein, the ad man behind the ’80s conservative revival, to the defection of former “hit man” David Brock, to Ken Mehlman, the Bush-era party chairman who didn’t dare (until recently) to speak of his own true nature, and even Karl Rove, who ran gay-baiting campaigns despite his own father’s orientation, Republicans have repeatedly watched their own intellectual and political leaders embarrassed by what emerges from that capacious closet.

For months, the Justice Department has largely been silent as Republican-dominated legislatures in state after state made it harder for minorities, poor people and other Democratic-leaning groups to vote. On Tuesday, however, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. spoke out forcefully and promised to use the full weight of his department to ensure that new electoral laws are not discriminatory. To live up to that vow, he will have his hands full.

Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states have recently enacted laws designed to limit Americans’ access to the polls, often concentrating on voters – blacks, Hispanics, students and the poor – who showed up in large numbers in 2008 to elect Barack Obama. They have imposed strict voter-ID requirements, knowing that millions of people cannot easily meet them; eliminated early voting periods; and restricted registration drives. (Voter ID laws have been introduced in at least 34 states.)

What the hell took Holder so long?

John R. McArthur: President Obama Richly Deserves to Be Dumped

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Eizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country.. . .Money rules.. . .The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

A former aide to Lyndon Johnson who knows politics from the inside, Moyers then delivered the coup de grace: “[Lease] should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.”

Paul Krugman: In the US, Decidedly Warped Standards for “Mission Accomplished”

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum say the right thing about revelations that big banks got very easy terms during the 2008 financial crisis: the real scandal isn’t so much that those banks got rescued as that the rest of the population didn’t. [..]

What’s unforgivable is the way policy makers, both at the Fed and elsewhere, basically declared Mission Accomplished as soon as the panic in financial markets subsided and stocks were up again. When spring rolls around, we’ll reach the third anniversary of a declaration from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, that “green shoots” were making an appearance – and there will still be 4 million Americans who have been out of work for more than a year. Yet there has been no sense of urgency about dealing with unemployment; indeed, most of the elites’ conversation has been about stuff like cutting Social Security payments a decade or two from now.

As Mr. Drum says, that’s the true radicalizing experience.

Robert Reich: Newt’s Tax Plan, and Why His Polls Rise the More Outrageous He Becomes

Newt Gingrich has done it again. With his new tax plan he has raised the bar from irresponsibility to recklessness.

Every dollar estimate I’m about to share with you comes from the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center – a group whose estimates are used by almost everyone in Washington regardless of political persuasion.

First off, Newt’s plan increases the federal budget deficit by about $850 billion – in a single year!

To put this in perspective, most forecasts of the budget deficit cover ten years.  The elusive goal of the White House and many on both sides of the aisle in Congress is to reduce that ten-year deficit by 3 to 4 trillion dollars.

Newt goes in the other direction, with gusto. Increasing the deficit by $850 billion in a single year is beyond the wildest imaginings of the least responsible budget mavens within a radius of three thousand miles from Washington.

Gail Collins: Mitt’s Zest for Zings

Mitt Romney arrived in New York City on Wednesday, newly endorsed by Christine O’Donnell, who we have not seen since her not-a-witch race for the U.S. Senate. She praised Romney for having “been consistent since he changed his mind.” I so miss Christine O’Donnell.

Romney was in town to raise money. Iowa and New Hampshire get the love; we get the traffic jams. ‘Twas ever thus. We’re not bitter, really.

However, he did sit down with The Times’s Jeff Zeleny and Ashley Parker to compare himself to Newt Gingrich. (The above-the-fray Mitt is so November.) “Zany is not what we need in a president,” he said.

I would say this is an extremely safe position for Romney to take because the odds are very good that no one has ever called Mitt zany in his entire life. Unless it was when he drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the station wagon. (“Hey, Mister, you got an Irish setter on top of your car. What are you, zany or something?”)

Vulnerable Women and Contraception: Obama Turns Clock Back Nearly 100 Years

“For a woman to ‘ask her physician’ for a safe and effective contraceptive  presupposed that she had a physician, that she could afford a contraceptive, and that the physician would be willing to give it to her, regardless of her marital status.”

These are the words of the historian Sheila Rothman, writing about the setbacks Margaret Sanger faced in the 1920s and 1930s in trying to realize her vision of making birth control widely available to all women, including the poorest-and about the ultimate “ownership” of contraceptive services during that era by physicians. Sanger’s original vision was a fleet of clinics, to be run by public health nurses. But as Rothman and others have documented, when she attempted to open such clinics, she experienced repeated arrests and the closures of her facilities, as contraception was then illegal. In the years leading up to the 1965 Supreme Court Griswold decision, which legalized birth control for married persons, only physicians were legally permitted to provide such services, and as the quote from Rothman implies, this situation put poor women at a tremendous disadvantage.

Rothman’s critique, written in the 1970s about events in the ’20s and ’30s,  is remarkably relevant to today’s leading reproductive controversy: the Obama administration’s overruling of the FDA decision to allow over-the-counter status of Plan B, an Emergency Contraceptive product, for young women under the age of seventeen. If one substitutes “teenager” for “woman” and “Plan B” for “a safe and effective contraceptive” in Rothman’s quote, one can readily appreciate how, once again in America’s longstanding reproductive wars, the needs of the most vulnerable are willfully neglected.

Laura Flanders: What a Difference an Occupation Makes

It was never a genuine question. Money media prattled on about Occupy Wall Street’s supposedly ineffable demands the same way they batted aside the end capitalism signs to wonder what the Seattle protesters had on their minds. That said, the Occupy movement has always been more about doing than demanding and this week, OWS stepped it up another notch.

On December 6, OccupyYourHomes joined with local community organizers to take on the housing crisis. In twenty-five cities, protesters interrupted house auctions, blocked evictions and occupied foreclosed homes. In East New York they moved Alfredo Carrasquillo, Tasha Glasgow and their two children into a foreclosed home that had stood empty for three years. I attended the action Tuesday and couldn’t drag myself away. Even as the rain drizzled and the temperature sank, I watched the numbers of protesters grow and thought of the many, many members of underfunded community groups I’ve spoken to over the years. Among those, Community Voices Heard, New York Communities for Change, Picture the Homeless, Organize for Occupation, VOCAL-NY and Reclaim the Land. They talked on GRITtv about toxic loans and targeted neighborhoods, forced foreclosures, fear and the general lack of national interest.

Karen Greenberg: How Terrorist ‘Entrapment’ Ensnares Us All

When the government gets in the business of playing along with terror plots, it’s not just justice that suffers – but our safety

Two weeks ago, Jose Pimentel was arrested as an alleged terrorist bomb-maker as a result of an NYPD sting. Within hours of the arrest, his attorney raised the prospect of a possible entrapment defense. Last month, when Mansour Arbabsiar was indicted for trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on behalf of Iran, he, too, was the subject of a sting, in this case by the FBI, and he claimed entrapment. These are but the latest iterations of dozens of terrorism cases that have come through the system with varying degrees of “entrapment” claims by the defense at the time of arrest. The Fort Dix case from New Jersey in 2007, and the more recent instances of the sole terrorism suspects in Portland, Washington, DC and Baltimore are among the many cases in which some sort of entrapment was alleged (at least, at the outset).

This is a problem in a counterterrorism world where law enforcement relies on preventive stings as its main strategy. By definition, the strategy precludes a defense. Legally, entrapment is mostly about the suspect’s predisposition because the other element of entrapment, inducement by the government to commit the crime, is usually not disputed. Thus, if the government can show that the defendant was inclined to the crime, then the entrapment-by-inducement defense cannot prevail in court. In a terrorism case, the fact of being willing to commit an act of terrorism is seen as predisposition, no matter how much of a Catch-22 this may be. As a result, lawyers rarely choose to mount the defense.

Mary Bottari FOX News, OWS, Banksters, and Bombs

Last week, tragedy was averted when savvy security at Deutsche Bank (DB) in Frankfurt, Germany, spotted a suspicious package and sequestered a letter bomb intended for the DB CEO. This was the second time Deutsche Bank was attacked in this manner. In 1989, their CEO was killed by a bomb later traced to violent extremists in Germany’s Red Army Faction.

Scanning the horizon for someone to blame for the latest attack on Germany’s largest bank, FOX news pundit Dan Gainor worked “the Internets.” Did he detail Deutsche Bank’s track record of making friends by ripping off consumers and foreclosing on their homes? Did he mention that Deutsche Bank stirred public ire when it was bailed out by multiple governments, including two billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve? Did he even bother to notice that it was widely reported that an Italian anarchist group had already claimed responsibility for the attack?

No. In his piece on FOX News, “Left, Obama Escalate War on Banks Into Dangerous Territory,” Gainor decided to go after the bank-busting activists at the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, specifically our BanksterUSA.org site, because the Bankster masthead is riddled with bullet holes.

Miriam Pemberton: Military Spending is the Weakest Job Creator

Even before the supercommittee’s demise, the defense industry and its Pentagon and congressional allies were making preemptive strikes on the next phase: the automatic cuts, half of them from defense, that are supposed to follow the supercommittee’s failure. And with national unemployment rates stuck near 9 percent, the effect of these cuts on jobs has loomed large in their sights.

The largest defense industry trade association, the Aerospace Industries Association, recently funded a study predicting $1 trillion in military cuts over 10 years would add 0.6 percent to the national unemployment rate. The Pentagon then funded its own study that conveniently rounded that prediction up to an even 1 percent.

The glaring flaw in these studies is that they make claims about the effect on the economy as a whole as if these military cuts were being made in a vacuum.

Not long after I first came to Washington 20 years ago I was at a conference dealing with Social Security privatization. One of the panelists used a number for the administrative costs of private accounts that was far lower than the numbers I had seen in the literature. After the panel, I asked one of the other panelists about her best estimate of the administrative costs of private accounts. She said that this depended on whether I was interested in advocacy or policy.

I was somewhat taken aback by her response, but after a moment I told her that I was interested in accuracy. I have always felt that this is the best approach to policy questions.

Accuracy has not featured prominently in Washington budget debates in recent decades. There is an enormous amount of misunderstanding about the deficit, much of it deliberately promoted by politicians. We hear endless tales of out-of-control government spending and chronic deficits. This is nonsense as the data clearly show, but unfortunately both parties have an interest in promoting the deceptions.

Jim Hightower: Don’t Call Gingrich a “Lobbyist”

Gingrich, his lawyers, and his staff adamantly insist that it’s rude and crude to call him a lobbyist.

Mea culpa, I misspoke, my bad. I stand corrected. I have called Newt Gingrich a lobbyist.

Apparently, he hates that tag, even though he has indeed gotten very wealthy by taking big bucks from such special interest outfits as IBM, Astra Zeneca, Microsoft, and Siemens in exchange for helping them get favors from federal and state governments.

But Gingrich, his lawyers, and his staff adamantly insist that it’s rude and crude to call him a lobbyist. No, no, they bark, the Newt is “a visionary.”

Eugene Robinson: A Mild Victory in Durban

I’m inclined to believe that the apparent result of the climate change summit in Durban, South Africa, might turn out to be a very big deal. Someday. Maybe.

That’s my view, but it’s hardly universal. After the meeting ended Sunday, initial reaction basically ranged from “Historic Breakthrough: The Planet Is Saved” to “Tragic Failure: The Planet Is Doomed.” Such radically different assessments came from officials and activists who have the same general view of climate change-that it’s real and something must be done about it-and who fully understand the agreement that the delegates in Durban reached.

The optimists and the pessimists disagree mostly on what they believe governments can do to curb the carbon and methane emissions that are warming the atmosphere, and when they are likely to do it. My conclusion is that for now, at least, the conceptual advance made in Durban is as good as it gets.

Ari Berman: ‘Occupy the Voting Booth’-Thousands March to Protect the Vote

Tomorrow Attorney General Eric Holder will gave a major speech on voting rights at the LBJ presidential library in Austin. According to the library, “Holder will discuss the importance of ensuring equal access to the ballot box and strengthening America’s long tradition of expanding the franchise.”

Holder’s speech could not come at a more critical time. Over the last year we’ve witnessed an unprecedented GOP war on voting, with a dozen Republican governors and state legislators passing laws to restrict voter registration drives, require birth certificates to register to vote, curtail early voting, mandate government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot and disenfranchise ex-felons who’ve served their time. The Brennan Center for Justice has estimated that “these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012,” and notes that “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.”

George Zornick: Meltdown at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Tensions at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation’s chief overseer of civilian nuclear materials, finally boiled over into public finger-pointing and accusations of malfeasance late Friday-creating what one lawmaker called “a regulatory meltdown.” It’s a messy conflict, but one thing is clear: the nuclear industry has many friends on the NRC.

On Friday, Representative Darrell Issa released a letter written in October by four of the commission’s five members. It accused the fifth member, Gregory Jaczko-who is also the NRC Chairman-of “causing serious damage” to the agency with “increasingly problematic and erratic behavior.” The commissioners feel Jaczko limited their role and bullied them in an emergency review of the nation’s nuclear facilities following the Fukushima meltdown in March.

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s article one in every Democratic president’s playbook. Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly; he ranched in North Dakota and explored the Amazon. He was a rabid imperialist, charging up San Juan Hill and sending the Great White Fleet round the world. And he loved the wilderness – so long as it was suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he wrote in “The Winning of the West,” “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

When necessary, he could play the populist rabble-rouser’s card, flaying the corporations, railing against “the malefactors of great wealth.” But on Roosevelt’s watch modern corporate America came of age.

Williams Rivers Pitt: Short Tales From Bizarro World: The GOP Primaries Edition

Bahwitabah da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy said the boogie said up jumped the Mitty…

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. You see, I was perusing the New York Daily News and came across this little gem about Mitt Romney choosing the Kid Rock song “Born Free” as his 2012 campaign anthem. “The patriotic pick,” reported the Daily News, “comes as Romney tries to shake the image that he’s a buttoned up elitist who has little in common with the average American.”

Mitt Romney and Kid Rock. Throw them together with Fred Phelps and the ghost of Lee Atwater, and you’d have the most phenomenally deranged golf foursome in the history of the universe.

Michelle Chen: Embarrassment of Riches: Conflict Diamond Regulation Breaks Down

The holiday season is a time of material pleasures, but it’s also a time to take stock of how our social values tend to be at odds with the objects we most prize.

While countless American shoppers splurge this month-probably to delude ourselves momentarily that we can still afford to indulge-the social cost of one luxury item has exposed a global crisis. The human rights group Global Witness has abandoned the Kimberly Process, the international regulatory framework aimed at restricting trafficking in “conflict diamonds.” The group argues that the process, which it helped create, is broken and ridden with loopholes.

Bill Keller: The Good Newt

At least on one issue – immigration – Newt Gingrich gets it.

Immigration is a subject that brings out the best and the worst in Americans.

As taught to my fourth-grade daughter this semester, the story of the peopling of America encourages us to celebrate our identity as the land of e pluribus unum. It reminds us of the tolerance required to coexist in a culture of many cultures. It honors the courage to uproot your life so your children can have a better one.

As it is practiced in our politics, the subject often dredges up darker feelings: tribalism, xenophobia, envy, a pull-up-the-ladder stinginess. This is not new. The English and Dutch colonists resented the immigrant waves of Irish and Germans, who resented the later waves of Italians and Poles and Jews. Polls show that Americans only halfheartedly support immigration, and less than halfheartedly in hard times.

Thomas Edsall: Let’s Not Talk About Inequality

Conservatism’s strength, its stress on the value of individual responsibility, is also its central weakness.

The right’s claim that liberalism creates a deterrent to personal initiative and generates an ethos of dependency has resonated powerfully among white swing voters crucial to the ascendance of the Republican Party over the last four decades.

As the aftereffects of the financial collapse of 2008 continue to batter the nation with high unemployment and low growth, however, the conservative message has run into headwinds.