codeman463's Blog

Missing the big picture, one AIG exec bonus at a time

2009-03-29T17:28:18Z

Among all the media coverage this week, all the outrage over the AIG bailouts, the outraged protestors, the AIG sign gone missing and the bus tour of bailed-out exec's homes, I get the feeling that this country and the news media missed something.

Oh yeah, how do we as a country make sure that we don't get into an economic mess like this again? That's kind of important, right?

So then where's the reporting on it? Some shows, like the Rachel Maddow Show, did manage to spend a little time addressing the issue. But not much

So now we have to fix this mess. Obama's new plan, announced to Congress this week, is to give the governments new sweeping power to regulate what are now very unstable and risky companies. Sounds pretty formidable. After all, big bailout execs were there do to play the part of an outraged everyday joe who just happens to control a company with trillions of dollars in assets. But a lot of it was just theater. We will keep the companies that are too big to fail in one piece. And somehow our government is going to tell them what to do.

And they're going to be rooting for the taxpayer all the way! Not those pesky CEOs. Right?

Let's look at how much these companies give to Chris Dodd, head of the Senate Banking Committee:

Citigroup: $428,294
Bear Stearns $347,350
American International Group $281,038

Even people who are supposed to be the good guys here, say Barack Obama, received huge campaign bonuses from companies like AIG.

So when the popular outrage dies out, will our elected representatives in Congress do the right thing. There has always been a rather cozy relationship between elected officials and big business, since political campaigns are expensive. But the real question is whether or not our Government will actually do the right thing here. Break up the companies that are too big to fail.

Oh, and while you're at it, stop paying AIG bonuses.

Side-Show Economics

2009-03-27T22:53:07Z

Among all the media coverage this week, all the outrage over the AIG bailouts, all of the horse-race commentary on Obama's budget, the Republican counterattack, and the conservative Democrats flank of the president, something slipped through. It was only a whisper compared to everything else but every once in awhile people in the media let it slip.

Everything that's going on now in the media may deal with vast sums of money and political shifts but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem. We need to fix the financial system in this country.

At one point, we had a bulwark of regulations, lessons learned from the Great Depression, that allowed us to prosper without severely overextending ourselves. Sure, there were occasional setbacks, say the burst of the tech bubble, but that was a part of the moderate boom and bust cycles that we see in our capitalist economic system even today when we have financial institutions like the Federal Reserve who help stabilize currency.

But through all of this, all of these 24 hour news cycle freak outs, we haven't really started to do everything that needs to be done to correct the problem. Deregulation led to companies that were too big to fail, financial products that no one really understood, and two of the biggest busts in our country's economic history.

Until we begin to regulate our economy, we're going to keep coming back to the same problem that we're experiencing now. Call it the Savings and Loan crisis, call it the Depression of 2008, call it the Panic of 1873 or the Great Depression. Until we fix the problem and our representatives in elected office subordinate the will of the financial sector to make a quick buck to the Main Street need for financial stability, we're going to keep coming back to this same problem.

Nobody can pretend to be surprised if there's another financial crisis in 10 years. If we don't do something, finally, now to fix the problem, then it's our own fault.

Is the US ever going to see a Sudan-esque legal showdown?

2009-03-04T21:01:25Z

The International Criminal Court (think UN,) has issued an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan due to human rights violations. Sudan has vowed not to comply with the court. One wonders if --supposing the ICC were to issue something like this against Cheney and Bush-- whether or not the Obama administration would cooperate, considering the amount of water Obama's administration is already carrying for Bush's.

Yeah, if Obama will go so far as to have White House lawyers charge the only "enemy combatant" held on US soil as a way to block a Supreme Court decision on his illegal detention or if his Pentagon releases a statement saying that Gitmo complies with the Geneva Conventions, will real prosecutions, not wishy-washy truth comissions, ever come from the US justice system? 5 years down the road, is the US going to be fighting with the ICC?

He's not the Cheerleader in Chief

2009-03-03T00:46:38Z

Nancy Pelosi was on the Rachel Maddow Show last week where she publicly disagreed with the president. This means a lot more then what it appears to be. At issue here is not just a change from what we saw during the Republican congress and presidency. This is important because if means that Democrats are governing as a majority power should.

The legislative and executive branches are, by design, two opposing forces. While Bush may have not done this until he lost congress to the Dems, it means that we are going to see a greater range of voices. Why?

National elections are the best way of finding moderates. Take Obama, for example. His "socialist" tax plan? It largely returns taxes to where they were under the Clinton Administration. His willingness on the campaign trail, as McCain put it, "to win an election rather then win a [Iraq] war"? We now find Republicans largely in agreement with Obama's Iraq plan. On healthcare reform, he will not support a "controversial" plan that involves a single payer system. Sure, Obama is more of a Democrat then he is a Republican, that much is obvious, but he's not going to make any waves.

House elections (think Pelosi) are over much smaller districts. This means that you can see more of a range of view points simply because they only have to win the plurality, in some cases majority, of votes in their home state. This means that there should be people, on both ends of the spectrum, who can bump heads with a more moderate executive.

Having the two branches of government, openly bad mouthing each other, means that there is going to be a range of voices. It means that while not everyone is going to be happy all of the time, everyone is going to have their say, even if they don't agree with the majority, and even if they don't agree with their own party.

Hey Republicans! Forget about one good message, just get rid of a lot of bad ones

2009-02-27T19:26:24Z

The Republican party right now looks more like a mob then a well oiled political machine but the real problem isn't that they lack a message, it's that they have too many voices saying too many things.

Certain people, like the ones with 3 hour talk shows, have always represented the more radical wing of the Republican party, those who have about as much of a connection to average Republicans as Air America does to average Democrats. But now, these people have somehow become main stream.

Both parties, Republican and Democrats, have people who will fit under their parties tent that really don't represent that actual party: abortion clinic bombers, revolutionary communists, or racists.

Right now, the Republican party is so far right that they no longer resonate with the people that they need for the 2010 elections. So how do you succeed? How do you rescue the Republican party?

You wait. You start to invest in bipartisanship. The Democrats just did did this during the crazier (2002 and 2004,) years of the Bush administration. It had progressives furious, but they survived. I'm sure, unfortunately, that there will be another greed is good revolution in this country but until then, Republicans are going to have to change their message to avoid remaining a regional power.

The Only Crime the Founding Fathers Ever Defined

2009-02-19T19:44:00Z

With all of this talk about enemy combatants, the nature of the "War on Terror," and the now flippant regard for civil liberties in this country, it's easy to lose sight of one simple fact:

This country already has a definition for terrorism.
It was not established by George Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Regan, or any individual president to ever preside over this country. There is one crime that the founding fathers established and defined:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court
-Article 3, Section 3, Paragraph 1 of the US Constitution.

Now, I'm sure that anyone reading this blog is already aware of this little fact here. My intention is to both remind you of it and to remind you of what it means. This means, and has always meant, that under the Rule of Law, the US has not managed to find a single terrorist in the eight years of the Bush Administration. Under his presidential authority alone, and by executive order, people such as Ali al Marri have been detained, but they have not been convicted. There have been no trials, only tribunals and we as a country can do so much better.

Yes, the Bush Administration must be prosecuted for their human rights violations and their gulags, but we as a country must take a stand. Our founding fathers were willing to give their lives for their civil liberties. The least we can do as Americans is honor their sacrifice, protect their legacy, and do everything in our power to pressure our representative government to take a stand for law and order once again. They will be called terrorists when they are convicted as terrorists. Before that, they are only suspects. Right now, they are not even that. The people of Gitmo, CIA black sites, and secret US prisons are the living face of a government that lost its respect for what this country represents: a fair trial.

Prosecuting the Bush Administration is Not Optional

2009-02-11T22:47:21Z

disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN Charter

Something that has not been lacking from Obama or his administration is a moral clarity about various methods of state-sponsored torture run by the Bush Administration; they acknowledge that the US must no longer stop torturing and so they took steps to end the practice, like closing Gitmo.

That's not enough.

What is now being bandied about the Senate, forming some kind of commission, is not going to cut it. We are the country that is supposed to be the beacon of freedom and democracy for the entire world. Our system of Justice and the stability of our government is a testament to this country and a light for the world.

That is why we, as a country, will not recover until every last Bush Administration official, but to Bush himself, has his day in court. We are not a country that deals in pain, in torture, or in corrupt justice. We believe in equality before the law and if we don't cling to that, we have little left as a country. If we don't prosecute the Bush Administration, we might as well replace the legacy of our country's justice with the history of Coke, Walmart, and GMC.

However, even if we as a nation do not prosecute, other countries will. Indeed, Bush and Cheney are already wanted men in Vermont.
So what compels us as a country to prosecute? It's evil Democrat's at work, right? Nope!

The text of the Geneva Conventions has a sort of 1-2 punch approach to torture. The first is to say that nations in which torture takes place must prosecute and the second is to define one of those crimes as torture, or more precisely:

torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, compelling a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of the hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a prisoner of war of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in this Convention.
-Articles 129 and 130

This is language that was designed to combat the Nazis, or whoever their successors may be, and it is not applicable to the US. Few people realize just how serious US violations are, but it seems to me that if more people realized just how like Hitler's Germany certain US controlled regions have become, they would think twice about not prosecuting.

The End of Constant Washington Spin?

2009-02-06T19:51:54Z

Dick Cheney's interview with Politico has helped unearth a bizarre incongruity in American politics. But don't take my word from it. Humor me, read this:

He [Cheney] warned that if Democrats succeed in forcing a quick end to the war, the American people will be at greater risk.

"I think, among other things, it would encourage [Al Qaeda terrorists] to launch further attacks," he said. "I think it would encourage them, if we were to operate in way that said, 'You're right, if you kill enough Americans, you can change U.S. policy,' they'll kill more Americans.
Cheney Bashes Top Democrats, Politico.com

How do you feel? Frightened, horrified, ready to surrender your civil liberties? Or are you tuned out, maybe mildly alarmed, but not exactly motivated to put down this article and go hide under the bed?

The problem with trying to spin a story, regardless of party, is that you must maintain control of both the facts and the emotions of your audience; former Bush operatives now possess neither. When the Fox News Channel screams of unknown horrors caused by Obama Administration policies, no one really listens to that anymore. When Cheney says that we could all die tomorrow under Obama Administration policies, no one seems to care. Even the talking points from the Project for the New American Century, the biggest driving force towards the Iraq War, now ring hollow.

A tip to the next administration, think tank, or anyone else who tries to fool the American people: try all you want but the President himself, the most powerful man in the world, and all of the King's men could not fool us forever. There can be little speculation as to whether the American people will be a little more savvy the next time something like this rolls around; we won't be so easily fooled the next time.

"Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is,l that they are the touchstone of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered"
-Common Sense, Thomas Paine

Excessive police force and American democracy

2009-02-03T00:22:24Z

One of the things that we, hopefully, as Americans hold close is the right we have to live our lives free from government intervention. This is not a conservative idea or a liberal one, it is a Constitutional one under the Fourth Amendment. However, it is also common for the American people, tacitly at least, to give up freedom when we feel that our lives are in danger. Sometimes this is a good thing, but most of the time it's a bad thing. The Patriot Act, having nothing to do with patriotism, was passed in the aftermath of 9/11.

So it is with the domestic "war" currently being waged on drugs. At first glance, it sounds like a good idea; I want criminals off of the street as much as anyone else does. The problem is that this balancing act of freedoms and security is no longer on track. Two things come to mind.

The Washington Post released an article awhile ago about a man, the mayor of his town, who had his home invaded by a SWAT team. He was someone completely innocent of any wrongdoing and had been caught up in a recent trend in drug smuggling: have drug packages delivered to someone's house while the person is at work and have someone pick them up before the person got home. In this case, law enforcement knew that this was happening, had detected the package at a mail sorting facility, and had staked-out the house of this particular mayor. None of this was wrong and all of this would have been enough to prevent the crime, but people went a step further. This mayor's home was invaded, without a warrant even nearby, when it was not necessary. How excessive was the force here? This was the story that made headlines when two dogs were even shot, one of which was trying to run away. Yes, there are times when a heavy response is necessary, but there is no way police could not have known that the people inside posed no threat; they were there all day.

So why not send an officer to the front door? Why ransack someone's house? Why go so far as to even kill there dogs? The balance is off in American law enforcement. But the worst part? No one took note of this use of excessive force until it happened to a white, middle class mayor. We don't know how many times this had happened before now. And, I don't know about you, but I think that if law enforcement sends a SWAT team every time something like this happens, we are well on our way to becoming a police state. Look, I hate to be the one who defends the right of a possible criminal, but police enforcement are there to protect the people, not come in guns blazing.

But this isn't the first time this has happened. As it stands, 2008 was a horrible year for the use of force. Recall the RNC convention. Here, people who were doing nothing but exercising their Constitutional right, to peaceably assemble, were arrested wholesale. Think 800 people.

1
in 20
were
journalists

Maybe what worries me the most, though, was that certain groups in particular seemed to be targeted. Fringe media, like I-Witness Video Collective got special treatment. In this case, 2 police raids in 5 days; no one messed with the main stream media because millions watch their broadcasts, not thousands or hundreds of thousands. The harm in this? It has a chilling affect on freedom of speech at one end of the political spectrum. Regardless of whether or not I agree with a media outlet, I would never call for them to be arrested for talking. Would I argue if I don't agree? Yes. But targeted police violence? That's not right.

The balance in American law enforcement is off.

Oh yeah, and the funny thing about I-Witness Video Collective? Their footage of the 2004 Republican National Convention, another time for wholesale arrests, proved around 400 people innocent of any wrongdoing, despite law enforcement testimony.

Obama needs to do the right thing for the economy, even if it's not bipartisan

2009-01-29T20:33:47Z

How many Republican votes did Obama get from the House after he significantly altered his own economic plan? Zero.

You know that things are serious when you see economic reporters yelling at their audiences. Don't believe me? The host of CNBC's Mad Money was happy to do this on yesterday's broadcast of Hardball.

If you were to listen to the remaining Republicans in Congress, all you would hear is an echo chamber filled with the cry "Tax cuts!" Seems that they would rather rally their own base then do what is right for the economy.

Go ahead and ask any economist you can find, or a CNBC reporter, and all that you'll hear is that the government needs to spend "More! More! More!" Why? Because right now we are sitting on an economy that could go up at any second. Americans took out record levels of credit card debt in order to maintain their standard of living while wages stagnated under the Bush Administration. If too many Americans can no longer pay back their debt, Jim Cramer projects the magic number is around 10%, then you'll see the economy tank even more.

So what do republicans have to do with this? They seem to have forgotten that it was the Bush policy of tax cuts, less regulation, and less oversite that got us into this mess in the first place. They seem to ignore the collective wisdom of economists in favor for their own outdated principles.

Tax cuts may work to stimulate the economy in times of plenty, but right now, there is an increasing number of Americans who don't even have jobs upon which to pay their taxes. No, in times of serious crisis, it takes defecit spending to get the job done. That got us out of the Great Depression, and it will get us out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. All Obama has to do is realize that he will find no help from Republicans; all they can do is make it worse.

An Economic Gamble

2009-01-27T15:12:05Z

With congressional Republicans working to oppose the new economic stimulus plan, you have to wonder what their hoping for. It is, after all, a gamble.

Every rational economist that crosses the news broadcasts seems to realize that these construction plans do work. We also know that they worked for the New Deal. Republicans, then, are hoping that the plan's effect will not be felt until the midterm elections.

There is a chance that that might happen.

A study by the Congressional Budget Office, broadcast in the this week's Meet the Press, states that the only about $250 million of stimulus will hit the economy within the year. Makes sense, when you consider the fact that you don't want the government throwing money at the problem banking-bailout style.

So now the best hope of Republicans is to stall, claim that the plan is a failure at midterm elections, and grab as many seats as they can.

Al-Qaeda's Obama Problem

2009-01-25T15:18:23Z

With Obama's recent actions seem to have created a bit of an image problem for Al-Qaeda. The Washington Post today reports:

"With Obama,al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: A U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world...the change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaeda's leaders, some of whom are scrambling to convince the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same"
-Wash Post Article

Now, the US' image problem is nothing new. However, it wasn't until the Iraq war began that opinion in that region of the world really began to tank. So what did the US do? Started a tv channel. On June 22, 2008, 60 Minutes reported:

The Bush administration felt it had to act fast to explain America to the Arab world. So it began spending about $100 million a year on a U.S. government news channel in Arabic. It's called "Al Hurra," meaning "The Free One."
-Link

But even a US run state channel couldn't fix the image problem; it has always been one of policy. Now, though, it appears that following our own Constitution may have just made us safer.

"This Too Will Pass"

2009-01-24T03:16:24Z

This recession came on rather quickly with a sudden steep drop off in GDPs around the world. Reflecting on the different "shapes of a recession, BBC World News America noted tonight the hopes of government leaders that the recession would be shaped like a V. Fat chance. Apparently, economists, such as those quoted in their news program, predict a slower U shaped recession, with more time spent at the bottom of the economic downturn just because so much has gone wrong.

Also, as a much needed reassurance, the news program tonight noted that even with the downturn, most major world economies are still producing about the same, meaning that we are not looking at the beginnings of a crash.

On Domestic Spying

2009-01-23T02:45:41Z

Keith Olberman, appearing on his home show on MSNBC, had as his guest yesterday one of the NSA officers who knew first hand about the domestic spying program. Russell Tice gave the horrific announcement that the domestic spying program does not encompass just select groups of the American populace but every citizen of this country.

This does come with some caveats: spying was concentrated on certain organizations, such as the news media, and (obviously,) not every phone call, email, text, and blog post was reviewed by a human being. Rather, the NSA looked at the so called meta-data of the communiques; terrorists typically have 1 to 2 minute conversations. But then again, so does a call to order to a pizza.

The problem with finding someone who wants to do society harm is that it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Want an example? Here's one from former National Counterterrorism Director, Richard Clarke. He talks about a conflict between US and Israeli intelligence and the airstrikes that didn't even know the target existed.:

"Israeli intelligence analysts had come to Washington and sat in my office in 1989, adamant that Iraq was well along in making a nuclear bomb. The CIA analysts sitting opposite them were equally convinced that the Iraquis had only the beginnings of a program, an aspiration. When the [Iraq] war came in 1991, the first phase was a sustained U.S. strategic bombing campaign...Toward the end of the bombing campaign, it grew difficult for the Air Force officers who...were running out of things to bomb...[after the war] the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency...shockingly, found evidence that Irqaq had a full-scale nuclear weapons development program that was only months away from creating its first nuclear weapon...Only two of twenty sites had been known and attacked during the war."
-Your Government Failed You (98-99)

The US, having gone to war on this country, was not able to spot what Clarke refers to as "facilities [that] were on the same scale as the sprawling campuses that had been built in the 1940s for the U.S. Manhattan Project" (Clarke 99).

How are they going to spot some terrorists phone call? The problem, as Clarke notes over and over again is not that there is insufficent information, it is that there is too much for anyone to really process.

So let's take another example, something that every American REALLY wants to prevent: 9/11. Would the current domestic spying program have prevented this? Yeah, but even without the program the US government already knew. There was:

The Hart-Rudman comission, which issued a report on February 15, 2001 that warned of "mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland" and urged for the formation of a "National Homeland Security Agency"
Richard Clarke's report on terrorism threats that was delayed continuously
A report filed by FBI agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix about a group of Arizona flight school students who were concerned with flying a plane, but not learning how to takeoff or land.
The August 6 memo delivered by CIA Director George Tenent entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." that warned that airplanes might be hijacked.

But that's just a kind of greatest hits list. Americans were rightly scared after 9/11 and they still to some extent are. I'm not saying that pre-9/11 protections are inappropriate; they worked. It is going beyond that, to the point where we forfit the civil liberties that the founding fathers fought to give their children.

Remember John Adams:
"It is when the stakes are the highest and when tempers run the hottest that we must work doubly hard to keep a check on our government and prevent it from trading in our values for visceral and political motives...it is suring the most challenging situations that our country's values are most intensely tested"

More about yesterday's Benediction

2009-01-21T21:40:27Z

Again from Pacifica's Democracy Now. Turns out that that reverend began his benediction with what was actually the Negro National Anthem.

The excerpt:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, Our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our GOD,
True to our native land
Link to NNA